Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell.

Robin Chamberlain is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University.

In this analysis of Victorian attitudes towards work, Breton argues that Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell all refuse to privilege either the “Gospel of Work,” in which work is seen as inherently valuable as an end in itself, and the more pragmatic view of work as a necessary means to end. The first arose with the ascendancy of Protestantism as an alternative to a rationalistic, economic world view. The second view—that of work as a necessary evil—emerged from industrialism and the tendency to make work a purely economic activity. By the Victorian period, however, the “Gospel of Work” was more closely linked to Romanticism than to Protestantism or Puritanism, according to Breton. He is careful to point out that no Victorian work ideology was unified: the ideas surrounding work varied widely according to what class was doing the work.

Breton concentrates on Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell’s “radical conservative” view of the work done by the working classes. Although all three of these writers had experience with manual labour, they idealized such labour when they wrote about it after the fact. All three also share a tendency to theorize work in the context of both a romanticized past and a particular understanding of Englishness. For Orwell and Carlyle, in particular, to be English meant being able to maintain traditional work values in the face of modernity. Furthermore, although none of these authors was wealthy enough to exist outside of the world of work, they each experienced work as something they chose to do.

Breton’s book is meticulous in its scholarship. Three long chapters, one for each writer, are flanked by a thirty-two page introduction, fascinating in itself, and a fifteen-page epilogue. His study of texts by Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell provides a rigorous analysis and a broad perspective on Victorian ideologies of work.