The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939

This innovative study investigates the emergence and impact of the lower middle class on British print culture through the figure of the office clerk. This interdisciplinary work offers important insights into a previously neglected area of social and book history, and explores key works by George Gissing, Forster and JB Priestley.

'A revealing, often poignant introduction to a layer of society that literature has largely ignored.' - John Carey, Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford

'...this is a valuable study, and Wild's work has implications that extend beyond the depiction and reading habits of the clerk.' - Victoria Stewart, Literature and History

'[A] herculean program of research that will serve as the bedrock for any future studies in this area... the research is not only an impressive achievement but a pioneering one.' - Lawrence Rainey, Modernism/Modernity

Autorentext
JONATHAN WILD is a Lecturer in Victorian Literature at the University
of Edinburgh, UK. His published and forthcoming work includes articles on George Gissing, First World War literature and John O'London's Weekly. Wild is currently working on a study of British 'middlebrow' literature in the inter-war period.

Inhalt
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction: Leonard Bast's Revenge 'Getting On'?: The Clerk's Emergence in Literature 1880-1900 'The Decently Ignoble - or, the Ignobly Decent?': George Gissing's Fictional Clerks The Day of Inconceivably Small Things: The Clerk in Comic Literature 1888-1900 Degeneration in the Edwardian Office The Friends and Patrons of Leonard Bast: Liberal Anxiety and the Edwardian Clerk 'A Merciful Heaven-Sent Release'?: The Clerk and the First World War The Black-Coated Worker and the Great Depression in 1930s Literature Afterword Notes Bibliography Index