The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy

Joshua Gooch

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137525505
• eBook ISBN: 9781137525512
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: Economics

This book offers a much-needed study of the Victorian novel's role in representing and shaping the service sector's emergence. Arguing that prior accounts of the novel's relation to the rise of finance have missed the emergence of a wider service sector, it traces the effects of service work's many forms and class positions in the Victorian novel.

1

The Social Work of Unproductive Labor

This chapter provides a framework for understanding service work in the Victorian novel by examining political economy’s changing articulations of unproductive labor, and the relation of these articulations to the mid-nineteenth-century liberalization of finance and the expansion of the service sector. My analysis of unproductive labor builds from the work of J. G. A. Pocock for its eighteenth-century beginnings, and relies on the analysis of gentlemanly capitalism by P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins in their account of the British Empire. My discussion in this chapter thus explores how unproductive labor and the gentlemanly converge in financial services, and how this affects the appearance of other modes of services. One result of this approach is to provide a bridge between scholarly accounts of political economy from Mary Poovey, Catherine Gallagher, and Regenia Gagnier with those of masculinity and work from Tim Barringer, James Eli Adams, and Herbert Sussman. Using lenses of class and gender, my argument suggests a particularly ambivalent experience of service work during the Victorian era. In an increasingly financialized and professionalized society, services are marked by duplicity, acting socially as dependent and productive, and personally as dominated and self-constructing. The relation of body and intellect to external forces of domination is central to this ambivalence. Independence, useful skills, and professional disinterestedness mitigate the force of domination by creating or maintaining something separate from the work-relation, yet gender norms and racism place these mitigating factors out of reach for women and minorities engaged in service.

While subsequent chapters will delve further into the specifics of this historical and discursive moment by exploring how novels provided a means for individuals to experience and to represent their experience in conflicting ways, this chapter focuses on political economic discourse and economic history. The first section maps service work’s relation to political economy’s changing notions of unproductive labor to uncover how shifts in what constitutes unproductive labor indicate how particular forms of work were valued in social, political, and moral terms. I begin with the concept’s roots in eighteenth-century moral and political philosophy, trace it through the work of major political economists, including Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Ramsay McCulloch, Nassau Senior, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, and finally locate its disappearance in William Stanley Jevons’s marginalist economics at the very moment of the service sector’s expansion. The second section traces the growing role of service work in Britain’s mid-nineteenth-century economy using social, economic, and imperial histories, and paying particular attention to the gendering that accompanied the rise of service work, the liberalization of finance, and the relation of services to the economic transformation that preceded the rise of Britain’s second Empire. This history reframes the discourses examined in the chapter’s first part as discursive mechanisms to maintain work-discipline for a growing number of service workers, for example, government and professional workers, financiers, clerks, servants, and prostitutes. Accordingly, I will not attempt to offer a complete account of all political economy’s varied constructions of unproductive labor so much as a genealogy of crucial moments in the concept’s discursive ascent and dispersal. Such moments reveal the ambivalences that surrounded and shaped the growth of the nineteenth-century service sector. This trajectory illustrates how class, gender, and education allowed particular forms of unproductive labor to become productive for Victorian political economists, as well as how problematic moral and political valences continued to attach to such work. Services are thus at the center of a continuing low-level battle over the political subjectivity of workers and the economic value of their intellectual and affective work. Indeed, service work remains a political problem even after marginalism begins to displace the labor theory of value in the 1870s, albeit one distinct from that of its earlier discursive appearances. Ultimately, this discussion of the historical and discursive changes that swirl around the emergence of the service sector reveals how work itself operates as a key site of social domination.

If political economy’s notions of unproductive labor encompass many of the activities that constitute nineteenth-century service work, this is in large part a result of the term’s eighteenth-century discursive roots. It is not simply because the term itself originates in eighteenth-century texts—first in François Quesnay’s Tableau Economique and then repurposed by Smith in The Wealth of Nations—but more importantly because it continues to carry with it the political, moral, and economic anxieties that marked civil society’s emergence in Britain. As Pocock details, these interrelated anxieties were the result of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the subsequent so-called ‘financial revolution’, including the creation of the national debt and the Bank of England in order to fund a standing army to prop up the new regime. These anxieties further generated two distinct political economic perspectives in the subsequent Augustan period.¹ On the one hand, a Country-centered ideology emphasized the customary rights of Parliament and limits to the power of the monarch; and on the other hand, a Court-centered ideology, although less fully articulated than that of the republican tradition, argued that finance and mobile property were necessary aspects of an emerging modern state. From the first perspective, finance and mobile property were the basis of a monarchical social and political corruption because they allowed for the extension of the King’s power. For example, finance provided the monarchy with a new and powerful tool to raise money outside customary channels. This new source of income threatened the gentry on multiple fronts. It was used to maintain a standing army, which undermined the gentry’s customary control over their own militias for an army answerable only to the King, and it was also used to bribe members of Parliament and create a new Court-centered party to support the King’s policies. British republican thinkers like Bolingbroke upheld instead landownership and the armed citizen as the basis of a shared political and personal virtue, a position that draws on the legacy of earlier republican theorists such as Harrington and Machiavelli. Finance was associated with the creation of a new and corrupting class dependent on the state. In short, finance and Court-reliant work provide the initial ground for services as apparently unproductive labor. For the Court-centered perspective, and as the successes of the new British state attested, financial innovation was economically productive, even if it was also disconnected from political virtue or personal morality.² Proponents of this view accepted that individuals might be corrupt and driven by their vices and passions but argued that rationality could be recouped at the social level through economic expansion. Bernard Mandeville most famously explicates this position in The Fable of the Bees, or Private Vices, Public Virtues: private vices create economic activity for others, and economic interdependence overcomes a lack of individual rationality or morality to produce a kind of social rationality, most especially in terms of economic innovation and expansion. Social and economic interdependence thus turn individual immorality into the basis for social and economic development since the specialization of work to satisfy individual passions produces luxuries and refinements that would otherwise be unavailable.

The tension, then, is between dependence as a source of political corruption or of economic expansion. Classical political theory, which tended to support republican views, was a significant influence in the reception of these arguments. In Plato’s Republic, Socrates’s declension narrative of political organization is driven by the expansion of economic specialization to satisfy citizens’ increasingly unrestrained and unproductive passions. Economic innovation, then, is a marker of political decline. The descent of the Republic through oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny follows the ascent of the drone, who Socrates describes as the subject of a society in which ‘a man can sell all he has to another and live on as a member of society without any real function’; whether rich or poor, the drone lacks social function and is ‘a mere consumer of goods’.³ Socrates’s political nadir, the tyrant, represents the drone’s furthest development, a man not merely without social function but ruled entirely by his passions, a fearful and ravenous consumer who produces nothing and carries with him a pack of similarly rapacious hangers-on. It is certainly not difficult to see the connection for republican thinkers between the court of Socrates’s tyrant and England’s new party of financiers.

But there is a further turn of the screw in classical political theory’s understanding of the political and the economic, and it is one that bridges the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. Much like Socrates in The Republic, Aristotle notes in Politics that the passions offer a despotic rule compared to reason’s ‘constitutional and royal rule’ of the soul.⁴ However, Aristotle offers a further distinction between reason and the passions, that of the political from the natural. As he explains in the next section, nature makes slaves ‘for servile labor’ while free landholding men ‘although useless for such services, [are] useful for political life’.⁵ As Hannah Arendt notes in The Human Condition, this distinction is crucial for the construction of Greek civic life.⁶ For the Greeks, the political world’s ability to reflect with disinterest on the universal good of the republic existed only through its exclusion of the natural world of work that reproduces life—in a word, of the economic. The world of the political belonged to male citizens, the world of nature to women and slaves. This distinction clarifies Socrates’s argument in The Republic that justice is doing one’s proper work, a formulation that initially seems to emphasize one’s occupation but that speaks more directly to one’s gender and social and political standing.⁷ A privileged few can live free from work, but the majority will be condemned to toil in the natural world. If the drone represents one kind of problematic dependent picked up by republican thought—the unproductive consumer who encourages a world of unnecessary luxuries—then women and slaves represent a second category of workers, whose economic production supports the existence of the political but who must be excluded because they depend upon the political to supply them with reason itself.⁸ For republican thought, this classical political model thus offers a two-fold sense of dependence, first of political corruption through economic dependence, and second of a necessary exclusion of the economic from the realm of the political.

These multiple views of dependence—of both classical political theory and British republican thought—inform political economy’s construction of service work as unproductive labor. In terms of political economy’s notions of productive labor, one may already sense in passing how eighteenth-century republican theory’s view of the landholder’s political independence becomes the basis of an economic independence. To reach political economy proper, however, we must first deal with one further complication. As Pocock notes, by the mid-eighteenth century, these seemingly opposed views of dependence reached an uneasy accommodation.⁹ The undeniable success of state and financial interests in eighteenth-century Britain in maintaining the nation’s commercial and social stability as well as in its emergence as a world power meant that these contradictory views had to learn to coexist almost by material necessity. As John Brewer demonstrates in Sinews of Power, social interdependence made the funding of Britain’s new military power possible via state bureaucracies, financial services, and Britain’s developed commercial economy, and the feared standing army projected British power outward rather than inward, as did the less politically fraught British navy.¹⁰ Yet these successes remained marked by political corruption as the Whigs’ single party rule made political corruption a watchword for interdependence’s successes. As Pocock explains, this uneasy accord over dependence’s political and economic role appears in the Scottish enlightenment’s narrative of social development. Known as stadial theory, it traces history as a continuing process of economic specialization—that is, from hunter-gather to farmer and so on—in which society’s growing interdependence generates increased wealth and corruption. Economic progress, then, is also a trajectory of moral decline. As we will see, service work emerges discursively as unproductive labor out of this tension in part because Smith’s construction of the term retains this narrative and its ambivalent view of dependence.

I want to note one further effect of this ambivalence before turning to political economy proper. For the eighteenth century, Pocock argues, the problem of dependence was less that of a class of dependents on landed lords than on the Court itself—that is to say, fears of corruption focused on the Court’s ability, either directly or indirectly, to influence Parliament and the military.¹¹ As the menial servant becomes the political economic apotheosis of unproductive labor, it is easy to lose sight of the politics that inform this objection. I would argue that these political fears of servants of the Court were expressed in part through economic derision of servants and service workers, and that classical political theory’s other form of problematic dependence, the economically productive but politically excluded, provides the model for this displacement of the political into the economic. As a result, service work becomes marked in unproductive labor as servile work, most especially the work of women and political dependents, and figured as non-productive, immaterial, or otherwise unable to produce tangible commodities, either because it draws its substance from elsewhere or because it lacks the capacity to act on its own. This intersection of dependence and servility makes service work a key site to examine how work as such operates as a form of social domination and a potential deformation of the existing political world. In this discursive intersection, service work thus solicits anxieties about political corruption and social interdependence through its immaterial forms of work—that is, intellectual, signifying, and affective work.

From sterile expense to unproductive labor

In the Tableau Economique, François Quesnay introduces the problem of non-productive forms of work into political economy through the category of sterile expenses. This includes all activities that do not produce natural surpluses, including ‘manufactured commodities, house-room, clothing, interest on money, servants, commercial costs, foreign produce, etc.’¹² Such expenses contrast with productive expenditures, which create surpluses, what Quesnay terms net produite. Sterile expenditures consume these surpluses, as either their raw materials or the subsistence of their workers. As Quesnay’s surpluses are always the product of the natural world, with productive expenses being investments in agricultural or extractive undertakings, services cannot help but be counted as sterile. As one should sense, the argument that work that does not produce food lives parasitically on the productive is as much political as it is economic. In his study of Quesnay, Ronald L. Meek explains that the Tableau and its categories were part of an argument for the development of French agriculture and against courtly expenses.¹³ This is best seen in a separate analysis of Quesnay’s that maps his terms to social classes: the productive proprietor and capitalist farmer, and the sterile manufacturer, merchant, and inefficient farmer.¹⁴ Services, then, are not Quesnay’s concern so much as new goods and market relations. Merchants and manufacturers are sterile because they depend either on goods provided by another o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Social Work of Unproductive Labor
• 2 Silas Marner: Narration as Work-Discipline
• 3 Our Mutual Friend: Service Work as Subject-Work
• 4 The Moonstone: Service Work as Narrative Work
• 5 The Way We Live Now: Service Work and Violence
• Conclusion, or How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love My Work-Discipline
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index