Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People ed. by Andrew King (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People ed. by Andrew King
• Françoise Baillet (bio)

Andrew King, ed., Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People ( New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. xiii + 240, $160.00/£125.00 hardcover, $48.99/£35.99 paperback and e-book.

Labour occupied a prominent position in Victorian public discourse. After the Reform Bill of 1832 gave power to the wealthy middle classes, rhetorical constructions increasingly associated labour with manhood and respectability. In line with the principles of evangelical Christianity and under the influence of thinkers such as Thomas Carlyle—"Laborare est Orare. Work is worship" (Past and Present, 1843)—and Samuel Smiles, whose Self-Help (1859) was an instant success, Victorians emphasised work as the condition and instrument of self-improvement. The press played a decisive role in the formulation and dissemination of such values. Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press: Living Work for Living People (2022) precisely addresses this situation, investigating the content, form, and impact of the labour discourse in the pages of trade periodicals or under the pen of professionals. Edited by Andrew King, whose work on the Victorian period lies at the junction between literature, history, media studies, and sociology, this ten-chapter volume derives from the BLT19 project (https://www.blt19.co.uk/), a database of nineteenth-century business, labour, trade, and temperance magazines King launched in 2016. It is published as a complement to The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century Periodicals and Newspapers (edited by Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John Morton, 2016) and Researching the Nineteenth-Century Press: Case Studies (edited by Easley, King, and Morton, 2017).

Beyond work's centrality as a benchmark of Victorian value, it was a cultural construction formulated and widely disseminated by the press. Pervading all sections of specialised periodicals, the labour rhetoric pertained to five areas: bodily and intellectual practice, social and commercial exchange, class, Christian value, and moral imperative. As King suggests in his introduction to Work and the Nineteenth-Century Press, this set of values can be used as a road map to the whole volume (7). The subsequent chapters assess this discourse as it was circulated by a selection of trade and business periodicals or through the writings of several well-known [End Page 516] figures connected to the printing business. In chapter 2, Andrew Hobbs shows how provincial newspapers and periodicals quickly became "an information technology, providing an infrastructure which assisted efficient trade and employment" (38). Analysing the trade, professional, and work-related content of six local publications spanning the second half of the century, Hobbs sheds light on the omnipresence of business news in newspapers' columns and reveals the strong connection between publishers and local business interests. This approach is very much in keeping with the "taxonomies and procedures" of chapter 3, in which King suggests fresh ways of looking at the field of Victorian periodicals studies. Using the example of the BLT19 project, King calls attention to the transformational and cultural potential of classification processes in digital humanities. "The question of how we map fields of inquiry and classify units of those fields," he writes, determines the ways in which we understand the world (61).

Chapters 4 and 6 both deal with (auto)biographical constructions of the nineteenth-century professional. In "The Page as Stage," Anna Maria Barry examines the way in which male opera singers used the press to advertise their skills and promote their professional interests. Flore Janssen, in chapter 6, chooses the example of Margaret Harkness (1854–1923), a nurse turned journalist and novelist, to comment on representations of nursing in Victorian periodicals. Harkness's writings, Janssen remarks, raise contradictions in the representation of nursing as work but also testify to a degree of evolution in the perception of female employment (111). Strongly enmeshed with Victorian assumptions about social, national, and ideological worth, professional identities were constantly renegotiated through the press. Both Deborah Canavan, in chapter 5, and Rachel Calder, in chapter 7, tackle this complex issue, showing how, in the context of highly volatile markets and mutable careers, workers used the printed page to establish and maintain their public status. For the...