Lower-Middle-Class Nation

The White-Collar Worker in British Popular Culture

Nicola Bishop

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350064379
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Lower-Middle-Class Nation provides an unparalleled interdisciplinary cultural history of the lower-middle-class worker in British life since 1850. Considering highbrow, lowbrow, and middle-brow forms across literature, film, television and more, Nicola Bishop traces the development of the lower-middle-class from the mid-19th century to the present day, tackling a number of pressing, consistent concerns such as automation, commuting, and the search for a life/work balance. Above all, this book brings together ideas about class, nationhood, and gender, demonstrating that a particularly British lower-middle-class identity is constructed through the spaces and practices of the everyday. Aimed at undergraduate, postgraduates and scholars working in media and social history, literature, popular culture, cultural studies and sociology, Lower-Middle-Class Nation represents a new direction in cultural histories of work, labour, and leisure.

1

The office

As the white-collar workforce expanded throughout the nineteenth century, the clerk went from being a semi-professional personal assistant to entering vast bureaucratic halls filled with row upon row of identical desks. Later the male Victorian clerk would face increasing de-skilling and mechanization as well as competing with a new generation of female secretaries. The Victorian lower-middle-class clerk would move from humble residences in unfashionable areas of the city to newly built suburban dwellings on the outskirts, forming a first generation of rail commuters as the tracks stretched further into Metroland. By the mid-twentieth century, white-collar work would no longer be confined to vast urban areas, as bureaucratic processes began to spread across all industries, centred not just around London but growing into fledgling industrial estates and suburban outposts. Across nearly two centuries of change, however, many of these daily details remained the same. The office worker continues to characterize the humdrum and the everyday in media and cultural representations. Even individual traits ascribed to the lower-middle-class clerk in the 1850s prove powerfully long-lasting: popular associations between the clerical type and a series of physical and temperamental characteristics became embedded in cultural memory, enduring into the twenty-first century.

Christopher Baldry suggests there are ‘three aspects of “the office” ’ in social constructions: ‘the office building (for most people symbolized by its exterior), the office space within the building and office work within that space’.¹ This chapter explores each of these realms within popular representations arguing that they are equally significant in a cultural sense. What follows is a second office chapter – ‘The Desk’ – which turns to consider a range of social, emotional and psychological features of working within this environment. What Baldry asks, when examining the office, is that we consider why it is that ‘an office looks and “feels” like an office’ – or, as this chapter posits – how is the office recreated through image, text and dialogue so that it feels authentic for the viewer or reader? This chapter addresses some of the ways in which the office functions within architectural semiotics, considering the ways that, for instance, exteriors and interiors perform as a simultaneous signal both to potential customers and clients but also to a company’s staff. How do details that form the office interior instruct the ways that we view their ‘status and appropriate behaviour’? And how are these communicated in popular representations?

The almost exponential growth of office work in the late nineteenth century saw one of the most impactful shifts in social structures in modern terms and a turning point for the development of the lower middle class. This relationship between the office space and class became fundamental and is astonishingly long-lasting. As Francis Duffy suggested in the 1980s:

The clerks are gone now. Lupin as well as Mr Pooter is dead. But the office buildings which were designed to meet their need and foster their fantasies still exist and still contain their ghosts.²

Examining these spaces, in all of their forms – large, intensive halls of industrial clerical work through to tiny offices and cramped conditions – can offer us an insight into society more widely and the white-collar, lower middle class, in particular. Duffy calls old office buildings the social historians’ equivalent of an archaeological dig: in Manchester, the city where I work, there is evidence all around me of this rich – and largely untapped – history of the many thousands of clerks who passed their working days in these buildings across the twentieth century. And, as Duffy observes, in many ways, despite their relative recentness, we know very little about why these offices were built in the style that they were; records of commercial buildings are few and far between making it difficult to draw conclusions about whether they were designed with efficiency, communication or comfort in mind. More fascinating still is just how many of those buildings are still offices; renovated, converted, made open-plan, contemporary office workers live with these ‘ghosts’ every day.

Significant, too, is the preference for privileging in modern memory the run-down office, ill-fit for purpose, rather than the grandly designed architectural pinnacle. This is not, it appears, just a contemporary trend; it is hard to find positive descriptions of office spaces in literature at the end of the nineteenth century, just as modern texts continue to place emphasis on the flaws of even the plushest of gleaming glass and steel office buildings. Cultural architectural impressions – or, rather the process by which we remember certain tropes over others – are negative and reinforce a perception that is constructed as much by the ways that office work is conceived, as they are any kind of reflection of the reality of the environment. The attitude towards clerical and administrative work thus shapes our collective understanding of the office as a space and vice versa.

In part, this scepticism towards office work evolved because, as Michael Zakim discusses, from the outset it complicated an Anglo-American tradition that ‘identified labour as the source of value’.³ As a result of this, manual labour has long been romanticized, particularly in a gendered context and most visibly in ideas embodying masculinity in the Victorian period.⁴ In 1886, one commentator in The Spectator wrote about the position of the clerk in these terms: ‘in a country where education has become universal, mere clerk’s work is not skilled labour; and the man who uses the pen has, in the nature of things, no better right to expect high pay than has he who uses the chisel or the trowel’.⁵ By this account, the office worker was neither specialist nor viewed as being particularly useful – in a context where the working class were at least respected for their ability to create something tangible. In the same way that the loss of British industry in contemporary analyses is considered irrevocable in the nation’s decline, the rise of a bureaucratic, white-collar replacement has long held little weight in notions of worth. Indeed, much of the scepticism directed at the European Union rests on its conceptualization as a mechanism for needless bureaucracy.

Treated largely with suspicion, office work corrupted notions of Britain as a producing nation and destabilized associations imagined between physical labour, honesty and integrity. One manifestation of this – found most commonly within the banking sector – is the association between office work, fraudulence and theft. Recurrent mentions in the press of clerks who had absconded with sums of money highlight the way that white-collar workers had responsibilities that were above their moral station, a feature that filtered into genres such as crime writing where plenty of suspects are in dire need of money to replace misappropriated funds.⁶ At the same time, the white-collar criminal is perceived in quite interesting ways; the details of criminal behaviour at a commercial level are rarely viewed with the same fascination or given as lengthy sentences as more visceral crimes, despite the consequences of this type of theft being potentially much more widespread in terms of the number of victims.⁷

Beside the more extreme association connecting white-collar work and corporate crime, there are a series of broader impressions of daily toil that continue to dominate popular representations. As Carl Rhodes and Robert Westwood draw attention to, popular culture is resplendent with images of working lives, nearly all of which are ‘explicitly critical of work and its organization’.⁸ Alexia Panayiotou expands on this when she writes about depictions of men, in particular, within representations of ‘man’-agement in contemporary film, adding that

Popular culture is imbued with images of managers, employees and organizations from the novels we read to the music we listen to, daily life is filled with images of blue collar heroes, ruthless bosses and bored office workers – typically male.⁹

These consistent attitudes to work, more generally, and office work as a specific site of tedium, continue to idealize or romanticize aspects of manual labour while highlighting the psychological, intellectual and creative monotony of the nine-to-five job. While, as Panayiotou argues, film and other visual sources are not straightforwardly related to everyday practices, their ‘wide appeal and large accessibility’ make them crucial instruments of influence – both in shaping our view of work and in having the potential to challenge ‘dominant discourses’.¹⁰ The gendering of this discourse is also significant; while the administrative workforce in contemporary British society is made up of more women than men, the typical characterization of the office worker who captures our attention is, as Panayiotou makes clear, a successor of the fictionalized Victorian male clerk.¹¹

While organizational studies – both historic and contemporary – are important areas of critical attention (accounting history, in particular, provides the basis for several journals), the office as an environment that is shaped as much by those who work within it as it is by managerial aspirations (towards greater efficiency, robust output, cost effectiveness) is less frequently given attention. Aside from the important work by Jeacle and Parker and other historians on the physical layout of the office, and the implications for surveillance and mechanization, there is another strand of office dynamic that can be viewed through popular culture – the attempt to articulate the lived experience of the office space. This is more critical when considering that, as the wide array of popular cultural examples that Rhodes, Westwood and Panayiotou draw upon show, there has been a coherence in the representations of the office across the nineteenth, twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This chapter – and the one that follows it – examines in detail representations of the office space that range from the architectural to the emotional, exploring the ways that the office has been both designed, conceived of, and imagined from the perspective of those who work within.

The first of these twinned chapters takes physical descriptions as the focus, exploring the ways that space and personality conflate, creating a recognizable office-worker ‘type’ situated in a ‘typical’ office. Architectural historians like Duffy have tried to make use of the limited surviving records to offer a thesis about the ways that offices were designed and the potential implications for those who worked within them. Duffy takes as a starting point that office buildings are central to not only office history but also modern society. His argument raises interesting ideas about the under-considered ways in which work shapes our lives, forms our social groups, the basis of our personal finances and reflects our values. Much of Duffy’s persuasive chapter on office design focuses on questions that need to be more rigorously asked of office buildings for us to understand their place in contemporary society. For instance, Duffy queries how we might read social relationships through office in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The office
• 2 The desk
• 3 The commute
• 4 The suburbs
• 5 The home
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page