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

The Victorian Novel, Service Work, and the Nineteenth-Century Economy offers a much-needed study of the novel's role in representing and shaping the nineteenth-century service sector. Arguing that prior accounts of the novel's relation to the rise of finance have missed the emergence of a wider service sector, Gooch traces the effects of service work's many forms and class positions in the Victorian novel. The novel registers the Victorian era's changing economic circumstances and political economy's increasingly fraught understanding of unproductive labour through its own work of narration, characterization, and plotting, and, in the process, comes to reimagine what it means to be employed and to see oneself as an employee. Novels by George Eliot, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, and Bram Stoker uncover the cultural, social, and affective experiences that inform these new experiences of work, from their revolutionary potential to their new forms of discipline.

Joshua Gooch is an Assistant Professor at D'Youville College in Buffalo, New York. His research focuses on intersections of work, power, and aesthetics in literature and film, particularly in relation to cultures with financialized economies, and includes essays on Samuel Butler, Joseph Conrad, Wes Anderson, and war films.