Description
This study is based on a wide range of business sources as well as newspapers, journals, novels and oral history, allowing Heller to put forward a new interpretation of working conditions for London clerks, highlighting the ways in which clerical work changed and modernized over this period. Despite more than ten per cent of male Londoners being clerical workers at a time when London was the largest city in the world, no study has ever been carried out on this important historical demographic. This monograph is a comprehensive study of metropolitan clerks, examining aspects such as the changing dynamic of the clerical profession, the emergence of large scale organizations, the feminization and rationalization of the office, recruitment, remuneration, the rising importance of technical education and formal qualifications and the attitudes of clerks towards their work. Based on a wide range of sources including archives, contemporary literature, government and professional sources, diaries and interviews, newspapers and novels, Heller puts forward a new interpretation of clerical work, arguing that the growth, modernization and structural transformation of offices and the development of the clerical labour market was benign overall and had important long term implications for the history of work in London. Review: 'Challenging both popular prejudices and scholarly orthodoxies in his meticulous study of London clerical workers at the turn of the twentieth century, Heller argues that this giant, regimented, and increasingly mechanized class of wage laborers did indeed find meaning at the office.' Victorian Studies 'a revealing and thoroughly researched study' Business History 'sheds important new light on the day-to-day lives of the hundreds of thousands of young men who helped transform the world of work in the City of London.' Journal of British Studies
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