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In The Representation of Business in English Literature, five scholars of different periods of English literature produce original essays on how business and businesspeople have been portrayed by novelists, starting in the eighteenth century and continuing to the end of the twentieth century. The contributors to Representation help readers understand the partiality of the various writers and, in so doing, explore the issue of what determines public opinion about business.

"The Early Twentieth Century: Uniformity, Drudgery and Economics

ALLAN SIMMONS St. Mary’s University College

INTRODUCTION

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.1
T. S. Eliot’s damning portrayal of the power of economic forces, in the opening section of The Waste Land, is illustrative of how business is represented in the literature of the early twentieth century. The dehumanising daily routine, that drains these workers of life and renders them anonymous, is reinforced by a host of poetic devices ranging from simple repetition (“Un-real,” “Un-der,” “un-done”; “so many”), through half-rhyme (“brown,” “dawn”; “crowd,” “flowed”), alliteration (“death,” “undone”; “fixed,” “feet”), and sibilance (“Sighs,” “short,” “exhaled”), to passive constructions (“were exhaled”). The effect of these literary techniques is to underscore the sense of drudgery in the lives of workers, caught up in the homogenising rituals of labour. For this is the age of the faceless multitudes of office-bound clerical-workers whose entrapment within a dehumanising and impenetrable “system” is captured in the novels of Franz Kafka. Thus, in his description of workers, which associates them, by allusion, with the dead in Dante’s Inferno, Eliot might be said to be responding to a key feature of the age: this is the age of Modernism, the age of the masses, and the age of the “anonymous” worker. As John Carey observes in The Intellectuals and the Masses:

Between 1860 and 1910 the section of the middle and lower-middle class employed in commerce, banks, insurance and real estate increased markedly in all Western European countries, as a result of the emergence of the imperialist and international economy of the late nineteenth century. In England by 1911 the clerical profession, including 124,000 women, was one of the most rapidly expanding occupational groups."

Arthur Pollard (ed.)

Arthur Pollard (1922-2002) was Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Hull, in Hull, East Yorkshire, England. Among his principal scholarly interests were nineteenth-century and Australian literature. His publications include works on Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, the Brontës, and William Makepeace Thackeray, as well as the three-volume Complete Poetical Works of George Crabbe (with Norma Dalrymple-Champneys, Oxford University Press, 1988).