In this appropriately workmanlike and energetic study Martin Danahay astutely examines the ambiguities surrounding the notion of ‘work’ in the Victorian period, focusing especially on the ambiguities involved in male definitions of labour and the evolving relation to the female worker. This study is marked by Danahay’s ability to call upon both literary and pictorial representations of work, and is as it were prompted by the fascinatingly complex relationship between the middle-class Arthur Munby and working-class Hannah Cullwick. Building on earlier studies by Adams, Kestner and Sussman, Danahay astutely identifies work as a crucial component of masculine identity, and he is particularly interesting on male celebrants of physical labour such as Carlyle and Ruskin. The Carlylean doctrine of work ascribed guilt to leisure pursuits but was also racially inflected in relation, for instance, to both the Irish and the Caribbean ‘black gentleman’. In this structure of feeling industriousness connoted manufacture in a strategy which attempted unsuccessfully to censor pleasure or sexuality.

Danahay offers trenchant readings of, for example, Hood’s ‘Song of the Shirt’ in conjunction with Redgrave’s picture of ‘the Sempstress’, and provides a lively if breathless survey of work in assorted works by Dickens. Gender at Work is specially interesting on the pre-Raphaelite concern with work, and inevitably Danahay has a good deal to say about Ford Madox Brown’s famous and problematic painting. Other chapters extend our understanding of the Munby-Cullwick relationship and of Ruskin’s well-intentioned but flawed projects of labour in the Ferry Hinksey road building and the Guild of St George, and Danahay concludes with a spirited analysis of the demise of the man at work and the countervailing rise of the New Woman in Gissing and elsewhere. One notable gap in this study is any consideration of the depiction of rural working-class labour by such middle-class observers as Hardy or Jefferies, but overall Gender at Work accomplishes its objectives with range, fluency and insight, and makes a genuinely new contribution to the burgeoning field of Victorian gender studies.

Roger Ebbatson (Loughborough University)

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