I did not notice, in this massive anthology related to work, any librarians reporting their experience, but their many contributions relating to authorship and scholarship. Among those that caught my eye was Anthony Trollope, listing “the books I have written, with the dates of their publication and the sums I have received for them”. For his first‐listed, The Macdermots of Ballycloran (1847), Trollope received £48 6s. 9d. He got £3,000 for The Last Chronicle of Barset and in total, he records an income of £68,939 17s. 5d. (46 titles and “Sundries”). This extract is followed by one from Victorian journalist, Margaret Oliphant: “I had been obliged to work pretty hard before to meet all the too great expenses of the house. Now four people were added to it …”. In different vein is an extract form Hilaire Belloc’s poem Peter Goole Who Ruined His Father and Mother by Extravagance: “And even now, at 25. He has to work to keep alive!” And different again is the reply of a worker on the Bhakra Dam to the question asked by Pandit Nehru about why he was doing the work: “Sahib Bahadour, that man tells me to take those stones over there. At the end of the work he gives me some money. That is why I do it.” These are just four of the 133 extracts chosen to illustrate “The primal curse, the need to work”.
This anthology is in three parts: The nature of work; Kinds of work; and The reform of work. Each of these is divided into a total of nine sections, the first of which is “The curse of work” mentioned above. In turn, these sections are further sub‐divided into themes. Thus under “Head work” are finance; office workers; clergy, doctors, and lawyers; schoolteachers; actors and entertainers; artists; writers; and students, scholars, and scientists. In all there are 73 of these sub‐headings. Several hundred authors and sources are quoted, ancient and modern, poets and playwrights, sociologists and politicians. The range is impressively wide and numerous are the apposite quotations from hitherto unknown and surprising quarters. The editor has not, as so many have, stinted on the length of quotation, so we get decent chunks of Tolstoy, D.H. Lawrence, Charlotte Brontë, Solzhenitsyn and J.B. Priestley, to name but five authors. Brief editorial notes occur, but generally the reader is left to browse and savour for him or herself the insights and accounts which illustrate the themes. The documenting of sources is thorough.
This is another excellent addition to the Oxford corpus of anthologies, and it is well done. I must confess, though, to wondering as to their place in the scheme of things in general, and in reference collections in particular. This volume is too bulky to read on the bus and I can’t imagine starting at page one and plodding through to page 618, however inspirational and educative the experience might be. And it is. The index to authors will allow us to locate sayings on work by a number of known authors, but I can’t imagine that is the purpose. Writings on the experience of work are, as the editor comments, rare, and herein lies, I think, the value of this anthology. The book’s structure, treating the subject of work in 133 sub‐divisions, will provide students of work and cultural history with a wealth of illustrative word pictures of the experience of work, and what the workers, and others, thought about that experience. From Hesiod and the Bible to Chaucer, John Clare, Pepys, Marx, Freud, Mass Observation, Tom Wolfe and Libby Purves, here is a volume of exceptionally good value to brighten up a normally unexciting section of the library shelves.
