Alexandra Irimia reviews The Rise of Office Literature

Daniel Jenkin-Smith. The Rise of Office Literature: Bureaucratization and Aesthetics in Britain and France, 1810–1900. New York: Bloomsbury, 2025. 284 pp.

Review by Alexandra Irimia

29 August 2025

Daniel Jenkin-Smith’s ambitious study aims to excavate a “‘forgotten genre’” (p. 4) from the dusty archives of nineteenth-century literature: the curious phenomenon of office literature, interested in bureaucratic drudgery, including office spaces, office workers, and what Edgar Allan Poe termed “deskism for want of a better word”—the ultimate defining feature of “the tribe of clerks.”[1] Given the proliferation of literary forms engaging with administrative tropes throughout the twentieth- and, indeed, twenty-first century (in Britain and France, as elsewhere), it is perhaps risky to deem “forgotten” this vein of fascination for administrative subjects and forms. Would understudied be a safer word, then? No question, although the appeal of “forgotten” is obvious already from the corpus: apart from the usual suspects (Honoré de Balzac, Charles Dickens, Gustave Flaubert, Joris-Karl Huysmans), Jenkin-Smith brings to his readers’ attention authors and periodicals that literary histories have meanwhile discarded or longtime ignored, filed away as unimportant. Here lies one of the notable merits of this research. The author not only provides his own translations when none are available and draws on primary sources—often pushing the usual boundaries of epigraphs with rare and fascinating material (see p. 55)—but also balances his close readings, giving as much attention to canonical texts as to lesser-known ones.

A second hesitation concerns the risk of using the word “genre,” which the author himself addresses briefly (p. 16). The literary tradition engaging with office work, institutional infrastructure, and bureaucratic subjects presents a kaleidoscopic picture. It is, to be sure, a world first populated by comic clerk stereotypes. Alongside the caricatures and the political satire, however, office literature matures to experiment with realist drama, naturalist sketches, moral essays, more complex portrayals of bureaucratic alienation, and even romance. Later, it would include metaphysical novels as well as dystopias, memoirs as well as fragmentary observations tinged with surrealism and fantasy tropes. To the extent there is a common thread that goes beyond the purely thematic, office literature is traversed by a sense of being caught in its own bureaucratic paradox: it documents the mundane particularities of office life—whether with meticulous calm or compulsively, with passion or impersonally, with grotesque horror or lightheartedly—while developing an abstract logic that mirrors the administrative structures it seeks to portray. The multiplicity of affective regimes at play here aside, one of the most convincing arguments of the book is that office literature developed its own aesthetic logic by exploring the tension between administrative labor and artistic expression.

Another original insight lies in the attention paid to the reflexive dimensions of office literature: see, for example, the administrative precision used by J.-K. Huysmans (a dedicated civil servant himself) to catalog excentric objects in À rebours (1884). Writers repeatedly discovered that their own practices—collecting, organizing, and processing cultural materials—mirrored the clerical work they depicted, spurring formal innovations that anticipate modernist self-reflexivity and aesthetic autonomy.

Even within the realm limited to Britain and France, the book is not the first attempt to retrace the origins and the development of fictional portrayals of office work. However, unlike previous efforts (including but not limited to Anne Marie Bijaoui-Baron’s 1981 Bureaucratie: naissance d’un theme et d’un vocabulaire dans la littérature française and Jonathan Wild’s 2006 The Rise of the Office Clerk in Literary Culture, 1880-1939), this examination starts several decades earlier, capturing modern bureaucracy in its crystallization phase. The results are most confident and unequivocal: “Office literature begins in the UK and France with Charles Lamb’s semiautobiographical ‘familiar essays’ and the satirical exposés of Jean-Gilbert Ymbert” (p. 56).

Relative to its predecessors focusing on national literatures, the comparative Franco-British approach yields richer insights into how writers experimented with depicting a new category of workers and workplaces in the context of two different processes of bureaucratization. Where French office literature developed around the centralized Parisian ministries, reflecting what Jenkin-Smith calls a “statist” emphasis, British portrayals emerged from the more diffuse world of commercial firms, legal chambers, and company-states (p. 11). This divergence manifests not only in subject matter, with different emphasis on public and private bureaucracies, respectively, but also in formal strategies: for example, where the French Jean-Gilbert Ymbert developed detached, satirical taxonomies that mimicked administrative procedures, the British Charles Lamb crafted more personal, essayistic reflections on clerical experience. Largely absent from both traditions presented here is, however, a consideration of the administrative machinery enabling the colonial projects of the two countries.

The book fleshes out its arguments on a three-part chronological scaffolding (Origins, 1810–1850; Convergences, 1830–1870; and Metamorphoses, 1860–1900), with every section branching three further case studies. The theoretical framework draws productively from literary, cultural, and media studies, anthropology, history, and sociology, but mainly from Max Weber’s analysis of bureaucratic rationalization, remaining alert to its historical and material contingencies. The physical work of record-keeping, indexing, storage-retrieval, and correspondence created what Marx called a “‘symbolic reflection’” of administered subjects and objects (p. 6). Office literature feasts precisely on the tensions between the administered world and its paper double.

The Rise of Office Literature makes a significant contribution to nineteenth-century literary studies, as well as to the wider examination of bureaucratic fiction as a transnational, multimedia phenomenon. While the framing of a “forgotten genre” is somewhat tentative, the demonstrated need to revisit this corpus—and, why not, to create similar ones—is most compelling and inspiring of further research. The book resonates with particular urgency in an era marked by evolving modes of office work and the wielding of antibureaucratic rhetoric as an instrument of political warfare.

[1] Edgar Allan Poe, “The Man of the Crowd,” The Portable Poe, ed. Philip Van Doren Stern (Harmondsworth, 1977), p. 109.