The Wonder of Work : THE OXFORD BOOK OF WORK Edited by Keith Thomas; Oxford University Press: 618 pp., $35

“What a dreary subject!” Keith Thomas suspected his friends of thinking when he announced he was writing a book about work. “The Oxford Book of Work” has turned out to be anything but dreary. Thomas, a historian at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, has put together an amazingly varied collection of poems, snippets of novels, newspaper articles, diaries, socialist denunciations and capitalist celebrations about the experience of working, from farmers of ancient Greek times to modern office workers. The book is mercifully short on academic social science treatises; instead, this is an exploration of work lived and imagined.

The origin of books like this lies in the scrapbooks people used to compile of favorite writings. When you do it yourself, you have no need to be organized; the pleasure of a scrapbook lies in snipping oddities without worrying about their logical connections. The Penguin Book of Penguins (it’s only a matter of time) would have on the contrary to give you the whole bird complete from beak to tail feathers; the professional compiler of a scrapbook needs to be obsessively focused on just that one thing, which can indeed be dreary for others to read.

Thomas makes labor come to life by charting a stark, great historical conflict in the value given to working, a conflict between those who believe work is degrading and those who believe we fulfill ourselves through our jobs. Men “will never cease from toil and misery,” the 8th century Greek poet Hesiod wrote, “in constant distress, and the gods will give them harsh troubles.” W.H. Auden evokes the contrary view in these memorable lines:

You need not see what someone is doing

To know if it is his vocation,

You have only to watch his eyes:

a cook mixing his sauce, a surgeon

making a primary incision,

a clerk completing a bill of lading

wear the same rapt expression,

forgetting themselves in a function.

It might seem that the conflict between work as oppressive and work as self-fulfilling might be something about which labor economists and sociologists would have a lot to say, but they’ve said less than they should. This is because economists--with notable exceptions like Adam Smith and John Maynard Keynes--have obsessed about wages and salaries, while sociologists tend to analyze work as a source of organizational status and personal power. Too often, academics treat work as a means to an end rather than as an experience in itself. That gap is what “The Oxford Book of Work” fills in, by turning to poetry, fiction, philosophy and personal narrative.

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Common sense tells us that the more privileged a person’s work, the more he or she should enjoy it; the ultimate privilege of being rich enough not to work should be the most enjoyable state of all. Thomas shows reality to be quite different. In the past, aristocrats suffered from their idleness, and what we today call “leisure” can be experienced, by the prematurely retired for instance, as a feeling of uselessness. Common sense errs again in suggesting that work is just a means to getting money, power and status. Work occupies today most of the waking hours of most men and women; if you spend 12 hours a day six days a week to make a million but are bored with your job, you are experientially impoverished. Thomas makes clear, indeed, just how manual laborers may well enjoy more of the pride of craftsmanship that Auden evokes than office workers who do “head work.”

Belief in the virtue of hard work is no more straightforward. Socialists from the 19th century on imagined that, in Fourier’s words, “Work makes the man.” But for this fulfillment to occur, they believed, workers would have to be equals, the tasks of one as much the tasks of anyone else. In his section on women’s work, Thomas follows the lead of a new generation of feminist historians in challenging the view that women were simply “condemned” to housework and child-rearing. Although certainly unequal, they were not therefore simply hapless victims. They made the work assigned them of value to themselves and to others. Some of the poetry Thomas has unearthed in the section of his book on women’s work is particularly moving; he includes 19th century Irish street ballads and fine poems by Mary Collier (1690-1762) and Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1824), writers unknown to me and I suspect to other readers.

Work embodies the most basic of human problems: How do you wrest something of value from a condition in which you are not free? Most of us work for someone else; most of us will never earn the money we deserve; most of us will have to struggle with impossible demands and incompetent employers. Making work meaningful has to be more difficult than just finding pleasure in a particular task. And yet the wonder of work is that people do create that value in the very process of laboring. How ordinary people manage to do so in everyday life is what preoccupies Thomas, and his collection has so much unusual and arcane material precisely because he wants to go beneath the common sense stereotypes we harbor about working.

Thomas organizes “The Oxford Book of Work” in three sections. The first part focuses on the general nature of work, including writings on idleness, work as a calling, the sociability of the office, the daily grind, weekends and holidays. The second section, on different kinds of work, is the most unusual: It records the experiences of shepherds, fishermen, textile workers, shopkeepers, servants, clergymen and scientists, as well as housewives doing their jobs. Because this is a literary book, the selections are chosen for their evocativeness rather than their representative accuracy. In the final part of the book, Thomas turns to the reform of work--the tyranny of the clock, job insecurity, how to resist an oppressive boss.

The organization is frustrating. In part this is the publisher’s fault. The author lays out his subjects neatly in the table of contents, but the text typography is set up so that you don’t know clearly when you are moving on to a new section. Thomas also succumbs to one vice of the amateur scrapbook collector. Within each section there are pieces from different times and places jumbled together; after the 19th century Irish street ballad, for instance, comes a bit of something from a 14th century writer and just after that a poem by the modern poet Margaret Walker. The thread may be apparent to Thomas but is hidden from the reader.

These are, however, just literary dents. What I missed has to do with Thomas’ sense of the present. We are entering a new era of work, perhaps as profound as the transition from agriculture to manufacturing in earlier centuries. The computer, the advent of global work migration and the breaking apart of big work bureaucracies into looser networks are changing work values in ways we cannot at the moment fully comprehend. For instance, the work ethic of previous generations required delayed gratification; you disciplined yourself to deal with pains immediately at hand and worked toward a long-term goal. That work ethic makes no sense in the emerging world of work; those who wait, perish. The companies they work for will, in all probability, not exist in a few years’ time. For the same reason, loyalty to other workers is undergoing a radical transformation. In the modern short-term world of work, people don’t work together long enough to develop strong social bonds.

I wished therefore for more contemporary poems, stories and newspaper accounts in “The Oxford Book of Work.” Indeed, the reforms of work that Thomas invokes in his book--the need to get rid of the tyranny of the clock or the dire effects of a rigid division of labor--address a work world rapidly disappearing. I don’t mean that the wealth of struggle, thinking and imagining evoked in this book is irrelevant to the present, but people will turn to this book precisely because something is being dislodged in their laboring lives. Perhaps Thomas wished us to reflect on the revolution now occurring in work by laying out the human richness of this subject in its long history. If so, he has magnificently succeeded, but that effort of self-understanding is work we have, as readers, to do for ourselves.*