This monograph fills a surprisingly wide gap in the historiography of the experience of labor in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. London, aptly described by Sidney Webb in 1904 as “the head office of the world” (1), employed over 300,000 clerks on the eve of World War I, yet until now, no book-length study (and only a handful of articles) has examined their lives or the substance of what they did on the office floor. That which has been written on clerks in England focuses on other cities, where they were less vital to the local economies, and even much of that is substantially out of date. Although Michael Heller's contribution is avowedly narrow in scope—he focuses only on male clerks, for instance, despite the fact that women comprised at least 20 percent of this workforce by 1911—his many new avenues of inquiry will certainly inform future work that takes a broader view.

Heller has produced what amounts to a cohort study of the thousands of young men who joined London's white-collar workforce during the three decades after 1880. This workforce, which more than doubled in size between 1890 and 1910, was significantly younger, less male, and more subject to routinized and impersonal processes than that which preceded it. Where past historians have associated these changes with alienation and insecurity, Heller sees new forms of sociability. Staff pension plans, amateur sports, inhouse magazines, and night-school classes, he argues, enabled clerks to carve out a reasonably fulfilling existence on and away from the office floor. Anyone who has ventured into the City of London on the Central Line during rush hour will recognize echoes of this cohort's new patterns of living: these were status-conscious “City men” who dreamed of upward mobility and mustered a self-confident, if weedy, sense of their own masculinity.

Heller accomplishes this reinterpretation by relying on new sources (diaries and oral histories as well as staff magazines and performance reviews) and by questioning the relevance of the sources generally used in previous accounts. The literature of complaint that clerical unions produced, he points out, must be taken with a grain of salt since membership in such unions was minimal, and the often-negative image of the clerk in Edwardian fiction typically revealed more about the disaffected clerks who wrote them than the world they purported to describe. He also plausibly argues that, for men at least, the most monotonous effects of routinization were reserved for the female typists and stenographers who entered the lower tier of a “dual labor market” after 1900. Finally, he provides a useful reminder that the older “master-servant” model of clerical labor had its drawbacks. Although Heller's insistence that job satisfaction did not decline after 1890 wears thin in places—such qualities are notoriously difficult to measure, and assertion sometimes fills in for evidence—the basic point is well taken.

The strongest chapters in London Clerical Workers focus on the new opportunities for secondary and commercial education that were available to clerks in Edwardian London. The rise of secondary grammar schools after 1900, the author argues, provided a crucial sorting mechanism for employers in search of efficient office staff. Universal primary education meant that most boys could read, write, and do basic math, but additional time at a secondary school (at a cost of £4–£8 per year) added important skills and guaranteed a modicum of middle-class status. Heller also makes a good case that these schools complemented the continuing role played by patronage in recruiting new workers. Once on the job, roughly a third of all London clerks continued to hone their abilities by enrolling in night classes. Heller provides a useful survey of the impressive range of choices in technical education, ranging from the London School of Economics and the new polytechnics to Pitman's Metropolitan School.

London Clerical Workers is marred by the insistently officious tone it takes toward the admittedly meager historiography on the topic. This is one of the few senses in which the book's origins as a doctoral dissertation remain in view: Heller spends too much time finding fault with those who preceded him and sometimes wrongly infers faults by pulling statements out of context. He would have been better advised to devote some of this effort to identifying implications of his evidence that he leaves largely unexplored. Heller has little to say, for instance, on the impact of these clerks on the fabric of London society or on differences between their work and clerical labor in the provinces. Nor does he make any reference to the parallel transformation in white-collar employment that was under way in the United States in the same period: this was much commented on at the time, and historians of American business have produced much more interesting work on this development than their counterparts in British history. “Sadly this book does not concern itself with these wider issues,” Heller admits in the introduction (3). Happily, what he has produced sheds important new light on the day-to-day lives of the hundreds of thousands of young men who helped transform the world of work in the City of London.