In this short volume, Martin Danahay explores the changing meaning of “work” in Victorian society. The author is particularly interested in how changing definitions of work and manliness in the mid-Victorian period created a crisis of confidence for male intellectuals. He argues that the producers of Victorian culture both successfully established muscular, physical work as the defining element of male virtue and rhetorically excluded women from the sphere of meaningful labor. In doing so, however, male intellectuals undermined their own status within Victorian society. Authors and artists, who worked in the home and with their minds rather than with their muscles, no longer fit the definitions of manliness that they themselves had helped foster and propagate. Danahay closely analyzes how the work and lives of Victorian writers and artists such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, Ford Maddox Brown, and John Ruskin expressed their struggle to be both “manly” and to work meaningfully despite their poor fit in a gendered division of labor. The author's approach is informed by the scholarship of historians John Tosh, A. James Hammerton, and Sonya Rose, by literary and cultural analysts of masculinity, such as James Eli Adam, Joseph Kestner, and David Kuchta, and it pays significant debt to feminist literary theory, particularly the work of Judith Halberstam and Jean Bobby Noble.

Danahay opens his first chapter with an examination of Thomas Carlyle and his articulation of the Victorian “gospel of work.” Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Smiles helped elevate productive labor to the pinnacle of accomplishment in Victorian society, making work “a transcendent category” (32) that promised virtue to men regardless of their class status. To be a man, these authors held, was to work, and vice versa. Middle-class, Protestant piety was a central feature in this discourse of work, Danahay argues, as Carlyle and Smiles contrasted the productive labor of working-class men with the idleness and leisure of the upper class. A natural outgrowth of this process, however, was the consequent devaluing of their own work and of intellectual labor in general.

In chapter 2, Danahay discusses the painting of Richard Redgrave and the poetry of Thomas Hood. Their work furthered the rhetorical division of labor in Victorian society by asserting that manual, productive labor was harmful to women. Whereas work elevated men, the visual and poetic lexicon deployed by Redgrave and Hood posited that work had the opposite effect on women, leading them into sin and moral degradation. Chapter 3 describes how the novels of Charles Dickens reinforced the Victorian division of labor by presenting women's work as inherently domestic and therefore essentially valueless. Danahay points out the subtle contradictions in this effort, arguing that Dickens's portrayals devalued the work of writers, who themselves worked in the home. This is probably the weakest section of the book, however, both since the author's suppositions are based on a somewhat tenuous analysis of latent psychological dynamics in Dickens's work and because the author's treatment of women's domestic status does not fully explore the extensive scholarship on the subject. Chapter 4 describes the difficulties inherent in a strict division of labor along gender lines by examining Ford Maddox Brown's panoramic painting, Work. While some of the imagery analysis here is thought provoking, Danahay essentially rehashes the same arguments presented in the previous chapter, albeit while applying them to a different canvas.

Danahay's analysis develops more fully in chapters 5 and 6. Here, the author describes how intellectuals negotiated, in both their work and their lives, the untenable position they found themselves in as a result of the rigidly drawn lines that separated useful male labor from its useless female counterpart. Chapter 5 deals with Arthur Joseph Munby and his relationship with women laborers—particularly his “servant-wife” Hannah Cullwick—whom he portrayed in photographs and diaries. Munby subverted the ideas of authors like Carlyle by celebrating the physical labor of women, even at the cost of denigrating his own gender status. Munby was ultimately unsuccessful in propagating his ideas, particularly among the audiences of working-class women to whom he often lectured. But his efforts, Danahay argues, undercut the seeming immutability of Victorian class and gender roles. In chapter 6, Danahay describes the response of John Ruskin to the same issues that Carlyle, Ford, and Munby faced. Ruskin's response was an eminently practical one—to be useful, intellectuals must work with their hands. Ruskin's attempts to “spiritually regenerate” Oxford undergraduates through road-building projects, however, ultimately foundered on the Victorian assertion that “manual labor, no matter what its aims, was indelibly marked as a menial activity” (125). In chapter 7 and in his conclusion, Danahay addresses the decline of the Victorian division of labor with the ascendance of bureaucratic and clerical work, the consequent blurring of the rigid gender roles that had once excluded women from useful labor, and the long-term legacy of the valorization of muscular labor as the central aspect of masculinity.

Gender roles, gendered imagery in art and literature, and the relationship between gender and labor in the Victorian era have generated a considerable body of scholarship over last decade. Danahay deserves praise for both introducing new evidence to the debate and for developing innovative ways of approaching familiar ground. In particular, the author's analysis of visual imagery is precise and elucidating. Danahay's analysis of Munby's obsession with the physical attributes of both men and women as they related to labor is especially compelling. The author's originality, however, does come at a price. By choosing to focus narrowly on a handful of particular authors and artists, albeit very prominent and often prolific ones, Danahay limits the broader significance of his work. Some of the author's most interesting points of analysis are also those that seem to hold the fewest implications for the broader subjects at hand. Despite this shortcoming, Gender at Work in Victorian Culture is a thoughtful and thought-provoking book that should be of interest to scholars of Victorian gender, culture, and labor—useful work indeed, even if little muscle was required in its production.