ABSTRACT
Why so many typists? One answer might be that the newly-invented ‘writing
machine’ provided a less easily legible emblem than its New Woman operators
for what the French critic Sainte-Beuve had dubbed as early as 1839 ‘la littérature
industrielle’: an object that could be named only through oxymoron because it
located readers and writers within the commercial sphere against which art had
traditionally been defined. The proliferation of business machines in the 1880s lent
new force to that metaphor. Not only was bureaucratic text now produced by
inanimate objects and the inarticulate masses who operated them, but by 1900,
increasing amounts of the copy submitted to even literary publishers was typed by
(and sometimes dictated to) a paid amanuensis.3
