ABSTRACT
The myth of vocation is expressed in its purest form in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe, the prototypical middle class fictional hero, provides a model of the way that life can be integrated by work. Defoe’s novel contains two plots, each of which gives form to an attitude towards work. In David Copperfield, Great Expectations, and Jude the Obscure, Dickens and Hardy transform Defoe’s plot structures and themes to suit their own purposes. While in Robinson Crusoe the myth of vocation is a story, in David Copperfield and Great Expectations that story becomes epistemology, providing writer and reader with a way of organizing experience and giving it meaning. The myth of vocation is a middle class myth; it describes one way that a self-examining social group, contending with the rewards and anxieties attendant upon occupational freedom, perceived its own activities.
