ABSTRACT
Ideas about work, and particularly ideas about vocation, have a history which can be traced through the developing genre of fiction. Victorian novelists were, typically, critics of their culture. If the denizens of the culture were busily seeking success according to whatever version of the Puritan ethic they chose to follow, Victorian fiction writers perceived the possibility and the desirability of another set of values. For women deprived of work or threatened with its loss, work becomes everything; the parallel to the Victorian male’s idealization of the hearth may be the female idealization of work. Perhaps the reader’s satisfaction with integration accounts for the overwhelming popularity of David Copperfield, a novel in which everyone’s life seems quite literally to “work out.” Class antagonism, so evident in the 1830’s and 1840’s and reflected in Charles Dickens’s earlier fiction, virtually disappears in David Copperfield. Working class characters teach David his most important lessons about love and work.
