Explores the connection between writers' desire to prove that they 'work' and parallel histories of craft and artisanal revival

Examines Victorian and modernist writers who re-describe their work as an artisanal labour The Work of Words considers the unconventional path of middle-class writers who re-presented literature as a manual craft. Tracking this ideal of 'author-craft' through the work of - among others - Thomas Carlyle, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barret Browning, John Ruskin, William Gladstone, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Olive Schreiner, these chapters culminate in Ezra Pound's troubling conception of a usury that 'rusteth the craft and the craftsman'. By examining previous attempts to make composition palpable, this study takes the long view on questions that still preoccupy us, including the convergence of Left and Right positions in labour politics, revivals of workshop culture and debates about the weight and worth of the humanities. Marcus Waithe is a University Associate Professor in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Magdalene College.