from Chapter VIII
At last, I succeeded in obtaining some clerical employment. For no other work was I fit, for my training had not been special in any one direction. My hours were long, from ten in the morning till seven in the evening, and as I was three miles distant from the office, I was really away from home for eleven hours every day, excepting on Sundays. I began to calculate that my life consisted of nothing but the brief spaces allowed me for rest, and these brief spaces I could not enjoy because I dwelt upon t heir brevity. There was some excuse for me. Never could there have been any duty incumbent upon man much more inhuman and devoid of interest than my own. ... The whole day I did nothing but write, and what I wrote called forth no single faculty of the mind. Nobody who has not tried such an occupation can possibly forecast the strange habits, humours, fancies, and diseases which after a time it breeds. I was shut up in a room half below the ground. In this room were three other men besides myself, two of them between fifty and sixty, and one about three or four-and-twenty. All four of us kept books or copied letters from ten to seven, with an interval of three-quarters of an hour for dinner. In all of these men ... there had been developed, partly I suppose by the circumstances of enforced idleness of brain, the most loathsome tendency to obscenity. This was the one subject which was common ground, and upon which they could talk. It was fostered too by a passion for beer, which was supplied by the publican across the way, who was perpetually travelling to and fro with cans. My horror when I first found out into what society I had been thrust was unspeakable. There was a clock within a hundred yards of my window which struck the hours and quarter s. How I watched that clock! My spirits rose or fell with each division of the day. From ten to twelve there was nothing but gloom. By half-past twelve I began to discern dinner time, and the prospect was brighter. After dinner there was nothing to b e done but doggedly to endure until five, and at five I was able to see over the distance from five to seven. My disgust at my companions, however, came to be mixed with pity. I found none of them cruel, and I received many little kindnesses from them. I discovered that their trade was largely answerable for the impurity of thought and speech which so shocked me. Its monotony compelled some countervailing stimulus, and as they had never been educated to care for anything in particular, they found the necessary relief in sensuality. At first they "chaffed" and worried me a good deal because of my silence, but at last they began to think I was "religious," and then they ceased to torment me. I rather encouraged them in the belief that I had a right to exemption from their conversation, and I passed, I believe, for a Plymouth brother. The only thing which they could not comprehend was that I made no attempt to convert them.
The whole establishment was under the rule of a deputy-manager, who was the terror of the place. ... I never saw anybody hated as he was, and the hatred against him was the more intense because nobody could convict him of a mistake. He seemed to enjoy a storm, and knew nothing whatever of the constraints which with ordinary men prevent abusive and brutal language to those around them. Some of his clerks suffered greatly from him, and he almost broke down two or three from the constant nervous strain upo n them produced by fear of his explosions. For my own part, although I came in for a full share of his temper, I at once made up my mind as soon as I discovered what he was, not to open my lips to him except under compulsion. My one object now was to ge t a living. I wished also to avoid the self-mortification which must ensue from altercation. ...
Another stratagem of defence which I adopted at the office was never to betray to a soul anything about myself. Nobody knew anything about me, whether I was married or single, where I lived, or what I thought upon a single subject of any importance. I cut off my office life in this way from my life at home sop completely that I was two selves, and my true self was not stained by contact with my other self. It was a comfort to me to think the moment the clock struck seven that my second self died, and t hat my first self suffered nothing by having anything to do with it. I was not the person who sat at the desk downstairs and endured the abominable talk of his colleagues and the ignominy of serving such a chief. I knew nothing about him. I was a citiz en walking London streets; I had my opinions upon human beings and books; I was on equal terms with my friends; I was Ellen's husband; I was, in short, a man. By this scrupulous isolation, I preserved myself, and the clerk was not debarred from the doma in of freedom. It is very terrible to think that the labour by which men are to live should be of this order. The ideal of labour is that it should be something in which we can take an interest and even a pride. Immense masses of it in London are the m erest slavery, and it is as mechanical as the daily journey of the omnibus horse. There is no possibility of relieving it, and all the ordinary copybook advice of moralists and poets as to the temper in which we should earn our bread is childish nonsense . If a man is a painter, or a physician, or a barrister, or even a tradesman, well and good. The maxims of authors may be of some service to him, and he may be able to exemplify them; but if he is a copying clerk they are an insult, and he can do nothing but arch his back to bear his burden and find some compensation elsewhere. True it is that beneficent Nature here, as always, is helpful. habit, after a while, mitigated much of the bitterness of destiny. ...
Oh, how many times have I left my office humiliated by some silently endured outbreak on the part of my master, more galling because I could not put it aside as altogether gratuitous; and in less than an hour it was two miles away, and I was myself again. If a man wants to know what the potency of love is, he must be a menial; he must be despised. Those who are prosperous and courted cannot understand its power. Let him come home after he has suffered what is far worse than hatred --- the contempt of a superior, who knows that he can afford to be contemptuous, seeing that he can replace his slave at a moment's notice. Let him be trained by his tyrant to dwell upon the thought that he belongs to the vast crowd of people in London who are unimportant; almo st useless; to whom it is a charity to offer employment; who are conscious of possessing no gift which makes them of any value to anybody, and he will then comprehend the divine efficacy of the affection of that woman to whom he is dear.