The Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution forever changed the typical lifestyle of people; from agricultural practices to having everything being manufactured by machines. Thomas Carlyle, in his essay, “Labour”, talks about the peak of the Revolution and how there was “a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work”. On the other hand, Herman Melville in his short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, makes a point through a fictional occurrence that working destroys the human soul and whole purpose of life. In Labour, Carlyle uses religious and uplifting diction and syntax to voice to his audience how working is beneficial to the human race, while in Bartleby, the Scrivener, Melville uses dehumanizing and mechanical forms of diction and syntax to get his audience to understand how working is destructive to a human.

In “Labour”, Carlyle states how there are a “high calling” and “destiny, on the whole” for the human race to work. In Carlyle’s point of view, working was a “God-given Force” that “rises from the inmost heart of the Worker”. He argues that without work, people would have no other way of obtaining the knowledge and intelligence that they acquire while doing it. Thomas Carlyle then goes on to argue that “a man perfects himself by working” and uses examples of actual jobs like “foul jungles” being cleared away and “fair seed fields” rising in its place to “prove” if you will, how without jobs and men being put to work, no advances in the human race and its overall society would take place. Carlyle’s whole point of his essay is to ascertain that the Industrial Revolution is infamous for creating “the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him [a worker] by Almighty God” since the Revolution created many jobs for people.

On the other hand, in the short story, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”, Melville states through a fictional story that working is damaging to the human soul, causing them to become almost “mechanical”, like a machine. In this short story, Melville makes it seem like Bartleby is in fact, a machine. He does that by giving Bartleby machine-like qualities. In order to support his argument, Melville has Bartleby constantly repeat the same phrase of “I prefer not to”, in order to compare him to how a machine is constantly repeating the same tasks every day. Melville goes on further to give Bartleby mechanical qualities when Bartleby states how he “prefers not to dine to-day” and how he “lives without dining”; comparing it to how you cannot feed machines because they are inanimate objects. Melville’s whole point of his short story is to persuade readers to realize the harmful and dehumanizing effects that working has on the human soul.

In “Labour”, Carlyle uses religious and uplifting diction and syntax to voice to his audience how working is “healthy” if you will, for the human soul. For example, Carlyle states