One of the most curious things connected with the construction of the railway Varna-Rustchuk was the number of different races that, for one reason or another, were collected on the works. At one time we counted among this heterogeneous mass thirty-two different languages and dialects (Barkley, Danube, 174.). As he was directly responsible for the line works Kustenjeh-Chernavoda and Varna-Rustchuck, Barkley gained first hand information about the character and working habits of his international "navvies". From all the nations which took part in the line projects, the most interesting accounts are about the Turks and the Bulgarians, often reflected upon in contrast to the author's fellow countrymen working shoulder to shoulder with the Orientals. The labour habits of both are valued according to Barkley's value system, which in its turn was formed by the culturally specific English Zeitgeist -- the early nineteenth-century protestant work ethic.
Research on the protestant work ethic (PWE) is so extensive that a comprehensive review is impossible within the limits of this paper. Although giving contradictory definitions of the Victorian PWE, the different authors tend to agree that it consisted of a striving for security, collecting, miserliness and saving but also with autonomy and power. At the heart of the concept was an obsession with money as a sign of success (and God's grace). Oates sums this up in one sentence:
A universal taboo is placed on idleness, and industriousness is considered a religious ideal; waste is a vice, and frugality a virtue; complacency and failure are outlawed, and ambition and success are taken as sure signs of God's favour; the universal sign of sin is poverty, and the crowning sign of God's favour is wealth.
There was a dimension to the belief in hard work as the inevitable route to personal and collective salvation. Its proponents were convinced that social problems were a result of collective personal weakness and that social defects did not derive from faults of society itself. For those Victorians, for whom human behaviour had its roots in personal, not social, explanations hard work seemed to offer an antidote to the major failings of individuals, and therefore society. There was evidence which at first glance seemed to confirm the belief in self-improvement through industry and thrift. Many working-class people were indeed actively improving themselves. The money deposited in local Penny Savings Banks came primarily from low income groups, often from domestic servants.
This was, however, only one side of the coin. Wealth and prosperity brought misery and (spiritual) poverty. The love of money was repeatedly demonstrated in Victorian literature to be the root of all evil. Again and again the plots of Victorian novels were arranged to illustrate that the craving for money, the desire to get far up the scale of prosperity, simply corrupted. It brought a sort of moral corruption, and such physical emblems and analogues of evil as crime and filth in the lower places of the city, the world and the self, madness and particular kinds of exile and alienation.
The effect of the Industrial Revolution in England brought about a call for great social reform. Utilitarianism seemed to many members of the middle class to be the answer to that call. This philosophy became popular because it appealed to those who had benefited financially from the Industrial Revolution. The utilitarian principle of happiness proposed by Bentham allowed the pursuit of individual happiness, in this case wealth, as morally good (Oates, 84). The middle class of England had moved to a position of power as a result of their new-found wealth. This middle class realised that the best way for them to maintain their wealth and power was to enact a democratic system of government such as suggested by Utilitarianism. Although his first premises were first published in the 1790s, Bentham heavily influenced social reforms in Great Britain during the 1830s and 40s. His An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation has been associated with several reform acts that were introduced into English law such as the Factory Act (1833), the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), the Prison Act (1835), the Municipal Corporation Act (1835), the Committee on Education (1839), the Lunacy Act (1845), and the Public Health Act (1848). Selections of Bentham's Constitutional Code published posthumously allowed his presence to make itself felt during many of the reforms of the late 1840s.
In the fifties and sixties, the code of duty and self-restraint still held good, but the philosophy on which it was based was visibly breaking up. It had rested on two assumptions which experience was showing to be untenable: that the production of wealth by the few meant, somehow and in the long run, welfare for the many; and that conventional behaviour grounded in a traditional creed was enough to satisfy all right demands of humanity. At about this time the word "Victorian" was coined to denote a new mentality.
Oates, Wayne E., Confession of a Workaholic; the Facts about Work Addiction. New York: World, 1971.
Last modified 11 October 2002