In the preface to the first edition of Little Dorrit, Dickens proclaims that his novelistic exposition of the ‘whole Science of Government’ was based on the ‘common experience of an Englishman.’ Dickens in other words meant to give the laity’s perspective on public administration. However, ideas about officialdom tend to be shaped not only by experience, but also by stories. Indeed, one supposes that it is only because Dickens’s male protagonist had been out of the country for so long that he arrives at the Circumlocution Office seemingly without having heard, through bureaucratic folklore, about its obfuscations and faux busyness.

In this talk Jonathan Foster explores the narrativisation of bureaucracy and its consequences for the study of public administration, focusing on what Ceri Sullivan has described as Dickens’s ‘pestilential effect on the image of office life.’ Dickens’s bureaucratic imaginary has not only influenced the broader narrative about British state administration, it has also bolstered the vocabulary that we have at our disposal when discussing bureaucracy, through inspired neologisms like ‘red tapeworm,’ and above all through the ‘Circumlocution Office’ and the dictum ‘How not to do it.’ Jonathan Foster argues that Dickens’s impact as a writer on bureaucracy derives largely from the meme-like quality of these catchphrases, which live on, notably, in the work of other writers who have set their civil service stories in the Circumlocution Office.

Jonathan Foster is a doctoral student based at Stockholm University whose research focuses on fiction dealing with administrative statecraft. His dissertation examines the depiction of state bureaucracy in the work of Harriet Martineau, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. He is the co-editor of a special issue of The Parish Review: Journal of Flann O’Brien Studies on ‘Brian O’Nolan and the Irish Civil Service,’ and he is currently co-editing a special issue of Administory on ‘Administrative Cultures and their Aesthetics’ as well as a volume on Dickens and Decadence.