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This chapter considers William Wordsworth’s thirty-year civil service career as a Distributor of Stamps to examine how Romantic literature was shaped by several intertwined developments: the formation of a fiscal bureaucracy in Britain during the long eighteenth century, the attendant proliferation of bureaucratic genres and media, and utilitarian theories of administrative efficiency. This chapter argues that Wordsworth’s writing responds to what it calls bureaucratic form: the form taken by writing when the efficient capturing and communicating of data, or “particulars,” are principal considerations. Operating in concert with the contemporaneous virtue of brevity in writing and long-standing concerns about brevitas in literature, bureaucratic form made the economical collection and delivery of information an ideal for all kinds of writing. This chapter shows that Lyrical Ballads (1798), Essays upon Epitaphs (comp. 1810), and above all, The Excursion (1814) accommodate, as much as they ignore, the rule of streamlined writing.

This chapter considers the early work on bureaucracy before examining the foundations of a bureaucratic rationality. It strongly distinguishes between the bureaucratic form and a bureaucratic rationality that underpins it. Bureaucratic rationality is identified as domination through knowledge, or that which allows things to be known. It is the mundane, seemingly insignificant acts of semantics, drawing definitional boundaries, rules, procedures, codes, protocols, and writing the world in formalized terms, that enables it to be known, become predictable, and be acted upon. As such, bureaucratic rationality is the underlabourer allowing bureaucratic structures to function. And it is this bureaucratic rationality that persists, if not more so, when the organizational form identified as bureaucracy undergoes many changes.

One of Hoccleve's autograph manuscripts, San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 111, provides insight into the audience that Thomas anticipates in the Series as well as the audience that Hoccleve might have anticipated for the book he was making. MS HM 111 can help us to understand Thomas's view that bureaucratic clerks will read his “Complaint” even though—and perhaps because—it forms part of a book he is making for Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester. This chapter argues that the audiences anticipated in and for the Series were capable of employing sophisticated interpretative practices when judging the ironic juxtaposition between what the narrator intends and what he accomplishes when making his book. It ends on a cautious note, however, by acknowledging that many of the readers whom Hoccleve addresses were profoundly committed to personal reform and may therefore have focused especially on the moral and spiritual significance of the Series rather than its formal innovation.

This chapter explores the narrative of the frontier, of the gendarmes' being caught between les textes and le social, between bureaucratic form and lived life—in a lack of resolution. There is nothing beyond this tension, no safe space where the gendarmes can find certainty and protection; there is no bureaucratic haven. This tension is even accentuated by the different and often conflicting expectations of civilians, prosecutors, and the gendarmes' superiors. The gendarmes' mandate is ultimately unaccomplishable, their task impossible. The bureaucratic drama thus created both communitas and isolation at the same time. It created communitas among the gendarmes through their shared sense of frustration. But it also caused a sense of isolation as tragic creatures, with neither catastrophe nor catharsis in sight. Indeed, the gendarme is a bureaucratic Sisyphus: a frontier figure tasked with the impossible project of closing the frontier.