Even where the emphasis of previous chapters has been on sheer toil or invigorating labour, my examples have been closely tracked by discourses of manual skill and apprenticeship. Part III considers a more fully realised version of this craft-consciousness, where the emphasis falls on the associated malleability of words. Chapter 5 explores the most popular of these literary-artisanal tropes: namely, the implied connection between the writer and the blacksmith. Running from late Dickens, through late Ruskin, to Hopkins, it demonstrates a common attraction to the idea of the literary artificer, albeit one that is troubled by the forge’s Promethean glow. While Salmon demonstrates the foundational role of ‘Carlyle’s invocation of literary ‘guilds’ and ‘apprenticeships’ in Sartor Resartus’, the following discussion reveals how these models became instrumental at the level of their linguistic tooling. This effect is also derived from Carlyle, but rather than feeding into the novelistic tradition of self-development, it fosters here a resurgent trope of linguistic making, which gradually intersects with the Arts and Crafts movement in the last decades of the century. The chapter charts an early encounter between these approaches through the pages of Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), a novel highly sensitised to languages of labour, but also – as we shall see – to distinctions between licensed and unlicensed tooling.

The stakes involved in this turn towards literary handicraft are worth considering. Reflecting on a fashionable turn towards artisanal versions of literature, David Masson observes in 1873 that the ‘poems and songs’ of the Anglo-Saxons ‘were made – were actually fabricated for them out of their language by word-smiths’. Masson’s last term appears in the OED as the first instance of its use. As such it evokes the period’s revived interest in Old English, a language whose compound methods of word formation inspire both the morphology of this coinage, and an associated challenge to reified distinctions between culture and craft. Such thinking inspires, in turn, a new generation of ‘word-smiths’, each of whom presses archaic linguistic resources into the service of analogies between literary composition and metalwork.