According to the American Time Use Survey, American managers work a median of 43 hours per week, and 10% of them work at least 55 hours per week (Flood, Sayer, and Backman; my tabulations). Managers work more hours than people in the lower-status occupational categories. Construction, production, and transportation all report about 40 median weekly hours.
In Victorian times, when British managers ran the wealthiest and most advanced economy in the world and the largest empire in history–and when factory workers often labored for 72 hours per week–the elite spent few hours on the job.
I formed this impression recently as I read Anthony Troloppe’s Phineas Finn, a novel about politics. Finn, a rising MP and the Under-Secretary of State in charge of Canada, works for a few hours most afternoons, punctuated by holidays in country houses. He is dismayed that his former mentor, the barrister Mr. Low, must work 10 hours/day to make a living “and could rarely call a day his own.” Of course, Victorian workers and domestic servants worked even longer hours than lawyers did. But none of Finn’s political friends, including the Prime Minister, seem to work much beyond the afternoon.
This book is fiction and could be satirical (although it doesn’t seem to be). However, Samuel Hughes supplies facts to support the generalization that Victorian elites spent few hours on the job. “The great prime minister of the Victorian period, William Gladstone, hosted a social breakfast starting at 10.30am (claret was served), continuing till about noon. His rival Benjamin Disraeli attended breakfasts hosted by Lord Houghton, which started at 10am, but which Disraeli would join at about 11.30am.” Hughes adds, “many Victorians had a substantial lunch with wine, usually with professional peers at a club, sustaining them until dinner at about 8.30pm.” That left them just a few afternoon hours to work in the office.
These men had been educated in what the British call public schools, where (Hughes says) pupils spent about 2-5 hours/day on schoolwork. The curriculum was dominated by Latin and Greek, but few adults recalled either language, which might reflect the lack of attention they had given to their schoolwork. Hughes quotes Winston Churchill: “In all the twelve years I was at school no one ever succeeded in making me write a Latin verse or learn any Greek except the alphabet.” I similarly recall a line from George Orwell’s Wigan Pier: “You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school–I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet–but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.”
Many leaders had finished their educations at Oxford or Cambridge, where a “pass” degree required almost no work, and the rarer “honors” degree might demand a few hours of studying between morning chapel and an elaborate lunch, plus a tutorial around 4 pm–over sherry.
The US was not so different. As I wrote in 2015, FDR “was a busy man: Secretary of the Navy, Governor of New York, President of the United States for 13 epic years. And yet he also had time to collect one million stamps and more than 20,000 books, many of them about naval history, a special interest of his. He also welcomed many house guests and obviously socialized constantly. He had a dog and was interested in birds.”
Here is a theory of why Victorian and early-20th century elites spent few hours officially on the job, while our elites spend so much time at work.
First, it pays to be recognized and liked by others within an elite. This is “social capital,” as Pierre Bourdieu defines it. The main benefit is to the individual who is included in an elite network. But the whole network may also function better if it is tight and mutually supporting. Then information can move efficiently and individuals may sacrifice–if not for the common good or the welfare of the poor, then at least for their collective interests as the rulers or owners of an institution. Many a Victorian gentleman gave his life for his peers.
Second, the forms by which elites maintain social ties vary. Victorian gentlemen spent many hours on sports (especially as youth), clubs, dinners, country parties, balls, hunting, and paying visits. As Hughes says, “By one definition, then, elite Victorians did remarkably little work: they could easily spend just four or five hours a day actually in the office. But by another definition, they were working all the time. Lunches, balls, and dinners were certainly fun, but they were not just fun.” These were the places where information traveled and people decided whom to favor and support.
By the way, Troloppe is sympathetic to his female characters for their vulnerability and lack of explicit power, yet he explores how women exert influence in settings like dinner parties and hunts, where they distribute social capital.
Today’s managerial elites are more likely to spent their time in meetings or in front of screens, exchanging messages. A typical email, text, or Slack message goes from one person to many. All the recipients must consider whether to reply, which means that every message generates a great deal of work for others. If you are not cc-d or invited to a meeting, you may miss social capital. If you fail to answer a message, you may be forgotten or cause offense. The more hours you spend sending and receiving messages or sitting around a conference table, the better networked you are. People with very busy calendars have high social capital (in the Bourdieu sense) and can dispense appointments selectively. Whole tranches of managers can be mainly engaged in communicating with one another about when and how to meet to communicate with each other, which is exhausting labor.
Third, networking will tend to become more demanding over time. Wine-soaked lunches will give way to text-message threads at 11 pm. This is because networking in an elite status-group is intensely competitive and has high stakes. It may seem fun if it takes place over claret or at a country house party, but the function is serious. Therefore, the serious side will constantly ratchet up.
Networking behavior will grow more efficient in the sense that the competition for influence will grow more relentless and unsparing. However, elites will not necessarily manage things better. A remarkably small number of British men (and one Empress) ran a vast empire pretty well–as measured by their own interests–while saving time for drinking and hunting. They were much more efficient at ruling than our modern elites are.
Functionally, a modern office may be like a Victorian dinner party. But our modern ways seem a lot less fun.
Source: Sarah M. Flood, Liana C. Sayer, and Daniel Backman. American Time Use Survey Data Extract Builder: Version 3.3 [dataset]. College Park, MD: University of Maryland and Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D060.V3.3. (My tabulations.) See also: what happened to leisure time? (on FDR’s ample free time); Mrs. Dalloway with a smartphone; two approaches to social capital: Bourdieu vs. the American literature; and vestiges of feudalism in Emma; or, why the gentry acts as it does.
