The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
2004; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 24; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1553-0620
Autores Tópico(s)Race, History, and American Society
ResumoThe Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral in Nineteenth-Century America. By Thomas Augst. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 321. Illustrations. Cloth, $62.00; paper, $25.00.)Clerks occupied an ambiguous place in nineteenth-century society. They pursued an occupation that men had been following for hundreds of years, yet their vocation was being radically transformed. They were white-collar workers, but when off job, they led lives quite similar to those of manual workers, living and eating in boarding houses, attending theater, and patronizing saloons. Clerks dreamed of success, yet were worried that they could only achieve it through moral compromise.Middle-class self-making is central subject of The Clerk's Tale, but unlike Daniel Walker Howe's Making American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham, Lincoln (1997), this book focuses less on theories of self-making and concentrates instead on how ordinary young men tried to craft their identities as they went about their quotidian existence in America's burgeoning cities. Augst, who teaches English at University of Minnesota, concentrates on reading and writing to explore how young men tried to make sense of their vocation and of their lives in midst of Market Revolution. The story Augst tells, is, he believes, about more than clerks. He aspires to interpret form and meaning of moral for an emerging middle class, and even more broadly, to examine how institutions arid practices of literacy shaped the democratic practice of moral life in American society (2, 61). This may sound bit pretentious, arid level of abstraction is somewhat higher than historians are used to. But, while there are places where Augst piles meaning on top of meaning until I was left wondering what exactly was really important, The Clerk's Tale is generally clearly written and its conclusions are prudent.The main focus of book is an analysis of clerks' diaries and letters, mostly from mid-nineteenth century. The diaries are diverse in format arid intent, but they provide important, indeed critical, evidence about writers' lives. These young men, Augst argues, hoped to become equal of their aspirations through act of writing itself. These documents are almost all texts of self-making-or what clerks themselves would have called character building. In pages of diaries we can see authors attempting to order daily events arid thus to understand and perhaps even to exert measure of control over volatile world in which they found themselves. They used writing to try to grasp meaning of their lives. Central to this meaning was journey to fulfillment, both financial and ethical, and clerks used their diaries to compare their situations with their own and others' expectations and to compare their older and their younger and reflect on contrast. Key to self-improvement that was so central to so many was proper use of time, which diaries helped writers to chronicle.Clerks often recorded in their diaries and letters what they had learned from reading hooks and from listening to puhlic lectures. Augst examines how Emerson in his lectures addressed problem of trying to live an ethical in society dominated by amoral values of marketplace. Emerson was not, Augst argues, complacent about bourgeois individualism, but was instead searching for a pragmatic system for management of self (121) that was adapted to realities of capitalist enterprise and would resonate with liis audience. By reading and listening to moralists like Emerson, young men learned what Augst calls conventionality: deportment and attitudes normally associated with middle-class male and how to achieve them. …
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