The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America

The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. By Thomas Augst. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii, 321 pp. Cloth, $62.00, ISBN 0-22603219-1. Paper, $25.00, ISBN 0-226-032205.)

In this ambitious study, Thomas Augst examines the tools of literacy-writing, reading, the art of conversation-through which mercantile clerks sought to bring their present selves into "communion" with their future selves in order to make themselves "personally accountable to the future" (p. 53). Mediated by a "moral Other" (p. 54), an idealized self by which a young man gauged his progress in the emerging market culture, diary writing, for instance, developed as a peculiarly modern, literary form of self-imagining. An avatar of the eras possibilities, Ralph Waldo Emerson garnered acclaim on the lecture circuit in the 184Os and 185Os by advising young men on...