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9780226032207
By Thomas Augst
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226032205
Chapter One - Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life
The diaries that have ended up in archives frequently begin as travel journals, recording a first voyage from home in search of work. E. E. Belding memorialized his first trip away from home by writing a "Memorandum of journey to Buffalo and back" in 1834. He described the difficulty of the journey by carriage, noting that his fellow passengers were a mixture "of English Irish and New England, all very agreeable and sociable." After arriving in Buffalo on 21 May, he wrote on 24 May that there was "Nothing worth noticing this day only not finding business to suit us." On 25 May, he decided to return home because of a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati. Belding does not pick up his pen again until a year later, when he again ventured out into the world. There was "nothing worth noticing" in a young man's life, evidently, until he had left behind the predictable routines of childhood, broken away from defined roles and familiar comforts to face risk and uncertainty. Like Benjamin Franklin arriving in Philadelphia for the first time, Belding finds himself in a strange place with neither friends nor money to pave the way: "May 31 arrived atTroy this morning with but twenty cents left don't know what to do nor where to lay my head yet I still trust in Divine Providence knowing that he will take care of me." Like Charles French's declaration of "comparative independence," Belding's diary makes the very question of his fate the condition of hope--the preface to moral venture.
Young men entered the alien terrain of independence by writing in diaries. With their many arrivals and departures, nineteenth-century Americans had no simple standard for marking adulthood. "Full attainment of manhood," as Joseph Kett observes, might be tied to "the age of leaving home for the final time, the age of marriage or joining a church, or perhaps the age of entering a profession." Prior to their legal emancipation at the age of twenty-one, young man would typically move through states of semi-dependence, leaving home several times for apprenticeships or to live with relatives, attending schools and academies seasonally. The first entries in the diary of Enos White (1803-ca. 1852) from 1821 record a struggle to leave his father's home in Weymouth, Massachusetts, to make a life for himself: "This Day I leave my Father after having got him to consent to my being Free. I leave in good spirits, although my prospects are very small, and the opinion of my friends is that I shall soon wish myself back again. I am now eighteen years and five months old with one decent suit of clothes and fifteen dollars in change to commence my career with." White's life as a man only begins, it seems, once he has secured his father's consent to "being free," and it is at that point when writing in a journal begins to mat-ter--a gesture of defiance against the law of majority. In a second entry, from May 1821, he notes that he has moved back home. In the third entry, dated two years later on 24 March 1823, he declares: "I am now again free and 21 years of age." In these long lapses between entries, we can perhaps imagine White's demoralization on reentering parental wardship, the frustration of his struggle to claim a life worthy of respect.
In the midst of the social and geographic displacements that increasingly defined manhood, young men used their diaries as totems and allies of moral aspiration. Take, for instance, the choice that William Hoffman (b. 1829) made about the kind of journal to keep. Beginning at the age of seventeen, Hoffman wrote from 1847 to 1850 in a heavy, leather-bound folio volume, some eight by twelve inches, with his name embossed on the cover. Obviously, this was not one of the "pocket diaries" that so many clerks carried casually as they went about their errands but a cumbersome physical object demanding its owner's solicitude. Hoffman carried this tome with him through the late 1840s as perhaps the most precious of his meager belongings as he moved by foot, carriage, and ferry from upstate New York to Albany to Manhattan in search of a retail post. For Hoffman, the record of a life--at least, the life to which he aspired--was worthy of a big, substantial book. For this reason, he had to leave it at his boardinghouse, writing in it only after he returned in the evenings, after working long hours as a clerk in various dry goods stores. Once back in his room, however, Hoffman found both the time and privacy he needed for writing to be in short supply. In 1849, while working in Albany, for example, Hoffman writes: "April 27 I do not know how much I did sell as I am so wearied when night comes & also my roommates are so sensitive on many things & especially on my sitting up after they have retired that I am obliged to defer writing till the lapse of several days: sometimes a whole week. Consequently do not get the occurrences of each day correctly registered." Why was it important for a clerk to "correctly register" the occurrences of each day, despite his exhaustion from work and the presence of sensitive roommates?
As these young men found jobs as clerks, working twelve to fourteen hours a day, independence became a matter of quotidian accounting, the struggle to find and value time apart from the pressures and exhaustion of making a living. Hoffman repeatedly expresses frustration about his failure to "register occurrences": "Monday Tuesday Wednesday & Thursday I have not time to note down the occurrences I do not have time." The following year, when he was working in New York City, lost days had become months: "1850 March April May & June Here again I have neglected to record the proceedings of each day as will be noticed have suspended such for quite a length of time." Hoffman attributed these gaps in his diary to his own neglect, as though having time depended less on circumstances, which left very little room for self-reflection, than on his own perseverance: "I am recording the proceedings of the weeks as they have been neglected till this hour. The Boys are dozing on their beds etc." As he stays up to write, Hoffman not only records the "proceedings of the weeks" but equates writing itself with moral responsibility. So it went for others: as clerks accounted for time in their diaries, they became accountable to themselves, blaming lapses of writing on their own "neglect" and perhaps judging other boys in the boardinghouse for their laziness or poor discipline.
Young men such as Hoffman, Belding, and White used their diaries to give their movements in market culture moral shape and direction. Across gaps of days, months, and years, each of these diaries tells a personal history, narrating a struggle for autonomy that was only fitfully achieved and impossible to take for granted. For Belding and White, writing was a ritual act that self-consciously transformed their separation from family, whether from necessity or inclination, into a rite of passage, a movement toward the elusive threshold of becoming responsible for one's self. In Hoffman's diary, this moral accounting becomes more perfunctory and particular, measured by a routine of daily observation performed with diligence or neglect. Individuals brought different degrees of intention and responsibility to the process of writing, and it is in a diary's particular use by young men where we find evidence of ethical practice. Whether someone writes in a diary at all, the sort of diary being used, the patterns of reflection staged within it, the conventions followed--these literary and material qualities testify to the ways that the act of writing inscribes an individual claim to moral distinction. In the silence of missed days, months, and years, these personal histories document the ephemeral process by which individuals acquire and regulate a moral consciousness about the meaning and drift of their choices. From self-conscious declarations of "comparative independence" to the record of months and years that have slipped away, young men sought in their diaries to make their tentative movements add up to something, to account for the value of their ordinary lives. Too often, as clerks became absorbed with the struggle of finding and keeping work, their diaries could seem like "nothing but an almanac," as one disappointed reader complained in 1810, recording the passing of time but not its value.
When they are recovered from unpublished, fragmentary, and fragile papers stored in archives and libraries throughout the United States, these personal histories do not unfold as autobiographies typically do, from the certitude of age as a retrospective of one's life. Rather, they evolve in haphazard and tentative fashion, depending on the resources of time, education, inspiration, and energy that individuals were willing or able to devote to them. As a result, the literary content of diaries has often been minimized in comparison with the journals and life stories of more educated, expert, or historically prominent authors. Taken up with the banality of living-- monotonous references to the weather, repetitive accounts of chores performed, spare notations of illness and death, and the like--diaries often submerge signs of individuality in the relentless tedium of everyday routines and unremarkable lives. It is precisely this "exhaustive, repetitious dailiness," as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich described the writing of the midwife Martha Ballard, that in recent decades has given the diary new importance as a window into micro-histories of ordinary people. In the particular ways they accounted for their days, young men in the nineteenth century managed their personal transitions from agricultural to urban time, from farms to boardinghouses, and developed modern strategies of self-making that were distinct from eighteenth-century patterns of gender and identity.
Rather than assessing the evidence that diaries seem to offer about a historical mentalite or worldview, or judging their quality as literary texts, this chapter analyzes the diary as a material artifact of moral life. It considers both the conventions of its form as they have been shaped by historical norms of ethical judgment and the singularity of its practice--as a performance of individual habits and motives. Every diary narrates an uneven and hesitant path of self-realization that, like Enos White's becoming "now again free," undergoes revision even as it aspires to coherence and wholeness. For this reason, we should value the diaries of ordinary people not for the way they resemble the finished, self-conscious achievement of literary texts but for the ways they remain ephemeral and incomplete, artifacts from the messy business of living. Every diary testifies to a material process of moral formation that takes place between individuals and the resources of literacy available to them in their social moment. In this sense, diaries dramatize the epistemological and narrative strategies by which ordinary people give form to their moral identities. Young men wrote to take an objective view of their own actions and motives, to make ethical judgments about the value of their perceptions, thoughts, and actions. As they compiled what Hoffman calls a "record" and Charles French calls a "chronicle" of events and observations, they also sought to compare and interpret their standing against a linear scale of progress spanning days, months, and years. In both of these ways, nineteenth-century clerks used their diaries like the faithful servants in the biblical parable of the talents, calculating the "interest" their lives accrue over time. As they did so, they wrote not in the confessional tones of modern privacy but with the omniscient clarity and formal detachment of a moral persona: "As will be noticed," Hoffman writes, as though his writing will be judged for its accuracy and quality. Treating their diaries as wise friends or companions, clerks entered a dialogue with their own future selves, the mature men who would look back on their younger selves for signs portending, justifying, or excusing what they had become. By writing in diaries, young men sought to acquire the moral authority that they hoped would follow from a judicious accounting of their lives.
In the duty to write and its neglect, we begin to see how character takes aesthetic form, in the ephemeral rhythms and quotidian rituals of literary practice. This chapter describes the longstanding relation between moral life and literacy, suggesting how the rhythms and rituals of ethical practice were shaped by secular and religious traditions of life-writing. Recording entries that ranged from the spare to the prolix, from meditations on the soul to inventories of the weather, young men sought to acquire knowledge about themselves and to govern their own conduct. They did so through daily repetitions of writing which, like the weather, gave their lives a temporal index that was at once spiritual and material--a constant reminder that life is comprised by a finite number of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrows. Just as Puritans sought to discern the design of providence in their meticulous records of daily life, so young men engaged in a moral accounting that, like fiscal accounting, had a general reckoning as its terminus. But as they used their diaries to navigate the alien climates of market culture, they attached moral value to the self as an end, accumulating experience as the capital out of which character is made.
Young men used their diaries to create moral identities for themselves in the context of ordinary life. Their writing was shaped by three distinct traditions of ethical practice: a classical tradition of humanist pedagogy, a Christian tradition of self-examination, and a utilitarian tradition of bookkeeping. Each of these traditions invested life writing with particular ethical functions, allowing individuals to achieve what the historian Michel Foucault termed "an intensity of relation with the self " concerned with the purpose and quality of one's life. As they wrote in their diaries, young men drew in hybrid ways on the narrative and epistemological strategies of these moral traditions--strategies of memory, attention, and calculation-- in order to cultivate character as a material object of rational habits and practical intention. I have exaggerated the separateness of these traditions in order to delineate the distinctive forms of moral accounting they made available to nineteenth-century Americans, and also to suggest a broad genealogy for the evolution of the diary as a site of ethical practice. These ethical frameworks supplied young men with rhythms and rituals of moral accounting, distinct ways of knowing and governing the self against a linear standard of progress. The values of humanist education, Protestant devotion, and liberal individualism all motivated young men to keep diaries. As this chapter demonstrates, however, young men in the nineteenth century drew on these values in competing and contradictory ways that located moral life not in obligations outside the self but in the temporal form and aesthetic shape of writing.
The expansion of literacy in the nineteenth century did more than create readers for books; it altered the very form of moral authority in a democratic culture. Within the objects and habits of mass literacy, the practices of character became more democratic and more personal. In the chronicles ordinary people made of their uncertain paths to freedom, moral life became both more interior and more individual, in ways that were better suited to social and geographic mobility in this protean world than religious duty and caste discipline. Although young middle-class men continued to look for guidance from Protestant piety and civic humanism, they altered their narratives and values as they brought diaries along with them into adulthood, into the boardinghouses and other temporary locations of market culture. The very looseness of these clerks' attachment to traditional motives of life writing--the diverse methods and moods that they brought to their personal histories--suggests how the nature and scale of ethical practice evolved with the expansion of liberal capitalism. Within the standardized objects and practices of mass literacy, young men acquired a consciousness of their own individuality. By inscribing character in humble objects such as the diary, they increasingly identified social mobility and moral responsibility alike with material devotions of the will. As Hoffman's furtive record of his lost days suggests, character came to be rationalized as an obligation to the self, the duty owed to one's unrealized promise, to the blank slate of an unwritten future.
The Coin of Character
The concept of character, poised between descriptive accounts of human nature and normative ideals for the shaping of values and conduct, has always been identified with literacy. The word originally referred to the impress or stamp used in the minting of coins, where malleable material acquires its distinctive features. When John Locke used the term in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), it still retained its association with the process of imprinting, writing, and engraving: "Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of characters." Locke's theories of education and psychological development would develop the figurative implications of this metaphor. As the mind is shaped by experience, so too more generally would the "metal" of human nature acquire, through the impress of education, its distinctive type as the "coin" of character. This etymology of character may explain the repeated allusions to the printing process in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography when he discusses the acquisition of "credit and character." Franklin describes various regrets as "errata," which, like the careless mistakes of a typesetter, deviate from the uniform and reproducible standard of the virtuous life. Like Locke's metaphor of the tabula rasa, Franklin's metaphor suggests that we understand character in normative terms, as a master text we seek to reproduce in our own lives, and against which we correct our errors and revise our habits. Like Locke's image of characters on paper, it also suggests how the modern psychology of introspection required a more discursive medium than the wax tablet Aristotle first used as an emblem for the imprinting of information on the mind.
With the revival of civic humanism and the development of romantic individualism, character acquired its modern importance as a term of moral distinction, referring less to a standardized type of nature than to a special sum of moral habits and qualities that singles out an individual for esteem and emulation. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, character had come to mean "moral qualities strongly developed or strikingly displayed" (OED), those qualities that through some combination of heredity and influence marked a person as individual and unique. In this sense, character became linked with the ancient rhetorical concept of ethos, which described a person's structure of motives, feelings, and thoughts that cause action and to which we impute moral responsibility. It was in this sense that John Stuart Mill saw character as the very end of human liberty, the expression of one's moral autonomy as an individual: "A person whose desires and impulses are his own--are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture, is said to have a character," Mill wrote in On Liberty (1859). "One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character." For Mill and other liberal thinkers in the nineteenth century, character represented an achievement of individuality, a moral standing that the inhuman world of industrial capitalism, symbolized by the steam engine, seemed to undermine.
The power to actively shape and perfect one's nature as an individual-- to have desires and impulses that are one's "own," as Mill puts it--has always been the practical goal of liberal humanist education in the West. In this tradition, individuals acquire a character through active development of the rational and moral faculties, in becoming capable of knowing and governing their own conduct. Rooted in the natural law tradition of Aristotle, liberal or humane education prepared young men for their future lives as citizens by making an "ideal wholeness of the individual" a practical object of comprehensive training in self-government. As an outgrowth of Hellenic cosmology, the purpose of liberal education has always been "to form a character or type, all of whose parts are in harmonious agreement, no one part of the character (or personality) being overdeveloped at the expense of another." Liberal education equipped elite males in early modern Europe with secular arts of "self-fashioning," giving them access to what Stephen Greenblatt has termed "a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behav-ing." Motivated by ends that were at once spiritual and material, their acquisition of character claimed moral authority through the educational privileges of gender and class.
The power to control one's identity has been a source of moral distinction, of one's difference as an individual, because it has always circulated in hierarchical economies of cultural capital--exercised through practical skills of speaking, writing, and reading that most people did not possess. As a schoolboy, for instance, George Washington wrote into one of his composition books a series of maxims under the heading, "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation." By so doing, he practiced the obligations that came with his inherited social position. The rules resemble the didactic precepts by which educators since Plutarch linked civic education to refinement, preparing gentlemen's sons for their future duties by training them to be "virtuous, useful, and able in their distinct callings," as Locke would put it in his popular conduct book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). As Jared Sparks described the rules in his Life of George Washington (1844), "Some of these are unimportant, suited only to form the habits of a child; others are of a higher import, fitted to soften and polish the manners, to keep alive the best affections of the heart, to teach what is due to others in social relations, and above all to inculcate the practice of a perfect self-control." This lay catechism had its origin in a treatise written by a French Jesuit in 1595, which over the seventeenth century appeared in print in Latin, Spanish, French, Bohemian, and several English editions. As he copied these maxims by hand, the young Washington learned to identify the cultivation of character not only with the cosmopolitan values that circulated in aristocratic circles in Europe and the American colonies but also with progressive training in advanced literacy. From rules of bodily deportment and polite conduct practiced by children, to readings of rhetoric and philosophy and mastery of ancient languages in the classical curriculum of the academy or the eighteenth-century college, this training fostered among elite men such as Washington "acceptance of personal autonomy, the deliberate construction of a personal identity, and the pursuit of a balanced character." Through privileged access to advanced literacy, Washington accumulated moral knowledge and habits of civility that would make him a favorite exemplar of character in the nineteenth century.
Identified with the restricted practices of advanced literacy, the liberal humanist ethos of character throughout the early modern period re-mained--like the privileges of citizenship to which it was tied--largely the province of gentlemen. At the same time, developments in religious education and culture that began with the Protestant Reformation helped to institutionalize a more egalitarian relationship between literacy and moral authority. Training in self-government was extended to new populations that were previously unaccustomed to it. As a consequence, new sources of moral authority emerged that furnished modern identity with a distinctive sense of interiority. The most important was a "caste discipline" of Christian pastoral guidance devoted to "the self-realizing personality," as Ian Hunter puts it. As Hunter has argued, the first public school systems in Europe were established by the churches as "instruments for the intensification and dissemination of Christian spiritual discipline and pastoral guidance." Post-Reformation Protestantism and Catholicism brought about the reform of popular culture by which large sectors of the European population acquired "capacities required for individuals to comport themselves as self-reflective and self-governing persons." In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, Max Weber described early modern Protestantism as a massive campaign in spiritual training, which transferred ethical disciplines from the priesthood to the lay population. As distinctive literary genres of this period such as spiritual autobiography demonstrate, this ethical labor consisted primarily of "practices of self-watchfulness and self-control, special forms of devotional reading and writing," through which the faithful monitored their ethical standing and became personally responsible for their salvation. The Christian pedagogy that twentieth-century critics have so often dismissed as religious brainwashing contributed, Hunter argues, to the "organizing routines, pedagogical practices, personal disciplines, and interpersonal relationships that came to form the core of the modern school" under the secular systems of mass education in the liberal state.
With the expansion of citizenship and schooling in the nineteenth century, once elite forms of moral authority became available to ordinary people. On both sides of the Atlantic, reformers and educators drew on the pedagogical traditions of civic humanism and evangelical Protestantism to make arguments about the qualities that were requisite to the citizens of a modern democratic state. Like John Stuart Mill, they idealized the self-realizing moral personality, or character, as the purpose of education, and increasingly viewed institutions of secular "culture" as vital foundations to the expansion of liberal democracy and market capitalism. In this regard, Stefan Collini has noticed that the idea of character became central to Anglo-Victorian politics during the debates over the franchise. Discussion of the Second Reform Bill in Britain in 1867 was not focused on a working man's rights but on whether his moral qualities allowed him to be trusted with the vote. Similarly, the prevalence of the concept of character in nineteenth-century America should be seen as a consequence of the expansion of citizenship. Although it does not discuss the vote, for example, William Alcott's Young Man's Guide (1833; revised 1849) includes a copy of the United States Constitution in an appendix as though to consummate the book's purpose of "forming the character of young men." Alcott, the first cousin of another educational reformer, Bronson Alcott, invests the "weighty responsibilities" of character with a patriotic appeal to his young readers: "It is for you to decide whether this greatest of free nations shall, at the same time, be the best." In seeking to win support for state-supported common schools, Horace Mann also argued that nothing was more crucial to the fate of the republic than educating the moral character of its future citizens, which the new state-supported common schools would take as their primary mission.
With the expansion of education in the liberal state, character was democratized in the objects and practices of mass literacy. One of the bestselling commodities in the nineteenth-century publishing trade was the blank book. Throughout the early modern period, printers had made blank books, ledgers, and legal and business forms a staple in their inventory, counting on steady sales year after year. A profound consequence of the industrial revolution that, in the nineteenth century, helped to transform printed books into mass-market commodities was that paper became cheaper and writing implements more convenient to use. As a result, diaries acquired prominence as a consumer item. In an 1855 broadside, the New York firm of Kiggins & Kellogg announced the publication of diaries in eleven different sizes, ranging from small 2.5 5-inch Pocket Diaries to large octavo volume Daily Journals as well as a Counting House Diary and Workmen's and Employers' Time Books (fig. 2). As many such advertisements of printers and booksellers reveal, diaries occupied a broad spectrum of paper goods. They were sold as expensive objects of fashion that appealed to the discriminating eye of the genteel classes, to people conditioned by best-selling sentimental fiction to the romantic cultivation of individual feeling. They were also sold as functional objects of commerce and education: diaries "in eleven different sizes," memorandums and "daily journals," or the cheap composition books used in the classroom for reading and writing drills by an expanding population of school children.
What is most striking about the nineteenth-century diaries that survive in libraries and archives is not their uniformity as a genre of consumer good but the diversity of their physical nature and uses. In the front of The Merchants' Desk Diary ("A great aid to a slippery memory, and a shield against forgetfulness") the stationer Henry Anstince reminds readers of Locke's commonplace that "a daily notebook, well kept, was a good evidence of a correct man of business." It further notes that "a Record at the time of transaction is safer as a reference, than the best memory," and that "a good memory, like a good servant, should not be over-taxed because of its faithfulness." The writing in all diaries is pulled in two directions, between regularity and consistency and a more detailed, and complete, record that might "overtax" the space of reference. In meeting these competing aims, clerks could purchase small volumes that accompanied them on their various movements during the day. Or they might purchase diaries designed for one, two, or three "days to a page." These books were often ruled and sized in ways that encouraged writers to treat their experiences as brief "transactions," precluding any but the briefest of notations (fig. 3). James Cunningham (1825-1891), for instance, who had just opened a dry goods store with another merchant, writes for 27 September 1849: "Warm day-- at business all day, introduced to several more merchants, assisting Father, c [etc.]. Evening went to hear Christy's minstrels very much enter-tained--hard rain in the night." Especially in stationary identified with white-collar work, diaries promoted brevity and efficiency as traits of a "correct man of business" or "Professional Men." With their pages ruled and dated for brief entries, memorandum books and pocket diaries made the record of a life more strictly regular, a ledger of activity ruled by the epistemological values and writing practices of bookkeeping. They also made the process of self-accounting perfunctory, potentially indifferent to the ethical motives that, as we shall see, had motivated the writing of diaries for hundreds of years.
The ubiquity of the diary as a consumer object and the diversity of its uses each attest to the new centrality that the habit of writing came to have in the lives of ordinary people. Before the nineteenth century, relatively few people learned to write, and when they did it was typically years after they had learned to read. Young men who went on to write did so as a requirement of their vocations in the clergy, medicine, or the law, and especially business, which, with its daybooks, ledgers, invoices, bills of lading, receipts, and correspondence, was particularly identified with penmanship. As Thomas Watts declared in 1716, "writing is the First step, and Essential in furnishing out the Man of Business." Until the late nineteenth century, clerks still saw a good hand as essential to success in business. Clerks learned penmanship because it was a virtual prerequisite for a career in business. As we shall see in chapter 5, only in the late nineteenth century, with the invention of the typewriter, the avalanche of specialized printed forms, and the entrance of women into secretarial positions would penmanship cease to have this symbolic importance for men entering business. The variety of "hands" in young men's diaries testifies to the fact that writing with a pen is always a technical skill acquired with difficulty. As the sheer quantity of nineteenth-century letters, journals, and diaries also suggests, however, writing ceased to be taught as a specialized, advanced form of literacy and gradually became part of the standardized, graded curriculum of the common school.
In the nineteenth century, even modestly educated young men cultivated character in the diary and other sites of literacy. In the northern United States they were likely to learn reading and writing in the home, Sunday schools, common schools, academies, and for the privileged few, colleges. Young men not only mastered the skill of penmanship but also inherited a set of values, narratives, and conventions that allowed them to invest their practices of reading and writing with moral consequence. Our engagement with texts of all kinds is mediated by the expectations we bring to them, within educational and spiritual traditions that furnish us with what Larzer Ziff terms "pretexts" for literacy. In taking up these ephemeral artifacts, my concern lies not with the prescriptive and normative quality of moral instruction that clerks such as Hoffman, White, and Belding received through mass education: the didactic program drilled into children by McGuffey Readers, for example, or the new kinds of psychological and physical discipline enforced by the common school and other institutions. Rather, I wish to explore how ordinary individuals understood and pursued moral authority for themselves by self-consciously imagining life to be a tabula rasa, by inscribing character in the empty pages of their diaries. Character became an incremental and schematic process of self-analysis, a material object of writing for which a man was personally responsible, inexorably accountable.
Middle-class clerks in antebellum America did not write diaries because they expected to become famous, or because they thought they would be remembered by the world after they were gone. They wrote diaries to exercise some control over the uncertain and changing world in which they found themselves. In doing so, they benefited from means of advanced literacy that had long identified moral authority with exclusive and hierarchical forms of cultural capital: the blank book; pen and ink; the facility with penmanship; the space and time to write; habits of reading and writing; and elite forms of moral knowledge and ethical practice concerned with correction, self-examination, and civility. Prior to the nineteenth century, a small number of highly educated men cultivated this capital of character in the service of duties incumbent to their social position. How was the meaning of character transformed in liberal democratic culture, as it became identified with habits of mass literacy? What consequences did quotidian objects such as the diary have for how young men shaped their lives as stories, for how they understood and pursued a moral life amid the pressing demands of the ordinary and the everyday?
Memory and the Commonplace Tradition
No pretext was more fundamental to literary practices of character in the nineteenth century than the humanist ideal of education described in ancient Greece as paidea, and in Alexander von Humboldt's Germany as bildung: the perfecting of human nature through active development of the rational faculties and moral virtues. In some of his last works, Michel Foucault explored an ancient humanist tradition of ethical practice he termed "the care of the self." In this tradition, individuals used acts of reading, writing, and speaking as what Foucault termed "technologies of self," to alter their thoughts or conduct to achieve some particular idealized version of the self, such as wisdom, happiness, or purity. As with the Apollonian injunction to "know thyself," these technologies allowed students of liberal education to enter a self-conscious relationship to their own actions and desires, to cultivate a moral Other as a functional object of rational habits and practical intentions. To the extent its tools and institutions remained the exclusive property of the ruling class, humanist ethics was, as one critic points out, "a means of self-empowerment and of exercising responsible power over others," a caste system of moral authority in which "your superiors were your moral betters."
The diary is a technology of the self that has an ancient genealogy in Western culture. "One of the main features of taking care of the self," Foucault observed, "involved taking notes on one's self to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed." These ancient notebooks, the Greek hupomnemata, were scrapbooks for daily meditation that were compiled by the individual to constitute the self as an ethical subject. The ancient cultivation of self demanded active and diligent habits of attention, because, as Plutarch observed, the individual could be oblivious to his own moral disorders, or diseases of the soul, or mistake these vices for virtues-- taking anger for courage, envy for emulation, cowardice for prudence. Ethical tools such as the hupomnemata enabled students to bring habits of rational attention to their own thoughts and actions.
Continues...
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Moral Economy of Literacy
Chapter One
Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life
The Coin of Character
Memory and the Commonplace Tradition
Self-Examination and the Devotions of Literacy
Time Is Money: The Value of the Future
Equality of Aspiration
Chapter Two
Forms of Feeling: Habit, Sociability, and the Domestication of Literary Taste
The Drill of Nature: Habits of Writing across Time
Letters and the Debts of Family
The Profit of Pleasure
The Art of Conversation
Sentimental Pathos and the Conventions of Intimacy
Chapter Three
Popular Philosophy and Democratic Voice: Emerson in the Lecture Hall
Becoming Whole: The Struggle for Composure
Modes of Civic Education: The Public Lecture
The Eloquence of Moral Life
Chapter Four
Making Society out of Books: The New York Mercantile Library and the Enterprise of Reading
Circulating Libraries and the Business of Books
Reading and Breeding for the Profession
The Liberty of Intellect and the Taste for Fiction
Chapter Five
The Melancholy of White-Collar Work: Professional Ethos and the Modern Literary Sphere
The Blank Page and the Place of Writing
The Credit of Character, in Parts and Whole
Professional Authorship and the Literary Sphere
Epilogue: Debris from the Business of Living
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America available in Paperback
The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
by Thomas Augst
Thomas Augst
- ISBN-10:
- 0226032205
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226032207
- Pub. Date:
- 11/15/2003
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226032205
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226032207
- Pub. Date:
- 11/15/2003
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
by Thomas Augst
Thomas Augst
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Overview
Thousands of men left their families for the bustling cities of nineteenth-century America, where many of them found work as clerks. The Clerk's Tale recounts their remarkable story, describing the struggle of aspiring businessmen to come of age at the dawn of the modern era. How did these young men understand the volatile world of American capitalism and make sense of their place within it?
Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.
Thomas Augst follows clerks as they made their way through the boarding houses, parlors, and offices of the big city. Tracing the course of their everyday lives, Augst shows how these young men used acts of reading and writing to navigate the anonymous world of market culture and claim identities for themselves within it. Clerks, he reveals, calculated their prospects in diaries, composed detailed letters to friends and family, attended lectures by key thinkers of the day, joined libraries where they consumed fiction, all while wrestling with the boredom of their work. What results, then, is a poignant look at the literary practices of ordinary people and an affecting meditation on the moral lives of men in antebellum America.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226032207 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 11/15/2003 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 328 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Thomas Augst is an assistant professor of English at the University of Minnesota.
Read an Excerpt
The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America
By Thomas Augst
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2003 Thomas AugstAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0226032205
Chapter One - Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life
The diaries that have ended up in archives frequently begin as travel journals, recording a first voyage from home in search of work. E. E. Belding memorialized his first trip away from home by writing a "Memorandum of journey to Buffalo and back" in 1834. He described the difficulty of the journey by carriage, noting that his fellow passengers were a mixture "of English Irish and New England, all very agreeable and sociable." After arriving in Buffalo on 21 May, he wrote on 24 May that there was "Nothing worth noticing this day only not finding business to suit us." On 25 May, he decided to return home because of a cholera epidemic in Cincinnati. Belding does not pick up his pen again until a year later, when he again ventured out into the world. There was "nothing worth noticing" in a young man's life, evidently, until he had left behind the predictable routines of childhood, broken away from defined roles and familiar comforts to face risk and uncertainty. Like Benjamin Franklin arriving in Philadelphia for the first time, Belding finds himself in a strange place with neither friends nor money to pave the way: "May 31 arrived atTroy this morning with but twenty cents left don't know what to do nor where to lay my head yet I still trust in Divine Providence knowing that he will take care of me." Like Charles French's declaration of "comparative independence," Belding's diary makes the very question of his fate the condition of hope--the preface to moral venture.
Young men entered the alien terrain of independence by writing in diaries. With their many arrivals and departures, nineteenth-century Americans had no simple standard for marking adulthood. "Full attainment of manhood," as Joseph Kett observes, might be tied to "the age of leaving home for the final time, the age of marriage or joining a church, or perhaps the age of entering a profession." Prior to their legal emancipation at the age of twenty-one, young man would typically move through states of semi-dependence, leaving home several times for apprenticeships or to live with relatives, attending schools and academies seasonally. The first entries in the diary of Enos White (1803-ca. 1852) from 1821 record a struggle to leave his father's home in Weymouth, Massachusetts, to make a life for himself: "This Day I leave my Father after having got him to consent to my being Free. I leave in good spirits, although my prospects are very small, and the opinion of my friends is that I shall soon wish myself back again. I am now eighteen years and five months old with one decent suit of clothes and fifteen dollars in change to commence my career with." White's life as a man only begins, it seems, once he has secured his father's consent to "being free," and it is at that point when writing in a journal begins to mat-ter--a gesture of defiance against the law of majority. In a second entry, from May 1821, he notes that he has moved back home. In the third entry, dated two years later on 24 March 1823, he declares: "I am now again free and 21 years of age." In these long lapses between entries, we can perhaps imagine White's demoralization on reentering parental wardship, the frustration of his struggle to claim a life worthy of respect.
In the midst of the social and geographic displacements that increasingly defined manhood, young men used their diaries as totems and allies of moral aspiration. Take, for instance, the choice that William Hoffman (b. 1829) made about the kind of journal to keep. Beginning at the age of seventeen, Hoffman wrote from 1847 to 1850 in a heavy, leather-bound folio volume, some eight by twelve inches, with his name embossed on the cover. Obviously, this was not one of the "pocket diaries" that so many clerks carried casually as they went about their errands but a cumbersome physical object demanding its owner's solicitude. Hoffman carried this tome with him through the late 1840s as perhaps the most precious of his meager belongings as he moved by foot, carriage, and ferry from upstate New York to Albany to Manhattan in search of a retail post. For Hoffman, the record of a life--at least, the life to which he aspired--was worthy of a big, substantial book. For this reason, he had to leave it at his boardinghouse, writing in it only after he returned in the evenings, after working long hours as a clerk in various dry goods stores. Once back in his room, however, Hoffman found both the time and privacy he needed for writing to be in short supply. In 1849, while working in Albany, for example, Hoffman writes: "April 27 I do not know how much I did sell as I am so wearied when night comes & also my roommates are so sensitive on many things & especially on my sitting up after they have retired that I am obliged to defer writing till the lapse of several days: sometimes a whole week. Consequently do not get the occurrences of each day correctly registered." Why was it important for a clerk to "correctly register" the occurrences of each day, despite his exhaustion from work and the presence of sensitive roommates?
As these young men found jobs as clerks, working twelve to fourteen hours a day, independence became a matter of quotidian accounting, the struggle to find and value time apart from the pressures and exhaustion of making a living. Hoffman repeatedly expresses frustration about his failure to "register occurrences": "Monday Tuesday Wednesday & Thursday I have not time to note down the occurrences I do not have time." The following year, when he was working in New York City, lost days had become months: "1850 March April May & June Here again I have neglected to record the proceedings of each day as will be noticed have suspended such for quite a length of time." Hoffman attributed these gaps in his diary to his own neglect, as though having time depended less on circumstances, which left very little room for self-reflection, than on his own perseverance: "I am recording the proceedings of the weeks as they have been neglected till this hour. The Boys are dozing on their beds etc." As he stays up to write, Hoffman not only records the "proceedings of the weeks" but equates writing itself with moral responsibility. So it went for others: as clerks accounted for time in their diaries, they became accountable to themselves, blaming lapses of writing on their own "neglect" and perhaps judging other boys in the boardinghouse for their laziness or poor discipline.
Young men such as Hoffman, Belding, and White used their diaries to give their movements in market culture moral shape and direction. Across gaps of days, months, and years, each of these diaries tells a personal history, narrating a struggle for autonomy that was only fitfully achieved and impossible to take for granted. For Belding and White, writing was a ritual act that self-consciously transformed their separation from family, whether from necessity or inclination, into a rite of passage, a movement toward the elusive threshold of becoming responsible for one's self. In Hoffman's diary, this moral accounting becomes more perfunctory and particular, measured by a routine of daily observation performed with diligence or neglect. Individuals brought different degrees of intention and responsibility to the process of writing, and it is in a diary's particular use by young men where we find evidence of ethical practice. Whether someone writes in a diary at all, the sort of diary being used, the patterns of reflection staged within it, the conventions followed--these literary and material qualities testify to the ways that the act of writing inscribes an individual claim to moral distinction. In the silence of missed days, months, and years, these personal histories document the ephemeral process by which individuals acquire and regulate a moral consciousness about the meaning and drift of their choices. From self-conscious declarations of "comparative independence" to the record of months and years that have slipped away, young men sought in their diaries to make their tentative movements add up to something, to account for the value of their ordinary lives. Too often, as clerks became absorbed with the struggle of finding and keeping work, their diaries could seem like "nothing but an almanac," as one disappointed reader complained in 1810, recording the passing of time but not its value.
When they are recovered from unpublished, fragmentary, and fragile papers stored in archives and libraries throughout the United States, these personal histories do not unfold as autobiographies typically do, from the certitude of age as a retrospective of one's life. Rather, they evolve in haphazard and tentative fashion, depending on the resources of time, education, inspiration, and energy that individuals were willing or able to devote to them. As a result, the literary content of diaries has often been minimized in comparison with the journals and life stories of more educated, expert, or historically prominent authors. Taken up with the banality of living-- monotonous references to the weather, repetitive accounts of chores performed, spare notations of illness and death, and the like--diaries often submerge signs of individuality in the relentless tedium of everyday routines and unremarkable lives. It is precisely this "exhaustive, repetitious dailiness," as Laurel Thatcher Ulrich described the writing of the midwife Martha Ballard, that in recent decades has given the diary new importance as a window into micro-histories of ordinary people. In the particular ways they accounted for their days, young men in the nineteenth century managed their personal transitions from agricultural to urban time, from farms to boardinghouses, and developed modern strategies of self-making that were distinct from eighteenth-century patterns of gender and identity.
Rather than assessing the evidence that diaries seem to offer about a historical mentalite or worldview, or judging their quality as literary texts, this chapter analyzes the diary as a material artifact of moral life. It considers both the conventions of its form as they have been shaped by historical norms of ethical judgment and the singularity of its practice--as a performance of individual habits and motives. Every diary narrates an uneven and hesitant path of self-realization that, like Enos White's becoming "now again free," undergoes revision even as it aspires to coherence and wholeness. For this reason, we should value the diaries of ordinary people not for the way they resemble the finished, self-conscious achievement of literary texts but for the ways they remain ephemeral and incomplete, artifacts from the messy business of living. Every diary testifies to a material process of moral formation that takes place between individuals and the resources of literacy available to them in their social moment. In this sense, diaries dramatize the epistemological and narrative strategies by which ordinary people give form to their moral identities. Young men wrote to take an objective view of their own actions and motives, to make ethical judgments about the value of their perceptions, thoughts, and actions. As they compiled what Hoffman calls a "record" and Charles French calls a "chronicle" of events and observations, they also sought to compare and interpret their standing against a linear scale of progress spanning days, months, and years. In both of these ways, nineteenth-century clerks used their diaries like the faithful servants in the biblical parable of the talents, calculating the "interest" their lives accrue over time. As they did so, they wrote not in the confessional tones of modern privacy but with the omniscient clarity and formal detachment of a moral persona: "As will be noticed," Hoffman writes, as though his writing will be judged for its accuracy and quality. Treating their diaries as wise friends or companions, clerks entered a dialogue with their own future selves, the mature men who would look back on their younger selves for signs portending, justifying, or excusing what they had become. By writing in diaries, young men sought to acquire the moral authority that they hoped would follow from a judicious accounting of their lives.
In the duty to write and its neglect, we begin to see how character takes aesthetic form, in the ephemeral rhythms and quotidian rituals of literary practice. This chapter describes the longstanding relation between moral life and literacy, suggesting how the rhythms and rituals of ethical practice were shaped by secular and religious traditions of life-writing. Recording entries that ranged from the spare to the prolix, from meditations on the soul to inventories of the weather, young men sought to acquire knowledge about themselves and to govern their own conduct. They did so through daily repetitions of writing which, like the weather, gave their lives a temporal index that was at once spiritual and material--a constant reminder that life is comprised by a finite number of tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrows. Just as Puritans sought to discern the design of providence in their meticulous records of daily life, so young men engaged in a moral accounting that, like fiscal accounting, had a general reckoning as its terminus. But as they used their diaries to navigate the alien climates of market culture, they attached moral value to the self as an end, accumulating experience as the capital out of which character is made.
Young men used their diaries to create moral identities for themselves in the context of ordinary life. Their writing was shaped by three distinct traditions of ethical practice: a classical tradition of humanist pedagogy, a Christian tradition of self-examination, and a utilitarian tradition of bookkeeping. Each of these traditions invested life writing with particular ethical functions, allowing individuals to achieve what the historian Michel Foucault termed "an intensity of relation with the self " concerned with the purpose and quality of one's life. As they wrote in their diaries, young men drew in hybrid ways on the narrative and epistemological strategies of these moral traditions--strategies of memory, attention, and calculation-- in order to cultivate character as a material object of rational habits and practical intention. I have exaggerated the separateness of these traditions in order to delineate the distinctive forms of moral accounting they made available to nineteenth-century Americans, and also to suggest a broad genealogy for the evolution of the diary as a site of ethical practice. These ethical frameworks supplied young men with rhythms and rituals of moral accounting, distinct ways of knowing and governing the self against a linear standard of progress. The values of humanist education, Protestant devotion, and liberal individualism all motivated young men to keep diaries. As this chapter demonstrates, however, young men in the nineteenth century drew on these values in competing and contradictory ways that located moral life not in obligations outside the self but in the temporal form and aesthetic shape of writing.
The expansion of literacy in the nineteenth century did more than create readers for books; it altered the very form of moral authority in a democratic culture. Within the objects and habits of mass literacy, the practices of character became more democratic and more personal. In the chronicles ordinary people made of their uncertain paths to freedom, moral life became both more interior and more individual, in ways that were better suited to social and geographic mobility in this protean world than religious duty and caste discipline. Although young middle-class men continued to look for guidance from Protestant piety and civic humanism, they altered their narratives and values as they brought diaries along with them into adulthood, into the boardinghouses and other temporary locations of market culture. The very looseness of these clerks' attachment to traditional motives of life writing--the diverse methods and moods that they brought to their personal histories--suggests how the nature and scale of ethical practice evolved with the expansion of liberal capitalism. Within the standardized objects and practices of mass literacy, young men acquired a consciousness of their own individuality. By inscribing character in humble objects such as the diary, they increasingly identified social mobility and moral responsibility alike with material devotions of the will. As Hoffman's furtive record of his lost days suggests, character came to be rationalized as an obligation to the self, the duty owed to one's unrealized promise, to the blank slate of an unwritten future.
The Coin of Character
The concept of character, poised between descriptive accounts of human nature and normative ideals for the shaping of values and conduct, has always been identified with literacy. The word originally referred to the impress or stamp used in the minting of coins, where malleable material acquires its distinctive features. When John Locke used the term in Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), it still retained its association with the process of imprinting, writing, and engraving: "Let us suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper void of characters." Locke's theories of education and psychological development would develop the figurative implications of this metaphor. As the mind is shaped by experience, so too more generally would the "metal" of human nature acquire, through the impress of education, its distinctive type as the "coin" of character. This etymology of character may explain the repeated allusions to the printing process in Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography when he discusses the acquisition of "credit and character." Franklin describes various regrets as "errata," which, like the careless mistakes of a typesetter, deviate from the uniform and reproducible standard of the virtuous life. Like Locke's metaphor of the tabula rasa, Franklin's metaphor suggests that we understand character in normative terms, as a master text we seek to reproduce in our own lives, and against which we correct our errors and revise our habits. Like Locke's image of characters on paper, it also suggests how the modern psychology of introspection required a more discursive medium than the wax tablet Aristotle first used as an emblem for the imprinting of information on the mind.
With the revival of civic humanism and the development of romantic individualism, character acquired its modern importance as a term of moral distinction, referring less to a standardized type of nature than to a special sum of moral habits and qualities that singles out an individual for esteem and emulation. By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, character had come to mean "moral qualities strongly developed or strikingly displayed" (OED), those qualities that through some combination of heredity and influence marked a person as individual and unique. In this sense, character became linked with the ancient rhetorical concept of ethos, which described a person's structure of motives, feelings, and thoughts that cause action and to which we impute moral responsibility. It was in this sense that John Stuart Mill saw character as the very end of human liberty, the expression of one's moral autonomy as an individual: "A person whose desires and impulses are his own--are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture, is said to have a character," Mill wrote in On Liberty (1859). "One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character." For Mill and other liberal thinkers in the nineteenth century, character represented an achievement of individuality, a moral standing that the inhuman world of industrial capitalism, symbolized by the steam engine, seemed to undermine.
The power to actively shape and perfect one's nature as an individual-- to have desires and impulses that are one's "own," as Mill puts it--has always been the practical goal of liberal humanist education in the West. In this tradition, individuals acquire a character through active development of the rational and moral faculties, in becoming capable of knowing and governing their own conduct. Rooted in the natural law tradition of Aristotle, liberal or humane education prepared young men for their future lives as citizens by making an "ideal wholeness of the individual" a practical object of comprehensive training in self-government. As an outgrowth of Hellenic cosmology, the purpose of liberal education has always been "to form a character or type, all of whose parts are in harmonious agreement, no one part of the character (or personality) being overdeveloped at the expense of another." Liberal education equipped elite males in early modern Europe with secular arts of "self-fashioning," giving them access to what Stephen Greenblatt has termed "a distinctive personality, a characteristic address to the world, a consistent mode of perceiving and behav-ing." Motivated by ends that were at once spiritual and material, their acquisition of character claimed moral authority through the educational privileges of gender and class.
The power to control one's identity has been a source of moral distinction, of one's difference as an individual, because it has always circulated in hierarchical economies of cultural capital--exercised through practical skills of speaking, writing, and reading that most people did not possess. As a schoolboy, for instance, George Washington wrote into one of his composition books a series of maxims under the heading, "Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation." By so doing, he practiced the obligations that came with his inherited social position. The rules resemble the didactic precepts by which educators since Plutarch linked civic education to refinement, preparing gentlemen's sons for their future duties by training them to be "virtuous, useful, and able in their distinct callings," as Locke would put it in his popular conduct book, Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693). As Jared Sparks described the rules in his Life of George Washington (1844), "Some of these are unimportant, suited only to form the habits of a child; others are of a higher import, fitted to soften and polish the manners, to keep alive the best affections of the heart, to teach what is due to others in social relations, and above all to inculcate the practice of a perfect self-control." This lay catechism had its origin in a treatise written by a French Jesuit in 1595, which over the seventeenth century appeared in print in Latin, Spanish, French, Bohemian, and several English editions. As he copied these maxims by hand, the young Washington learned to identify the cultivation of character not only with the cosmopolitan values that circulated in aristocratic circles in Europe and the American colonies but also with progressive training in advanced literacy. From rules of bodily deportment and polite conduct practiced by children, to readings of rhetoric and philosophy and mastery of ancient languages in the classical curriculum of the academy or the eighteenth-century college, this training fostered among elite men such as Washington "acceptance of personal autonomy, the deliberate construction of a personal identity, and the pursuit of a balanced character." Through privileged access to advanced literacy, Washington accumulated moral knowledge and habits of civility that would make him a favorite exemplar of character in the nineteenth century.
Identified with the restricted practices of advanced literacy, the liberal humanist ethos of character throughout the early modern period re-mained--like the privileges of citizenship to which it was tied--largely the province of gentlemen. At the same time, developments in religious education and culture that began with the Protestant Reformation helped to institutionalize a more egalitarian relationship between literacy and moral authority. Training in self-government was extended to new populations that were previously unaccustomed to it. As a consequence, new sources of moral authority emerged that furnished modern identity with a distinctive sense of interiority. The most important was a "caste discipline" of Christian pastoral guidance devoted to "the self-realizing personality," as Ian Hunter puts it. As Hunter has argued, the first public school systems in Europe were established by the churches as "instruments for the intensification and dissemination of Christian spiritual discipline and pastoral guidance." Post-Reformation Protestantism and Catholicism brought about the reform of popular culture by which large sectors of the European population acquired "capacities required for individuals to comport themselves as self-reflective and self-governing persons." In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, for example, Max Weber described early modern Protestantism as a massive campaign in spiritual training, which transferred ethical disciplines from the priesthood to the lay population. As distinctive literary genres of this period such as spiritual autobiography demonstrate, this ethical labor consisted primarily of "practices of self-watchfulness and self-control, special forms of devotional reading and writing," through which the faithful monitored their ethical standing and became personally responsible for their salvation. The Christian pedagogy that twentieth-century critics have so often dismissed as religious brainwashing contributed, Hunter argues, to the "organizing routines, pedagogical practices, personal disciplines, and interpersonal relationships that came to form the core of the modern school" under the secular systems of mass education in the liberal state.
With the expansion of citizenship and schooling in the nineteenth century, once elite forms of moral authority became available to ordinary people. On both sides of the Atlantic, reformers and educators drew on the pedagogical traditions of civic humanism and evangelical Protestantism to make arguments about the qualities that were requisite to the citizens of a modern democratic state. Like John Stuart Mill, they idealized the self-realizing moral personality, or character, as the purpose of education, and increasingly viewed institutions of secular "culture" as vital foundations to the expansion of liberal democracy and market capitalism. In this regard, Stefan Collini has noticed that the idea of character became central to Anglo-Victorian politics during the debates over the franchise. Discussion of the Second Reform Bill in Britain in 1867 was not focused on a working man's rights but on whether his moral qualities allowed him to be trusted with the vote. Similarly, the prevalence of the concept of character in nineteenth-century America should be seen as a consequence of the expansion of citizenship. Although it does not discuss the vote, for example, William Alcott's Young Man's Guide (1833; revised 1849) includes a copy of the United States Constitution in an appendix as though to consummate the book's purpose of "forming the character of young men." Alcott, the first cousin of another educational reformer, Bronson Alcott, invests the "weighty responsibilities" of character with a patriotic appeal to his young readers: "It is for you to decide whether this greatest of free nations shall, at the same time, be the best." In seeking to win support for state-supported common schools, Horace Mann also argued that nothing was more crucial to the fate of the republic than educating the moral character of its future citizens, which the new state-supported common schools would take as their primary mission.
With the expansion of education in the liberal state, character was democratized in the objects and practices of mass literacy. One of the bestselling commodities in the nineteenth-century publishing trade was the blank book. Throughout the early modern period, printers had made blank books, ledgers, and legal and business forms a staple in their inventory, counting on steady sales year after year. A profound consequence of the industrial revolution that, in the nineteenth century, helped to transform printed books into mass-market commodities was that paper became cheaper and writing implements more convenient to use. As a result, diaries acquired prominence as a consumer item. In an 1855 broadside, the New York firm of Kiggins & Kellogg announced the publication of diaries in eleven different sizes, ranging from small 2.5 5-inch Pocket Diaries to large octavo volume Daily Journals as well as a Counting House Diary and Workmen's and Employers' Time Books (fig. 2). As many such advertisements of printers and booksellers reveal, diaries occupied a broad spectrum of paper goods. They were sold as expensive objects of fashion that appealed to the discriminating eye of the genteel classes, to people conditioned by best-selling sentimental fiction to the romantic cultivation of individual feeling. They were also sold as functional objects of commerce and education: diaries "in eleven different sizes," memorandums and "daily journals," or the cheap composition books used in the classroom for reading and writing drills by an expanding population of school children.
What is most striking about the nineteenth-century diaries that survive in libraries and archives is not their uniformity as a genre of consumer good but the diversity of their physical nature and uses. In the front of The Merchants' Desk Diary ("A great aid to a slippery memory, and a shield against forgetfulness") the stationer Henry Anstince reminds readers of Locke's commonplace that "a daily notebook, well kept, was a good evidence of a correct man of business." It further notes that "a Record at the time of transaction is safer as a reference, than the best memory," and that "a good memory, like a good servant, should not be over-taxed because of its faithfulness." The writing in all diaries is pulled in two directions, between regularity and consistency and a more detailed, and complete, record that might "overtax" the space of reference. In meeting these competing aims, clerks could purchase small volumes that accompanied them on their various movements during the day. Or they might purchase diaries designed for one, two, or three "days to a page." These books were often ruled and sized in ways that encouraged writers to treat their experiences as brief "transactions," precluding any but the briefest of notations (fig. 3). James Cunningham (1825-1891), for instance, who had just opened a dry goods store with another merchant, writes for 27 September 1849: "Warm day-- at business all day, introduced to several more merchants, assisting Father, c [etc.]. Evening went to hear Christy's minstrels very much enter-tained--hard rain in the night." Especially in stationary identified with white-collar work, diaries promoted brevity and efficiency as traits of a "correct man of business" or "Professional Men." With their pages ruled and dated for brief entries, memorandum books and pocket diaries made the record of a life more strictly regular, a ledger of activity ruled by the epistemological values and writing practices of bookkeeping. They also made the process of self-accounting perfunctory, potentially indifferent to the ethical motives that, as we shall see, had motivated the writing of diaries for hundreds of years.
The ubiquity of the diary as a consumer object and the diversity of its uses each attest to the new centrality that the habit of writing came to have in the lives of ordinary people. Before the nineteenth century, relatively few people learned to write, and when they did it was typically years after they had learned to read. Young men who went on to write did so as a requirement of their vocations in the clergy, medicine, or the law, and especially business, which, with its daybooks, ledgers, invoices, bills of lading, receipts, and correspondence, was particularly identified with penmanship. As Thomas Watts declared in 1716, "writing is the First step, and Essential in furnishing out the Man of Business." Until the late nineteenth century, clerks still saw a good hand as essential to success in business. Clerks learned penmanship because it was a virtual prerequisite for a career in business. As we shall see in chapter 5, only in the late nineteenth century, with the invention of the typewriter, the avalanche of specialized printed forms, and the entrance of women into secretarial positions would penmanship cease to have this symbolic importance for men entering business. The variety of "hands" in young men's diaries testifies to the fact that writing with a pen is always a technical skill acquired with difficulty. As the sheer quantity of nineteenth-century letters, journals, and diaries also suggests, however, writing ceased to be taught as a specialized, advanced form of literacy and gradually became part of the standardized, graded curriculum of the common school.
In the nineteenth century, even modestly educated young men cultivated character in the diary and other sites of literacy. In the northern United States they were likely to learn reading and writing in the home, Sunday schools, common schools, academies, and for the privileged few, colleges. Young men not only mastered the skill of penmanship but also inherited a set of values, narratives, and conventions that allowed them to invest their practices of reading and writing with moral consequence. Our engagement with texts of all kinds is mediated by the expectations we bring to them, within educational and spiritual traditions that furnish us with what Larzer Ziff terms "pretexts" for literacy. In taking up these ephemeral artifacts, my concern lies not with the prescriptive and normative quality of moral instruction that clerks such as Hoffman, White, and Belding received through mass education: the didactic program drilled into children by McGuffey Readers, for example, or the new kinds of psychological and physical discipline enforced by the common school and other institutions. Rather, I wish to explore how ordinary individuals understood and pursued moral authority for themselves by self-consciously imagining life to be a tabula rasa, by inscribing character in the empty pages of their diaries. Character became an incremental and schematic process of self-analysis, a material object of writing for which a man was personally responsible, inexorably accountable.
Middle-class clerks in antebellum America did not write diaries because they expected to become famous, or because they thought they would be remembered by the world after they were gone. They wrote diaries to exercise some control over the uncertain and changing world in which they found themselves. In doing so, they benefited from means of advanced literacy that had long identified moral authority with exclusive and hierarchical forms of cultural capital: the blank book; pen and ink; the facility with penmanship; the space and time to write; habits of reading and writing; and elite forms of moral knowledge and ethical practice concerned with correction, self-examination, and civility. Prior to the nineteenth century, a small number of highly educated men cultivated this capital of character in the service of duties incumbent to their social position. How was the meaning of character transformed in liberal democratic culture, as it became identified with habits of mass literacy? What consequences did quotidian objects such as the diary have for how young men shaped their lives as stories, for how they understood and pursued a moral life amid the pressing demands of the ordinary and the everyday?
Memory and the Commonplace Tradition
No pretext was more fundamental to literary practices of character in the nineteenth century than the humanist ideal of education described in ancient Greece as paidea, and in Alexander von Humboldt's Germany as bildung: the perfecting of human nature through active development of the rational faculties and moral virtues. In some of his last works, Michel Foucault explored an ancient humanist tradition of ethical practice he termed "the care of the self." In this tradition, individuals used acts of reading, writing, and speaking as what Foucault termed "technologies of self," to alter their thoughts or conduct to achieve some particular idealized version of the self, such as wisdom, happiness, or purity. As with the Apollonian injunction to "know thyself," these technologies allowed students of liberal education to enter a self-conscious relationship to their own actions and desires, to cultivate a moral Other as a functional object of rational habits and practical intentions. To the extent its tools and institutions remained the exclusive property of the ruling class, humanist ethics was, as one critic points out, "a means of self-empowerment and of exercising responsible power over others," a caste system of moral authority in which "your superiors were your moral betters."
The diary is a technology of the self that has an ancient genealogy in Western culture. "One of the main features of taking care of the self," Foucault observed, "involved taking notes on one's self to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed." These ancient notebooks, the Greek hupomnemata, were scrapbooks for daily meditation that were compiled by the individual to constitute the self as an ethical subject. The ancient cultivation of self demanded active and diligent habits of attention, because, as Plutarch observed, the individual could be oblivious to his own moral disorders, or diseases of the soul, or mistake these vices for virtues-- taking anger for courage, envy for emulation, cowardice for prudence. Ethical tools such as the hupomnemata enabled students to bring habits of rational attention to their own thoughts and actions.
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Excerpted from The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America by Thomas Augst Copyright © 2003 by Thomas Augst. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of IllustrationsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Moral Economy of Literacy
Chapter One
Accounting for Character: Diaries and the Moral Practice of Everyday Life
The Coin of Character
Memory and the Commonplace Tradition
Self-Examination and the Devotions of Literacy
Time Is Money: The Value of the Future
Equality of Aspiration
Chapter Two
Forms of Feeling: Habit, Sociability, and the Domestication of Literary Taste
The Drill of Nature: Habits of Writing across Time
Letters and the Debts of Family
The Profit of Pleasure
The Art of Conversation
Sentimental Pathos and the Conventions of Intimacy
Chapter Three
Popular Philosophy and Democratic Voice: Emerson in the Lecture Hall
Becoming Whole: The Struggle for Composure
Modes of Civic Education: The Public Lecture
The Eloquence of Moral Life
Chapter Four
Making Society out of Books: The New York Mercantile Library and the Enterprise of Reading
Circulating Libraries and the Business of Books
Reading and Breeding for the Profession
The Liberty of Intellect and the Taste for Fiction
Chapter Five
The Melancholy of White-Collar Work: Professional Ethos and the Modern Literary Sphere
The Blank Page and the Place of Writing
The Credit of Character, in Parts and Whole
Professional Authorship and the Literary Sphere
Epilogue: Debris from the Business of Living
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
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