| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Thomas Augst. The Clerk's Tale: Young Men and Moral Life in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003. Pp. xii, 321. $25.00.
This is an important, inspired, and difficult book. Thomas Augst explores the moral education during the nineteenth century of young, male, white-collar workers, following them through places of work, family, and leisure. He finds inspiration for his investigation in studies by Michel Foucault and others of "an ancient humanist tradition of ethical practice in which individuals used acts of reading, writing and speaking to alter their thoughts or conduct to achieve some particular idealized version of the self, such as wisdom, happiness, or purity" (p. 33). Adopting Foucault's term for these acts, "technologies of the self," Augst hopes "to move our thinking about moral life toward practical techniques and material contexts of conduct" (p. 15). Augst sees antebellum clerks' reading in business manuals, fiction, conduct books, and biographical sketches as "a means of spiritual exercise" and of exercising "moral agency" (p. 118).	1
The literary dimension of moral life in the nineteenth century encompassed a wide range of hand-written and oral performances like diaries, letters, lectures, and conversations. Indeed, Augst believes that conversation "offered a compelling model for all literary activity because it exemplified this culture's profound commitment to language as a medium of social cohesion" (p. 96). He coins his own term, "literary leisure," to refer to the "cultivation of taste across multiple sites of education and recreation" (p. 63). Augst examines the diaries of some twenty clerks to show how they moved in action and appraisal among boarding houses, libraries, lecture halls, parlors, and offices, staged debates and orations, and, in an era when spoken eloquence had a unique authority, evaluated the styles of those who addressed them in churches and lyceums.	. . .

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