Industrial Writing: The Poetics of the Ledger

Michael Zakim

Most writing in nineteenth-century America was devoted to business correspondence, wholesale inventories, sales accounts, and ledger postings. But the significance of this writing was not just a function of its quantity. Mercantile penmen proved to be a foundation of bourgeois civilization, for in administering the new market economy they oversaw the industrial future.

Such “writing operations” were also controversial. This was because they required a giant new class of business clerks recruited from the “countless throng” of young men being carried along at mid-century by “an increasing centripetal force ... towards the great emporium.” In fact, the clerk became an anti-hero of industrial revolution, embodying the transience and risk of a wage economy divorced from land and household, the traditional foundations of social order in America. As such, his very service to capital made the clerk into one of the era’s “dangerous classes,” a reminder of the subversive nature of capitalism in these early decades of industrialization.

And yet, while all this scrivening subverted older notions of industry and even manly virtue, it provided the technological underpinnings of a new regime. It constituted a system of regulation for a society that rested on anonymity and individual ambition. In this respect, writing proved to be instrumental to the rise of a modern liberal order.