Name: The Collected Works of Sir William Jones
ISBN: 9780814741993

Synopsis

In the bustling cities of the mid-nineteenth-century Northeast, young male clerks working in commercial offices and stores were on the make, persistently seeking wealth, respect, and self-gratification. Yet these strivers and "counter jumpers" discovered that claiming the identities of independent men—while making sense of a volatile capitalist economy and fluid urban society—was fraught with uncertainty.

InOn the Make, Brian P. Luskey illuminates at once the power of the ideology of self-making and the important contests over the meanings of respectability, manhood, and citizenship that helped to determine who clerks were and who they would become. Drawing from a rich array of archival materials, including clerks’ diaries, newspapers, credit reports, census data, advice literature, and fiction, Luskey argues that a better understanding of clerks and clerking helps make sense of the culture of capitalism and the society it shaped in this pivotal era.

Recommendations

Economic Policy in Europe Since the Late Middle Ages: The Visible Hand and the Fortune of Cities

by Herman Diederiks

Chandler traces how American business transformed from family enterprises to modern corporations through the rise of professional managers—a natural companion to Luskey's focus on how clerks navigated and shaped capitalist identity. Where Luskey examines the clerk's perspective from below, Chandler shows the institutional structures they were helping to build, giving you the full architecture of mid-century American commerce.

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Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall Notes

by Hana Sambrook

This 1848 novel is a surprise pick, but it's obsessed with the same question as *On the Make*: what does respectability actually mean, and who gets to define it? Brontë's protagonist deliberately violates social codes to claim autonomy, and the novel's exploration of reputation, judgment, and self-determination in a volatile social landscape echoes Luskey's archival findings about how clerks negotiated identity in uncertain times.

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Bisexualities: The Ideology and Practice of Sexual Contact With Both Men and Women

by Germany) International Berlin Conference for Sexology 1990 (Berlin

Halttunen examines the same era and many of the same anxieties—how did you know if someone was genuine or a fraud when everyone was performing respectability? Her analysis of advice literature, fashion, and social performance complements Luskey's use of diaries and credit reports, and together they create a richer picture of how clerks and their contemporaries managed the gap between appearance and reality.

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The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure, Community, and Everyday Life

by Richard Florida

A deliberate leap forward to 2002—Florida argues that modern economies run on self-making and personal branding in ways that echo the clerk's predicament, but now applied to knowledge workers everywhere. Reading this after Luskey gives you a genealogy: the anxieties about self-invention and respectability that clerks faced in 1850 haven't disappeared; they've just become the default condition of contemporary work.

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