Before sitting down to write this review, I consulted my diary, looked at my deadlines and made a list of tasks. It was the order of that list that prompted me to open The Accidental Diarist first. There I found to my delight that Molly McCarthy had given my prosaic act of time management a lucid and insightful history that spanned two centuries’ worth of American diary keeping. Tracing the origins of the printed “page-a-day” diary back to the eighteenth-century almanac, McCarthy charts the evolution of this quotidian publication from its birth as a deluxe daily planner and on into its reinvention as a commercially marketed, mass-produced diary that offered Americans a standardized vision of time, consumption and even nation. In doing so her book takes on some of the grandest themes of nineteenth-century American historiography and grounds them in the lived experience of everyday minutiae.

McCarthy's central contention is that the changing format of the diary provided Americans with a means to renegotiate their relationship with time and money as well as redefine their understanding of themselves. Contrasting the design of the almanac with the daily planner, McCarthy demonstrates how the innovation of imposing a grid onto the page, with columns for accounts, transactions and days, encouraged Americans to look beyond the present moment and into their own future. Connecting personal finance with temporal realities, the diary urged Americans to reimagine time as money, something to be accounted for and, as one diarist, Susan Brown, wrote in 1857, to be “spent more profitably” (131).

As the diary took on a more sophisticated form in the postbellum period, new innovations, such as tables of standardized time, conversions into the metric system and even illustrations showcasing the continent's most striking views, offered diarists the opportunity to look beyond the local and see the horizons of a modern nation. Connected through the “daily habit” of writing in this new standardized diary, Americans felt newly united through time, space and ultimately commerce (171). Some of these claims felt a little stretched. I see no real evidence to suggest that Civil War veterans “yearned for a more universal form” of diary (165). Nor do I think it was the diary itself that offered the kinds of connection to commerce she talked about. Rather it was the mail-order catalogues that some diary users devoured. Here the instrumentality of the diary's form becomes too great a force in McCarthy's narrative. The relentless Anglo-American focus of the story also prompts me to wonder what other European influences there might have been on this form of stationery. Finally, given that McCarthy takes on the question of nation and the imagined community, it seems odd that she does not talk about whether this format was understood at the time to be uniquely American.

Overall, McCarthy's book provides an intimate look at how people experienced the major cultural transitions of the era. By mid-century, she tells us, the diary had become an embodiment of “all the characteristics of the age … democratic, commercialized, educational and self-centered” (126). Such a list of qualities reflects a familiar story: the expansion of democracy and the market economy, the rise of modern standardization and American consumer culture. But her aim, it seems, is not to challenge the established narrative arcs of the period, but rather to add a richness of human experience to these more abstract themes. She takes on Stuart Sherman's portrait of English timekeeping, not to undermine his thesis but more to point out that the reluctance to embrace the preformatted diary should remind us that Americans did not segue smoothly into mechanized clock time. And her focus on the masculine business-like preformatted diary is a wonderful counterbalance to the literature that has given us a portrait of the diary as a female preoccupation, secretive and steeped in self-reflection.

Yet her greatest contribution is undoubtedly the vivid portrait she paints of the relationship between the ambitious printers and publishers of the ever-changing diary and the wide array of consumers and users of this little book as they “stuttered towards a more self-reflective mode” (147). Historians of consumption will know how rare it is to be able to discover the consumers who explain why they bought goods and how they engaged with the objects they purchased. Yet in McCarthy's hands, these voices emerge. As she unpicks the way Americans wrote in their diaries, defying the format, ignoring the innovations or, even more memorably, providing a running commentary on the advertisements therein, she deftly uncovers the ways in which producers’ intentions did not dictate the shape of the market. At a moment when the structures of the global marketplace seem to be engulfing the individual, such a delicate restoration of consumer agency, proffered through a warm and witty prose, is a welcome surprise indeed.