Managerial Forms: Narrative, Information, and Household Government in the Diaries of Sarah Cowper

The diary of Sarah Cowper (written 1700-16) is characterized by elaborate techniques of information management and a sustained attention to the fractious emotional dynamics of her household. Bringing together historical scholarship on domestic service and literary analyses of organizing practices in print and manuscript, the article argues that the finding devices in Cowper’s seven-volume diary disclose a practical knowledge both textual and social—one which took the affective dynamics of the household as its object, but which was also shaped by and afloat in those dynamics. The article is in two parts. The first explores how Cowper’s information management practices were shaped and motivated by the social relations and affective dynamics of her household. The second examines how Cowper’s thinking about management and about servants as a group was shaped by the forms of her books and the uses those forms enabled. Examined in this way, Cowper’s idiosyncratic diary discloses what the common sense of early eighteenth-century masters and mistresses looked like as was being assembled and put to work. Focusing on form and affect, and attending to material and conceptual dimensions of textual ordering, the article establishes connections between the social relations of domestic service and the material practices of early modern life writing, illuminating both.