In the 19th century, industrialization became more and more a part of American culture and with it came new societal structures that transformed the country into a multifaceted nation. New York City was an increasingly diverse metropolis with a growing number of classes and cultures within it. As Irish and Southeastern Europeans arrived in the country's northern ports, young American boys also arrived from within the country. Adolescents came looking for work in the recently industrialized world. In New York, the mass influx of young people produced a new adolescent subculture that encouraged deviant and licentious behavior throughout the city. The book “The Murder of Helen Jewett” by Patricia Cline Cohen is about a community of corporate employees known as clerks. These young businessmen were a faction of the newest society and a representative of the urban adolescent culture of New York and the nation. In the 1830s, employees were teenagers who traveled to New York to learn the trade. Most employees came from middle-class families who couldn't spare the expenses to send all their sons to college, but could afford to release them into the working world. Young boys worked in various mercantile businesses and stores “earning at most $4 a week” (Cohen, 111) and accumulated several hundred dollars a year. Clerks aspired to become journeymen earning “ten to twelve dollars a week” (Cohen, 111) and eventually to one day have their own store or mercantile business. “By day they wrote letters, measured fabrics, swept stores, sold to customers or perhaps kept the books” and at night they experienced their new independence on the streets of the city, in its saloons and brothels.B...... middle of paper ...... premarital and immoral sexual services that would be inappropriate for respectable courtships of the time. Under false names such as “Frank Rivers and Bill Easy,” young clerks experienced courtship “unburdened by… bourgeois courtship and freed from the renunciations and monotony of lifelong marriage” (Cohen, 131). Women also took care of the employee's feminine and domestic needs. needs like repairing and sewing clothes “as a wife would do for her husband” (Cohen, 149). The adolescent employee culture that developed in the early 19th century was fostered by the lack of supervision from parents and teachers like that of previous generations. . Young boys were sent to industrialized cities full of immoral attractions. Many teenagers of the time were led astray from their moral orientation and accepted the new sinful routines as a normal aspect of their lives..