1650-1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era (Volume 27) 9781684484133
Rigorously inventive and revelatory in its adventurousness, 1650–1850 opens a forum for the discussion, investigation, a
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Table of contents :
Contents
Special Feature. Worldmaking and Other Worlds: Restoration to Romantic
Foreword to the Special Feature
Introduction to the Special Feature. Worlding and Deworlding Reimagined: A New Introduction
Other Worlds: Cartographies and Spatiotemporal Orders
A New Science for a New World: Margaret Cavendish on the Question of Poverty
“All the Kingdoms of the World”: Global Visions of Empire and War in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained
Texts and Tectonists: Worldmaking and World-Cleaving on the Anglo-Algonquian Frontier
Charlotte Smith’s Littoral Zones: Worldmaking in the Elegiac Sonnets and Beyond
Worldmaking: Artifacts, Collections, and Material Culture
The Tree and the World
Imperial Cosmopolitanism and the Structure of Global-Domestic Space in Enlightenment Britain
Colonial Intimacies: Indian Ayahs, British Mothers
A World Affair: The South Sea Pavilion in the Garden Realm of Dessau-Wörlitz
Worlding: Ecologies of Being and Othering
Indigeneity Overlooked: Indigenous Technologies and Criollo Worldmaking in Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690)
William Dampier’s “Sagacious” Worldmaking
“To Serve Them in the Other World”: Natural History, Worldmaking, and Funeral Song in Hans Sloane’s Voyage to . . . Jamaica (1707–1725)
Crusoe’s Goat Umbrella
Speaking in Voices: The South African Poetry of Thomas Pringle
Book Reviews
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen. The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age
W. R. Owens, Stuart Sim, and David Walker, eds. Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture
Michael Edson, ed. Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry
Christiane Hertel. Siting China in Germany: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie and Its Modern Legacy
Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, eds. Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century
Thomas F. Bonnell, ed. The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell: Research Edition: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript in Four Volumes. Volume 4: 1780–1784
Peter J. Aschenbrenner and Colin Lee, eds. The Papers of John Hatsell, Clerk of the House of Commons
Deborah Heller, ed. Bluestockings Now! The Evolution of a Social Role
Eileen Hunt Botting. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in Frankenstein
Lee Jackson. Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment
John M. Gingerich. Schubert’s Beethoven Project
Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, with an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary
Frances B. Singh. Scandal and Survival in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: The Life of Jane Cumming
About the Contributors
Citation preview
1650–1850 •
Editorial Board Theodore E. D. Braun University of Delaware Samara Anne Cahill Blinn College Norbert Col Université Bretagne Sud Kathryn Duncan Saint Leo University James T. Engell Harvard University Scott Gordon Lehigh University Paul Kerry Christ Church, Oxford Colby H. Kullman University of Mississippi Mark A Pedreira University of Puerto Rico Cedric D. Reverand II University of Wyoming Howard D. Weinbrot University of Wisconsin
1650–1850 • Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era Vo l u m e 2 7 K evin L . C ope Editor Samar a A nne Cahill B ook R ev iew Editor
Lewisburg, Pen nsylvania
ISBN 978-1-68448-410-2 ISSN 1065-3112 A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library. This collection copyright © 2022 by Bucknell University Press Individual chapters copyright © 2022 in the names of their authors All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law. References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. www.bucknelluniversitypress.org Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press Manufactured in the United States of America
Contents
Special Feature Worldmaking and Other Worlds: Restoration to Romantic 1 Edited by Elizabeth Sauer and Betty Joseph Foreword to the Special Feature 3 Introduction to the Special Feature 5 Worlding and Deworlding Reimagined: A New Introduction Betty Joseph and Elizabeth Sauer
Other Worlds: Cartographies and Spatiotemporal Orders A New Science for a New World: Margaret Cavendish on the Question of Poverty 21 Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa Walters “All the Kingdoms of the World”: Global Visions of Empire and War in Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained 37 Daniel Vitkus Texts and Tectonists: Worldmaking and World-Cleaving on the Anglo-A lgonquian Frontier 55 Ana Schwartz
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Charlotte Smith’s Littoral Zones: Worldmaking in the Elegiac Sonnets and Beyond 70 Daniel O’Quinn
Worldmaking: Artifacts, Collections, and Material Culture The Tree and the World 91 Chris Barrett Imperial Cosmopolitanism and the Structure of Global-Domestic Space in Enlightenment Britain 105 Mita Choudhury Colonial Intimacies: Indian Ayahs, British Mothers 130 Felicity Nussbaum A World Affair: The South Sea Pavilion in the Garden Realm of Dessau-Wörlitz 149 Billie Lythberg
Worlding: Ecologies of Being and Othering Indigeneity Overlooked: Indigenous Technologies and Criollo Worldmaking in Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (1690) 169 Matthew Goldmark William Dampier’s “Sagacious” Worldmaking 182 Su Fang Ng “To Serve Them in the Other World”: Natural History, Worldmaking, and Funeral Song in Hans Sloane’s Voyage to . . . Jamaica (1707–1725) 197 David S. Mazella Crusoe’s Goat Umbrella 214 Chi-ming Yang Speaking in Voices: The South African Poetry of Thomas Pringle 238 Jennifer L. Hargrave
Contents
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Book Reviews Edited by Samara Anne Cahill
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen. The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age 261 Reviewed by Erica Johnson Edwards W. R. Owens, Stuart Sim, and David Walker, eds. Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture 265 Reviewed by Andrew Black Michael Edson, ed. Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry 269 Reviewed by Anthony W. Lee Christiane Hertel. Siting China in Germany: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie and Its Modern Legacy 274 Reviewed by Stephanie Howard-Smith Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, eds. Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eighteenth C entury 277 Reviewed by Sir Malcolm Jack Thomas F. Bonnell, ed. The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell: Research Edition: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript in Four Volumes. Volume 4: 1780–1784 280 Reviewed by Anthony W. Lee Peter J. Aschenbrenner and Colin Lee, eds. The Papers of John Hatsell, Clerk of the House of Commons 284 Reviewed by Jacqy Sharpe Deborah Heller, ed. Bluestockings Now! The Evolution of a Social Role 287 Reviewed by Gefen Bar-On Santor Eileen Hunt Botting. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in Frankenstein 292 Reviewed by Samara Anne Cahill Lee Jackson. Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment 296 Reviewed by James Hamby
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John M. Gingerich. Schubert’s Beethoven Project 300 Reviewed by Seow-Chin Ong Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, with an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary 304 Reviewed by Linda L. Reesman Frances B. Singh. Scandal and Survival in Nineteenth- Century Scotland: The Life of Jane Cumming 308 Reviewed by Daniel Livesay About the Contributors 311
Special Feature wor l dm a k i n g a n d o t h e r wor l d s : r e s t or at io n t o rom a n t ic Edited by Elizabeth Sauer and Betty Joseph
Foreword to the Special Feature
“Worldmaking and Other Worlds: Restoration to Romantic” developed from a panel on “Other Worlds of Restoration and Early Enlightenment” organized by Betty Joseph for the forum on Restoration and Early Eighteenth-Century English held at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago, Illinois, in 2019. Betty Joseph and Elizabeth Sauer are very grateful to Kevin L. Cope for the opportunity to produce this special issue for 1650–1850: Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era. Our exchanges with the distinguished contributors of this volume w ere likewise educative, enlightening, and rewarding. We especially wish to recognize the labor, courage, and brilliance of Brandie R. Siegfried, who, in the face of the greatest challenges, continued to produce scholarship of the highest quality and significance. We are honored to include her coauthored essay on Cavendish’s worldmaking feats in this collection. Like her collaborator Professor Lisa Walters, and like Cavendish herself, Professor Siegfried w ill always be known as a distinguished, multitalented, and compassionate scholar. This collection of essays is a special tribute to her creativity, inspiration, and worldmaking accomplishments. February 18, 2021
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Introduction to the Special Feature worlding and deworlding reimagined: a new introduction Betty Joseph and Elizabeth Sauer Our Elder World, with all their Skill and Arts, Could but divide the World into three Parts: Columbus, then for Navigation fam’d, Found a new World, America ’tis nam’d; Now this new World was found, it was not made, Onely discovered, lying in Time’s shade. Then what are You, having no Chaos found To make a World, or any such least ground? But your Creating Fancy, thought it fit To make your World of Nothing, but pure Wit. Your Blazing-World, beyond the Stars mounts higher, Enlightens all with a Cœlestial Fier. —William Newcastle, “To the Duchesse of Newcastle, on Her New Blazing-World,” Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, The Description of a New World Called the Blazing-World (1668)
A partner in a marriage often characterized as “collaborative,” William Cavendish, the Duke of Newcastle, appears in the works of his wife, Margaret Cavendish, as a character, a coauthor, a promoter, and an authenticator.1 Newcastle’s endorsements, such as the dedication above to Cavendish’s 1668 edition of her most famous work, The Blazing World (1666), undoubtedly served to allay rumors that the latter was not the author of texts that bore her name. Yet, the dedication 5
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also enables Newcastle to stage a role reversal of sorts, whereby the long-standing patron of seventeenth-century intellectuals like Thomas Hobbes now becomes the author of a dedication rather than its addressee. In so doing, Newcastle brings Cavendish’s fantastic sci-fi world into a contact zone with other probabilistic worlds emerging from Newcastle’s own forays into natural philosophy and early modern scientific projects that were actively transforming existing theories about the nature and origin of the known and unknown world. Such transformations underpin the temporal supersession heralded by the notion of an “Elder World” that is passing away. Emergent new epistemologies challenge dominant cosmologies like the G reat Chain of Being, which had divided the world into the three parts that Newcastle references: the sublunary changing world in which h uman beings live, the celestial unchanging world of planets and stars, and the supercelestial world that is the domain of angelical beings and the Divine. However, Newcastle does not oppose this aging elder world to a New World but rather many new worlds, including Cavendish’s infamous blazing world. The literary or imaginative world of Cavendish’s text is, he asserts, a “made” world and not one of t hose that had been “found” or “discovered” like America. While seafarers like Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci merely moved “America” from the realm of the unknown to that of the known in an already existing sublunary world, for Newcastle it is the creations of authors like Margaret Cavendish that should merit the designation of worldmaking. Cavendish as a maker of imaginative texts has no ground, no chaos, to transform; rather, she builds a world out of nothing—t he virtual inventiveness of intelligence as opposed to the material world of mud and stone. Newcastle ends his dedication by elevating Cavendish’s new world above the sublunary and the celestial worlds, while illuminating both with its blaze. Notwithstanding the spatial cohesion of t hese geographical and cosmological worlds, it is hard to miss the role of temporality in Newcastle’s worldmaking. The verse dedication gives us a sense of coevality, on the one hand, of all these newly imagined worlds existing as parallel worlds. On the other hand, t here are worlds entering and leaving the one Newcastle inhabits: America has lain in “time’s shade” waiting to be found, while the Elder World, the pre-Enlightenment world that cannot survive the illuminating brilliance of Cavendish’s literary work, is moving out of Newcastle’s present. In these scant twelve lines, we see the advancement of a remarkable case for worldmaking as an activity with the potential to remake the contemporary or shared world of Newcastle and his audience. As literary critics, we know that literature and works of art create worlds and possess worldmaking power, but the m atter of how worlds are made merits more attention. Investigating this subject would f ree us up to probe the meanings of “world” and the ways literary texts offer new possibilities for remaking worlds. Is a literary world defined by its aesthetic content, which is answerable to an
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idealized or a negated representation of the material world—the object of all human practice? Does such a world have a form that serves as the material self- organization of the work produced through creative activity? Do t hese aspects of the world, what Eric Hayot calls “world-content” and “world-form,” allow for something more than an altered relation between the world outside the work and the world inside the work, or do worlds also open up at the intersections of the outside and the inside, of the historical and philosophical?2 This special issue discovers and scrutinizes such junctions, notably historical considerations of literary, visual, and material art’s setting up of a world, the world-forming quality of the works themselves, and their practical appearance in the “actual world,” that is, the realm of human life. In his essay “The Age of the World Picture,” Heidegger gives us an example of such a historicist stance. The “age” in the title indicates the possibility of defining the dominant metaphysical essence of a historical era. For Heidegger, the appearance of the “world picture” is an event in h uman history. As he sees it, the question is not about the changing of the world content per se: “The World picture does not change from an earlier medieval one into a modern one, but rather the fact that the world becomes picture at all is what distinguishes the essence of the modern age.” 3 Humans making the world their object—standing before it and outside it rather than in it, appearing as subject to object—constitutes modernity for Heidegger. Consider how markedly different this modern world is, for instance, from a superseded one like the world implied by the Great Chain of Being, which begins with God and descends through angels and h umans to animals, plants, and minerals. Th ese elder worlds are not necessarily outmoded ways of thinking about humans and others. This premodern world is undeniably hierarchical, but it is hardly anthropocentric. The editors of this special issue believe that scholars of early modern litera ture and culture have much to offer from careful analyses of the slow gradual advancement of the modern age or the age of the world picture. It is hardly in dispute t oday that this historical process began in earnest with the Enlightenment, which enabled the objectification of the material world as the object of science and cartography and the a ctual mastery of the earth through the “discovery” and conquest of non-European worlds. When Jean-Luc Nancy asserts in The Creation of the World that “a world is only a world for t hose who inhabit it,” we are presented with another way of imagining a world that continues despite historical shifts. H ere, “world” is not a picture to be grasped and set apart from its viewer-inhabitants but one that encompasses the practical activity of living in it and making it the ground of all activity, including the social relations of production and the creative act of worlding through literature and works of art. Nancy’s concept of worldedness thus implies that t here are as many worlds as t here are inhabitants and that the activity of worldmaking through art is grounded in the world in two ways. First, art arises from it and reflects
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and refers back to it as world-content. Second, art anticipates new worlds in that one can assert a particular normative structuration of the world through the act of interpreting the artwork. Early theories of worlding, including Harry Berger Jr.’s “The Renaissance Imagination” and Nelson Goodman’s post-Kantian premise that worldmaking is an art and philosophy of “remaking,” inform our project.4 Goodman was indebted to philosopher Ernst Cassirer’s aesthetic theories and position on the question of cognition as an unworkable concept of symbolic representat ion. Goodman develops Cassirer’s theory of multiple symbolic forms, interpreted as worlds, and explores how symbolic systems, including language, create worlds. We produce and remake the world by recognizing the multiple, aut hentic kinds of symbolic systems and world visions, theoretical and artistic. Goodman proposes the existence of multiple “world-versions,” which are independent and equally valid, “without any requirement or presumption of reducibility to a single base.” 5 In this volume, we survey the literary imaginings and reconstellations of the dimensions of worlds that defy the prescriptions of cognition. The symbolic forms materialize in a range of literary genres that engage with the philosophical and political complexities of the question of the world—their constitution and remaking.6 These genres countered empirical and scientific discourses through the constitution of worlds less visible or beyond h uman scales of perception. Most obviously, of course, literary and artistic worlds are openings of “new” worlds that w ere not previously i magined. Here we have an opportunity to discuss representations of utopian or exotic worlds as they w ere delineated in early modern and eighteenth-century literature; however, given the undeniable colonial provenance of “new” worlds, we have to ask how t hese i magined worlds related to this history. How were differentiated human subjects placed in a unified world imagined from a European perspective, and how did t hese perspectives result in the deworlding of o thers?7 For John Locke, seventeenth-century America was a non-coeval world existing in a state of nature from which its inhabitants could be removed by an abstraction like the social contract. Gayatri Spivak has called this historical violence a “vulgarization” of Heidegger’s idea of the “worlding of a world” in the latter’s essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” 8 Heidegger used the earth-world distinction to indicate an enabling gap between the two in which the work of art emerges. Spivak, however, argues that within imperialism this gap was not an aesthetic struggle but rather a violent reinscription whereby Europe made populated worlds into uninhabited space and then remade them into European worlds: “Consolidating the self of Europe by obliging the native to cathect the space of the Other on his home ground . . . worlding their own world, which is far from mere uninscribed earth, anew, by obliging them to domesticate the alien as Master.” 9
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The history of imperialism and its close alliance with cartography thus makes it hard to focus on European worldmaking activity in the age of Enlightenment as something other than spatial practice, as is the case when the world is represented on a map or by way of taxonomies. But as Pheng Cheah has argued in What Is a World? even present-day postcolonial writers have found value in the making of worlds that are analogous to the Heideggerian notion of a world that cannot be represented on a map—a world that is not reduced to a spatial object but rather emerges as worlding—“a force that subtends and exceeds all human calculations” and uses “the unifying power of temporalization” to usher us into a “meaningful w hole that brings all beings into relation.” 10 This notion of a world as a meaningful whole helps account for the renewed interest in the humanities t oday in the theorizing of worlds and worldmaking processes. Such concepts have proved vital for thinking about responses to our ongoing planetary crises and for imagining non-anthropocentric (posthumanist) frames. Making worlds is not only a h uman undertaking. Any relationship to the natural world includes the complex ecological “lives” of the h uman and the nonhuman species, animality, biology, and m atter. Furthermore, difficult though it may be to specify exactly what is meant by “world,” invoking it opens up the question of historicizing one’s ways of seeing. Worlding draws attention to our present historical moment as only one in a series of world-changing processes, which also transform how we see the world we live in and its relationship to the worlds that we represent and form through the practices of humanistic knowledges (including literary and aesthetic knowledges) and scientific knowledges. What are the types of worlds that this collection of essays contemplates? We find useful Pheng Cheah’s delineation of several worlds on the basis of their ontological status. There is the literary world that creates a “totality with its own consistency” by way of appropriating elements from the referential or actual world. For Cheah, the literary world’s ontological status is one of virtuality because, even though literature does more than reflect the “actual world,” it is also limited to a construction through “diegesis and mimesis” (narration and imitation or enactment) of what is in effect “a possible world.” Next, Cheah lists the “cartographical image of the world” that is projected by various disciplinary discourses. Th ese include political economy’s map of the world as the movement of capital and its investment, anthropology’s world of migration flows, the political scientist’s world that appears as a zone of conflict and influence with hot or cold wars, and the climate scientist whose thermal map records ocean and land temperatures. Such disciplinary maps, which are to be distinguished from the literary, have what Cheah calls a “critical edge” and an “important impact on h uman existence.” 11 These examples are useful, but they enact a slippage when one moves from discussions of ontology in the case of the literary, to functionality in the case of
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disciplinary maps. Cheah elides the fact that all cartographies are more or less virtual and symbolic too. There is also the difficult lesson we have learned in an age when openly endorsed conspiracy theories have become the stuff of policy making and electoral politics: the bar between literature as unverifiable information and the social sciences as verifiable information is not to be taken for granted. However, we can still differentiate between a statement that is announcing itself as belonging to a literary world (it is not true) and a statement that is announcing itself as referring to the empirical world (it is true). The point is that it is not virtuality of one versus the concreteness of the other that makes literary worlds different from the disciplinary worlds. To t hese two kinds of worlds, of literature and the disciplines, Cheah adds another world in which literature and art are inserted into a political economy—a world created by the circulation and exchange of works where one can make empirical statements about the aesthetic object: literature and its audiences, its national bounda ries, its circulations, and its exchanges. Th ese three models of world are powerf ul and compelling, but they fail to directly engage the ethicopolitical dimension of worldliness that the essays in this issue strive to grasp. What if we replaced the cartographic desire to totalize or girdle the world with a phenomenological understanding that is exemplified in Heidegger’s notion of worlding (welten) that refers to how a world is held together and unified by the force of time? Here Heidegger is talking about how the uninscribed earth is transformed by h uman and nonhumans, being with and beside each other, into a world. The emphasis is on contemporaneity, on shared temporality rather than spatialization, and such an emphasis allows us to think of a world beyond the notion of h uman community and of o rders that are fixed by anthropocentrism. Conceptualizing the world as a meaningful whole in which humans coexist with other beings and forms of m atter, and thinking of the world teleologically and normatively—what world we would wish it to be, want it to be—both of t hese modes of apprehension prioritize unity and meaningful wholeness. This is precisely the opening that the aesthetic object allows us to grasp and render visible. For instance, literature is a linguistic field where different processes of worlding are played out. But it is not about geography: it is about the experience of linguistic meaning, of timing and spacing, of narrative and rhythm. Fundamentally it is about the experience of time and thus about an artful world that is held together with time. Art expands the present of the reader by enabling access to other modes of temporality, by relativizing linear time, by celebrating other temporalities, and by pluralizing history and memory. As such, worlding processes allow us to generalize about imaginative works as creations that invoke hetero- temporalities, not only in everyday life, utopias, or oral traditions that have survived slavery and colonialism, but also in spiritual practices, vibrant m atter (like atoms), cosmopolitanism, collections of t hings, microcosms, rituals of survival, the natural world, ethics and empathy, and storytelling.
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When literature imagines a higher spiritual world (better than the one we have), it also imagines this superior world by judging the one we have as inadequate, flawed, or ruined. Further it is true that literature often creates phantasmatic ideological distortions of the world so that we never see the material conditions that organize the relations of production. But literature is also the experience of a radical indeterminacy in that it gives us the capacity to imagine the world that can be without having to manifest the empirical evidence of anything. This singularity gives it a force unlike any other form of knowledge. Lit erature shows us how time holds a world together and how temporality structures form and give way to the experience of reading. We don’t read novels or listen to stories or view visual art for information: we do so because t here is, beyond information, the opening of a world that is captured in the experience of reading, listening, or viewing. It is the force that sends us back to re-v iew, to read again and again, to listen again and again, to tell it over and over—something we do not do with the messages we call “information.” Finally, aesthetic and literary worlds allow us to experience the worlding of temporality w hether we are reading upward or downward in scale. We can enter the epic scales of divine, angelic, h uman, and nonhuman worlding in Milton’s Paradise Lost, where human temporality is an immeasurable blip in the narrative of the G reat Chain of Being, but we can also read at a smaller scale when we are inside the diegetic, in the chronotopic experience of close reading the Miltonic chiasmus that stops a poetic line in the m iddle and backtracks. We experience temporality in the ekphrastic descriptions that expand space, supply visual renderings, and create long narrative pauses. It is not implausible that these sub-and para-chronotopes are ruminations on the nature of prelapsarian and postlapsarian worlds when human temporality and human history constituted a break from a divinely ordained order of plenitude, eternity, and immortality. Thus, close readings of a text, like t hese diegetic chronotopes, do not puncture the world of the readers and writers; rather, they constitute, as Hayot argues, a particu lar way of articulating the relationship between the instance and the general.12 While the world is primary as an organizing rubric for the essays in this volume, the essays themselves reflect upon three broad aspects that capture the very different conditions, potentialities, and contexts of worldmaking as the authors see them. Worlds emerge as new spatiotemporal orders facilitated by systems of thought and knowledge like cartography, the geographical and topological study of the earth, philosophical materialism, and cosmology. These systems of thought intersect in new and compelling ways with various genres of symbolic practices such as prose, poetry, and oral narratives of the early modern period. Next, worldmaking stretches beyond the linguistic practices of authors, poets, storytellers, and philosophers to the material practices that supplement emerging early modern scientific disciplines. Here worlds issue forth
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by way of microcosmic and metonymic forms in various projects undertaken by antiquarians, collectors, artists, and architects. Finally, the possibility of other worlds, a possibility that imaginative work brings home to us with optimism and anticipation, also impels us to question the forms of relation that we desire and t hose that we disavow. Such critical attention may be called ecological in that it involves embracing new genres of experience that reimagine forms of relation, and interrogating those existing ideologies of relation in terms of how we understand the o thers (human and nonhuman, beings and objects) in our social, sexual, linguistic, political, environmental, and economic assemblages.
Arc of the Special Issue The first two groups of essays explore different modes of projection and worldmaking by early modern British and Continental writers and artists, who probe the epistemological forms of cartography and travel that Heidegger would l ater describe as the conquest of the world as picture. The first four contributions on the cartographic imaginary and spatiotemporal orders depict, while also presenting alternatives to, worldmaking as imperial and colonial activities. Authors offer literary and visual evidence of comprehensive visions of the whole by attending less to geographical models than to conceptual, imaginative, and metaphysical challenges posed by the task of envisioning an abstract totality. In this regard, the essays illustrate what Ayesha Ramachandran characterizes as “a comprehensive vision of the whole—global and eventually cosmic.” 13 But the accounts of existing and new worlds and landscapes also give way to powerf ul factors disrupting the picture of w holeness and unification.14 Each contribution thus reconceives the relations between the local and global, and between textual/ imaginative and geographical and other charged spaces. Brandie Siegfried and Lisa Walters open this set of essays on “Other Worlds” with a discussion of a world made of atoms: Epicurean philosophy supplied the material and conceptual foundation for philosopher, poet, scientist, and fiction writer Margaret Cavendish to imagine new worlds with different political and social structures. As the epigraph for this volume’s introduction reminds us, Cavendish was interested in the possibility of new worlds where people “may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.” 15 Siegfried and Walters’s essay crucially and vitally reveals how Cavendish’s worldmaking politics and projects intersect with matters of ethics. The fact that t here is a politics to worldmaking is taken up and adapted by Daniel Vitkus for a reading of Cavendish’s contemporary John Milton. Vitkus asks w hether Milton’s rejection of worldly power and ambition differs, if at all, from traditional Christian discourses of contemptus mundi or the ascetic contempt for worldly matters. We learn that Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are events produced within, and in response to, the much larger cultural and economic system of world
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empires and global commerce. Taken together the poems reveal a compelling form of “world history” that encourages Milton’s audience to think of the globe- spanning, conquering empires of their own time in terms of the “dismal world” in which Satan and his followers prosecute their imperial desire to conquer or occupy newly discovered territory. Vitkus argues that the poet’s appeal in his epics to individual, inner liberty of conscience c ounters the visions of empire, war, conquest, and human history played out on a global scale. The following two essays concentrate on world-remaking in the British Atlantic world. Ana Schwartz’s analysis of English colonists on the Anglo-A lgonquian frontier historicizes and theorizes worldmaking in the figurations of shelter, home, and everyday life. Schwartz argues that while t here was nothing inherently violent or colonial about the “desire to protect,” the tendency “to imagine the external world to be full of danger” in the stories the settlers narrated about themselves inevitably shaped the constitution of an ideal political community within settler colonialism. For Schwartz, it is acts of storytelling that revealed and shaped the sort of world the colonists saw themselves to inhabit: a world that was affectively and emotionally unentangled with, cleaved from, t hose other old worldly places of Europe. This notion of world-cleaving not only constituted the settlers’ new world as a split between chosen and unchosen but also affirmed by way of the “unthought desires for protection” that the border between this world and that inhabited by indigenous p eoples remained intact. Daniel O’Quinn demonstrates how landscapes present deliberations on British and American national histories that are remade in verse. He posits that contact zones called littoral zones are in English poet Charlotte Smith’s sonnets sites of affective negotiation with cultural crises arising from American decolonization. Smith’s worldmaking develops out of negotiations with and disjunctions from preexisting poetic worlds as she creates a locus for poetic utterance following the rupture of the British Empire in the late eighteenth c entury. As O’Quinn adeptly shows, Smith politicizes the treatment of space in representing the world less as a spatial m atter than as a temporal modality. The relationship between the local and the global is reformulated in novel ways in the next group of essays, which offer lessons in object histories. Th ese contributions thus examine extraliterary items and articles. Once recounted in the ancient myths of creation, the Bible, and histories of the cosmos, the earliest representations of worldmaking are reinvented and redrawn in the early modern and Enlightenment eras in maps, material collections, domestic objets d’art, paintings, and artifacts from the farthest reaches of the world. Contributors investigate the ways t hese objects are used and reproduced by self-conscious worldmakers, who include not only authors but also antiquarians, painters, collectors, anthropologists, artists, architects, and arborists. Chris Barrett’s study of the encyclopedic and imperialist imperative to cata logue and gather specimens of vegetal types explores the ways early modern
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literary and professional discourses of arbors, arboriculture, and tree management developed a paradigm of worldmaking and specifically a stereoscopic view of the world itself. Offering a vegetal model for the relationships among the globe’s inhabitants, trees emerged, as Barrett shows, as an idiom of worldmaking in green. The specimens, whose amassing Mita Choudhury surveys and politicizes, are associated with the continental tours of David Garrick and Horace Walpole. In “Imperial Cosmopolitanism and the Structure of Global- Domestic Space in Enlightenment Britain,” Choudhury reviews the idea and the reality of discovered objets d’art, which would provide the material foundations of cosmopolitan identity as it evolved in domestic or private spaces. Objects are shown to belong to an ecosystem of production, consumption, value, and exchange. Felicity Nussbaum examines the politics of British artists’ recovery, interpretation, and translation, not in words but in images, of their notions of colonial relations. In penetrating analyses of eighteenth-century paintings, she studies representations of the Indian ayah as an other in her own world to show that British artists portraying Indian servants are implicated in what Spivak labeled the “worlding” of the now-called “Third World.” But in unveiling this visual “worlding,” Nussbaum also discerns and exhibits the subtle ways Indian women servants may have resisted their objectification and strategized to shift its implications. Billie Lythberg likewise presents a visual worlding and unworlding: she pictures an other world of Tahitian, Māori, and Tongan artifacts, made and presented by naturalist Georg Forster. As she reveals, the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz is an exceptional example of eighteenth-century landscape design and planning, engineered to serve aesthetic, educational, and economic purposes. The collection, its malae, and the associated library bring the world of Oceania to central Germany. Contributions to the final grouping, which deal with ecologies of being and othering, address the question of worldmaking as an ethical imperative and the world as a habitus and ground for human and nonhuman life. In these five essays, worlding is both cohabitation and the practical activities undertaken by all kinds of beings. Some essays attend to the perversion of the ecological principle (that humans are surrounded by many worldmaking projects), by way of the transformation of o thers’ worlds—deworlding nonhuman living arrangements by making them exclusively into sites of h uman activity or colonizing human habitations so that natives are made alien on their own land. Other contributions investigate the ways humans and nonhumans are held together in the same world. Further, authors like David S. Mazella analyze some of the implications of Cheah’s notions of worldmaking, literature, and their ethicopolitical horizons, but do so by attending to e arlier yet adjacent historical moments when the roles of genre, media, and the scientific knowledge of worldmaking were evolving. Chi-ming Yang’s essay on the goat umbrella challenges us to think how non-
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human ways of being, like h uman ones, shift historically. Even more important is her point that what we understand to be “media” is ecological too, in that they are “infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are.” Taken together, t hese contributions demonstrate the value of Anna Tsing’s assertion that in order to think ecologically we have to move from human- centered “communities” to open-ended conglomerations of human, animal, mineral, and plant “assemblages.” 16 The first of the five chronologically ordered case studies is an investigation of Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez, the biography of a criollo, Alonso Ramírez, who had circumnavigated the globe (1690). Scholars often overlook how Ramírez’s criollo world is composed of a web of relations of peoples and products, explains Matthew Goldmark, who examines in Infortunios the place of Indigenous technology in colonial worldmaking at the expense of the indios’ contributions to worldmaking. These assemblages of practices and products are not static gatherings; they contain subaltern histories of connection and knowledge. A related genre, travel literature, is equally rife with world-building qualities and potential, and with insights into the European valuations of cultures encountered abroad. Su Fang Ng’s essay on William Dampier’s influential account of his circumnavigation of the world, A New Voyage Round the World (1697), exhibits how the writing of a travel text involves the compositional processes of worldmaking as remaking, by reusing and redeploying other narratives and secondhand knowledges in that process. Particularly revealing in this linguistic assemblage, which drew on the author’s extensive correspondence networks, is Dampier’s fascination with capturing the environmental adaptability or the “sagacity” of indigenous peoples. H ere deworlding is achieved when indigenous knowledges are appropriated as European scientific knowledge and the “sagacious Indian” becomes the recipient rather than a source of knowledge. The following essay, David S. Mazella’s investigation of Hans Sloane’s natural history, Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica (1707–1725), offers a form of worldmaking reflecting an era when literature and scientific discourse w ere not yet fully separated. While Sloane’s project involved his pursuit of the useful plants of Jamaica, this natural history inevitably documented the lives, diseases, and deaths of the island’s enslaved population, whose existence was caught up in the cultivation of t hose plants. In this account of a “polyphonic assemblage” (Tsing), Mazella’s analysis of the common objects, ceremonies, songs, and dances of the enslaved demonstrates the importance of temporality in the evocation of a different world to which they desire to “return” and in which they will be free. Chi-ming Yang’s analysis of Robinson Crusoe combines object histories with worlding practices to show how artful objects are invested with significance through their applications and the “truths” they reveal about the world. Defoe’s
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parallel worlds of making are brought together u nder the sign of a versatile implement of Asian, Brazilian, and animal media—an umbrella that prosthetically supplements Crusoe’s Englishness and creates an interface between personhood and the environment as shaped by technology. The umbrella’s animal material invites a reassessment of the history of environmental displacements in the novel’s staging of “new world” encounters and the ongoing translation of old media into new. In the closing essay of this section, Jennifer Hargrave’s analysis of Thomas Pringle’s Ephemerides (1828), demonstrates how the methodologies of world systems and world ecology—the way the production of nature under capital becomes fundamentally world-historical, and connections between local socioecologies become increasingly determined by the global market—can be used as an analogon for understanding the rise, circulation, and decline of aesthetic forms, the emergence of new generic conventions, and the varying centers of cultural (and critical) valuation.17 Hargrave’s essay on Pringle’s South African poetry shows the peripheralization of the Scottish author’s literary works within a transnational field of production. This field has its own dynamics of competition and valuation between various agents—w riters, editors, publishers, institutions, and, most importantly, critical reviewers who are happy with representat ions of South Africa as a world that yields to Gaelic-inflected words like “glen” and the “sylvan bowers” of English pastorals. Hargrave asks how we might reevaluate this poet if we attended to t hese ignored themes in his poetry: a Cape Colony that is rife with colonial violence, South African populations that live in coeval time as Europe’s contemporaries, and an African world inhabited by free people who cannot be divided into the expected racial taxonomies in their respective segregated territories. Today, the concepts of worlding and deworlding are often upstaged by the term “globalization,” which exemplifies (and suggests a widespread acceptance) that world concepts have a history. To use that term now is not only to acknowledge that we are living in a world that has been radically transformed by an economic system, capitalism, that encountered few barriers to its expansion but also to concede that, through the same historical transformation, we, the inhabitants of the world, are now actively producing a different world-as-picture— one that moves beyond the culmination of modernity to a postmodern age. When we begin to talk about the world we inhabit in terms of networks and flows or circuits and nodes, we recognize such metaphors as metaleptic reversals. Although the metaphors seem to create an interconnected world of motion and fluidity that is horizontally dispersed and flat, our mode of picturing the world this way is actually supplementary. It is an effect of the economic restructuring that we have already undergone and that has brought distant sites of economic activity and production into proximity through outsourcing, virtual work, consumerism, and telecommunications. It is easier to grasp such systemic eco-
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nomic change as “cultural” change. However, thinking of literature and art as forms and processes in which the world is not merely the accumulation of t hings at hand but also an accompaniment and an opening to all beings, a totality, allows us to surpass the palpable tension that we see in the picturing of globalization above, between a material world that we apprehend as social fact, measurable and certain, and an ideal world we grasp through imaginaries, through world- creating aesthetics.
Notes 1. Valerie Billing, “ ‘Treble Marriage’: Margaret Cavendish, William Newcastle, and Collaborative Authorship,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 11, no. 2 (2011): 95. 2. Eric Hayot, On Literary Worlds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 25. 3. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper, 1977), 130. 4. Harry Berger Jr., “The Renaissance Imagination: Second World and Green World,” Centennial Review 9 (1965): 36–78; Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 6. 5. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 4. 6. See Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons,” in Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, ed. Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, and Birgit Neumann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 1–25. 7. Betty Joseph, “Worlding and Unworlding in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 52, no. 1 (2018): 27–31. 8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Three W omen’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12, no. 1 (Autumn, 1985): 260. 9. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Rani of Sirmur: An Essay in Reading the Archives,” History and Theory 24, no. 3 (October 1985): 253–254. 10. Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 8–9. 11. Cheah, What Is a World? 4. 12. Hayot, On Literary Worlds, 17. 13. Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6. Studies of worldmaking focused on sixteenth-and early seventeenth-century English texts include Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman, eds., This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literat ure (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 14. See Betty Joseph’s observation on the competing “twin desires of the Enlightenment in play” in “Worlding and Unworlding in the Long Eighteenth Century,” 29. 15. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called the Blazing-World (London, 1668). 16. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 22–23. 17. For a discussion of the analogy between world ecology and world literature, see Michael Niblett, “World-Economy, World-Ecology, World Literature,” Green Letter 16, no. 1 (2012): 15–30.
Other Worlds c a rt o g r a p h i e s a n d s pat io t e m p or a l o r de r s
A New Science for a New World margaret cavendish on the question of poverty Brandie R. Siegfried and Lisa Walters If any should like the World I have made, and be willing to be my Subjects, they may imagine themselves such, and they are such, I mean in their Minds, Fancies or Imaginations; but if they cannot endure to be Subjects, they may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please. —Margaret Cavendish, The Blazing World1
As a pioneer of science fiction, Margaret Cavendish vividly imagines new worlds throughout much of her literature, whether it be microscopic worlds composed of atoms, fantasy worlds filled with submarine technology, or new societies where women obtain the highest levels of achievements in science, government, education and warfare. Although Cavendish’s new worlds are structured in radically different ways from her own, her moral philosophy has received little attention, perhaps because her work is seen as being relatively divorced from the religious and theological debates of the period. However, Cavendish’s worldmaking often demonstrates a keen interest in ethics, and challenges early modern assumptions about poverty. For instance, she addresses poverty in detail in several of her works, including Poems and Fancies (1653) and Orations of Diverse Sorts (1662). Indeed, as a recurring theme in her writing, the subject of poverty deserves special attention as a frame for her science fiction story, The Blazing World (1666), which includes elements of utopian fiction and its attendant critiques of current society implied through contrast with a foreign land or alternate world. Cavendish’s interest in both poverty and worldmaking was partly inspired by Epicurus, who argued for the existence of multiple worlds and advised his adherents to avoid wealth and power. Significantly, as the opening quotation 21
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suggests, Cavendish was interested in the possibility of new worlds where people “may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please.” A world where individuals “Govern themselves” is markedly different from the political world of the Restoration where Charles II recently reestablished monarchy in England after the English Civil War. This chapter argues that Epicurean philosophy provided the philosophical foundation for Cavendish to imagine new worlds with different political and social structures, and in doing so, she provides an important critique of early modern attitudes about wealth, poverty, and social justice. Cavendish’s interest in worldmaking and poverty has roots in Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a poetic rendition of Epicurean atomism that provided a new epistemological framework for reimagining the universe. The rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura during the Renaissance was of such significance, according to Stephen Greenblatt, that it dramatically “changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.” 2 According to Epicurean science and philosophy, all matter is composed of atoms, which are constantly in motion and move by chance. Epicurus (341–270 b.c.e.) argued the world was entirely material and not governed by predestination or divine will. He held that atoms can produce “an unlimited number of cosmoi, and some are similar to this one and some are dissimilar. . . . For atoms . . . are not exhausted [in the production] of one world or any finite number of them. . . . Consequently, t here is no obstacle to the unlimitedness of worlds.” 3 Th ese infinite worlds and cosmoi do not follow an ontological pattern or divinely sanctioned hierarchy such as the G reat Chain of Being. Therefore Epicureanism paved the way for imagining new social and political worlds for early modern society, worlds that could contradict or serve as a critique for Renaissance feudalism. In other words, Epicureanism provided a new type of moral philosophy and ethics that held significant implications for early modern politics.4 Pierre-Marie Morel explains how Epicurean understandings of m atter created new ways of perceiving the world and opened up possibilities for imagining new worlds: “Physical nature is, at bottom, nothing but atoms and void. The organization and beauty of our world are only effects of an initially disorderly movement of corpuscles. The world itself is destined for destruction and is only a distinctive specimen among an infinity of worlds to be found in an unlimited universe. Th ere is no providence or teleology that could explain the local and precarious order in which we live. Physical nature is, therefore, not in itself a bearer of meaning: it is neutral.” 5 Since classical atomists held that our physical world is one among many and is not divinely ordered or structured by God, atomism challenged ontological justifications for social hierarchy that structured feudal society. Hence, Epicureanism had been associated with atheism and unorthodoxy.6 Influenced by the rediscovery of Epicurean science, Cavendish was the first person to create an original theory of atomism in Britain when she published
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Philosophical Fancies (1653) as well as Poems and Fancies (1653), which followed the poetic structure of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, a didactic first-century b.c.e. text explaining Epicurean philosophy and science in poetic form. Her interest in Epicurean atomism not only was scientific but, as this chapter shows, provided the foundation for her ethics, particularly regarding poverty. Contrary to what some scholars have asserted—that, in becoming a Duchess, Cavendish must have held commoners and the poor in low esteem—she regularly celebrated the importance and worth of everyday labor and denounced the corruption of wealth.7 In Orations (1662), for example, an advisor pleads to his king that “when Rich Miserable men Hord up Money, it makes such a Scarcity of it, that the Poor P eople, although they Labour Painfully, yet cannot get enough to Maintain Themselves, their Wives, and Children; for the Scarcer Money is, the Cheaper is their Work, in so much as Poor Labouring men cannot get Half the Worth of their L abour.” 8 Indeed, in her poem titled “A World Made By Atoms,” in Poems and Phancies (1668, 3rd ed.),9 she compares atoms to “several workmen” who “may a new world create,” raising the status of builders to creators of new worlds.10 In addition to valuing the work of laborers, Cavendish was also deeply interested in the problem of and causes of poverty. While Orations provides a multitude of political perspectives, laborers voice their opinion upon the c auses of their poverty; they claim that the law “doth not set the Poor a-Work, but takes away the Poors Work, I mean not their L abour, but their Getting, as the Profit, and so leaves them not any t hing to Live on.” 11 Here laborers comment upon the systematic structures that cause their misery, arguing that their work is not adequately compensated, leaving them in perpetual poverty. The ethics surrounding poverty is apparent in her early works, where the issue is taken up in her first book of poems (1653), a text that is equally concerned with the possibility of infinite worlds that “are not subject to our sense.” 12 In her poem, “Of Poverty,” for instance, Cavendish develops a clear contrast between the poor and the rich, and the rich do not come off well. Here, she addresses poverty not as a question of social justice per se, as she does in Orations, but as a contrast for the moral degradation of the wealthy. As the first lines read, “My dwelling is a low thatched h ouse, my cell / Not big enough for Pride’s g reat heart to dwell.” 13 After listing common household trappings of the wealthy, which cause a constant longing for more, and after briefly describing the simple furnishings of a humble cottage, w e’re told, “And this is all which poverty allows. / Yet it is free from cares, no thieves doth fear.” 14 As this poem would have it, wealth is a prison: it locks some in and o thers out. As Cavendish explores the possibilities of infinite worlds in this collection of poems, “Of Poverty” argues that wealth is morally corrupt and confining, implicitly suggesting the possibility of different social worlds with different values regarding poverty. The notion that wealth is imprisoning or an impetus for moral degradation was likely influenced by Cavendish’s sustained interest in Epicurean philosophy
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and ethics. Epicurus held that wealth, status, and power impede pleasure and a happy life. Walter Charleton, a friend and correspondent of Cavendish who translated and wrote about Epicurus, for example, in Epicurus’s Morals (1656), advises p eople “to live not only privately, but even obscurely and concealed in some secure corner” in order to avoid “Greatnesse, or Power, or Honours.” 15 Consequently, Epicureans recommended a life of retreat away from power, politics, and wealth, and Cavendish was eager to explore how the Epicurean orientation might mitigate the plight of the poor while curbing the worst excesses of the rich. Cavendish’s interest in poverty was not only s haped by Epicurus but also influenced by Thomas More’s Utopia, a debt clearly visible in both Poems and Fancies and The Blazing World (1666).16 According to Stephen Greenblatt, Thomas More’s depiction of a radically egalitarian society in Utopia was influenced by Epicureanism.17 It is notable that in Cavendish’s poem “Of Poverty,” humble cottages are “not big enough for Pride’s great heart to dwell.” In More’s Utopia, pride is described as the root and primary cause of social problems and injustice. The idealist Raphael, for example, asserts that “the whole world [would] adopt the laws of this [Utopian] commonwealth,” 18 which eradicates poverty by eliminating private property. Yet “one single monster, the prime plague and begetter of all o thers—I mean, Pride,” prevents this.19 As in More’s Utopia, whose inhabitants live in a world without pride or private property, where the doors are devised to “let anyone come in—so t here is nothing private,” 20 so also the poor in Cavendish’s poem have no pride and their “door stands open; all are welcome t here.” 21 Well in line with More’s Utopian vision, and firmly grounded in Epicurean thinking, Cavendish is committed to further ruminations on how freeing oneself from wealth and power opens up new forms of freedom for both rich and poor. Rather than being subject to pride and moral degradation, in the verses that follow, we learn that the poor are more attuned to nature’s cycles, while the rich are likely to sew crops repeatedly until “th’ Earth, her strength they waste. / For bearing oft, she’ll grow so lean and bare, / That like a skeleton she will appear.” The rich, in contrast to being mindful of their relationship to the earth, are busy drinking and eating to excess: “This heats the mind with an ambitious fire; / None happy is but in a low desire. / Their longings do run out, and fix nowhere, / For what they have, or can have, naught they care. / But long for what they have not, this th’ admire; / Oft sick for want, so restless is desire.” 22 This disease of acquisition leads to an endless cycle of self-destructive self-indulgence. Tranquility, on the other hand, is found in s imple, productive labors: When we from labors come, we quiet sleep; No restless thoughts, our sense awake doth keep. All’s still and silent in our house and mind; Our thoughts are cheerful, and our hearts are kind.
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And life, although’t in motions still does dwell; Yes rest, in life, a poor man loveth well.23
This is no pastoral idealization of the simple life, however. In fact, without ignoring the want that poverty entails, Cavendish is clear about where real wealth is to be found: in the very next poem, “Of Tranquility,” the question of social justice and worldmaking emerges. She explains that the only world that will last is one that is built on “pillars” of “justice strong.” Only in honor and justice “will the mind enjoy itself in pleasure, / For to itself, it is the greatest treasure. / But they are poor, whose mind is discontent; / What joy they have, it is but to them lent.” 24 The poem goes on to showcase temperance, prudence, love, and conscience as the real treasure. Likewise, in the next poem, “Of the Shortness of Man’s Life and His Foolish Ambition,” she criticizes men who think that by hoarding up wealth and status, they can somehow elude death, “As if he should live to eternity.” Such “Hoards up a mass of wealth, yet cannot fill / His empty mind, but covet he w ill still. / To gain and keep, such falsehood men do use; / ’Gainst right and truth, no base ways they refuse.” 25 Hoarding wealth does not create a world based upon the “pillars” of “justice strong,” but instead makes “empty” minds willing to pursue “base ways”—for worldmaking, modesty provides a better pattern. Drawing attention to her Epicurean influences, Cavendish not only discusses wealth and power in unflattering terms in these poems but also structures Poems and Fancies to correspond with Lucretius’s On the Nature of Th ings.26 Lucretius’s text also contends that humans do not require wealth since “our bodies profit nothing / From riches or noble birth or glory of kingdom, / We must believe our minds also gain nothing.” 27 Lucretius further takes pains to demonstrate that the universe is not controlled by gods or divine forces.28 Injustices and hierarchy are not divinely ordained or structured by gods but are the result of humanity’s unending desire for power and wealth. The implication is clear: if the urge for power and wealth are contained, humanity has the agency and wherewithal to create new social worlds that are more just, free, and attuned to nature’s cycles of bounty. Cavendish is firm about the prospects for better worldmaking at the ethical level, a project she may have felt was made easier by the fact oversight was local: the parish exercised oversight and administration.29 Statutory relief included four categories of need, one of which was the worthy poor who were to be housed and provided with a weekly pension. Poor c hildren and “bastards” w ere to be apprenticed at a fit age, and the laboring poor were to be given work. The fourth category—clearly the most fraught, given the screeds published regularly—was defined as the willfully idle, to be punished and forcefully employed. In Poems and Fancies, “Hoards” of wealth go “ ’Gainst right and truth.” 30 Cavendish’s assertion contrasts markedly with common early seventeenth-century
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attitudes toward poverty which trended t oward conceptualizing more and more of the poor as belonging to the willfully idle. Alexandra Shepard argues that “poverty was often readily linked to dishonesty” and “was also readily associated with idleness and dissolute living.” 31 Poverty rates rapidly increased during the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Thomas Max Safley suggests that the increase in poverty during the early modern period led to a shift in attitude, whereas “poverty had once been considered innocent and, indeed, important as a reflection of the soul’s relationship to God, it came to be viewed with suspicion, even opprobrium.” 32 In stark contrast, Cavendish’s representa tion of poverty reveals a belief that poverty is a structural problem rather than a reflection upon an individual’s moral failings. If poverty is structural, caused by society rather than individuals, and is not part of a divinely sanctioned cosmic hierarchy, then new societies and worlds are possible, which is perhaps why Cavendish elaborates on the ethics of poverty and wealth in her book of poems that theorizes in such detail her belief in infinite worlds. Indeed, Cavendish’s interest in poverty is not limited to simply considering the corruption of the wealthy; as previously mentioned, Orations devotes much time to exploring the material conditions and social attitudes that caused and maintained poverty in early modern society. Paul Slack argues that “over the seventeenth century as a whole, it seems probable that the number of people in deep poverty—t hose in danger of starvation—markedly declined, while the number in shallow poverty—those who might be described as ‘poor’—increased by at least as much.” 33 Robert Jütte explains that by “the end of Middle Ages, the . . . poor no longer included only the traditional groups (widows, orphans, the blind, the lame) but also comprised newer kinds as well. As a large number of urban wage-earners, cottagers and day-labourers lived in circumstances which even contemporaries admitted to be extremely precarious.” 34 Discussing the increase in the poor population, Patricia Fumerton estimates that the “unstable working poor, and depending on varying geog raphic al and economic conditions . . . constituted from 30 to 50 percent of the early modern English population.” 35 Given t hese circumstances, Cavendish’s interest in an Epicurean understanding of wealth is not surprising; it led her to consider the means by which the wealthy systemically enriched themselves at the expense of a significant portion of the population. With the exception of More’s Utopia, Orations is one of the only early modern literary texts that attempts to understand the structural causes of this new poverty.36 Orations, published nearly a decade after the first edition of Poems and Fancies, provides speeches from people across the social spectrum of early modern society. While these speeches often contradict each other, they highlight Cavendish’s continued interest in pluralism.37 An oration is a public speech, so it is significant that Cavendish gives a public voice to not only kings and generals but also beggars, soldiers, poor servants, impoverished sailors, peasants, a
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courtesan, and a poor thief who stole to provide for his “Weak; Sick Wife, that Labours in Child Birth.” 38 As Shepard notes, the “voices of the poor themselves have remained largely muffled, audible only in relation to (and deeply shaped by) the highly strategic negotiations of formal poor relief ” available in the period.39 Indeed, Orations not only gives various members of the impoverished class a public voice but also insists on giving them their dignity: their orations do not plead for charity but rather eloquently discuss the injustices they suffer, astutely shedding light upon the social conditions which cause their destitution.40 Keith Thomas explains that “many aristocrats despised and feared ‘the vulgar’; they were horrified by the thought of the populace being involved in national politics, and they would have agreed with Sir Thomas Smith’s suggestion in 1549 that, at the first hint of popular discontent, sixty or a hundred h orses should come ‘suddenly in the night’ and take away the ‘stirrers’ before o thers joined them.” 41 Smith clearly did not want a new social world to emerge that allowed popular discontent or the poor to have more agency, more shaping power for a better world. Cavendish clearly did not share such attitudes: in fact, a number of the orations represent poor people who forcefully voice their opinions about politics, stressing the structural inequities that emerge thanks to “Monopolies” and fixed pricing. For example, laborers in “Complaints of the Subjects to their Soveraign” argue against high taxation and monopolies, claiming taxes take the Profit of our Labours, which should maintain our Lives, Wives and Children, . . . and we do not only Pay Taxes, but Intolerable Prices for all Commodities and Necessaries, occasioned by Monopolies and Projects, which ingross all Particu lar Commodities.42
The laborers here point out that their economic hardships are rooted in economic policies and politics that render it difficult to maintain their “Lives” and families. The speaker in “An Oration against Taxes” demands that the people not Part with our Money, untill we know How it shall be Imployed, for if it be Imployed in the Serv ice of the Common-wealth, it w ill Return to our Profit, which w ill be as Traffick to Inrich, and not as Robbery to Impoverish us.43
That is, from an ethical perspective, the general population should properly have a say in taxation policies. Similarly, soldiers argue for having more agency in military decisions in “A Common Souldiers Oration, to take the City by Force.” In this oration, the soldier notes that “poor Common Souldiers are naked and almost starved for Want” and should participate in military decisions—otherw ise the
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“Commanders” will “rob us of the Spoils, / which by the Law of Arms ought to be ours.” 44 As with Cavendish’s readers of The Blazing World, where she claims they “may create Worlds of their own, and Govern themselves as they please,” so with Orations, which shows individuals in poverty yearning for a world that allows for more self-governance and a stronger voice in decision making. Without such agency, those in poverty will continue to suffer. A common theme throughout these orations by the poor is that the wealthy and powerful create policies that enrich themselves and cause destitution to o thers. Social inequality is portrayed in starkly material terms rather than through a divinely sanctioned hierarchy. The common soldiers, for example, are “almost starved” because higher rank commanders do not share the spoils of war with t hose of lower rank. Soldiers, according to Patricia Fumerton, w ere particularly vulnerable to poverty and dispossession. She argues that t here was “a large and growing number of mobile and casually employed laborers in early modern England. These included in their ranks . . . huge numbers of servants, apprentices, journeymen, and soldiers/seamen.” 45 These “poor mig rants” w ere sometimes “arrested for vagrancy or peremptorily whipped before being hurried out of town, as was the custom of treating undesirable ‘strangers’ after the late 1590s.” 46 Thus, it is notable that Orations includes speeches by not only soldiers but poor servants and farm laborers, in addition to an oration to help poor sailors. As Fumerton further notes, “Proclamations and acts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were repeatedly directed t oward containing the feared potential for instability from seamen and soldiers once released from duty onshore. The sheer numbers were daunting. Seamen formed a massive and growing class of wage laborers in the seventeenth c entury.” 47 In “An Oration concerning Shipping” Cavendish addresses the poor wages and working conditions of this growing class of workers. The oration claims that seamen are “Poor themselves, and . . . for the most part accompanied / with Dangers and Fears, as much as with Want and Necessity.” 48 A fter detailing their dangerous working conditions, the oration concludes that “Mariners deserve / more pay and thanks.” 49 Indeed, Michael J. Braddick explains how there was “an over supply of l abour and declining real wages” during the early modern period.50 The orations that discuss the working poor tend to point to structural inequality that causes and maintains their impoverished condition. This contrasts with what Jütte describes as “the view that vagrants were poor not so much by circumstances beyond their control as through their own fault,” 51 even though dispossessed laborers constituted approximately 50 percent of the rural population by 1650.52 When Cavendish focuses upon poverty, she does not focus upon w idows, orphans, and the disabled who might receive some sympathy and official poor relief. Cavendish instead explores the voices of the working poor who, as Jütte explains, were often perceived as the “undeserving poor,” t hose who lacked morality, w ere lazy, and were a threat to civil order.53 While Orations also pro-
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vides the perspective of kings and generals who are more conservative in their opinions, many of the orations more radically point to the economic and politi cal policies that disadvantage poor laborers. In “An Oration against Excess and Vanity,” for example, the speaker complains to fellow citizens that you Ruine the Poor, inclosing the Land with your Walls, and filling up Lands with Houses, whereas Corn and Fruits should Grow; thus you Tread upon the Bellies, Backs, and Heads of the Poor.54
ere the speaker complains about the controversial practice of enclosing comH mon lands for private use. Thomas More’s Utopia addresses this same practice when Raphael complains that when one greedy, insatiable glutton, a frightful plague to his native country, may enclose thousands of acres within a single fence, the tenants are ejected; and some are stripped of their belongings by trickery or brute force, or, wearied by constant harassment, are driven to sell them. One way or another, t hese wretched people—men, women, husbands, wives, orphans, w idows, parents with little children and entire families (poor but numerous, since farming requires many hands)—a re forced to move out. They leave the only homes familiar to them, and can find no place to go. Since they must leave at once without waiting for a proper buyer, they sell for a pittance all their h ousehold goods, which would not bring much in any case. When that little money is gone (and it’s soon spent in wandering from place to place), what finally remains for them but to steal, and so be hanged—justly, no doubt—or to wander and beg? And yet if they go tramping, they are jailed as idle vagrants. They would be glad to work, but they can find no one who will hire them. Th ere is no need for farm l abour, in which they have been trained, when t here is no land left to be planted.55
Like Raphael who sees land enclosures as causing structural poverty, crime, and serious social injustice, the poor in Orations tend to know precisely what policies and people cause their poverty, whether its land enclosure or corrupt politicians. Raphael argues that poverty and unemployment force many into theft.56 Similarly, in “A Cause Pleaded at the Barr before Judges, concerning Theft,” a lawyer claims his client indeed stole, but only b ecause he has “nothing of his own to Live on” and needed to feed his “Young C hildren” and “Sick Wife” who cannot work.57 The l awyer argues that this poverty is unnatural, claiming the thief appeals to, Nature, who made all t hings / in Common, She made not some men to be Rich, / and other men Poor, some to Surfeit with overmuch / Plenty, and others to be Starved for / Want: for when she made the World and the /
30 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 Creatures in it, She did not divide the Earth, / nor the rest of the Elements, but gave the use / generally amongst them all. But when Governmental / Laws were devised by some Usurping / Men, who w ere the greatest Thieves and Robbers, / (for they Robbed the rest of Mankind of / their Natural Liberties and Inheritances, which / is to be Equal Possessors of the World;) these / G rand and Original Thieves and Robbers, / which are call’d Moral Philosophers, or Common-wealth / makers, w ere not only Thieves and / Tyrants to the Generality of Mankind, but they / were Rebels against Nature, Imprisoning Nature / within the Jail of Restraint, Keeping her to the / spare Diet of Temperance, Binding her with / Laws, and Inslaving her with Propriety, whereas / all is in Common with Nature. Wherefore, / being against Nature’s Laws for any man to / Possess more of the World or the Goods of the / World than an other man, t hose that have more / Wealth or Power than other men, o ught to be / Punished as Usurpers and Robbers, and not those / that are Poor and Powerless.58
Like Utopia, where property is held in common, the thief radically suggests that private property, social hierarchy, and rank are the fundamental problems with society; the thief even argues that economic inequality is tyrannical and a type of theft worthy of punishment. The more typical attitude in the early modern period was expressed by Samuel Hartlib in 1650 in his book about poverty, where he argued that petty criminals should be put to work “the better to make them serv iceable to the Common-wealth, by reforming their ungodly life.” 59 Rather than poverty being associated with crime and disorder, in much of Orations “Poor Subjects” complain about the corruption of judges, magistrates, and officers who take bribes and “Rob the Subjects.” 60 The king seems unable or uninterested in his subjects’ complaints about corruption and poverty and angrily rebukes them for their “Rebellious Tumults.” The king’s unsympathetic response to his subjects’ concerns is perhaps not surprising. Michael J. Braddick contends that “at the centre of much social and economic policy in this period was a view of the moral and political worth of l abour and a calling. As William Tyndale told lowly kitchen servants, ‘God hath put thee in that office.’ Social responsibility flowed, in Tyndale’s view, from the proper fulfilment of the functions to which God had called the individual: ‘Let e very man therefore wait on the office wherein Christ hath put him, and therein serve his brethren.’ If that was a place of low degree, ‘let him patiently therein abide, till God promote him, and exalt him higher.’ ” 61 What is fascinating about Orations is that many of the speakers do not see social inequality as divinely sanctioned, just, or natural. If poverty is not “the office wherein Christ” puts people, Orations provides arguments from impoverished characters that lay the groundwork to create a new social world with less economic suffering. As Cavendish’s texts suggest, real poverty is created by denying proper work and wages, by ignoring nature’s cycles, and by instituting instead a cycle of hoard-
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ing and injustice that makes everyone—even the wealthy—miserable. In Poems and Fancies, the poem “A Moral Discourse of Corn” reemphasizes t hese points: “t hose that are content can ne’er be poor.” By echoing Epicurus and his famous loaf of rye bread, Cavendish underscores the serious philosophical implications of her social critique of t hose whose wealth creates, paradoxically, endless dissatisfaction for all. Moreover, she is not simply dismissing the complaints of the poor when she concludes, “He that doth grumble at what he cannot mend, / Is one that takes a t hing at the wrong end.” H ere she is invoking Epictetus, who taught, “Everyt hing has two handles, one by which it may be carried and the other not. If your brother acts unjustly toward you, do not take hold of it by this side, that he has acted unjustly (since this is the h andle by which it may not be carried), but instead by this side, that he is your brother . . . and you w ill be taking hold of it in the way that it can be carried.” 62 There is a twofold presumption here, one the implicit point that in a social structure that creates poverty, the poor cannot be expected to erase their own predicament, the other that while attempting as much as possible to change their circumstances, the poor should not mimic the unjust behavior of the rich, for to do so simply reinforces an unjust society. Cavendish takes up similar themes in other works, but in turning to The Blazing World, where worldmaking is part of the plot, questions of poverty are not discussed in detail. Yet we might want to think more carefully about her use of the animal men. That her Bear Men, Spider Men, and Magpie Men are meant to parody several members and practices of the Royal Society is well established. However, it is useful to remember that much of the humor in this regard resides in how she has structured her parody: for each instrument or practice associated with the Royal Society, she provides an animal that, in nature, accomplishes similar (if not greater) feats of prowess. Spiders, for instance, are wonderful geometricians, birds are gifted orators. The point, of course, is that the Royal Society has had to depend upon what in the period w ere sometimes referred to as the “lower orders.” Cavendish is not mocking spiders, birds, and so on. Rather, she is figuratively insisting on displaying the Royal Society’s reliance on t hose whose work—chemists, cooks, chart makers, midwives, breeders, and o thers— in fact made advancements in science possible. Like builders in her poetry, who are compared with atoms that purposefully create infinite worlds, Cavendish indicates that laborers are fundamental to the scientific creations and experiments of the Royal Society. In Cavendish’s comic zootopia, t here are no poor for a very s imple reason: all have the freedom to pursue their interests and employ their individual and collective capabilities to best (or even misbegotten) effect. The one reference to poverty in the text is made by the Empress of the Blazing World, an alien who originated from another world. As the empress views lice under a microscope, she is reminded of beggars, presumably from her former world. She “pitied much t hose that are molested with them, especially poor
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Beggars, which although they have nothing to live on themselves, are yet necessitated to maintain and feed of their own flesh and blood, a company of such terrible Creatures called Lice; who, instead of thanks, do reward them with pains, and torment them for giving them nourishment and food.” 63 Although this passage might indicate that the Blazing World does indeed have “poor Beggars,” t here are no allusions to poverty in the intricate aesthetic descriptions Cavendish provides of this world. Indeed, the homes are described as “no higher then two stories from the Ground,” which is more modest than the homes in Thomas More’s Utopia where the communal homes are “are all three storeys high.” 64 The bear-men, who become her experimental philosophers, reside outside the imperial city living in “Caves under ground” instead of houses.65 Yet this is not described as an impoverished or homeless condition, particularly since the bear- men become her experimental philosophers who use expensive microscopes and telescopes. While it is true that the Blazing World has an “Imperial Race” of nobles, poverty does not appear to exist in this world, suggesting that poverty is not a natural or inevitable part of any society.66 Lawrence Wilde argues that More’s “Utopia is an explicitly moral text, rejecting the complacent accep tance that poverty and war are unavoidable.” 67 Cavendish embraces a similar theory for better worlds. Tellingly, Cavendish also entertains the possibility that items that signify and maintain wealth in the present world may not have any value or use in other worlds. Initially, for example, Cavendish’s Blazing World seems to uphold wealth and privilege. We are told that “None was allowed to use or wear Gold but t hose of the Imperial Race.” 68 The imperial race was the upper classes in this world with copious amounts of gold and jewels; “they had an infinite quantity both of Gold and precious Stones in that World; for they had larger extents of Gold, then our Arabian Sands.” 69 By comparing the infinite quantity of gold and jewels to sand in an expansive desert, it becomes apparent that the nobility wear metal that would be of little value in this world. This is emphasized when the empress’s soul visits the world of “the Duchess of Newcastle,” she “wonder’d . . . t hat they should prize or value dirt more then mens lives, and vanity more then tranquility.” 70 Here, gold’s function is similar to that in More’s Utopia where it has no value except for being used to make toilets and chains for prisoners.71 Rather than a divinely sanctioned cosmic hierarchy, both More and Cavendish suggest that humanity invests objects with value that creates a world full of inequality; ultimately, such inequalities harm both rich and poor. Besides rethinking the value of gold and jewels, Cavendish provides an eye- opening addition to our sense of how attitudes about poverty as well as English poor laws and relief w ere weighed and found wanting. Indeed, setting her writing alongside that of o thers who crafted their own ideas on the cause and relief of poverty will certainly provide further enlightenment about how authors interested in poverty w ere imagining new social worlds. Hugh Peter—a Puritan
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minister executed for his role in upending absolute monarchy—imagined a new social world where profits are shared in the community; his ideas stand in revealing contrast to the assumption of criminality that undergirded the royal statutes.72 Cavendish’s thinking on poverty overlaps with Peter’s in intriguing ways. Richard Baxter, an ordained deacon in the Church of England, is another who provides revealing observations on poverty that are useful for thinking about in relation to Cavendish. While Baxter did not write about the structural prob lems causing poverty, he nonetheless claims that “ordinarily Riches are far more dangerous to the soul than poverty.” 73 Jonathan Swift, who also mocked social structures by means of animal societies in his famous Gulliver’s Travels, begs for rereading in light of Cavendish’s Blazing World; the Yahoos’ fixation upon shiny stones with no clear value is reminiscent of how gold and jewels are worthless in Cavendish’s Blazing World. Still, Swift’s own views on the poor in other works stand in stark contrast to t hose of Cavendish’s noted here. In short, t hese suggestive avenues of further inquiry affirm how wide of the mark a reading of Cavendish might be when merely paying tribute to a simplistic notion of what the identity of a “duchess,” or a “royalist,” entails. Cavendish’s sustained interest in the structural causes of poverty and social inequality suggests that she took worldmaking seriously: finding structure allows for rethinking architecture. Ultimately, Cavendish was committed to the notion that t here could be radical alternatives to the crisis of poverty in early modern E ngland.
Notes 1. Margaret Cavendish, The Description of a New World Called the Blazing-World (London, 1668). 2. Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York: Norton, 2011), cover copy. 3. Epicurus, “Letter to Herodotus,” in The Epicurus Reader: Selected Writing and Testimonials, trans. and ed. Brand Inwood and L. P. Gerson (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 8. 4. For more details about Cavendish’s engagement with Epicurean ethics, see Lisa Walters, “Gender and Epicurean Pleasure in the English Newcastle Circle,” in A Companion to the Cavendishes, ed. Lisa Hopkins and Thomas Rutter (York: Arc Humanities Press, 2020), forthcoming. 5. Pierre-Marie Morel, “Epicureanism,” in A Companion to Ancient Philosophy, ed. Mary Louise Gill and Pierre Pellegrin (Malden, MA: John Wiley, 2009), 486. 6. Jill Kraye, “Philologists and Philosophers,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renais sance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 153–154. 7. Peter Dear, for example, argues “no doubt a part of her disdain for experimentation lay in its close association with workmen.” See “A Philosophical Duchess: Understanding Margaret Cavendish and the Royal Society,” in Science, Literature and Rhetoric in Early Modern England, 2nd ed., ed. Juliet Cummins and David Burchell (Abingdon: Ashgate, 2016), 131. 8. Margaret Cavendish, Orations (London, 1662), 113. 9. Throughout this article, we cite from the later (1668) edition of Poems and Fancies because of the modernized edition available, which is extensively glossed and comes with much additional historical, philosophical, and political explanations of issues in the poems. Cavendish made changes from the original 1653 text in both the 1664 (2nd edition) and the 1668 (3rd edition) reprints.
34 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 10. Cavendish, “A World Made by Atoms,” Poems and Fancies with the Animal Parliament, ed. Brandie R. Siegfried (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2018), 81–82 (hereafter cited as Poems and Fancies). 11. Cavendish, Orations, 120. 12. Cavendish, “Of Many Worlds in this World,” Poems and Fancies, 128–129. 13. Cavendish, “Of Poverty,” Poems and Fancies, 194–195. 14. Cavendish, “Of Poverty,” Poems and Fancies, 194–195. 15. Walter Charleton, Epicurus’s Morals (London, 1656), 92. 16. Geraldine Wagner, for example, argues in her discussion of the Blazing World that “undoubtedly, Margaret was also acquainted with Thomas More’s Utopia: both texts employ a construction of the self as double that is enabled by a playfully complex authorial stance, and both are torn between establishing an egalitarian society and valuing individual subjectivity.” Geraldine Wagner, “Romancing Multiplicity: Female Subjectivity and the Body Divisible in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World,” Early Modern Literary Studies 9, no. 1 (2003): para 12. 17. Greenblatt, The Swerve, 227–233. See also Marina Leslie, Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), 119–150. 18. Thomas More, Utopia, ed. George M. Logan and Robert M. Adams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 106. 19. More, Utopia, 106. Raphael further argues that pride is particularly cruel since “pride measures her prosperity not by what she has but by what others lack. Pride would not deign even to be made a goddess if t here were no wretches for her to sneer at and domineer over. Her good fortune is dazzling only by contrast with the miseries of others; she displays her riches to torment and tantalise the poverty of others” (106). 20. More, Utopia, 46. 21. Cavendish, “Of Poverty,” Poems and Fancies, 194–195, lines 15–16. 22. Cavendish, “Of Poverty,” Poems and Fancies, 194–195, lines 27–36. 23. Cavendish, “Of Poverty,” Poems and Fancies, 195. 24. Cavendish, “Of Tranquility,” Poems and Fancies, 195–196. 25. Cavendish, “Of Tranquility,” Poems and Fancies, 196. 26. Brandie Siegfried, “Introduction,” in Poems and Fancies, 22. 27. Lucretius, On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Melville, ed. Don and Peta Fowler (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Book 2, lines 37–39. 28. For example, in Book Six Lucretius discusses entrances to the underworld, claiming “all t hese t hings have a natural origin/ And the causes that produce them are quite clear. / Do not believe that in t hese regions lie / The gates of Hell.” On the Nature of the Universe, Book 6, lines 760–764. 29. It is worth noting that parishes often had quite distinct attitudes and practices in the exercise of poor relief. Although space prohibits a more focused local analysis here, more work needs to be done on how the parishes Cavendish encountered may have influenced her attitudes on poverty. 30. Cavendish, Poems and Fancies, 196. 31. Alexandra Shepard, “Poverty, Labour and the Language of Social Description in Early Modern E ngland,” Past and Present 201, no. 1 (2008): 82 and 94. Shepard uses court transcripts to assess attitudes toward poverty (51–52). 32. Thomas Max Safley, “Introduction,” in The Reformation of Charity: The Secular and the Religious in Early Modern Poor Relief, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Boston: Brill, 2003), 1. 33. Paul Slack, Poverty and Policy in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Longman, 1988), 39. 34. Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. 35. Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), xv.
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36. Lawrence Wilde explains that the character Raphael in Utopia argues “that poverty is the principal reason for theft, he cites two social groups forced into poverty as a result of their dependence on rich noblemen. First, t here are the tenant farms, ‘bled white’ by nobles who are constantly raising their rents, and second, the unskilled retainers of nobles, wither household servants or members of private armies, who are dismissed when they become old or ill, or when their master dies.” Lawrence Wilde, Thomas More’s Utopia: Arguing for Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 2016), 56. 37. For a longer discussion of the politics and science undermining Cavendish’s pluralism, see Lisa Walters, Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 38. Cavendish, Orations, 86. 39. Shepard, “Poverty, L abour and the Language of Social Description,” 52. 40. The “Oration of a Common Courtesan” is more moralistic in tone compared with the other orations about the poor. 41. Keith Thomas, “John Walter and the Social History of Early Modern E ngland,” in Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter, ed. Michael J. Braddick and Phil Withington (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017), 23. 42. Cavendish, Orations, 118, 119. 43. Cavendish, Orations, 252. 44. Cavendish, Orations, 24. 45. Fumerton, Unsettled, xii. 46. Fumerton, Unsettled, xii. 47. Fumerton, Unsettled, xx. 48. Cavendish, Orations, 15 and 16. 49. Cavendish, Orations, 16. 50. Michael J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c.1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 49. 51. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, 147. 52. Fumerton, Unsettled, 30. 53. Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe, 158 and 143. He explains that “numerous tracts, statutes and proclamations [made] the distinction between the worthy and unworthy poor” which “became a commonplace concept through which contemporaries organized their view of the social order. . . . Increasingly, all the able-bodied poor were considered willfully idle and unworthy of charity” (12). 54. Cavendish, Orations, 205. 55. More, Utopia, 19. 56. For a more detailed discussion of the politics of Utopia, see Leslie, Renaissance Utopias, 25–56. 57. Cavendish, Orations, 86. 58. Cavendish, Orations, 86. 59. Samuel Hartlib, Londons Charity Inlarged Stilling the Orphans Cry (London, 1650), title page. 60. See “The Subjects Complaint to Their Soveraign, of the Abuses of Their Magistrates,” in Cavendish, Orations, 120. 61. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, 108. See also William Tyndale, reprinted in English Historical Documents 1485–1558, ed. C. H. Williams (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1971), 293. 62. See Epictetus, The Handbook (The Encheiridion), trans. Nicholas P. White (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), 26. 63. Cavendish, Blazing World, 31. 64. More, Utopia, 47.
36 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 65. Cavendish, Blazing World, 5. 66. Cavendish, Blazing World, 14. 67. Wilde, Thomas More’s Utopia, 18. 68. Cavendish, Blazing World, 14. 69. Cavendish, Blazing World, 14. 70. Cavendish, Blazing World, 104. 71. More, Utopia, 60–63. 72. Peter Cornelius (pseudonym for Hugh Peter), A Way Propounded to Make the Poor in These and Other Nations Happy (London, 1659). 73. See Richard Baxter’s “Chapter. XXVII. Directions for the Poor,” in A Christian Directory (London, 1673), 627–630.
“All the Kingdoms of the World” global visions of empire and war in milton’s paradise lost and paradise regained Daniel Vitkus God has not brought us hither where we are but to consider the worke that wee may doe in the world as well as home. —Oliver Cromwell (at a meeting of the Council of State on July 20, 1654) They err who count it glorious to subdue / By conquest far and wide, to overrun great countries. . . . —John Milton, Paradise Regained (1671)
In the age of John Milton, emergent capitalism, in both its domestic and global forms, continued the expansion begun during the sixteenth century, solidifying the accommodation between the waning capacity of traditional landowning aristocratic elites and the accelerating power of the new capitalist elements in British society. The Eng lish Revolution and the “commonwealth” never replaced or overthrew the British class system: rather, the radical elements that rose up against tyranny and corruption during the 1640s, including those in the army, were purged or persecuted under Oliver Cromwell.1 W hether the government was a monarchy or a republic, the underlying structure of bourgeois power developed and grew more potent throughout the seventeenth c entury and after. In this essay, the focus is on Milton’s attitude toward empire and war—and their connections to the aggressive accumulation of wealth by t hose in power.2 A number of complex questions about how Paradise Lost (1st ed. 1667, 2nd ed. 1674) and Paradise Regained (1671) refer or respond to the political history of the mid-seventeenth century have already been raised and debated extensively by Miltonists,3 but very few scholars since Christopher Hill have placed Milton’s 37
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poetry within a Marxian framework for understanding their representation of empire and war as the product of (and reaction to) larger socioeconomic forces and structures. H ere, the questions to be addressed in t hose terms include the following: With the republican cause defeated, the monarchy restored, and a Stuart king back on the British throne, was Milton condemning empire and worldly power and wealth only because he and the republican-Puritan movement in church and state had been deprived of t hose t hings? Was this merely a case of sour grapes? Or did Milton become genuinely disillusioned with the idea of a universal empire to be ruled by God’s chosen p eople? Did he, in fact, come to see war, empire, and the wealth accumulation of the upper classes as inherently corrupt, immoral, and unjust? And how does Milton’s rejection of worldly power and ambition differ, if at all, from traditional Christian discourses of contemptus mundi or asceticism? As Ayesha Ramachandran has pointed out, during the early modern period, Mundus “retained its medieval associations with vice, corruption, and metaphysical decay . . . even as it came to signify the immensity and beauty of the cosmos.” 4 Ramachandran sees poetic “worldmakers” like Milton as imaginative geniuses and cultural entrepreneurs who were capable of reconciling the old religious discourses with the new knowledge and secular perspective of an emerging scientific modernity. In her book, she “seeks to move conversations about globalization and modernity beyond the events and material processes that were its catalysts to the imaginative responses that sought to comprehend them” (14). This essay operates, by contrast, on the principle that to set aside or “move beyond” such “material processes” while focusing on the aesthetic and the imaginative instead is to forgo an ethically necessary dialectical approach that shows how socioeconomic process and cultural formation are inextricable. Further, I argue that Milton’s h andling of both science and art must always be understood as connected to the powerf ul underlying forces, like t hose of empire and war in a capitalist, profit-seeking society, that drove and defined the transformation of Milton’s “modern world.” The development of early modernity during the seventeenth century saw the creation of a new, globalizing order under the sign of an aggressive imperial expansion that linked Western Europe with other empires, and this imperial modernity left a heavy mark on Milton’s socioeconomic world and on his epic poems. In fact, t hose poems teach readers to resist the appeal of imperial glory, power, and wealth and to view them instead with contempt—a new form of condemnation for the material Satanic forces and processes that had created a new, early modern world. In the opening of her chapter from The Worldmakers on “ ‘This Pendant World’: Creating Miltonic Modernity,” Ramachandran acknowledges that Milton’s “life spanned the better part of the century that historians repeatedly identify as the bridge to a recognizably modern world, defined variously in terms of scientific advancement, socio-economic upheaval, and political revolu-
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tion” (182), but she goes on to address only the first of these three historical, worldmaking processes. Whereas Ramachandran defines “Miltonic modernity” almost exclusively as a time of transition from religious faith to scientific skepticism, from “a belated, nostalgic humanism” to “an early intellectual liberalism that would have been at home in the eighteenth [century]” (182), this essay looks instead to the other two spheres of historical change and human struggle as they were manifested in imperial violence and the onset of modern capitalism. Ramachandran’s angelic, humanist reading of Paradise Lost idealizes Milton as an epic poet capable of a g rand epic synthesis, an inspired individual who could meet and master the challenges that the new science posed to religious faith; but she hints only at another Milton, the epic author who struggles, and perhaps fails, to reconcile unresolvable contradictions. This essay examines both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as conflicted and anxious texts that come to us in a form that is undoubtedly an imaginary resolution of real historical contradictions—the contradictions that formed deep structures in the seventeenth-century world. The divine poet, who is able to make “the world . . . visible in its entirety through the power of the poetic imagination” (191), reveals nonetheless a world convulsed by the imperial upheavals and anti-imperial revolutions that defy all individual human control. A world history defined by empire building, conquest, and the exploitation of enslaved subjects occupies a huge part of t hese two poems. That history, the nightmare from which we cannot awake, inhabits that middle Earth that exists, in a very material sense, between the poetic-scientific imagining of cosmic order (the “infinite universe” [187]) and the bounded mindscape of a single human being (“the circumscribed self” [187]). It is neither the world of individual subjectivity nor the world of universal totality. What Ramachandran calls “the tangible business of establishing an ethical order” (219), to which Paradise Lost turns in books 11 and 12, is not simply a shift t oward the private ethics of “human moral conduct” (219)—it is a movement toward the troubled imperial world of public, political action revealed by Michael. In any case, to have any hope of success in what Ramachandran terms “the theater of human action” (219), such action would need to be political and collective, and accomplished neither by solitary divine beings nor by solitary human beings. Between Heidegger’s world as totality and his theorization of subjective being-in-t he-world lies a vast world of “being-w ith- others.” As Hannah Arendt’s critique of Heidegger shows us, Heidegger’s description of worlding decries and belittles politics, h uman action, and plurality; but t hese are the elements that in fact shape world history.5 We will never know Milton’s exact mind and intention, but if we examine two of the long poems that he composed a fter the Restoration, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, what do they say about empire, war, wealth, and worldly power? And how can we understand the treatment of war and empire in t hese poems in relation to Milton’s own experience and career path between the time he first
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began working for the Council of State and the time that, blind and powerless to oppose the Stuart monarchy, he completed his epics? Like it or not, Milton could no longer act according to the principles of classical civic republicanism, which taught that active participation in government was an essential element in a life of personal virtue. As a regicide in word, if not in deed, the author of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was lucky to be alive and f ree after 1660. Near the beginning of book 7 of Paradise Lost, the poet portrays himself as one who sings on “with mortal voice unchanged” though he has “fall’n on evil days” and now dwells “in darkness and with dangers compassed round / And solitude.” 6 These lines reveal a Milton who had become “an isolated and shunned Puritan dissenter, a disappointed prophet and internal exile living in literal blindness in what he regarded as a corrupt, metaphorically blind nation.” 7 As many critics have pointed out, this experience of defeat and alienation informs his late poetry in powerf ul, fundamental ways. Milton’s involvement with the Commonwealth government and, subsequently, his disappointment with the republican regime under Cromwell shaped the structure of political meaning in his later poems that represented biblical narrative but frequently glanced at the realities facing an early modern world encompassed by global empires. Both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained refer in great detail to the history of earthly empires, but it might be said that they give such imperial endeavors a secondary status by prioritizing the operation of spiritual powers that either are found within the individual spirit or else exist beyond the earth on an infernal, celestial, or cosmic scale. Milton had a deep humanist understanding of world history defined by g reat empires, and t hese two poems represent that history of the world in a manner that encourages his audience to think of the globe-spanning, conquering empires of their own time—just as the words of God, Satan, and other characters recall the political figures of Milton’s day. During Milton’s lifetime, the world grew more intensively interconnected through the expansion of Euro-Christian empires and their contact with other empires, through the extension of overseas commercial networks, and through the development of colonial cultures that syncretized with indigenous societies. This was a powerful, violent, exploitative form of worldmaking. We are still confronting its legacy today in the North/South division between overdeveloped and underdeveloped nations under postmodern globalized capitalism. During Milton’s lifetime, the creation of new world systems resulted from the expansion of an emergent Euro-capitalism that forged complex and far-reaching entanglements with other cultures and economies around the world.8 In both Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, the poet surveys the history of world empires in ways that warn against the sins of pride, avarice, aggressive warfare, and power lust committed by those who were tempted by imperial desire.
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Paradise Lost A number of scholars, primarily new historicists writing during the g reat surge of interest in early modern coloniality that followed the 1992 anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World, have already shown how Paradise Lost promotes and/or questions an “imperial vision” and “the discourse of colonialism.” 9 J. Martin Evans’s 1996 study, Milton’s Imperial Epic, situates Milton’s epic in the context of contemporary Eng lish writings about the early colonial experience in New E ngland, V irginia, and the Caribbean. Evans maps out many of the connections between Paradise Lost and the main tendencies in seventeenth-century English writing about t hose early colonies. Milton worked for C romwell’s government during a time when English subjects were encouraged to think that an English Protestant empire would be a benevolent one by contrast with the cruelty of the Spanish empire u nder its tyrant-emperors. This view was urged in texts like C romwell’s A Declaration Against Spain (1655) and The Tears of the Indians (1656), a translation of Las Casas’s Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, undertaken by Milton’s nephew John Phillips. As Evans points out, however, the promotional discourse in which English writing about the new plantations tended to be couched was accompanied by “a powerf ul undercurrent of barely repressed anxiety concerning the settlement of North America.” 10 Evans concludes his argument by disagreeing with David Quint’s earlier claim, in Epic and Empire (1993) that Paradise Lost offers “an indictment of European expansion and colonialism that includes [Milton’s] own countrymen and contemporaries.” 11 If “the poem’s most powerf ul and successful imperialist is God,” suggests Evans, then “imperial expansion, the poem implies, is morally neutral. When it is practiced by the virtuous, it is entirely admirable. When it is practiced by the wicked, it is one of the greatest evils that the human race can endure” (146–147). Here, Evans’s argument has two fundamental flaws: First, it considers God’s “empire” as analogous to earthly empires—and as an imaginative construct that could be taken as a fairly direct sort of model. Second, in suggesting that “Europe’s colonial adventures” are merely poetic raw material (“a rich cultural stockpile of ideas and images”) that Milton draws on in order to make “the ancient rivalry between good and evil” more relatable for late seventeenth-century readers, Evans downplays the vehemence and immediacy with which Milton presents war, conquest, and empire as evil and wrong in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. Furthermore, as David Armitage has argued, Milton the humanist valued the Roman Republic over dictatorship and the Roman Empire. According to Armitage, Milton’s reading of Sallust and ancient Roman texts had led him to believe that “avarice, ambition, and impiety slowly corrupted t hose who had formerly been so virtuous and hardy” u nder the republic.12 Armitage further claims that in his epics Milton shows his readers
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how the pursuit of military greatness (under a leader like Nimrod, Satan, Sulla, or Cromwell) would inevitably lead to the loss of liberty for the followers of that leader. Though valuable for understanding how Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained represent colony and empire, none of t hese studies looks at the question of imperial worldmaking through the lens of cultural materialism or sees the poems in relation to emergent capitalism. A striking instance of this turn away from the political economy that informed Milton’s experience of English imperialism is Sharon Achinstein’s insistence that “the terms of [Milton’s] imperialism . . . are not drawn from contemporary commercial, economic, or mercantile language; rather they are drawn from the classical discourses of barbarism and civility.” 13 There is little doubt that Milton often represents empire using concepts taken from his deep knowledge of classical texts and that the liberty/slavery and civility/barbarism binaries are central to his thinking throughout his c areer; but that does not mean that his attack on imperial greed in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained is not based on a more radical notion of liberty than the “liberal” one invoked by Achinstein in his name.14 There are scholars who have seen Milton, the usurer’s son, in relation to the rising power of the capitalist classes during his lifetime: for example, the classic study by Christopher Hill and the more recent work of David Hawkes on Milton both acknowledge that Milton was deeply implicated in (and troubled by) the values of the new consumerist market economy.15 If we understand empire, colony, war, the circum-Atlantic slave trade, and ruling-class accumulation of wealth in Milton’s day as products of an emergent and aggressive capitalism, then we can see more clearly how texts like Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained are events produced within, and responding to, the much larger cultural and economic system of world empires and global commerce, in which the English sought to seize a greater role and more territory. This was a world system that Milton himself perceived, commented on indirectly, and, in some instances, roundly denounced.16 As David Quint has so convincingly demonstrated, empire building is a crucial element in a Virgilian epic tradition that was so important to Milton the learned Latinist, but Milton treats empire as Satanic and sinful throughout Paradise Lost. One way that Milton’s Paradise Lost clearly depicts empire building as an outgrowth of acquisitive sin and pride is in the manner in which the fallen angels disperse throughout hell, exploring and colonizing their new infernal world. In book 1, Satan rises from the flaming lake to muster his legions of warriors, led by “Princes” and “Potentates” (315). Milton’s epic similes compare this vast host to Pharaoh and his army. They are a militarized “multitude” (351), commanded by an oriental despot, a “great sultan” (348) who rallies them behind “Th’imperial ensign” (536). A fter Satan’s first speech to his assembled army, further discussion is interrupted by the actions of Mammon, “the least erected spirit that fell / From Heav’n” (679–680), who leads a “num’rous brigade” to dig a gold mine and
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refine the gold ore. The precious metal is then immediately used to build a vast and magnificent palace, which is compared to those of imperial Egypt, Assyria, and Babylon (i.e., Mesopotamia). In this section of the epic’s first book, Milton clearly sets forth a pattern of associations that runs through the poem as a whole: imperial power and tyranny are linked to military might, warfare, and conquest, which are in turn connected directly to images of vast wealth and opulence, which are then associated with the history of vast empires. This set of associations—empire, war, wealth—is repeated in various parts of the poem in ways that condemn this kind of h uman activity as profoundly evil. There is one empire that receives praise, of course—God’s cosmic empire. That divine empire is not simply a blueprint for worldly empires, and though Milton’s cosmic empire may serve as a kind of world system in productive tension with early modern European empire, it is not a model for how h uman power should be distributed or enacted in the created, fallen world. Given the questions that Paradise Lost raises about divine tyranny, and the fact that no earthly emperor can successfully emulate God the Almighty Creator, we can hardly say that the poem’s glorification of God’s transcendent empire is a condonation of earthly aspiration to universal rule. After all, as Adam will declare in the final Book of Paradise Lost, “man over men / He made not lord, such title to himself / Reserving, human left from human free” (12:69–71). In book 2, at the end of the council in Pandemonium, the devils settle on a two-pronged strategy: to “build up” in hell a “growing empire” (314–315) while seeking also, by guile, to conquer Eden and in doing so open the way for a full- scale invasion of Earth by Satanic forces bringing sin and provoking damnation. If Satan has lost the battle for heaven, he will preside over the creation of a newly founded empire in hell, one that w ill rival God’s: the fallen angels “desire / To found this nether empire which might rise / By policy and long process of time / In emulation opposite to Heav’n” (2:296–298); but this would be an empire, like that of early modern England in the time of the Western Design and the Anglo- Dutch wars, seeking to expand at the expense of its rivals. Beelzebub’s proposal (“first devised / By Satan” [2:379–380]) to attack the newly created Earth and “seduce” its “puny inhabitants” (2:367–368), the innocent peoples of a new world, articulates a greater imperial ambition—not to limit Satanic empire building to hell itself (the infernal homeland), but rather to expand it to include all of Earth through a gradual process of invasion, colonization, and enslavement of its human inhabitants. There, they w ill take up residence as pagan gods to draw human worship away from the true God. In doing so, Satan and his followers aim to prevent “the king of Heav’n” (2:316) from extending his empire to both of the newly created worlds of Earth and Hell. L ater, the poem recounts how the fallen angels, eager to gain thralls to serve them, will issue forth from the gates of hell to invade Earth and pave the way for the damned to enter hell and serve t here as the devils’ slaves and underlings.
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At the end of the council in book 2, Satan is confirmed as “Hell’s dread Emperor with pomp supreme / And God-like imitated state” (510–311); but this emperor soon departs the newly constructed palace to undertake his “solitary flight” out of Hell and into Chaos, a journey that Milton compares to the voyage of a merchant fleet bound for the East Indies to obtain “Their spicy drugs” (640) and bring them home. Meanwhile, a number of fallen angels disperse “On bold adventure to discover wide / That dismal world, if any clime perhaps / Might yield them easier habitation” (571–573). Thus, both within hell and without, Satan and his followers prosecute their imperial desire by exploring with the intent to conquer or occupy newly discovered territory. It is also important that, at a crucial rhetoric moment, just a fter Satan is declared “equal to the High’st in Heav’n” (479) by the demonic parliament, and just before “The Stygian council” is “dissolved” (506), the Miltonic narrator interjects a lamentation on human strife and warfare that demands the reader’s special attention with its sudden and unexpected digressiveness. In this digression, the devils’ ability to hold “firm concord” in hell is contrasted with the inability of humankind to live in peace and harmony. It is a strong condemnation of the bickering, unstable Long Parliament that C romwell failed to reform or control; but it is also a broader denunciation of war, and of the general tendency toward conflict in human societies that “live in hatred, enmity and strife / Among themselves and levy cruel wars, / Wasting the earth each other to destroy” (500–502). Milton had lived through the turmoil of the mid-seventeenth century and had seen both civil strife and overseas war cause death and destruction. In fact, he had served Cromwell, had praised him as a military leader, and had supported his bellicose policies and actions, not only in Ireland, but also during the Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Spanish Wars. There is clearly a bitter and complex political irony in having Beelzebub criticize t hose devils who would “sit in darkness h ere / Hatching vain empires” (376–378) and in the infernal council’s strong support for the “bold design” (386) of attacking that new world, earth: here, both the failure of C romwell’s grand plan for the Western Design and the futile plots of the defeated republicans a fter the Restoration are suggested. We have seen now how the first two books of Paradise Lost establish a clear pattern linking wealth, empire, and war—and condemning them all as Satanic in the worst possible sense. Those l ater portions of the poem that reveal the interiority of a solitary Satan and encourage readers to see him as a hero (or Romantic antihero) resisting the tyranny and cruelty of God are quite different in their tenor and import when compared to the way that the pursuit of empire, war, power, and worldly treasure are attacked from the outset. Th ese condemnations in the first two books are powerfully and decisively confirmed in the last two books of Milton’s epic, in the sections of the poem where Michael reveals the f uture history of the human race to Adam. At first, it seems that Michael’s prophetic vision bestowed on the newly fallen but penitent Adam might be a con-
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soling one, including the potential for earthly power in the fallen world to come: “All th’Earth He gave thee to possess and rule, / No despicable gift” (11:339–340). It is not long, however, before Adam, observing the world from the highest hill of Paradise, sees just how despicably humankind w ill come to use that gift to pursue wealth, war, and empire. The initial transhistorical perspective granted to Adam is a vision of a world made up of rich empires and their capital cities, stretching around the globe from China to El Dorado and ruled by sultans, emperors, and kings. It is from t hese (ironically) less “nobler” sights (and sites) of imperial power that Michael turns Adam toward the beginnings of h uman history, according to the Genesis narrative, starting with the Cain, “the sweaty reaper,” and Abel the shepherd. This section of the poem juxtaposes supercivilized empires, the height of human social development and complexity, with the simplest beginnings of human society in agriculture and pastoralism. But the epic catalogue of imperial capitals cannot escape the taint of original sin: Michael’s pronouncement about the f uture, “from that sin derive / Corruption to bring forth more violent deeds” (11:427–428), w ill apply to the long arc of history that is revealed to Adam. The divine vision of the f uture begins with fratricide and death, and it proceeds rapidly to world war. The next time that Adam is given a vision of the w hole civilized world, including cities as wells as “towns and rural works between” (639), it is immediately a world of war and plunder: “So violence / Proceeded and oppression and sword- law” (671–672). The antiwar, antimilitary note is quite clear in this section of the poem. With Adam in tears at the sight of these martial horrors, Michael explains, For in t hose days might only s hall be admired, And “valor” and “heroic virtue” called. To overcome in b attle and subdue Nations and bring home spoils with infinite Manslaughter s hall be held the highest pitch Of h uman glory and for glory done Of triumph to be styled g reat conquerors, Patrons of mankind, gods, and sons of gods: Destroyers rightlier called and plagues of men! (689–698)
As if this had not been emphasized enough previously, a fter explaining that God will bring the Flood to depopulate the earth and start again with Noah’s family, Michael reiterates his e arlier denunciation of warfare, conquest, and empire, of “triumph and luxurious wealth” (788). This second time, the archangel stresses that after “having spilt much blood and done much waste / Subduing nations and achieved thereby / Fame in the world, high titles and rich prey” (791–793), the imperial ruling class descends into pleasures and a moral degeneration, which also negatively affects the ruled. This account of corrupt, tyrannical rulers and their “enslaved” (797) subjects, “cooled in zeal,” who “shall practice how
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to live secure, / Worldly or dissolute on what their lords / Shall leave them to enjoy” (801–804), alludes to the victorious parliamentary forces in the English Revolution whose “acts of prowess eminent” (789) under Cromwell declined into corrupt factions, “all depraved” (806); and at the same time, it references the “enslaved” subjects who submitted to the Stuart monarchy in 1660 and in doing so “turn[ed] degenerate” (806). Like Adam, Milton had seen “one world begin and end” (12:6). Milton’s representation of antediluvian violence and war is an attack on the kind of valor that he had once praised in military leaders like Cromwell and Vere, and this impassioned condemnation of conquering power is couched in emphatic terms that applied very aptly to the violent, expansionist empires of his own time. At the opening of book 12, Adam’s hope that h uman history w ill change for the better a fter the Flood has wiped out all nearly all of his offspring, and a fter the imperial rulers’ “palaces / Where luxury late reigned” (11:750–751) were “overwhelmed . . . with all their pomp” (11:748), is soon disappointed. God-fearing virtue lasts a scant twenty-five lines before Nimrod the hunter appears to establish his unjust sovereignty, using force to subdue “With war and hostile snare such as refuse / Subjection to his empire tyrannous” (12:31–32). Monarchy, tyranny, and the imperial impulse run through the section of book 12 that follows as Michael informs Adam about the Tower of Babel and the story of Moses, Pha raoh, and the Promised Land. The narration of biblical history that follows drops the obsessive attack on empire and stresses instead God’s providential guidance through his covenant with Israel, leading eventually to the heir of David, Jesus, whose sacrifice brings the possibility of redemption and salvation.
Paradise Regained In book 11 of Paradise Lost, Michael compares Adam’s position atop the hill in Eden to the hill from which “the Tempter set / Our Second Adam in the wilderness / To show him all Earth’s kingdoms and their glory” (11:382–384). This passage connects the two poems, collapsing time through typology and looking forward to the “brief epic” sequel that Milton penned a fter Paradise Lost. Of course, the obvious choice of subject m atter for a poem about how humankind (re)gained access to Paradise would be the passion, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Instead, Milton chose a less challenging story, that of Jesus’s temptation in the wilderness, taken primarily from the Gospel of Luke (4:1–13). Paradise Regained begins with another council in hell, this time called by Satan to discuss how to deal with Jesus, who has just been baptized and now, Satan tells the assembled devils, poses a “danger on the utmost edge / Of hazard” (1:94–95), a threat to their “fair empire won of earth and air.” 17 Proposing to meet this threat not with force but with “well-couched fraud” (97), his
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followers “Unanimous . . . commit the care / And management of this main enterprise / To him their g reat dictator” (111–113). In Paradise Regained, the threat to Satan’s dictatorship and to unjust imperial power is not a virtuous emperor leading a Christian republic against the forces of evil. Instead, it is the power of a solitary figure, Jesus, who refuses entirely the temptations of the vast wealth and earthly empire offered by Satan. The empire-conquering messiah that, at the beginning of book 2, the disciples pray w ill come soon to restore “the kingdom . . . to Israel” and remove by force the oppressive “yoke” and “pow’r unjust” exercised by “the kings of the earth” (2:44–48) is prefigured in the poem but deferred u ntil the end of time. With a certain irony, God announces that his Son and heir w ill gain the power to defeat Satan and “All his vast force, and drive him back to hell, / Winning by conquest” (1:153–154), but that victory w ill come, says God, by means of a “humiliation” and “weakness” that “shall o’ercome Satanic strength / And all the world” (1:161–162). Clearly, this strength-i n-weakness paradox speaks to the defeated republican cause, which placed Milton and his political allies in a position of weakness from which they could only fantasize about a second political coming while coping with temptation on their own, in “private life” (3:22). L ater, in book 2 of Paradise Regained, Satan tries to compete with God by offering to bestow “Riches and realms” (458) on Jesus, and in this section of the poem, wealth is again linked closely to imperial power. In fact, it is described as the source, rather than the reward, of empire: “Money brings honor, friends, conquest and realms” (422), Satan tells Jesus. Jesus responds with a lesson in classical history: Witness t hose ancient empires of the earth, In highth of all their flowing wealth dissolved; But men endued with [virtue, valor, and wisdom] have oft attained In lowest poverty to highest deeds. (435–438)
Jesus then cites, as specific examples of virtue and valor, the humble heroes of the Roman Republic who refused bribes and riches while protecting Rome from foreign attackers. Satan, by contrast, upholds Julius Caesar and other imperial conquerors as models. Of course, Jesus is unfazed by t hese allurements. He tells Satan, “Thou neither dost persuade me to seek wealth / For empire’s sake, nor empire to affect / For glory’s sake” (3:44–46). “Confounded” by Jesus’s refusal of riches as the means to gain vast empires, Satan then turns to the temptation of power and glory, to be obtained by world conquest: “thy skill / Of conduct,” asserts Satan, “would be such that all the world / Could not sustain thy prowess, or subsist / In b attle, though against thy few in arms” (3:17–20). Responding to this offer of glory won through conquest, Jesus launches into an attack on the kind of “false glory” (3:69) that would be
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won through conquest and praised by the common p eople. The speech that follows speaks directly to an expansionist Britain u nder the Stuart monarchy, but may also glance back at the largely unsuccessful effort under Cromwell to attain glory through overseas conquests: They err who count it glorious to subdue By conquest far and wide, to overrun Large countries, and in field g reat b attles win, Great cities by assault. What do t hese worthies But rob and spoil, burn, slaughter and enslave Peaceable nations, neighboring or remote . . . ? (3:71–76)
Jesus goes on to point out that t hese “conquerors . . . leave behind / Nothing but ruin . . . / And all the flourishing works of peace destroy” (3:78–80). This attack on imperialism becomes a strongly worded denunciation of all forms of expansionist “ambition, war, or violence” (90). By the time that Milton composed Paradise Regained, the millennialist hopes and high expectations of Cromwell’s imperial decade (1646–1655) had passed. With the return of monarchy, the republicans had to suffer humiliation while waiting on God’s providence. This predicament is figured in the response of Jesus to Satan’s insistence that Jesus seize the throne of David immediately. Jesus posits instead, What if [God] hath decreed that I shall first Be tried in humble state, and t hings adverse, By tribulations, injuries, insults, Contempts, and scorns, and snares, and violence, Suffering, abstaining, quietly expecting Without distrust or doubt, that he may know What I can suffer, how obey? (3:188–194)
Though Jesus rejects the offer of freeing Judea “from her heathen servitude” (176) under the emperor Tiberius, Satan does not give up on his effort to make imperial power seem appealing to Jesus. Since Jesus had led a h umble life in Galilee, and had not been directly exposed to the “glory” of “Empires, and monarchs, and their radiant courts” (3:236–237), Satan takes Jesus “up to a mountain high,” a site that suggests the very same mountain (probably Mt. Niphates) where Adam received his final vision in Paradise Lost. From t here, Jesus can see for himself the same “huge cities and high-towered . . . seats of mightiest monarchs” (261–262) that Adam viewed. Initially, Satan’s offered vision of imperial power (like the one induced by Michael) transcends time and space, but it concludes with Satan pointing once more to the specific, contemporaneous situation of Judea, caught between two great “enclosing enemies, Roman and Parthian” (361–362)—
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the ancient equivalent of Protestant England confronting aggressive imperial powers like t hose of Catholic Spain and France. Satan’s detailed commentary on the imperial spectacle of Rome strives to glorify war and romanticize armies with beautiful poetry describing their ordered ranks, weapons, and other martial trappings. Satan even mentions the kind of heavily armored cavalry (“Cuirassiers all in steel”; 3:328) that were associated with Cromwell and the New Model Army. Yet again, Jesus disdains Satan’s glorifying vision of empire, deflecting Satan’s suggestion that military power could be employed as a means to protect “David’s throne” (3:357), along with Jesus’s homeland and people. Milton draws on his experience u nder Cromwell with diplomacy and foreign policy in order to deliver a blistering rejection through the words of Jesus’s response: Much ostentation vain of fleshly arm, And fragile arms, much instrument of war Long in preparing, soon to nothing brought, Before mine eyes thou hast set; and in my ear Vented much policy, and projects deep Of enemies, of aids, battles and leagues, Plausible to the world, to me worth naught. (3:387–393)
According to Jesus, Satan’s glorification of the “cumbersome / Luggage of war” demonstrates “human weakness rather than . . . strength” (3:401–402). The attack on corrupt imperialism dominates book 3, but it does not stop t here. The fourth and final book of Paradise Regained begins with Satan’s per sistence in placing the power, glory, and wealth of empire at the forefront of his temptations offered to Jesus. Here, Satan turns from earlier empires, especially Asian and Middle Eastern empires, t oward Europe and the model of Rome. A fter surveying the scope and extoling the workings of the Roman Empire u nder Tiberius, Satan concludes, “I have shown thee all / The kingdoms of the world, and all their glory” (4:98–99). He offers to help Jesus overthrow the “monster” (100) Tiberius and take his place. “Aim therefore at no less than all the world” (105), he urges. Jesus, in his answer, denounces the kind of diplomatic activity that occupied Milton when he worked for the Council of State: . . . embassies thou show’st From nations far and nigh; what honor that, But tedious waste of time to sit and hear So many hollow compliments and lies, Outlandish flatteries? (4:121–125)
The passage that follows has Jesus tracing the moral decline of the Roman Empire, concluding in a description of a
50 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 eople victor once, now vile and base, p Deservedly made vassal; who once just, Frugal and mild, and temperate, conquered well But govern ill the nations under yoke, Peeling their provinces, exhausted all By lust and rapine. (132–137)
This narrative evokes the trajectory of the English people from republican virtue to slavish subjects of the restored monarchy. Paradise Regained ends with a final instance, conveyed in the heavenly anthem sung by the angels, of the poem’s relentless examination of militarism: Satan’s return to hell, where he reports his failure to the infernal “legions” there, is “No triumph” (624). Jesus, a figure who has been and w ill be “all unarmed” (626), has nonetheless “vanquish[ed] / Temptation . . . , regained lost Paradise, / And frustrated the conquest fraudulent” (606–609). Between the solitude of the wilderness and the supercivilized urban centers of empire lies the home of Jesus, and the poem’s last four lines end the poem with his return “Home to his m other’s house private” (639). As a w hole, Paradise Regained sets up two main alternatives to the power and glory of wealth, empire, and conquest: messianic apocalypse and private virtue. The first reverberates with the dream that the Old Cause might be revived some day; the second corresponds to the limitations of t hose who, like Milton, had served the republican cause but now had to stay out of public politics. In politi cal terms, this implies a kind of quietism, although it reserves the potential to take political action against tyranny in the distant f uture. Many scholars have already traced and debated the connections between t hese two poems and the pol itic al events and personalities of Milton’s time, but they have not seen Milton’s shift from imperial ambition to isolation and constraint, and from public politics to private scribbling, in relation to the deep structural economic forces that w ere driving pol itical and cultural history. The poem traces a pro cess of individualization, privatization, and internalization of virtue and exposes all external political action on a worldwide scale as ethically problematic— the bigger the scale (moving up from tribe to nation to kingdom to empire), the more corrupting and violent the urge to conquer and accumulate wealth. Both the wealth-hoarding capitalist and the tyrannical king fall far short of Jesus’s model for human virtue. The religious ideology of Christ ianity substitutes the universal triumph of Christ as messiah for any worldly imperial glory. Seen from a strictly theological perspective, the only legitimate world ruler is the Christ who w ill return to earth at the end of time. But what undermines and deconstructs this fantasy is Milton’s heretical Arianism, which is very clear in Paradise Regained. In that poem, Milton never refers to Jesus as “Christ.” Paradise Regained focuses instead on the question of Jesus proving, by a series of tests, his status as the legitimate
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heir and “son” of God. Milton avoids what would have been the obvious subject matter for a poem called “Paradise Regained”—t he passion, sacrifice, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that made possible h uman entry to paradise in the afterlife. Instead, Milton stresses the potentially fallible humanity of Jesus the Man, subject (just as all-too-human Adam and Eve were) to Satan’s wiles and thus to temptation and fall. But Jesus succeeds, of course, where Milton’s Eve and Adam failed.
Conclusion: Anti-imperialist Milton As a participant in the work of government u nder Cromwell, and as a sharp observer of political changes in seventeenth-century England, Milton witnessed how the worldwide scope of C romwell’s ambition was ultimately contained, his g rand plans thwarted, and his republican reforms largely undone. Milton lamented in The Ready and Easy Way (February 1660) the willingness of the English people to welcome back the king; and it must have been with a keen bitterness that he witnessed so many members of the godly party give way or conform to the reestablishment of the Stuart monarchy and its Anglican church. The experience of defeat informs his global visions of empire, war, and conquest presented in Paradise Lost and in Paradise Regained. The images of war, luxury, and empire revealed to Adam by the archangel Michael, and to Jesus by Satan, indicate Milton’s critical view of imperial conquest and how it bestowed a tainted, false glory and an ill-gotten gain on t hose elites who directed and supported it. Imperialism, for Milton, is a defining feature of h uman history on a global scale, a grand maker and shaper of worlds. And yet as an epic subject matter, it both attracts and repels him. Not only does Milton’s poetry tempt the reader through the rhetoric and antiheroic personality of Satan—it also tempts the reader through seductive evocations of grand power, vast wealth, and military might.18 These glorifications of war, conquest, and empire building are among the conventional features of the epic poem, and of the romance tradition too. They are part of the appeal of such poems for readers; but in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained the riches that are both the source of imperial power and its reward are, as we have seen, decisively condemned, even if they are described in soaring epic terms and heightened verse. As a supporter of C romwell who lived to see the demise of the Commonwealth and the Restoration of the monarchy under Charles II, Milton grew disillusioned with Cromwell himself and attacked the very notion of an aggressive empire that sought wealth and power through the conquest of other people outside the homeland. In this sense, we should see Milton’s appeal to individual, private, inner liberty of conscience as a complex reaction to the triumph of the commercial forces and globalizing powers that supported Cromwell’s government, persisted a fter the Interregnum, and grew even more powerf ul during the Restoration
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period. Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained contain powerf ul attacks on t hose who would use violence to try to conquer the world and, in d oing so, accumulate vast wealth. This anti-imperialism is emphasized in the opening and closing portions of Paradise Lost and throughout Paradise Regained. To show that worldly power and riches are corruptive is a highly conventional element of the Christian tradition based in the gospel teachings, but it is remarkable that a poem like Paradise Lost—about a war in heaven, the fallen angels in hell, and the fall of humankind in Eden—would have so much to say about a later world of earthly empires. The obsession with the evil trinity of war, empire, and wealth in Paradise Regained is perhaps less surprising since Milton’s source, the biblical account of the temptations, does include Satan’s offers of worldly riches, power, and glory as central features of the story. In both cases, Milton draws on the Christian contemptus mundi tradition, but t here is something quite specific about the way that t hese poems repeatedly link imperial power, warfare, and riches. Milton’s own experiences, first at the center of power u nder Cromwell and then later as a defeated survivor of the republican movement, are clearly the source of his disillusionment and his hostility t oward imperial ambition. But this disillusionment was not limited to a disappointment with Cromwell himself or with the foreign adventures and ambitions sponsored by C romwell and supported by a coa lition of military and commercial elites. Having been forcibly exiled from power, Milton was critical of a worldly, political power to which he no longer had access; but his role as epic poet also enabled him to express his outrage at the post-1660 establishment in E ngland and its subjects, who pursued imperial and economic power while, in Milton’s view, tempting the Eng lish people to serve that power slavishly. Just as Milton’s attack on monarchy in The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates was a radical one, so too is his attack on empire and/as wealth accumulation in his late poetry. Furthermore, we might understand the stern warnings about wealth, power, and empire communicated to the readers of Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained as a message intended to caution them against not only the loss of liberty under monarchical tyrannies, but the loss of virtue resulting from the worship of Mammon under the sign of an emergent capitalism.
Notes 1. The best scholarship on how the radical aspects of the English Revolution w ere contained and disempowered by bourgeois and gentry protectors of property, including Cromwell himself, is still the work of Christopher Hill. See also James Holstun, Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution (London: Verso, 2000); and the A. S. P. Woodhouse edition of the army debates, Puritanism and Liberty: Being the Army Debates (1647–49) from the Clarke Manuscripts, 3rd ed. (London: Everyman’s Library, 1986). 2. On the connections between Milton, empire, and British colonial expansion, see J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); Walter S. H. Lim, The Arts of Empire: The Poetics of Colonialism from Raleigh to Milton (Cranbury, NJ: University of Delaware Press,
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1998), chap. 5; and the essays in Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer, eds., Milton and the Imperial Vision (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999). 3. The criticism on connections between political history and Milton’s late poetry is vast. Some good places to begin looking at studies of politics and/in Paradise Lost include Joan S. Bennett, “God, Satan, and King Charles: Milton’s Royal Portraits,” PMLA 92, no. 3 (1977): 441–457; Laura Lunger Knoppers, Historicizing Milton: Spectacle, Power, and Poetry in Restoration England (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994); Walter S. H. Lim, John Milton, Radical Politics, and Biblical Republicanism (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006); and David Loewenstein, Representing Revolution in Milton and His Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). On Paradise Regained, see Gregory Chaplin, “The Circling Hours: Revolution in Paradise Regain’d,” in Milton in the Long Restoration, ed. Ann Baynes Coiro and Blair Hoxby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016): 265–283; Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1978; London: Verso, 2020), chap. 30, and “Milton and the Experience of Defeat,” in The Experience of Defeat: Milton and Some Contemporaries (1984; London: Verso, 2016), chap. 10; and David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). 4. Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 11 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 5. My brief discussion of Heidegger and Arendt h ere is informed by Pheng Cheah’s detailed analysis of “Worlding and Unworlding” in What Is a World? On Postcolonial Lit erature as World Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 95–190. 6. All quotations from Paradise Lost are taken from John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: Norton, 2005), 7:24–28 (hereafter cited parenthetically by line number). 7. Nicholas McDowell, Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020), 418. 8. On the emergence of new economic “worlds” or world systems under capitalism during early modernity, see the foundational contributions of Immanuel Wallerstein, including Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), as well as more recent descriptions of how capitalism and modernity emerged together as a result of global interactions (and not simply from a genesis point in Western Europe) in the following: Alex Anievas and Kerem Nisancioglu, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism (London: Pluto Press, 2015); Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth C entury: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times (New York: Verso, 1994); Jairus Banaji, A Brief History of Commercial Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2020); A. G. Hopkins, ed., Globalization in World History (New York: Norton, 2002); Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon: How Capitalism Became the Religion of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019); Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000); David Porter, ed., Comparative Early Modernities, 1100–1800 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); and Kaveh Yazdani and Dilip M. Menon, eds., Capitalisms: Towards a Global History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 9. See the final chapter of Lim’s Arts of Empire, which discusses “Theological Imperialism and the Poetics of Colonialism in Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes.” See also Balachandra Rajan’s “The Imperial Temptation,” in Milton and the Climates of Reading, ed. Elizabeth Sauer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 93–111. 10. Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic, 12. 11. Quint, Epic and Empire, 265. 12. David Armitage, “John Milton, Poet Against Empire,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Quint, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 213–214.
54 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 13. Sharon Achinstein, “Imperial Dialectic: Milton and Conquered Peoples,” in Rajan and Sauer, Milton and the Imperial Vision, 86. 14. For treatments of Milton’s life and work in relation to the emergent capitalism of the seventeenth c entury, see Hill, Milton and the English Revolution; Andrew Milner, John Milton and the English Revolution: A Study in the Sociology of Literature (London: Macmillan, 1981); Christopher Kendrick, Milton: A Study in Ideology and Form (New York: Methuen, 1986); Michael Wilding, Dragon’s Teeth: Literature and the English Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987); Marshall Grossman, “The Fruits of One’s Labor in Miltonic Practice and Marxian Theory,” ELH 59, no. 1 (1992): 77–105; David Hawkes, Idols of the Marketplace and John Milton: A Hero of Our Time. On slavery in Milton’s time, see Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 15. The debate between Blair Hoxby and David Hawkes is also relevant here. Hawkes argues for Milton’s hostility to a market economy that inculcated idolatry in the forms of financialization and commodity fetishization, while Hoxby (unconvincingly, in my view) claims that Milton recuperates a form of economic activity u nder capitalism that is compatible with Christian virtue. See David Hawkes, “The Concept of the ‘Hireling’ in Milton’s Theology,” Milton Studies 43 (2004): 64–85, in which Hawkes responds to an earlier essay by Hoxby (“The Trade of Truth Advanced: Areopagitica, Economic Discourse, and Libertarian Reform,” Milton Studies 36 [1998]: 117–202). The latter was revised and included in Hoxby’s Mammon’s M usic: Literature and Economics in the Age of Milton (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). 16. On the various imaginative “worlds” constructed by Milton in Paradise Lost, see Karen L. Edwards, “The ‘World’ of Paradise Lost,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 174–185. 17. All quotations from Paradise Regained in this essay are taken from John Milton, Milton’s Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Jason P. Rosenblatt (New York: Norton, 2011), 1:63. 18. See Stanley Fish, Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), on how the reader is tempted to sympathize with Satan.
Texts and Tectonists worldmaking and world-cleaving on the anglo-algonquian frontier Ana Schwartz
A tectonist, according to the Oxford English Dictionary’s short entry for the word, is “a constructor, a builder.” 1 William Wood coined the word in his 1634 promotional tract New England’s Prospect, and it was never used again. As a nonce word, the only examples of tectonists are Algonquian women, who not only built the edifices that Wood saw provided shelter Algonquian communities, but also “carrie[d] their houses on their backs” and rebuilt them when necessary.2 William Wood was not the only English colonist who witnessed their skill and marveled at it, even benefitted from it. In his 1643 Key into the Language of America, Roger Williams described these houses, wetus, their architects, and their interior décor: “the w omen cover the pole fram of the h ouse with mats. The interior is lined with woven decorative mats which the women make, called munnotaúbana. They look as lovely as any hangings the English have.” 3 Williams was able to describe these edifices from firsthand experience b ecause he had enjoyed the hospitality of his Narragansett neighbors after being exiled from the colony that his fellow English countrymen had built. His colleague, sometime antagonist, and governor of that colony, John Winthrop, likewise knew t hose edifices and had intimate knowledge of their interior. Within the first year of arriving in Algonquian territory, Winthrop found himself lost on the property he claimed to own. It had grown dark early on his after-dinner walk, and t hose darkening clouds began to precipitate over the course of the night.4 Winthrop protected himself from t hese conditions by entering into a momentarily vacant wetu. But unlike Williams or Wood, Winthrop tried to avoid contact with the tectonist. At some point overnight, an Algonquian passed by and presumed to enter. Winthrop forcefully refused her entry u ntil she gave up. The
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sun eventually r ose, and he left the wetu and made his way back to what he felt to be the protection of his own home. The word “tectonist” shares little common ground with the word “protect.” Yet their apparent similarity serves as a neat emblem for the challenge this essay poses to ideas of world and self that can often seem, within settler society, to be universal. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the “tect” in “protect” preserves the Latin past tense of tegere, which means “to cover.” 5 Meanwhile, the “tect” in “tectonist” reaches still further into the past, to the Greek τέκτων, τέκτον-, denoting “carpenter, builder,” a history that appears nowhere in the dictionary’s entries for the variants of “protect” (“protection,” “protector,” e tc.). The syllable appears to be identical between the two words. But its history differs, and so do its implications. In an analogical fashion, the work of the tectonist and the work of protection that Winthrop enacted from within the wetu may seem to share a foundation. The activity of barring external bodies from entry and the activity of building an edifice both share the goal of shielding or insulating a body or a group of bodies from undesirable contact with other bodies or forces. Wood noted, for example, that the density of the weave of the mats “deny entrance to any drope of raine,6 an activity of deterrence that Wood imagined was equivalent to the barring out that Winthrop practiced. This almost banal similarity, expressed in such a highly reductive fashion, however, can be a useful foundation for preserving the sensitivity toward the distinctions between the two actions and the distinctions in their modes of being in the world. While we might claim that all humans desire shelter, we tend to neglect the significant differences in the intellectual resources particular parties have in recognizing shelter and recognizing phenomena from which one might desire it. Th ere is nothing inherently violent or colonial about the desire to protect. Yet men like Winthrop cherished nearly instinctual, largely thoughtless tendency to imagine the external world to be full of danger. They cultivated t hose instincts in the stories they told about their world. Th ese tendencies risk enduring, as we will see, into the stories we tell about the past. For the tectonist and for the colonial settler, the work of creating shelter and protection required more than material building. It also required constructing stories that rehearsed and strengthened distinctions between who was worth protecting and who was not, as well as distinctions between what w ere sources of potential harm and what w eren’t. It can be easy to overlook this second sort of construction b ecause some of the fundamental principles of causality that they feature have persisted among settler chroniclers as principles for decision-making into the present. They tend, therefore, to appear universal, and unchanged by particulars of time or place—attributes of h uman nature that can be invoked, in Mark Rifkin’s words, as “settler common sense.” 7 The settler-colonial politics of recognition, recent critics have observed, make the liberal subject intelligible only narrowly. This essay observes how they also shape the threats by which t hose
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subjects come to understand themselves.8 Here I review the invocation of that settler common sense by one very verbose colonial chronicler, John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for much of its first two decades of existence. The notebooks he used to preserve his recollection of collective colonial life during this period exhibit an exemplary engagement with the work of building t hose distinctions, making them appear normal, and deploying them in service of an ideal political community. But the stories are frequently surprising, sometimes in their content, other times in their form. Occasionally, as with the anecdote Winthrop preserved about his postprandial walk, they surprise by their existence in the first place. These anomalies, more emphatically than neater or more predictable stories, pry open and make visible the priorities that Winthrop and settlers like him brought to the tasks of materially building what they thought to be a new world.
Narrative as a World-Historically Symbolic Act The reform Protestants who settled in Algonquian territory in the first half of the seventeenth c entury liked to tell stories. The stories they composed, at least to their minds, didn’t make worlds so much as reveal them. In their affinity for narrating their own lives, t hese colonists are probably not unique. Yet t hese individuals did associate a particu lar importance and virtue to the act of organ izing events in a sequence that could reveal principles of causality, and vindicate one especially significant causal agent, typically their sovereign deity.9 They believed that successful transformation into an ideal acolyte of the sovereign Christian deity required them to perfect this skill. This is because they believed that the substance of t hese stories, the deity-absconded secular world, was the raw material through which their deity still manifested himself. Christians claimed that their deity was sovereign. But they also understood him to be coy. He had made a world, but tended not to make himself ostentatiously evident in it. Rather, he liked to make good Christians search for his presence, and to search in particular for clues that he was eager for them to be doing that searching. These clues existed less in the miraculous than in the quotidian. Sometimes, however, they bridged both. Attention to the quotidian was the foundation for noticing the miraculous, and though they credited their deity with producing those normalcy-interrupting miracles, they were also explicit about the necessity of finding emblematic value. Take, for example, the forthrightness of the need for interpretation when, in 1632, “diverse witnesses” in the settlement at Watertown saw a mouse kill a snake in a fight. It was exigent, Winthrop noted, for “the Paster of Boston mr willson” to offer “this Interpretation, that, the snake was the devil, the mouse was a poor contemptible people which God had brought hether, which should overcome Sathan here & disposesse him of his kingdome” (72). Discoveries and episodes like t hese provoked wonder, what Susan Scott Parrish
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has described as a “cognitive feeling,” and reform Protestant settlers diligently made use of their cognitive faculties to preserve their commitments to the source of wonder.10 The world to be discovered, in their minds, was intensely oriented around the self who was d oing the searching. The individualism of t hese epistemological pursuits can sometimes sound narcissistic, though it’s not likely anyone would have called it that in the seventeenth century because that word’s modern denotation of an abnormal quality of the personality had to wait another three centuries to come into existence. Certainly, settlers w ere wary of self-absorption and excessive pride. But the centripetal pattern of attention was, for t hese individuals, deliberate and meaningful. They saw the work of searching for the deity’s interventions to be a duty. Protestantism’s great innovation had been precisely this extraordinary new responsibility. That doctrine, still in its intense early decades of refinement, had privileged a freshly individual sense of obligation.11 That doctrine turned away from a vision of a deity who expressed himself in arcane rules intelligible only to specialists prone to exploiting their proximity to the divine. The Protestant deity was, by contrast, more widely accessible. By the same token, broader accessibility meant greater responsibility to search for signs of the deity’s attention and f avor. As they searched for t hose signs, Protestants saw themselves to be recovering truths about divine concern that could tease out a spiritual world that they hoped to share with like-minded others.12 And when the world they inhabited in a relatively small island in Northern Europe seemed unhappily too small and narrow for their flourishing, some of t hose acolytes began seriously to consider that translating that spiritual world into a material world might be a worthwhile gamble. Hiving themselves off from a spiritual body organized loosely around the nation, t hese reform Protestants heightened the stakes of the work of discerning evidence of their deity’s favor from the phenomena they saw in the world around them. Their ambitions w ere world-historical. The testimonies of individual Christians to that f avor was no longer quite so sufficient. This was at least in part b ecause failure in that g amble would have been so severe. On a colonial frontier, failure could mean death. It could mean humiliation and shame. And it could mean, far more unsettlingly, a transformation of their desires and understandings of what a shared world could be. It’s likely that many individuals thought a great deal about this favor, and searched for evidence of it beyond their inquiries into their own personal standing. Occasionally, in response to shared struggles like drought or the fear of crop failure, settlers would undertake collective days of what they called fasting—together renouncing material nourishment in order to direct their attention to the relationship between the deity and the political community.13 But the intellectual work of discerning evidence and organizing it into a story at the scale of collective life remains steadfastly opaque. Few early modern English people committed t hese interpretations to writing.
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Fewer still narrated the processes of interpretation, and virtually none w ere very interested in historicizing their claims to be able to access the workings of the divine. There are not very many rough drafts of the documents that preserve explic itly the literal and imaginative work of building the colonial world. There was no manual that settlers read to acquire t hese skills. Lacking such a memo, documents that show writerly development over time are indirectly useful materials to make visible the process and the techniques by which this worldmaking took place. Consider John Winthrop’s manuscript notebooks. Over the course of almost two decades and three small booklets, from his departure from England on the Arbella in 1630 to his death in 1649, Winthrop tried to preserve the events that the colony underwent in a more or less regular fashion.14 Over time the shape of his narrations changed, and t hese transformations reveal some the challenges and the affordances of storytelling to the project of building a new world. For the first three months, during the Atlantic crossing, for example, the entries tend to bore. This is in part a consequence of the content he meant to preserve. A successful crossing would not be very eventful, and so the most exciting objects of attention are only passing observations, such as when, on Saturday 8 May 1630, “about 4: of the Clocke we sawe a whale,” and “passed within a stones cast of him, as he laye spouting up water” (19), or when, a week later, they imagined they saw a w hale but realized that they were in actuality looking at “a firre Logge, which seemed to have been many yeares in the water, for it was all overgrowne with Barnacles, & other trashe” (21). But that boring quality is also a consequence of the paucity of data. As time passed, however, and especially as time passed after arrival and disembarkation, and as Winthrop accumulated observations in his memory, so increased his materials for constructing a world and identifying interesting evidence of his coy deity in that world’s movements. Accordingly, Winthrop’s sophistication in his storytelling would become sharper over time. In t hese stories, Winthrop perfected his techniques to cultivate his confidence in his p eople’s specialness. These techniques, and the ideological goals they affirm, have tended to elude the attention of many scholars of colonial America.15 This document did not have very wide circulation during its author’s lifetime, and as a consequence, modern historians and literary historians tend to read it as a relatively unselfconscious document, not too concerned with guile, and a source for extracting information relatively neatly. It is true that the document is less concerned with persuading o thers than, say, colonial promotional tracts or conversion narratives. But that does not mean that it is uninterested in persuasion. Rather, as it collected, organized, and articulated together materials into a story about the world and the reader or writer’s place in it, t hese stories w ere a powerf ul way to persuade oneself of the certainty of potentially destabilized ideals. They were a powerf ul way to affirm that such ideals—say, an idea of the universality of the desire for safety—were natural. One
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effect of this pressure was a heightened sensitivity to contrast, to the possibility that one could clarify one’s favor in one’s deity’s eyes by, first, identifying objects of disfavor and, second, by clarifying one’s distinction from those unfavored parties. And on the way to acquiring confidence that his p eople were special, Winthrop found it useful to naturalize a notion of perpetual vulnerability, a world from which one always needed protection rather than tectonic renewal.
Global Worlds, Local Worlds Composing stories d idn’t simply make worlds. It also s haped what sort of world one saw oneself to inhabit. Winthrop’s critiques show that the world he hoped to inhabit was a cleaved one. Winthrop has become famous for his vivid meta phor to represent his local community. He wanted it to be a metropolis set at an exemplary topographical height. But he also wanted it to be separate and distinct from other civic and political communities.16 He sought this distinction and separation in several ways. In at least geographic terms, Algonquian territory had its affordances. It was inconvenient materially, certainly. The region’s ecology took some time to prove itself productive in ways that English settlers recognized, and that enabled them to trade with Europe for dear commodities like warm clothes.17 But if the location’s remoteness was materially inconvenient, that distance could by the same token be useful in shaping the colony to imagine itself to be insulated from and less dependent on other metropoles and colonies in the Atlantic world. In turn, colonial leaders like Winthrop might be able, eventually, to represent an ideal for the colony as affectively, emotionally unentangled from t hose other worldly places. In making observations about his fellow colonists, Winthrop practiced sensitivity to evidence that the deity favored them as a group. That distinction, for Winthrop, f avor required committed settlers to cleave themselves from that world, to split themselves from it—yet, dialectically, to remain dependent on it for definition and distinction. The clearest expression of this cleaving appears in his arrangement of several stories into one split, self-consciously, into two. Organizing information into a story required patience, an intuitive sense of plotting, and, for some pious early modern reformists, a clear theological lesson that would enjoy fixed permanence, like an English house. Without such narrative intervention, it was and is not often very clear when an episode or event can be said clearly to begin or end.18 In the summer of 1641, for example, John Winthrop had noticed a number of changes in colonial life of varying subtlety. A decade into their colony’s history, for example, many individuals were finding New England’s annoyances to be less and less worth the work of overcoming. Many w ere leaving to return to England or other English colonies.19 Sometimes dissatisfaction infected an entire neighborhood—in 1641, for example, Winthrop recorded an attempt by forty settlers from the town of Salem to abandon it, and
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to follow their minister, John Humphrey, to resettle at Providence Island, that “other Puritan colony” off the coast of current-day Nicaragua.20 Winthrop wasn’t the only one who noticed that dissatisfaction either. One of his many rivals, Lord Say and Sele, the governor of that British colony in the West Indies, let Winthrop know in a letter that he thought his style of leadership was fanatically pious at best, authoritarian at worst, and that Winthrop himself was responsible for these defectors.21 His criticism might have been negligible, if it w ere not so plausible. Even materially, conditions in the northern colony w ere bleak. The Massachu setts Bay Colony lacked many of what Thomas Hariot had called “merchantable” commodities. To begin to solve that problem, settlers turned to qualitatively dif ferent resources. A fter the 1637 campaign against the Pequots, settlers began to sell captive prisoners in the West Indies, for commodities like cotton and tobacco, and for enslaved Africans.22 In order to live up to their material ideals, leaders like Winthrop had to make compromises on their political and spiritual ones. To tell this story while preserving one’s status as divinely chosen would be difficult. None of t hese turns of events were particularly flattering. They didn’t have any clear spiritual lesson, much less a very inspiring, hopeful, or buoyant one for providential hopefuls like Winthrop. But with enough investigation, it could be possible to tease out not only inspiration and hope from t hese conditions, but also a sense of proper embeddedness within a world. That sense of proper embeddedness required contrast: it required identifying and marking out a cleavage between the proper and the improper. And Winthrop found one such contrast in an anecdote of spectacular failure that he received secondhand from beyond limits of the local community. After the church at Salem gave up on the work of searching for the deity’s f avor in a landscape they expected to be barren of it, they packed up and left.23 The ship they boarded, the Desire, was not returning to E ngland but was on its way to the West Indies. Its captain’s primary ambition was not to ferry them to a new home but to trade in cotton, with, among other colonies, the one at Providence Island, despite animosity between the colonies’ governors. Before they arrived (and luckily, not a fter), however, the island was captured by the Spanish, who, still eager in their aggression, attacked the Desire as it approached, too. Still more luckily, almost no one was killed in the firefight. Almost no one. Spanish guns shooting at the ship hit its captain. He quickly died. And Winthrop found his death emblematic, meaningful. Captain William Peirce had been a man who, contentiously but conventionally given his position, asserted nearly authoritarian rule. Yet specifically, and sympathetically to Winthrop’s eyes, he did so with great piety. In his detailed and report of the event, Winthrop revealed the ship’s captain’s exemplary leadership. He had been, Winthrop suggested, a second Moses, the biblical prophet who led his people out of slavery and back to the promised land, though he himself would die before reaching it. Winthrop went so far in his research as to recover the biblical
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readings that he had chosen on the morning of his death. There, Winthrop found the key to that event’s meaning: Captain Peirce, like Moses, had aspired to guide t hese wayward people back to safety: “Mr. Peirce had read to the com pany that morning,” Winthrop noted, “(as it fell in course) that in Genesis the last, Lo I die, but God w ill surely visit you and bring you back” (356–357). Here, in his death and especially in some of his last words, Winthrop the storyteller was able to extract a valuable lesson out of t hese narratively loose conditions of colonial life. H ere, more or less, was the lesson: it was their deity’s plan, he quietly asserted, that t hose chosen p eople remain geographically distinct, in contact with the world, but isolated from it. Winthrop hoped that this sense of global distinction would inflect everyday piety, too. This emerges in the complicated wait he undertook, not only in his research but also in his exposition. He waited to tell this story. He waited to acquire all the information and the details, but he also waited u ntil a fter he found a local event flatteringly to complement his insight on what the loss of the captain meant for t hose at home, and what lessons t hose at home might learn about any desires they might have to leave their local habitation. Two months before writing about the death of Captain Peirce, but after learning about it, Winthrop narrated a story about a woman with remarkable attachments to the t hings of the world—attachments to the metropole and to the commodities whose circulation bound the various colonies to that metropole. H ere was a w oman who had not successfully cleaved herself from the world for the sake of local flourishing. This story similarly required a bit of local word-of-mouth research—it is similarly unlikely that he witnessed this story himself, given its intimate location. His story featured this woman, Bridget Peirce, her hearthplace, and her heart’s affections. Mrs. Peirce loved the world. Specifically, she loved the England that settlers w ere meant to have materially abjured. Her love for her old home was manifest, in Winthrop’s eyes, in an unusual attachment to a piece of fabric, “a parcel of very fine linen of great value, which she set her heart too much upon, and had been at charge to have it all newly folded washed, and curiously folded and pressed” (352). Winthrop found that parcel of fabric just as precious as Mrs. Peirce did, but for different reasons. For Winthrop, the parcel was valuable as an opportunity for the deity to reveal himself and his jealous desire for the love of t hese people, jealousy that would make them feel special. In Winthrop’s eyes, Mrs. Peirce’s unwise attachments were the perfect opportunity for the deity to intervene. And Winthrop seems pleased to have noticed. He concluded his story by observing, confidently, that “the loss of this linen did her much good, both in taking off her heart from worldly comforts, and in preparing her for a far greater affliction by the untimely death of her husband, who was slain not long after at Isle of Providence” (352). The story surprises. Specifically, what surprises modern sensibilities about the story—its eagerness to indict a white woman for a remarkably petty activity while
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seeming to overlook a potentially far more subversive action—attests to the world-cleaving that Winthrop hoped for the colony. The source of the fire was interesting to Winthrop, but ambiguously: “She had a negro maid went into the room very late, and let fall some snuff of the candle upon the linen, so as by the morning all the linen was burned to tinder” (352). This enslaved w oman in the Pierce h ousehold is one of the few Black individuals who appear in the colonial New E ngland archive, despite the significant presence of African p eople in the reform Protestant colonies since at least 1638.24 The infrequency with which they appear in the writings of chroniclers like Winthrop means that when they do appear, their presences are weighted with g reat potential historiographical significance. But the quality of the attention that t hese appearances have received tends to remain vulnerable to the quieter priorities that settlers brought to the colonial project. Take, for example, Wendy Anne Warren’s treatment. She has suggested the possibility that this enslaved w oman may have been engaging in arson. Warren engages in symptomatic reading, extrapolating one plausible response to the confirmed qualities of her local circumstances: her abduction, her captivity, and her vulnerability to coerced labor and threats of sexual vio lence that we know at least one of her “countrywomen” experienced a few miles away at Noddles Island.25 Given certain presumptions about h uman inclination, if not human nature, Warren’s suggestion isn’t extravagant. But that Winthrop, who was by no means invulnerable to paranoia, did not make this connection explicit is worth noticing and considering. Winthrop knew resentment; he saw it in his colleagues and neighbors, and he himself occasionally succumbed to it. Here, though, he did not entertain that possibility. One plausible reason to avoid that narrative possibility would be that doing so would admit that t here was something to resent, and that what t here was to resent was a product of the entanglement between, rather the separation of, the nascent settler colony with the larger Atlantic world. A second, indirectly related explanation for his evasion is the possibility that he may have recognized—maybe explicitly, maybe not—t he intimate operations and the urgent necessity of worldmaking rather than cleaving in novel, seemingly hostile environments.
Worlds within Worlds The stories that settlers told to each other, revised, and occasionally wrote down didn’t just try to acquire certainty of f avor through contrast. They also approached certainty by proposing a particu lar relationship between themselves and t hose who w ere clearly and distinctly unlike them. This organizing offered gratifications both at the level of collective and at the level of the individual. The idea that vengefulness—a retributive, often destructive aggression—intuitively orga nized peoples’ movement through the world has a history. One page in that history consisted of encounters on the colonial frontier. Those encounters tested
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and often appeared to vindicate European hypotheses about the privileged agent of worldmaking projects, “the human.” 26 Expecting to see evidence of these universal qualities, evidence such as expressions of clear vengefulness, settlers thrilled to mistrust local expressions of just dealings. The plots and anecdotes they composed (and sometimes bungled) insisted on creating and peopling a world in this fashion. Many early modern Eng lish, not only t hose who tried themselves to settle in other lands, found this template for perceiving aggression to complement to existing fantasies, like the Black Legend.27 They told stories that featured themselves as victims—usually as possible victims rather than actual victims—of native peoples’ aggression and failure to distinguish one colonizer from another, worse one. In this fashion, they could convince themselves not only that they were distinct from t hose neighbors but that they were on morally more stable ground. Their unthought desires for protection affirmed that the border between their world and o thers remained intact. This script gratified collective self-consciousness, and it worked because settlers felt it personally. This gratification appears in instances of narrative failure sometimes more vividly than success. In instances of failure, t here are fewer places for this vision of universal h uman nature, and the colonial disposition it supports, to hide. This is best apparent in Winthrop’s encounter with the tectonist, and his vehement turn to very narrow forms of self-protection in response. The episode at large happens neatly to emblematize modern theories of settler colonialism. Most memorably articulated at the turn of the millennium by Patrick Wolfe as a “structure, not an event,” settler colonialism is a form of colonial occupation that moves to replace an Indigenous population, occupying native homelands, trying to reproduce or even renew a former world on the frontier.28 This typically takes place through policies and activities that dispossess native people—through the complexities of an abstraction-based legal system, through the vagaries of liberal recognition, and sometimes through forcibly invading native lands, refusing to leave, and refusing native people access to them.29 This is precisely what Winthrop did. On his after-dinner walk, he realized he could not make it home on his own in this new world—even in the corner of that new world he liked to imagine was “his.” When it began to rain, he sought shelter in a small edifice he imagined was abandoned. Once inside, after benefitting from the weaving of human and other-t han-human vitality, he tried to prevent the home’s prior occupant, perhaps its tectonist, from reentering. The emblematic neatness of this story, like the neatness that Winthrop saw in the linen parcel, likewise surprises. It is easy, and for some, maybe, attractive, to use this moment to catch its protagonist a red-handed hypocrite. The lost man w asn’t just any settler colonist. This was the very mouthpiece of one of Anglo-America’s most cherished ideals—the idea that these settlers would be dif ferent, would be pure, would be sincere, and would distinguish themselves
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from the rest of the impure spectating world through their powers of sympathy, their ability to imagine what their neighbors w ere feeling.30 Here Winthrop more or less failed to do that. And not only did he fail: he also seems relatively unbothered by his failure. One way to explain his failure might be to infer swiftly from his actions that what he meant by fellow feeling had its limits. Perhaps gender names that limit; perhaps Englishness does or Christianity; perhaps an idea of the h uman. Another way to explain this failure would be to observe that it does not contradict the content of his most famous idea, at least not from the standpoint of property. Generosity and lenity, which he recommended in his sermon, do not abolish property but affirm it.31 Likewise, his ease in reporting his response to this woman might express property’s esteemed place within his ideas of civic orderliness. He initially described the house as abandoned, an emblem of his concept of vacuum domicilium, a variant of the l egal concept of terra nullius that reasoned that derelict property, h ere, made vivid in seemingly domestic spaces, might be legitimately reoccupied by others who made it productive.32 Although he was not capable even of finding his way back to his own home on this property, he had faith in a legal fiction that allowed him to feel this edifice to be accessible to him in a fashion that could exclude, legally and materially, other parties. More urgently and somatically than t hese possibilities, however (and not exclusive of them), is the possibility that Winthrop, with what seems to be s imple logic, did not feel safe. He justified his actions through recourse to ideas of personal safety, ideas that he i magined needed no justification. The threat of harm presaged the entire episode, and set the tone for what followed. After his dinner, Winthrop decided to take a walk around the land he recently claimed as his own. In his recollection of that decision, he recalled that he took a gun with him and he also noted why. There were wolves, he observed, and the gun was intended as self-defense. This was on his mind b ecause on the frontier, in the early months and years of colonization, he and his fellow English settlers remained acutely aware of their vulnerability to the environment. B ecause of their ineptness, because of their unfamiliarity with their fellow inhabitants, and b ecause of their tendency to cherish the boundaries of the body as essential for their ideals of civility, the frontier felt hostile. They w ere living in the vehicle of the metaphor that Hobbes and other political theorists would go on to use to describe a world outside of what they recognized as civilization.33 This sort of thinking primed men like Winthrop to perceive everyt hing beyond the boundaries of their bodies, their clothes, their house walls, as a possible threat to their integrity, even when, as Winthrop indeed went on to experience, it did not require any g reat leaps of logic to imagine that o thers w ere experiencing the same cold, wet, and discomfort that he was. Despite t hese possibilities for justifying his actions, the event, nevertheless, seems to have disturbed Winthrop. He saw it exigent to write about it, to write
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about an event that happened to himself, with no witnesses, in a narrative proj ect that he self-consciously undertook as a document of collective experience. There is no immediately obvious reason why he should have recalled it at all, and t here is nothing close to a “moral,” implicit or explicit, the way t here would be for episodes like t hose at the Pierce h ousehold or on the Pierce vessel. Organ izing events into a plot can provide them with more coherence than they might have without, and it’s possible that this narrative assuaged the disturbing incoherence of a very acute encounter with different epistemological priorities, dif ferent ideas of what constituted protection, and the human who sought it. Still further, he might have been disturbed by the familiarity despite alterity. The home he entered was likely furnished; like Eng lish homes, it was organized around a fire, or hearth, and it was a home that was sensitive to what might have seemed to him the possibility of beauty, with hangings, as his friend Roger Williams went on to observe, “as lovely as any hangings the English have.” 34 It was an artifact of human making rather than the “waste and howling wilderness” that early English settlers anticipated finding in America.35 Further, it was a work of h uman construction that did provide shelter, but with less distance and alienation from the other-t han-human world. In the possibly uncanny fright at discovering t hese similarities—similarities that implied that certain features of his own world w ere maybe not as essential as he i magined them to be—he expressed his resistance vehemently. He tried to turn woven mats into walls through the force of bodily contact and, in d oing so, gambled on the desire of the other party to preserve their own handiwork, a g amble that may have been intuitively accessible because settlers themselves, in their own desire to access a mastery that they imagined would save them, were ready to destroy their worlds rather than build together. Many in the present consider the desire for safety to be universal, and to therefore require no explanation. In the name of that desire, much is sacrificed, including sustainable conditions in which individuals might cohabit with each other and with other than human agents. This thoughtless desire for protection animates world-cleaving in spectacular ways, such as in the rhetoric that justifies “defense” in policies from the walling of nation-states to the deployment by t hose states of chemicals so noxious that even its agents of diffusion require shields from it. This thoughtless desire reactivates the universalizing rationality of world-cleaving projects in less obvious or spectacular ways, as in the historiographical logic that presumes that an enslaved w oman would intuitively seek to destroy her world with the same ardor—what one colonist called “fury”—that her enslavers brought to the work of destroying their own new world.36 Such world-cleaving, as we have seen, takes place through narrative work. Suspending and historically interrogating the desire to “protect,” refusing to insist that it supersede all other motives as historically transcendent, we might begin to
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work on ways of building worlds more tectonically—weaving, assembling, taking apart, and rebuilding when it becomes historically exigent.
Notes 1. OED, “tectonist, n.,” September 2020, https://w ww-oed-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu /v iew/Entry/198492?redirectedFrom=tectonist. 2. William Wood, New E ngland’s Prospect (London, 1634), 94. 3. Roger Williams, A Key into the Language of America, ed. Dawn Dove, Sandra Robinson, Lorén Spears, Dorothy Herman Papp, and Kathleen J. Bragdon (1643; Westholme: Tomaquag Museum, 2019), 30. 4. John Winthrop, Journal of John Winthrop, ed. Richard S. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge: Belknap, 1996), 55–56 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 5. OED, “protect, v.,” September 2020, https://w ww-oed-com.ezproxy.lib.utexas.edu/view /Entry/153127?redirectedFrom= protect. 6. Wood, New E ngland’s Prospect, 94. 7. Mark Rifkin, Settler Common Sense: Queerness and Everyday Colonialism in the American Renaissance (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 8. Elizabeth Povinelli, The Cunning of Recognition: Indigenous Alterities and the Making of Australian Multiculturalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Glen Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 9. Patricia Caldwell, The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 10. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 63. 11. Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 12. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 13. Hall, Worlds of Wonder; Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs: The Poetics of Implication in Colonial New E ngland Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 14. Richard S. Dunn, “John Winthrop Writes His Journal,” William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 2 (1984): 185–212. 15. Scholarship on John Winthrop tends to prioritize his politic al theory. It typically aspires to offer an exegesis of the political and social vision he had as governor of one of the first modern settler colonies. With a handful of exceptions, Winthrop scholarship tends to place extraordinary value on a sermon that, as Abram van Engen has recently pointed out (“Origins and Last Farewells”), Winthrop may not himself have written. For examples of this scholarship, see Hugh Dawson, “John Winthrop’s Rite of Passage: The Origins of the ‘Christian Charitie’ Discourse,” Early American Literat ure 26, no. 3 (1991): 219–231; Scott Michaelsen, “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ Covenant and the Company Way,” Early American Literature 27, no. 2 (1992): 85–100; Michael Warner, “New English Sodom,” American Literature 64, no. 1 (1992): 19–47; Mark Valeri, “Religious Discipline and the Market: Puritans and the Issue of Usury,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 4 (1997): 747–768; Hugh Dawson, “ ‘Christian Charitie’ as Colonial Discourse: Rereading Winthrop’s Sermon in Its English Context,” Early American Literature 33, no. 2 (1998): 117–148; Peter Coviello, “Agonizing Affection: Affect and Nation in Early America,” Early American Literature 37 no. 3 (2002): 439–468; Ivy Schweitzer, “John Winthrop’s ‘Model’ of American Affiliation,” Early American Literature 40, no. 3 (2005): 441–469; and van Engen, “Origins and Last Farewells:
68 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 Bible Wars Textual Form, and the Making of American History,” New E ngland Quarterly, 86, no. 4 (2013): 543–592. Richard Dunn’s bibliographic essay, published by the William and Mary Quarterly in 1984, and reprinted in part as the introduction to the 1996 Harvard University Press edition of the Journal, is an exception to Winthrop’s thought insofar as it directs minimal attention to that much-a nthologized text and instead privileges the writing that is literally quotidian and, as a result, often quite a bit duller. Stephen Carl Arch has offered a reading of Winthrop’s diurnalistic method that would elevate it into a proto- historiographic practice in Authorizing the Past: The Rhetoric of History in Seventeenth- Century New England (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994). Only one literary historical treatment that I have found engages explicitly with Winthrop’s simultaneous development as both a political theorist and a writer, rather than describing the development of his prose as the raiment adorning an already fixed and autonomous political theory. See Adam McKeown, “Light Apparitions and the Shaping of Community in Winthrop’s ‘History of New England,’ ” Early American Literature 47, no. 2 (2012): 293–319. 16. For recent examples of the enduring popularity of his figure, see Abram van Engen, City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020); Daniel Rodgers, As a City on a Hill: The Story of America’s Most Famous Lay Sermon (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018); Alex Krieger, City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019). 17. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill & Wang, 1983). 18. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Repre sentation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 19. Edward Johnson, “New E ngland’s Annoyances,” in American Poetry: The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. David Shields (New York: Library of America, 2007), 17–19; Susan Hardman Moore, Pilgrims: New World Settlers and the Call of Home (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 20. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Providence Island, 1630–1641: The Other Puritan Colony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 21. “Lord Say and Sele to John Winthrop,” in Winthrop Papers (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1944), 4:263–267. 22. Thomas Hariot, A Brief and True Report of the New Found Land of V irginia (London, 1588); Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014); Wendy Ann Warren, New E ngland Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: Norton, 2016); Winthrop, Journal, 246, 573. 23. Winthrop, Journal, 355–357. 24. Warren, New England Bound; Emanuel Downing to John Winthrop, ca. Summer 1645, “Letter of Emanuel Downing,” in Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, ser. 4 (1863): 6:64–66; Ana Schwartz, “Were There Any Immigrants in New E ngland?,” New England Quarterly 93, no. 3 (2020): 400–413. 25. Wendy Anne Warren, “The Cause of her Grief: The Rape of a Slave in Early New England,” Journal of American History 83, no. 4 (2007): 1031–1049. 26. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: T owards the H uman, A fter Man, It’s Overrepresentation—an Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 27. Cassander Smith, Black Africans in the British Imagination: English Narratives of the Early Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2016), 59. 28. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999); see also Jodi Byrd, Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011); J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “A Structure,
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not an Event,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (2016), https:// csalateral.org /issue/5-1/forum-a lt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-i ndigeneity -kauanui/; Malini Johar Schuller and Edward Watts, eds., Messy Beginnings: Postcoloniality and Early American Studies (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave, 2010); Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave, 2012); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. 29. On conflicts between native people and settler governments regarding land within liberal regimes of recognition, see Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks. 30. John Winthrop, “Modell of Christian Charity,” in Winthrop Papers, 2:282–295; Ivy Schwetizer, “John Winthrop’s ‘Modell’ of American Affiliation,” Early American Literature 40, no. 3 (2005): 441–469; Abram van Engen, Sympathetic Puritans: Calvinist Fellow Feeling in Early New E ngland (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 31. Ana Schwartz, “Mercy as well as Extremity: Forts, Fences, and Fellow Feeling in New England Settlement,” Early American Literature 54, no. 2 (2019): 343–379. 32. Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, L abor and Civic Identity in Colonizing English Americ a, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 148–156. 33. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). 34. Williams, Key into the Language of America, 30; Kathleen Bragdon, Native P eople of Southern New E ngland, 1500–1650 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), esp. 102–130. 35. Michael Wigglesworth, “God’s Controversy with New E ngland,” in The Poems of Michael Wigglesworth, ed. Ronald Bosco (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989). 36. John Underhill, News from Americ a (London, 1638).
Charlotte Smith’s Littoral Zones worldmaking in the elegiac sonnets and beyond Daniel O’Quinn
Charlotte Smith’s work has long been recognized as a crucial precursor to the verse experiments of Wordsworth and Coleridge, but I explicitly politicize the treatment of space in Smith’s early work by arguing that she is struggling to find a viable locus for poetic utterance after the temporary fragmentation of the British Empire in the 1770s and 1780s. Numerous historians have demonstrated that the American War accelerated a “tilt to the East” in the British imperial imaginary that required complex realignments in identity and sociability during this time of economic and political transition. By giving form to certain kinds of spaces Smith instantiated a radical disjunction from her poetic precursors because she recognized that a world is not simply a spatial matter but rather a temporal modality.1 In a genre that had been recently deployed to secure cultural connection with this history of British poetry, her sonnets that address the River Arun anatomize her melancholy alienation from poetic tradition. But Smith’s importance lies in her response to this alienation. In a series of extraordinary sonnets integrated into the third edition of Elegiac Sonnets (1789), she leaves the space of riparian meditation behind and inaugurates a complex engagement with the seashore.2 That engagement lays the groundwork for Britain’s poetic future. This is obviously a strong claim, but I suggest that without this reorientation of the spatial fantasies and temporal modalities subtend poetic subjectivities and histories, British culture—and verse practice in particular—would be caught in a melancholic return to the same tropes and figures. On the verge of the ocean, a new kind of speaking voice, one marked by vigorous intensity and harshness, emerges to deal with the historical turbulence of the 1780s and beyond. This essay argues that the littoral zones in Charlotte Smith’s sonnets are sites of affective negotiation with the cultural crisis posed by American decoloniza70
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tion. In coastal environments, the littoral zone or shoreline extends from the high-water mark to areas that are permanently submerged; in freshwater environments the littoral is a far narrower and, in some ways, less dynamic wetland. Across Smith’s verse she worlds t hese kinds of environments in almost oppositional ways. The argument I put forward is twofold. First, the melancholy of Smith’s River Arun sonnets is intimately tied to a disruption in Britain’s cultural patrimony and her attempts to revitalize the poetic history associated with the river motif in t hese sonnets mark her work as post-American. Second, Smith’s post-A merican poetics necessitate an engagement with the territorial limits between land and sea that points to a new future for a specifically British poetry, sometimes referred to as Romanticism. If the freshwater littoral of the River Arun affords l ittle opportunity for temporal and historical reinvention, the saltwater littoral of the cliffs and rocks of Sussex provides the locus for the spatial realignment of British imperial fantasy in the post-American era. With this argument in place, I w ill conclude this essay with a brief sketch of how Smith’s littoral worldmaking animates the complex historiographical gestures of her final masterpiece “Beachy Head” (1807). To build this argument we need to go back to the global war of the early 1780s in order to move forward. In early December of 1781, less than two months after Cornwallis’s surrender at Yorktown, William Cowper sent an imaginary “sociable conversation” to his friend Joseph Hill in which Cowper articulated his thoughts on the American War. After stating that he knew of no one up to the task of leading Britain out of the conflict, Cowper offered the following summary of the state of the empire: “If we pursue the war, it is because we are desperate; it is plunging and sinking year after year in still greater depths of calamity. If we relinquish it, the remedy is equally desperate, and would prove, I believe, in the end no remedy at all. . . . W hether we adopt the one measure or the other, are equally undone. For I consider the loss of America as the ruin of England.” 3 For Cowper and others, the reverses of the early 1780s raised the simultaneous possibility that British culture may die and yet live on in a ghostly form elsewhere. In Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, I put forward the notion of post-American literature as a heuristic for understanding a range of cultural problematics in the 1770s and 1780s. In readings of materials as disparate as Sheridan’s “Monody on the Death of David Garrick,” his complex after-piece The Critic, the Handel Commemoration of 1784, and Cowper’s poetry from The Task to “Yardley Oak,” I argued that the American War instantiated a phantasmatic realignment of the cultural patrimony and a disjunctive deployment of the future to pull Britain past its present predicament.4 The political dilemma presented in Cowper’s 1781 letter presupposes a strong sense of the integration of colony and metropole. For Cowper, the loss of America implies the ruin of England; his thoughts on the nondistinction of England and America emerge frequently in his letters, but nowhere more explicitly than in the
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following missive to John Newton: “I consider E ngland and America as once one country. They w ere so in respect of interest, intercourse, and affinity. A g reat earthquake has made a partition, and now the Atlantic Ocean flows between them. He that can drain that Ocean, and shove the two shores together so as to make them aptly coincide and meet each other in every part, can unite them again; but this is the work for Omnipotence, and nothing less than Omnipotence can heal the breach between us” (1:569–570). This strange account of the American War seems to forget that the Atlantic Ocean has always separated the colonies from the British Isles. Cowper h ere imagines a prerevolutionary state that negates the very material structure of the globe. In this fantasy it is contiguity that m atters most: the shores must “aptly coincide.” It is a figure of an organic whole rent asunder, which in some ideal future state could be sutured together again only by God. Unlike Cowper’s correspondence, Smith’s letters and poems from the early 1780s d on’t immediately invoke the war or its aftermath. But as with Emily Dickinson, whose work was also assumed to have little to do with the war g oing on around her, Smith’s misery is more than simply private, and I would contend that she actually provides the formal strategies for dealing with that which may have been unspeakable in the immediate aftermath of the American crisis. The strangeness of Cowper’s geographical distortion points us to other vexed deployments of space. As David Fairer, Jacqueline Labbe, Susan Wolfson, and o thers have noted, the reinvigoration of the sonnet at this moment is curiously linked to the invocation of the river as a trope for understanding poetic bildung and the history of literature itself. Thomas Warton’s “To the River Lodon” is the foundational poem in what became a burgeoning riparian tradition, a species of worldmaking with important historical resonances: Ah! what a weary race my feet have run, Since first I trod thy banks with alders crown’d, And thought my way was all through fairy ground, Beneath thy azure sky, and golden sun: Where first my muse to lisp her notes begun! While pensive memory traces back the round, Which fills the varied interval between; Much pleasure, more of sorrow, marks the scene. Sweet native stream! t hose skies and suns so pure No more return, to chear my evening road! Yet still one joy remains, that not obscure, Nor useless, all my vacant days have flow’d, From youth’s gay dawn to manhood’s prime mature; Nor with the Muse’s laurel unbestow’d.5
Fairer emphasizes the importance of Warton’s spatialization of memory in this hugely influential poem:
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Underlying t hese various motifs is a sense of the connecting stream of human experience. The images of fostering, of recovering distant voices and lost texts, locating springs and “holy” places, reaching into the past for meanings to illuminate the pres ent, all t hese are bound with a concept of an organic history. . . . His sonnet “To the River Lodon” is his most influential poem in the sense that its mood, phrases, even syntax, flowed into the work of many 1790s poets. . . . In this meditation on loss, continuity, and gain, the crucial concept is the return to the source, the re-establishing contact with the “native stream.” 6
Extending Fairer’s argument further, Bethan Roberts argues that the infusion of the poet’s personal past into the present emblematizes the way that Thomas Warton draws upon the forms and “phrases” of the literary past in his poems.7 With this model for historical suture in mind, Smith’s first invocation of the River Arun in “Sonnet V. To the South Downs” startles because it adheres closely to Warton’s example both to argue for and enact discontinuity: AH! hills beloved!—where once, a happy child, Your beechen shades, “your turf, your flowers among,” I wove your blue-bells into garlands wild, And woke your echoes with my artless song. Ah! hills beloved!—your turf, your flowers remain; But can they peace to this sad breast restore, For one poor moment soothe the sense of pain, And teach a breaking heart to throb no more? And you, Aruna!—in the vale below, As to the sea your limpid waves you bear Can you one kind Lethean cup bestow, To drink a long oblivion to my care? Ah! no!—when all, e’en Hope’s last ray is gone, There’s no oblivion—but in death alone!8
fter the invocation of childhood memory in the octave, the speaker’s address A to the river directs attention not to its beginning, but to its end, to the sea. As Roberts argues, Smith’s adoption of temporal, physical, and poetic distance brings the poem into the orbit of Thomas Gray’s “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” and her poem expresses a similar alienation of the present from the past.9 The octave explicitly recognizes that memory cannot “restore peace” or “soothe the sense of pain,” and thus the sestet’s question is whether a differ ent understanding of the river’s temporality can do this affective work. Rather than looking at where it came from, Smith directs the reader to where the river is g oing, to the f uture. The desire for the “oblivion” of the river’s “kind Lethean cup” is expressed and harshly refused by the disjunctive final couplet, but it suggests that forgetting and f uture life may be intrinsically connected. The closing
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couplet’s slant rhyme no less than the placement of the word “no” in the penultimate line marks a significant negation of both Warton’s Petrarchan form and the continuity woven into its remarkably diminished volta. Warton’s poem, like his riparian trope for historical continuity, does not turn so much as flow over temporal loss. Smith’s sonnet uses its final Shakespearean couplet to end all hope of connection with the past. As the final line indicates, connection will occur in death alone. Life and death are crucial concepts h ere. The four remaining river sonnets in the 1786 edition take us to the littoral zone, to the banks of the Arun and suddenly the poems become haunted by the literary past. Bethan Roberts has carefully shown how the specters of Otway, Collins, and Hayley (although living) haunt Sonnets XXVI, XXVII, and XXX. And Roberts is no doubt correct that “the river becomes explicitly associated with the male poetic tradition. . . . The linear motion of the river evokes inheritance-based male succession.” 10 But there is a tangible limit between w ater and land that seems to map onto a distinction between life and death in “Sonnet XXVI. To the River Arun” (1786, 30): on thy wild banks, by frequent torrents worn, No glittering fanes, or marble domes appear, Yet s hall the mournful muse thy course adorn, And still to her thy rustic waves be dear. (1–4)
The very notion that t here would be shrines, that this is a scene of mourning, needs to be considered. The pun on course/corpse may seem forced at first but the sonnet goes on to invoke the “lingering” Otway and “kindred spirits” who “shall relate / Thy Otway’s sorrows, and lament his fate” (13–14). In this narrow freshwater littoral, Smith is not only separated from the movement of poetic tradition; that tradition is itself on the borderline between life and death. What happens if we read this as both a historical and a personal predicament? The sheer wretchedness of Smith’s marital life cannot be denied, but it should not obscure the fact that Smith’s alienation goes beyond her specific struggle with female authorship and authority. Her insistence on disconnection, on death, and above all on borders resonates with other post-American cultural productions. If the loss of America is understood in Cowper’s terms as self-mutilation, as a self-division that cannot be repaired by human hands, then that which remains is not only separated from its past but also forced to revitalize the fragments. One of the startling t hings about Smith’s River Arun sonnets is the degree to which they expand upon the tropic capacity of the river by eschewing any movement upstream. This tropic expansion is engaged in the name of life and comes in two different forms that both ultimately leave the river behind as a trope for cultural continuity. This fulfills one of Nelson Goodman’s key t heses about the constraints on worldmaking; “We cannot just create t hings: predicates must be entrenched and thus there must be some close continuity with former versions.” 11
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As Goodman states, “[Worldmaking] starts from worlds already at hand. The making is remaking.” 12 Each world version redeploys or redirects already established versions. In poetic terms, Smith’s reworlding w ill arise from an intense negotiation with preexisting poetic worlds. If life is going to be accorded, it is going to come from her, and it is going to emerge in an altogether different space. But the process of revivification, as Goodman emphasizes about worldmaking in general, is not g oing to be easy: it will involve two key experiments in littoral zones where she tests whether certain fantasies of cultural continuity can bear the affective weight of this historical moment. The first of t hese experiments to push the river trope beyond its very boundaries comes in “Sonnet XXXII. To Melancholy,” the only river poem in which a lyric “I” declares its affective relation to tradition: Written on the banks of the Arun, Oct. 1785. when latest Autumn spreads her evening veil, And the grey mists from t hese dim waves arise, I love to listen to the hollow sighs, Through the half-leafless wood that breathes the gale: For at such hours the shadowy phantom, pale, Oft seems to fleet before the poet’s eyes; Strange sounds are heard, and mournful melodies, As of night wanderers, who their woes bewail Here, by his native stream, at such an hour, Pity’s own Otway I methinks could meet, And hear his deep sighs swell the sadden’d wind! O Melancholy!—such thy magic power, That to the soul t hese dreams are often sweet, And sooth the pensive visionary mind! (1786, 34–35)
Jacqueline Labbe links the poem’s autumnal moment to a “liminal aesthetics and a border tonality.” 13 I want to be slightly more precise h ere because “liminal” and “border” denote a strong threshold between one space or state and another. Sonnet XXXII is far hazier and more porous. Having already established the river with the poetic past, this poem blurs the boundary between water and land: the “grey mists” rise from the waves only to transform into “night wanderers.” It is only in such a gothic encounter that Smith can imagine the prospect of meeting Otway. The poem marks the desire to do so and the strange impossibility or inappropriateness of such a meeting. Christopher Stokes has read the scene as uncanny, and indeed her place and her practice seem fully alienated from themselves.14 Ultimately it is the melting of space in this poem that warrants attention because it projects both Smith and her poetic forebears into a nowhere space, a kind of interim unworlding, where the past can only haunt, not inspire, the
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present. The way that the River Arun poems sequentially disclose this problematic in the 1786 edition of Elegiac Sonnets is revealing. First viewed at a distance, the River Arun figured for the ineluctable disjunction of the present from the past. As we move increasingly closer to the river, Smith metaphorically ties the river to literary tradition, but she is alienated from it because it is dead. Negotiating with ghosts is contemplated but rejected as one of Melancholy’s subtle traps: a form of self-indulgence that may be soothing but, for its capacity to alleviate pain, inconsequential. To play on the very notion of evaporation, Smith implies that sublimation is a tender trap. The vapors rising from the river are simply too insubstantial to ground the poetic rejuvenation needed to deal with Smith’s affective condition. The contrast is palpable when she leaves this space and moves downstream to the seashore, to an altogether different littoral zone in “Sonnet XII. Written on the Sea Shore, Oct. 1784.” 15 In light of the strong Wartonian predilection to connect the river’s source with the past and the course of the river with poetic tradition, Smith’s seashore poems take us not only to the f uture but to the end of tradition. This should be a zone of terror, but it is rather one of comfort: on some rude fragment of the rocky shore, Where on the fractured cliff the billows break, Musing, my solitary seat I take, And listen to the deep and solemn roar. O’er the dark waves the winds tempestuous howl; The screaming sea-bird quits the troubled sea: But the wild gloomy scene has charms for me, And suits the mournful temper of my soul. Already shipwreck’d by the storms of Fate, Like the poor mariner methinks I stand, Cast on a rock; who sees the distant land From whence no succour comes—or comes too late. Faint and more faint are heard his feeble cries, Till in the rising tide the exhausted sufferer dies. (1786, 20)
Roberts sees the spatial contrast in gendered terms: the gushing river figures patrilineal descent that Smith both invokes and eschews; the womb-like sea “constitutes a nonlinear, nonhierarchical space.” 16 But as with the River Arun poems, Smith is on the territorial limit between land and sea, and that limit is here figured as a rocky cliff. The sea crashes into this precipice, its tempest eroding and encroaching on her space. That sense of fracture extends beyond the poem’s diction into its intensely irregular form: Petrarchan and Shakespearean forms crash into one another, the octave is broken up on the page, the sestet is metrically unsettled and unsettling. From her seat on the cliff, Smith imagines
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herself as a shipwrecked mariner stranded at sea looking back at her; as the tide rises her alter-ego drowns. This is Smith’s first seashore poem, and this zone will be the locus of her greatest achievements. But at this moment I see the poem as a historical reckoning. By staging the act of projection onto the shipwrecked mariner she is in a sense concretizing both an authorial and a colonial fantasy. The date here is impor tant: in late September the last of territorial limits in the Peace of Paris were ratified. In the aftermath of the American War the Atlantic Ocean is no longer a connective tissue on which a fantasy of imperial plenitude can be imagined. H ere on the fractured border of her and the nation’s territorial limits, the “mournful temper of my soul” projects itself as a castaway only to watch and listen to it drown. As with the “Sonnet XXXII,” this is a psychic and cultural dead end and a fantasy of continuity that needs to be overcome. But Smith does not so much overcome as explore its affective implications. This is nowhere more evident than in “Sonnet XLIV,” the most violent of the seashore sonnets and the poem more than any other that I associate with the post- American condition. The 1789 edition of Elegiac Sonnets contained numerous seashore sonnets, and my sense is that the unresolved trauma of the American War is being reactivated as a symptom by the progression of events in France. At a crucial moment, the word “war,” so carefully repressed throughout Smith’s work, erupts into the discursive and phantasmatic space of her poetry: Written in the Church-yard at Middleton, in Sussex. press’d by the moon, mute arbitress of tides, While the loud equinox its power combines, The sea no more its swelling surge confines, But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides. The wild blast, rising from the western cave, Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed; Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead, And breaks the s ilent sabbath of the grave! With shells and sea-weed mingled, on the shore, Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave; But vain to them the winds and w aters rave; They hear the warring elements no more: While I am doom’d—by life’s long storm opprest, To gaze with envy on their gloomy rest. (1789, 42)
The first three quatrains catalogue a desecration of sorts where the sea scours the land away, exhumes the bodies of the dead and exposes their bones to the “warring elements.” Littered with t hese bones, the littoral zone now prompts a moment of subjectification at the couplet’s volta in line thirteen. In the face of these whitening bones, the lyric “I” envies their rest: a curious statement, for they
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are conspicuously not at rest. These bones are moving, their beds are heaving, and yet the poem exhibits a remarkable equanimity. Formally the poem describes great turbulence, but unfolds with controlled intensity. The motion of these bones in this littoral zone is paradoxically figured as “gloomy rest,” a kind of equipoise at the heart of the storm that somehow offers solace when shrines and monuments to the past have been literally broken open. Is it too much to see the work of the sea as the undoing of both the quiet monumental history implied by Warton’s riparian tropes and the antiquarianism implied by so many of the river sonnets written in response to Warton’s example? H ere the tombs are broken and the fragments of the past are not collected but cast into the surf. And it is the force and power of the surf, driven by the tides, that paradoxically animates not the dead, but the living observer of this desecration. The exposed and whitening bones instantiate the lyric utterance and the expression of the desire for “rest.” This is a critical desire; it d oesn’t mourn the condition of t hese fragments or weep for desecration, but rather it recognizes that “life’s long storm” inheres in this violent scene to the point where it can figure for subjectivity itself. A wounded, historically alienated subject no doubt emerges here, but it appears to be and will become a poetic subject committed to doing t hings otherwise, committed to the psychic condition articulated in this littoral zone where war had only just ended and was about to begin again. It is in this light that the temporal continuity inscribed in the -ing form of “warring” in “Sonnet XLIV” is so resonant. For the bones in the surf war is over, but for the lyric “I” of t hese sonnets war inheres to the point where it quite literally defines the repressed past, the troubled present, and the unresolved f uture of Smith’s poetic world. As the remaining seashore sonnets in the ensuing editions unfold war becomes increasingly tangible to the point where, in “Sonnet LXXXIII” (1797, 72), bones are replaced by blood: the wide scene Magnificent, and tranquil, seems to spread Even o’er the rustic’s breast a joy serene, When, like dark plague-spots by the demons shed, Charged deep with death, upon the waves, far seen, Move the war-freighted ships; and fierce and red, Flash their destructive fires—The mangled dead And dying victims then pollute the flood. Ah! thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood. (6–14)
This poem’s fully fractured structure—from the highly irregular opening lines we encounter the sestet first, then the octave—is the culmination of Smith’s poetics of precarity where life and death, the living and nonliving coexist.17 As disturbed and disturbing as t hese littoral zones are, it is from h ere that she w ill build
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The Emigrants and “Beachy Head,” poems that make worlds for the f uture of poetry beyond Warton’s riparian idylls. Smith herself marks this shift in worldmaking in a manner that emphasizes the key points of transition. “Sonnet XXXIII. To the Naiad of Arun” appears first in the 1786 edition, and it abandons the hard-won lyric “I” of Sonnet XXXII only to offer an envoi to the freshwater littoral and the worlding tradition associated with it: Go, rural Naiad! wind thy stream along Thro’ woods and wilds: then seek the ocean caves Where sea nymphs meet their coral rocks among, To boast the various honours of their waves! ’Tis but a little, o’er thy shallow tide, That toiling trade her burden’d vessel leads; But laurels grow luxuriant on thy side, And letters live along thy classic meads. Lo! Where ’mid British bards thy natives shine! And now another poet helps to raise They glory high—t he poet of mine! Whose brilliant talents are his smallest praise: And who, to all that genius can impart, Adds the cool head, and the unblemish’d heart! (1786; 35)
The imperative injunction in the opening quatrain sends the spirit of the Arun forth to the sea while leaving her laurels, letters, and bards b ehind. The poetry of this riparian world will abide, but the poem posits two f utures: one that will include Smith and one that w ill not. The suggestion that John Sargent’s poem The Mine (1785) offers a continuation of the Arun’s cultural patrimony carries an implicit irony for his subject is fossils. Sargent was a friend of Hayley’s whom Smith had venerated in earlier sonnets, thus he is in some senses validated here, but one cannot deny the irreducible pastness of this f uture. Smith of course would radically open the world nascent in the fossil trope in “Beachy Head,” but her immediate f uture follows that of the w ater nymphs in line 3 at the saltwater littoral where river meets ocean “to boast the various honours of her waves!” (4). The way that this poem subtly links the estuary’s “shallow tide” to oceanic trade anticipates much to come, for the shoreline w ill feature prominently in Smith’s verse as a zone of increasingly global, extranational exchange. This retrospective envoi to the River Arun leaves a former world intact at the same time that it posits a new largely unrepresented world.18 Smith’s project now becomes one of elaborating on this new littoral zone by not only establishing its discursive parameters but also articulating its affective and allegorical import. Not surprisingly this would require a movement beyond the sonnet form. The
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riparian tradition worlds in a predictable fashion: the flow from source to river mouth figures for linear time and thus offers an especially apt metaphor for the transience of life and the continuity of subjectivity. Played with and against each other, t hese two qualities allow for the consolidation of identity w hether that be understood in subjective or national terms. It is this predictability that gives riparian discourse its normative force. One way of thinking of Smith’s engagement with this tradition is to see her, like so many of the characters that populate the saltwater littorals of the Elegiac Sonnets and her l ater works, as an alien either because she is a woman writer and therefore constitutively outside a masculine literary tradition or because the world itself in the 1780s was in flux and therefore not easily seen as temporally predictable. This implies that Smith perhaps more than any of her peers was open to a far more mediated, dispersed poetics. This is evident in her increasingly multifarious formal experiments. Kevis Goodman’s extraordinary reading of “Beachy Head” persuasively understands Smith’s practice in this late poem in geologic terms. Through a series of astute observations on the famous fossils passage and a rigorous historicization of how geology was conceptualizing revolutionary time in the years leading up to the poem, Goodman argues that the poem mediates a sense of the totality of the ongoing present.19 Goodman recognizes the importance of mixture, both formal and historical, to Smith’s poetics; I would add that this tendency in Smith’s work predates “Beachy Head” because it first emerges from the shifting littoral zones in Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets. This is to say that Smith’s rigorous testing of the affective viability of the narrow freshwater littoral at the heart of riparian verse and her conjectural experiments with the capacious figural potential of the saltwater littoral are an act of worldmaking implicitly and eventually explicitly tied to a fundamental change in the spatial mentality of British imperialism. We are not at all distant here from Giovanni Arrighi’s argument that the imagination of space, what he calls “territorialization,” itself shifts with alterations in imperial capitalism.20 Smith’s verse operates at the pivot point between the first and second British empires, from a moment when the Indies mentality was tilting far more resolutely away from the Atlantic toward the Asian continent.21 It is not an accident that Smith’s major work frequently incorporates an eastward gaze and that t here are significant meditations on the relationship between naval warfare and global trade. But before turning to this problematic, two aspects of Smith’s worldmaking are by now evident. First, the seashore is a zone of radical admixture, where life does not flow from one point to another, but rather coexists in multifarious forms and exists in constant, violent relation to death. Sonnet XLIV figures this through the “warring elements,” a privileged trope for what amounts to the existential experience of wart ime, that strange temporal loop where events are happening and not happening, collapsing and proliferating in a wavelike fashion.22 As Sonnet XII demonstrates, Smith’s subjects live constantly on the verge of death in this space, and the lyric “I” is just as endangered
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as the castaway mariner. The degree to which the implicit collapse between lyric subject and drowning mariner in Sonnet XII predates explicit deployment of this comparison in Cowper’s “The Castaway” is noteworthy, for both poets throughout the 1780s are rigorously working through the privileged poetic tropes for collective identity. The shared sense of danger is significant and points toward the second key point regarding Smith’s worldmaking. Unlike Cowper’s final poem, Smith’s interest in the saltwater littoral figures forth subjectivity not as that which can be conceived in providential, nostalgic, or unifying terms, but rather as a zone of radical uncertainty. At the close of “The Castaway,” Cowper’s comparison of himself to the drowned mariner contains his tempestuous psychic life in one final metaphor; at the close of “Sonnet XII” Smith’s comparison to the drowning mariner is conjectural, suspended, and ultimately subsumed into further poetic acts of worldmaking. And importantly Smith embraces this uncertain condition as that of female authorship. The lyric “I” in this context enters language as event not as subject; and as event it dis appears as soon as it arrives only to reappear in slightly modified version or echo. The temporality is that of the wave crashing and receding over and over again. This helps us gain some purchase on the manifestly compulsive aspect of the Elegiac Sonnets itself—a book that comes out repeatedly throughout the period in a seemingly open-ended fashion—a nd Smith’s compulsive lapse into melancholy that was ridiculed by Anna Seward and o thers.23 This sense of the lyric “I” as compulsive event inscribes ephemerality directly into the sonnets and I would argue constitutes the most radical aspect of Smith’s worldmaking. The world shift in Elegiac Sonnets has an effect on how we read Smith’s subsequent work. The Emigrants and “Beachy Head” both take place on the saltwater littoral, but both poems are looking at France from this precarious world. In this context it is important to remember that riparian discourse is a historical heuristic, but one that foregrounds the individual subject, linear pro gress, and stable forms of pastoral sociability. History, especially national and imperial history, is bounded and explained by the riparian pastoral world. Space implies a persistence in time.24 In the wake of the American War fractures in the relation between empire and realm meant that this kind of bound world lost its heuristic power.25 Smith’s experiments in the 1780s w ere aimed at finding a new heuristic for articulating the visceral feeling of historical change.26 Littoral discourse for Smith has deeply historical applications, but it is a form of historical enquiry that attempts to capture the present in the midst of its unfolding.27 Littoral worlding foregrounds affect as it moves through the collective; it is diffuse, recursive, and repetitive much like the sea itself; and its social dimension combines local exiles and vast global networks in a kind of counter-pastoral more suited to the reach of global imperial capital. The complexity of the littoral world in “Beachy Head” almost defies description, for across a wide array of forms and through repeated citations she uses
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the specific geographical space as locus for multivalent historical meditations. But most importantly she makes the extraordinary leap to suggest that temporal expansion renders all worlds littoral. This occurs in the famous verse paragraph on fossils roughly midway through the poem: Ah! hills so early loved! in fancy still I breathe your pure keen air; and still behold Those widely spreading views, mocking alike The Poet and the Painter’s utmost art. And still, observing objects more minute, Wondering remark the strange and foreign forms Of sea-shells; with the pale calcareous soul Mingled, and seeming of resembling substance. Tho’ surely the blue Ocean (from the heights Where the downs westward trend, but dimly seen) Here never roll’d its surge. Does Nature then Mimic, in wanton mood, fantastic shapes Of bivalves, and inwreathed involutes, that cling To the dark sea-rock of the wat’ry world? Or did this range of chalky mountains, once Form a vast bason, where the Ocean waves Swell’d fathomless? What time t hese fossil shells, Buoy’d on their native element, were thrown Among the imbedding calx: when the huge hill Its giant bulk heaved, and in strange ferment Grew up a guardian barrier, ’twixt the sea And the green level of the sylvan world. (368–389)28
The direct suggestion that t here is no permanent boundary between land and sea in geologic time has received copious commentary, but in the terms we have been discussing this subsumptive worldmaking has enormous historical implications. Looking down, the speaker in the poem recognizes that at one point this rocky eminence was submerged. With this kind of boundary now taking on the diffuse qualities of a littoral zone, conventional lines of demarcation between peoples, nations, and the histories they subtend don’t so much dissolve as become radically undifferentiated from the other forms of life that exist and have existed here in this location and thus lose their normative force. The poem’s intense engagement with botany, ornithology, and the sciences of life amounts to a radical repositioning of humanity as but another life form in an aggregated world.29 In this context, literary history is but one of many fascinating worlds from which a poetics could be developed. What interests me is how carefully Smith explores Fancy’s role in the structure of observation and hence the construction of a world version. The poem’s
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thrilling opening stanzas propel Fancy outward across the waves in a manner very reminiscent of Smith’s first projection onto the observing mariner in “Sonnet XII,” only h ere the identification resolves not into the death of the lyric subject but rather into an occasion for vigorous life, for Fancy’s explicit construction of a world: On thy stupendous summit, rock sublime! That o ’er the channel rear’d, half way at sea The mariner at early morning hails, I would recline; while Fancy should go forth, And represent the strange and awful hour Of vast concussion; when the Omnipotent Stretch’d forth his arm, and rent the solid hills, Bidding the impetuous main flood rush between The rifted shores, and from the continent Eternally divided this green isle. (1–10)
If we look closely here we see something crucial about Charlotte Smith’s littoral zone, for it oscillates rather than flows: t here is a very strange perspectival shift in the opening three lines where looking out from Beachy Head and looking at Beachy Head from the water are syntactically blurred across two subjects, across two acts of observation. In and out seemingly occur simultaneously much like the movement of water in the saltwater littoral. This same blur happens in the fossil passage, only t here the speaker and the world she invokes seem to move up and down. Indeed, this blurring of times, spaces, and worlds happens virtually every time “fancy” or “conjecture” or “contemplation” is explicitly activated, suggesting that Smith’s littoral zone is now more than a world but rather a differential model for worldmaking. The very dynamics that define life in the saltwater littoral are being generalized to account for affective, existential, and poetic experience. This takes us deep into poetry as itself a techne or act of making that has epistemic connotations.30 We have already seen this in “Sonnet XII” when countervailing models for the sonnet form crash into each other; here in “Beachy Head” the collocation of seemingly opposed perspectives is allowed to operate at the local syntactical level and at the level of larger formal discontinuities. The poem has long been recognized as an aggregate of forms and genres, but there is a similar tendency to meld clauses, citations, and subject positions at a more micrological level in order to know or rather make the world in multifarious ways. By way of conclusion, I play out the implications of this shift for one partic ular set of social worlds that Smith has been scrutinizing from the beginning of her poetic career. Earlier in this essay I argued that the narrow freshwater littoral subtends a pastoral fantasy of cultural and social continuity that operates in contrast to the far more precarious, yet ultimately more capacious world of the saltwater littoral. We could argue that the inherent expansion of Smith’s
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worldmaking, although precipitated by imperial crisis, parallels the subsequent expansion in imperial capitalism in the nineteenth century. And yet for a poem so conspicuously perched on the seashore, pastoral tropes recur again and again in “Beachy Head.” As the sun rises in the east of the opening verse paragraph, the poem is inundated by “shrill harsh [cries]” of the birds inhabiting the “chalky clefts that scar / Thy sides precipitous,” but these sounds are metaphorically compared to the sounds of a recognizably pastoral world: and ever restless daws With clamour, not unlike the chiding hounds, While the lone shepherd, and his baying dog, Drive to thy tufty crest his bleating flock. (25–28)
The shepherd has an important place in this poem, but I think the key recognition is that the geog raphical location allows Smith to pivot between worlds, between pastoral shepherds and shore-bound hermits, between contraband traders and ships bound for India, between peace and war, between multiple pasts and possible f utures, between various forms of life. Shortly after the pastoral at the end of the first verse paragraph, “Beachy Head’s third verse paragraph (37–99) offers a remarkable treatment of the India trade that is subtly in dialogue with Pope’s lines on the flow of Eastern riches up the Thames in “Windsor Forest,” but Smith envisions a network of relations rather than a unidirectional flow.31 As Kevis Goodman indicates, the poem’s treatment of commerce near and far, official and clandestine (see lines 175–193), deeply enmeshes the present world with the metageography of imperial capitalism, but this present is in turn set in relation to other metageographies and other temporal modalities that both subsume and obviate the present’s claim to singular attention.32 In Nelson Goodman’s terms, the poem provides the substrate for multiple world versions while at the same time emphasizing that worlding is not and never can be a totalizing poetic. Rather it is riven by precarity and disaggregation. These key counterbalancing forces to organic forms susceptibility to normative totalization are formally encoded into the poem itself—it coheres, but as an aggregate not an organic totality—and thematized in the closing story of Parson Darby—a narrative that Smith carefully notes was related to her “thirty years” before at roughly the time when the American War started. That dating may or may not be significant, but the fact that it is the shepherds of Beachy Head who come to search for one who adapted to life in the saltwater littoral is auspicious. Parson Darby drowns in that world trying to save other endangered denizens of the saltwater littoral, but in a remarkable turn it is his pastoral peers who come to retrieve and honor him. Smith emphasizes that their recognition of him is distinct from grief, their affective relation to him is not for the self- same, but for one whose alienation resembles Smith’s own misery and her exilic poetic persona—it is as though the inhabitants of the riparian world have come
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to testify to the importance of Smith’s littoral zone. Unlike in Elegiac Sonnets where t hese forms of sociability and tradition seem ineluctably alien to one another, “Beachy Head” brings t hese avatars of the pastoral and littoral worlds into affective proximity and thus recognizes their place in a new world that holds them both. Smith’s poem is rigorous in its establishment of the terms on which t hese worlds can be made coextensive b ecause the poem explicitly places this world on a precarious margin that is tied to global war and to colonial exploitation. I think this is why, in a poem so brimming with life, that in “Beachy Head” a fleeting resolution of social and poetic worlds, between pastoral and littoral, nonetheless occurs under the sign of death.
Notes 1. See Pheng Cheah’s “World against Globe: T oward a Normative Conception of World Literature,” New Literary History 45, no. 3 (2014): 303–329. For Cheah, a world far exceeds the “Mercatorian space” of the globe; it is a temporal modality, a state of being whose “unity and permanence is premised on the persistence of time.” Cheah’s key recognition is that figuring the world as a chartable space naturalizes the logic of capitalist globalization. That naturalization requires that we ignore how worlds are made in and sustained across time. As David Fallon summarizes in “In Lately Sprung up in America: Ann Bradstreet’s Untimely Worldmaking,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 18, no. 4 (Fall 2018), “It is time that gives worlds their normative force” (105). 2. Coastal space is important to Smith’s novels as well. See Zoë Kinsley, “ ‘Ever Restless Waters’: Female Identity and Coastal Space in Charlotte Smith’s The Young Philosopher,” in Gender and Space in British Literature, 1660–1820, ed. Mona Narain and Karen Gevirtz (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), 101–115. 3. William Cowper, The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, vol. 4, ed. James King and Charles Ryskamp (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 1.555 (hereafter cited parenthetically by volume and page number). 4. Daniel O’Quinn, Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). 5. Thomas Warton, “Sonnet IX. To the River Lodon,” in Poems. A New Edition, with Additions (London, 1777), 83. 6. David Fairer, Organizing Poetry: The Coleridge Circle, 1790–1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 108. 7. Bethan Roberts, “Literary Past and Present in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 54, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 652–653. 8. Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets (1786), 15. Henceforth I indicate the year of the edition in which the sonnet first appeared in the text but refer the reader to the page number in Stuart Curran’s standard edition of The Poems of Charlotte Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 9. Roberts, “Literary Past and Present,” 653. 10. Roberts, “Literary Past and Present,” 656. 11. See Daniel Chonitz and Marcus Rossberg, “Nelson Goodman,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2020/entries/goodman/. 12. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978), 3. He makes a similar point in his discussion of “invention” in Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968), 31–33. 13. Jacqueline M. Labbe, Writing Romanticism: Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth, 1784–1807 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2011), 87.
86 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 14. Christopher Stokes, “Lorn Subjects: Haunting, Fracture, and Ascesis in Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets,” Women’s Writing 16, no. 1 (May 2009): 143–160. 15. Bethan Roberts’s Charlotte Smith and the Sonnet: Form, Place and Tradition in the Late Eighteenth Century (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2019), 71–81, also sees the seashore sonnets as an unmistakable innovation and pursues the religious implications of her break with riparian tradition. An expansion of her 2014 essay, this monograph provides the most exhaustive and persuasive account of how space and poetic tradition are deeply entwined in the Elegiac Sonnets. 16. Roberts, “Literary Past and Present,” 664. 17. This argument is consonant with Anne D. Wallace’s “Interfusing Living and Nonliving in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Beachy Head,’ ” Wordsworth Circle 50, no. 1 (2019): 1–19. 18. Numerous critics have pointed out the relative paucity of oceanic writing in the eigh teenth century. See Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea: The Discovery of the Seaside in the Western World 1750–1840, trans. Jocelyn Phelps (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994). 19. Kevis Goodman, “Conjectures on Beachy Head: Charlotte Smith’s Geological Poetics and the Ground of the Present,” ELH 81, no. 3 (Fall 2014): 983–1006. 20. See Giovanni Arrighi, The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of our Times (London: Verso, 2010), 28–59. 21. See Ashley Cohen, The Global Indies: British Imperial Culture and the Reshaping of the World, 1756–1815 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020), 1–26, for a detailed discussion of the “Two Indies” mentality. 22. On the vicissitudes of wartime, see Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 54–70. 23. Seward termed this repetitive melancholy as Smith’s “everlasting lamentables.” See Letters of Anna Seward: Written Between the Years 1787 and 1807, 6 vols. (Edinburgh, 1811), 2:287. 24. Cheah, “World against Globe,” 303. 25. On this point, see J. G. A. Pocock, “Political Thought in the English-Speaking Atlantic, 1760–1790: (i) The Imperial Crisis,” in Pocock, Variet ies of British Political Thought 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 257–267. 26. This refers to Lauren Berlant’s understanding of the mediation of crisis in Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 3–16. 27. This is a crucial part of Kevis Goodman’s argument as well. See her opening theoretical discussion of mediating the present (“Conjectures on Beachy Head,” 984–987). 28. All references to Beachy Head are to Curran’s Poems of Charlotte Smith (1993). 29. See Theresa M. Kelley, “Romantic Histories: Charlotte Smith and Beachy Head,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59, no. 3 (December 2004): 281–314, and Anne D. Wallace, “Picturesque Fossils, Sublime Geology? The Crisis of Authority in Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head,” European Romantic Review 13, no. 1 (2002): 77–93. 30. For a succinct discussion of this avowedly Heideggerian notion of worlding and its relation to poetry, see Tom Clark, Emily Finlay, and Philippa Kelly, Worldmaking: Litera ture, Language, Culture (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017), 1–5. 31. Written to celebrate the Treaty of Utrecht, Pope’s “Windsor Forest” devises complex strategies for deploying pastoral tropes to incorporate fantasies of imperial global power. At least since Laura Brown’s compelling reading of the “dying pheasant” and the reversing flow of the Thames, critics have associated this poem with the establishment of the first British Empire. In the terms set forward in this essay it is notable that Pope’s meta-geography is thoroughly riparian: the riches of the colonial world and the peoples who so benignly migrate up the Thames come into representation only when they are within the precincts of the river (383–480). In this context, Smith’s “Beachy Head” is the cognate poem for the
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second British empire. Although this is not the place to elaborate in detail on their contrasting worlds, it is worth noting that the cost of empire, figured so powerfully by the dying pheasant in “Windsor Forest” (111–118), has been fully humanized in “Beachy Head,” and perhaps even more radically, brought fully home in the figure of Parson Derby. Allegory affords Pope requisite distance for contemplation that Smith boldly eschews. 32. See Goodman, “Conjectures on Beachy Head,” 999.
Worldmaking a rt i fac t s , c o l l e c t io n s , a n d m at e r i a l c u lt u r e
The Tree and the World Chris Barrett
In his 1692 The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, Royal Society fellow John Ray attempts to estimate the number of insects, fishes, plants, and other living beings in the world. Thinking specifically of plant types, Ray points to the some six thousand kinds of plants listed in Caspar Bauhin’s 1623 Pinax theatri botanici and hypothesizes that t here might be more than three times that number of species in the world, “there being,” he explains, “in the vast continent of America as great a variety of Species as with us, and yet but few common to Europe, or perhaps Africk and Asia, and if, on the other side of the Equator, there be much Land still remaining undiscovered as probably there may, we must suppose the number of Plants to be far greater.” 1 Ray’s back-of-t he- envelope estimate puts the known landmasses of the earth in the serv ice of vegetal knowledge: the possibility of “much Land still remaining undiscovered” is significant b ecause of the yet-unknown plants growing on t hose continents. The possibility of new genres of plants drives Ray’s worldmaking imagination. Ray’s combination of geographic speculation and vegetal inquiry fits with the early modern Eng lish interest in natural philosophy—in part icu lar with the encyclopedic and imperialist drive to catalogue and gather specimens of all the vegetal types on the planet. Yet audible, too, in Ray’s numerical musing, is another sense of how the variety and vastness of the vegetal world s haped early modern English conceptions of the world. When Ray sets out to attach a number to the numerous plants of the earth, he invokes a planetary immensity, setting the known and unknown world before the reader in order to access a truth about the vegetal. The point of the world containing lands that are known and lands that are unknown is, for Ray, that there are plants in all those places. Plants attach to all the lands of the earth, and the drive to know the green world by its kinds is what leads to Ray’s speculative worldmaking. Later, anticipating and dispensing with the argument that the vegetal world is valuable only because 91
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of the uses it affords humanity, Ray goes on to declare, “For my part, I cannot believe that all the t hings in the World w ere so made for Man, that they have no other use.” He continues, thinking specifically of those undiscovered living t hings on unknown lands, “I believe t here are many Species in Nature, which were never yet taken notice of by Man, and consequently of no use to him, which yet we are not to think w ere created in vain; but it’s likely . . . partake of the overflowing Goodness of the Creator, and enjoy their own Beings.” 2 Ray’s effort to understand the vegetal world thus involves a sort of stereoscopic view of the world itself. On the one hand, plants activate an interest in the world’s diversity of places: the vegetal is key to generating a coherent sense of the world as an integrated conceptual w holeness. At the same time, the world is already understood by plants who engage—entirely independently of h umans—in “enjoy[ing] their own Beings,” and leading lives outside the telos of h uman exploitation. While plants might be essential to Ray’s conceptualization of the planet’s entirety, Ray acknowledges, too, that plants might be engaging in their own activities beyond instrumentalization in classificatory systems of knowledge and the concomitant organization of the planet. This article considers several early modern texts that sought, as Ray does here, to imagine not just the world from a plant’s position, but the world as made alongside and in collaboration with plants; these are texts of vegetal worldmaking. Following Ayesha Ramachandran’s account of worldmaking as “the methods by which early modern thinkers sought to imagine, shape, revise, control, and articulate the dimensions of the world,” seeking “a comprehensive vision of the whole—global and eventually cosmic—by attending not only to large- scale macro-historical processes, but to the conceptual, imaginative, and metaphysical challenges posed by the task of envisioning an abstract totality,” 3 I suggest that early modern Eng lish writers sought to conceptualize the integrated wholeness of the world by thinking its representational possibilities in terms of the vegetal, and in particular the tree. Paradigms had long existed for using the imagery, metaphor, and study of plants, and Renaissance and early modern European writers let the vegetal undergird logics of nation, place, religion, and more.4 Indeed, for some writers, even the idea of a planetary globe demanded plants: reflecting in the 1550s on the interconnectedness of all the seas of the earth, Jean de Léry postulates that all the visible landmasses of the world are “likewise all conjoined, and bound together as it were by roots, in the deep hollows of the seas.” 5 Later, natural philosophical inquiries would suggest, as Nehemiah Grew does in his dedicatory epistle to The Anatomy of Plants, that the (microscopy-assisted) study of plants themselves yielded “a new World, whereof we see no end.” 6 Yet t here emerges in early modern English literature a sense that plants have a worldmaking power beyond being objects of inquiry or vehicles of abstraction, that their noninstrumentalization might actually be key to better articulating—and by articulating,
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realizing—a world differently structured and inhabited. As Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman note, “The worldmaking of a text may not coincide with a representational aim of reproducing a known world.” 7 In some ways, the efforts of t hose writers, who sought to make world-shaping narratives with vegetal partners, and not just out of them, resemble Donna Haraway’s preoccupation with “multispecies storytelling” and its “possibilities of partial recuperation and getting on together.” 8 Positing that “it m atters what matters we use to think other matters with; it m atters what stories we tell to tell other stories with . . . it matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories,” Haraway links the work of worldmaking with that of narrative, and specifically with narrative attuned to complexity, difference, trouble.9 For the writers I consider in the coming pages, the narration of the world demanded a green kind of poiesis, a simultaneous making of a global story, and making of a discourse capable of engaging plants in at least aspirationally nonexploitative ways. The curious library of works I consider here range from dialogues with trees to treatises envisioning cross-species planty publics and poetic accounts of vegetal metamorphoses. Each of them seeks to articulate both a concept of the world’s totality (along varied disciplinary axes) and the representational modes best suited to that conceptualization; and each of t hese texts, while leaning into the possibilities of focalizing worldmaking through the vegetal, also registers the insufficiency of available genres for representing a planetary whole comprising living beings whose shared vulnerability undercuts efforts to divide them. These texts—some earnest attempts to consider the subjectivity of plants, some acts of interested if humane ventriloquism—propose a generically improper way of worldmaking, ultimately suggesting that the error of nonvegetal worldmaking has something to do with the delimitable quality of narrative itself. These efforts to consider the work of worldmaking with or alongside vegetal collaborators unfolded across diverse texts, each of which exists in complicated relationship to its nearest peers; indeed, t hese are misfit texts, whose imagination of vegetal worldmaking seems to have made it difficult to assimilate them into preexisting genres. And that is precisely why I am fascinated by t hese texts: this effort to imagine worldmaking with and not through plant life severs t hese works from regimes of genre expectation in ways that lead me to ask if generic impropriety might be the key to early modern critiques of worldmaking rooted in instrumentalist logics of divisive classification. That is, does the poiesis of worldmaking, when activated by a sense of the interiority or maybe even subjectivity of vegetal life, create new poetics unassimilable to existing generic worlds? Let me begin this consideration with a work that foregrounds poetry as a form of worldmaking. Margaret Cavendish’s “A Dialogue between an Oake, and a Man Cutting Him Downe” appears in Poems and Fancies (1653), a volume largely dedicated to speculation about the nature of the world and how knowledge of
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its smallest and largest components (from atoms to stars) might be integrated into a conceptual whole.10 Indeed, the poem appears in the midst of a series of dialogues (“betwixt Man, and Nature,” e.g.) and following the initial collection of poems (“Nature Calls a Councell, Which Was Motion, Figure, M atter, and Life, to Advise about Making the World,” or “A World Made by Atomes,” or “Of Many Worlds in This World”) that collectively interrogate the way the cosmos might be understood. While the poem is among numerous philosophical dialogue poems in the volume (as “between Melancholy, and Mirth” or “between Love, and Hate”), the conversation that emerges in the text points to the continuity of embodied feeling across beings, and to a kind of worldmaking in photonegative: by rejecting the totalizing narratives of politics, society, and colonial endeavor outlined by the human interlocutor in the poem, the arboreal speaker proposes an inclusive account of a world organized and perceived by the injury its inhabitants suffer and impose. In “A Dialogue,” a tree initiates a conversation with a woodcutter, indignantly asking in the first lines why the man is seeking to cut the tree’s boughs. The oak outlines a theory of the world as defined in opposition to the ambitions of h umans and contoured by degrees of pain. The talkative oak begins with a list of injuries at h uman hands, injuries like being cut, burned, peeled, chopped, lopped, and minced. Cavendish’s oak demands sympathy, and while the woodcutter does not seem to manage such compassion, he does eventually recognize in the tree’s speaking itself a kind of sense, the existence of which convinces him, eventually, to walk away with his axe. Throughout the conversation, though, the woodcutter seeks to persuade the oak to participate in any of multiple discourses inflected by early modern worldmaking: politics, society, and coloniality. W ouldn’t the oak like to die before, like an old king, younger subjects grow discontented and resentful of him? The tree answers no, t here is no need to engage in any consideration of others’ opinions, beyond “live[ing] the Life that Nature gave,” implicitly one unconditioned by such dis/affiliations. Wouldn’t the oak like to be a h ouse, the woodcutter asks, and enjoy m usic and gatherings and company? But the tree wants none of it, literally refusing to be part of a society of h ousehold (and in so d oing rejecting the oikos at the root of ecology’s familiar etymology). Yet the inquiry I want to linger over in this back-and-forth comes when the woodcutter suggests to the tree “thou liv’st in Ignorance, / And never seek’st thy Knowledge to advance. / I’le cut the downe, ’cause Knowledge thou maist gaine, / Shalt be a Ship, to traffick on the Maine.” It becomes clear that the woodcutter has in mind the familiar metonym of the oak for the sort of ship ready to advance the colonial enterprise of the nation, an enterprise explicitly connected to the cutting of trees, as Vincent Nardizzi notes: the deforestation of English forests and resulting scarcity of shipbuilding timber was among the reasons touted for undertaking overseas ventures.11 The woodcutter’s imagined ship is the sort to
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“cut the Seas in two,” with “thy Sharpe Keele the watry Wombe doth teare,” en route “round the World, new Land to find, / That from the rest is of another kind.” That venture, naturalized with gendered violence as access to “the watry Wombe” of the seas, leads to places “of another kind,” and t here is something in this insidious “another kind”—already built on misogyny and colonialism—that inaugurates in the tree a remarkable resistance. The oak, in response, anticipates the many dangers of such a transformation into a ship: being split into “sundry peeces” in a wreck, being beaten by waves, catching cold from the damp, and, in a stunning few lines, chilling dangers: And greedy Merchants may me over-fraight, So should I drowned be with my owne weight. Besides with Sailes, and Ropes my Body tye, Just like a Prisoner, have no Liberty.
The tree looks at the knowledge of the world brought by participation in colonial undertaking and sees pain—and pain specifically rendered with analogy to “a Prisoner,” transported without “Liberty.” In resisting this fate, the oak invokes a shared vulnerability with forcibly transported persons, and on the basis of this pain, rejects the enterprise that would impose it. I do not want to make facile suggestions about the resonance of t hese lines amid the contemporary trafficking of enslaved p eople. But it is clear that the oak here rejects the kinds of interlocking systems of oppression the woodcutter celebrates as generative of the knowledge of “kind,” and instead speaks in a way that figures the world as a space of interlacing vulnerabilities. In critiquing the woodcutter’s vision of a knowable world, differently navigable depending on subject positionality, the tree outlines a theory of the world as being assembled from pains that are at least analogous, if not outright similar, to injuries that exist on the same continuum of experience. This at least imaginable continuity of experience governs the world vision articulated by the several trees who converse with the husbandman, the avatar of arborist and gardener Ralph Austen, in his 1676 A Dialogue (or Familiar Discourse) and Conference betweene the Husbandman and Fruit-Trees.12 Indeed, one of the first things the trees do is dispense with the sorts of kinds that would interrupt a conversation before it could begin. The husbandman, having noted to the trees that “it is knowne yee can speake very intelligibly, and convincingly, to the minds, and consciences of men,” asks the trees, “What language is it that yee speake, is it English, or Latin, Greek, or Hebrew, or what other Language else, wherein yee discourse with men?” The trees reply, “We can speake all Languages; We can discourse with any People, or Nation, in any Language whatsoever; according as p eople please to discourse with us, so we Answer them; every man in his owne Language.” 13 The polyglot trees immediately discard divisions of language and nation, outlining a posture of radical openness to communication.
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This movement away from specificity of language and nation at first surprises, given the nearest comparator volumes to this one. Works like Austen’s, celebrating and instructing in arboriculture, often spoke explicitly to the specifically nationalistic merits of cultivating trees. Charles Cotton’s The Planters Manual (1675) asserts, somewhat Austen-like, that “Fruit-Trees are no Contrabanded Commodity betwixt the Nations,” but then turns the point to nationalistic purpose, urging somewhat xenophobically that in the interests of “the honour of the Eng lish Nation,” it might behoove planters to “better our selves by them [other countries whence the trees come] this way,” instead of being “Frenchified” in manner and fashion.14 John Evelyn’s landmark Sylva: or, A Discourse of Forest- Trees (delivered 1662, printed 1664) begins by urging the remediation of deforestation, lest the loss of the timber resources weaken “the strength of this famous and flourishing Nation.” 15 Yet Austen’s trees seem unconcerned about speaking in English or any other tongue—and unconcerned, too, with the implied industrial and military projects a “famous and flourishing Nation” requires in Evelyn’s pragmatic account. The world, to Austen’s trees, is wholly intelligible, undivided by nation or idiom, available for conversation at w ill. If Cavendish’s oak imagines a world in which trees and h umans suffer pain that is discursively sharable, Austen’s trees imagine a world in which discourse itself is sharable. This is, after all, a dialogue. And while the dialogue might unavoidably be the product of ventriloquism (however admiring), it nonetheless foregrounds Austen’s account of the entanglement of material and discursive dimensions of human and nonhuman ecological participants. That entanglement extends to this volume’s multiple genres; Austen’s quirky text combines, among other genres, spiritual dialogues (in which the represented conversation enlightens the faithful reader through an avatar interlocutor) and arboriculture treatises (providing guidance and advice for planting and maintaining an orchard). Austen’s garrulous trees offer instruction that seems to straddle both registers, sometimes extrapolating, from the workings of trees, the workings of entire ecosystems and human communities. According to the trees, for example, “many severall Substances are made of one simple substance: For of the Sap of Trees is made the Barke, Wood, Pith, Leaves, Buds, Blossoms, Stalks, Fruit, and Seed: drawne from the same juyce of the Earth”—a lesson that leads to the conclusion, “By all which we [humans] should learne to owne, and love one another; and to be usefull, and serviceable one to another; e very one according to the Gifts, and Talents which God hath given unto them; Let not the Rich dispise the poore, nor the Poore envie the Rich; let not the wise, and Learned, despise the meaner sort, who want what they themselves have.” 16 The trees envision a world in which all are parts of a w hole: arboreal worldmaking depends on a unifying origin, whence the variety of experience emerges. W hether the parts of a tree or large-scale socioeconomic swaths of society, to the tree, the world is a forest, with bark, wood, pith, leaves, buds, blossoms, stalks, fruit, and
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seeds all drawn from the same earth, and this demands affirmative care among t hose parts. Those parts might seem at first to be l imited by species: the tree understands its diverse components to be members of the same arboreal body, and so humans should understand their diverse membership to be so, too. And yet, as much as the linguistic range of the trees is not l imited to a single language, the sociability the trees model for humans is not limited to a single species. In his Treatise of Fruit-Trees, Austen points out that from antiquity to the present moment, all people—w ise or not, corrupt or not—have been united in their love of trees and their cultivation: the “general consent of all p eople” points to a shared commu17 nity convened by the arboreal. Reveling in the glory of trees, the husbandman shares an epiphany with the reader: But this delight in Fruit-trees in Orchards and Gardens (in a kind of Communion, and complacency with them) it shaddows out unto us a great, and singular mistery, and a priviledge of beleevers . . . t hat is; Communion, and Fellowship with God. . . . And herein we need not restraine or lymitt our love, and affections, as we o ught to do towards the Creatures; all we have, or can let out, is too little, and small for this inifinitely best Object of Love: Communion with, and delight in all other Objects, must be subordinate unto this; for all the good, and desireablenesse of the Creatures, are but so many Drops derived from this infinite Ocean.18
To appreciate a tree (in what the husbandman insists must be only to an appropriately moderate degree) opens the heart to appreciating all the “Creatures” and “Objects” of the world, an affective practice that unfolds a transcendent, cosmic inclusivity. The trees lead the husbandman to conceptualize the world as a divine ocean, with all its created beings drops suggestive of a transcendent whole. Carl Phelpstead proposes redefining ecocriticism as cosmocriticism, a term that foregrounds the degree to which the environment and nonhuman world at the center of such critical inquiry should include the superlunary and divine figures that are so vital to the worldmaking of centuries of literature and thought.19 Austen’s trees tutor their husbandman in a radically inclusive vision of a multispecies world of mortal and immortal beings. The trees instruct in how to dress a trunk, care for branches, harvest fruit; how to imitate trees in their steadfastness, their egalitarian leanings, their spiritual exemplarity. Amid all these lessons, the trees confer knowledge of a world-shaping ideal: a trans-species communitarian ethos of joyous admiration, unconstrained by language or national boundary, that leads to transcendent communion with the divine. Austen’s faith in the instructively worldmaking power of trees puts him in company with vicar and gardener William Lawson. In a later edition of his influential A New Orchard and Garden—which combines recommendations for caring for trees and plants with reflections on their practical and personal
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benefits—Lawson is prompted to imagine the planet as a human body, with trees as the hairs on its surface.20 This global vision complements the theory of social living undergirding Lawson’s account of both trees and h umans: the interactions among t hese parties might be fraught or genial. Lawson reminds the reader, “Therefore at the setting of your plants, you must have such respect, that the distance of them be such, that e very tree be not annoyance, but an help to his fellowes,” 21 but they are inveterately communal, in ways recognizable across species. Even Lawson’s suggestion about the best way to avoid having one’s fruit pilfered off mature trees is to be generous with giving away the fruit: “liberality w ill save it best from noisome neighbours, liberality I say is the best fence.” 22 For Lawson, as others, the tree invites conceptualization of the world, both as a planetary totality and as a coherent account of individuals’ interactions; in the former case, the world picture requires imagining h uman and arboreal embodiment as being at least homologous, and in the latter case, the world as shaped by trees links neighbors and plants in a cooperative multispecies economy. Both conceptual maps demand deprioritizing distinctions as dispositive. Something of this cosmological shaping and communal theorizing structures, too, the encounters with the oak tree in Aemilia Lanyer’s “The Description of Cooke-ham.” 23 A literary experiment that inaugurates the country house poem in English, Lanyer’s poem likewise seeks to conceptualize a world order, one in this case centered on a specific locale and, implicitly, a single tree. If Cavendish’s oak articulates a multispecies world community hostile to division in kinds and joined in its overlapping vulnerabilities to harm, and Austen’s trees lead him to a transcendent vision of all created beings as distinct and as unified as drops of water in a cosmic ocean, Lanyer’s oak sits at the center of a cross-species community characterized by the conduction of desire. The poem suggests that the many nonhuman inhabitants of the Cooke-ham estate react with perceptible emotion to the comings and g oings of Lanyer’s patron Margaret, Countess of Cumberland, along with her daughter Lady Anne Clifford and Lanyer herself. The flowers, hills, birds, winds, and more all celebrate their arrival, including “The Trees,” who “with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad, / Embrac’d each other, seeming to be glad.” The conceit of a joyful nature celebrating the arrival of a poem’s honoree seems at first an anthropocentric projection onto the nonhuman, representing them as existing solely to elevate the human guest. Yet the intra-arboreal affection among the trees—their embrace of one another—introduces at least the possibility of acknowledging the affective lives of these beings, who might celebrate the Countess of Cumberland, but who simultaneously inhabit emotional landscapes of their own. Among t hese beings whose interiority is imagined (even if, in part, to center the greatness of Lanyer’s human companions), and imagined as being both perceptible and representable, is the “stately Tree,” an august oak, under which these human visitors to the estate often sat. The oak, “seeming joyfull in receiving
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thee,” was “Desirous that you t here [in its shade] should make abode,” and would be found “Joying his happinesse when you w ere t here.” The literary gesture h ere might be one of anthropomorphic projection—but it is also, on some level, a countenancing of vegetal emotion, and that exploration of the relationship between the tree and these human companions introduces the passage in which the poem’s scale of reference moves from the specifically local to the global and abstract. The tree’s location offers a prospect of “Hills, vales, and woods,” which then are absorbed into “thirteene shires,” “A Prospect fit to please the eyes of Kings.” This motion from the estate to the county to the nation continues to the continent, with the observation that “Europe could not affoard much more delight,” and then to the sprawling community of Judeo-Christian belief: the Countess is said to “walke, / With Christ and his Apostles there to talke.” Finally, at the midpoint of the poem, Lanyer’s poetic persona invokes the difference in her and her companions’ social standing, by way of pointing to “t hose Orbes of state” and to the ability, even of t hose “but borne of earth” to “behold the Heavens.” That is, from the nearby hills to the shape of the cosmos, the recognition (if an artifact of a technique for flattering the Countess) of the possibility of vegetal feeling occasions and sustains the poem’s progressive conceptualization of a planetary wholeness, and of the systems in place for administering its riches. There is no worldmaking without plant partners in the endeavor: a multispecies community makes possible the idea of world. For Lanyer’s poem, the potential for perceiving the existence of plants’ emotions is bound up in the work of worldmaking; and in a later moment, amid the farewells of these three women to the estate, it becomes clear that the world made by the poem’s engagement with the vegetal is characterized by the conduction of desire. If the embraces of trees signal the emotional interiority of the vegetal, a kiss establishes the interspecies relationships on which worldmaking is built. When the countess “with a chaste, yet loving kisse tooke leave” of the oak, Lanyer’s poetic persona kisses the tree to appropriate that kiss: “Of which sweet kisse I did it soone bereave,” stealing this “So rare a favour, so g reat happinesse.” The tree is able to transfer this kiss (which may be, among other t hings, metonymy for the richness and intimacy of this unusual community) between persons otherw ise separated by class and policed by gender. The tree stands at the center of this network of relationships around which the world is made in Lanyer’s text, making clear that the shape of the world begins and ends with the willingness to take vegetal beings as partners. Lanyer’s text shares with Cavendish’s, Austen’s, and Lawson’s a backdrop that lends to the farewell to Cooke-ham’s oak an especial poignancy: all t hese texts appear in print amid seventeenth-century England’s persistent crisis of deforestation, a long-running difficulty made especially acute for the l ater writers by the English Civil War’s ravages. Nardizzi notes that the price of wood—essential for daily life—skyrocketed in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries,
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the result of a resource crisis.24 In the late sixteenth c entury, the sudden dominance of E ngland’s navy demanded enormous amounts of timber suitable for shipbuilding, while the making of iron (especially for arms) similarly required significant amounts of wood. Indeed, as Anne Barton points out, Elizabeth I had to sell parts of her royal forests to fund her wars in Ireland.25 By midcentury, as Diane Kelsey McColley observes, “Trees were cut by both sides in the civil wars and by both monarchs and Protector to pay the King’s and the Commonwealth’s war bills, to feed and warm the poor in hard times, and to replenish the naval fleet and increase trade.” 26 In this light, Lanyer’s (triangulated) affection for the oak on the Cooke-ham estate, or Cavendish’s openness to the desire of a tree to remain in the forest, seems all the more arresting, as she imagines a world in which trees need not be understood primarily as commodity, but rather as interlocutors. At the same time, t hese texts also share something else—a formal creativity or generic willfulness, exploring new modes of narrative and expression in order to present worldmaking with t hese vegetal beings as something requiring the deprioritization of genre. This might be connected to the vanishing of the woods that haunts the period of t hese texts’ composition; as Rob Nixon points out, in speaking of narrative in our own moment of ecological crisis, new representa tional modes are needed to account for the “slow violence” of environmental degradation.27 Facing the progressive deforestation of the nation, these writers might have sought new forms—in an era of formal experimentation—to account for the sense of loss and anxiety introduced by such shortages. I have been suggesting throughout this article, though, that t here might be something about the tree as worldmaking partner that does not like a genre, and that in order to engage in worldmaking with the vegetal world, a text needs to extricate itself from generic expectation as a form of classification. Cavendish’s oak rejects participation in the systems of suffering built on “another kind,” and Austen’s trees lead him to see an oceanic world of droplets ungenre-able in the cosmic sea. Moved to think the world and trees as a human body, Lawson encourages the reader to downplay the distinction between a neighbor and oneself when it comes to the product of fruit trees, with generosity taking the place of a fence. And Lanyer’s triangulating affection with a tree makes possible transcendence— however ephemeral or oblique—of the class difference between her and her patroness. If genre might be understood as a means of organizing difference in ways that can reify it, t hese texts suggest that this process of identification and classification might be hostile to vegetal worldmaking. This antipathy of the vegetal, in the interest of imagining h uman and nonhuman entanglement, to the making of genre seems to subtend a wide array of early modern texts interested in the project of worldmaking. In these last couple pages, let me consider the early modern fascination with two classical sites at which worldmaking, genre, and the vegetal intersect—t he dendrification nar-
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ratives of Daphne into a laurel tree, and of Polydorus into a myrtle copse. Both moments position worldmaking as dovetailing with the intimate cooperation of person and plant, but they are also illuminatingly traumatic sites, at which genre is established or concretized, and their popular invocation points to the classificatory violence certain early modern texts sought to unwrite in imagining worldmaking with different stories. Classical antiquity bequeathed the early modern a bevy of p eople who turn into plants: Baucis and Philemon (oak and linden trees), Carya (walnut tree), Cyparissus (cypress), Dryope (black poplar), Hyacinth, Lotis (lotus), Minthe (mint), Myrrha (myrrh tree), Narcissus, Syrinx (reed), and more, but two vegetal transformations in particular haunted the early modern poetic imaginary. The first appears in book 1 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which outlines the origins of the world. Early in the new-built world, Apollo is lovestruck for the nymph Daphne, who wants none of Apollo’s affections. Chasing her as she runs from him, Apollo urges her to consider the ways he is himself the agent of making worlds, in e very dimension of poiesis: “Through me, all is revealed: what’s yet to be, / what was, and what now is. The harmony / of song and lyre is achieved through me,” he tells her.28 But Daphne wants no part of this, and her prayers for delivery are answered with her transformation into a laurel tree. The god of poetry and of worded worldmaking responds to Daphne’s metamorphosis by using the laurel’s branches and leaves to adorn his lyre, whence the lyric tradition. The origin of this genre for the Renaissance, then, is a story of attempted assault, wherein the supernatural agent of poiesis itself creates a genre out of the fusing of person and vegetal life. At the moment different kinds of beings (trees and persons) are shown to be porous to one another, worldmaking’s avatar insists on the formation of generic specificity. The trauma of Daphne’s emergency trans- species collaboration produces lyric, a specific kind of poetry, and one that carries with it the memory of naturalized violence. This account of the lyric poetry’s origins held such purchase in the Renais sance that it was rehearsed widely, in texts from the courtly to the bawdy. Yet because of its conventionality, Daphne’s dendrification grounds some of early modern English literature’s most audacious critiques of genre, works in which generic experimentation authorizes the imagination of more collaborative ecologies, in which difference in being does not presuppose instrumentalization or the trauma of classificatory division. Consider, for example, Milton’s A Mask at Ludlow Castle (1634, published 1637), which itself strips away so much of the genre’s conspicuous consumption and monarchical adoration to produce a reformed version centered on language in a forest setting.29 When Comus abducts the Lady in the woods, he secures her to a chair in a manner explicitly linked to Ovid’s tale of metamorphosis: “Nay Ladie sit,” he tells his prisoner, “if I but wave this wand, / Your nervs are all chain’d up in alablaster, / And you a statue; or as Daphne was / Root bound that fled Apollo.” The menace of assault becomes
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explicit in the invocation of Daphne’s story, but Milton’s Lady makes this text an opportunity to rewrite Daphne’s Ovidian silence. Whereas Daphne’s voice is displaced, post-dendrification, to Apollo’s lyre, the Lady’s response to Comus makes clear that, as a new Daphne, she w ill speak as though from within the tree: “Thou canst not touch the freedome of my mind / Withall thy charms, although this corporall rind / Thou hast immanacl’d.” The Lady here insists on a kind of untouchable interiority, borrowing from the long history of vegetal metamorphosis a sense that an inaccessible sentience inhabits the plant. A willingness to posit a vegetal self-sufficiency independent of instrumentalization undergirds this generically innovative text, a text in which the delivery of its main character is accomplished by the cooperation of another being of ontological porosity, Sabrina, a human-turned-river. If Milton’s Mask reimagines its genre in part by rewriting Daphne’s dendrification to reflect not the use value of plants but the mutual recognizability of interdependent ecological agents, Spenser’s Faerie Queene undertakes its own generic experiment by rewriting the epic’s dendrification locus classicus, the case of Polydorus.30 In Virgil’s Aeneid, the paradigmatic epic for early modern writers, Polydorus is betrayed by the king who was supposed to protect this son of Troy; in book 3, the murdered Polydorus speaks from the myrtle grove that sprouts from the spears in his corpse when Aeneas, searching for the site of the new Troy (itself perhaps an act of worldmaking), arrives on this Thracian beach and inadvertently tears some of the myrtle shoots. While Daphne haunts the background of early modern lyric writing, the specter of Polydorus shades the early modern epic, appearing in iterated forms (in Dante’s Inferno, for example, or Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso) before arriving in book 1 of Spenser’s poem, when the hero Red Cross Knight encounters the unfortunate Fraudubio, a former knight transformed with his erstwhile girlfriend Fraelissa into a tree by the sorceress Duessa (now disguised as Fidessa and traveling with the unknowing Red Cross). As is usual in texts evoking the Polydorus case, the conversation with the tree begins with an act of damage: Red Cross pulls a bough in order to make a garland and is horrified when blood and a voice both issue from the wound. Fraudubio describes the physical susceptibility of his tree shape to environmental damage: “plast in open plaines, / Where Boreas doth blow full bitter bleake, / And scorching Sunne does dry my secret vaines: / For though a tree I seeme, yet cold and heat me paine,” he says, plaintively outlining a world of ambient torment. To be a tree, it seems, is to be vulnerable to a world hostile to this shape, and to endure it indefinitely: when asked how long they have to remain, in Fraudubio’s words, “enclosd in wooden wals full faste” (1.2.42.8), Fraudubio points to the end times in which he and Fraelissa might be “bathed in a living well,” and that only “Time and suffised fates to former kind / S hall us restore” (1.2.43.4, 8–9).
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For Spenser, the Fraudubio episode lacks the narrative utility of the Aeneid’s Polydorus episode: unlike Aeneas, Red Cross does not take any lesson for himself from his conversation with Fraudubio, carryi ng on instead with the very Duessa from whom Fraudubio sought to protect the knight. Yet the episode’s inutility is precisely what creates the conditions for its remarkable quality: it is a rare moment in the text in which a heroic character seeks to understand what it is like to inhabit an altogether different mode of being, and to construct a world around that alterity. In a poem that famously intermingles epic, romance, and allegory, this epic trope gets rewritten to eschew utility in favor of simple being- with, as ephemeral and dangerous as it might be for the parties involved. W hether lyric or epic, genre’s reliance on mythic dendrifications gets repurposed by early modern texts keen to erode the specificity of literary kind and to engage in the project of worldmaking alongside, and not by means of, the vegetal world. If worldmaking seems to have required the instrumentalization of the rigorously othered vegetal, works by Cavendish, Austen, Lanyer, Lawson, Milton, and Spenser troubled this logic, proposing instead a mode of worldmaking in which generic experiment opens up alternative ways of conceptualizing cooperation, cultivating community, and unifying accounts of the world’s totality. Th ere exists, t hese texts propose, a worldmaking poiesis that does not assume the inevitability of violence or the availability of beings to exploitation; at the center of that made world is the tree.
Notes My gratitude to the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, the Folger Library, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University for access to many of the volumes cited in this article. 1. John Ray, The Wisdom of God Manifested in the Works of Creation, 2nd ed. (London, 1692), 9–10. I have modernized the typography of f/s, u/v, i/j, and most abbreviations in quoting early modern texts throughout this article. 2. Ray, Wisdom of God, 168–169. 3. Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 6. 4. Consider, for example, Christy Wampole’s Rootedness: The Ramifications of a Meta phor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), which examines the long-standing power of this organizing trope, especially in constructing nationality, belonging, politics, philosophy, and science. Meanwhile, Maggie Campbell-Culver in A Passion for Trees: The Legacy of John Evelyn (London: Eden Project Books, Random House, 2006) notes the role of trees in religious practices and faith systems for millennia (2–3). 5. Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 201. 6. Nehemiah Grew, “To His Most Sacred Majesty Charles II, King of G reat Britain, &c.,” in The Anatomy of Plants . . . (London, 1682). 7. Introduction to The Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature, ed. Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 5.
104 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 8. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 10. 9. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, 12. 10. Margaret Cavendish, Poems, and Fancies Written by the Right Honourable, the Lady Margaret Newcastle (London, 1653), 66–70. 11. Vincent Joseph Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and E ngland’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 11. Indeed, Captain John Smith lamented the danger to “that great foundation of all Shipping; Tymber, chiefly the oak: None therefore can be ignorant of the great Wasts committed in this Nation, of all sorts of Timber and especially of this, which in the space of 100 years, but much more within t hese 30 years; so that his Majesty’s Forrests, that have most abounded with the best Materials in the World for Shopping, are very much impoverished and Decayed.” In England’s Improvement Revived: Digested into Six Books . . . (London, 1670), 7. For another instance of the oak as metonym for ship, see Moses Cook, The Manner of Raising, Ordering; And Improving Forest and Fruit-Trees (London, 1679), where verses on the oak describe the tree-turned-ship as world spanning and profit conveying for the English nation (49). 12. Ralph Austen, A Dialogue (or Familiar Discourse) and Conference betweene the Husbandman and Fruit-Trees in His Nurseries, Orchards, and Gardens (Oxford, 1676). 13. Austen, Dialogue, 1–2. 14. Charles Cotton, The Planters Manual: Being Instructions for the Raising, Planting, and Cultivating All Sorts of Fruit-Trees (London, 1675), A4r. 15. John Evelyn, Sylva: or, A Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (London, 1664), 1. 16. Austen, Dialogue, 79–80. 17. Ralph Austen, A Treatise of Fruit-Trees Shewing the Manner of Grafting, Setting, Pruning, and Ordering of Them in All Respects, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 1657), 21. 18. Austen, Dialogue, 15. 19. Carl Phelpstead, “Beyond Ecocriticism: A Cosmocritical Reading of Ælfwine’s Prayerbook,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 69, no. 291 (2018): 613–631. 20. William Lawson, A New Orchard and Garden. The first edition appeared in 1618, but the reference to trees as hairs on the planet’s surface appears in a later edition, expanded by Lawson. I have used the 1638 edition (London), in which the remark appears on p. 63. 21. Lawson, New Orchard and Garden, 28. 22. Lawson, New Orchard and Garden, 16. Austen offers the same advice in his Treatise of Fruit-Trees, 5. 23. Aemilia Lanyer, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (London, 1611), H2r–I2r. 24. Nardizzi, Wooden Os, 10–12. 25. Anne Barton, The Shakespearean Forest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 6–7. 26. Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Hampshire, UK: Ashgate, 2007), 100. 27. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 15. 28. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Harcourt, 1993), 23. 29. All quotations from A Mask are taken from the Dartmouth Milton Reading Room edition of the text: https://w ww.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/comus/text.shtml. 30. All quotations from The Faerie Queene are taken from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas P. Roche Jr. (London: Penguin, 1978).
Imperial Cosmopolitanism and the Structure of Global-Domestic Space in Enlightenment Britain Mita Choudhury
Bronze, brass, silver, stone, marble, gold, wood. Plaques, statues, monuments, pillars, mausoleums, and memorial slabs. Th ese material objects of commemoration, of remembrance, and homage are no longer sacrosanct; these have become in the twenty-first century symbols of a negotiable past, a past that is now under scrutiny, a past that is subject to interrogation and deliberation. Perhaps inevitably, the concept of Enlightenment—that amalgamated, periodized, serialized, and storied formation—is far more malleable today than it has been ever before. The most recent attacks on Western civilization evidenced in peaceful and riotous protests, and with or without explicit references to slavery in relation to modern trade practices, might be interpreted as decisive blows to the rhetoric of foundations and grand narratives of progress;1 while the outcome of t hese protests is unknown, the systemic and structural tremors and jolts might shed light on how the rude and brute force of Newtonian m atter was, by the Enlightenment, gradually hard-w ired into institutionalized practices driven by science, curiosity, discovery, colony, and empire.2 Yet stories of objects continue to bypass economies of class and divergences of culture. Equally, the glitter of the acquired object—d riving discussion of the form, size, patina, frame, placement, and provenance—deflects naturally from the artifact’s social and pol itical coordinates, its sine qua non or exchange value, or indeed the genre of money with which it was acquired as well as the ramifications of the object’s spatiotemporal dislocation, which starts at the point of acquisition.3
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I begin this essay with the familiar premise that the continuum established by a coveted object, its collector, and the collection that endows this object with its identity—this relentless and distinctly modern pattern of acquisition- ownership-framing-display—must be recognized as a significant prelude to the Anthropocene. European modernity is the starting point of what has been since then a steady assault on the environment. But the story of environmental impact of h uman behavior remains embedded in—and is made invisible by—two interrelated and visible forms of cultivation:4 First, cultivation was epitomized by exuberant urban and ex-urban development, incentivized largely by inheritance or endowment, with haute monde neoclassicism serving as the public face of institutions (national identity) as well as private residences (individual identity). Second, cultivation was codified by the unprecedented scale of both public and private collections within the resplendent buildings of which I focus here on only one. Th ere was no discord between form and content; t here was no architectural flaunt with an empty shell. Indeed, substance (weight, gravitas, encyclopedic knowledge) was plentiful—and it is in this wealth of culture and cultivation that one finds a conundrum that I describe briefly in this essay. Lacking the disciplinary rigor of an art historical approach, this essay underscores the following proposition articulated some time ago by W. J. T. Mitchell: “that pictures form a point of peculiar friction and discomfort across a broad range of intellectual inquiry.” Despite the “all- pervasive image- making” described by Mitchell, following Erwin Panofsky, a phenomenon that has increased exponentially in recent years, we continue to battle with issues of repre sentation.5 Of particu lar concern h ere is the nostalgia related to objects representing both ends of the imperial spectrum: on one end is the production and at the other is consumption, a trajectory embedded and diffused by framing and display. Nostalgic critique of t hings and objects, art and architecture, pervades discussion of worldmaking and early globalism, destroying the perspectival distance that historiography demands and the passage of time dictates. Museology brings the object close; reproduction makes it accessible. In this essay, I argue that the sustainability of high culture, its products and processes, its power to acquire objects and to exhibit them, relies upon one consistently stable factor: the emergent imperial economy of cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century Britain.6 But before launching this discussion, I offer a brief digression related not to the first successful British corporation (the East India Company, which received its charter in 1600) but the most meticulously conceived and efficiently managed one, which was established roughly 150 years later, also in the imperial capital: the British Museum, founded in 1753. Impeccable in its public serv ice mission, this institution continues to be both the epitome of the past and a majestic global classroom for our times. In this museological context, consider the story of Charles Frederick Newcombe (1851–1924), a scientist, engineer, and anthropolo-
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gist who immigrated to the United States in 1884 and, thereafter, moved to British Columbia in 1889 and acquired in 1903 at least two totem poles made by “Northwest Coast Peoples” or the Haida-speaking indigenous Americans of British Columbia and Alaska. This set of collections is made of cedar wood and was produced circa 1850. Acquisition, as we know, is the not the same as purchase or discovery; indeed, we do not and w ill never know the means by which British (and other European) anthropologists and adventurers acquired an infinite number and variety of what they considered to be unique north American objets d’art even as travel to the far corners of the globe became easier, beginning in the seventeenth c entury; the East India Company was established in 1600 and the Royal African Company in 1660. Provenance, in this imperial sense, stops to tell the story at the point at which European demand meets supply at the indigene end. Newcombe’s invisibility stands in ironic contrast to the visibility of the totem poles he acquired. Sitting as t hese “acquisitions” do in the G reat Court of the British Museum, they draw attention—t hrough their placid and elevated presence—to the dramatic circular promenade on the ground floor of the museum and to the height of the glass ceiling above, producing a grandeur for which this museum has few peers. The totem poles have thus been naturalized even as the ethos of the museum atrium is organically linked to the ethos of the distant indigenous Americans and their totemic craftsmanship.7 As it happens, t hese poles have been placed a few feet away from the entrance to the Enlightenment Room, presumably a serendipitous spatial association of nineteenth-century objects with principles and practices of discovery, collection, scientific inquiry, expansion, and empire that came to be codified systematically in the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment Room of the British Museum features innumerable sculptures and busts as well as the collections of Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, and other pillars of Enlightenment.8 In the National Portrait Gallery in London resides a painting of Joseph Banks (1743–1820), a baronet, a celebrity, and arguably the most visible among eighteenth-century explorer-cum-botanists. As Steven Shapin has pointed out, one finds in this Joshua Reynolds masterpiece (1771–1773) “the romantically unwigged young Banks with a globe and a seascape in the distant background. His left hand rests on a pile of letters, the uppermost bearing an inscription from Horace: ‘Cras Ingens Iterabimus Aequor’ (‘Tomorrow we’ll sail the vasty deep once more’). Everybody wanted to meet Banks; everybody wanted to see the spoils of his voyage.” 9 In this artistic apology for his expeditions to New Zealand, Australia, and the South Seas Reynolds might be seen as inserting an invocation of “tomorrow,” the at-once ephemeral and also an inscribed (thus material) sentiment of the spirit of the age of curiosity, discovery, and speculation—a ll harmoniously conjoined by the master painter and first president of the Royal Society (1768–1792). Moreover, the symbolic elements in this portrait might be read as producing in the contemporary spectator a sense of g reat expectation (a
Figure 1. Totem-pole, Kayang, Masset, ca. 1850. Artist unknown. © Trustees of the British Museum.
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futuristic impulse) and the assurance of the iterative (or repetitive) voyage facilitated by circumnavigation (or open-loop system); and t hese constitutive elements of the piece are worth reflection as well as dissection in this, our time of reckoning.
Cosmopolitanism The alliance between art and circumnavigation, however, goes well beyond celebrity portraiture. In discussions of eighteenth-century British culture today, circumnavigation as fact, fiction, and narrative backsplash invokes images of that distant elsewhere, t hose perilous high seas, the vagaries of financial investment, and the thrill of speculation, all of which carry a special allure, even as the reckoning (of imperial misdeeds) goes on in tandem with nostalgic storytelling. These associations contributed to the seduction of discovery and the limitless potential of contact zones and commerce during the Enlightenment. In this globalized context I would like to impose, anachronistically, the economy of cosmopolitanism, dependent as this evolving concept was upon travel, g rand tours, and circumnavigation for the twin purposes of discovery and commerce— and scientific knowledge as well as education. Joseph Banks’s cultural capital was not just tied to his baronetcy; he was the embodiment of the twin attractions of exploration and acquisition and his social status rested upon the creation of a class which redefined the para meters of domesticity to ensure the lasting value of luxury within it—epitomized by private collection. Who better positioned to experience the exclusivity of this privileged class, its entitlements, and its insularity than Johan Zoffany (1733–1810). The immigrant who had been trained in Regensburg, at the Court of Prince Alexander Ferdinand von Thurn of Taxis, and the man who at first spoke very little English when he migrated to Britain in 1760, was to become a royal academician. But no one could have predicted that turn, least of all the man himself, the one who was to become one of Britain’s most influential artists. Zoffany spent time in Italy before he went to London for the first time in 1760; the Italy of his formative years and his training in neoclassical art w ere omnipresent in his art. In the pan-European north-south alliance of art, intellectual pursuits, and elite consumerism, one finds oddities, however. Consider, in this context, that in Britain at the time the conceptual framework of “library” was not as rigidly defined as space dedicated to books.10 And Italy might provide an explanation if not a precept for the shifting nomenclature of “library.” A useful example of the fluidity of the taxonomies related to elite domestic space is Zoffany’s Charles Townley in His Library at No. 7 Park St. Westminster (1781–1783). In this picture, while Pierre H ugues, a cataloguer of vases at the British Museum, is positioned roughly in the center (along with Townley, William Hamilton, and Thomas Astle)—a nd Hugues is seen perusing a catalogue—t he human subjects are, in fact, dwarfed in number
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by sculptures of all shapes and sizes.11 Besides a c ouple of catalogues (one shown to have been carelessly thrown on the floor), t here are no books or book shelves and the entire “library” has the aura of a gallery. This painting is important in the context of this discussion b ecause Townley was familiar with Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi (1772–1773) and wanted something similar, which led to the commission of the “Library.” As Martin Postle has noted, The Tribuna was arguably Zoffany’s greatest work and the finest example of this artist’s interest in social commentary.12 This painting also established Zoffany as the preeminent artist in Britain. By this point, Zoffany’s career had reached its peak, but his reputation among London’s influencers was solidified when he received a royal commission to reproduce the gallery in the Uffizi, Florence. The spectacular and storied history of the Uffizi was known throughout cosmopolitan Europe. Its origin was utilitarian as it h oused the administrative and legal offices of Florence. The Uffizi that was the envy of the British elite in the eighteenth c entury was at first remodeled and designed by the Andrea del Sarto–trained Georgio Vasari (1511–1574), then Italy’s premiere painter and architect, who received a royal commission from Cosimo I de’ Medici, first grand duke of Tuscany. Vasari was tasked to create a new architectural cum civic space within the existing constraints of the Uffizi. The credit for commissioning “the first museum arrangement in the gallery” goes to Francesco I, who was the g rand duke from 1574 to 1587. In this second phase of development or the Bernardo Buontalenti redesign, the porch (or loggia) h oused statues and busts of antiquity while the “tribuna” was placed in the corridor.13 The Uffizi—as artistic venue and as concept, as Italian original and English pictorial counterfeit—was not universally attainable nor easily accessible. Most of London’s literary celebrities were, however, peripheral figures in that cosmopolitanism that aspired to be part of the Uffizi, whether in Florence or in Paris. So, for instance, James Boswell spent only two weeks in Florence in August 1765 as part of his grand tour;14 and for Samuel Johnson Rome, Venice, and Florence remained elusive. Johnson’s plan in November 1775 was to spend an entire year in Italy with the bulk of that time set aside for Tuscany; but that was not to be. “Without seeing Italy, he felt incomplete,” Boswell notes and then goes on to provide thus more details about this sentiment of sadness and deprivation that his friend had experienced: “A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority . . . t he grand object of travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On t hese shores were the four g reat empires of the world: the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman. All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean.” 15 Huge quantities of inherited wealth were a distinct advantage then as today—and Johnson was plagued by a lack of disposal income, a congenital deficiency, one might say, the effects of which dogged his career and all his life.
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The idea of eighteenth-century “cosmopolitanism”—as real and aspirational sense of accomplishment—was ubiquitous in the elite public culture, and Zoffany’s Tribuna of the Uffizi allows us to explain this concept in further depth. First, in it one finds a mature artist who had returned to his roots. At the age of seventeen Zoffany had gone to Naples, Venice, and Rome, where he was immersed in the world of the influential Agostino Masucci. Martin Postle tells us, for instance, that in this first round of travels “Zoffany’s Italian sojourn coincided with artists who w ere to be influential in shaping the canon of British art—Reynolds, Richard Wilson, and the sculptor John Wilton. Th ere is no documented evidence that Zoffany associated with any of t hese artists in Rome, but his gregariousness and the compact size of the artistic community suggest that he must have rubbed shoulders with them”—making him the cosmopolitan artist who would, later, be in high demand in London.16 Anyone who studies the culture of this period finds repeated invocations not just to Renaissance and Italian art, architecture, and sculpture but also to a collective consciousness of a shared European past. And the imprint of that past was indelibly inscribed in contemporary culture, which was deeply invested in developing, alongside the civilizing mission elsewhere, a visual dimension of global exchange at home. Manifestations of this global-domestic space in the eighteenth century—built environments in the public domain and carefully designed residential interiors— came to be recognized as an integral feature of modernity and cosmopolitanism. Several factors contribute to the cultural capital of Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi. In early 1772, it was reported in the press that Zoffany had entered into a contract to accompany Joseph Banks and James Cook on their second voyage to the South Seas. At around the same time, this émigré had filed papers under the provisions “for naturalizing foreign Protestants.” Despite significant differences in national origin, background, rank, and status, Zoffany and Banks were socially compatible. So, for instance, they appeared together in a masquerade in Soho at Carlisle House, “the capital’s most fashionable ‘celebrity’ hotspot.” And on this occasion Zoffany dressed as a Venetian sailor and Banks as a gardener— choices, one might argue, that reflect the former’s obsession with and artistic allegiance to Italy (as well as cultural commerce?) and the latter’s passion for discovery, botany, and “cultivation” in the colonies. But that trip was canceled and Zoffany, who had considerable investment in the voyage, was left with huge debts. Serendipitously or by virtue of behind-t he-scenes lobbying, it was at this point that he received Queen Charlotte’s commission for an Italian piece, specifically, a depiction of the Tribuna of the Uffizi. Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was interested in reclaiming her extended royal heritage; and what better way to do this than to bring to the royal h ousehold in London the apartment of the imperial gallery at Florence.17 Zoffany’s The Tribuna of the Uffizi includes four categories of animate and inanimate objects: visitors, paintings, sculpture, and other objects. Pertinent to
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Figure 2. Johann Zoffany, The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, 2021.
this discussion in the category of visitors are the figures of Thomas Patch, Horace Mann, and James Bruce—influential figures in late eighteenth-century worldmaking. What we find here are layers of objectification and, simmering right below the surface, sexual dalliance, deviancy, and imperial curiosity. So, for instance, in a letter to Joseph Banks, Zoffany referred to James Bruce (1730–1794) as a “great man” and went on to explain that he was “the wonder of his age, the terror of married men, and a constant lover.” 18 About Bruce and his posed presence beside Venus de Medici, Penelope Treadwell has this to say: “With his hands b ehind his back, he f aces away from the Venus and her young admirers to engage with the viewer outside the fame. The conception invokes the public image of Sir Joseph banks himself. The casual stance, aloof position and detached expression are at once suggestive of a man more scientist than artist, more collector of botanical specimens than of Old Master paintings, who wonder why the enraptured male visitors to the gallery are seduced by images of w omen in paint and marble, when he, James Bruce, had the effortless ability to possess the real t hing. ” 19 The admiration of Zoffany for a man such as James Bruce and the British influencers in this moment in Florence (early to mid-1770s) stemmed from an easy intersectional association between and among science, colony, and
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omen, all operating within various institutions including but not l imited to that w of marriage—w ith transaction being the common denominator. Bruce, an “explorer,” had spent ten years in Africa and then had s topped in Florence on his way back to London. By all accounts, his journey out of Africa was an odyssey,20 although in Zoffany’s rendition of the explorer, prominently positioned as he is in the right margin of the Tribuna, all signs of abrasion are gone. Zoffany thus inserts an allusion to Africa in the figure of a “detached” explorer, one who was credentialed in and by Africa and as part of a large pan-European map with a radial interconnection between London and Florence, Florence and Africa. Indeed, Bruce seems to have been of greater importance in the cluster of cosmopolitan subjects in Florence discussed h ere than the historical record would indicate. The Royal African Company (1660–1752) was by then defunct and had been replaced in 1752 by the African Company of Merchants whose chief operations (including the slave trade) w ere in West Africa. Appointed as the British consul at Algiers (1763–1765), Bruce is known for tracing the source of the Blue Nile and for “exploring” Northern Africa; his ostensible goal was to study the Roman ruins in the “Barbary” coast. This “Levantinization” of Zoffany’s Tribuna is necessary b ecause it underscores the many fissures in the topography of cosmopolitanism which this painting maps.21 Moreover, whether in Tuscany or Rome or elsewhere in the northern Mediterranean, “Arabia” and Africa are omnipresent and palpable even if not visible. British art, in this sense, subsumes and expresses both cosmopolitanism and globalism, in a confident and self- conscious entanglement. With his right hand resting casually on Titian’s Venus of Urbino (not only a picture within a picture but also the focal point of Zoffany’s composition around which all four categories—British visitors, Uffizi paintings from the Uffizi gallery and Pitti Palace, Italian sculpture, and art objects—a re placed), Thomas Patch is seen turning left to chat with John Taylor and Horace Mann. In the cultural marketplace of British expatriates in Tuscany, these were influential entities. Zoffany not only knew them, he shared their vision and version of “worldmaking,” which is visible in a range of his work with the Tribuna of Uffizi being the most significant. Inclusion in this circle (and to have the privilege of being represented) was not to be taken for granted as evidenced in letters of the twenty-year- old George Finch, Ninth Earl of Winchilsea, who was thrilled to be in the picture: “I go every morning into the Gallery which I admire more & more, I believe it is allowed to be one of the finest things in the World . . . for he not only copies a great Many Pictures & Statues & and the Room &c. which is a g reat deal to do, but even the Frames & e very the most minute t hing Possible the small bronzes, the T able &c. to make it to be a compleat & exact representation of the Room.” 22 Finch is seen squeezed between a painting of Roman charity (artist unknown) and three subordinate “characters”—Wilbraham, Watts, and Doughty—all staring at and enraptured by the Venus de’ Medici.23 Fearing persecution due to his
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homosexuality, Thomas Patch had left Rome and was an expatriate artist in Florence when Zoffany arrived to fulfill his obligations related to the royal commission to reproduce for the Queen the Uffizi gallery. Horace Mann—baronet, Knight of the Bath, British resident at Florence, close friend of Horace Walpole— was also t here, and it was through him that Zoffany met Patch.24 The fate of this painting was not quite what was expected despite and perhaps due to its spectacular provenance. Given the royal patron and financier and also the composition thick with glitterati gathered in Florence—“characters ” Zoffany sprinkled generously throughout the canvas, with meticulous care and attention to detail—t he cosmopolitans might have expected the painting to receive unreserved praise. “Yet, when in 1779 Zoffany returned to England with the picture, it was accepted reluctantly, paid for eventually and consigned to a room used by the King in Kew Palace,” according to Martin Postle, who notes additionally that in 1788 George III, during his illness, “pulled the picture to the floor.” Why such a slight? At issue was Titian’s Venus. Postle goes on to explain that Horace Mann had predicted this outcome, that the picture “will not please her Majesty so much as it did the young men to whom it was showed.” Moreover, Postle adds, “Many years l ater . . . the King returned once to the picture and ‘expressed wonder at Zoffany having done so improper a t hing as to introduce the portraits of Sir Horace Man[n], [Thomas] Patch, & o thers, who were considered as men addicted to improper practices—He sd. the Queen wd. Not suffer the picture to be placed in any of Her apartments.’ ” 25 This story positions at one end of the moral spectrum regal indignation and at the other end the alleged hedonistic depravity of English expatriates in Florence. But, irrespective of sides taken or sentiments expressed, the sharply divided reaction to Zoffany’s Tribuna establishes, among other t hings, that the entire artistic complex understood the material value of objects and objectification—in this instance the objectification of the body of a mythological figure that is always virtual, never real, and yet a threat. From the establishment perspective, then, the homosocial, indeed homosexual, and also heteromasculinist impulse,26 even if not represented explicitly on the canvas, endowed upon the various inanimate objects the same illicit status—by association—as the real men Zoffany inscribes and entertains, in the painting and in the gallery. In this example of reception history at least, the “judgement of taste,” upon the articulation of which rests so much of the might of European civilization, is thus impossibly and irrevocably amorphous.
Object Histories Besides the sculptures—of which there are six—The Tribuna of the Uffizi includes several objects—ostensibly made of bronze, brass, silver, stone, marble—strewn mostly in the foreground, and t hese are as follows: South Italian crater (two items), Etruscan helmet, Chimera, Roman oil lamps, South Italian situla, Egyptian
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ptahmose, Greek bronze torso, bust of Julius Caesar, Roman silver shield, head of Antinous, Etruscan jug, and octagonal table with pietra dura top.27 “Man- made” objects, particularly as t hese are naturalized into their museological and thus framed identities, become inherently performative when placed in the Florentine gallery or represented in Zoffany’s painting. The display (of such an object), in this sense, is never static since the spectator brings to the object a tacit and reciprocal gaze that consumes and is, in equal measure, consumed (by the object). Beauty accompanied by flaunt makes beauty (of person, things, or place) visible; minus the flaunt or the display, the object of potential aesthetic value remains invisible, lies dormant, and has neither cultural nor exchange value. If taste is acquired and “provenance” is tied to the ownership of objects, any historiography of objects must reflect human agency—that which drives production, that which triggers the supply and creates demand (in this case) of art. Bred into the cultures of Eton and Cambridge and ensconced in privilege as MP and sole inheritor of the Robert Walpole brand of politics, Horace Walpole (1717–1797) inhabited that sphere that was, for the likes of David Garrick, for instance, wildly aspirational. Walpole’s g rand tour commenced when he was twenty-two (March 29, 1739) and lasted more than two years (September 12, 1741). But it is in the extravagant flaunt of Strawberry Hill’s self-conscious Gothicism that we find one example of the physical manifestation of his encyclopedic knowledge of painting, engraving, and architecture. Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England is an impressive register beginning with “The Earliest Accounts of Painting in E ngland” and ending with the “Painters in the Reign of George the Second”; but the title of this descriptive catalogue is deceiving since it does not forecast the very helpful database related to engravers, statuaries, carvers, medalists, and architects.28 This work, Walpole wrote, filled a gaping hole in the history of England: “In Italy, where the art of painting has been carried to an amazing degree of perfection, the lives of the painters have been written in numberless volumes, alone sufficient to compose a little library.” 29 Refreshingly candid and transparent, Walpole goes on to say the following: “Flanders and Holland have sent us the greatest men that we can boast. This very circumstance may with reason prejudice the reader against a work, the chief business of which must be to celebrate the arts of a country which had produced so few good artists.” It is with a clear sense of this drawback that Walpole chose the title that would most appropriately obviate this truth about Britain’s “few good artists” without compromising his interest in extending the local knowledge base on art, architecture, and painting: “This objection is so striking that, instead of calling it ‘The Lives of English Painters,’ I have simply given it the title of ‘Anecdotes of Painting in E ngland.’ ” 30 To see how privilege was used to bypass the booksellers’ (whether copyright- owning or w holesaling) “congers,” 31 one might turn to the printing press at
116 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 Strawberry Hill where Walpole produced his own books. An in-house publication, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole was printed by Thomas Kirkgate in 1774.32 The distinctive feature of this book is its elaboration of not just the rooms in this mansion house but also the contents of each room. A short description of the China Room, for instance, w ill provide a clue to the ethos of this home and the range collections contained therein: Painted glass in the windows; and crests of Shorter and Gestinthorpe: the veiling painted with convulvulus’s on poles, by Mūntz, from a ceiling in a little Borghese villa at Frescati: the sides white Dutch tyles, with borders of blue and white. In the floor some very ancient tyles with arms, from the cathedral in Gloucester. The upper part of the chimney-piece is taken from a window in an ancient farm h ouse, formerly Bradfield Hall belonging to Lord Grimston in Essex; the lower part of the chimney at Hurst Monceaux in Sussex: it is adorned with the arms of Talbot, Bridges, Sackville, and Walpole. . . . In a niche, supported by two columns of oriental alabaster, over the chimney, is a fine ewer of sayance, designed by Julio Romano; and two green glass tumblers, with golden edges; and two round saltsellers of old blue and gold Venetian glass, with flowers. Over the niche, four chocolate-cups of sayance, by Pietro Cortona; and a bronze medallion of Pandulfo Malatesta.33
This is one among dozens of rooms in Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill mansion. The pan-European nature of the collections here is no different from others spread across the island nation where “enlightenment” was readily and irrevocably associated with a grander map than any that a straightforward narrative of the tours such as Garrick’s, Walpole’s, or any other celebrity’s might convey. Embedded in these tours are the potential and the reality of discoveries which would provide the material foundations of Enlightenment. The idea (of Enlightenment) is thus so closely aligned to object that the idea becomes the object. The object then reflects eloquently the idea of tour as the quin tes sen tial activity of enlightened citizenship. The materiality of still objects for display, from Brescia or from the outskirts of Rome, stands in sharp contrast to the kinetic force of travel, both within and outside Britain, within Europe and to the trading posts and colonies in “dark” continents. It is in the relation between the object collected and the search or discovery to unearth the object that we can locate the radial interface between and among science, the arts, the pleasures of acquisition, the display of objects, the flaunting of architecture, and the imperial cosmopolitanism which Horace Walpole came to represent.
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Enclaves of Elites It was Strawberry Hill where Walpole gave expression to his elaborate fantasy of a Gothic home-cum-museum and gallery designed for the display of his artwork. His was a project of imperial proportion designed to make a statement. Its flamboyant cosmopolitanism brought considerable value to Twickenham and to that western bank of one among several dramatic bends in River Thames as it meanders northeast toward London via the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (which bears the foundational imprimatur of Joseph Banks). Peter Linfield and Dale Townshend have noted that the Gothic novelist William Beckford’s architectural imagination, which seems to reflect the resplendence of his extravagant home in Wiltshire, and his literary imagination do not coalesce in the same way as Walpole’s. Beckford’s productions follow the opposite pattern, they argue: “Separated by the differences in style, temporality and t hose imposed by Beckford himself, Vathek and Fonthill Abbey do not readily lend themselves to the type of analysis that W. S. Lewis undertook in his seminal article ‘The Genesis of Strawberry Hill’ (1934), that is, the identification of the return of ‘real’ architectural features of the writer’s h ouse in the fictional text that it was thought to have inspired. If anything, Beckford’s fiction seemed to have inspired his home.” 34 But whether fiction inspires architecture or architecture inspires fiction, t hese productions—of writing and building or painting and gardening—could be deployed with civilizational force from places of sizable inheritance and vast wealth within the hierarchical scheme of which the émigré Zoffany stood outside and alone. The aristocratic ethos of Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill has similarities with the seat of the Burlingtons. The architectural order of Burlington House is Renaissance Doric, near to the Palladian style, and has been since the eighteenth century the quintessence of distinction in Piccadilly’s perpetual upmarket value.35 These environs and this real estate weathered the storm of the London Blitz (whose scars exist, for instance, in the tasting room of Widow Bourne’s eighteenth-century grocery store, now the wine connoisseurs’ haven at Berry Brothers and Rudd). Th ese architectural elements and amalgamations resist dichotomized notions of old and new, foreign and domestic; at the same time, an awareness of pan-European effluence and patterns of absorption (of the same in Britain) helps to underscore the necessity of discussion on circulation as part of the project of Enlightenment. James Mulholland has recently reminded us that “John Hawkesworth’s (1753, I:205, 209) magazine the Adventurer argues that ‘quick circulation of intelligence’ typifies 1750s British society and defines his venture’s aspiration as ‘universal circulation among persons of quality.’ ” 36 The spatial dimension of circulation can in fact be found not just in charts and maps but also in t hose heavily networked fields of social engagement and economic
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and cultural exchange that provide depth and detail to cartographic points of significance. The Italian Renaissance had rehearsed the logics of living space with the leading architects weighing in on all the related m atters of sight and prospect as well as dimension and style. So, for instance, in A Short Treatise of the Five Orders, and the Most Necessary Observations Concerning All Sorts of Building, Andrea Palladio (1508–1580) provides the fundamental requirement “of the site to be chosen for the fabricks of villas.” 37 But fabrick is more than the blueprint or architectural design of an opulent private residence or villa such as the Garricks’ in Hampton; it is also about location—a real estate truism which is not new. Palladio’s Treatise, originally published in Venice in 1570, was divided into four books and was available in English translation in two volumes in London circa 1721. Among the subscribers of this Treatise were Henry Flitcroft (the surveyor for Montagu House in Bloomsbury, circa 1725, and also a resident of Twickenham), the Earl of Orrery, the Earl of Burlington, Arthur Onslow (the Speaker of the House of Commons), Thomas Gray, William Hogarth, Francis Hayman, Robert Walpole, John Evelyn, and Charles Fleetwood, to name just a few. The circulation of Palladio’s Treatise alone explains definitively the scope and extent of the British Enlightenment’s investment in the study and systematic appropriation of the principles and practices of the European Renaissance and its Greco- Roman heritage, with Palladio serving as the model and “wise architect.” 38 Consider in this context that the survey of historical records reveals the staggering value of the Burlington House in Piccadilly, originally started (but not completed) by John Denham, who was both a poet and surveyor general of works, soon a fter the Restoration in 1665. The land had been granted by Charles II to Clarendon in 1664. Further, we know that t here was a “Palladian refronting in 1719” captured in the Vitruvius Britannicus drawing (Figure 3), published in 1725.39 It is h ere—in this neoclassical mansion, an embodiment of considerable pol itical clout and cultural capital—t hat the Elgin marbles w ere first h oused, before they w ere moved to the British Museum. As the ultimate epitome of “taste,” this mansion had a gate that blocked the prospect of the building inside. But that does not stop Alexander Pope (1688–1744), who appears as a plasterer in the etching in Figure 4, climbing onto a scaffolding ramp to gain access to the Burlington mansion or the bastion of “taste.” The description of this e tching appears on the British Museum site as follows: “Satire on Alexander Pope’s ‘Epistle to Burlington’ in which he praises Lord Burlington’s architectural taste; the gate of Burlington House, Piccadilly, surmounted by statues of William Kent, Raphael and Michelangelo, is being whitewashed by a plasterer (Pope) standing on scaffolding.” Recall in this context that Pope’s Epistle was written partly in response to the mansion’s magnificent flaunt standing then as now in the center of London—and in the epicenter of very conspicuous consumption that the Palladian style of architecture helps
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Figure 3. Henry Hulsberg, The Great Gate at Burlington House in Pickadilly, Vitruvius Britannicus, 1725. © Trustees of the British Museum.
to convey. All sorts of social and economic values are embedded in Pope’s brilliant satire:40 Yet thou proceed; be fallen Arts thy care, Erect new Wonders and the Old repair, Jones and Palladio to themselves restore, And be whate’er Vitruvius was before: Till Kings call forth th’ Idea’s of thy Mind, Proud to accomplish what such hands design’d, Bid Harbors open, publick Ways extend, And Temples, worthier of the God, ascend; Bid the broad Arch the dang’rous Flood contain, The Mole projected break the roaring Main; Back to his bounds their subject Sea command, And roll obedient Rivers thro’ the Land: These Honours, Peace to happy Britain brings, These are Imperial Works, and worthy Kings. (171–184)
The implicit distinction h ere between worthy imperial projects and unworthy imperial projects is reminiscent of Daniel Defoe’s insistence on worthy projects and what t hose projects should be.41 Despite the critique of culture and the satiric bent of t hese published and thus public pieces, notice that the commitment to
Figure 4. Satirical print, Taste, or Burlington Gate, 1732. Formerly attributed to William Hogarth. © Trustees of the British Museum.
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“Imperial Works” is widespread (and not limited to Pope or Burlington), just as peace and happiness are integral parts of Britain’s manifest destiny.
Domestic Luxury, Redefined At the Uffizi in Florence, the concept of “gallery” (Le Gallerie Degli Uffizi) followed the pattern of museums, while the “tribuna” was the repository for statues. In British lexical history, the word “tribune” echoes the Italian of which it might be regarded as an extension; in both we find the idea of an external gothic structure and an interior with vaulted ceiling and expansive space for display of “collections.” Zoffany’s Tribuna, designed for the British connoisseur, expands the definition of the Florentine “tribuna.” He incorporated into the composition both statues and paintings; to t hese he added other objets d’art and also “spectators” or British expatriates, travelers, artists, and other visitors. Zoffany suggests, but does not capture the entirety of, the octagonal space, as in Florentine Uffizi; therefore, we see only three sides (of eight) of the ceiling, the center of which is above Raphael’s St. John the Baptist flanked by two Madonnas (one after Titian and other by Guido Reni).42 At Strawberry Hill, located on the upper floor, the “tribune” is the cabinet for the display of curiosities (see Figure 5). Among the long list of items in Walpole’s Tribuna—some visible in the watercolor by Edward Edwards created for Walpole’s extra-illustrated Description of the Villa— for instance, is a French Medieval “Chasse Depicting the Murder of Thomas Becket” (ca. 1200–1210). The description of this item reads: “Copper with champlevé enamel, on oak caracase.” The descriptions and provenance of items, some from eighteenth-century sale catalogues and others generated by Walpole himself (and presumably his staff), embed an expansive geography. What might be regarded as a pan-European roll call of artistry can be found in catalogue descriptions of item after item, such as the “Cabinet of Miniatures and Enamels,” which is described as follows: A cabinet of rose-wood, designed by Mr. Walpole; on the pediment, statues in ivory of Fiamingo, Inigo Jones, and Palladio, by Verskovis, a fter the models of Rysbrach. In the pediment, Mr. Walpole’s arms, a cupid and lion, by the same: on the doors, bas-reliefs in ivory, Herodias with the head of the baptist, by Gibbons; a lady, half-length, by the same; Perseus and Andromeda; the Hercules Farnese; the Flora; Diomede with the Palladium; the Medusa of Strozzi; the Perseus of ditto; Caracalla and Alexander, by Pozzo; and eight other heads. On the drawer, the Barberini lion, by Pozzo; and heads of eagles, by Verskovis. (77–78)43
The dazzling array of objects defy national borders with the logic of the display pledging allegiance only to the finest artistry in Europe, which relied upon materials sourced in Europe and also scoured from various “discovered” lands and
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Figure 5. John Carter (1748–1817), The Tribune at Strawberry Hill, ca. 1789. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
commercialized sites of exchange in Africa and Asia. But t hese distant sites remain unacknowledged and extrinsic to the stories of collection except for brief and accidental references. Thus “Henry the Eighth’s Dagger” is described as “of Turkish work; the blade is of steel damasked with gold, the case and handle of chalcedonyx. set with diamonds and many rubies. From the collection of lady Elizabeth Germaine. The duchess of Portland has such another set with jacinths.” 44 Collection as worldmaking is simultaneously collection as conspic uous consumption, designed to invoke an infinity of material possession and
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ensuring limitless potential and lasting value of objects made of steel, gold, chalcedony, diamonds, and rubies. Also on the upper floor is the library, which carries over some of the elements from the Tribuna or Cabinet (of rare objects and curiosities) from the gallery (see Figure 5). The gothic exterior of Strawberry Hill might have aspired to be grotesque in parts, but the interiors remained neoclassical and w ere disciplined into smooth lines and curvaceous edges that defy suggestions of darkness or haunting. Moreover, the dense fabric of portraits on busy walls in each meticulously designed room brings in the h uman element and the warmth that the sole proprietor of Strawberry Hill would not have been able to supply in space that might have been more like an Abbey, more like the cavernous Fonthill.45 Visible to even the uninitiated, the casual visitor, or accidental tourist is the similarity of design elements throughout (such as the gothic arches and orientalist floral patterns and curvatures in thresholds and staircases) in each of t hese three important rooms at Strawberry Hill—the Tribune or Cabinet, the Library, and the Holbein Chamber. A deep dive reveals, however, t hose contradictions and tensions that the glitter and scale of luxurious interiors obfuscate. This cultural reality, this intellectual environment, this cosmopolitanism, absorbed if not obliterated the many fissures in the social fabric (casting, for instance, tropicopolitans as merely intrusive and thus marginal in this grand narrative).46 The literal contradictions are entertaining nuggets: beyond the Oriental screen in the Holbein Chamber, for instance, and on the wall visible through it, hangs The Triumph of Poverty, presumably not the bronze plaque of late sixteenth-century origin but a painting based on the plaque. Thus figurative tensions and contradictions of epic proportion, contrariwise, are often masked as totems of civilizational superiority. The materiality of select objects described in this essay and their production histories embody the complexity of the Eurocentric global modalities of supply and demand of luxury in the eighteenth c entury. Art, architecture, and literary and scientific praxis are shown to be not in a smooth path of progress toward Enlightenment but in a permanent state of flux and disruption so much so that endogamous and exogamous, near and far, polite and deviant cultures coexist and cohere, even as private entities parrot the same globalist paradigms of grandeur and narrativize prog ress as, say, the “public” British Museum. Moreover, any discussion such as this pertaining to the “judgement of taste” in the eighteenth century must contend with the fact that the gothic structures, the neoclassical facades, and lavish interiors that framed both political and literary life and discourse are inherently global. But this pattern of critique has to go beyond “locating specific cultural acts within complex structures of power.” 47 Critiques of culture have to outline, even when unable to trace fully, the prob lems of consumerism and the development of unregulated global economies of
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Figure 6. John Carter, The Library at Strawberry Hill, 1788. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
art, the unchecked supply and demand of materials, and the lost or silenced stories of labor.48 Why consider l abor? Figure 8 shows us the drawing of the precise location of the desk that was to be placed within the library at Strawberry Hill; the centrality of privileged intellectual labor is thus visualized and conceptualized with care. Additionally, we learn that “the chimney-piece imitated from the tomb of John of Eltham, Earl of Cornwall in Westminster Abbey, the ceiling painted by Clermont.” John Carter’s drawing of the library with furniture (Figure 6) stands in sharp contrast to the library without furniture (Figure 8). In the latter, the sketches of books in shelves along the walls provide a statement of utility in virtual reality (what will this room be used for?) while the oriental (and gothic) arches encasing the shelves echo the same design element of the Holbein Chamber. The missing element in Figure 8 is not just the librarian, the writer, the philosopher, the connoisseur, the collector, or the one who embodies intellectual and highly skilled labor, but also the surveyor, the bricklayer, the builder, the joiner, the carpenter, the mason, the carver, the chimney cleaner, t hose whose physical labor contributed to the progression from the “idea” we see captured in Figure 8 to that of its realization in Figure 6, or from space conceptualized to space codified as high culture. Like the histories of design elements in architectural space, object histories follow a tangled path. Provenance starts at the point of known and recorded exchange
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Figure 7. John Carter, Hobein Chamber, ca. 1790. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
(acquired or found?); more often than not, the identity of the object is then linked to the elevated social status of the collector and his acquisition, to wealthy donors and buyers, to technologized forms of auctioning, cataloguing and curating, to elaborate systems of public exhibition and display, and, in the examples above, to lavish designs of private libraries and tribuna—all of which eclipse the narratives of social, cultural, or environmental impact at the source, elsewhere. The success of European cosmopolitanism (of which the British version was particularly
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Figure 8. Edward Edwards (1738–1806), The Library at Strawberry Hill, ca. 1781. Courtesy of the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.
robust during the Enlightenment), fueled by unfettered consumption and colonial expansion, led not only to a steady assault on the environment but also to unspeakable violence aimed at the Americas and the Global South and the displacement of natural and human resources. There is a thin line, one that can easily dissipate, between desire—driven by curiosity, need, want—and demand; the latter takes us into the actualized transactional, commercial sphere that we assume to be separate from but, in fact, is entwined with the spheres of pleasure, imagination, education, art, architecture, and other markers of modernity.
Notes For advice and help with “Strawberry Hill” images as well as materials related to Horace Walpole, I would like to thank Kristen McDonald and Susan Odell Walker at the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University. 1. Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Confronting Race and the Memory of Evil (London: Allen Lane, 2019). See also Thomas Laqueur, “While Statues Sleep,” London Review of Books 42, no. 12 (June 18, 2020). 2. See Terry Eagleton, for instance, “Materialisms,” in Materialism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 1–35. 3. For a discussion of genres of money, see Mary Poovey, “Financing Enlightenment Part 1: Money Matters,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 323–335. 4. I mean cultivation both in the sense of farming and in the sense of acquired taste or sophistication; both senses connote culture or a contradistinction to nature.
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5. “The fantasy of a pictorial turn, of a culture totally dominated by images, has now become a real technical possibility on a global scale. Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’ is now a fact and not an especially comforting one.” See W. J. T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994; repr., 1995), 11–34, esp. 15. Mitchell provides me with useful vocabulary, much of which I use anachronistically since language informs our ability to process the past. 6. I use the term “cosmopolitanism” in the sense in which Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859) used it. This Victorian historian was also a member of the Council of the Governor-General of India, the chief architect of the Indian Penal Code, and, significant in the context of my argument here, one of the founding trustees of the National Portrait Gallery in London. 7. I use the term “naturalized” in the legal sense of immigration and naturalization. 8. For the most comprehensive study of Sloane and his relationship to the British Museum, see James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2017). See also Mita Choudhury, “Cultural Logic of Museology I: A Genealogy of the Global ‘Endeavor,’ ” in Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire (New York: Routledge, 2019), 124–171. For a “heroic narrative” of Banks and his travels, see Toby Musgrave, The Multifarious Mr. Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, the Natural Historian Who Shaped the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020). 9. In his review of Toby Musgrave’s recently published biography of Joseph Banks, Steven Shapin rightly points out that Banks was “a g reat fixer, an enabler, a patron, a networker, an organizer and an administrator.” See Shapin, “Keep Him as a Curiosity,” London Review of Books 42, no. 16 (August 13, 2020): 5, 8. This Reynolds painting is at the National Portrait Gallery, London. 10. Recall that the British Museum, at its inception, housed various collections, including but not limited to the Harleian and Cottonian collection of manuscripts, samples of botany and natural history gathered by Sloane and other scientists, as well as a library. The British Library in St. Pancras opened in November 1997. 11. For a full analysis of this picture, see Penelope Treadwell, Johan Zoffany: Artist and Adventurer (London: Paul Holberton, 2009), esp. 321–324. 12. See Martin Postle, “Johan Zoffany: An Artist Abroad,” in Johan Zoffany, RA: Society Observed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 13–49, passim. 13. For a history of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, see Le Gallerie Degli Uffizi, “History: The Uffizi,” https://w ww.uffizi.it/en/t he-uffizi/history. 14. See Frederick A. Pottle, James Boswell: The E arlier Years, 1740–1769 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 237–238. 15. Peter Martin quotes this passage in a chapter in the biography of Johnson appropriately titled “A Very Poor Creeper Upon the Earth,” in Samuel Johnson, A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2008), 457–472, esp. 462. 16. See Postle, Johan Zoffany, RA, 16–18. 17. Postle, Johan Zoffany, RA, 31, 34. 18. Penelope Treadwell points to the source as follows: “Zoffany’s letter to Joseph Banks dated 15 January 1774; British Museum, Anderson Papers, 510, p. 197.” Treadwell, Johan Zoffany, 447. I have not had the chance to see the Anderson Papers. 19. Treadwell, Johan Zoffany, 237. 20. James Boswell, “Some Account of the Very Extraordinary Travels of the Celebrated Mr. Bruce,” London Magazine 43 (August–September 1774): 388–391, 429–431. 21. This term originated in Srinivas Aravamudan’s groundbreaking book Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 22. Quoted by Treadwell, Johan Zoffany, 230. 23. Postle, Johan Zoffany, RA, 231.
128 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 24. Treadwell, Johan Zoffany, 226–227. 25. Postle, Johan Zoffany, RA, 231–232. 26. Only eleven years separated Horace Walpole and Horace Mann; arguably, Mann was to Walpole what Alexander Cozens (1717–1786) was to William Beckford (1760–1844). L ater in this essay I discuss briefly why this comparison is relevant. 27. For a complete list of objects and entities in this Zoffany painting, see Postle, Johan Zoffany, RA, 231. 28. Horace Walpole and George Vertue, Anecdotes of Painting in England: With Some Account of the Principal Artists and Incidental Notes on Other Arts, 2nd ed. ([Strawberry- Hill]: Printed by Thomas Kirgate at Strawberry-Hill, 1765–1771). 29. Horace Walpole and George Vertue, Anecdotes of Painting in England, preface, 1. 30. Horace Walpole and George Vertue, Anecdotes of Painting in England, 1–2. 31. For a succinct definition and history of congers, see Leslie Ritchie, David Garrick and the Mediation of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 20–43. 32. Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole, the Youngest Son of Robert Walpole, Earl of Orford, at Strawberry-Hill, near Twickenham (Strawberry-Hill, 1774). See also C. H. Timperley, A Dictionary of Printers and Printing, with the Prog ress of Lite ra ture, Ancient and Modern (London, 1839), 701. 33. “Sayance” is probably a decorative tool or prop for a séance. Julio Romano was a sixteenth-century painter and architect. Pietro Cortona was a seventeenth-century Italian baroque painter and architect. Pandulfo Malatesta was an aristocratic Italian (Renaissance) family belonging to the House of Malatesta. 34. Peter N. Linfield and Dale Townshend, “Reading Vathek and Fonthill Abbey: William Beckford’s Artistic Imagination,” in Fonthill Recovered: A Cultural History, ed. Caroline Dakers (London: UCL Press, 2018), 286. 35. While the Italian influence on eighteenth-century British architectural orders is indisputable, t here w ere no pure or unalloyed borrowings since most w ere an amalgam of vari ous domestic and foreign styles reflecting the preferences of the aristocratic owners or their architects. Regarding Burlington House, see the caveat in “Burlington House,” in Survey of London: Volumes 31 and 32, St James Westminster, Part 2, ed. F. H. W. Sheppard (London: London County Council, 1963), 390–429; British History Online, March 16, 2019, http://w ww.british-history.ac.u k/survey-london/vols31-2/pt2/pp390-429. 36. James Mulholland, “An Indian It-Narrative and the Problem of Circulation: Reconsidering a Useful Concept for Literary Study,” Modern Language Quarterly 79, no. 4 (December 2018): 373–396, esp. 375. 37. Andrea Palladio, A Short Treatise of the Five O rders, and the Most Necessary Observations Concerning All Sorts of Building, 2 vols., trans. Giacomo Leoni (London, 1721). 38. Andrea Palladio, “Of the Site to Be Chosen for the Fabricks of Villas,” book 2, chap. 12, in The Four Books of Andrea Palladio’s Architecture: Wherein, a fter a Short Treatise of the Five O rders, Those Observations That Are Most Necessary (London, 1738), 46. 39. See “Burlington House,” in Sheppard, Survey of London, 390–429. British History Online, January 24, 2021, http://w ww.british-h istory.ac.u k /survey-london/vols31-2/pt2 /pp390-4 29. 40. Mr. Pope, An Epistle to the Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington: Occasion’d by His Publishing Palladio’s Designs of the Baths, Arches, Theatres, &c. of Ancient Rome (London, 1731). 41. See my discussion of Defoe and urban planning and development in “The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time,” in Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain, 15–49. 42. Key provided by Postle, Johan Zoffany, RA, 231. 43. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, “The Cabinet of Miniatures and Enamels,” https://libsvcs-1.its.yale.edu/strawberryhill/oneitem.asp?id= 67.
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44. Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University, “Henry 8th’s Dagger,” https://libsvcs-1.its.yale .edu/strawberryhill/oneitem.asp?id=29. 45. For a consideration of the grotesque and how it functions in fiction, see, for instance, Maximillian E. Novak, “Gothic Fiction and the Grotesque,” NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 13, no. 1 (1979): 50–67, doi:10.2307/1344951. 46. The term “tropicopolitans” was coined by Srinivas Aravamudan. See Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 47. Echoing Stuart Hall, Partha Chatterjee presents a scathing review of cultural criticism in the United States. See Chatterjee, “Critique of Popular Culture,” Public Culture 20, no. 2 (2008): 321–342, esp. 322. 48. The eighteenth-century Twickenham presents us with a microcosmic view of how manual labor is at once visible and invisible in this elite enclave that continued to boast about such residents as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Alexander Pope, and Henrietta Howard, George II’s mistress. But Henry Flitcroft goes unnoticed even though his works still stand in pictorial if not in actual form. See my discussion of Flitcroft in Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain, 203–205.
Colonial Intimacies indian ayahs, british mothers Felicity Nussbaum The tax I have to propose is on Negro and East-India servants, who of late years are become too abundant in this kingdom; . . . they serve but to obstruct a more eligible population. The mixture of their breed with our own o ught by no means to be encouraged. . . . In their employments they . . . stand in the way of our own people. . . . These poor people are all, for the convenience or humour of their owners, brought into this kingdom slaves. —F. Freeman, London Chronicle and Universal Post 18 (October 19–22, 1765), 387.
East Indian domestic servants working for eighteenth-century British families often remained outside of public view, but they occasionally appear in literary and visual representations. In a 1789 letter to Frances Burney, Frederica Augusta Lock described an arrival at Godalming, Surrey, of “several Post Chaises containing East Indian [British] families with their Negro [Indian] servants, Nurses and Children.” Listening from her adjoining room, she complained of the “inhuman voices of the Nurses and their barbarous chattering” and speculated that the c hildren must be very naughty or the nurses extremely cross. Yet she sympathized with “t hese poor negro w omen taken away from their own country” who struggled with the English language.1 Requiring the serv ices of nursemaids for their c hildren, the eighteenth- century British w omen returning home frequently brought Indian caretakers with them. In the early days of the empire, British women constituted a scant minority numbering about one woman to every nine or ten British men in India.2 Various images and literary references testify to t hese foreign w omen’s presence on the subcontinent, increasing a fter the Black Hole incident of 1756 into the 130
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nineteenth century, a period characterized by the East India Company’s (EIC) shift from a largely mercantile interest to a colonizing presence. British women writers in the period dominate its literary representations, including most prominently Phebe Gibbes’s Hartly House, Calcutta (1789), Mariana Starke’s plays The Sword of Peace (1788) and The Widow of Malabar (1791), Elizabeth Hamilton’s Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (1796), Sidney Owenson’s The Missionary (1811), and Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India (1817).3 Here I concentrate on representations of the domestic intimacies that arose between British w omen and the Indian w omen servants, or ayahs, who cared for their children, both in India and in Britain. In surveying some of t hese women’s “worlding,” we can suggest alternatives to their containment within representations of the period. Most ayahs were the mixed-race offspring of Euro pean fathers and Indian mothers or “sable Portugueze” (“the most contemptible race to be found on earth”).4 These nursemaids or nannies were sometimes paid eight to twelve rupees monthly, while “Hindoostanee” w omen, either Muslims or Hindus who were sometimes denied caste standing, were most often employed as wet nurses. Their status was unsettled since some were sold to their employers, while o thers were drawn into serv ice as concubines or “bibis.” Such servants, sometimes indistinguishable from slave laborers in the h ousehold, experienced social segregation but were often invited into domestic intimacy and “affectionate loyalty,” an apt phrase that nevertheless remains inadequate to convey the colonizers’ complicated dependency upon such w omen.5 The EIC officers needed Indian intermediaries in dealing with local authorities, buying and exchanging funds and goods, and trading with Indian merchants.6 The ayah (or dhaye as the wetnurse was called) provided, I suggest, the domestic equivalent for this kind of requisite interaction for a British family residing in Calcutta or Madras. Such w omen servants also sometimes slipped of necessity into the category of mistress. In his 1782 will, British EIC officer Alexander Crauford bequeaths two thousand rupees to his “Girl” and directs her to surrender their c hildren without fuss to his b rother as guardian.7 Conflicts sometimes arose not only between British w omen and their female servants but also between English maids and Indian ayahs. The letters and journals of Lady Maria Nugent (1771–1834), for example, detail the competition between white domestic servants and Indian ayahs. Nugent’s English maid Johnstone is comforted in her social isolation by the ayah and playful with her, yet she insists on maintaining a hierarchy over her fellow servants.8 Even as a maid Johnstone, like Crauford’s “Girl,” exemplifies Betty Joseph’s notion of the “modern European entitlement to the bodies, land, and resources of people deemed to be different from them.” 9 Another kind of tension arose between British m others and Indian ayahs because the nursemaid was sometimes thought to take advantage of the absolutely essential nature of her serv ice to her employer’s child.10 In the colonial depiction of Black servant bodies, such w omen could, in spite of serving as
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objectified subjects of representation, also act as agents of resistance, as Srinivas Aravamudan’s evocative notion of tropicopolitans as both fictive and a ctual beings leads us to consider.11 British artists portraying Indian servants might, then, be described as engaging in what Spivak labeled the “ ‘worlding’ of what is now called ‘the Third World,’ ” in the sense that the artists w ere recovering, interpreting, and translating, not in words but in images, their notions of colonial relations. Among the l imited number of representations of ayahs during this period, perhaps the most striking is Joshua Reynolds’s painting George Clive(?) with His F amily and an Indian Servant (ca. 1765–1766), along with several other paintings of note that include female Indian servants. An even earlier example is Reynolds’s Elisabeth, Sarah, and Edward, C hildren of Edward Holden Cruttenden with an Indian Ayah (ca. 1760s). Other paintings of note include Sarah (née Buck) Baxter’s painting of her son, The Infant Nadir al-Mulk Muhammad al-Daula Baxter Bahadur Daulat Rajah, Seated on a Ledge with a Nurse and a Male Attendant (1793); Thomas Hickey’s (1741–1824) Portrait of a Young Boy [Laurence Sullivan] and His Ayah (1785); and two conversation pieces by Johann Zoffany: The Impey Family Listening to Strolling Musicians” (ca. 1783–1784) and Colonel Blair with His Family and an Indian Ayah (1786).12 In t hese paintings, the world quite literally transforms into pictures. Drawing on Heidegger’s 1938 essay, “The Age of the World Picture,” Betty Joseph adds that “the long eighteenth century is the age of the world becoming picture,” coinciding “with the devastation of other worlds.” 13 In unveiling this visual “worlding,” we can aim to counter its effects in part by emphasizing the subtle ways the Indian women servants may have resisted their objectification and strategized to shift its implications. The pictures and tales I examine here grapple with attempts at filtering affection and dependence through imperial assumptions of superiority. At the same time, they suggest that the children’s intimacy and ease with their Indian caretakers may have interfered with their formation of a robust English identity.14 Productive of the lure of the East and constitutive of it, t hese paintings reveal a largely untold story of the way Indian servants within the colonial Eng lish family are deeply intertwined within emerging ideas about “race” and empire. Families relied on Indian servants to care for their children, to tend them during the dangerous journey from India, and, once in E ngland, to embody the 15 family’s newfound wealth and status. “Race” sometimes faded as the servants were incorporated within the h ousehold, but it resurfaced when they became destitute after being dismissed or abandoned upon their arrival in England where many were treated as slaves or slave-servants and given no contract and little or no wages. By the early nineteenth c entury, lodging h ouses were set up for as many as sixty ayahs, some of whom were stranded in E ngland when employers reneged on their promise to pay for return transport.16
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Many Anglo-Indian w omen living in India in the late eighteenth century worried that their c hildren, if brought up by an ayah, would be tainted by that culture’s religions and values.17 Just as nabobs, enriched by their extraction of wealth from India, became figures exemplifying the imbrication of nation and empire, the wives of EIC officers may have been even more aware of the ways that the households they managed in India and E ngland reflected the hybridity of cultures to which their children w ere especially vulnerable.18 Documenting her experience in the East India Journal, Lady Nugent accompanied her husband to India when he was appointed commander-in-chief after having spent years at a post in Jamaica. Convinced of the dangers for British c hildren in India, Lady Nugent, making a decision that brought on a depression, left her children with guardians in E ngland rather than expose them to the disease and danger she believed they would encounter in India. She longs for their presence with deep ambivalence: “In spite of my constant craving to see my dearest children, who are rarely absent from my thoughts, it is very seldom that I ever indulge the wish to have them by my side, in this uncongenial country.” 19 The mortality rate for Anglo-Indian children in the subcontinent was twice that of those born in England, and they were frequently sent home before they reached school age. “In general the c hildren here are fat but deadly pale and sallow,” Lady Nugent lamented. “Very few of them speak a word of English and I should imagine the indolent Habits and suspect Ideas instilled in them here would be very difficult to get the better of in E ngland.” Further, she terrified herself with stories of female infanticide: “It is generally done by the midwives. What must the poor mothers suffer, if they know of their infants being sacrificed! It is too horrible to think of.” 20 But other British w omen gave birth in the environment they perceived as perilous, allowed their children to be absorbed into the culture, and made their home in India for many years. Over the course of the later eighteenth century, the period of these paintings, nabobs quickly transformed from being i magined as legitimate traders to corrupt thieves. The Oxford English Dictionary interestingly attributes the first pejorative application of “nabob” to a wealthy British trader returning from India. This definition parallels the approximate date of the Reynolds’s paintings and appears in a Horace Walpole letter of 1764. Walpole’s strong antagonism to nabobs was well known. The date of the Reynolds’s painting alleged to be of the Clive f amily also corresponds to the end of the Seven Years’ War as the British turned their attention from the West to the East, from one imperial theater to another. In Reynolds’s early picture of Elisabeth, Sarah, and Edward, C hildren of Edward Holden Cruttenden with an Indian Ayah (ca. 1760s), though the ayah is placed slightly off-center with downturned eyes that seem disengaged from the children, she is significant to them for she is believed to have saved her charges
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Figure 1. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Elisabeth, Sarah, and Edward, Children of Edward Holden Cruttenden with an Indian Ayah, ca. 1760s. Museu de Arte de São Paulo, Brazil.
from the massacre at Calcutta.21 More European than Indian, her white dress may have come from Reynolds’s theatrical stock: her red bowed headband picks up the color of the boy’s clothing and draws the reader’s eye to both the ayah and her charge. The ayah’s dark skin contrasts to the white c hildren who seem oblivious to her presence. Though the ayah is important to the painting, it is the children who most command our attention as they stare at the observer. The elder daughter gestures protectively toward her younger brother as if to adopt her mother’s role, for Mrs. Cruttenden had died during the Nawab of Bengal’s siege.22 Another Reynolds painting, alleged to be of the Clive family, shows cultural assimilation as exchange between the ayah and the English f amily.23 The paint-
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Figure 2. Sir Joshua Reynolds, George Clive (?) and His Family with an Indian Ayah, (ca. 1765–1766). Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Photo credit: Art Resource, NY.
ing, along with Reynolds’s earlier one of the Cruttenden family, was among the first representations of the nabobs who made empire’s spoils and pleasures vis ible within England itself. Returning nabobs created a lucrative and highly competitive market for portrait painters seeking patrons. Nabobs threatened the long-established hierarchy of the aristocracy with its inherited wealth and status, and Reynolds’s painting indicates the importance of the nabob, as a new source of both prosperity and the integration of his public affairs with domestic ones. Thus, the painting makes legible the ability of upstart patrons to afford pictorial representation and to impersonate aristocrats in their domestic space. At the same time, the painting emphasizes the marked difference of complexion between the nabob’s f amily and the Indian subjects. Sir Joshua Reynolds’s domestic family portrait now displayed in Berlin was first thought to be of Robert Clive’s f amily, and then later of that of his cousin, Lord George Clive (ca. 1720–1779) with his wife and his infant daughter.24 Robert, Lord Clive (known as “Clive of India”), in spite of leading the EIC troops to victory at the B attle of Plassey (1757), became a symbol of the worst aspects of corrupt and greedy nabobs as he toggled back and forth between the
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two countries from 1743 u ntil his apparent suicide in November 1774. George Clive, on the other hand, son of a pastor from Shropshire and born in Derbyshire, became an MP for Bishop’s C astle in 1763 and early achieved the status of nabob. Reynolds’s interest in his subjects may have been piqued because the painter himself held substantial shares in the EIC. The painting may in fact represent an even more fascinating set of subjects. It has now been convincingly identified as Tysoe Saul Hancock, His Wife Philadelphia, Their Daughter Elizabeth, and Their Indian Maid Clarinda (ca. 1763– 1765). Hancock, a surgeon to the EIC and sometime merchant, sought his fortune in Madras and then Calcutta, where he met his wife Philadelphia Austen (1730– 1792), Jane Austen’s aunt.25 Traveling to India to seek a husband, the young milliner’s apprentice was attached to the Robert Clive h ousehold in Calcutta, a fact that may partially explain the long-held misunderstandings regarding the painting’s subjects. Philadelphia married Hancock in January 1753 at age twenty- three. Her child Elizabeth, rumored to be the result of an affair with Warren Hastings, was born on December 22, 1761, making her barely four years old in the painting. The Hastings became the child’s godparents, and the families traveled back to London together, along with the Hancocks’ servant Clarinda, arriving in June 1765.26 Notes in Reynolds’s calendar suggest that the Hancocks and Clarinda sat for him in his studio from August 1765 to February 1766. In commentaries on the painting, the strikingly attractive ayah is variously described as a “Malay” maiden, a “Hindoo nurse,” a “coloured girl,” and “a black.” Clarinda’s clothing, gold jewelry, physiognomy, and dark skin suggest South Indian or Sri Lankan origins.27 Sir Thomas Lawrence, a British portrait painter and fourth president of the Royal Academy, longed to possess the painting and admired it for portraying “a beautiful group, characteristic of the g reat charm of portrait: a noble simplicity of expression, wherein the passing soul is made visible.” He testifies in a sentimental way to the servant’s racialized femininity: “The coloured girl is inimitable for a truth to nature, and a tenderness of feeling fully expressive in the action.” 28 The ayah’s gold, russet, and black arm bangles repeat the glossy tones of her dark hair, the ornately upholstered chair, and the lush curtains, all of which associate her more closely with the interior furnishings than with the family members.29 Aileen Ribeiro points out that her dress was most probably supplied by Reynolds’s studio, but the child’s elaborate muslin frock was more likely authentically produced in India.30 The richly brocaded coral chair with decorative nailhead trim, the broad swag of drapery framing the bucolic English landscape, and Philadelphia Hancock’s luminous white satin gown dramatically display the nabob’s wealth. In drawing attention to the nabob’s possessions, they align the material objects with the ayah. The child posed between mother and ayah seems the very epitome of empire’s luxury returned to the nation, but also a sign of the tension between the two women and their countries. The ayah’s left hand is rather awkwardly
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placed u nder the child’s arm; it visually interrupts the space between mother and child while seeming gently to restrain or support her charge while the mother cups the face of her daughter. In contrast to the ayah’s dark skin, the porcelain- faced toddler wears an angelic white dress resembling a christening dress, reminding us of her Christian Englishness, yet it is ornately trimmed in blue, silver, and gold, and her filigreed veil-like headpiece is fastened with a large jeweled brooch evoking the East. The child’s exceedingly white skin and dress bind her to the fair complexions of her mother and father, yet her jeweled armband and pendant with nine stones representing the sun, moon, and known planets, believed to represent prosperity in Hindu astrology, assert her connection to India.31 If these transcultural associations are the ones the viewer is intended to make, the image of the child reflects the agency of the ayah, for the toddler appears to be partially incorporated into Indian beliefs. Though she embodies the conundrum faced by British mothers who worried that their children would be contaminated by Indian culture, Mrs. Hancock’s rather blank stare seems to register none of those fears—this, even though the ayah may have served as toddler Elizabeth’s wet nurse as well as her caretaker, enacting what Sara Suleri calls “the economy of the borrowed breast.” 32 The outnumbering of parents to child in the painting seems to compensate for Clarinda’s importance and serves as visual reassurance about the limits of the Indian ayah’s influence on the British child. The child at the center thus represents both the porousness between the two cultures, colonizer and colonized, and also the potential strain between them. Her religion and clothing reflect the mixture while her complexion remains untainted. The Englishwoman turns her face toward the painter and viewer, unlike the ayah, who averts her eyes, as mother and child share similarly open, if inscrutable, expressions.33 Further, the ayah’s kneeling position, depriving her of legs, reinforces her subordinate status. In contrast the child stands at full height. Though the ayah’s eyes are cast downward away from the viewer, she steadies the child with both hands, almost possessively, allowing her gold jewelry to blend with the child’s garment and the golden slipper that peeps out from beneath the gown’s folds. The mother, on the other hand, stands at a slight distance from the child, touching her chin and, like Clarinda, holding the child’s waist, as if to direct her face toward the viewer. The mother’s gossamer shawl envelops both of their arms and binds the daughter to her. The two women’s hands—Clarinda’s left hand and Mrs. Hancock’s right hand clasping the child’s chest—seem together to constitute a hybrid pair against Eliza’s white dress. The two adult women are joined through the child in nurturing it with apparent devotion to its welfare, but they are separated by status, complexion, and nation.34 Sir Joshua Reynolds sketched the picture, and painted the f aces, but his assistants Peter Toms and the Italian painter Marchi executed the clothing, landscape, furnishings, and architectural structures. Positioned somewhat awkwardly, Mr. Hancock was probably a later addition to the painting, for the two women
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and girl child seem to be a tight unit unto themselves. Traces of earlier versions are visible beneath layers of paint on the canvas (pentimenti), especially in the domestic grouping of w omen on the right side.35 An X-ray of the painting reveals that two pieces of canvas were seamed together to the right of the gentleman; and while Henning Bock maintains that the unity of the painting is unspoiled, it seems oddly asymmetrical to me.36 The patriarch Hancock stands firmly in the center of the framed rural landscape representing the English rather than the Indian countryside. His gaze is slightly turned away from the female members of the family as if he is other wise engaged, perhaps contemplating affairs in the subcontinent or his impending return to it. His gold-braided suit, a further signal of rank and achievement, links him to India’s wealth and to the adornments of the ayah and the child. Curiously, Philadelphia Hancock is bare of India’s spoils with the exception of a pearl clasp highlighting her translucent complexion. Though whiteness may often signal innocent femininity, here it creates a family bond, excluding the exotic outsider. The interposition of the child next to the m other, rather than placing the child between husband and wife, precludes any suggestion of eroticism between Hancock and the ayah, though EIC officers frequently took ayahs as mistresses or even wives.37 In spite of the positioning of the members of the English family as somewhat distant from each other, they are united by an almost freakish whiteness of complexion, heightened in the mother and child’s case by the dark background surrounding them. Tysoe, Philadelphia, and the child Elizabeth all are painted with unnaturally white pigment, as if to emphasize not only their similarity to each other, but also their difference from the Indian maid, although art historian Matthew Hunter has suggested to me that the original carmine pigment in the European complexions may simply have worn away. Clarinda’s dark hand resting on the child contrasts starkly to the whiteness of the women’s frocks. Thus, the picture conveys both a sense of the integration of India with England and its intimacies as well as its developing imperial tensions and racial hierarchies. Two other paintings of note incorporate children with their caretakers but without their parents. Among t hose women who integrated aspects of Indian culture into their work was portrait painter and miniaturist Sarah Buck Baxter, who was largely ignored by her contemporary male artists. Married to widower John Baxter, a Calcutta merchant, Buck Baxter lived from 1791 to 1796 in India. Her son John was born on November 22, 1791, and a second son, Nadir, the subject of the painting The Infant Nadir . . . with a Nurse and a Male Attendant, was probably born in late 1792.38 The painting focuses on the child seated on a veranda among fruits and flowers, flanked to the right by a seated ayah wearing a heavily ornamented sari. The ayah is magnificently bejeweled with nose ring and multiple earrings, finger rings, and bangles. On the left sits a turbaned bearer with hands outstretched as if to protect the infant from falling, although the child
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seems firmly planted. As in the Reynolds’s picture, the focal point of the painting is the light-skinned child who offers a small bunch of ripe purple grapes to the viewer, while the servants, smiling benignantly, cast their eyes downward, their attention appearing to be wholly upon their charge. Among the muted colors of the painting are the soft white and peach of the infant’s complexion in contrast to the darker skin of the servants. The child is positioned as if between a father and m other and slightly closer to the ayah, seeming to suggest a closer relationship with his caregiver. In Baxter’s portrait the positioning of the subjects may suggest parallels to portraits of the Holy Family.39 Giving the child a full Persian name, Nadir al-Moulk Mahomed al Dowlah Baxter Bahadour Dowlut Rajah (meaning “Rare one of the Kingdom, praiseworthy one of the state, Baxter champion of the dynasty”),40 the Baxters appear not to have shied away from assimilating him into their adopted locale, though he bears no obvious markers of Indian religion or dress. The child’s maternal grandmother felt differently, however, and renamed the child William Nadir Buck Baxter, much to the consternation of his parents who insisted that he be called by his Persian name.41 But the picture, in which a plethora of fruits and flowers seem to emanate from the infant’s body, aptly prophesizes that he w ill share in the fruits of empire. Fully enjoying its offerings, the child appears to partake of its exotic produce without becoming tainted by its more brutal side. (As an adult, Nadir returned to India where he became a partner in his father’s Bombay company.) In his w ill John Baxter, Nadir’s father, left two thousand rupees to Vousk, an Indian w oman servant to the family, and we might speculate that she is the unnamed ayah pictured in the child’s portrait.42 Reynolds’s and Baxter’s paintings as well as Lady Nugent’s journals offer varied examples of British women’s differing responses to exposing their children to India and sharing the upbringing of a child with an Indian w oman. The intimate relationship could welcome difference, absorb it, take it on as one’s own, stand at an arm’s—or an ocean’s—length from another country, social class, or religion. While Sarah Baxter’s picture combines still life with portraiture, Hickey’s picture “Laurence Sulivan and his Ayah” (ca. 1785) suggests an active child, surrounded by Indian artifacts, reaching toward the ayah who holds a toy top.43 The subject is the infant grandson of the elder Laurence Sulivan, chairman of the EIC, and the son of Stephen Sulivan who was agent for supplies and contractor for opium.44 Although Indian playthings surround the child, he is distinguished from the exotic rather than absorbed within it. The overturned hassock or drum, along with the scattered nursery toys, creates a sense of pleasant disarray. The young boy wears a soft, flowing garment, while the ayah, bedecked in jewels and bangles, is sumptuously dressed in a sari liberally trimmed with gold. As in the Reynolds portrait, the ayah is seated while the unadorned child stands at full height, arms outstretched. Surrounded by objects, he seems to defy their pull, while the playthings compete for our attention to her. The vigilant ayah reaches
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Figure 3. Johann Zoffany, The Impey Family Listening to Strolling Musicians, ca. 1783–1784. Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain. Photo credit: Art Resource, NY.
to steady the tottering child as if to suggest attachment, if not necessarily affection. Johann Zoffany’s “The Impey Family Listening to Strolling Musicians” (ca. 1783–1784), centering on the very white-skinned British f amily surrounded with brown-skinned musicians and servants, focuses on the young daughter Marian Impey who, dressed as a nautch girl, dances to Indian m usic. At the center of the picture, she divides the British, seemingly aloof, from the Indians, but she and her b rother appear to integrate the cultures—she with her dancing, while the boy is seated on an ayah’s lap at the far right edge of the picture. Lady Impey attired in an elaborate white dress looks at the observer, not at the child. An ayah wearing a nose ring and gold-bordered sari holds the wiggling toddler, while another flicks away insects. In another of Zoffany’s conversation pieces, Colonel Blair with His Family and an Indian Ayah (1786), the ayah seems almost incidental to the family with whom she is pictured (Figure 4). Following a convention typical of the genre, she is moved to the fringes of the frame. The EIC officer in command of a brigade at Cawnpore in Northern India is shown with his wife Jane and his d aughters Jane and Maria, along with an ayah and the family’s pets. The cozy family portrait
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Figure 4. Johann Zoffany, Colonel Blair with His Family and an Indian Ayah, (1786). Tate Gallery, London.
centers on Blair whose wife, dressed resplendently, holds his hand as they listen to their elder d aughter perform on the piano. In the domestic interior, the younger daughter pets a docile cat in sharp contrast to the violence of the print over her head. Hanging above are three smaller paintings showing an Indian encampment along with two pictures that portray a fearsomely sublime India: a painting of suttee, and another of a Hindu festival known as charak puja or hook-swinging with a man suspended by a wire strung from his shoulder blades.45 The barefoot ayah’s positioning at the edge of the scene suggests her humble role may be to care for the family’s pets, making her seem more mascot than human, while the red and gold of her beautiful sari-like drape links her to the colors of the colonel’s imperial EIC uniform. The family’s white skin and garments contrast to the duller brown of the young ayah’s complexion and trousers that blend with the drab floor covering. The ayah, open-faced and somewhat expressionless, seems to have no connection to the m other, and she does not touch the Blair daughter next to her. More than intimacy, the painting displays a subservience predicated upon “worlding” unsettling elements of Indian culture that are captured within the framed artifacts on the wall. As we have seen, the ayahs in the paintings by Reynolds, Buck, Hickey, and Zoffany are portrayed as caregivers, companions, or mascots for the Anglo- Indian children they tend. Their status as human subjects is often undermined
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by the way they blend with the material objects of their culture, yet t hese paintings are characterized less by dominance over the Indian population than by the portrayal of uneasy, complicated roles within the domestic space, the family, and the two nations. Despite her subordinate position, the ayah is potentially threatening for numerous reasons: b ecause of the family’s dependency upon her ser vices, because the child’s affection for her may compete with the m other, and because of her potential to influence the child in untoward ways regarding religion, language, and political ideology. Ayahs also appear as significant figures in Mary Margaret Sherwood’s early nineteenth-century c hildren’s tales of India. The stories feature fictions about the attempt of British w omen to civilize and convert their domestic servants. Most especially, The Ayah and Lady: An Indian Story (1818) centers on the relationship between a Muslim ayah and her English mistress; it berates the servant for her moral depravity evidenced by her unwillingness to share her possessions with a starving outcaste beggar woman.46 The Lady, whom the Ayah calls Bebee- Saheb, sets herself up as an interpreter of the English Bible b ecause it is not yet available in Indian languages. Assuring the Ayah that all men are sinful, the narrator tells us that the Lady “was very kind” to her servant, “not only when she was well and could do her work but when she was sick and could do nothing.” 47 In addition to her small salary, the Lady grants two sets of clothing, sugar, tea, and extra money to the Ayah, who thinks of herself as a slave, when she is ill. The reader is meant to find the Lady admirable and generous as she lectures the boastful, contentious, and petty Ayah about her various failings. We learn the Lady’s life story: when she arrived in India ten years e arlier, she had first acted as a nabobess, seeking jewels and delighting in the pleasures of decadent dinners and nautch-girl entertainments. But, ironically, being in India brought the Lady to Christian conversion when a “holy padre” schooled her in Christianity. To appeal to the Ayah, she contextualizes Christianity as an Eastern religion, arguing that the Ten Commandments w ere delivered from a mountain in Arabia. In response the Ayah asserts that she prefers her Muslim god, a spirit, in contrast to both Christianity and “the Hindoos,” whom she characterizes as pretending “that their gods eat, and drink, and sleep, like men, [and thus] shew that they know nothing about the nature of God.” 48 Though the Ayah mentions several times that she is Muslim, the Lady (and perhaps, Sherwood) seems confused about the servant’s religion and assumes that the many Hindu gods are also gods to Indian Muslims. When the Ayah falsely accuses a fellow servant of breaking a lamp, and swears on the Koran that her lie is true, the Lady fires her. The Lady claims that “We English people are wicked enough, but in this respect we are not half so sinful as you Hindoos and Mussulmauns are. Very few English men or women will tell lies upon oath; but . . . you are all liars.” 49 But when the Ayah is unable to find
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other employment a fter becoming lame, the Lady relents; she rehires the Ayah and continues the conversion attempt. In her autobiography Sherwood’s perverse version of worlding found the fantastical Arabian Nights to be “the very best description of Eastern manners and Eastern modes of thinking which w ere then in existence.” 50 The Lady draws a curious parallel between an Eastern king in a story resembling an Arabian Nights tale, and the Christian God whose wrath is felt when his laws are v iolated. The nurse corrupts the Lady’s child with “wonderful tales of fairies and genii; of sailors, whose surprising histories rivalled t hose of the famous Sinbad; of enchanted caverns,” and of rings, wands, and lamps with magic qualities.51 Though the Ayah does not convert, fearing loss of caste, she reflects upon “how happy real Christians must be” because they are promised eternal life.52 The dying Lady asks the Ayah to accompany her orphaned daughter to England where relatives w ill become the child’s guardian. In short, the contradictory attitude toward Indian servants, particularly ayahs, prevails as the Lady’s best efforts to make a Christian of the nanny fail, yet she is willing to allow the unrepentant Ayah, whom she believes to be deceptive, thieving, and murderous, to raise, and presumably to guide, her daughter. Upon her return to India, the Lady’s widowed husband rewards the Ayah by taking her son into his serv ice. For Sherwood, the antagonisms seem largely religious and cultural with complexion hardly at issue. In another of Sherwood’s fanciful stories, The History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye stresses the importance of an Indian nurse who offers “the bosom of a Hindoo woman, to receive that nourishment without which it is found utterly impossible to rear the infants of European parents in that burning region, so uncongenial to the nature of a northern race.” 53 In her autobiography Sherwood worries that Indian wet nurses will ignore their own suckling babies: “Whenever they nurse a white baby, they cease to care for their own; they say, ‘White child is good; black child his slave.’ ” 54 She worried about cultural contamination. The motherless child Lucy’s dress was “half Hindoostanee and half European”; she eats the local cakes and treacle and speaks only “Hindoostanee.” 55 Once the dying Lucy returns to England, she successfully prays for her nurse’s conversion despite her having to renounce caste and f amily. Thus, in spite of the allegedly detrimental influence of the ayah, the child triumphs in her Christian mission. The contradictions brought about by empire’s intimacies are especially intense in the domestic sphere, for families were often heavily reliant upon ayahs both in England and India, although the ayah was seldom, if ever, granted equal status as a family member. The domestic relationships that the paintings and children’s tales portray helped breed attitudes of English superiority and advancing colonialism for f uture generations of British children, both girls and boys, in India and at home. The various visual and literary representations range from openly incorporating the ayah into the Anglo-Indian family, as in the Reynolds
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and Baxter pictures, to moving the servant to the fringes of the domestic unit in the Zoffany pictures, portraying her as incidental in the Hickey picture, and finally demonizing her as in Mary Sherwood’s c hildren’s stories, attempting to “civilize” the ayah into Christianity, but without fully assimilating her into British social structures. Th ese paintings and fictions are characterized less by unquestionable mastery over a population than by diverse complicated roles within the domestic space, the f amily, and the nation. It is worth remarking that paintings of British children with their British nursemaids during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries seem very scarce, perhaps even nonexistent. The Indian ayahs in the paintings discussed here, then, are not merely proxies for white nannies but instead signifiers of empire and of the allegedly benevolent incursion of India into English domesticity in an attempt to show that the colonizing employers are able to maintain control and superiority in spite of the possibility of intimacy and influence. They exist only in another “world.” English child and Indian caretaker, sans the child’s parents, would seem then to exist symbolically in a separate world where ayahs have affective primacy. Attitudes toward the East in the second half of the eighteenth century were not easily codifiable but instead inconsistent and vexed—intensely so in the domestic sphere. As ideas about the East evolved and the British relationship to India shifted, the literary and visual representations of ayahs varied greatly, ranging from regarding the servant maid and nurse as essential though subordinate, to imagining her as an erotic object or a corrupt and violent subject ripe for Christian conversion, but without fully assimilating her into British social structures. As we have seen, moving into the nineteenth century, the relationships among mistress, child, and ayah became more troubled as children are taught that the ayahs who teach and influence them may be deeply misguided and untrustworthy. Encouraging c hildren to accept stereot ypes of the servants who are granted authority over them as unschooled apostates enabled the reversal of the power in the relationship. Notwithstanding the ayah’s subservient position, then, she is potentially threatening and even agential, because of the family’s dependency upon her serv ices and her ability to negotiate her culture, because the child’s affection for her may compete with that for the mother, and because of her potential for influencing the child in untoward ways. It is worth noting that the titles of the paintings often provide specific names for the c hildren yet not the servants. The nameless servants’ absence yet presence in art or words complicates their apparent anonymity. “Worlding,” Spivak argues, is “a making into art, a making into an object to be understood.” 56 While a white w oman’s subjectivity often requires the othering of a “third world” w oman, her authority is compromised by the potentially incendiary power of the w oman servant caring for and nursing her c hildren.57 In short, the domestic intimacies depicted here conveyed between the British
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other, the Indian female servant, and the British child she cares for reflect the m colonial exploitation of servant bodies but also the way an Indian woman servant may insist on her agency as a subject. While we probably cannot go so far as to suggest that the ayahs in Reynolds’s paintings use their objectification “as a specific strategy,” as Uri McMillan writes of Black w omen performers,58 we can suggest that the colonial consumption of Indian caregivers is undermined by the ways that women servants such as Clarinda, Vousz, and the unnamed ayahs in Sherwood’s stories, aestheticized objects of representation, found avenues to seize agency and insist on their humanity. If we attend to t hese women, even in their filtered forms, we might find a way to interrupt and interrogate “worlding.”
Notes 1. Frederica Augusta Locke, Letter to Frances Burney, August 6, 1789, cited in Duchess of Sermonetta, The Locks of Norbury: The Story of a Remarkable F amily in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: J. Murray, 1940), 53–54. I am grateful to the editors of this volume for their astute suggestions. 2. Rosemary Raza, In Their Own Words: British W omen Writers and India 1740–1857 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), xix, notes, “When Siraj-ud-Daula took Calcutta in 1756, of the estimated 751 Europeans in Bengal, only eighty w ere women, many of them with non-British names.” Captain Thomas Williamson, The East India Vademecum: or Complete Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the . . . Service of the East India Company, 2 vols. (London: Black, Parry, and Kingsbury, 1810), 1:453, remarks, “The number of European w omen to be found in Bengal, and its dependencies, cannot amount to two hundred and fifty, while the European male inhabitants of respectability, including military officers, may be taken at about four thousand.” 3. See, for example, Kathryn S. Freeman, British Women Writers and the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1785–1835: Reorienting Anglo-India (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014); Ashok Malhotra, Making British Indian Fictions, 1772–1823 (New York: Palgrave, 2012); and Ashley L. Cohen, ed., Lady Nugent’s East Indian Journal: A Critical Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 4. Williamson asserts this point in East India Vademecum, 1:338; 1:337–341. 5. Kristina Straub employs the term “affectionate loyalty” in Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 2. 6. Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 87. 7. Cited by Margot Finn in “Slaves out of Context: Domestic Slavery and the Anglo- Indian F amily, c. 1780–1830,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 19 (2009): 182. Lady Constance Russell “sailed from India . . . in 1804, taking with her the two youngest children and two female Indian servants (known in the f amily as ‘Black Mary’ and Anne Ayah, albeit the latter was re-named Mrs Williams when she began to serve as a lady’s maid in E ngland).” Margot Finn, “Swallowfield Park, Berkshire: from Royalist Bastion to Empire Home,” in The East India Company at Home, 1757–1857, ed. Margot Finn and Kate Smith (London: UCL Press, 2018), 217. 8. HL-STG 9 #24, Stowe Collection, Huntington Library. Many thanks to Ashley Cohen for this citation; Cohen indicates in private correspondence, “I believe the letter was written by Lady Nugent . . . a nd directed to Anna Eliza Brydges (Lady T emple), her very close friend and the wife of her husband’s patron’s son.” The letters in the folders are not numbered.
146 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 9. Betty Joseph, “Worlding and Unworlding in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth- Century Studies 52, no. 1 (2018): 28. 10. Raza, In Their Own Words, remarks on t hese tensions, 51–53. 11. See the definition in Srinivas Aravamudan, Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1807 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 8: “a name for a colonized subject who exists both as a fictive construct of colonial tropology and actual resident of tropical space.” See also his Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), and Ali Behdad, “Orientalism M atters,” Modern Fiction Studies 56, no. 4 (Winter 2010): 709–726. 12. Though Reynolds never traveled to India, a fter artist Tilly K ettle went to Madras in 1769, “almost sixty of such [British] painters went to India between then and 1820 to stay for a longer or a shorter period,” according to Mildred and W. G. Archer, Indian Painting for the British, 1770–1880 (London: Oxford University Press, 1955), 10. 13. Joseph, “Worlding and Unworlding,” 28. 14. See Dara Rossman Regaignon, “Intimacy’s Empire: Children, Servants, and Missionaries in Mary Martha Sherwood’s ‘Little Henry and His B earer,’ ” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 26, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 84–95. 15. See Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars, and Princes: Indians in Britain 1700–1847 (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 12–17. 16. Suzanne Conway, “Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-Indian Children, c. 1750–1947,” in Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World, ed. Shirleene Robinson and Simon Sleight (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 41–58. I have integrated insights of this essay into my comments h ere. A home for ayahs was established around 1825 in London. See also Joyce Grossman, “Ayahs, Dhayes, and B earers: Mary Sherwood’s Indian Experience and ‘Constructing Subordinated Others,’ ” South Atlantic Review 66, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 14–44; Napur Chaudhuri, “Memsahibs and Motherhood,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 4 (Summer 1988): 517–535; and Nandini Battacharya, Reading the Splendid Body: Gender and Consumerism in Eighteenth-Century British Writing on India (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988). 17. The term “Anglo-Indian” was used to describe the British in India until the early twentieth c entury, when it came to signify, as it does today, a person of mixed ethnicity. 18. For an excellent discussion of nabobs as threatening hybrid figures, see Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 76. Nechtman defines a nabob as “a social upstart who . . . extorted a criminal fortune from South Asia and hoped to translate it into power and prestige in the metropolitan world.” 19. Cohen, Lady Nugent’s East India Journal, 307. 20. Cohen, Lady Nugent’s East India Journal, 255. 21. R. Holden, Notes and Queries, 9th series, 7 (May 11, 1901): 369. 22. Conway, “Ayah, Caregiver to Anglo-Indian Children,” 44, remarks upon this death. 23. In the collection of Staatliche Museen Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, oil on canvas, 140 × 171 cm. Henry Austen’s painting was sold at auction June 1817 to art merchant John W. Brett, along with Reynolds’s Portrait of Warren Hastings, which now belongs to the National Portrait Gallery. The sale was critical to the identification of the sitters. The painting was sold again on June 1838 at a Christie’s auction; Lord Frances Egerton, later the Earl of Ellesmere, purchased it for the Bridgewater House in London. The Berlin museum bought it after 1976. See Henning Bock, “Joshua Reynolds, ‘George Clive und seine Familie mit einer indischen Dienerin,’ ” in Jahrbuch PreuBischer Kulturbesitz, vol. 14 (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1977), 163–173. My thanks to Dustin Lovett, University of California, Santa Barbara, for his excellent translation. For a recounting of the painting’s complicated provenance, see Charlotte and Gwendolen Mitchell, “Passages to India,” Times Literary Supplement, July 18, 2017, 13–14.
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24. Algernon Graves, William Vine Cronin, and Sir Edward Robert Pearce Edgcumbe, The History of the Works of Joshua Reynolds, 4 vols. (London: Henry Graves, 1909), 1:179–180. 25. Mitchell and Mitchell, “Passages to India,” 13–14. 26. Warren Hastings later established a £10,000 trust for Eliza. In 1768 Hancock, seeking to increase his fortune, returned to India, where he died in 1775. 27. David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 1:381, notes that “her hairstyle and necklace, with its t riple pendant, indicate that she was a married woman.” 28. James L. Yarnall and William H. Gerdts, eds., The National Museum of American Art’s Index to American Art Exhibition Catalogues, 6 vols. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1986), 4:2932. 29. Sir Thomas also valued the way the picture “combine[d] a lovely conception with a subdued and transparent colouring and careful execution,” in Dr. G. F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain, 3 vols. (London: John Murray, 1854), 2:53. 30. Aileen Ribeiro, cited in Nicholas Penny et al., Reynolds: Catalogue of the Exhibition . . . in London Royal Academy of Arts, January 16–March 31, 1986 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986), 217: “His wife’s satin dress, with soft ballooning sleeves tightening to the wrist . . . , is a studio garment..” 31. “Account of the Province of Rámnád, Southern Peninsula of India,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, article 7 (London: John W. Parker, 1836), 3:171. 32. Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 81. 33. Rose-Marie Hagen and Rainer Hagen, What Great Paintings Say: From the Bayeux Tapestry to Diego Rivera, 2 vols. (Cologne: Taschen, 2005), 2:517, 516, remark that the m other’s face “provokes questions.” They add that “the maidservant only found herself in the center” a fter the two parts of the canvas were sewn together. 34. On w omen and servants, see, for example, Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth C entury (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Carolyn Steedman, L abours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern E ngland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 35. Joseph, “Worlding and Unworlding,” 28. Henning Bock writes: “A portion of the eve ning landscape and the bright clouds was covered up. . . . In this manner, the greatest brightness in the center of the composition, by which the maid’s dark head is further emphasized, is reduced since it would otherw ise form an all to obvious center for the picture.” “Joshua Reynolds,” 170, trans. Dustin Lovett. 36. Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds, 1:381, explains that “the canvas consists of two pieces joined by a vertical seam to the right of Clive himself [beginning at the top edge of the red drapery].” 37. Tysoe Saul Hancock pens several benevolent messages regarding his servant, e.g., “Tell Clarinda that I always remember her and have the greatest Regard for her” (November 21, 1771), letter cited in Mitchell and Mitchell, “Passages to India,” 14. 38. Sarah (née Buck) Baxter, The Infant Nadir al-Mulk Muhammad al-Daula Baxter Bahadur Daulat Rajah, Seated on a Ledge with a Nurse and a Male Attendant (1793, private collection). For details of this painting, see Mildred Archer, India and British Portraiture 1770–1825 (London: Sotheby Parke Bernet, 1979), pl. 317, 400–402. For an online print, see Bonhams, “Lot 258,” https://w ww.bonhams.com/auctions/19960/lot/258/. 39. My thanks to Professor Zirwat Chowdhury for this and other helpful suggestions that strengthened this essay. 40. Archer, India and British Portraiture, 401.
148 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 41. Archer, India and British Portraiture, 402: “The argument [about naming the child] reflects the change in attitudes that was taking place at the turn of the century.” 42. Archer, India and British Portraiture, 402, notes that Baxter singles out Vousk as someone who provided “long and faithful serv ice to his late wife, Sarah,” and he awards 4,000 rupees to Charles, his natural son with her. Archer does not speculate about the ayah subject of the painting. 43. Laurence Sulivan and His Ayah (ca. 1785, private collection) is pictured in “Thoughts on an Irish Artist’s Portrait of a Bibi,” in India in Art in Ireland, ed. Kathleen James- Chakraborty (London: Routledge, 2017), fig. 2.7, 62. 44. Laurence Sulivan (1783–1866) eventually became a British statesman, deputy secretary of war, and philanthropist. 45. See Mary Webster, Johan Zoffany 1733–1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 461. See also Beth Fowkes Tobin, Picturing Imperial Power: Colonial Subjects in Eighteenth-Century British Painting (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). 46. Mrs. Sherwood, The Ayah and Lady, an Indian Story, 3rd ed. (London: F. Houlston and Son, 1818). 47. Sherwood, The Ayah and Lady, 7. 48. Sherwood, The Ayah and Lady, 38. 49. Sherwood, The Ayah and Lady, 76. 50. Mrs. Sherwood, The Life of Mrs. Sherwood (Chiefly Autobiographical), ed. by Her Daughter Sophia Kelly (London: Darton and Co., 1857), 265. 51. Mrs. Sherwood, “The History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye,” in The Works of Mrs. Sherwood, 16 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 3:47. 52. Sherwood, The Ayah and Lady, 91. 53. Sherwood, “History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye,” 3:39. 54. Sherwood, Life of Mrs. Sherwood, 378. 55. Sherwood, “History of Little Lucy and Her Dhaye,” 48. 56. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak with Elizabeth Grosz, “Criticism, Feminism, and the Institution,” in The Post-colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies, Dialogues, ed. Sarah Harasym (New York: Routledge, 1990; repr., 2014),1. 57. See Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth- Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 58. Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: New York University Press, 2015), 8.
A World Affair the south sea pavilion in the garden realm of dessau-wörlitz Billie Lythberg Wörlitz is not a local affair, not even a German one; it is an affair of European scale, a world affair. —Wilhelm van Kempen, 19251
In the late eighteenth century, central Germany was second only to Polynesia for its concentration of Südsee (South Sea) architecture,2 inspired by the literary accounts of voyages of scientific exploration into the Pacific. “Otahitische” pavilions, cabinets, and bathing and angling huts punctuated landscape garden narratives designed to collapse the temporal and geographical distances between worlds ancient, present, and newly discovered, and promote the philosophical and didactic ideals of the Enlightenment. “Tahitian” structures referred specifically to Tahiti and more broadly to the South Sea islands, Otaheite then denoting both. They consolidated the myth of the South Sea as the i magined paradise of Arcadia, a place of “innocent desire and sexual freedom,” 3 espoused first by Admiral Louis Antoine de Bougainville, who styled Tahiti “Nouvelle Cythére,” after the birthplace of Venus. As Anne Salmond observes, “Although Europe discovered Tahiti during the Age of Reason, fantasy was far from dead, and the worlds that came together in t hese meetings w ere as much imaginative as real.” 4 In this era, the garden realm emerged as a site for the presentation and dissemination of knowledge but also “a constructed projection space accessible to the senses for concepts of utopia, world and identity.” 5 Schloß Wörlitz in the Garden Realm of Dessau-Wörlitz, the earliest landscaped garden in Central Europe, offers an exceptional example. Among its impressive residential buildings, follies, and collections are an assortment of Tahitian, Māori, and Tongan 149
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Figure 1. Eisenhart with library (left) and South Sea Pavilion (right). Courtesy of Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz.
objects collected during the second Pacific expedition of Captain James Cook and presented to Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau (Prince Franz) by voyage naturalist Georg Forster. For a hundred fifty years, this “Wörlitzer Südseesammlung” collection was displayed in a Südseepavillon (South Sea Pavilion) with an adjacent library atop a tiered-stone platform. Straddling a canal connected to Wörlitz Lake, the platform bears the colloquial name of its Raseneisenstein (bog iron stone) cladding, Eisenhart. The Eisenhart and its pavilions w ere the first structures purpose built for a Pacific artifact collection and associated texts,6 bringing the public into close quarters with accounts of European exploration and domestic and ritual objects of Pacific p eoples. This essay traces how this curious assemblage of microcosms and cosmogonies brought South Sea worlds to central Germany. In d oing so, it moves between worlds and through chronologies of encounters and relationships. Concurrently, it calls linear historiography into question, tracking recursive arcs of worlding and reworlding to contemplate how past, present, and f uture intentions might coalesce in and spiral outward from the Eisenhart in Wörlitz. The Eisenhart complex was both like and unlike other Tahitian-style architecture in Germany at the time—like in that it instantiated the exoticism of Tahiti, associated with ideas of a Golden Age; unlike in that its form invited visual comparison with garden grottoes more readily than with an “Otahitische
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Hütte.” 7 In fact, the Eisenhart platform was modeled on a Tahitian voyaging marae, a place of arrivals, departures, and returns, a place where worlds could meet and from which they might expand.8 These were sacred precincts for worship and offerings, prestations and sacrifices (including human), and instruction in arts, including star navigation. Marae emerge early in Tahitian histories. A fter the primordial feathered god Ta`aroa has created the earth and ten domed heavens, parts of his body transform into ata (shadows or embodiments). Tetumu (the rock of foundation) is made from his phallus, plants and trees from his feathers, the homeland Havai`i from his body, while his backbone and ribs give form to the first god house and sacred canoe.9 Ta`aroa then makes a marae for each district “and set(s) a star above it, ordering the universe.” 10 Marae stones carried to new islands became the foundations for new marae through which voyaging islanders “imposed a cultural template intended to bring order and give structure to the newly encountered landscape. . . . By manipulating the environment in this way, islanders sought to re-create the cultural coordinates of the ancestral Polynesian homeland [Havai`i] at every stop along their journey.” 11 Th ese cultural coordinates encompassed sophisticated noninstrumental systems of navigation, and understandings of time and space of interest to, and application by, European visitors to Tahiti. The most famous is the map laid out by Ra‘iātea navigator-priest Tupaia during Cook’s first circumnavigation. Tupaia had trained at Taputapuatea marae (meaning “vast and sacred light”), the center of a vast voyaging network. His chart denotes voyaging geography according to time traveled and sequential progress from star point to star point and island to island.12 In Tupaia’s world, star gods traversed the skies in star waka (canoes), mirroring their descendants’ voyages across the sea (itself conceptualized as a marae), and Tahiti was spoken of as a g reat fish, recalling its birth as a swimming shark.13 Discoverers of new islands w ere worldmakers, hauling land from the sea. When Tahitians sighted their first European visitors in 1767, it made sense to perceive their ship as a floating island, as Tahiti had once been, impelled by ancestral power across the great marae of the sea.14 The ari`i rahi (high chiefs) of marae in Tahiti w ere the living faces of gods still resident t here, from whom they counted forty generations of descent.15 By assuming the form of a voyaging marae in Wörlitz, the Eisenhart envisioned a highly charged and potent space fixed into the cosmos by the stars above, where “Te Po (the world of darkness, death and the gods) entered Te Ao (the world of light, life and p eople).” 16 The “Eisenhart” is an otherworldly constellation and the imaging of other worlds. The imagining of the Eisenhart began with a gift, from scientist donor to wealthy patron. When the Resolution docked in London in July 1775, it was packed to the gunwales with “artificial curiosities,” as human-made (artificial) “objects of rare interest” (curiosities) w ere called to distinguish them from natural history
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Figure 2. Tuinga kahoa, bird bone necklace, Tonga. 26 × 18 × 2 cm. Kulturstiftung Dessau- Wörlitz, Inv. II-1171.
specimens. While many were domestic items, some were manifestations of ancestors, and others were the ata of living gods. Some signaled presence through appearance: bright feathers, bird bones, shark teeth, skeins of finely plaited human hair, luminous shells, and the creamy patina of whale tooth and bone were “a bold visual index that underpins island cosmologies and signals chiefly dominion over the distinct realms of the land, sea, and sky.” 17 Others materialized and managed mana (potency, authority, and chiefly status) through their shape, scale, and construction methods. There was also a single Society Islander on board, Ma`i (“Omai”), who would become immortalized in portraits, a pantomime, and poetry before returning home on Cook’s third voyage. Ma`i emulated fellow Ra`iāteans Ahutoru, who toured Paris with Bougainville in 1769, and Tupaia, who navigated Cook’s first voyage bark the Endeavour safely through the Society Islands, and to New Zealand and Australia. Ma`i became the first Polynesian to achieve a circumnavigation; Ahutoru died on his return voyage, Tupaia en route to London. Ahutoru gave Europeans their first insights into Polynesian astronomy and navigation, including his belief that the moon and sun were populated, perhaps referring to the Tahitian goddess Hina, who beat tree bark into cloth on the moon.18 At this, Bougainville asked, “What Fontanelle taught them about the plurality of worlds?” inviting Polynesian cosmologies into dialogue with an early proponent of the Enlightenment.19 Ahutoru set a precedent for the literary cele brations of Ma`i when he was described by the poet Jacques Delille in the series of poems, Les Jardins, “walking in the royal gardens and seeing a tree that he
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Figure 3. Patu paraoa, whalebone club, New Zealand. 40 × 10 × 2 cm. Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Inv. II-1187.
recognised from his native island, wrapping his arms around its trunk and weeping in a romantic expression of homesickness.” 20 Tahiti was discovering Europe, as Europe was discovering Tahiti. Among the crew and savants to disembark the Resolution w ere father and son naturalists, Johann Reinhold Forster and Georg Forster. The Eisenhart materializes a particular relationship between the younger Forster and Prince Franz. When he returned from the Pacific at the tender age of twenty, Georg had already seen more of the world than any other German and was a “polyglot wunderkind” who helped establish the literary travel book as a favored genre in German lit erature. He published his Pacific voyage account in English before doing so in his native tongue and said of Tahitian, “no language seemed easier to acquire than this.” 21 Georg was well connected in society and learned circles and had been well liked by the Resolution’s sailors. At the time, though, “elite sponsorship remained more consequential than popular reception” for scientific explorers.22 Collections made in the idealized and mythical South Sea were mobilized in Europe to bind patrons into “exchange-of-gift” relationships with donors, which imposed “an obligation to confer a benefit in return.” 23 These mirrored the taio “bond friendships” many of Cook’s officers and savants had entered with their Tahitian hosts, involving the exchange of gifts and also names and genealogies. Taio bonds achieved a partial merging of identities and ongoing obligations that must have been familiar to the Forsters. “Artificial curiosities” amassed through barter and gift exchange in Polynesia made valuable additions to the private cabinets and public exhibits of wealthy and influential patrons. They augmented their (new) o wners’ prestige, providing evidence of their relationships with significant intellectuals of the day and their engagement in Enlightenment discourse. Beginning on board and continuing in London, the Forsters’ systematic procurement methods generated microcosms for prospective patrons. Multiples of “types” of artifacts made ark-l ike assemblages; the Forsters’ care in this matter is evidenced by the overlap in collections still attributed to them.24
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Prince Franz, his consort Louise, and his architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorf visited the Forsters at their London house in October 1775. The prince was gifted more than thirty objects, while Princess Louise received a “South Sea” map marked by Georg with the Resolution’s course. She displayed it in the Schloß Wörlitz library, with the inscription: “ ‘It was in London in the summer of 1776 [sic] that I made the acquaintance of the famous Forsters, father and son. Still occupied with the unpacking of the rarities brought back with them from the sea voyage, they gave my spouse a number [of things] from Otaheiti, and gave me this map.’ Louise.” 25 The princess’s diary recalls a more intimate encounter with Georg and his collection: “I put one of the bracelets on my arm in such a way that I was barely able, with much effort, to take it off again. Mischievously, he asked: do I then have a Tahitian arm?” 26 Nearly two hundred fifty years later, her words blush at this suggestion, evoking the complex sensuality that adhered to South Sea things. In 1779, Georg returned the visit, spending two weeks as Prince Franz’s guest in the garden realm. During his visit just a year prior, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, considered the most significant German literary figure of the modern era, described the garden, which emulated the unfolding scenes created by English landscaping rather than the French garden’s formal symmetry. “As we wandered among the lakes, canals and forests yesterday evening, I was deeply moved by the way in which the gods had allowed the Prince to create all around him a dream. As one passes through it, it is as if one w ere being told a fairy tale. . . . In the gentlest multiplicity one t hing flows into another; no elevation draws one’s eye or one’s yearning t owards a single point; one wanders about neither asking whence one has gone nor where one is g oing.” 27 Prince Franz was one of “a small group of German theorists, designers, and patrons who thought extensively about the relationship between nature and culture within the context of the lived space of the Romantic garden” and shared a conviction that “garden forms affect feelings, with the role of the garden artist to determine paths that w ill alter and diversify the visitor’s experience of place.” 28 In this respect, the prince must have enjoyed Georg’s emotionally evocative and sensory descriptions of gardens in Polynesia, published two years before his tour of Wörlitz. Of the arrival of the Resolution in Tahiti, Georg wrote: It was one of t hose beautiful mornings which the poets of all nations have attempted to describe, when we saw the isle of O-Taheite, within two miles before us. The east-w ind which had carried us so far, was entirely vanished, and a faint breeze only wafted a delicious perfume from the land, and curled the surface of the sea. The mountains, clothed with forests, rose majestic in various spiry forms, on which we already perceived the light of the rising sun: nearer to the eye a lower range of hills, easier of ascent, appeared, wooded like the former, and coloured with several pleasing hues of green, soberly mixed with autumnal browns. At their foot lay the plain, crowned with its fertile
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bread-fruit trees, over which r ose innumerable palms, the princes of the grove. Here everyt hing seemed as yet asleep, the morning scarce dawned, and a peaceful shade still rested on the landscape.29
This passage is considered an “epoch-making contribution” for emotional understandings of landscape.30 Georg wrote just as evocatively of Tonga, including a reference to the lyrical poetry of Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus, 65–8 b.c.e.), the leading Roman poet in the time of Augustus: Our walk lay through a number of rich plantations or gardens, enclosed as before mentioned with fences of reeds, or with quick-hedges of the beautiful coral flower, (erythrina corallodendron). Beyond t hese we entered into a lane between two enclosures, and observed bananas and yams planted in rows on both sides, with as much order and regularity as we employ in our agriculture. This lane opened into a fine extensive plain, covered with rich grasses. Having crossed it, we met with a most delightful walk about a mile in length, formed of four rows of coco-nut trees, which ended in another lane between plantations of g reat regularity, surrounded by shaddocks and other trees. It led through a cultivated valley to a spot where several paths crossed each other or met in one. Here we saw a fine lawn covered with a delicate green turf, and surrounded by large shady trees on all sides. In one corner of it t here was a house, which was empty at present, its inhabitants being probably by the water’s side. Mr. Hodges sat down to draw this delightful spot. We breathed the most delicious air in the world, fraught with odours which might have revived a d ying man; the sea-breeze played with our hair and g ently cooled us; a number of small birds twittered on all sides, and many amorous doves cooed harmoniously in the deepest shade of the tree u nder which we were seated. The tree was remarkable for its roots, which came out of the stem near eight feet above the ground, and for its pods of more than a yard long, and two or three inches broad. This secluded spot, so rich in the best productions of nature, where we sat solitary with no other h uman being besides our two natives, struck us with the idea of enchanted ground, which being the creation of our own gay fancy, is commonly adorned with all possible beauties at once. In fact, t here could not have been a more desirable spot for a little place of retirement, according to the elegant imagination of Horace, if it had only been supplied with a crystal fountain or a little murmuring rill!31
oward the end of this extraordinary description Georg acknowledges his fanT ciful adorning of the Tongan landscape with “all possible beauties at once,” in a passage that could apply to the gardens at Wörlitz. During his visit to Wörlitz, Georg gave a lecture and, at the prince’s request, wrote an index of the collection. Since lost, its details survive in the list of
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Sehenswürdigkeiten or “landmarks” from the South Seas prepared by August Rode in 1788, with which all subsequent records and stock-takes correspond: 1. From O Taheite and the Society Islands: A stone axe. A breastplate. Woven hair worn as an ornament during dancing. A sinker for fishing gear, made from shells. Thirteen different types of fabric created from bark by means of beating. A mat. An underskirt for a female dancer. 2. From the Friendly Islands, and specifically from the island of Amsterdam, or Tongatabu: A fishing net. A small stool used as a pillow for the head. Two baskets. A syrinx, or Doric pipes. Three items of fishing gear. Two clubs, a bow and arrow. Two combs. Two pieces of fabric. A club used to pound breadfruit into pulp. 3. From New Zealand: An earring and an axe of green nephrite stone. An item of dress. A small [whale] bone battle club. An item of fishing gear made of h uman bone. A small bundle of hemp. Compared with Georg’s landscape descriptions, this index of “landmarks” is sparse and unimaginative. Did Rode take editorial liberties? It appears not: the index maps well onto a catalog Georg addressed to Italian scientist and director of the Mint in Florence, Giovanni Fabroni, on February 17, 1778, intended for presentation to the grand duke of Tuscany.32 Written a year before Georg prepared the Wörlitz South Sea Collection index, this list is also spare. Yet a comparison between these two reinforces the Forsters’ deliberate assembly of multiple representative worlds in miniature. A covering letter to Fabroni explains the Forsters’ need to sell their remaining collection, including “6–700 extremely rare specimens” of plants as well as artifacts from the Society Islands, Tonga, New Zealand, New Caledonia, and New Hebrides. It also exposes the workings of exchange-of-gift relationships. I remember with g reat gratitude the obliging offers of Mr Favi [business agent for the grand duke, 1780–1794] with regard to the artifacts brought back (by my father and myself) from the South Sea. . . . A ll t hese objects are still in our possession, but it is too heavy a load for a private person, especially for a poor scholar with a big family, to keep. . . . You understand that I am in no position to make gifts to the Grand Duke without expecting something in return . . . princes have at their disposal unequivocal tokens of kindness such as honorariums or rare books. One would certainly not fail to proportion the munificence to the value and rarity of the objects we could send.33
By drawing parallels of “value and rarity” between rare (old) books and then con temporary Pacific artifacts, Georg equates temporal with spatial distances and calls on the grand duke to do the same.
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In Wörlitz, Georg made a “deep impression” on the prince and his circle, evidenced by the abiding interest in the South Sea “stoked by Forster’s books.” 34 In t hese, and perhaps in his Wörlitz lecture, the qualities of the curiosities from “Otaheite” (writ large) were afforded more detail than his catalogs preserve. His talk must have been moving, motivating; the prince rewarded it with a “munificent” payment of one hundred Louis d’or,35 causing Georg to tell Joseph Banks, gentleman naturalist on Cook’s first voyage: “The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau is perhaps one of the most inconsiderable in Germany; he was in England the latter end of 1775, and received a few pieces of Otahitee Cloth from my father at the time. But I assure you, the present he made in return was such, that a King or Queen of E ngland, if they w ere to give in proportion to their importance in the world, must at least give a thousand pounds.” 36 His reference to cloth from “Otahitee” echoes an apparent humility found in his description of his Wörlitz lecture on “two flannels.” 37 Another interpretation is possible: he is demonstrating an understanding of the potency of the barkcloths he refers to, which he conveyed to his audience. Barkcloths are creative technologies deployed to manage transitions across thresholds, including birth, death, and new relationships. Presented at first encounters and used to wrap and demarcate bodies and space, barkcloth figured among the first presentations made to Europeans in order to contain their otherwise potentially dangerous mana (personal or scared power). In Europe, the finest examples, soft as muslin, entered into more intimate relationships. Georg’s offering to Fabroni included “large pieces from which entire garments can be made,” and gave a bolt to the d aughter of a Göttingen professor who had a ball gown “à la Bergère with blue sashes” made from it to wear to a ball.38 Could this also be why just one of the thirteen Tahitian `ahu barkcloths gifted by the Forsters remains in Wörlitz today? Recall Louise trying on the Tahitian bracelet; the urge to drape these garments on the body, w hether in Tahitian or Roman style, must have been strong. The remaining `ahu, embossed with red pigment using bamboo stamps, is of the type visibly worn by Ma`i in Omai, A Native of Ulaietea (Ra`iātea) (Figure 4), which may even have inspired such activities. It is tempting to locate the impetus for the Eisenhart in Forster’s visit to Wörlitz and his lecture (ostensibly) on these simultaneously world-managing and sensual cloths. Indeed, the building’s materials w ere ordered that same year, and the structure, made from red brick clad with Raseneisenstein bog iron to mirror Pacific volcanic rock, was completed in 1785.39 Georg Forster scholar Frank Vorpahl suggests a double pyramid like the marae Manunu on Huahine may have inspired the Eisenhart’s form.40 Georg visited there in September 1773 and May 1774, describing marai overgrown with creepers as places of burial and worship.41 Gustav Frank’s View of Wörlitz (ca. 1860) shows the platform bare of foliage, but it was later subsumed u nder ivy. Atop the Eisenhart, the library pavilion has bog iron on two facades. The
Figure 4. Omai a native of Ulaietea, 1774, England, by Francesco Bartolozzi, Sir Nathaniel Dance-Holland. Gift of Horace Fildes, 1937. Te Papa (1992–0035–1801).
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Figure 5. `ahu barkcloth. Tahiti. 122 × 60 × 0.1 cm. Breadfruit bast, plant pigments. Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Inc. II–1177.
neighboring Südseepavilon is a brick building with a pilaster arrangement and alcoves with round arches. The lower level of the Eisenhart is open to flowing water, and to gondolas plying the Wörlitz Lake. The upper level is edged with upright stones, recalling t hose leaned against by priests and ari`i during lengthy rituals, and known as niho—t he “teeth” of the marae, themselves “jawbones of gods.” 42 The Eisenhart elevated rather appropriately its collection, which included a single Taumi breastplate, worn in pairs by warriors, so they appeared to emerge from the gaping jaws of sharks. The Wörlitz artifacts have a secure provenance, which owes much to the Eisenhart and Südseepavilon and the collection’s few “microtranslocations.” 43 Upon arrival in Woerlitz in 1775, the artifacts were installed in the Schloß, prob ably in the library. When the Südseepavilon was ready, the collection moved into its four glazed corner cabinets, where it stayed u ntil the 1930s. In 1936, a
Figure 6. Gustav Frank, View of Wörlitz, ca. 1860. Lithograph. Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz.
Figure 7. The South Sea Pavilion viewed from Wörlitz Lake. Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz.
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Figure 8. Taumi breastplate. Tahiti. 60 × 45 × 4 cm. Cane, coconut fiber, pearl shell discs, shark teeth, Polynesian imperial pigeon feathers, dog hair. Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Inv. II–1183.
conservation audit placed the collection into extended storage. In 1984, it returned to the Eisenhart, but only briefly. Upgrades to the Südseepavilon, which replaced wooden boards with sandstone slabs, caused humidity changes, and the artifacts quickly moldered. In 1985, some traveled to Weimar, where excellent plastic replicas w ere cast for possible display, but in 1990 the artifacts and replicas were put into storage in Dessau. Their reemergence “into the light,” in an exhibition of the same name (Rückkehr ins Licht) opened in the Schloß in May 2019, following an extensive conservation and research process. The Eisenhart has also been brought back into the light, defoliated to reveal its marae structure, long since forgotten, while the glass cabinets of the Südseepavilon now display silhouettes of the Wörlitzer Südseesammlung, a shadow of their former exhibition. This contrast of light and dark is productive. Michael Ewert has suggested, “To some extent, he [Georg] was searching in the dark” when making his collections.44 Yet, “he approached the objects as a sympathetic observer, sometimes to the extent that, in his contemplation of them, their story would reveal itself to him . . . he used concrete observations to rethink the relationships between culture, everyday life, and material reproduction, with an awareness that the perception of the world and the questions that may be asked of h uman history change with time, and depend upon perspective.” 45 Did the qualities of the artifacts in the Eisenhart convey to eighteenth-century audiences an understanding
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Figure 9. Tongan artifacts in the South Sea Pavilion, 1984. Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz.
of the realms of Te Po and Te Ao that converged on marae—the permeability of worlds of ancestors and living? Or was it more comfortable to bring Polynesian worlds into line with Arcadian visions in a process of domestication and subtle unworlding? As Malcolm Bowie observes of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927): “Everyt hing is connected to everyt hing else in the remembering or fantasizing mind, and the oceanic swell which seems to bear the voyager onwards to ever-new destinations can easily bring him home.” 46 The conceptual and perceptual leaps attempted (or resisted) by Europeans had equivalents in Polynesia. After the first European visitor to Tahiti, Captain Wallis, said he would return, Tahitians welcomed the next, Bougainville, in this spirit. Unknowingly, Bougainville and Wallis before him had fulfilled a prophecy, setting in motion the piercing of worlds foretold by the Ra`iātea high priest Vaita, in 1763. Following the sacking of Ra`iātea by invaders from Borabora, he predicted the arrival of “the adorned offspring of Te Tumu . . . Their bodies are different, our bodies are different, but we are the same. We both come from Te Tumu, the origin [but] the strangers come on board a vessel without an outrigger.” 47 Arriving in their “technologically impossible vessels,” 48 it surely would have surprised both Wallis and Bougainville to know they were expected. The prophecy of Vaita contains vital clues to Tahitian ways of accommodating and making sense of potentially unworlding incursions, attributing common origins or foundations (Te Tumu) yet allowing for differences.
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It might have surprised Wallis and Bougainville further to learn their arrival was connected to an event in Tahitian history, the outcome of which would propel Cook’s first voyage through the Pacific and prompt the Ra`iātean discovery of Peru. The attack compelled Tupaia, wounded in battle, to flee to Tahiti with Ma`u, the usurped paramount chief of Ra`iātea. When Tupaia agreed years l ater to accompany Cook as navigator and translator, he was in part motivated by desire to return to and reclaim Ra`iātea—armed, he hoped, with European weapons. Ma`u would later join the crew of the Águila, under the acting commander Lieutenant Gayangos, and sail to Lima, where he stayed. Thus, ancestral pathways across the great sea marae w ere traversed again, and new ones w ere found in the ongoing process of Polynesian expansion. Reminders of foretold and prior relationships between Polynesians and Euro peans were recursive arcs of worlding and reworlding. These were sometimes instantiated in artifacts. On May 15, 1774, when the Resolution anchored in Fare Harbour in Huahine, Cook’s taio (bond brother) displayed the medal and copper engraving he had given him previously.49 Later, Cook observed the red pennant erected by Wallis, stitched into the sacred feather girdle Te Ra`ipuatata.50 This incorporation was a deliberate strategy to capture and enhance mana and record this auspicious first meeting. In Tonga, the Forsters obtained an iron nail lashed to a bone haft. Now at the Pitt Rivers Museum it is described in the Forster manuscript catalogue t here as “an old nail brought to the friendly Isles by Tasman in 1642 and preserved by the natives, & used as a gouge or borer.” W ere Tongans demonstrating both the history and future responsibilities of their relationship with Europe? Polynesian gifting was (and still is) predicated on an expectation of return, which can be significantly delayed—a process the Forsters, collecting with a view t oward their own “exchange-of-gift relationships,” were well placed to appreciate.
Conclusion Marilyn Strathern notes, “Time is not a line between happenings; it lies in the capacity of an image to evoke past and f uture simultaneously . . . space is not an area between points, it is the effectiveness of an image in making the observer think of both h ere and t here, of oneself and o thers.” 51 In eighteenth-century Europe, the Polynesian world became literary and other images, a pantomime, poems, and garden follies. In Wörlitz, it was instantiated by the Eisenhart, a structure built in response to the South Sea collection given to Prince Franz by the Forsters, and Georg Forster’s evocative account of his circumnavigation with Cook. Michael Ewert proposed that Forster’s texts overflow with references and lines of connection, which correspond with his approach to collecting. “They are component parts in dynamic communication processes with the character
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of dialogues. At their heart is the impossibility of concluding this cultivation of experience. And this is also Forster’s motivation as a collector. For Forster, collecting means the bringing together of as many building blocks, experiences, and insights into the world as a whole as possible—a utopia passionately dedicated to the Enlightenment age.” 52 Although the makers of the artifacts Forster amassed have long since passed, their creations enable a kind of continuity. Their reintroduction into the discourse of the societies who made them allows their ancestors to “maintain a presence that transcends the limitations of biological mortality.” 53 Dynamic dialogues are resuming. In May 2018, a delega tion from New Zealand visited the artifacts then under conservation in Dessau. Among them w ere Tongan artists Dagmar Vaikalafi Dyck, who brings the German and Tongan worlds together in her parentage, and Sopolemalama (“light- bringer”) Filipe Tohi. For the first time in two hundred fifty years, Polynesian hands warmed the collection. In May 2019, Dyck returned to Wörlitz, giving a lecture (with this paper’s author) and touring the Eisenhart and redisplayed South Sea collection. In October 2019, a delegation from Germany joined Dyck and Tohi in Tongatapu to deposit the Tongan replicas: the headrest, breadfruit pounder, and clubs. This delayed return may have been anticipated by Polynesian donors nearly two hundred fifty years ago. It tends to the relational space known as vā, which has connected Tonga to Wörlitz since the Forster collection first arrived. Significantly, these replicas are ata of the originals, conveying much of their aura, but designed to withstand the humidity of the Südseepavillon and therefore suitable for tropical Tonga. The Forster Pavilion was built to h ouse the replicas and examples of other revitalized eighteenth-century arts, a partial mirroring of the collection in Wörlitz. The Forster Pavilion in Tonga mirrors the newly installed Georg Forster exhibition in Schloß Wörlitz, further bridging the worlds brought together in the Eisenhart and reconnecting central Germany with South Sea landscapes.
Notes 1. “Wörlitz ist keine lokale Größe, nicht einmal eine nur deutsche, es ist eine europäische, eine Weltangelegenheit,” Wilhelm van Kempen speaking in 1925. Quoted in English translation in Uwe Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” in Georg Forster: The South Seas at Wörlitz, ed. Frank Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz (Munich: Hirmer, 2019), 68. 2. Joachim Meissner, “The Myth of the South Seas and the Cult of Freemasonry in Late 18th-Century Follies,” in Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Georg Forster, 47. Beyond Wörlitz, Meissner details the Otaheitisches Badehaus / Tahitian bathing house in Garzau; Tahitian small-scale architecture at Bellevue, the residence of Prince August Ferdinand of Prussia, younger b rother of Frederick the Great; an Angling lodge at Charlottenburg Palace built for Friedrich Wilhelm; the garden of the Abbey of Oliva near Danzig, belonging to the cousin of Frederick II, Bishop Carl von Culm; and a Tahitian pavilion on the island Pfaueninsel, built for Friedrich Wilhelm II. 3. Anne Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island: The European Discovery of Tahiti (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), 21.
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4. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 21. 5. Michael Niedermeier, “Semantik. Ikonograpgische Gratenprogramme,” in Gartenkunst in Deutschland. Von der Frühen Neuzeit bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Stefan Schweizer and Sascha Winter (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2012), 329. Cited in English translation by Jana Kittelmann, “An Interchange of Influences: Georg Forster’s Relationship to Gardens and Descriptions of Gardens,” in Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Georg Forster, 40. 6. Uwe Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” in Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Georg Forster, 86. 7. The Otahitische Hütte featured among a series of German designs for garden pavilions published between 1779 and 1805. Robert Rosenblum identifies it in vol. 25, pl. 9, Johann Gottfried Grohmann, Ideenmagazine für Liebhaver von Gärten, englischen Anlagen und für Besitzer von Landgütern (Leipzig, 1779–1805). Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 143. 8. Marae stones found in Aotearoa-New Zealand in the Catlins, in Tautuku in south Otago, and in Rakiura (Stewart Island) have been provenanced to Meheti`a, east of Tahiti, backing up the Tahitian oral history that describes navigators stopping at this sacred island before embarking on their long journey. 9. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 23. 10. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 23–24. 11. Maia Nuku, “Atea: Nature and Divinity in Polynesia,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 76, no. 3 (2019): 5. 12. Tupaia explained that distances w ere counted in days and nights, and despite being predictable, they were never fixed or absolute. Sea currents, trade winds, and seasonal weather could extend or protract time-space coordinates. Spatially equidistant voyages were experienced differently depending on when t hese routes were traveled and the direction taken. 13. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 24. 14. British Captain Samuel Wallis, in the aptly named Royal Navy frigate Dolphin. 15. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 25. 16. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 26. 17. Nuku, “Atea,” 24. 18. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 112. 19. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 112, citing Lewis de Bougainville in A Voyage Round the World Performed by Order of His Most Christian Majesty, in the Years 1766, 1767, 1768, and 1769, ed. John Reinhold Forster (London: J. Nourse, 1772), 276; and Bernard le Bovier de Fontanelle, in Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes [Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds], published in 1686. 20. John Dunmore, Storms and Dreams: Louis de Bougainville: Soldier, Explorer, Statesman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 394, citing Jacques Delille, “Les Jardins” in Oeuvres de J. Delille (Paris, 1834), Chant II, p. 18. 21. Georg Forster, A Voyage Round the World: In His Britannic Majesty’s Sloop, Resolution, Commanded by Capt. James Cook, During the Years 1772, 3, 4, and 5, vol. 1 (London: B. White, 1777), 257. 22. Vanessa Smith, “Point Venus,” in Contact in Context, ed. Sandhya Patel (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 44. 23. Andreas Pečar, “Forster and Prince Franz: A Relationship Illuminated by the Enlightenment,” in Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Georg Forster, 79. 24. Billie Lythberg, “A Modular Microcosm: The Tongan ngatu tāhina in the Wörlitz Forster Collection,” Georg-Forster-Studien (forthcoming). 25. Friedrich Matthison, Sämmtliche Werke, 8 vols. (Vienna, 1815–1817); vol. 7, Fünfter Theil, XVIII: Wörlitzer Blätter 1805 (Vienna 1817). Cited in translation by Michael Ewert,
166 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 “Collecting, Contextualising, and Writing: Georg Forster—A Travelling Collector,” in Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Georg Forster, 33. 26. Quoted in English translation by Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” 64. 27. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethes Briefe an Charlotte von Stein, ed. Jonas Fränkel (Jena: Verlag von Eugen Diederichs, 1908), 110. Quoted in Jennifer Milam, “Cosmopolitan Translation and Patriotic Sensibilities in German Garden Art,” Intellectual History Review 27, no. 3 (2017): 388–389. 28. Milam, “Cosmopolitan Translation,” 378. 29. Forster, Voyage Round the World, 253. 30. Kittelmann, “Interchange of Influences,” 40. 31. Forster, Voyage Round the World, 241–242. 32. Misc. Ms. 1169, Alexander Turnbull Library, New Zealand. Translator from the French unknown. Reproduced in Adrienne Kaeppler, Cook Voyage Artifacts in Leningrad, Berne and Florence Museums (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1978), 72. 33. Original held in the American Philosophical Society Library. Translated from the French by Renée Heyum. Reproduced in Kaeppler, Cook Voyage Artifacts, 72. 34. Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” 66. 35. Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” 64. 36. Georg Forster, “Briefe bis 1783,” in Sämtliche Schriften, Tagebücher, Briefe, vol. 13, no. 100, Tagebücher, ed. Brigitte Leuschner, p. 193. Quoted in Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” 65–66. 37. Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” 64. 38. Ludwig Uhlig, Georg Forster: Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 2004), 110. 39. Quilitzsch, “On the History of the Forster Collection in Wörlitz,” 67. 40. Frank Vorpahl, “The First Permanent Georg Forster Exhibition,” in Vorpahl and the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz, Georg Forster, 17. 41. Forster, Voyage Round the World, 267, 273, 295, 324. 42. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 211. 43. Vorpahl, “First Permanent Georg Forster Exhibition,” 20. 44. Ewert, “Collecting, Contextualising, and Writing,” 31. 45. Ewert, “Collecting, Contextualising, and Writing,” 31. 46. Malcolm Bowie, Proust among the Stars (London: HarperCollins, 1998), xv–x vi. 47. As told by Richard Ariihau Tuheiava (Senator, French Polynesia; Cultural revivalist) in Tupaia’s Endeavour (2017), https://w ww.imdb.com/title/t t10800756/. 48. Hank A. H. Driessen, “Outriggerless Canoes and Glorious Beings: Pre-contact Prophecies in the Society Islands,” Journal of Pacific History 17, no. 1 (1982): 17. 49. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 312. 50. Salmond, Aphrodite’s Island, 434. 51. Marilyn Strathern, “Artefacts of History: Events and the Interpretation of Images,” in Culture and History in the Pacific, ed. Jukka Siikala (Helsinki: Transactions of the Finnish Anthropological Society, 1990), 29. 52. Ewert, “Collecting, Contextualising, and Writing,” 34. 53. Amiria Henare [Salmond], “Artefacts in Theory: Anthropology and Material Culture,” Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2003): 61–62.
Worlding e c o l o g i e s o f be i n g and othering
Indigeneity Overlooked indigenous technologies and criollo worldmaking in infortunios de alonso ramírez (1690) Matthew Goldmark
When the biography of a criollo who had circumnavigated the globe was published in 1690 in Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, it affirmed that criollos (children of Spaniards born in the Americas) existed on a global stage. However, this text, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez (The Misfortunes of Alonso Ramírez, 1690) told a story that was more tragedy than triumph. As narrated to the elite academic Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora who documented the tale in Mexico City, Ramírez recounted how he fled financial poverty in his natal Puerto Rico in pursuit of better fortunes by crossing Mexico and landing in the Spanish Pacific. Th ere, he was captured by English pirates who easily traversed t hese unprotected waters. After suffering torments, violence, and humiliation, Ramírez was finally set adrift with a crew in the Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil where he sailed until he shipwrecked on the Yucatán Peninsula. However, since this New Spanish region was well known for its pirate-infested waters, he described (if not condemned) local criollos who embargoed his ship and meager possessions. A change in fortunes comes, Ramírez notes, only after he gains an audience with the Viceroy Gaspar de la Cerda Sandoval Silva y Mendoza and, finally, Sigüenza. Of course, though the document speaks in Ramírez’s first person voice, it is Sigüenza y Góngora who truly authors the work, transcribing its contents and likely embellishing the narrative. While this fact may undermine the veracity of the narrative, it also suggests a criollo world built by collaboration, community, and mutual support. Scholars have paid a good deal of attention to this intersection between criollo voices, bodies, and authorship, noting how criollos both enable Ramírez’s survival and bring his narrative into global circulation. However, scholars often 169
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overlook how Ramírez’s world is made by another web of relations forged among peoples and products: Indigenous American ones. In a moment that occurs a fter Ramírez has returned to New Spain, this weary criollo sits to eat in a lodging house provided for the destitute by “Indians.” Hungry and poor, Ramírez must eat at the mercy of people he considers his inferiors. However, this misfortune does not prevent Ramírez from asserting an opinion regarding the meager offerings. He states that indios should vary the menu and give him something differ ent than the repetitive corn tortillas and beans—two products notably Indigenous to the Americas—t hat form his daily meals. However, such a condescending comment receives a snappy retort from t hese donors. Ramírez is in no position to comment on the menu (or t hese people’s dietary habits), for even though he may believe in his superiority, t hese “Indians” state that he needs them, their generosity, and their food. The Indigenous innkeepers tell him that they need to be counted “en el catálogo de mis benefactors” (in the catalog of my benefactors) because their food and shelter will receive no repayment. Ramírez, put in his place, states that “callé mi boca” (I shut my mouth) (212). On its surface, this scene appears to function as a condemnation of criollos’ refusal to look after their own. However, I take it to show how interdependencies and Indigenous presences in the narrative speak to a larger truth: Indigenous p eoples and technologies—what Marcy Norton defines as practices and products that contain subaltern histories of connection and knowledge—are integral to colonial worldmaking.1 Worldmaking has served as a fruitful lens to study how p eoples and texts reimagine what it means formulate a global totality. Scholars have taken the idea of worldmaking in various directions: to describe literary works that reshape the world through fiction, to explain how postcolonial actors build international ties, to reveal conflicts between shifting epistemological paradigms, and to clarify the relationship between governments and economic world systems in flux.2 For the study of all of these types of worldmaking with regard to seventeenth-century Spanish empire, Infortunios has functioned as a key point of reference. While early studies of this text emphasized how the work made a new world order through fiction by operating as a picaresque critique of empire and thus a precursor to the Spanish American novel,3 newer scholarship has emphasized how Infortunios reveals economic systems and nation-building projects that shaped the seventeenth-century Americas.4 This new scholarship emphasizes how social and political grievances of American criollos coincide with an economic shift from Spain’s trade monopoly to a global economy based on mercantilism and piracy. However, this view of a world remade by criollo subjects and their preoccupations can overlook the ways that Indigenous American peoples and technologies condition the seventeenth-century globe.5 As a theoretical term, technology recenters the mediated relationships between products and producers, showing that “objects” do not appear ready-made, but rather contain and inscribe colo-
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nial relationships.6 As I argue, the technologies of worldmaking in Infortunios show how Indigeneity remains ever present, even when Indigenous peoples are not physically in view. In the Spanish Pacific, Ramírez is captured by pirates who use a piragua (an Indigenous boat formed from a hollowed-out tree trunk and identified by a word with a Caribbean etymology). In New Spain, communities use the Indigenous technologies of cacao (chocolate) as a symbol of luxury. The text thus narrates a seventeenth-century world composed by epistemological and technological ties that make Indigenous and other forms of subaltern life essential to what has often been studied as a European and criollo globe.7 By focusing on technologies, I am able to show that a narrative account of a criollo’s circumnavigation depends upon Indigenous worldmaking. We must note, however, that in this text, technologies like the piragua are not labeled as “Indian.” In contrast, foodstuffs like corn and beans are explicitly tied to “Indians” and treated as signs of their poverty and stagnation. In this regard, my opening anecdote proves instructive. In contrast to Ramírez’s global presence (unfortunate as it may be), physical “Indians” and their consumption practices are cast as hyperlocal and unmoving. Infortunios thus shows a central fact of Indigenous worldmaking in a colonial imaginary: it is intersected by expectations of “what counts” as indio versus what might become “less-so” due to an assumed technological utility in a criollo world. As Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn write in their critique of “hybridity,” the products that scholars often celebrate as hybrid might not have been viewed as such in the past. Latin American products and identities that w ere “mixtures” could “become naturalized over time.” 8 Here, however, I argue that the potential naturalization of technologies does not mean that we should ignore their Indigenous genealogies. To the contrary, texts like Infortunios show that worldmaking integrates indigeneity in multiple relationships and forms, casting different technologies indio and Indigenous, visible and unseen, racialized and overlooked. It is often our task to interrogate how worldmaking integrates and obviates the “Indian” and to question when and how we maintain this performative occlusion by ignoring technologies. In the first section of this piece, I review how Infortunios has been used to focalize a criollo vision of the seventeenth-century world due to its ability to chart both economic and political formations. In the second section, I note how the text is marked by interdependencies on technologies to show that t here is an Indigenous worldmaking so visible as to go unseen.
A Criollo World To read Infortunios alongside a theorization of indigeneity, worldmaking, and interconnectivity first requires a consideration of how criollo worldmaking has operated as a frame for analyses of this text. For scholars of the seventeenth- century Spanish Americ as, Infortunios has proven useful to the study of
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Spanish empire’s crises since it highlights both administrative and economic shifts and sociopolitical conflicts.9 In admittedly schematic terms, when read via the frame of economics, Ramírez’s spatial trajectory maps a teleological vision of Spanish empire’s global systems. In Infortunios, Ramírez travels West. He is born in Puerto Rico but abandons his homeland for New Spain, travels to the Spanish Pacific, and then circumnavigates the globe by traveling around the Cape of Good Hope and up through the Atlantic u ntil he shipwrecks in Yucatán. This movement west evokes this history of (1) Spanish landfall and devastation in the early sixteenth-century Caribbean; (2) the congregation of bodies into orga nized labor systems (the encomienda) in the Tierrra Firme (Mexico and Peru) in the mid-to late-sixteenth century and the extraction of wealth; and (3) mercantile capitalism and Spanish decline in the Pacific forced by the ascendancy of Northern European powers such as the Dutch and the English in the seventeenth c entury.10 In turn, this vision of Spain’s economic decline intertwines with perspectives on the seventeenth-century criollos’ emergent nationalist subjectivity. Mercantile capitalism aligns with the failure of imperial feeling, bringing scholars like Kathleen Ross and Mariana Zinni to treat Ramírez’s narrative as a symbolic consolidation of the Americas as home in the minds, hearts, and geopolitical maps of its criollo citizenry.11 In sum, Infortunios becomes a cypher for an epistemological juncture: a once powerful empire fallen into disrepair leads to the ascendancy of mercantile capitalism and criollo allegiance to a nation-state. Subtending this analysis, for many scholars, the narrative highlights a critique of empire that is based on personal, historical, and economic grievances made by a collective criollo populace. As noted above, Ramírez is not the author—though much of the work speaks in his first-person voice. Instead, this text is a transcription of Ramírez’s narrative (or even an elaboration/partial fabrication) by Sigüenza, one of the leading criollo academics of the period.12 Yet, despite their class difference, Sigüenza and Ramírez potentially unify in their critique of imperial disregard. A well-studied comment included in the text indicates the collective impoverishment of all criollo subjects by a negligent Peninsular power. At the conclusion of this text, the work notes that Sigüenza, despite his elite status, has “títulos [que] son estos que suenan mucho y valen muy poco, y a cuyo ejercicio le empeña más la reputación que la conveniencia” (titles that sound important but are of l ittle value, and that reputation more than convenience forces him to carry out; 214). Titles and reputation do little to assuage the criollo condition of “misfortune.” Even if the ostensible focus is Ramírez, emphasis on shared impoverishment can again highlight the economic terms of criollo worldmaking. In turn, the formulation of historical abandonment and economic deprivation articulates a familiar narrative of imperial teleology that fractures Spain from the Americas. The work opens on Ramírez’s Puerto Rican birthplace in terms of its bygone prominence and present decay. While once a flourishing commercial center, the region is now a bulwark left to protect the transatlantic
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flotas (treasure fleets) that carry wealth from the Spanish Pacific and New Spain back to Iberia. While the populations of the islands are left to languish on the laurels of historical glory, they face the continual onslaught of pirates in the present—a major grievance of Caribbean subjects who decried their position as sacrificial lambs.13 Ramírez attests to this fact with the tongue-in-cheek statement that the island of his birth is ineffectually guarded by “lo incontrastable del Morro que la defiende, las cortinas y balaurtres coronados de artillería que la aseguran, sirviendo aun no tanto esto . . . cuanto el espíritu que a sus hijos les reparte el genio de aquella tierra sin escasez al tenerla privilegiada de las hostilidades de corsantes” (the Morro C astle that defends [the bay] with walls and bulwarks crowned by artillery—though it offers l ittle by means of protection versus the vigor of inhabitants on this land preferred by hostile pirates; 122). While celebrating the character and dedication of residents unwilling to abandon empire for piracy, this description depicts an island abandoned by an imperial system long past its time. Piracy thus draws attention to geographic and imperial fault lines, a fact that has been studied with reference to Infortunios. Yet, while on the pirate ship, Ramírez references different racialized subjects—Spaniards, mestizos, and barbarians—and repeats a taxonomy familiar to scholars of the Americas. In so doing, the text suggests that piracy is about more than an economic system. Indeed, as scholars have shown, piracy was also an identity structure. In the early modern period, it allowed groups to reaffirm their economic, political, religious, and racial identities as collectives besieged by external others. For the Spanish, Protestant and Muslim groups such as the English and the Turks played a constituent role in the construction of a national identity. However, piracy also revealed the tenuousness of a “Spanish” identity and challenged the terms of membership in its polity.14 For Infortunios, this fragility of “Spanishness” appears front and center in the form of an Iberian corsair, Miguel el Sevillano, who abandons his Catholic origins in order to live as a pirate and “morir hereje” (die as a heretic).15 As Boyer notes, not only is this man Spanish, he is Sevillano, and thus from Spain’s economic and administrative center where the transatlantic flota and its wealth made landfall (36–37). From Catholic to Protestant, Sevillano to pirate, Miguel breaks with imperial identity in religious and economic terms. Though Ramírez threatens to function as another “traitorous figure” to the criollo world via piracy,16 scholars such as Fabio López Lázaro have emphasized that Ramírez maintains firm criollo identification through an oppositional stance t oward racialized others. As José Antonio Mazzotti has remarked, pirates policing the waters of the Americas could affirm criollo unity by creating an opposition to racialized groups on the American mainland. For one, fears of English piracy created an ideological division that consolidated a criollo polity against an i magined insurrectionary Indigenous force lurking within and always ready for an opportunity to rebel.17 As Mazzotti states, criollo writers such as Antonio
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de la Calancha cast Incas as collaborators in waiting—ready to support a British invasion in order to recoup their conquered former kingdoms.18 This opposition between indio and criollo created a collective criollo sense of self that, according to Ralph Bauer and Mazzotti, functioned as “an emergent, though not yet fully articulated and theorized, modern essentialist discourse of race,” one that developed a connection between “Europeans and creoles across social and ancestral distinctions based on their common whiteness.” 19 In theory, then, it is this community identification that makes Ramírez criollo against pirates and captives, keeping him from aligning with other men on the ship, even t hose opposed to the pirates. Though he is captured with a crew that included a sangley mestizo (of “mixed” Chinese and Malay descent) named Francisco de la Cruz and an unnamed indio (Malay) boatswain, Ramírez presents himself unable to rebel since such men are inherently untrustworthy due to their non-criollo origin. He argues that he could not escape b ecause he did not have “bastantes compañeros de quien valerme para matarlos [los ingleses] y, alzándome con la fragata, irme a Manila” (enough shipmates who could help me kill [the English] and make off with the ship for Manilla), and even if he did, “puede ser que no me fiara de ellos aunque los tuviera, por no haber otro español entre ellos sino Juan de Casas” (I wouldn’t have trusted them since t here was no other Spaniard among them but Juan de Casas”; 177). Th ese antagonisms point to the complexity of global racialization in criollo worldmaking. Just as Ramírez and criollo identification move, indio and mestizo travel to maintain community. Ricardo Padrón, for instance, notes that a 1720 letter written by the missionary Gaspar de San Agustín called peoples of the Spanish Pacific “Indios Asiáticos” different from the “Indios naturales de América” in capacity, though “they are all commonly referred to as ‘indios.’ ” 20 Nancy van Deusen, in turn, shows how criollos and Spaniards avoided calling East Indians indio since enslaved indios could petition for freedom, leading authorities to strategically use the term chino to prevent such litigation.21 Thus, scholars show there is g reat power in a reading of Infortunios that focuses on criollo worldmaking. With such an intersection of economic systems, racializing and religious labels, and global movement, Infortunios can be read to show how criollo peoples make a place in the seventeenth century. However, this emphasis on the visible actors and their nominative labels might keep us from seeing another interlocking form of worldmaking that too often disappears from view: Indigenous technologies and interconnectivities. It is to that form of worldmaking that I now turn
An Indigenous World Though scholars rarely remark upon the presence of indigeneity in Infortunios, I contend that technologies integral to the world of trade and economic power
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are ever present in the fabric of Ramírez’s movement, though its Indigenous genealogy can be overlooked. The piragua is a case in point: the pirates are able to capture Ramírez with this vessel because he does not “see” it on the horizon. This boat, Indigenous in origin, was employed in both the West and East Indies and carved from a single trunk, assimilated into the visual and linguistic landscape, and used as part of the global trade circuit. The use of the piragua by multiple trade parties in fact undermines the ethnocentric citation employed to define this term in the Diccionario de Autoridades from 1737. There, the piragua is compared to Spanish ships and found lacking. The definition pulls a citation from the authoritative Historia general de los hechos de los castellanos en las Indias (1601) by Antonio de Herrera y Tordesillas to historicize the piragua in a colonial encounter, citing “Quedaron los Indios atónitos, quando la primera vez los vieron (los navíos) con sus velas tendidas: porque los suyos eran piráguas, balsas y canóas” (The Indians were stunned when they first saw the Spanish ships with their sails, because their boats were piraguas, balsas, and canoas; 5:282).22 Not only does this definition overlook the fact that in other moments within Herrera’s text Spaniards are seen using piraguas to navigate rivers—showing the superiority of Indigenous technology for the American environment—it also ignores that Herrera’s is not the first work to describe the piragua or its strengths. Earlier colonial texts like Fernández de Oviedo’s Historia general y natural de las Indias (1535), describe the piragua’s centrality for the American landscape and its quick assimilation by Spaniards.23 While the piragua surfaces many times in Oviedo’s multivolume work, he dedicates space to its origins and description in book 4, chapter 4, a section dedicated to “curious t hings.” A fter Oviedo compares the piragua to boats described in Pliny’s historical accounts, suggesting that t hese American vessels must be of the same origin, he describes the manufacture of t hese vessels in detail. While his comments on the piragua’s shape, material, and use suggest the author’s study of this “local” knowledge, his remarks on the piragua’s value shows its deep integration into colonial life. Oviedo writes that Spaniards cannot live without these boats, in particu lar the canoa (the smaller form of the piragua, to which it is often compared) to reach the agricultural plots on which the Spaniards depend. “Los christianos que por acá vivimos, no podemos servirnos de las heredades que estan en las costas de la mar y de los ríos grandes, sin estas canoas” (We Christians who live here cannot survive without using the canoe to travel between large rivers and the sea and get to their plots of land; 170).24 Thus, the piragua suggests the place of Indigenous technology in colonial worldmaking. However, in Infortunios, the treatment of indios as backward and their American foods as impoverished present a different reading: indios, themselves, are cast as disconnected from worldmaking. Emphasizing technology challenges this reading of “stasis” and “impoverishment” in two ways: first, Ramírez’s knowledge of Indigenous foodstuffs and their preparation; and
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second, the repeated presence of American items that Ramírez offers in exchange for American food. These two points occur together when Ramírez seeks to trade with “pagan Indians” for food in New Spain after the pirates release him with a skeleton crew on the Yucatán Peninsula. Th ere, a fellow Spaniard, Juan González, suggests that the crew capture a group of Indigenous peoples in order to “convert” them (and rob them of their provisions). Not only does the text assert that González can speak their Indigenous language, it states that he is willing to shift from his original goal of conversion to one of trade, exchanging “ámbar” (amber) for corn. At first glance, this scene appears to evoke earlier colonial texts, where Spaniards gain valuable objects (like gold) from Indigenous p eople by offering meaningless trinkets (like glass beads). However, in this text the shiny object held by the Europeans has value and has already appeared in Infortunios’s scenes of Pacific trade. Earlier in the text, Ramírez described goods that he traded in the Spanish Pacific that, “aunque no de tanto valor (como diamantes), le igualaban en lo curioso muchas alhajas de plata, cantidad de canfora, ámbar” (though not worth as much value (as diamonds), t here w ere equally rare jewels made of silver, a good deal of camphor, amber; 160, emphasis added). Thus, amber is not a meaningless object that Ramírez and his crew offer for the Indigenous food item corn, but rather an item that is part of the global trade system—an object of value to be exchanged.25 In turn, if Indigenous p eoples—even the unconverted “pagans”—a re integrated into a global economy based on amber that stretches to the Spanish Pacific, Ramírez shows himself to be integrated into an Indigenous food economy that he pursues in this moment of trade. After t hese Indigenous men are captured (since Ramírez states that evangelization is the only proper Christian mission, he cannot in good conscience only trade with them), Ramírez shows that American foodstuffs are a well-k nown part of his knowledge base. The text explains how corn becomes edible with a sentence that lacks an agential subject and notes the entire day was spent grinding corn: “gastose el día siguiente en moler maíz” (the next day was spent grinding corn; 207). While we might assume that the peoples doing this labor are Indigenous, t here is no clarification as to who does the work, nor is there a remark upon how this is done, where it is done, or how the corn is transformed from initial to final product. This process requires no further comment. There is no surprise or comment regarding the consumption of corn despite the fact that, as Rebecca Earle noted in her study of food and the criollo body, that t here was great anxiety regarding the degeneration of Europeans through their eating of American foods.26 Perhaps no text from colonial Spanish America represents the threat of a Spanish world made by Indigenous peoples and their food as much as Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios (1542), a narrative of a Spanish man’s shipwreck off the coast of Florida that led to an eight-year journey around the greater Gulf of Mexico and across what is t oday the southwestern United States.27 Like Ramírez, Cabeza
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de Vaca presents his survival as one of dependency and trade with an unconverted group.28 However, Cabeza de Vaca describes food as part of the practice of othering. Knowledge and the description of food designate what is indio versus what is Spanish, even if Cabeza de Vaca must partake in t hese acts of consumption.29 His text is an extensive offer of new knowledge and difference; he presents detailed accounts of Indigenous foodstuffs that readers had never encountered, such as prickly pears of many types that are “del tamaño de huevos y son bermejas y negras y de muy buen gusto” (the size of eggs and bright red, black, and of very good flavor). Moreover, Cabeza de Vaca notes that t hese fruits would be traded with “otros indios de adelante que traían arcos para contratar y cambiar con ellos” (other Indians from further ahead who brought bows to trade and exchange with them; 128).30 Indigenous technologies, trade items, and modes of survival are valuable types of information that merit description and inclusion in this text because of their foreignness. In Infortunios, in contrast, though the dependency on Indigenous trade remains, the items themselves are integrated into the colonial landscape to such an extent that they are no longer strange or out of place. In fact, against their Indigenous origin, such technologies become so present as to become a sign of criollo presence. When Ramírez finally returns to a Spanish village called Tilá, he is greeted and relieved to be rewarded with a “regalo de chocolate y comida espléndida” (gift of chocolate and splendid food; 208). As seen in Norton’s excellent study of chocolate, this sacred object remitted to a Mesoamerican tradition, one that became integrated into a global economy but as a sign of luxury through its exoticism and traffic.31 Yet ironically, here, choco late becomes a sign of return to New Spanish civilization rather than continued travails in the company of English pirates or Indigenous peoples. Ramírez’s text notes that this is a “pueblo no solo grande sino delicioso y ameno” in which “asisten en el muchos españoles” (town that is not only large but also delightful and pleasant . . . and many Spaniards live there; 208, emphasis added). Choco late symbolizes not Ramírez’s continued distance from criollo society but rather his presence within it. This does not mean that chocolate is divested from Indigenous technological ties. Lest we forget, Infortunios draws criollo and Indigenous p eoples together through chocolate, where they meet both corporeally and linguistically. In the text, Ramírez works with a merchant who exchanges with “indios mixes, chontales, and cuicatecans.” H ere, unlike in other scenes in which Infortunios uses the dismissive and totalizing epithet of indio the text describes specific groups of p eoples who enter into economic trade with Ramírez and his master to exchange “algodón, mantas, vainillas, cacao, y grana” (cotton, blankets, vanilla, cacao, and cochineal; 130), the Nahuatl word for chocolate.32 Cacao is a technology that is recognized as a part of this worldmaking. Like the piragua, cacao shows that life in the criollo community is inseparable from Indigenous technologies—a fact that strikes at the heart of Infortunios
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and its imaginary criollo world. When it describes the center of New Spain, Mexico City, Infortunios presents the fiction of a cohesive criollo society where the Viceregal capital has enough for all due to “la abundancia de cuanto se necesita” (great abundance of all that is needed t here; 128). Yet the claim of plenty and order contrasts with the reality of hunger, intergroup mixing, and conflict known to all in the moment of this text’s composition. As Sigüenza documented in another text composed just two years later, the Alboroto y motín de México del 8 de junio de 1692, the Viceregal populace would burn the main zócalo (city square) in the center of Mexico City during a rebellion caused, in part, due to a shortage of food and escalating corn prices.33 Though official reports attributed the incitement of this “riot” to Indigenous peoples, and women in part icu lar, reports also suggested that the intermixing of criollo peoples among Indigenous groups fueled the fires of revolt. Both More and Daniel Nemser have noted that elite criollos criticized physical proximity and shared food items between Indigenous and criollo p eoples as a reason for this collaborative destruction; not only corn, but also the Indigenous technology of pulque alcohol made from the maguey plant served as a primary focus of critique, with pulque supposedly bringing poor criollos to join indios and castas (mixed-race peoples) to destroy the town square.34 As Nemser shows, the technology of pulque need not be read as only a question of inebriation. Instead, pulque “provide[d] a language for talking about race mixing (mestizaje) and racial categorization, while at the same time constituting pulque consumers as a seditious collective subject—t he plebe (plebeian masses)” (99).35 Thus technology made another, more frightening world in the eyes of colonial authorities, one that could bring disorder and burn the world down. These interweaving appearances of Indigenous technologies, tropes, and p eoples in Infortunios thus beg the question: who and what make the world that Ramírez travels? This has been a question that occupies scholars, w hether they answer it by focusing on genre, economic systems, or protonationalism. Yet, looking at Indigenous technologies reconfigures these questions and draws attention to what Jodi Byrd has called “the cacophonies of colonialism.” It provides us a way to “identify Indigenous transits and consider possible alternative strategies for legibility,” not only by looking to the subjects who move, but also by considering the technologies that make and produce this movement.36 As the Indigenous patrons who open this essay suggest, they know more about the making of this world that Ramírez navigates, even if he—and we—fail to see that fact.
Notes 1. I employ the idea of Indigenous technologies as it has been articulated by Marcy Norton to describe the “practices and processes designed to transform matter (matter can include the body as well as exogenous elements) as well as the transformed m atter itself” (26). Marcy Norton, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38.
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2. Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman, eds., Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2000); Marcie Frank, Jonathan Goldberg, and Karen Newman, eds., This Distracted Globe: Worldmaking in Early Modern Literature (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self- Determination (Princeton, NJ: Prince ton University Press, 2019); Ayesha Ramachandran, The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015). 3. See Alberto Sacido Romero, “La ambigüedad genérica de los ‘Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez’ como producto de la dialéctica entre discurso oral y discurso escrito,” Bulletin Hispanique 94, no. 1 (1992): 119–139; Aníbal González, “Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez: picaresca e historia,” Hispanic Review 51, no. 2 (Spring 1983): 189–204; Julie Greer Johnson, “Picaresque Elements in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora’s Los infortunios de Alonso Ramírez,” Hispania 64, no. 1 (1981): 60–67. 4. Anna More, Baroque Sovereignty: Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and the Creole Archive of Colonial Mexico (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Patricio Boyer, “Criminality and Subjectivity in Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez,” Hispanic Review 78, no. 1 (Winter 2010): 25–48; John D. Blanco, “Subjects of Baroque Economy: Creole and Pirate Epistemologies of Mercantilism in the Seventeenth-C entury Spanish and Dutch (East) Indies,” Encounters 1 (2009): 27–61. 5. Scholars have identified how “indigeneity” runs the risk of flattening global native peoples into a single (racial) group conditioned by empire. However, in this chapter I engage “indigeneity” by thinking with Stephanie Nohelani Teves (Kanaka Maoli), who poses that something original and multiple remains, even if the terms “indigeneity” and “the Native” respond to colonial discourse. This reading subtends my consideration of indigeneity and worldmaking, especially when colonial authors ignore the Indigenous genealogies of worldmaking actors and technologies. See Stephanie Nohelani Teves, Defiant Indigeneity: The Politics of Hawaiian Performance, Critical Indigeneities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 12. 6. Norton, “Subaltern Technologies,” 23. 7. This is a globe marked by what Marcy Norton and Ralph Bauer have described as “interconnectivity.” Ralph Bauer and Norton, “Introduction: Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and European Histories,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 1–17. 8. Carolyn Dean and Dana Leibsohn, “Hybridity and Its Discontents: Considering Visual Culture in Colonial Spanish Americ a,” Colonial Latin American Review 12, no. 1 (2003): 5. 9. For a study of Spanish empire’s relationship to global capitalism, see the special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19, no. 2 (2019) dedicated to “Capitalism— Catholicism—Colonialism” in the Iberian world. 10. See Blanco, “Subjects of Baroque Economy”; Boyer, “Criminality and Subjectivity”; J. S. Cummins, “Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez: ‘A Just History of Fact,’ ” Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 61, no. 3 (1984): 295–303. 11. Kathleen Ross, The Baroque Narrative of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora. A New World Paradise (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Mariana Zinni, “Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez de Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora: aproximaciones a una geografía poscolonial,” Iberoamericana 12, no. 46 (2012): 47–73. 12. Mabel Moraña focuses on this writerly alignment between Sigüenza and Ramírez as part of development of the protonational consciousness. See Mabel Moraña, “Máscara autobiográfica y conciencia criolla en Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez,” Dispositio 15, no. 40 (1990): 107–117. For this reason, though I use Ramírez’s name to identify the first-person subject of the text, the “voice” remains ambivalent. 13. Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Coloniality of Diasporas: Rethinking Intra-Colonial Migrations in a Pan-Caribbean Context (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 19–38;
180 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 Buscaglia, “Introducción,” in Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez: Edición Crítica, ed. José F. Buscaglia (Madrid: Polifemo, 2011). 14. See Daniel Hershenzon, The Captive Sea: Slavery, Communication, and Commerce in Early Modern Spain and the Mediterranean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); Barbara Fuchs, The Poetics of Piracy: Emulating Spain in English Lite rature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Ralph Bauer notes how commodities included “secrets”—maps, trade routes, and information (a topic he studies with regard to Infortunios). See Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature: Empire, Travel, Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 170–172. 15. Boyer, “Criminality and Subjectivity,” 179. For further readings on Seville and Spain’s economic flota system, see Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 16. This reading is compounded by the fact that the Spanish Pacific served as a site of exile for criminals from the “Tierra Firme” (Martínez-S an Miguel, Coloniality of Diasporas, 23–29). 17. José Antonio Mazzotti, “The Dragon and the Seashell: British Corsairs, Epic Poetry, and Creole Nation in Viceregal Peru,” in Colonialism Past and Present: Reading and Writing about Colonial Latin America T oday, ed. Alvaro Félix Bolaños and Gustavo Verdesio (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002), 197–214. 18. Likewise, More points to the fact that pirates created allegiances with racialized subjects forced outside the criollo collective imaginary, such as marooned slaves. More, Baroque Sovereignty, 208. We must observe, however, notable exceptions to this process that occur in texts such as the Cuban Silvestre de Balboa’s epic poem Espejo de paciencia (1608) where an enslaved Black man protects the island from French corsairs. For one consideration of the paradoxical of integration and marginalization of racialized subjects in texts about piracy see Antonio Sánchez-Jiménez, “Raza, identidad y rebellion en los confines del imperio hispánico: los cimarraones de Santiago del Príncipe y La Dragontea (1598) de Lope de Vega,” Hispanic Review 75, no. 2 (2007): 113–133. 19. Bauer and Mazzotti, “Introduction: Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas,” in Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, ed. Bauer and Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 37. See also María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions: Limpieza de Sangre, Religion, and Gender in Colonial Mexico (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011) for a careful treatment of the relationship between religious discourse, racialization, and ideas of “whiteness” in Spanish Empire. 20. Ricardo Padrón, The Indies of the Setting Sun: How Early Modern Spain Mapped the Far East as the Transpacific West (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 279–280. 21. Nancy van Deusen, Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth- Century Spain (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 224. 22. Diccionario de la lengua castellana en que se explica el verdadero sentido de las voces . . . (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 1737). 23. See Kathleen Ann Myers, Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007) for an extensive exploration of Oviedo’s text. Myers mentions the piragua on page 72. 24. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdéz, Historia general y natural de las Indias (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 1851). 25. The mention of silver only compounds this presence of the Americas and Indigenous technology. The use of mercury to extract silver from the mines of Potosí in the Viceroyalty of Perú flooded the market, change global economies but also, as Allison Bigelow has shown, language usage and epistemology. Allison Margaret Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern
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Iberian World (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2020). 26. Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700, Critical Perspectives on Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). See also Cañizares-Esguerra, “New World, New Stars: Patriotic Astrology and the Invention of Indian and Creole Bodies in Colonial Spanish America, 1600–1650,” American Historical Review 104, no. 1 (1999): 33–68. 27. For an extensive introduction to this text, see Rolena Adorno and Patrick Charles Pautz, “Introduction,” in Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, The Narrative of Cabeza de Vaca, ed. Adorno and Pautz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 1–42. Bolaños also notes the resonances between the Naufragios and Infortunios but emphasizes the “crossing” of borders in a footnote. Bolaños, “Sobre ‘relaciones,’ ” 158. 28. Adorno, “The Negotiation of Fear in Cabeza de Vaca’s Naufragios,” Representations 33 (1991): 163–199; Sylvia Molloy, “Alteridad y reconocimiento en los Naufragios de Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 35, no. 2 (1987): 425–449. 29. For a discussion of the dissolution of racial boundaries via consumption and affect, see Matthew Goldmark, “Moved by Pity: Communities of Affect in the Infortunios de Alonso Ramírez,” Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos (forthcoming). For studies of colonialism, consumption, and incorporation, see Carlos Jáuregui, Canibalia, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América latina (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2008); and Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005) 30. Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca: His Account, His Life, and the Expedition of Pánfilo de Narváez, ed. Adorno and Pautz (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). 31. See Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 32. Scholars of colonial Spanish America have shown how t hese were perceived not as commodity objects alone but also as technologies that fed from indigenous knowledges for production to accrue meaning. For a study of Indigenous technologies used to produce cochineal dye and its impact on European painting, see Byron Ellsworth Hamann, “The Mirrors of Las Meninas: Cochineal, Silver, and Clay,” Art Bulletin 92, nos. 1–2 (2010): 6–35. 33. R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 34. More, Baroque Sovereignty, chap. 4: “Counterhistory and Creole Governance in the Riot of 1692,” 158–201; Daniel Nemser, “ ‘ To Avoid This Mixture’: Rethinking Pulque in Colonial Mexico City,” Food and Foodways 19, nos. 1–2 (2011): 98–121. 35. Nemser, “ ‘ To Avoid This Mixture.’ ” 36. Jodi Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxxvi–x xvii.
William Dampier’s “Sagacious” Worldmaking Su Fang Ng
In 1697, the explorer and buccaneer William Dampier published an influential account of his travels, A New Voyage Round the World, representing an advance in scientific writing with lasting influence: his work was used by such later explorers and naturalists as James Cook, Charles Darwin, and Alexander von Humboldt.1 Promoted by the Royal Society, the work was dedicated to the president, Sir Charles Montague, later Earl of Halifax, while the secretary, Sir Hans Sloane, not only acquired Dampier’s manuscript journal, among o thers, but also com2 missioned his portrait by Thomas Murray. A New Voyage’s detailed observations of natural phenomena modeled the kind of factual description that the Royal Society was advocating. From its founding in 1662, the Royal Society viewed travel accounts as central to scientific advancement, publishing many in Philosophical Transactions. Indeed, the first volume included Robert Boyle’s “Directions for Sea-men, Bound for Far Voyages” and a founding member, Thomas Sprat, voiced the expectation that “in short time, t here will scarce a ship come up the Thames, that does not make some return of Experiments, as well as of Merchandize.” 3 Dampier’s travel account exemplified the Royal Society’s tenets of Baconian empiricism and experientialism: when disputing travelers’ tales of cannibalism, for example, he claimed to “speak as to the Compass of my own Knowledge.” 4 Unlike other travelers retailing myths of marvels, his was a narrative self-consciously based on experience aimed at the enlargement of knowledge: “the f arther we went, the more knowledge and experience I should get, which was the main t hing I regarded” (440, sig. Ff3v). Despite or perhaps because of its popularity, the New Voyage’s experiential claims opened Dampier to mockery and satire. In particu lar, he was accused of not having written his own book. The best known of t hese satires was Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Not only did Swift parody Dampier’s plain style and overly detailed observations, he also poked fun at the Royal Society’s part in edit182
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ing the New Voyage, alluded to in the prefatorial “Letter from Captain Gulliver to his Cousin Sympson.” Gulliver says he is publishing “a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels; with Direction to hire some young Gentleman of either University to put them in Order, and correct the Style, as my Cousin Dampier did by my Advice, in his Book called A Voyage round the World.” 5 Instead of a straightforward account from direct observation, New Voyage was a heavily revised version of Dampier’s considerably shorter manuscript, as Glyndwr Williams shows, arguing that revisions w ere so intrusive that in places the descriptions were “not only judgmental and derogatory in tone” but also “factually wrong.” 6 The complications of New Voyage’s textual construction reveal how the writing of a travel text, even one framed as a work of experience, involves the compositional processes of worldmaking, including reusing and redeploying other narratives. Speaking of making a “world picture,” Martin Heidegger linked cultural life, from art and religion to science and technology, to self-conscious representation: “Hence world picture . . . does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as picture.” 7 Subsequently, Nelson Goodman explores how symbolic systems, including language, create worlds in his foundational Ways of Worldmaking, to link the objectual world version, correlated to the world of things, with the versional, that is, the interpretation.8 Thus quotation—essentially what Dampier was criticized for—is central to Goodman’s worldmaking. Literary scholars and cultural critics taking up Goodman’s ideas have tried to expand his framework to consider “questions of contexts, culture(s), history (or histories), functions, and values”: Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning highlight literary genres such as “science-fiction and revisionist historical novels” as “world-building genres in . . . project[ing] narratives to the world- models that we know as ‘reality’ ” and “in doing so, such literary genres often recirculate, recycle and reconfigure world-models already at hand, thus illustrating Goodman’s claim that worldmaking ‘is a remaking.’ ” 9 Travel literature is another genre with part icu lar world-building qualities. More than other travel accounts, Dampier’s New Voyage and its sequels, whose narratives take the reader on a voyage around the world, foreground his ambitions to reshape the world through description. Part of the Royal Society’s efforts at worldmaking is the rhetoric of scientific detachment, as scholars have noted.10 For Dampier, this detachment serves to distance himself from his identity as a buccaneer as he refashions himself into a gentlemanly natural philosopher.11 Yet he nonetheless has trouble presenting a wholly coherent narrative. Anne Thell persuasively analyzes Dampier’s difficulties integrating his individual history with natural history, termed “actions” and “places,” resulting in narrative fissures and paradoxes.12 The narrative difficulties of his texts arise too, I suggest, from the recomposition processes of worldmaking, or worldmaking as remaking.
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Notwithstanding his Baconian framework, Dampier’s published texts stage the myriad ways in which the experiential mode depended on the reporting of others and on secondhand knowledge, that is, one dependent on quotation. Accused of “borrowing from other Men’s Journals,” Dampier protests in the preface to his third volume, A Voyage to New Holland (1703), that he had carefully documented his sources: “I have taken nothing from any Man without mentioning his Name, except some very few Relations and particu lar Observations received from credible Persons who desired not to be named; and t hese I have always expressly distinguished in my Books, from what I relate as of my own observing.” 13 Since his worldmaking comes from recomposing materials from other sources, access to knowledge networks made it possible for Dampier to collect materials for his global survey. Dampier’s New Voyage and subsequent volumes take a number of strategies, but I focus on questions of recirculation, recycling, and reconfiguration. In par ticu lar, Dampier’s cross-system quotation highlights the ingenuity of taking materials from one sphere to transform them into new uses in other spheres. This recomposition process he extols as “the sagacity of the Indians” (New Voyage, 85, sig. G3). Dampier derives the idea from Francis Bacon, but it has some overlaps with Heidegger’s conception of worlding as more than “a merely i magined framework”: “Wherever t hose decisions of our history that relate to our very being are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are discovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds.” 14 Like Heidegger, Bacon and Dampier emphasize the process of discovery through “new inquiry.” Dampier’s own sagacity, I argue, is in collecting, comparing, and synthesizing information. However, he sometimes misunderstands indigenous knowledges. Unsurprisingly, he privileges European sources and forms. One, in particu lar, is the letter form and the networks of circulation it represented. Valued by the Royal Society as a conduit for the flow of knowledge from abroad to E ngland, the letter in Dampier’s travel accounts sometimes conveys valuable information, but at other times, in a kind of false worldmaking, it misleads and misrepresents. These instances underline the uncertainties and even unreliability of the emerging early modern scientific worldmaking.
Worldmaking involves a recomposition process of borrowing material and reconfiguring it for recirculation. Thus, Nelson Goodman devotes a chapter of Ways of Worldmaking to the question of quotation. To frame with quotation marks even something exactly repeated is already to repurpose it, but one of the modalities Goodman is interested is “cross-system quotation,” where “what is quoted and what quotes sometimes belong to different systems”; examples are translations between languages and nonverbal transfers as in “translating the Japanese print into Western perspective.” 15 Cross-system quotation is central to
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Dampier’s travelogues. His reportage already constitutes quotation as it reframes observations for his readers. Dampier makes overt the process of repackaging experience as he would sometimes defer discussions of topics in order to aggregate data, rather than discuss each point as it arises in the course of the voyage. There is a difference, however, between reportage from direct observation—such as when in Chile Dampier remarks, “These are the highest Mountains that ever I saw, . . . and I believe any Mountains in the world” (New Voyage, 95, sig. G8), revealing the limitations of any individual’s observation—and mediated knowledge. In fact, his experiences, even observations, w ere often mediated by interpreters and knowledge brokers. Dampier’s mediators ranged from indigenous informants, servants, and slaves to creolized Europeans and other European traders or missionaries. Some places had official interpreters, such as the Mughal Empire’s “Peuns,” who “learn the European Languages, English, Dutch, French, Portuguese, &c. according as they have any of the Factories of t hese Nations,” and serve “in many capacities, as Interpreters, Brokers, Servants to attend at Meals and go to Market, and on Errands, &c. . . . they being generally employed in buying and selling” (New Voyage, 508, sig. Kkk5v). Elsewhere the position of interpreter was more informal. Dampier’s audience with Aceh’s “Shabander,” or harbormaster, was interpreted by “an Irish man” resident in the English factory (New Voyage, 502, sig. Kk2v). Company f actors w ere also sources of information. Dampier obtained his account of Aceh’s gold mining from “Captain Tiler, who . . . spoke the Language of the Country very well.” 16 Dampier was quite willing to cross confessional lines to gather information. In Hean, Cochinchina (Vietnam), Dampier “made t owards the French bishops, as the likeliest place for [him] both to rest at, and get larger Informations of the Country, from the European Missionaries, whose seat it is” (Voyages, 93, sig. G7). In Manila, a creolized Spanish-speaking Irishman with a “Spanish Mustefa [mestiza] Woman to Wife” (New Voyage, 388, sig. Cc1v) helped them buy a boat. Dampier’s textual worldmaking in his travel writings comes out of cross-system knowledge transfer from cultural go-betweens who, if not indigenous, w ere deeply embedded in the local societies. Indigenous go- betweens, of course, are equally central to Dampier’s enterprise. Among them are the “Moskito Indians,” that is, Central American Miskitos, on whom he and his fellow buccaneers depended to navigate the New World environment. One particu lar story exemplifies the deep knowledge that Miskito Indians brought with them but also their enterprising spirit, one that also explains Dampier’s approach to worldmaking. A Miskito man, whom the buccaneers left on a desert island, survived in isolation for three years by his wits, proleptically anticipating the adventures of Robinson Crusoe. Among other things, he fashioned hunting and fishing tools by cutting his gun barrel and forging instruments from the metal. Recounting this episode, Dampier praises “the sagacity of the Indians,” who are “accustomed . . . in their own Country . . . [to]
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make their own Fishing and Striking Instruments, without either Forge or Anvil” (New Voyage, 85, sig. G3). This story of the Miskito Indian has been interpreted as one about Dampier’s appreciation for indigenous knowledge. Sarah Irving- Stonebraker argues that Baconian empiricism, “with its conception of the usefulness of knowledge, and its resistance to theorizing, provided a space . . . to view indigenous people not merely as objects of knowledge, but also as authors of knowledge” and “enabled Dampier to acknowledge some of the merits of indigenous knowledge for their potential utility to England.” 17 But Dampier was not, as Irving-Stonebraker seems to suggest, all admiration.18 In New Voyage Dampier’s response to indigenous knowledge is better shown in the incident when he was treated by a Malay doctor in Aceh. He was persuaded by fellow Englishmen from the East India Company factory to cure his fever by taking “some purging Physick of a Malayan Doctor” (503, sig. Kk3). Still sick after three doses, he wanted to stop treatment but “was perswaded to take one Dose more,” which caused him to purge so much and violently that he “thought my Malayan Doctor, whom they so much commended, would have killed me outright” (503, sig. Kk3). Here, despite being cured by traditional medicine, Dampier shows scant appreciation for the Malay doctor’s methods. Anna Neill rightly argues, “Fashioning himself as a careful observer of . . . natural phenomena and h uman societies . . . , he is able at once to identify himself as the member of a respectable profession and to divorce himself effectively from the ‘uncivilized’ behavior of his buccaneer colleagues and their indigenous allies.” 19 In this instance too, Dampier distances himself from his fellow Englishmen’s faith in Malay medicine, a kind of intellectual English-indigenous alliance. Even more revealing is Dampier’s well-k nown relation to Jeoly, or Giolo, the so-called tattooed prince of Gilolo, whom he bought as a slave in Mindanao and l ater sold to be exhibited in England, where Jeoly sadly died, having “metamorphose[d], in narrative stages, from agent of Dampier’s knowledge . . . to ethnographic trophy . . . to piece of h uman traffic,” and finally turned into an “object stripped of its humanity and reconstituted as raree show.” 20 By the end, even the modern scholar recounting the episode has reduced Jeoly into object with the impersonal pronoun. It is not traditional knowledge that Dampier extols; rather the Miskito’s ability to adapt to his environment is what he calls “sagacity.” Sarah Irving- Stonebraker glosses Dampier’s striking term, “sagacity,” by reference to Susan Scott Parrish’s work on the role of Native Americans in natural history as “the kind of wisdom which derived from nature and yet was bounded by it” and often applied to indigenous knowledge.21 Parrish explores how from the mid-sixteenth century to the end of the eighteenth, the term “was curiously associated with both animal acumen (particularly smell) and a hoary human wisdom,” and European authors associated it with “the Indian [who] . . . could assimilate his body, his instincts, and his sense to even the most subtle animal.” 22 Irving-
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Stonebraker argues more generally that “the framework of Baconian natural philosophy made it possible for Dampier to approach indigenous culture with a degree of genuine respect.” 23 However, Baconian empiricism offers a more precise context for Dampier’s term. Before sagacity was “Indian,” Bacon used it in his description of experientia literata in the fable of the “hunt of Pan.” First outlined in the Advancement of Learning, Bacon expanded on his practice of experiential literata in De augmentis scientarum. Referring to the story of Pan’s discovery of Ceres, Bacon asserts this moral: “not to look for the invention of t hings useful for life and civilization from abstract philosophies . . . but only from Pan, that is from sagacious experience [experiential sagaci] and the universal knowledge of nature; which oftentimes, by a kind of chance, and while engaged as it w ere in hunting, stumbles upon such discoveries.” 24 Lisa Jardine interprets Baconian “sagacious experience” thus: “Experientia literata argues by analogy from situation in which a specified procedure has had a desirable outcome to new situations in which it may prove equally fruitful. Such a procedure does not legitimately rank as philosophy but is rather an experimental skill. It is a ‘sagacity,’ a ‘hunting by scent’ (IV, 413, 421); a practical not a theoretical activity.” 25 This practical hunting can be observed in Dampier’s story about the Miskito. While at home the Miskitos made tools without forge or anvil, their genius, as this part icu lar Miskito exemplifies, is taking knowledge from elsewhere—in this case, the process of forging and use of iron learned from the English—and applying it to a new situation. This practical process, rather than traditional knowledge, is what Dampier admires as “sagacity.” In reusing and redeploying other narratives, Dampier himself practices a kind of sagacious hunting by putting old information into new arrangement. What is especially Baconian about his compositional processes, however, is his discursive strategy of comparison, one used extensively in his travel texts both with recycled narratives as well as in his own observations. Dampier’s method of comparison, I suggest, is analogous to the application of a skill in a new context in keeping with a Baconian inductive method. Rhodri Lewis’s explication of Baconian practical wisdom also foregrounds the method of comparison: as a preparatory phase of organizing data, experientia literata arrives at interpretations of nature—world versions, if you will—“through systematically juxtaposing diffusely gathered data, and interrogating them through a process of analogy and comparison.” 26 Dampier’s travel writing displays this Baconian practice of sagacious hunting through comparison and synthesis of data gathered widely from around the world. In New Voyage, weighing the relevance of previously gathered information from another geog raphical sphere, Dampier transposes the experience of one place to apply it to another. While akin to commonplacing—which John Locke sees as a memorial supplement in “extract[ing] any Thing out of an Author which is like to be of f uture Use” 27—comparison emphasizes the systematic examination of similarities and
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differences of natural and other phenomena. The manatees in the Bay of Campethe (Campeche) remind him of t hose he saw in Mindanao (the Philippines) and in New Holland (Australia). The small black birds found in Central America he compares to the size of “the English Black Bird” (53, sig. E3). This tendency makes him link species in one part of the world to t hose in another, such as the turtles of the West Indies with other sorts encountered in the South Seas. But he defers his description to a latter part of the narrative so that he can “give a general account of all t hese several sorts at once, that the difference between them may be the better discerned” (58, sig. D5v). Similarly, the discussion of plantains and coconuts is deferred to the section on the East Indies (77, sig. F7). When he discusses turtles, he distinguishes between land and sea turtles but also the kinds among each category. Sea turtles, he says, are of four kinds, and he notes where each are found—t he Hawksbill turtle are found in the West Indies, on the Guinea coast, and in the East Indies, but he “never saw any in the South Seas” (105, sig. H5)—t heir breeding grounds and seasons. This system of comparison lays the groundwork for an emerging taxonomy. Dampier also applies the mode of comparison to human culture. In this case, he runs the danger of conflating unlike t hings together. In his second volume, Voyages and Descriptions, which delves into greater detail about the East Indies, a description of a swearing-of-a llegiance ceremony turns into a string of associations little related to its original meaning and purpose. In Tonquin, Dampier observes how mandarins and government officers swear loyalty to the ruler by drinking the blood of a hen. Simply on the basis of the act of drinking, he compares this ceremony to a criminal trial in Guinea: “This way of giving solemn potions to drink, is used also in other Countries, on different occasions. As particularly, on the Gold Coast of Guinea; where Men or Women are taxed for a Crime, . . . and the matter cannot be proved by Evidence, the Fetissero or Priest, decides the difference, by giving a Potion of bitter water, to the person accused: which if they refuse to take, they are supposed to be guilty . . . if innocent, they are not hurt thereby” (81, sig. G2). This comparison is further extended to “the old Jewish Tryal by the w aters of jealousy, spoken of in the 5th Chapter of Numbers” (81, sig. G2), which describes the ordeal of b itter w ater to test a w oman’s marital fidelity. The three examples share only the act of drinking a potion and the swearing of an oath; their contexts are wholly divergent. The method of comparison, particularly in seeking equivalences and likenesses, has both advantages and disadvantages, offering world versions that can be more or less objectual. In the case of sea turtles, Dampier’s observations of the presence of the same species in different places at different times lead him to infer that they migrate. He notes how South Seas green turtles breed at an island called Caimanes in the West Indies and Ascention in the western ocean, “and when the breeding time is past t here are none remaining. Doubtless they swim some hundreds of Leagues to come to t hose two places” (New Voyage, 107,
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sig. H6). However, while Dampier correctly identifies sea turtle migration, his method of comparison to understand Tonkinese ceremonies runs the risk of flattening out territorial particularities and thus the distinctiveness of political life. Uday Singh Mehta’s critique of nineteenth-century liberalism also applies to Dampier’s Enlightenment rationalism: “the neglect of the role and significance of territory . . . [for] the manifold constituents of political identity” means a failure to recognize “that territory is both a symbolic expression and a concrete condition for the possibility of (or aspirations to) a distinct way of life.” 28 By seeking analogy, Dampier conflates dissimilar acts and risks misunderstanding what he observes.
Dampier’s comparative synthesis highlights cross-system knowledge transfer, or sagacity, from one sphere to another and especially across cultural boundaries. While Dampier is sometimes led into erroneous conclusions, his penchant for comparison does place particular importance on worldmaking processes of recomposition and recirculation, calling attention to cross-cultural borrowing and the resulting innovation. Thus, at Tonquin, Dampier observes how Chinese arrivals stimulated trade: “This desire of Trade, they seem to have taken up from some Chinese fugitives, who fled from the Tartars, when they conquered their Country: and being kindly received by these Cochinchinese, and having them many Artificers, they instructed their kind protectors in many useful Arts, of which they w ere wholly ignorant before” (Voyages, 7, sig. B4). Political upheaval led to the transfer of craft and skills brought by the exiles. Dampier does not elaborate on the useful Chinese arts brought to Tonquin, but he describes one shift resulting from European arrival. The locals traditionally trapped wild ducks with nets, but a fter acquiring firearms, they learned to shoot them like Europeans: the wild ducks “are very shy since the English and Dutch settled here; for now the Natives as well as they shoot them: but before their arrival the Tonquinese took them only with Nets: neither is this custom left off yet” (6, sig. C5v). In Aceh, he observes that large-scale rice cultivation was brought by slaves transported by the English and Danes from India’s Coromandel coast, “who first brought this sort of Husbandry into such request among the Achinese” (Voyages, 126, sig. K1v). Europeans embedded in local societies benefit from t hese cross-system translations. The Dutch, for example, established households with Tonkinese women, an accepted and widespread practice. Remarking on the advantage gained by the Dutch, Dampier details the women’s mercantile acumen: Many of t hese [Dutch] have gotten good Estates by their Tonquin Ladies; and that chiefly by trusting them with Money and Goods. For in this poor Country ’tis a great advantage to watch the Market: and t hese female Merchants
190 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 having stocks w ill mightily improve them, taking their opportunities of buying raw Silk in the dead time of the year. With this they w ill employ the poor people, when work is scarce; and get it cheaper and better done, than when Ships are here: . . . And by this means they w ill get their Goods ready against the Ships arrive, and before the ordinary working season, to the profit both of the Merchant and the Pagally [friend]. (Voyages, 51–52, sig. E2–E2v)29
Across early modern Southeast Asia, w omen w ere important trading partners for itinerant merchants making long-term stays in the country. Anthony Reid demonstrates how a “pattern of pre-marital sexual activity and easy divorce, together with the commercial element potentially involved in the paying of bridewealth, ensured that temporary marriage or concubinage rather than prostitution became the dominant means of coping with the vast annual influx of foreign traders to the major ports.” 30 Dampier underscores the w omen’s entrepreneurial spirit. Canny investors, they time the market by buying low and selling high and hiring when labor is cheap. The temporal rhythms are set by foreign ships, themselves dependent on monsoon winds. Not only is the arrangement a business alliance between Dutch and Tonquin merchants—t hat the latter are female does not vitiate the compact’s commercial nature—but also, viewed more broadly, the w omen apply old knowledge to new circumstances. For Dampier himself, knowledge is acquired by means of information networks. He remarks with admiration his Asian counterparts who are particularly adept at gathering news. His recognition suggests that he inserts himself into Indies knowledge networks with the initial understanding that he is in a horizontal relation. Dampier notes the centrality of Aceh’s harbormaster as the important fulcrum connecting strangers and locals: “All Merchant Strangers, at their first arrival, make their Entries with him, which is always done with a good present: and from him they take all their dispatches when they depart; and all m atters of importance in general between Merchants are determined by him. It seems to have bene by his Conversation and Acquaintance with strangers, that he became so knowing, beyond the rest of the Great men” (Voyages, 138, sig. K7 v). Again, what Dampier praises is the ability to integrate new information with old knowledge. Aceh’s Shabander is sagacious not because of an inherent indigenous knowledge but rather b ecause of his acquisition of new information applied to the East Indies context: he acts in an experimental mode. Similarly, Dampier praises the Mindanao sultan’s brother: “Raja Laut is a very sharp man; he speaks and writes Spanish, which he learned in his youth. He has by often conversing with Strangers, got a g reat insight into the Customs of other Nations, and by Spanish Books has some knowledge of Europe” (New Voyage, 337, sig. Z1). Raja Laut accumulates knowledge about foreign parts, just as Dampier gathers information about the world. His authority to license merchants, both strangers and natives, puts him in a position to learn from them even as his foreign knowl-
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edge aids his management of the trade. On the other side, Dampier is disdainful of the lack of curiosity. He criticizes the English settled in Bengkulen, Sumatra, for not keeping up a correspondence with the natives: “The Fort was but sorrily governed when I was t here; nor was t here that care taken to keep a fair Correspondence with the Natives in the Neighbourhood, as I think o ught to be, in all Trading places especially” (Voyages, 183, sig. N4). Dampier particularly values cross-system information transfer, in keeping with his Baconian notion of sagacity. For Europeans, epistolary networks w ere important channels for news and information. Hefty tomes like Dampier’s travel narratives—A New Voyage runs to five hundred fifty pages, while the two following volumes total over three hundred—rested on more modest reports and letters. The importance Dampier gives to correspondence is consistent with the Royal Society’s priorities. The letter form was the primary vehicle for the collection of Indies knowledge that was then disseminated in England through Philosophical Transactions, the Royal Society’s publication organ. Dwight Atkinson’s linguistic and rhetorical analy sis of Philosophical Transactions finds that “the single most common generic form in which articles appeared between 1676 and 1875 was the letter.” 31 Earlier volumes were more heavily epistolary than later ones: Atkinson estimates that 51 percent of articles take the letter form in the 1675 volume, but only 33 percent in 1725; in 1775, 48 percent of articles are epistles, though only 29 percent in 1825. Charles Bazerman contends that Philosophical Transactions grew out of a “letter correspondence” that “developed among natural philosophers to share their investigations” with the “earliest issues . . . largely in the form of a summary of his [Royal Society secretary Henry Oldenburg’s] correspondence along with the meetings of the Royal Society, as though Oldenburg w ere corresponding with 32 the readers.” But summary reports of correspondence turned into lengthy quotations and “the articles appear directly in the form of letters to the Royal Society,” such as Newton’s famous 1672 article on light; Bazerman notes, “It took well over a century for the articles to drop vestiges of the letter format and adopt the abstract argumentative tone and focus of scientific articles.” 33 Robert Iliffe concludes, “To an overwhelming extent, the Society was its correspondence.” 34 The epistolary form’s prominence can also be understood, I argue, as an extension of East India Company correspondence that maintained information flows to ensure profitable trade. As Miles Ogborn details, the company sent “an annual letter that went out with the fleet and a reply that came back with cargo,” supplemented by o thers between factories in Asia to ensure a “good Correspondence.” 35 The company developed particu lar structures for the letters—requiring factories to “answer ye Severall Paragraphs as they lye in Order”—a nd an archiving system; yet there were still problems of “letters delayed, mislaid, or not sent, and the gap between delivery and receipt could make orders irrelevant or troublesome.” 36 This infrastructure, the network of correspondence, could be
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accessed for writing natural history. With the Royal Society hoping to put voyagers’ experience and observations to scientific use, “to compose such a History of” nature as “to build a Solid and Useful Philosophy upon,” some fellows and professors w ere asked to “set down some Directions for Sea-men going into the East & West-Indies, to better capacitate them for making such observations abroad” and the sailors were to “keep an exact Diary, delivering at their return a fair Copy thereof to the Lord High Admiral.” 37 Iliffe explains, “The Royal Society functioned as a repository for reports of monsters, observations, and experiments from all over the known world.” 38 Letters w ere both authenticating documents and informational records. The Mindanao sultan produced letters of both kinds: The Sultan sent for two English Letters for Captain Swan to read, purposely to let him know, that our East India Merchants did design to settle here, and that they had already sent a Ship hither. One of t hese Letters was sent to the Sultan from England, by the East India Merchants. The chiefest t hings contained in it, as I remember, for I saw it afterwards in the Secretaries hand, who was very proud to shew it to us, was to desire some priviledges, in order to the building of a Fort there. This Letter was written in a very fair hand, and between each line, t here was a Gold Line drawn. The other Letter was left by Captain Goodlud, directed to any English men who should happen to come thither. This related wholly to Trade. (New Voyage, 355, sig. Aa2)
One letter gives evidence of a prior agreement with the East India Company. Dampier underplays its importance by summarizing the contents as simply a quotidian request for trading privileges and permission to build a fort. However, the material form of the letter—t he “fair hand” and the gold lines—suggests otherwise. The gold ornamentation recalls the style of Islamic diplomatic letters in Southeast Asia. Termed surat emas (golden letters), they w ere written on richly decorated paper, with the most impressive extant example from Aceh, a 1615 letter from Sultan Iskandar Muda (r. 1607–1636) to King James I of England (r. 1603–1625).39 The letter sent from London, imitating the style of gold decoration and thus performing a cross-system translation, is accepted by the Mindanao court as authoritative. Gerald MacLean argues, “Letters lay claims to ownership and authenticity: to material objects or part icu lar experience, to eyewitness knowledge about events or newly revealed truths, to specific rights to do something or go somewhere.” 40 Aut hentic knowledge or information is Dampier’s primary concern: the letter’s informational potential. He shows more interest in the sultan’s other letter containing commercial data on current prices, vendible goods, and local weights and measures. Dampier and his fellow privateers also availed themselves of information gathered from intercepted letters, that is to say, by hacking into other systems’ networks. Capturing “Pacquets” bound for Portobel (Panama)
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from Cartagena (Columbia), they “open’d a great quantity of the Merchants Letters, and found the Contents of many of them to be very surprising”; chief in this was the prophecy that the “English Privateers” might discover the “door into the South Seas” (New Voyage, 180, sig. N2v). Concluding that it must be a passage through the land of Darien Indians, the Miskitos, who had been soliciting their alliance, the privateers sought to deepen their friendship with them. Dampier writes, “the taking t hese Letters gave the first life to t hose bold Undertakings” (181, sig. N3). But while the letter’s presentation of a speaking “I” may be authenticating, such documents can also be forged—t he nineteenth-century German press, for example, invented false foreign correspondents to give news from abroad a flavor of authenticity41—or be otherw ise misleading. In New Voyage, the status of the speaking “I” is the origin of one misunderstanding. A letter sent from Borneo to Mindanao by the trader Captain Thomas Bowrey u nder mistaken assumptions was misconstrued by the privateers to further compound the error. Dampier’s Captain Swan declined to open the letter as “he thought it might come from some of the East India Merchants, whose Affairs he would not intermeddle with” (370, sig. Bbv). Only when Dampier finally met Bowrey in Aceh was the confusion cleared up: “[Bowrey] said that he sent that Letter, supposing that the English were settled t here at Mindanao, and by this Letter we also thought that there was an English Factory at Borneo: so here was a mistake on both sides” (370, sig. Bbv). Under this misapprehension, Swan prevented some of the crew from g oing to Borneo. In this case, the letters presented a fictional narrative that departed from reality. When communication breaks down even among Europeans sharing a language, as it did between Bowrey and Dampier’s company, it is no surprise that cross-cultural communications may fail to translate. Dampier’s own linguistic incompetence led to several misunderstandings. Putting the onus of understanding on the other party by relying on European signs, he reveals the limits of English comprehension. The best-k nown example is his crew’s interactions with Australian aboriginals from the later voyage funded by the Royal Society. In A Voyage to New Holland, Dampier tells of encountering natives who fled from them even when he made “all the Signs of Peace and Friendship I could” (145, sig. L). Frustrated by their lack of success, the buccaneers tried to capture the natives, who fought back; when simply discharging his gun did not frighten them, Dampier shot and killed one of them. Reading this scene in relation to Robinson Crusoe, Jason Farr contends, “Gesture was an instrument to be exploited for colonial advancement, but it also made legible the opposition of the p eoples under attack.” 42 The consequences of the gestural scenes reinforce Nelson Goodman’s assertion that “we can have words without a world, but no worlds without words or other symbols.” 43 Lacking a shared symbolic system, Dampier also misinterprets
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another situation from his earlier circumnavigation, described in Voyages and Descriptions, in which he makes the same faulty assumption that his gestural signs are legible. In Cachao, the Portuguese name for Hanoi, Dampier got into trouble with the locals as his “Guide could not speak English” nor he “the Tonquinese Language: So I askt him no questions about it” (Voyages, 91, sig. G6). Mistaking a funeral feast for a market, he attempted to buy meat displayed at the feast by gestural signs: I, as was customary in the Markets, took hold of a quarter, and made signs to the Master of it, as I thought, to cut me a piece of 2 or 3 pound. I was ignorant of any ceremony they were about, but the superstitious people soon made me sensible of my errour: for they assaulted me on all sides, . . . My Guide did all he could to appease them, and dragg’d me out of the Crowd: . . . some time after . . . the Guide’s Brother, who spoke English told me, it was a Funeral Feast, . . . and some English men who lived t here told me the same. (92, sig. G6v)
Although Dampier had a guide, he could not communicate with him and made no effort to do so. Instead, in a case of false worldmaking, lacking words and symbols, he grossly misinterpreted the situation and inadvertently dishonored a funeral feast. It turns out, gestures, rather than a universal language, signal untranslatability. Only when language was restored—when he found interlocuters who spoke English—could he finally comprehend.
In encompassing literally the w hole world, Dampier’s works constitute an ambitious attempt at a cross-system translation to render the Indies experience into English perspective, that is to say, worldmaking. While the experiential claim of direct observation suggests a transparent informational transfer, in fact, as with any narrative, recomposition processes underlie Dampier’s texts. Turning particularly to comparison and the aggregation of data to negotiate cross-system quotation, he emphasizes Baconian “sagacious hunting,” which defines ingenuity as the innovation coming from the transfer of knowledge from one sphere to another. Dampier’s worldmaking is a revealing case of how the Royal Society understood and valued cultures encountered abroad. Rather than an unalloyed respect for indigenous knowledge, Dampier privileges European forms of knowledge, especially the letter, which facilitates news networks. The instances of sagacity Dampier celebrates or dwells on are largely examples of indigenous p eoples adopting European knowledge, whether it is the Tonkinese learning to shoot wild ducks, Mindanao royalty reading Spanish books, or the Miskito Indian using English forging techniques to fashion new fishing instruments. Even while channeling new information back to Europe, Dampier highlights information flows to the Indies. Rather than purely a source of knowledge, the “sagacious Indian” is one who learns from Europeans. The colonial tendency to categorize science as a
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European practice rather than something universal was already evident in Dampier’s sagacious worldmaking.
Notes 1. Diana and Michael Preston, A Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The Life of William Dampier (London: Doubleday; New York: Walker & Company, 2004), 3–6. 2. Thomas Murray’s portrait, Captain William Dampier Pirate and Cartographer (ca. 1698), is held at the National Portrait Gallery, London. 3. Philosophical Transactions 1, no. 8 (January 8, 1665/6): 140; Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society (London, 1667), 86, sig. L3v. 4. William Dampier, A New Voyage Round the World (London, 1697), 325, sig Y3 (hereafter cited parenthetically). 5. Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in The Works of J.S., D.D., D.S.P.D., 4 vols. (Dublin, 1735), 3:i. 6. Glyndwr Williams, The G reat South Sea: English Voyages and Encounters, 1570–1750 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997), 113. 7. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 129. 8. Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (New York: Harvester Press, 1978), x. 9. Ansgar Nünning and Vera Nünning, “Ways of Worldmaking as a Model for the Study of Culture: Theoretical Frameworks, Epistemological Underpinnings, New Horizons,” in Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives, ed. Birgit Neumann, Ansgar Nünning, and Vera Nünning (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 3, 15. 10. Geraldine Barnes and Adrian Mitchell, “Measuring the Marvelous: Science and the Exotic in William Dampier,” Eighteenth-Century Life 26, no. 3 (2002): 45–57; Cristina Malcolmson, Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle, Cavendish, Swift (London: Routledge, 2016), 170–182. 11. Anna Neill, “Buccaneer Ethnography: Nature, Culture, and Nation in the Journals of William Dampier,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 33, no. 2 (2000): 165–180. 12. Anne M. Thell, “William Dampier’s ‘Mixt Relation’: Narrative vs. Natural History in A New Voyage Round the World (1697),” Eighteenth-Century Life 37, no. 3 (2013): 29–54. 13. William Dampier, A Voyage to New Holland, &c. in the Year, 1699, vol. 3 (London, 1703), sig. A5v (hereafter cited parenthetically). 14. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the World of Art,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 43. 15. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 52, 54. 16. William Dampier, Voyages and Descriptions. Vol. II. In Three Parts (London, 1699), 130, sig. K3v (hereafter cited parenthetically). 17. Sarah Irving-Stonebraker, “ ‘The Sagacity of the Indians’: William Dampier’s Surprising Respect for Indigenous Knowledge,” Journal of Early Modern History 21 (2017): 544. 18. Irving-Stonebraker includes a list of t hings Dampier “admiringly detailed,” including “the education system of the Mindinao [sic] people of Malaysia” (“ ‘Sagacity of the Indians,’ ” 544). Mindanao is in fact part of the Philippines. 19. Neill, “Buccaneer Ethnography,” 168. 20. Geraldine Barnes, “Curiosity, Wonder, and William Dampier’s Painted Prince,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (2006): 36. Barnes’s important account uses Dampier’s unpublished journal, as does Adrian Mitchell’s Dampier’s Monkey: The South Seas Voyages of William Dampier (Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press, 2010). 21. Irving-Stonebraker, “ ‘Sagacity of the Indians,’ ” 561.
196 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 22. Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 239, 243. 23. Irving-Stonebraker, “ ‘Sagacity of the Indians,’ ” 550. 24. Francis Bacon, De Augmentis scientarum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1864–1874), 4:326. 25. Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 144. 26. Rhodri Lewis, “A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the Arts Memoriae and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge,” Intellectual History Review 19, no. 2 (2009): 171. 27. John Locke, A New Method of Making Common-Place Books; . . . To Which Is Added Something from Monsieur Le Clerc (London, 1706), ii, sig. A4v. 28. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 119. 29. Dampier defines the term thus: “A Comrade is a familiar Male-f riend; a Pagally is an Innocent Platonick Friend of the other Sex” (Voyages and Descriptions, 1:318, sig. Y4v). 30. Anthony Reid, “Female Roles in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988): 632. 31. Dwight Atkinson, Scientific Discourse in Sociohistorical Context: The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1675–1975 (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 1999), 81. 32. Charles Bazerman, “Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated Genres,” in Letter Writing as a Social Practice, ed. David Barton and Nigel Hall (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2000), 24. 33. Bazerman, “Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated Genres,” 24. 34. Robert Iliffe, “Author-Mongering: The ‘Editor’ Between Producer and Consumer,” in The Consumption of Culture, 1600–1800: Image, Object, Text, ed. Ann Bermingham and John Brewer (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 166–192 [173]. 35. Miles Ogborn, Indian Ink: Script and Print in the Making of the English East India Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 92–93. 36. Ogborn, Indian Ink, 94, 95. 37. “Directions for Sea-Men, Bound for Far Voyages,” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–1666): 140–141, sig. V1v–V2. 38. Iliffe, “Author-Mongering,” 173. 39. Annabel Teh Gallop and Bernard Arps, Golden Letters: Writing Traditions of Indonesia / Surat Emas: Budaya Tulis di Indonesia (London: British Library; Jakarta: Yayasan Lontar, 1991), 34; image reproduced on 35. The paper is sprinkled with gold, the text is bordered with thick gold lines, a gold floral poppy pattern is painted in the margins, and the decorated panel above (called an unwān) features an intricate pattern of blues, gold, white, and red, showing Safavid and Ottoman elements. 40. Gerald MacLean, “Re-siting the Subject” in Epistolary Histories: Letters, Fiction, Culture, ed. Amanda Gilroy and W. M. Verhoeven (Charlottesville: University of V irginia Press, 2000), 177. 41. Heide Streiter-Buscher, Introduction to Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen, vol. 1 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), 49. 42. Jason S. Farr, “Colonizing Gestures: Crusoe, the Signing Sovereign,” Eighteenth- Century Fiction 29, no. 4 (2017): 552. 43. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 6.
“To Serve Them in the Other World” natural history, worldmaking, and funeral song in hans sloane’s voyage to . . . jamaica (1707–1725) David S. Mazella Mr. Flamstead, the Astronomer at Greenwich, speaking to me with g reat Warmth about some of [Burnet’s] Opinions, said at last, that he would prove and make him know, that there went more to the making of the World than a well turn’d Period. —Hans Sloane, A Voyage to . . . Jamaica1
Making Sense, Remaking Worlds For the last few decades, scholars attempting to make sense of the raging, catastrophic collapse of norms and institutions all around them have turned their attention toward the concept of “worldmaking.” 2 The Google N-gram for “worldmaking,” for example, even with all the usual caveats about its representativeness, tells a remarkable story about the term’s increasing salience: The N-gram’s spike suggests that worldmaking emerged as a key critical concept at a moment when global crises began to unfold, accelerate, and ramify. This raises the question whether worldmaking offers a fantasy of recuperation and rebuilding, or some path forward toward such a goal.3 A fter all, nothing makes one yearn for the power to make—or remake—worlds like a conviction that we are living in a constant, infinitely prolonged state of crisis. The pileup of mounting catastrophes has driven literary scholars and critical theorists to seek out new or neglected sources of political agency and knowledge, the better to sustain some version of “us” more justly and equitably into the f uture. And the 197
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Figure 1. Google N-gram for “world making.” Public domain.
sense of impossibly stretched, foreclosed, jagged, or broken temporal horizons for both problems and solutions has led to a related interest in temporalities and temporalizations. In the scramble for better, more durable grounds of political agency and knowledge, Pheng Cheah has argued for the indispensable power of literature to create “a world, a world with its own consistency, by appropriating elements from the referential,” while also noting the limitations of this created world’s “virtual status.” 4 What Cheah wants to offer beyond a virtual or created world, however, is a normative theory of world literature, along with a process of “worlding,” that highlights literature’s active, temporalizing effects beyond the realm of representation or existing realities. Cheah describes “worlding” as a term for “how a world is held together and given unity by the force of time. In giving rise to existence, temporalization worlds a world.” 5 If existing and created worlds do indeed interpenetrate as Cheah suggests, borrowing and taking sustenance from one another, perhaps the dependence is mutual? If so, it seems possible that normative, created worlds could infiltrate and reorder the existing worlds from which they are derived. Such an account of worldmaking should help us, in Cheah’s words, better “understand the normative force that literature can exert in the world, [and] the ethicopolitical horizon it opens up for the existing world.” 6
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This essay thinks through some of the implications of Cheah’s notions of worldmaking, literature, and their ethicopolitical horizons, but via a slightly dif ferent historical path, by attending to an earlier but adjacent historical moment that forces consideration of the roles of genre, media, and scientific knowledge in some “ways of worldmaking” preceding Cheah’s account. Instead, this essay focuses on “ways of worldmaking” prior to his point of departure in Kantian and late-Enlightenment cosmopolitanism.7 This amounts to a fuller analysis of what Cheah, following Spivak, calls the moment of imperialist discursive cartography, which tells us “how European imperialist cultural representations constructed the geography of colonies.” 8 Here I focus on an alternative to Cheah’s historical sequence of cartographic worldmaking followed by normative worldmaking. In my alternative account, Cheah’s Heideggerian notion of “the gift of time” precedes, endures, and outlasts imperial cartographies in ways that may or may not leave traces in the imperial record. These traces carry the possibility of serving as a resource for further worldmaking in the present or f uture.9 In pursuing this alternative historical path, I am not critiquing Cheah’s approach for its acknowledged focus but supplementing it to see how his and others’ notions of “worldmaking” might operate in a related but earlier set of literary, scientific, and colonial domains. Redirecting the chronological and epistemological scope in this way should also highlight the e arlier period’s characteristic overlaps of genre, along with the variety of media forms used to collect and disseminate both literary texts and scientific discoveries. I argue that this characteristic multiplicity of genres and media may serve a similar function as “literature” in Cheah’s scheme, as phenomena not amenable to description as “objective” nor reducible to “the subject’s rational powers of determination and calculation.” 10 In sum, normative worldmaking seems like a possibility in the versions of “story” or “media” that pre-or postdate a print-specific notion of “literature.” To reopen the questions regarding imperial cartography and worldmaking, t here is no better place to begin than one of this period’s most influential examples of natural history, Hans Sloane’s two-volume Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers, and Jamaica (1707–1725), which included his Natural History of Jamaica.11 Sloane’s achievement is best understood as a form of worldmaking reflecting an era when literature and scientific discourse were not yet fully separated, the audiences addressed nowhere near as distinct, disciplinary, and professionalized as they would become, and the powers of imaginative projection demystified but not quite desacralized.12 This is where the political stakes of information gathering and dissemination become clearer, when we realize that a text like the Natural History was in its own way as innovative, expansive, and powerf ul a platform for retaining and conveying information as Google in our own moment. Moreover, in their dissemination of more systematic and comprehensive information about hitherto “unknown” parts of the world, natural histories of the Americas typically depicted lands and p eoples
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as readily available for conquest or exploitation from potential readers. The only ethicopolitical horizon potentially shared (if not recognized) by enslavers and enslaved were the forms of death that overtook those living on the island. Despite Cheah’s own assumption of the “deworlding” of the enslaved, however, Vincent Brown has extensively documented their efforts to preserve and maintain Africanized funerary rites, which I argue represented their own forms of “worlding.” In contrast, the local planters and colonial officials who served imperial cartography found themselves leading hazardous lives in an atmosphere of ubiquitous and inglorious death.13 For all t hese reasons, Sloane’s Natural History represents an example of this hybridized, complex genre. It is a lavishly illustrated account of Sloane’s acquisition of a vast number of Caribbean flora and fauna while on site and his subsequent task of classifying and organizing his samples through a laborious process of cross-referencing and extraction of information from his metropolitan and colonial resources. The Natural History’s characteristic mix of genres, however, pioneered the incorporation of an extended first-person travel narrative into its third-person descriptive natural history. This arrangement would later provide an important generic model for the treatment of the people, places, communities, and natural environments of the West Indies and Americas, both in literary and in scientific discourses.14 Sloane’s Natural History presents an artful mixture of worldly fact and literary form in the first sense of Cheah’s worldmaking—in its creation of a “world with its own consistency, by appropriating elements from the referential.” As a complex genre emerging from Sloane’s scientific investigations, however, the Natural History also conforms to the absorptive generic model set out by Bakhtin and cited by John Frow as “absorb[ing] and digest[ing] various primary (simple) genres that have taken form in unmediated speech communication. Th ese primary [speech] genres are altered and assume a special character when they enter into complex ones. They lose their immediate relation to actual reality and to the real utterances of others.” 15 Bakhtin, moreover, asserts the virtual status of both scientific research and lit erature, since they have both lost their “immediate relation to actual reality.” As such, the Natural History also reflects Cheah’s characterization of imperial and instrumental ways of worldmaking, wherein a particular form of knowledge “projects a cartographical image of the world according to specific criteria and principles of knowledge-and information-production. . . . These cartographies divide the globe up hierarchically and map relations of power and inequality. They have an important impact on human existence, especially its social, economic, and political dimensions.” 16 Sloane’s Natural History offers its cartographical images in accordance with its genre’s protocols of knowledge and information production and dutifully represents its subjects’ “relations of power and inequality,” even while it incorporates the botanical and medical knowledge
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communicated orally by local, often enslaved, informants to Sloane, who must transcribe and order their remarks. Sloane’s book, however, also establishes a multidimensional “cartographical image” of the island that encompasses not just multiple, combined verbal genres (oral, scribal, and printed) but also an extraordinary assortment of visual images and even musical notations to conduct its multisensory, multimedia worldmaking. In this way it reflects Nelson Goodman’s theories of worldmaking, when Goodman suggests that “quotation” in and across linguistic and nonlinguistic systems function “as ways of combining and constructing symbols,” becoming one of the key modes and “instruments of world making.” 17 As Goodman remarks, “Worldmaking as we know it is always starts from worlds on hand; the making is a remaking.” 18 The Natural History’s mix of media via verbal and visual quotation, like its mix of genres, helps Sloane constitute the Natural History as a fully cartographic image of the island embedded within networks of power and assisting in the literal circulation of knowledge between Jamaica and England. At the same time, its hybridity of genres and media also allows a printed volume to represent in its sheer capaciousness and inclusiveness the temporal confusion and terror experienced in the West Indies, where time is experienced as a series of abrupt shocks and lulls, rather than the connected, continuous time of the metropolitan d rivers of empire: information, news, finance. Sloane’s text therefore makes its most immediate impact in its sheer surplus of forms, media, and meanings. At the same time, texts and genres like the Natural History also challenge Cheah’s tacit assumption that oral genres, performance, music, or other media are strictly nostalgic and backward looking elements incapable of exerting a similar “normative force” upon the world without the mediation of a unitary, tacitly print-based “literature.” As Sloane’s juxtapositions of illustrations, narratives, and observations together make clear, the proximity of natural beauty to ubiquitous disease and death are so commonplace in the West Indies that they are barely perceived or remarked upon by the inhabitants, but they make for some of the most memorable sequences in the Natural History. Hence, the Natural History’s tensions between the visual and the verbal, the scientific and the literary, the descriptive and the narrative, the enduring and the corruptible, are all played out in the rather haphazard sequencing, organization, and arrangement of Sloane’s items as well as in his narrative. Yet t hese superimposed tensions also tell us something about the collective and psychological experiences of time in pre- emancipation Jamaica. The distribution and treatment of disease and death on the island help remind us of the compounded, stratified forms of social time experienced by its various populations within a common physical environment, which proceeds according to its own rhythms of nighttime and daytime, seasonal weather, and geological event.19 Earthquakes and the plantation bell were
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just two of the ways that time is punctuated in Jamaica, along with the seasonal rhythms of planting, ship arrivals and departures, plus the interrupted or deferred time of credit panics, rebellions and mutinies, foreign invasions, and naval blockades that provided catastrophic interruptions on a scale capable of stopping time simultaneously for the entire island’s population.
The “Preface”: The Uses of Natur al History From Sloane’s “Preface” we can extract something like a scholarly autobiography and inventory for his life, methods, and career in collecting, cataloguing, and cross-referencing. What we learn, however, from following his life story is that it also contains a model for the expansion of his community of fellow questioners as well as a hint about how their pursuits over time could lead to results far from their intentions or rational calculations. Sloane’s reasons for undertaking the trip in the 1680s and producing his volumes w ere common enough for the collectors, antiquarians, and medical men of his era.20 Sloane’s youth and energy, however, distinguished him for intellectual and social ambitions in a field dominated by leisurely virtuosi and men wealthy enough to contemplate antiquities in retirement. Aspiring men like Sloane, however, needed the time, patronage, and opportunity to travel abroad to collect specimens or make observations and then transform, often at years’ remove, those specimens, notes, and cross-references into full-fledged catalogues or fully elaborated accounts. Published years apart, Sloane’s completed volumes nonetheless circulated worldwide to introduce a set of literally cartographic, botanical, and ethnographic images and texts that embedded the West Indies ever more securely within existing maps of English and European knowledge. This is what Cheah, following Said, calls the “geography of colonialism and imperialism,” whose “worldliness is its geographical infrastructure, its spatial situated-ness, the ‘historical affiliation’ that connects cultural works from the imperial center to the colonial peripheries and the interdependencies that follow from t hese connections.” 21 As the “Preface” explains, even before he was a physician and member of the Duke of Albemarle’s entourage, Sloane had been dissatisfied with the explanations he found in the local collections he sought out, as well as with existing studies of new world botany. He therefore decided that he would collect physical specimens, “imprint them in [his] mind,” transform them into words and images on a page, categorize and order them, then reintroduce them—literally and physically—into English soil and medical practice. This work would help him gain access to “both the knowledge of [these foreign specimens] and their Uses,” a process that would be further expanded by cross-referencing his findings with t hose of other scholars and collectors.22 Since books like t hese were continually made and remade from one another, with new observations folded in at e very
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iteration, Sloane diligently sought to expand and refine his networks of citation along with his collections, so as “to make this [study] more Exact and Useful.” With this book serving as model for both its genre and authorial method, its cartographic functions could thus be taken over by a growing community of scholars advancing and consolidating knowledge of the new world, and its initial depictions rendered “more Exact and Useful” by a globally distributed set of metropolitan and colonial scholars, patrons, or institutions rather than a single individual.23 Part of the reason why the Natural History could be considered “worldmaking,” however, is not just because it takes so much of its subject matter from the world, but also because it needs to range across the entire world collecting its information, which it then systematizes and reduces to a single, portable volume. In other words, this book, once completed and published, could be carried back to the same island where its data w ere collected, to be used whenever needed by the “inhabitants,” who in Sloane’s account refer solely to its British or European settlers and planters. Hence, this volume, once published and disseminated across the world, immediately reinforced the asymmetrical geographic, intellectual, and political power of the imperial center over and against the colonial peripheries, in Said’s terms. As to the purposes of such a natural history, Sloane’s “Preface” identifies four types or species of potential readers, along with their corresponding uses of the text and the temporalities they help produce. First, for the devout and contemplative Christian reader, the Natural History describes “t hings we are sure of . . . and which, in probability, have been ever since the Creation, and will remain to the End of the World, in the same Condition we now find them.” For such a reader, observing “so much Contrivance, in the variety of Beings, preserv’d from the beginning of the World, [ensures] that the more any Man searches, the more he w ill Admire.” Hence, Sloane argues that the achieved perfection of the world so described, and its “Contrivance, in the variety of Beings,” provides any Christian searching its wonders endlessly varied opportunities to admire God’s power, wisdom, and providential ordering of t hings. Second, for settlers newly arrived but not born in the West Indies, this volume contains the most comprehensive and accurate listing of the island’s flora, to “teach the inhabitants of the parts where the plants grow, [and] their several Uses, which I have endeavour’d to do, by the best Informations I could get from Books, and the Inhabitants, either Europeans, Indians, or Blacks.” As Iannini has pointed out, however, Sloane goes on to summarize the fortuitous, rather unprovidential path by which ownership of the island, and therefore the existing flora introduced by Spanish settlers, “throve wonderfully and now grow as it w ere Sponte [on their own accord]”: as he reminds on the first page of his Introduction, “The first Discovery of the West Indies, to me seems to have been accidental, as has happened in most other great Discoveries.” 24 These seemingly natural species w ere preserved
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by the remaining “Indians” and “Blacks” a fter the Spanish deserted, then taken up again by the English upon their arrival, who were later assisted by Dutch and English settlers from Surinam. This meant that the writings and knowledge of people familiar with the “vertues of plants” from other portions of the West Indies would have useful information for t hose settling in Jamaica. Third, for those not residing in the West Indies, who, “in reading voyages and talking to travelers to the West Indies, etc. [might] meet with words, and names of t hings” they have “no notion or conception of,” Sloane recommends they look in his index and find references to “other books treating of the topic.” Hence, for t hose interested in the region, Sloane has answered the needs of both readers of voyages and merchants eyeing investments, providing useful definitions, illustrations, synonyms, and cross-references for both the browsing and searching reader. Finally, for “Philosophers” interested in deep yet undeniable questions about the physical world, Sloane has carefully described the specific wonders of this island, including the unresolved questions they provoke, to elicit further thought and perhaps potential solutions from his readers. He notes, “the knowledge of what is produced t here [in the West Indies] naturally brings, [and] is a consideration of the Causes of some very strange, but certain, matters of fact.” Though “Philosophers of all Ages” have been “puzzl’d” by the problem of how “parts of Vegetables and Animals, Real Sea-shells and substances should be found remote from the seas, wherein they seem to have been produced and bred,” this volume, by virtue of its being printed and its knowledge shared as widely as possible, makes it possible for the puzzle to be solved. Sloane’s autobiographical account of his own path t oward collecting suggests that a book like this might very well help inspire others to join the worldwide community of collectors and botanists. Consequently, the Natural History offers at least four distinct temporal frames for readers: the immersive contemplation of the devout, the everyday informational needs of settlers and plantation owners, the transient curiosity of readers interested in the island and its environment, and last the focused attention of philosophers pursuing solutions. The simultaneous existence of t hese disjunct temporal registers helps suggest that we as readers are not simply viewing an environment but participating in an entire world. Multiple temporalities, and therefore multiple, nonoverlapping perspectives, are being made available in a series of texts and images, but simultaneously, and without any easily commensurable or sequenceable order for their final arrangement. The only way to make sense of their arrangement is through “the gift of time.”
Funerals, Festivals, Catastrophes: Stopping Time ecause of its proto-ethnographic and documentary method, Sloane’s Natural B History inevitably documented, as if in the margins of a set of photographs, not
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just his own pursuit of the useful plants of Jamaica, but also the lives, diseases, and deaths of the island’s population, both enslaved and f ree, whose existence was caught up in the cultivation of those plants. What is most striking in Sloane, however, is the degree to which the enslaved and their surrounding culture remained invisible, opaque, or fragmentary in his observations, however impor tant they w ere for his knowledge gathering. This is consistent with Kriz’s observation that, for a text written in the 1680s from firsthand experience of the island, the Natural History is remarkably reticent about the omnipresence of sugar cane, the driving force of the island’s monoculture, or t hose whose coerced labor cultivated, refined, and extracted value from this valuable plant. Instead, glimpses of that fact come through only in particu lar symptomatic moments.25 In Sloane’s writings and illustrations, the abiding oral culture and therefore the humanity of the enslaved is recognized by whites only in catastrophic moments like collective sickness, rebellion, or death, or in performative moments like songs, dances, and especially funerals.26 Such moments force white observers like Sloane to recognize, if only belatedly and fragmentarily, the connection between slaves’ collective physical and verbal acts and their underlying beliefs and value systems. One such symptomatic episode is Sloane’s famous description of enslaved people’s funerals and celebrations, which necessitated his venturing out to witness the behavior of Blacks not laboring, or in other words, not under the direct, immediate control of whites. Something about what he witnesses t here leads him to acknowledge, in a way he typically does not, the humanity of the p eople he is observing. Th ese passages have long been anthologized as one of the earliest firsthand published accounts of the ceremonies of the enslaved, but Sloane’s almost associative method of embedding this human scene with climatic and other information makes the surrounding description relevant as well. Thus, after describing the harsh weather and respective dwelling places of the “English,” “Spanish,” and “Negroes,” Sloane announces that “the Air here being so hot and brisk as to corrupt and spoil Meat in four hours a fter ’tis kill’d, no wonder if a diseased Body must be soon buried. They usually bury twelve hours after death at all time of the day or night.” 27 The “hot and brisk” air quickly corrupts and spoils meat of e very kind, which on this island includes the “diseased Bodies” to be buried but extends also to the beef markets that must open before sunrise and close before seven o’clock in the evening. Sloane’s digression on spoiled meat moves via its own internal logic to the island’s most crowded burial places: “The burial place at Port Royal is a little way out of Town, in a sandy soil, because in the Town or Church it is thought unhealthy for the living. Planters are very often buried in their Gardens, and have a small monument erected over them, and yet never heard of them who walk’d after deaths for being buried out of Consecrated ground.” 28 For the planters and other white inhabitants, a too- visible, too-fetid accumulation of rotting flesh is inconvenient or even unhealthy
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for the living. The solution is to make each planter’s estate his own grave, too, without any superstitious Christian concerns about the unquiet dead or unhallowed ground. Sloane, however, sets aside one set of superstitious fears to conjure up a far more horrifying picture of life and death on the island. This involves the insects that eagerly swarm over bodies left aboveground for any length of time. Sloane dispassionately describes the process by which ants strip those corpses clean: “An ampurated [amputated] Member buried t here, and dug up some days after, was found eaten by the Ants all but the Bones. In the Caves where the Indians used to bury, the Ants would eat the w hole Flesh off of the Bodies, and would perforate the Bones, and eat up the Marrow, of which I have a proof, having brought with me from thence the arm of an Indian so perforated, and its Marrow eaten by them.” Nature—or perhaps we should say the human racial economy of the island—extracts everyt hing it can from the enslaved h uman bodies dwelling there, down to the marrow that lies inside the bones. That horror is compounded by Sloane’s tacit acknowledgment that dead bodies or lopped-off body parts of the enslaved were a common spectacle on the island, whether produced by capital or physical punishments, torture, injury, or disease. It is in this atmosphere of ubiquitous degeneration and death that Sloane introduces the question of the enslaved and their beliefs about the afterlife: The Negroes from some Countries think they return to their own Country when they die in Jamaica, and therefore regard death but little, imagining they shall change their condition, by that means from servile to free, and so for this reason often cut their own throats. W hether they die thus, or naturally, their Country p eople make g reat lamentations, mournings, and howlings about them expiring, and at them throw in Rum and Victuals into their Graves, to serve them in the other World. Sometimes they bury it in Gourds, at other times spill it on the Graves.29
Sloane’s only visible, empirical evidence for his description of enslaved p eople’s beliefs comes from their visible defiance and unconcern about death, their frequent suicides, and their vocal grief at funerals, along with their practice of presenting the dead with food and drink to accompany them into the afterlife. Most of the socially experienced or felt significance of t hese rituals is therefore invisible to him. The associative sequence of descriptions here, heat > rotten meat > burial grounds > ants and bones > African funeral practices, entails the consumption or corruption of h uman flesh to something so hard and irreducible that it can no longer be consumed by the ants or the plantation economy, but taken down to the bone. The position of the irreducible thing—or emerging or remade world—seems to be occupied h ere by an invisible yet powerf ul African religion, which is communicated through song and dance and drums and guitars and
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gesture and speech along with orally transmitted songs when t here are no other media available. As Goodman points out, worlds are made or remade from acts of both composition and decomposition, and so the rituals of feasting and mourning, the food and drink buried with the corpse, the dancing and music all provide the enslaved with some access or notion of how their “country” will welcome them a fter death. It is unsurprising, then, that in his refusal to recognize the ritual, religious behavior of the enslaved as otherworldly or worldmaking, Sloane consistently describes enslaved p eople’s religious beliefs or celebrations as merely physical and performative, or even lewdly sensual: “The Negroes have no manner of religion by what I could observe of them. ’Tis true they have several Ceremonies, as Dances, Playing, e tc. but t hese for the most part are so far from being Acts of Adoration of God, that they are for the most part mixt with a great deal of Bawdry and Lewdness.” 30 Sloane also asserts that the songs and dances he witnessed were not “Acts of Adoration of God,” as his “Preface” had e arlier described his own book, but yet more evidence of the enslaved’s “venery,” or “pursuit of sexual pleasure.” 31 Yet t here is no way to read Sloane’s own book except as a record of his own strong appetite for knowledge. As he recalled in the “Preface” about his youthful desire for exotic specimens, “[I] could not be so easy, if I had not the pleasure to see what I had heard so much of.” Nonetheless, Sloane writes of the festivals he witnessed: The Negros are much given to Venery, and although hard wrought, w ill at nights, or on Feast days Dance and Sing; their Songs are all bawdy, and leading that way. They have several sorts of Instruments in imitation of Lutes, made of small Gourds fitted with Necks, strung with Horse hairs, or the peeled stalks of climbing Plants or Withs. These instruments are some times made of hollow’d Timber covered with Parchment or other Skin wetted, having a Bow for its Neck, the Strings ty’d longer or Shorter, as they would alter their sounds. The Figures of some of t hese instruments are hereafter graved. They have likewise in their Dances Rattles ty’d to their Legs and Wrists, and in their Hands, with which they make a noise, keeping time with one which makes a sound answering it on the mouth of an empty Gourd or Jar with his Hand. Their Dances consist in g reat activity and strength of Body, and keeping time if it can be. They often tie Cows Tails to their Rumps, and add such other odd things to their Bodies in several places, as gives a very extraordinary appearance.32
Despite Sloane’s assertions to the contrary, his descriptions of the Africans’ careful attention to their instruments and costumes and their elaborate, physically demanding performances suggest not uncontrolled appetites but
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craftsmanship, devotion, and stamina on the part of players, dancers, and crowds acting together. Their musical performances do indeed “lead that way,” but in the sense of leading to some act of collective self-assertion, a remade world. Their resort to these feasts, holidays, and ceremonies argues their need for some moment of collective joy and expression, during some licensed though ephemeral holiday time, when they could escape the otherwise punitive demands that left them “hard wrought.” During Sloane’s visit to their festival, however, some songs were transcribed with some accuracy in Western notation by a local musician, Mons. Baptiste.33 As the historian Richard Rath described it: “A remarkable scene: several languages—pidgin, English, French, at least two (and probably more) unrelated African tongues; three discrete musical styles recorded by someone versed in a fourth; participants ranging from slaves to gentry, with connections to three continents-a ll thrown together for a moment in time.” 34 In the “pidginization” or “creolization” process taking place among the different African ethnic groups or nationalities brought together, we discover yet another scene of linguistic and musical worlds being remade out of existing ones.35 In fact, though Baptiste apparently did an impressive job transcribing the non-Western aspects of their performances, Sloane seems to have misunderstood what he was told about the songs, and thought the names provided were the songs’ titles rather than the places and p eoples where the songs came from: “Angola,” “Papa,” “Koromanti.” 36 Nonetheless, Rath points out that the songs themselves contained sufficient coherence, referential meaning, and formal systematicity to convey at least something of their ethnic and geographic origins. As Rath remarks: “A culture’s music has a phonology of aesthetically permissible notes, a vocabulary of acceptable scales and rhythms, and a syntax of customs and rules that govern the largely unconscious ways people represent themselves through t hese notes, scales, and rhythms to produce what they recognize as m usic. These ways are conditioned by the cultural community—in the case of settled cultures, by means of tradition and adaptation; in the case of displaced African ethnic cultures meeting in the bonds of slavery, by means of negotiation.” 37 What is clear, however, from these episodes is the degree to which the coherence of each ethnicity’s regional musical conventions allowed not just discrete strains to be recognized, but also their degree of adaptation in each other’s presence. This was true, moreover, even in the isolated plantation settings where planters deliberately (though not always successfully) attempted to crowd together slaves from different nations so they would be unable to communicate, and therefore conspire, successfully. Nonetheless, some degree of remaking and worlding seems to have been taking place even on t hese plantations. Though Sloane was willing to accept information and useful medical knowledge from the enslaved, we find in moments like t hese passages the limits of his
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much-celebrated “curiosity.” As Delbourgo has pointed out, Sloane’s “curiosity” allowed him to briefly suspend his racialized views of the enslaved to learn what they knew, but he nonetheless remained uninterested in their beliefs or motivations.38 Ultimately, one of the greatest imaginative failures of Sloane was his incapacity or unwillingness to recognize the worldmaking of his indigenous or enslaved informants in their funeral ceremonies. What seemed like “bawdry” or “lewdness” to him was the musical and sensory experience that seems to have given the performers access to an African religion otherwise prohibited to them.39 Moreover, the very tokens of this world, the common, worldly elements of food or drink spilled on graves or buried with bodies, took on a different significance in the ceremonies and became objects to “serve” the dead in their transition to “the other world.” Th ose common objects, along with those ceremonies, songs, and dances, became elements that helped some of the enslaved evoke a different world, a “return to their own Country when they die in Jamaica,” and a means of “imagining they s hall change their condition, by that means from servile to f ree.” Yet, in keeping with Cheah’s notion of worldmaking, the religious ceremonies of the enslaved had the potential not just to help them imagine a “change in their condition,” but to enact that change: “They formerly on their Festivals were allowed the use of Trumpe[t]s . . . and Drums made of a piece of a Tree. . . . But making use of t hese in their Wars at home in Africa, it was thought too much inciting them to Rebellion, and lo they w ere prohibited by the Customs of the Island.” 40 Though this set of external behaviors and opaque beliefs are transformed by colonial projection into abject surrender to “venery” or suicidal disregard for their own lives, it might be better to regard this as the briefest opening of Cheah’s ethicopoetical horizon: even when their trumpets and drums are forbidden them, the ceremonies, dances, singing, and rites of the enslaved continue, awaiting the moment when a broader rebellion becomes possible. It is this assurance of returning to their native country one way or the other, and the prospect of changing their condition to that of free people, that allows them to “regard death but little.”
Postscript and Conclusion To counter the previous images of corruption and the afterlife on Jamaica, we have an almost providential contrast with Sloane’s forced departure from Jamaica in 1688. Sloane’s patron Albemarle had died within fifteen months from excessive heat, drink, and dissipation. Sloane was therefore obliged to embalm his former patron and deposit his remains in a sealed coffin, so that these could be shipped to England along with the duchess, their treasures, and the rest of the household. Because of the confusion involving the English throne, their departure
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was delayed for another five months, when Sloane fi nally returned to England.41 Death and burial have their own temporality, too. At that point, Sloane’s Voyage ended and his Natural History began. A few final thoughts about Sloane’s Natural History and its relation to worldmaking. It is a long, digressive, challenging text b ecause its genre is intrinsically caught up with its empirical method, colonial subject matter, and segmented yet additive form. All t hese characteristics meant that u nder the catastrophically brutal conditions of the enslaved inhabitants of the West Indies, Sloane’s proto- ethnographic method described not just the region’s “natural” flora and fauna but also the human processes, meaning the h uman intentions and accidents that led to t hese natural features’ emergence, cultivation, curation, or disposal. This was in a region, moreover, where, b ecause of chattel slavery’s commodification of both h uman and natural life, the distinction between humans and things, historical and natural processes, was consistently effaced or forgotten. Despite his own racist views of the indigenous and the enslaved, Sloane’s account contains nonetheless some irreplaceable outward traces of the lives that were lived and lost in that part of the world, along with portions of their temporalized language, particularly the orality, m usic, dancing, and religious beliefs, which w ere incorporated piecemeal into his account. Sloane’s Natural History shows how the world constituted by the island, its enslaved and free inhabitants, and its natu ral products had in fact been continually remade since at least the era of Columbus, and not in ways readily foreseen by its colonizers. The racism of Sloane, however, along with all but the most marginal elements of his influential, unmistakably imperial-scientific account, suggests the limits of Goodman’s morally and epistemologically relativistic view of worldmaking. If coherence and referentiality are in some sense the minimal requirements for worldmaking, then racist and authoritarian worlds seem just as likely to result from human communities or consciousness as antiracist or democratic ones. This is a point that Said, Spivak, or Cheah seem better prepared than Goodman to defend against because of their explicitly leftist, emancipatory versions of normative worldmaking. Nonetheless, a notion like worldmaking, when taken without a presumption of underlying truth or referentiality, helps explain why Western science, however pragmatically or theoretically it operates in some contexts, functions as a patched-together, artificially consistent world in others. Its efficacy can sometimes be as fictive as the scenes of bleeding and swift recovery found in any number of eighteenth-century novels. Consequently, the racism of a Hans Sloane, an Edward Long, or a Thomas Jefferson might be most effectively disentangled from science’s presumed effectiveness and worldliness by those rendered invisible or powerless in previous worlds, as they conduct their own forms of remaking. Finally, Sloane’s Natural History operates as a generic model for other, especially literary discourses in its embrace of multiple, discordant temporalities and
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its ability to accommodate catastrophe into its thinking about nature and human life. Though this work’s complex, mixed temporality is conventional for the seventeenth-and eighteenth-century genre of natural history, it is striking how similarly its representational strategies appear in the earliest Anglophone fiction and poetry depicting the Caribbean and New World, namely in writers like Behn, Defoe, or Swift, who w ere all interested in how the recognized forms of h uman life could be rendered unrecognizable in new contexts. When we look at that fiction, we find catalogues of wonderful flora and fauna, a variety of travel and autobiographical narratives, surprising encounters with exotic h uman populations, sometimes even diagrams or a scholarly apparatus. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century writers like these registered the difference between this world and unfamiliar “other worlds” by switching media (from visual to verbal or back again) or by plunging readers into new forms of temporality to terrify or entice them with the prospect of an “other world.” The worlds they ventured into would never be the same.
Notes I would like to thank the editors of this special issue, Betty Joseph and Elizabeth Sauer, for their help during revisions. I would also like to thank the original panel and audience for their responses and feedback at MLA 2019. Finally, Wynne Chin provided some invaluable last-minute assistance with an image during the final submission. 1. Hans Sloane, A Voyage to . . . Jamaica, 2 vols. (London, 1707), 2:xiii. 2. For the specific notion of worldmaking in the context “world literature” and postcolonialism, see Pheng Cheah, What Is a World? (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). One of the most important early explorations of the concept of “ways of world making” is found in Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1978). For postcolonial digital humanities as a form of worldmaking, see Roopika Risam, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018). For a useful overview of worldmaking subsequent to Goodman’s volume, and a discussion of media and narratives as ways of worldmaking, see Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning, Birgit Neumann, eds., Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), https://doi.org/10.1 515/9783110227567. 3. Google N-Gram, s.v. “world making,” https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content =%22world+making%22&year _s tart= 1800&year _end= 2 019&corpus= 2 6&smoothing =3&direct_url=t1%3B%2C%22%20world%20making%20%22%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2C%22%20 world%20making%20%22%3B%2Cc0. 4. Cheah, What Is a World?, 4. 5. Cheah, What Is a World?, 15. 6. Cheah, What Is a World?, 5. 7. Cheah, What Is a World?, 3–4. This moment is also prior to the Romantic segmentation of experience that helped sunder aesthetic from scientific knowledge in early nineteenth-century European thought, particularly German philosophy. 8. Cheah, What Is a World?, 15. 9. Cheah, What Is a World?, 16–18. 10. Cheah, What Is a World?, 18. 11. Henceforth referred to cumulatively as the Natural History. For Sloane’s Natural History as a foundational text for a genre mediating between scientific and literary discourses
212 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Williamsburg: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 1–74; see also Kay Dian Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s ‘Natural History of Jamaica,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2000): 35–78, https://doi.org/10.2307/2674358. 12. For a recent overview of subsequent scholarship of natural histories of the Ameri cas, see Michael Boyden, “Introduction to Special Issue: The New Natural History,” Early American Literature 54, no. 3 (2019): 633–641. See, in particular, Boyden’s description of Iannini and his cohort: “What seems distinctive about the new natural history scholarship is that it is profoundly attuned to the messy nature of knowledge making in a Creole context. Rather than an imperial and rationalist imposition metonymically representing Enlightenment science as a whole, natural history here emerges as a complex field in which a number of actors—from metropolitan virtuosos to Creole miners, to Native American tribes and African slaves—are affectively invested” (635). See also Richard Drayton, “Knowledge and Empire,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 231–252. 13. Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008). For Brown’s argument against a too- literal interpretation of Orlando Patterson’s notion of “social death” as a complete loss of cultural inheritance, see his argument that a ctual inheritance practices, ranging from slave bequests to the continued practice of “plays” and other funerary practices, show that “social connections and communities of memory had to be created through struggle” (127, 201– 219). For Cheah on the state of redoubled “worldlessness” and stolen temporality of the enslaved on the plantations, which seems to reflect Patterson’s “social death” thesis, see What Is a World?, 202–204. 14. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 1–74. 15. It’s worth noting, moreover, that for Bakhtin, “complex genres” are as applicable for “scientific research” as for literary productions in complex societies and their institutions. See John Frow, Genre (London: Routledge, 2006), 30. 16. Cheah, What Is a World?, 4, 197–224. 17. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 56. 18. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, 6. 19. Georges Gurvitch, The Spectrum of Social Time (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1964). 20. James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: The Life and Curiosity of Hans Sloane (London: Penguin, 2017). 21. Cheah, What Is a World?, 198, 199–200. 22. Sloane, Voyage, vol. 1, “Preface,” n.p. 23. For the growth of natural history through both professionalization and amateur practitioners, see, for example, Staffan Müller-Wille, “Names and Numbers: ‘Data’ in Classical Natural History, 1758–1859,” Osiris 32, no. 1 (2017): 109–128, https://doi.org /10 .1086/693560. 24. Sloane, Voyage, 1:i. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 49. 25. Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities, and Transplanted Bodies,” 68–71. 26. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions, 50–54; 67; Brown, Reaper’s Garden, 60–156. 27. Sloane, Voyage, 1:xlviii. 28. Sloane, Voyage, 1:xlviii. 29. Sloane, Voyage, 1:xlviii 30. Sloane, Voyage, 1:lvi. 31. OED, s.v. “venery,” “The practice or pursuit of sexual pleasure; indulgence of sexual desire.” 32. Sloane, Voyage, 1:xlviii–x lix.
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33. Laurent Dubois, David Garner, and Mary Caton Lingold, “Musical Passage,” http://w ww.musicalpassage.org /#home; Mary Caton Lingold, “Project MUSE—D igital Performance and the Musical Archive of Slavery: ‘Like Running Home,’ ” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 49 (2020): 109–125. For a visual image of Baptiste’s transcription contained in Sloane (Voyage, 1:l–li) and auditory reenactment of this historical per formance, go to http://w ww.musicalpassage.org/#explore. 34. Richard Cullen Rath, “African Music in Seventeenth-C entury Jamaica: Cultural Transit and Transition,” William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 4 (1993): 701. 35. Peter A. Roberts, From Oral to Literate Culture: Colonial Experience in the English West Indies (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1997), 1–68. 36. On the distinct ethnicities (Koromanti, Papa, Angola) documented in Sloane’s account, see Rath, “African Music in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica,” 709–711. 37. Rath, “African Music in Seventeenth-Century Jamaica,” 709. 38. Delbourgo, “Slavery in the Cabinet of Curiosities: Hans Sloane’s Atlantic World,” (British Museum, 2008), 8–10. 39. Here I am indebted to Diane J. Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics of Moral O rders (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1–33. 40. Sloane, Voyage, 1:lii. 41. Estelle Frances Ward, Christopher Monck, Duke of Albemarle (London: John Murray, 1915), 316–353.
Crusoe’s Goat Umbrella Chi-ming Yang An object is not an object. It is the witness to a relationship. —Artist, Cecilia Vicuña Make me a summary of the world! —Artist, Rina Banerjee
Installed on a corner plaza in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, is an unlikely reminder of British colonialism: a thirty-seven-foot-high steel sculpture of an umbrella. It has been magnified to fantastic proportions, like something from the land of Brobdingnag. The skeletal form lies on its side, without a canopy, stripped of its essential function of sheltering individuals from the elements. Known for their large-scale postmodern renderings of household objects (button, clothespin, lipstick, typewriter eraser), the artists Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen gave this metallic abstraction the very specific name of “Crusoe Umbrella.” They cited the narrative of Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe as their inspiration: “The first object made by the castaway [was] one of the few he took away with him when he was rescued. The umbrella of Crusoe was as structured as it had to be, yet organic in form, made of branches and plants on the island. This image became our point of departure. We wanted to place an exotic element in the midst of prosaic circumstances.” 1 An eighteenth-century fable of colonial resourcefulness provides a Midwestern cityscape with a claim to cosmopolitanism; yet the sculpture’s pop sublime is also premised upon a mistaken reading of the novel. Not only was the umbrella not the first t hing made by Crusoe, the vision of a leaf umbrella curiously deviates from Crusoe’s goat skin original. While the artists’ innovation was to render in steel something they thought was botanical, this vanishing of the goat becomes my point of departure. Skin, after all, conjures touch: the touching of world and body, and intermingling of human and animal. By divesting the goatskin umbrella of its animalis214
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tic qualities, vegetal interpretations of the implement also distance its bearer from concerns of the flesh, including associations with savagery and slavery. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote, “[Crusoe’s] leaf-umbrella is as fine an example of the civilized mind striving to express itself under adverse circumstances as we have ever met with.” 2 The novel’s frequent attention to Crusoe’s craftsmanship and tools has long been held to exhibit his mastery over nature, as well as to exemplify Defoe’s techniques of realism.3 In my reading, the goat umbrella is a form of animal media that helps us reimagine the racialized interface between personhood, climate, and l abor systems. By animal media, I mean the living or dead objects assembled from nature that mediate Crusoe’s interaction with the island environment and contribute to his survival and world building, as well as the novel’s meaning making. Goats and their byproducts participate in what John Durham Peters has theorized as “elemental media,” or devices that express, order, and alter the natural environment: “Media are our infrastructures of being, the habitats and materials through which we act and are.” 4 The misrecollections of the umbrella’s animal material invite us to contemplate both the history of environmental displacements at work in the novel’s staging of “new world” encounters and the ongoing translation of old media into new. As a protective technology, an umbrella provides temporary shelter for individuals while they are on the move; for the settler-colonial figure of Crusoe, it signals the portability and precarity of English efforts to engineer island ecosystems. An innovation of eighteenth-century Europe but long used in Asia, the umbrella of Defoe’s time demarcated rank, culture, gender, and race. Its borrowed forms and projected functions tell a story of how invasive species (human and nonhuman) reinvent spaces in accordance with the technologies, and aesthetics, of an emergent global capitalism.
Goat World The lasting—and deeply troubling—charm of Robinson Crusoe is rooted in its mythology of white-Anglo self-reliance. A shipwrecked slave trader miraculously survives alone in a tropical wilderness for over twenty-eight years; by the time he is rescued by English sailors, he has amassed something approaching a colony or, as he calls it, a “plantation” of domesticated plants and animals and a smattering of other, more recently shipwrecked Europeans, who subsequently expand the colony by importing livestock from Brazil and taking Carib captives.5 Famously, Crusoe departs the island at the end of the novel accompanied by his Carib servant-companion Friday and carrying three products of his labors: his goatskin cap and umbrella and pet parrot. More than mementos to be displayed for self-promotion, curiosity, or nostalgia, these animal objects conjure what Srinivas Aravamudan only half-jokingly called “Crusoe’s carbon footprint.” 6 That is, they materialize not only what the Englishman takes away, but the environmental
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legacy he leaves b ehind. To consider the goat materials of Crusoe’s relics as undead media is to consider, as Peters puts it, how media not only make up the world but “are the world.” 7 The ubiquity of goats, in one form or another, animates the island ecology; their presence drives the narrative of enclosure and domestication at the heart of the novel’s settler-realism, and at the same time they shatter the exceptionalism of the self-contained human. Unlike the cannibals Crusoe so fears, goats are everywhere on this island. Whether in the background or foreground, they govern his diet, movements, and even psyche. Like clockwork, each caprine encounter spurs the creation of another technology of survival. In the early years, as he experiments with his meals by broiling she-goats over coals, he longs for a pot with which to make broth; later he fashions earthenware vessels. In another instance of meat pro cessing, his construction of wicker baskets allows him to carry home his goat carcass a fter he has hung it from a tree, flayed and dressed it, and cut it into pieces. He also develops pit traps because shooting the swift-footed goats proves difficult; in this manner, he incrementally tames kids and breeds a population that roams “about my house like a flock of sheep.” 8 Like many cutting-edge technologies, goats organize space and enable the recalibration of calendrical time. Upon Crusoe’s momentous first kill, a “she- goat” with a kid, he begins a written record of his presence on the island—what Karl Marx called Crusoe’s bookkeeping of “labour-t ime,” characteristic of a “true-born Briton.” 9 In the format of a journal within the narrative, he dates and recapitulates previous events such as arriving on September 30, 1659, shooting the first goat on November 3, and taming a young goat by “laming” its leg on December 27 and then nursing it back to health. On January 2, 1660, he discovers a valley with “plenty of goats, tho’ exceeding shy and hard to come at”; a day later, he begins building his hedge fence to fortify his dwelling (61). This is the start of a long-term project of growing crops, enclosing goats within pastures, and building a dairy that produces butter, cheese, and one to two gallons of milk per day. After three years his system of feeding enclosures, pens, and gates separates tame from wild goats and allows him to amass forty-t hree goats (117). By European standards, his goat herding skills are exceptional: according to the natural historian Comte de Buffon, an admirer of caprine hardiness, “the robust man cannot manage more than fifty of them.” 10 After eighteen years, Crusoe has created three “plantations” on the island: his c astle, his country bower, and a goat enclosure in the woods. As Crusoe puts it, “I had my enclosures for my cattle, that is to say, my goats,” all thanks to the “infinite labour” of turning his initial hedge into a wall “stronger than any wall” (121). Well before Crusoe’s animal husbandry begets domestication, goats were an index of the transformative flows of early maritime capitalism through their feral existence. As island residents well before Crusoe arrives and long a fter he leaves, they are living histories of the oceanic crossings and plundering that helped grow
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the Pacific and Atlantic slave economies. While Crusoe’s island is located in the Caribbean, Defoe based it in large part on the island of Juan Fernández, or Más a Tierra, situated off the western coast Chile and named a fter the Spanish sailor Juan Fernández, who sighted it in 1574. Subsequent Spanish colonizers likely populated it with pigs and goats in the 1590s, and the island functioned as a contested territory and provision grounds for Dutch East Indies merchants and Spanish and English pirates and buccaneers for the next two centuries.11 Much of Defoe’s account of the island, though, is adapted from the popular reports of marooned Scotsman Alexander Selkirk, a privateer of the Cinque Ports galley that sailed with William Dampier’s 1703 anti-Spanish expedition. Stranded t here between 1704 and 1709, Selkirk was rescued by the crew of Captain Edward Cooke, u nder the command of another circumnavigating privateer, Captain Woodes Rogers. They found that the castaway could barely talk and appeared wilder than the feral goats on which he had fed (along with cabbages) for over four years. Selkirk had kept a record of the whopping five hundred goats killed, and marked the ears of the many more he caught and released. Among the details selectively borrowed by Defoe are Selkirk’s concoction of tasty goat broth made from broiling and boiling of the flesh, and the handmade jacket, breeches, and cap made of goat hair, in which Selkirk “look’d wilder than the first Owners of them.” 12 There are notable differences between the two castaways. While Crusoe values his pet parrot, cats, goats, and dog as a “loving” surrogate family of “domesticks,” his animal intimacies pale in comparison to Selkirk, who purportedly sang and danced with his goats and cats. According to Rogers, the stranded wild man also developed a bestial agility; he could run “with wonderful Swiftness thro the Woods and up the Rocks and Hills, as we perceiv’d when we employ’d him to catch Goats for us.” 13 Among Selkirk’s superhuman adventures was pursuing a goat on foot over a precipice, falling, and finding the goat dead u nder him as he landed. While Defoe stops short of imbuing Crusoe with such wilderness skills, he seems to have borrowed from this dramatic, vertical episode of entwined bodies for the most suspenseful and supernatural passage in novel, Crusoe’s encounter in a cave with a dying male goat (“a most monstrous frightful old he- goat”).14 As he stares into its eyes and pictures himself meeting a similar subterranean end—living out the rest of his days t here, safely hidden from the sight of the cannibals—we glimpse in his momentary surrender one consequence of the drive t oward fortification: deathly isolation. And yet this vision of Crusoe cowering unproductively in the bowels of the island underscores his embeddedness within the island ecology despite his efforts to remain distinct from it. Living or d ying, goats embody the island’s dual status as a pliant colonial dominion and an unoccupiable “zomia.” 15 Goats are a dept at hiding from humans, adapting to the severity of the climate, and surviving with limited supplies, particularly w ater. These happen to be the three key predicaments Defoe
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Figure 1. Alexander Selkirk on the Island of Juan Fernandes, in Edward Cavendish Drake, A New Universal Collection of Authentic and Entertaining Voyages and Travels, from the Earliest Accounts of the Present Time (London: J. Cooke, 1768), 87. Courtesy of Bryn Mawr College Special Collections.
elsewhere considers the requisites for new export markets for English manufactures.16 Lands “lying at the Mercy of the Savages,” he writes, are ripe for E ngland’s 17 domesticated animal products. Across multiple publications, Defoe’s advocacy of the nation’s wool trade assumes grandiose proportions.18 In A Plan of the English Commerce, published nine years a fter Robinson Crusoe, he lays out a rationale for enclosing virtually e very inch of English land into sheep pasture. Building on the premise that the entire wealth of Britain derives from wool production, he documents where sheep are kept, how many acres of land are devoted to each enclosure, and the different means of converting land into pasture through draining fens and commandeering marshes and fallow lands. His portrait of “numberless flocks” in effect turns the country into one enormous sheep pen.19 Sheep, of course, are not goats. Yet they were considered to be a closely related and profitable species of “cattle” by naturalists and agriculturists. The Somersetshire farmer Robert Brown promoted goats for their superior milk production, calling goat milk “the greatest nourisher of all liquid t hings on which we feed (except w oman’s milk).” 20 Another husbandry manual from e arlier in the period acknowledged the difficulties of taming goats but praised the usefulness
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of “their Flesh for Meat, their Skin for Leather, their Milk for making Chees, their Haire for making Ropes, Sacks and Garments; not Rotting by moisture, nor being easily burnt with fire.” 21 Weighing the meekness of sheep against the recalcitrance of goats, the Comte de Buffon found the latter to be more sagacious and hardy (goats are “not alarmed by rains or storms”); their coarser hair made good cloth, and their skins w ere “more valuable than t hose of sheep.” 22 Less dependent on h umans and less vulnerable to the climate, goats seem designed for remote island living. No wonder that William Dampier projected Juan Fernández as f uture farmland comprised of “savannahs” and “stocked with Goats in g reat Herds” and “1000 Head of C attle besides Goats.” 23 Following Dampier’s report that goats thrived on the western side of the island, Defoe populates his fictional Carib bean island accordingly. On Crusoe’s island nothing is made for exchange or monetary profit, and yet goat domestication seems oriented toward the horizon of commercial productivity when read alongside Defoe’s sheep tracts. As noted above, the two ungulates w ere understood to share marvelously adaptable, weatherproof fibers. For his part, Defoe offered abundant praise for wool’s versatility: “not too thin for the frozen Laplanders, Swedes, and Russians, or too thick for the scorch’d Americans and Inhabitants of Peru and Brazil.” 24 W hether in the equatorial or arctic zone, wool protects its wearers much like Crusoe’s goatskin apparel: “it covers them warm, from the freezing Breath of the Northern Bear; and t here it shades them, and keeps them cool from the scorching Beams of a perpendicular Sun.” Only the Chinese and Indians are immune to its appeal.25 According to Defoe, English wool outlasts French textiles—it “wears to the last like a Board, firm and strong, and has a kind of Beauty even in its Rags”—due to the “intrinsic Value of the Materials” and the superior craftsmanship of well-paid English laborers. The superior quality, he argues, also derives from the fact that “almost all the materials are our own. . . . In our Manufacture of Wool, all the Materials are our own, but the Oil, and some dye Stuffs.” 26 Such finished excellence has convinced even the natives of Eastern Africa to put on the English clothes supplied by the Portuguese.27 Following a logic of mercantile expansion, Defoe envisions business opportunities in the colonies of Africa and the Americas; populating islands with slaves will create more demand for provisions, including clothing. In this light, perhaps Crusoe’s island is not only a hypothetical plantation or self-sufficient manufacturing zone with ample raw materials but also a colonial market for imports—and his act of dressing a Carib Indian in goatskins, less about rescuing or civilizing Friday than turning him into a consumer of English goods. That Crusoe himself wears the skins of beasts—rather than woolens or linens—aligns him with American Indians who, according to the Plan of Commerce, buy from the English the very t hings Crusoe fabricates while on the island: “Caps, Stockings, Hats, Shoes, Gloves, for the same hard Weather” along with tools, “Chairs,
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Stool,” and “pots and earthen vessels (340). In other words, Crusoe stands in for manufacturer and market all in one. In Robinson Crusoe, Defoe essentially swaps Atlantic goats for English sheep. Not exactly commodities, the goats reveal the tenuousness and contradictions of being living property. Their resistance to domestication places them simultaneously inside and outside the routinizations of early modern Atlantic exchange.28 On one hand, Crusoe’s goat island is a curious site of noncapitalist resource production. Nothing is bought or sold in this fictional system of one— Crusoe alone performs all the tasks that w ere becoming increasing specialized in the exploitative sugar ingenios of the proximate Caribbean islands, not to mention the plantations of Brazil and North America.29 On the other, his isolated island economy overlaps with those brutal systems of slave labor. The coexistence of the two worlds, capitalist and noncapitalist, is made explicit when we are reminded of Crusoe’s role as an absentee plantation owner and slave trader from his time in Brazil. Over the years, that plantation has been accruing profits from afar in tandem with his goat husbandry and prolific manufacturing. (By the time he returns to E ngland at the end of the novel, he has made a fortune from his sugar investments.) In a sleight of synchrony, it is as if Crusoe’s artisanal island labors have providentially generated the rewards of his Brazilian ingenio in absentia. Even as they are converted into stock, or usable goods “accumulated for future use,” the island goats continually threaten to revert to feral status.30 Capra aegagrus hircus, introduced in the sixteenth c entury from domestic breeds from Europe, were seen as both amenable and resistant to domestication. The reproductive capacities of such naturally independent ungulates could, in the wrong hands, spell disaster. In closing the protrade Plan of Commerce, Defoe presents a nightmarish scenario: if there w ere no new island markets for the North American colonies, the continent would be overrun by domestic livestock turned feral: “If the Islands did not take off their Product, their lands which they have been at a vast Expense to cure, and clear, and plant, would lie useless and uncultivated; the Swine which the Woods feed for them by thousands, would overrun them with their Multitude, and be worse to them in time, than the Bears and the Wolves” (356). The release of goats onto islands in the Atlantic and Pacific did cause them to be overrun and despoiled. The English tried to legislate against destructive goats and sheep, for instance when the governor of Saint Helena in 1713 made the case that “goats destroy all the trees and the island [would be] speedily ruined if they w ere not killed.” 31 The Spanish repeatedly attempted to exterminate goats to prevent rival nations’ ships from stopping for provisions. In a cycle of futility, their introduction of predatory mastiffs in 1686 curbed the goat population, only to produce a feral dog population that endangered humans until the canines w ere then extinguished in 1830.32
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The discovery of the three islands of the Juan Fernández Archipelago in 1574 is still cited by conservationists in their efforts to save endemic plant and bird species from goats, or “invasive herbivores,” introduced to oceanic islands by pirates and sailors like Selkirk or, later, by Captain James Cook in the South Pacific. The irreparable damage to the two main islands of the Juan Fernández archipelago has become a recognized part of a three-hundred-year “alien invasion” of domestic animals from the trading ships that passed through the region.33 (Despite extermination attempts, t here w ere recently up to two thousand goats still on Alejandro Selkirk Island, formerly Más Afuera.)34 Goats, along with cats, top the list of mammals deliberately introduced to the islands of the world. In fact, the Portuguese goats unloaded onto Saint Helena as early as 1513 led to its ultimately deforestation, which has been described as an example of “the complete and catastrophic destruction of a whole flora by a single grazing mammal.” 35 In hindsight, the vulnerability of island flora and fauna contrasts starkly with Crusoe’s sense of his own victimization by largely imagined cannibal predators. From the ecosystem’s point of view, he and his domesticated goats (once wild, and domesticated before that) are the forest predators. Richard Nash, in his study of Enlightenment discourses of the “wild man” and the islands of Juan Fernández, has referred to Crusoe’s goats as “markers of an ecological imperialism.” 36 If we recall Aravamudan’s ecocritical quip about the “carbon footprint” of settler colonialism, a reference to the single human footprint Crusoe finds in the sand, we might extend the metaphor. Multiply that h uman impress by hundreds of goats’ feet trampling and eroding the land and topsoil. As agents of destruction, goat media configure space across time.
Umbrella Technology A narrow concept of media, especially one that privileges Western technological innovation, might overlook the capacities of nonhuman life forms to chronicle island ecologies past and f uture. Just as we shape the lives of animals, they define our social relations through their function and form. On Crusoe’s island, goats also supply the weather-resistant fabric and prosthetic second skins that, in the form of his garments and umbrella, extend the mobility of the lone biped and maintain his racialized whiteness even as he is darkened by the tropical sun. The umbrella is a form of tekne in the sense that Heidegger discusses in his work on technology: an artful object that is meaningful through its method of use and the “truth” it reveals about the world.37 As one among an impressive array of useful implements made in his first five years on the island, the umbrella might seem curiously incidental. And yet Crusoe describes it as the most “necessary Th ing” for his survival on the island, second only to his gun. An object with unusual applicability, the umbrella serves as a mast for his small boat, and he
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carries it everywhere to surveil the island. In one episode, he comes dangerously close to being swept into the ocean on one of his boating outings, and recounts “taking nothing out of my Boat, but my Gun and my Umbrella, for it was exceeding hot, I began my March” (164). In a curiously comical self-description, he imagines the laughter of fellow Englishmen who might behold his makeshift, “barbarous” outfit of goat skins and his semi-tanned visage.38 He carries over his head “a great clumsy ugly Goat- Skin Umbrella,” and remarks: [It] a fter all, was the most necessary Thing I had about me, next to my Gun: As for my Face, the Colour of it was r eally not so Moletta, like as one might expect from a Man not at all careful of it, and living within nine or ten Degrees of the Equinox. My Beard I had once suffer’d to grow till it was about a Quarter of a Yard long; but as I had both Scissars and Razors sufficient, I had cut it pretty short, except what grew on my upper Lip, which I had trimm’d into a large Pair of Mahometan Whiskers, such as I had seen worn by some Turks, who I saw at Sallee; for the Moors did not wear such, tho’ the Turks did; of t hese Mustachioes or Whiskers, I w ill not say they were enough to hang my Hat upon them; but they were of a Length and Shape monstrous enough, and such as in England would have pass’d for Frightful. (119)
Notably, Crusoe prefers resembling a Turk to having e ither the “Moletta,” or tawny, skin color of a native Carib, or the implied Blackness of a Moor.39 His “monstrous” Turkish whiskers are one of three monstrosities mentioned in the island setting, the other two being his arboreal wall fortification, and the dying he-goat in the cave. All are organic outgrowths that straddle the boundary between savage and civilized even as they police t hese boundaries.40 Less a monstrosity than an unseemly hairy contraption, the “clumsy” and “ugly” umbrella addresses the precarities of interspecies dynamics established in Defoe’s tropical island space.41 Historically, the umbrella’s function as a sun shade predates that of warding off rain, as evident from the etymology of “ombra,” meaning shade. Beyond insulating him from the hot sun, the umbrella also prevents Crusoe from being sunburned: he is “not so Moletta, like as one might expect from a Man not at all careful of it.” His concern with tempering the degree of heat and moisture absorbed by his body recalls early modern geohumoral theories of complexion that held that excessive exposure to one extreme or the other negatively determined one’s moral character.42 The “sunburn” explanation for Blackness, prevalent from the thirteenth c entury on, held that the sun’s heat burned out bodily moisture, leaving a black element that darkened the flesh. European climate theories of racial difference w ere premised on the ability of the environment to shape the body.43 Accordingly, Crusoe’s first phase of island survival is dedicated to conquering not cannibals but the climate. From the start, the rhythm of life is dictated by the two extremes of dry and wet seasons, which
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he obsessively charts in the form of a makeshift almanac. The time spent indoors during the rainy months of February through April and August through October spurs his craft-making. Preoccupied with keeping dry, he proceeds from making do with salvaged materials from the ship to use for “any manner of Covering,” to fashioning a tent that can “preserve [him] from the Rains that in one part of the Year are very violent t here” (71, 67). As late as the 1730s, skin was thought to be an “organ of interchange, or permeable membrane” important for expelling contaminants and keeping the body healthy. In other words, skin “guarantees continuous interchanges of substance between the body and its environment.” 44 If the umbrella is meant to compensate for the permeability of one’s skin, its own character is strikingly indeterminate. As Crusoe describes it: “[I] covered it with Skins, the Hair upwards, so that it cast off the Rains like a Penthouse, and kept off the Sun so effectually, that I could walk out in the hottest of the Weather with greater Advantage than I could before in the coolest, and when I had no need of it, cou’d close it and carry it u nder my Arm” (108). As the description moves from skins to hair to penthouse, one protective surface begets another. The use of wild animal hairs to deflect rain occasions the comparison of the umbrella to a penthouse, a sloping roof extension common to London city gutters and shop fronts. In turn, the intrusion of an image of metropolitan architecture onto the island scene is at once comical and indicative of the mediating work of the umbrella—it bridges urban and nonurban worlds.45 It is everywhere and nowhere. You see it (open), and then (closed), you d on’t. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European travel writers were fascinated with the umbrella’s origins in Asian civilizations, particularly in the case of the heavy, multitiered ceremonial umbrellas of Siamese royalty and the processional umbrellas of the emperor of China.46 Both large and small umbrellas, usually carried by servants, signaled social privilege, particularly one’s exemption from outdoor manual labor and hence the maintenance of fairer complexion. Even London-based accounts of oil-cloth umbrellas contrasted their adoption by individual English pedestrians with the practices of Eastern cultures and climes deemed effeminate and despotic: Good housew ives all the winter’s rage despise, Defended by the riding-hood’s disguise: Or underneath th’umbrella’s oily shed, Safe thro’ the wet on clinking pattens tread. Let Persian dames th’umbrella’s ribs display, To guard their beauties from the sunny ray; Or sweating slaves support the shady load, When eastern Monarchs show their state abroad; Britain in winter only knows its aid, To guard from chilly show’rs the walking maid.47
Figure 2. Emperor of China under an Umbrella, Frontispiece, Johann Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East-India Company . . . to the G rand Tartar Cham (London, 1669). Courtesy of Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.
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As Gay’s poem concludes, the rain gear that shields the British maid from head to toe also preserves her virtue: “female virtue must prevail.” 48 Whereas umbrellas help stalwart Britons rise to the challenge of winter, in sunny Asian climes, the implement accentuates the luxury and effeminacy of “dames” and “monarchs.” Gay adheres to the orientalist correspondence between “political servitude” and the “nature of the climate” later elaborated upon by the Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of Laws.49 Making the case for climate-based Asian despotism, Montesquieu declared, “Asia has properly no temperate zone; as the places situated in a very cold climate immediately touch upon t hose which are exceeding hot.” And hence “liberty, in Asia, never increases.” 50 Beset by tropical rain and heat, Crusoe’s umbrella positions him at once as Persian dame and Eastern monarch. The umbrella is elaborate enough to both protect his complexion when outdoors and—even in the absence of slaves to carry his ceremonial cover—to parody Eastern royalty. In adorning Crusoe with the umbrella, Defoe seems to mock the virility of the Englishman who continually weighs the threat of being transformed by nature against his newfound powers of adaptability. In the novel Crusoe suffers from delusions of grandeur, styling himself “king and lord of all this country” (80). Given that his subjects are his animals, he is essentially an Asiatic despot without despotism, a master with no slaves; even his relationship to Friday is portrayed as noncoercive. Covered by multiple layers of animal skins, he is a strange mix of benevolent, paranoid, enterprising, commanding, and abject, not unlike an indeterminately feral goat. The folding umbrella he carries everywhere enables Crusoe to surveil his kingdom free of the authoritarian weightiness of Eastern empire, even as his invented flexibility relies on Chinese technology. The late historian Joseph Needham, in his extensive studies of Chinese science and civilization, lists the collapsible umbrella as one of many inventions often attributed to Western modernity, when in fact the hinge technology and sliding levers that distinguished Chinese umbrellas from ancient Greek, Roman, and Babylonian sun shades have been traced to the Chou Dynasty (1046–1256 b.c.e.); the umbrella, an example of the “art of collapsibility,” dates to the fifth century b.c.e.51 This Chinese technique is clearly exhibited in the frontispiece illustration to the 1720 French edition of Robinson Crusoe.52 Far from being a conqueror-settler, this Crusoe is a tradesman and homo faber.53 Unlike the militaristic English frontispiece engraved by John Clark and John Pine, this image prominently showcases the umbrella, and in particular the stretchers, ribs, and notches that make it a collapsible apparatus. In their attempt to display all its parts, the illustrators have placed the ferrule on the inside of the umbrella, which would actually allow no room for all the parts to contract. While the image certainly displays Crusoe’s ingenuity, the umbrella as it is pictured would have been inoperable; ironically, the sheer number of accoutrements that weigh him down recalls Hannah Arendt’s vision of the modern homo faber who has become subject to the instruments of his making.54
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Figure 3. Frontispiece, Daniel Defoe, La vie et les avantures surprenantes de Robinson Crusoe (Amsterdam: L’Honoré & Chatelain, 1720). Engraved by Bernard Picart. Courtesy of Yale University Beinecke Library.
Underneath his layers of apparel Crusoe also sports Asiatic—even goat-like— features, including the “Mahometan whiskers,” perhaps not a coincidence given the influence of Asian art and iconography upon the artist, Bernard Picart. A French Huguenot in exile in Holland, Picart (tutor to John Pine) along with his fellow refugee Jean-Frédéric Bernard produced the monumental two-volume Religious Ceremonies of the World (1723–1737). The compilation contained copious illustrations of Asian customs borrowed from influential travel accounts of China and Japan. Arnoldus Montanus’s Atlas Chinensis and the work of the Dutch traveler Johann Nieuhof provided images of flora, fauna, peoples, customs—and umbrellas—t hat were already becoming staple decorative motifs in the Chinese-inspired baroque and rococo furnishings of early to mid- eighteenth-century European middle-class and court cultures.55 That a French chinoiserie design book included a template of Robinson Crusoe among its patterns speaks to Crusoe’s iconographic and Asiatic status in France. The innovative Englishman who has learned to replicate an Asian mechanical art has himself become an Easternized ornament.
Figure 4. Frontispiece, Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: W. Taylor, 1719). Courtesy of Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.
Figure 5. Alexandre Le Roux, “Robinson Crusoe chinoiserie design.” In Folio of Engraved Plates of Chinoiserie Figures (Paris? S.n., ca. 1750). Courtesy of the Winterthur Library.
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Despite long-standing paeans to his ingenuity, Crusoe’s inventions are far from purely Anglo-Saxon. His wall fortifications were inspired by Defoe’s familiarity with reports of the G reat Wall of China, and his experiments with earthenware pottery drew upon contemporary Europea ns’ emulation of Chinese porcelain technology.56 What Lydia Liu terms a “poetics of colonial disavowal” in her treatment of the novel, Peter Hulme, in his earlier study, called Crusoe’s “colonialist anxiety” over his borrowed technologies of the canoe and the barbecue, and a “denial of t hose very aspects of Carib culture from which Europe had learned.” 57 Interestingly enough, Defoe’s English commercial ideology baldly eschewed the importance of originality; in one instance he asserted that his countrymen “are better to improve than to invent, better to advance upon the Designs and Plans which other People have laid down, than to form Schemes and Designs of their own.” 58 Simply put, it is more efficient to borrow (or steal) from Asian, Carib, or Brazilian precedents. Scholars like Joseph Roach and Benjamin Schmidt have identified the exoticizing effect of the parasol (generally lighter and less waterproof than an umbrella) as a global icon and formal device that organized the compositional space of the tropics as portrayed in atlases, portraits, and frontispieces.59 For our purposes, though, the ornamental parasols of chinoiserie decorative designs, especially ones that display the inside ribs, invoke both an overlooked history of Chinese technology and the mystification of racialized labor. Let us then shift the focus from innovation or disavowal to that of technological mediation. Seen as a product of labor, rather than an original invention per se, the umbrella condenses the process of consolidating a global manufacturing system built on slavery. Its thingness echoes the modernist art objects studied by Bill Brown, which “seem to have a material unconscious . . . t hey register transformations of the material world that they do not necessarily represent or intentionally express.” 60 The umbrella conjures parallel worlds of labor. By his own account, Crusoe first encountered umbrellas while r unning a sugar and tobacco plantation in Brazil. This memory sets in motion his efforts to craft his own instrument of individualized climate control. As an instance of technological transfer from South America into the Caribbean, the umbrella connects the novel’s idealized, slavery-free island manufacturing to the regimes of Atlantic plantations and the global market chains that Crusoe indirectly participates in even while counting out his isolation. The imaginary goat umbrella essentially designates the New World as an experimental site of emergent labor-intensive and labor-saving technologies that dispense with a reliance on East Asian manufacturing. A species of early import substitution, it foregrounds Crusoe’s artisanal manufacturing as a process of producing self-reliance through an efficient, multipurpose device through which we can track the entirety of a goat’s life-and-death cycle. How is life managed, mediatized, or made? As a maker of t hings, his exertions assume grandiose
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proportions—even Friday is “well made” (148). Crusoe describes his painstaking craft thus: “I took a world of Pains at it, and was a g reat while before I could make anything likely to hold; . . . but at last I made one that answer’d indifferently well: The main Difficulty I found was to make it to let down. I could make it to spread, but if it did not let down too, and draw in, it was not portable for me any Way but just over my Head, which wou’d not do. However, at least, as I said, I made one to answer” (156). The process of trial and error echoes the repeated descriptions of Crusoe’s other labors: w hether working with wood or planting crops, he asserts his “indescribable labor,” “infinite L abour,” “inexpressible Labour,” or “hard L abour.” 61 It also underscores the sophistication of the instrument despite being a “great clumsy ugly” goat product. Animal media aside, the challenge of achieving portability and collapsibility was a contemporary reality for umbrella makers in Europe in the early eighteenth century. The perennial problem tackled by the umbrella maker is, in the words of one historian, “that of trying to achieve lightness and compactness when not in use, combined with strength, wind resistance, convenience and a large area of protection when in use.” 62 In 1780, when the first patented umbrella in Britain officially introduced to the public an everyday object that combined fashion and utility, collapsibility was still an engineering challenge that involved a complex process of attaching steel stretchers to whalebone ribs with sliding tubes, joints, and connecters. While the British were relatively late to adopt the trade, the first folding “parapluie” or umbrella designed for rain was invented by Jean Marius under the auspices of Louis XIV’s Royal Academy of Science in 1705.63 This pocket umbrella continued to be sold exclusively as a luxury item u ntil the 1760s.64 At the time of Robinson Crusoe’s publication in 1719, the folding construction was thus at the forefront of European technology. That “robinson” was once a popular French term for umbrella indicates the mythic appeal of a self- taught craftsman whose “invented” accoutrements were as relevant to the trends of European metropolitan consumer culture as they w ere rooted in visions of the New World and its conquest.65 In Robinson Crusoe, parallel worlds of making are brought together in a versatile implement that functions through the art of collapsibility. The umbrella’s design suggests that one could potentially become dark-skinned (a closed umbrella), and yet one’s whiteness could be maintained the world over (open umbrella). An implement of Asian design, discovered by Robinson Crusoe in Brazil, and made of island animal products, the umbrella prosthetically supplements Crusoe’s Englishness. It symbolically enacts a series of temporal and spatial displacements that collapse global relations of racialized labor into his solo acts of making t hings. In fact, the entire novel operates through deliberate and obfuscating substitutions: manual for artisanal labor, Pacific for Atlantic island, Eastern design for Western ingenuity, Moleta for Mulatto and Black, Xury for Friday, goats for sheep. Such indeterminacies point to the continual conversions
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of value at work across mixed modes of racial capitalism, ranging from settler colonialism to chattel slavery. In providing climate control, lightness, and portability, the umbrella emblematizes the act of repurposing and cross-cultural borrowing, for imperial and potentially anti-imperial ends. Remember, the hand-held umbrella enables and constrains Crusoe’s mobility. More generally, technologies are mobile and adaptable, offering potential room for alternative agencies and vibrant materialisms that thwart colonial outcomes. Technologies are embedded in ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmologies and can be, as historian Marcy Norton writes, added to or subtracted from.66 Elemental media also have the potential to contest Eurocentric claims to a universal system of knowledge production, especially if considered in terms of the entangled coevolution of the h uman and natural worlds. As Rajani Sudan argues in her study of Indian technologies and the British Empire, the impact of the climate upon imperial history unravels the conventional story that European “technological progress led to an inevitable global dominion.” 67 Crusoe’s fictionalized island was a provisional and provisioning space of ecological and maritime survival at an early moment of transatlantic capitalist development. His conversions of natural life into the goat umbrella’s fibrous shelter prompt us to consider the long history of what Richard Grove titles the “green imperialism” of a global environmental consciousness stimulated by early modern island management. In our reading, goat media create an imagined, racialized interface between personhood and the environment, one that fortifies and exposes the fragile white body. Today we configure our political and global present through mundane objects that continue to convey histories of colonial technology. As the violence of flexible labor has grown in magnitude u nder capitalism, it has also become more hidden. Karl Marx wrote of the l abor congealed into the commodity form, “The process disappears into the product.” For Marx, the umbrella exemplified the monetization of the division of labor in the nineteenth c entury. It makes one small appearance in volume 1 of Capital, in a footnote, to illustrate how taxes were heaped onto its unassembled product parts before their compilation into the final commodity, an “assembled article.” When Marx called the umbrella “a composite mixture of very heterogeneous parts,” the features of its collapsibility w ere once again on full display.68 Though their components are largely the same, umbrellas have become new symptoms of global capitalism— cheap, disposable, made in China, indispensable u ntil we put them down and then forget about them u ntil the next downpour. They work u ntil they d on’t: like Crusoe, what personal protective equipment do we imagine can protect us from our changing environmental and political climate? It is unusual for an object to evoke, indeed enact, both individualism and collective vulnerability, or even mass mobilization, in such an enduring fashion. In popular films ranging from Mary Poppins to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the
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Figure 6. Parrot lamenting, “Poor Robin Crusoe.” Daniel Defoe, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London: W. Taylor, 1719). Courtesy of Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.
umbrella as a prop and product of capitalism is used to tell stories of working- class aspirations. In that it creates intimacy in alienated public spaces, it is as much about the politics of community as simply an individualistic “invention of comfort.” 69 Umbrellas are signs of globalization and resistance used by diverse artists and social practitioners of the Asian diaspora. The Beijing-based perfor mance artist Huang Rui creates ritualistic personal encounters in urban public spaces u nder an umbrella canopy; New York–based Rina Banerjee salvages Chinese paper umbrellas for her mixed-media sculptures of empires past and ongoing; nature conservationists have used black umbrellas as goat camouflage in the Korean Demilitarized Zone.70 In the streets, we can look to the recent “Umbrella Revolution” of the Hong Kong prodemocracy movement where protestors used umbrellas as shields against police tear gas. Increasingly the commons are policed, entire ecosystems are under siege, and occupying public spaces means putting capitalism’s tools—including umbrellas—to anticapitalist ends. To return to the opening scene of Iowa. A Cor-Ten steel sculpture might withstand Midwestern weather, but like the best made umbrella, it is not everywhere impenetrable; it would rust in the tropics. The Des Moines civic center in effect memorializes tropical unruliness, plantations’ pasts and futures, and goats that refuse eradication. An exploration of the original umbrella’s adaptability
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and materiality across media forms raises the question of how we remember and reinvent the eighteenth century. In Defoe’s novel, Crusoe leaves behind his original parrot Poll, who might live to a hundred years, according to what he learned while in Brazil. As he puts it, “Poll may be alive t here still, calling after Poor Robin Crusoe to this day” (143). While parrots are not indigenous to Juan Fernández, the bird that melancholically announced its abandonment would have been materially threatened by the island’s goat predators. It conjures what Donna Haraway has called natureculture, or sympoiesis—t he human-plant- animal encounters of collectively producing systems.71 The image of the speaking bird, Crusoe’s only talking companion for over two decades, also calls to mind today’s endangered Juan Fernández firecrown, the only remaining nonmigratory hummingbird endemic to an oceanic island. Robinson Crusoe’s accounting of animal-object lives is more than profit driven; the island media are testaments to the centuries-long impact of white fragility and its discontents. Goats chew through time, umbrellas equip resistance movements.
Notes 1. Claus Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, Crusoe Umbrella, 1979. Cor-Ten steel painted with polyurethane enamel: 37 × 37 × 58 ft. (11.3 × 11.3 × 17.7 m), Des Moines, IA, http:// www.oldenburgvanbruggen.com/largescaleprojects/crusoeumbrella.htm. 2. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Philosophy of Umbrellas” (1871), in The Lantern-Bearers and Other Essays, ed. Jeremy Treglown (New York: Cooper Square Press, 1999), 3, emphasis added. A notable exception to the leaf umbrella is the decidedly shaggy representation in Luis Buñuel’s 1954 film version, Adventures of Robinson Crusoe. 3. James Joyce once noted, “The true symbol of the British conquest is Robinson Crusoe . . . [who] becomes an architect, a knife-grinder, an astronomer, a baker, a shipwright, a potter, a saddler, a farmer, a tailor, an umbrella-maker, and a clergyman. . . . The whole Anglo-Saxon spirit is in Crusoe.” Quoted in James Joyce, Daniel Defoe, ed. and trans. Joseph Prescott (Buffalo: University of New York at Buffalo, 1964), 24. For traditional scholarship on the novel’s socioeconomic realism, see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Maximilian E. Novak, Realism, Myth and History in Defoe’s Fiction (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983); Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). More recently the Eurocentrism of t hese studies has been challenged by Ning Ma, The Age of Silver: The Rise of the Novel East and West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 4. John Durham Peters, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 15. 5. In Defoe’s sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (London, 1719), goat taming continues to mark colonists’ induction of “savages” into the upstart “nation.” 6. Srinivas Aravamudan, “From Enlightenment to the Anthropocene: Vico Behind or Ahead of His Time?” (ASECS presidential address, Pittsburgh, PA, April 1, 2016). 7. Peters, Marvelous Clouds, 21. 8. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin, 2001), 116, HathiTrust (hereafter cited parenthetically). 9. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Fredrick Engels (London: Electric Book Company, 2000), 111.
234 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 10. Georges Louis Leclerc comte de Buffon, Barr’s Buffon. Buffon’s Natural History, Containing a Theory of the Earth, a General History of Man, of the Brute Creation, and of vegetables, vol. 5 (London, 1792), 274. 11. Alexandre Olivier Exquemelin describes killing and salting above one hundred goats in a day. His account was first published in English in 1684. The History of the Buccaneers of Americ a (Boston, 1853), 218, Internet Archive. According to R. L. Woodward, Fernández first named the three islands of the archipelago San Félix, San Ambor, and Santa Cecilia. A land grant for the island closest to Chile’s mainland, Más a Tierra, was granted to Captain Sebastián Garcia Carreto on August 20, 1591. In 1962, the Chilean government renamed the islands of the Juan Fernández Archipelago as Robinson Crusoe, Alejandro Selkirk (formerly Más a Fuera), and Santa Clara. Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 4, 12, HathiTrust. 12. Woodes Rogers, A Cruising Voyage Round the World, 2nd ed. (London, 1718), 125, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO). 13. See also Richard Steele, The Englishman: Being the Sequel of the Guardian (London, 1714), 168–173, ECCO. In his discussion of the goats of Selkirk and Crusoe, Richard Nash suggests that Defoe conflated Juan Fernández with the Caribbean island of Fernando de Noronha. Nash, Wild Enlightenment: The Borders of Human Identity in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), 82. 14. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 141. For discussion of this grotto episode, see Maximillian E. Novak, “The Cave and the Grotto: Realist Form and Robinson Crusoe’s I magined Interiors,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 20, no. 3 (2008): 460. 15. Here I have in mind James C. Scott’s discussion of Southeast Asian highlands and his expanded use of this term to theorize other unenclosed sites of resistance to state occupation, including swamps, marshes, and wetlands, in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009). 16. Daniel Defoe, A Plan of the English Commerce (London, 1728), 150, 76, ECCO. 17. Daniel Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 150. 18. See Daniel Defoe, A Brief Deduction of the Original, Progress, and Immense Greatness of the British Woollen Manufacture (London, 1727). On the romanticization of the sheep industry by Defoe and John Dyer, see Tita Chico, “From Fleece to Fleets; or, Wool and the Production of Wonder,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 32, no. 1 (2019): 101–121. 19. Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 161–162. The Brasils and the Portuguese are repeatedly praised for purchasing English manufactures. Defoe also recommends planting sugar on African coasts where slaves and provisions would be easily available and “they would always be able to furnish themselves” (333). The same goes for planting tea in African instead of importing it from China (349). 20. Robert Brown, The Compleat Farmer: or, The Whole Art of Husbandry (London, 1759), 38. ECCO. 21. J. S., Profit and Pleasure United, or, The Husbandman’s Magazene. Being a Most Exact Treatise of Horses, Mares, Colts, Bulls, Oxen, Cows, Calves, Sheep (London, 1684). 22. Buffon, Barr’s Buffon, 271. 23. For the role of livestock in colonization and deforestation projects, see Alfred Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 3rd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Virginia DeJohn Anderson, Creatures of Empire: How Domestic Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 24. Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 186. 25. Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 190. For the lack of a market for English woolens in China, see Giorgio Riello, “The Globalisation of Cotton Textiles: Indian Cottons, Europe and the Atlantic World, 1600–1850,” in The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200–1850, ed. Giorgio Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Oxford: Oxford University Press & Pasold Research Fund, 2009), 261–287.
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26. Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 76, emphasis added. 27. Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 179, 156. 28. The goats loosely correspond with Anna Tsing’s concept of “savage accumulation,” as “lives and products [that] move back and forth between noncapitalist and capit alist forms.” Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 65. 29. Stuart Schwartz, Sugar Plantations in the Formation of Brazilian Society: Bahia, 1550–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 211–212. 30. OED, s.v. “stock,” https://w ww-oed-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/v iew/Entry/190595 ?rskey= GjUaju&result=1 #eid. 31. Quoted in Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 114. 32. See Lionel Wafer, A New Voyage and Description of the Isthmus of America . . . from 1680 to 1688, ed. L. E. Elliot Joyce (Oxford: Hakluyt Society, 1934), 126, EBook Central Academic Complete. Among the efforts to exterminate Crusoe’s goats were mid-eighteenth century attempts by the viceroy of Peru and president of Chile, as described by Antonio de Ulloa, A Voyage to South-America, vol. 2 (London, 1758), book 2, chap. 4, 222, Google Books. See also the Spanish fortification of the island a fter 1750 and use as a penal colony a fter British commodore George Anson’s occupation. Woodward, Robinson Crusoe’s Island, 79. 33. On Defoe’s choice to omit the presence of rats as reported in accounts of Juan Fernández, see Lucinda Cole’s study of vermin control in Imperfect Creatures: Vermin, Literature, and the Sciences of Life, 1600–1740 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 146. 34. See Josef Greimler et al., “Strong Indication of an Extinction-Based Saturation of the Flora on the Pacific Robinson Crusoe Islands,” Ecology and Evolution 8, no. 5 (March 2018): 2527–2533, https://w ww.n cbi.n lm.nih.g ov/pmc/a rticles/PMC5838048/. The number of goats has varied depending on periods of hunting for population control. In 1995, 3,000–5,000 goats w ere reported on Alejandro Selkirk. Ingo Hahn and Uwe Römer, “Threatened Avifauna of the Juan Fernández Archipelago, Chile: The Impact of Introduced Mammals and Conservation Priorities,” Cotinga 17 (2002): 68. In 1998, 200–500 goats were counted on Robinson Crusoe Island, and in 2001, 1,900 on Alejandro Selkirk. Jame G. Cuevas and Gart Van Leersum, “Project ‘Conservation, Restoration, and Development of the Juan Fernández islands, Chile,’ ” Revista chilena de historia natural 74, no. 4 (2001): 899–910. Even a fter a hunting campaign conducted between 1999 and 2003 designed to decrease the population to 500 goats, over 800 remained on Alejandro Selkirk at the end of that period. See Alan Saunders et al., “Feasibility of Managing Invasive Species in the Juan Fernández Archipelago, Chile” (Santa Cruz, CA: Landcare Research for Island Conservation, February 2011), 20. 35. M. W. Holgate and N. M. Wace, “The Influence of Man on the Floras and Faunas of Southern Islands,” Polar Record 10 (1961): 488. 36. Nash, Wild Enlightenment, 87. 37. Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 12. 38. In her terrific study of Crusoe’s “clothing system,” Irene Fizer notes the feminizing function of the umbrella, a “re-invented parasol” (211) that provides a superfluous “prosthetic skin” (216). Fizer, chap. 10, “The Fur Parasol: Masculine Dress, Prosthetic Skins, and the Making of the English Umbrella in Robinson Crusoe,” in Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory in a Global Context, ed. Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014), 209–227, ProQuest Ebook Central. See also Lynn Festa’s object-focused study of Crusoe as a “theriomorphic figure,” part goat, part human, “Crusoe’s Island of Misfit Things,” Eighteenth Century 52, nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2011): 456. 39. Defoe often characterizes Turks as piratic thieves who “disdain’d all Industry and L abour,” Plan of the English Commerce, 319. He offers a negative portrayal of the Turks
236 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 or “Mahometans” of Sallee, the place where Crusoe is himself first enslaved. For a comparison of the Crusoe with the figure of the Turk in terms of “transgressive masquerade” per Defoe’s A Continuation of the Letters Written by a Turkish Spy at Paris (1718), see Jacob Crane, “The Long Transatlantic C areer of the Turkish Spy,” Atlantic Studies 10, no. 2 (2012): 235. For the etymology of the term “moletta” as it invokes animality and Islam, see Jack Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black P eoples, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 140–148, 209. 40. One instance of human-umbrella monstrosity was the one-legged Africans, by some accounts Patagonian giants, called monopods or skiapods, who used one large foot as a sun shade. See John Mandevi lle, Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967), 115, HathiTrust. 41. For a discussion of the liminality of goats and virtual ecology, see Nash, Wild Enlightenment, 87. 42. The drying effects of the sun in Ethiopia, for example, were held to explain at once its people’s ingenuity, overheated imaginations, and melancholic wisdom. Mary Floyd- Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 73. 43. Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth- Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). 44. Steven Connor, The Book of Skin (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 21. 45. Note Ben Jonson’s comic portrayal of “hat like a Penthouse” as sign of a sartorially outmoded malcontent in the play, The Devil Is an Ass (1631). See Lucy Munro, Archaic Style in English Literature, 1590–1674 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013, 146). 46. See Michael Blackman, “Patent Information: An Historical Perspective,” World Patent Information 16, no. 4 (1994): 223–232; Luke Hebert, The Engineer’s and Mechanic’s Encyclopaedia (London, 1836), 829. 47. John Gay, “Of the Implements for Walking the Streets, and Signs of the Weather,” Trivia, or The Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716), book 1, lines 209–218, ECCO. 48. Gay, “Of the Implements for Walking the Streets,” line 280. 49. Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, Complete Works, vol. 1 (The Spirit of Laws) (1748), Book 17, “How the Laws of Political Servitude Have a Relation to the Nature of the Climate,” 349, https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/m ontesquieu-complete-works-v ol-1 -t he-spirit-of-l aws 50. Montesquieu, Complete Works, vol. 1, 352. 51. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4, pt. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954), 70–72. Umbrellas w ere a documented part of thirteenth-century daily life. See Sung Ying-hsing, Chinese Technology in the Seventeenth Century (T’en-Kung K’ai-wu), trans. E-Tu Zen Sun and Shiou-Chuan Sun (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1966), 230. 52. Frontispiece to La Vie et les Avantures Suprenantes de Robinson Cursoe (Amsterdam, 1720). Picart owned a copy of Robinson Crusoe. See Lynn Hunt, Margaret C. Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt, The Book That Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 38–39. 53. Rather than simply being “inaccurate,” the Eng lish illustration by Pine and Clark focuses on a later moment in Crusoe’s stay on the island; a fter eighteen years he is newly beset by fears of being attacked by cannibals and describes carrying always at least two pistols, sometimes three, in his goat-skin b elt and a refurbished cutlass. See David Blewett, The Illustration of Robinson Crusoe, 1719–1920 (Gerards Cross, Buckinghamshire: Colin Smythe, 1995), 32. 54. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 307.
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55. See Arnoldus Montanus, Atlas Chinensis (London, 1671) and Johann Nieuhof, An Embassy from the East-India Company . . . to the G rand Tartar Cham (London, 1669). 56. See Eun Kyung Min’s study of Defoe’s mockery of Chinese inventions, including the Great Wall of China, in China and the Writing of English Literary Modernity, 1690–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 47–88. 57. Lydia Liu, “Robinson Crusoe’s Earthenware Pot,” Critical Inquiry 25, no. 4 (1999): 728–757; Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797 (London: Methuen, 1986), 210–211. 58. Defoe, Plan of the English Commerce, 299. 59. Benjamin Schmidt, “Collecting Global Icons: The Case of the Exotic Parasol,” in Collecting Across Cultures: Material Exchanges in the Earl Modern Atlantic World, ed. Daniela Bleichmar and Peter Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Joseph Roach, “The Global Parasol: Accessorizing the Four Corners of the World,” in The Global Eighteenth Century, ed. Felicity Nussbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 93–106. 60. Bill Brown, Other Things (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015), 9, EBSCOhost Ebooks. 61. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 46, 49, 55, 62, 69, 85, 97, 101, 102, 121, 179. 62. Blackman, “Patent Information,” 231. 63. In 1670s France, waterproof clothing had already become part of fashionable culture. Joan DeJean, The Essence of Style (New York: Free Press, 2006), 222. 64. T. S. Crawford, A History of the Umbrella (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1970), 105. 65. “Parasol ou Parapluye inventé par M. Marius,” Machines et inventions approuvées par l’Académie royale des sciences (Paris, 1735), 87, BnF Gallica. 66. Marcy Norton, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38. 67. Rajani Sudan, The Alchemy of Empire: Abject Materials and the Technologies of Capitalism (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 86. 68. Marx, Capital, 475–476. 69. John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 163. 70. Rina Banerjee, Make Me a Summary of the World . . . (mixed media, 2014), https:// rinabanerjee.com/artwork/3545782-Make-me-a-summary-of-t he-world.html; Huang Rui, “拆那(demol it ion)/China” (2010), https://t ransnationaldialogues.eu/hong-kongs-v isual -politics/; Eleana Kim, “Invasive Others and Significant Others: Strange Kinship and Interspecies Ethics near the Korean Demilitarized Zone,” Social Research 84, no. 1 (2017): 203–220. 71. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Speaking in Voices the south african poetry of thomas pringle Jennifer L. Hargrave
Buried within the endnotes of his modest 1828 volume Ephemerides; or, Occasional Poems, Written in Scotland and South Africa, Thomas Pringle (1789–1834) expresses the intentions b ehind his publication: “If I am but so fortunate as to excite, by t hese desultory sketches in prose and verse, the attention of some of my countrymen to the condition of the Native Tribes of South Africa, and induce them to investigate the subject for themselves, I shall rejoice in having promoted by slight means a worthy and important object.” 1 Pringle—whose contributions to the Anti-Slavery Society, most notably as editor of The History of Mary Prince (1831), define his modern legacy—provides something unique in Ephemerides; he presents a poetic representation of a global contact zone with its mixture of Dutch and British settlers, f ree and enslaved Africans, and merchants of the East India Company.2 Through twenty-eight poems composed principally during his six-year residence (1820–1826) as leader of a Scottish emigrant settlement in South Africa, Pringle provides his observations of this contact zone in a medium that challenges traditional assumptions about travel writing, particularly its complicity in perpetuating imperial ideology and supporting colonial governance. Scholarship on Thomas Pringle has tended to establish a causal relationship between his life experiences and his writing. His diverse experiences of serving as editor for the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine, of securing patronage from Sir Walter Scott, of emigrating to South Africa, and of embracing the abolition movement—to name just a few—offer a wealth of historical documentation for archival research. The most commonly cited sources for biographical information include Pringle’s correspondence and his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (1835). A. E. Voss and Damian Shaw use t hese sources to elucidate an understanding of Pringle’s poetry in particu lar.3 The critical consensus is that 238
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Pringle’s poetry transforms during his South African residence, but the perceived reasons for these changes—and even the very nature of the changes—vary widely based on the biographical framing provided. For example, scholars frequently note Pringle’s increased skepticism of British colonial rule in South Africa, though the reasons for his skepticism and the degree of his critique are debatable. Damian Shaw identifies a key disparity—between the British national government’s advertising of South African settlement as a path to economic prosperity, with the British colonial government’s ulterior motive of using settlers as a line of defense against indigenous encroachments along the frontier— as integral to understanding Pringle’s morphing attitudes.4 Motivated—perhaps naïvely—to emigrate to improve his family’s dire finances, Pringle finds himself an unwitting participant in colonial geopolitics along the frontier and finds his fellow settlers woefully unsupported by colonial authority to resolve any resultant difficulties. In short, the economic promise of settlement belies the British government’s more pressing need to safeguard the colonial space with a populated frontier. Shaw argues, then, that Pringle’s sonnet “To Oppression” should “not be read as an indication of Pringle’s commitment to the anti-slavery campaign” but rather as an indictment of Lord Charles Henry Somerset’s colonial (mis)governance.5 Pringle’s emigration into the disputed Cape frontier, Shaw suggests, prompts his politically subversive poetry rather than any righteous indignation on behalf of indigenous populations. Dirk Klopper similarly hesitates to read Pringle’s poetry as categorically subversive of the British imperial project. Though not questioning Pringle’s advocacy of abolition, Klopper does understand Pringle as invested in ameliorating colonial rule to align with his evangelical beliefs. He reads Pringle’s writings— letters, poetry, and travel narrative—as “argu[ing] in favour of a form of colonisation that would proceed along the lines of moral conquest and looks forward to a time when the spread of Christianity would extend the colonial boundary to include all of Africa.” 6 Klopper depicts missionary work as synonymous with colonization efforts, an association codified not by the 1820s but rather later in the nineteenth century.7 Both of t hese scholars bring Pringle’s lived experiences and firsthand observations—of South African settlements, missions, governance, and cross-cultural relations—to bear upon his poetry. Such comparative work— between journals or extant letters and the poetry—assumes that Pringle’s ideas remain consistent across genres—the primary consideration being that his compared writings are coeval. A comparative examination of contemporary compositions (e.g., letters and poems in 1822 South Africa) limits which poems are studied. Published two years after his return to England, Pringle’s Ephemerides— as a collection—receives little to no scholarly attention. Instead, single poems published in the South African Journal or the South African Commercial Advertiser during Pringle’s residence are privileged. These isolated poems are more readily framed by the experiences conveyed within Pringle’s travel writing. The
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oft-repeated search for the earliest published form of any poem diminishes the value of Pringle’s intentional collection of his poetry into a single volume that does not immediately invite external conversations with proximate journal articles or his personally lived experiences. This essay reconsiders Pringle’s textual representat ion of British colonialism not through selective prose passages or verse lines but through a consideration of his writing’s assumed form, namely its genre. In this essay, I attend to the modal differences across Pringle’s travel writings, differences that w ere not lost on contemporary British readers. I argue that poetry—especially persona poetry—provides a space wherein normative expectations of travel literature may be subverted. I first provide an analysis of the nineteenth-century critical reviews of Pringle’s South African texts across thirteen different British periodicals.8 These reviews reveal the degree to which positive reception of travel writing depended upon both the publication’s genre and its position vis-à-v is the British colonial project. Having revealed British reviewers’ general resistance to poetic representations of South Africa, I then establish Pringle’s poetry as travel writing that challenges an emerging nineteenth-century “world picture,” as defined in Martin Heidegger’s “The Age of the World Picture” (1938). Pringle’s poetry supplants Eurocentric worlding with transcultural representations of South Africa that destabilize British readers’ assumption of the European subject’s supremacy within any global contact zone. It is within this context of reception history and (re)worlding that I read two of Pringle’s Ephemerides poems, poems that offer a rich multivocal repre sentation of South Africa. In concluding, I indicate briefly how Pringle borrows formal techniques from his poetry to inform his famous editorializing of The History of Mary Prince. This text’s controversial reception stems, in part, from the amalgamation of narrative forms, each embodying different imperial relations. In short, it is within The History of Mary Prince’s generic incoherence that the singularity of Pringle’s poetry and its embedded colonial challenges becomes most apparent. By recovering Ephemerides—rather than individually published poems—as my primary object of study, the popular nineteenth-century reception and understanding of Pringle’s work—especially his poetry—may be traced through critical reviews. Modern scholarly debates seem hardly surprising given the vacillating critical assessments of Pringle’s work across the seven-year period from 1828 to 1835 in which the bulk of his South African writing was published in England. I focus on three overlapping texts and their immediate reception. The aforementioned Ephemerides (1828) consists of Pringle’s Scottish poetry prior to his emigration—much of it published previously—as well as new poetry reflecting his six-year sojourn in the Cape Colony. He complements his South African poetry with lengthy notes consisting of linguistic explanations, cultural context, and historical background. Pringle’s African Sketches (1834) consists of two vol-
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umes. The first reproduces, with some revisions, the South African poetry of Ephemerides alongside several new poems, though with considerably abbreviated notes. The second volume provides Pringle’s narrative of his years in South Africa. The posthumous publication of his Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (1835) reproduces only the second volume of African Sketches, replacing the poetry with a brief biographical sketch of the author. Despite the replication of textual material across t hese three works, the critical reviews—even within the same periodical—fail to coalesce into a coherent value assessment of Pringle’s writings, unless generic distinctions are taken into consideration. Across the six reviews of Ephemerides—a ll appearing in 1828, the same year as the volume’s publication—critics resoundingly agree that Pringle’s verse reflects the best of poetic style and language. Josiah Conder’s assessment in the Eclectic Review enumerates the qualities found in good poetry, qualities that Conder implies also characterize Pringle’s volume: “delicacy, rather than force, tenderness and elegance, rather than brilliancy, together with an unaffected simplicity.” 9 For half of the reviews, the unoffensive quality of the poetry rather than its content remains the reviewers’ predominant focus. If the content is reviewed, the reviewers primarily extoll Pringle’s ability to capture picturesque rural landscapes. Yet four reviewers do acknowledge, however briefly, the poetry’s critical dimension, which evinces Pringle’s “abundance of deep and right feelings—warm sympathies for the oppressed, and generous indignation against oppressors.” 10 The London Magazine accedes that the “tone of lofty and indignant scorn against the oppressors, and the soothing accents of compassion and encouragement for the oppressed, form another feature of the work,” but quickly undermines the significance of t hese articulations by assuring readers that “for the most part . . . the pieces are of a gentler character, consisting of domestic incidents, descriptions, and pictures from Scottish scenery and rural life.” 11 In fact, Pringle allots only 38 percent of Ephemerides to his Scottish verse. The Athenaeum, however, embraces the more substantial two-t hirds of Pringle’s poetry reflecting South Africa. Asserting emphatically the poet’s engagement with social injustices by titling their review “Colonial Despotism,” the Athenaeum demonstrates Pringle to be “incapable of suppressing the indignant emotions which he feels towards cruelty or baseness” as his poetry overflows “with the healthy sensibilities of humanity.” 12 Both the Athenaeum’s and the Monthly Magazine’s characterizations of Pringle’s “indignation” as indicative of his moral character suggest that the journals’ readers who claim virtue and morality for themselves should be similarly repelled by Britain’s colonial practices. To this end, the Athenaeum moves away from the oft-cited landscape poems “Afar in the Desert” and “Evening Rambles” to focus on the collection’s sonnet, “To Oppression,” in concluding the review. Speaking from within the colonial space, Pringle directs his gaze away the literal landscape to Oppression personified as a callous monarchical figure:
242 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 Oppression! I have seen thee, face to face, And met thy cruel eye and cloudy brow; But thy soul-w ithering glance I fear not now, For dread to prouder feelings doth give place Of deep abhorrence! Scorning the disgrace Of slavish knees, that near thy footstool bow, I also kneel—but with far other vow Do hail thee and thy herd of hirelings base: I swear, while life-blood warms my throbbing veins, Still to oppose and thwart with heart and hand Thy brutalizing sway—till Afric’s chains Are burst, and Freedom rules the rescued land,— Trampling Oppression and his iron rod: Such is the vow I take—So help me God! (156)
In knelling before Oppression’s footstool, Pringle establishes some kinship with his countrymen—t he “slavish knees” beside him—but then quickly turns to explain that this seeming act of subservience is rather a pledge to fight for Africa’s freedom. As the only complete poem in the Athenaeum’s review, readers are precluded from seeing an African landscape untarnished by imperial aggression. Even more forcefully, the Athenaeum is the only journal that delves into Pringle’s sixty pages of endnotes—t hough both the Eclectic Review and the Monthly Magazine acknowledge their presence. It is within his endnotes that Pringle dispels any readings of his South African poetry as merely entertaining. Instead, as the Athenaeum aptly observes, the poems coupled with the notes serve to educate as “probably not one English reader in a thousand has any suspicion that the same iniquitous system [established by Dutch colonizers] has been maintained, under the British Government, with but slight and casual mitigation.” 13 While reviewers generally allude to the subversive quality of Pringle’s volume, they simultaneously—excepting the anonymous Athenaeum writer—refrain from extended ruminations on the topics of oppression. Instead, they assert that such arguments w ill be better suited to Pringle’s recent employment with the Anti-Slavery Society, “in which capacity he will find a congenial employment for a mind animated by a detestation of that moral blight and curse, of which, in its existing effects, he has been an eye-witness.” 14 Such displacement of the subversive political dimensions of Ephemerides becomes even more marked when the poetry is reprinted as one of the two volumes of African Sketches. Despite their consuming an entire volume of African Sketches (1834), Pringle’s new and revised South African poems receive considerably less discussion in the seven reviews appearing across 1834 and 1835. Whereas reviewers cite twelve passages from across the second narrative volume, only four poems are represented. In fact, the Gentleman’s Magazine goes so far as to provide a poem
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but not one of Pringle’s, including instead a poem composed by Pringle’s friend John Fairbairn—a lso a resident of South Africa. Formerly, reviewers at least acknowledged that Pringle’s poetry often provides social critique, even if the more politically inclined poems were subsequently circumvented by citing poems depicting supposedly picturesque, unpopulated landscapes. With the exception of the Metropolitan Magazine’s writer, reviewers of African Sketches reveal discomfort with, and even distaste for, Pringle’s Whiggish sympathies. Pringle’s views of colonialism are e ither grossly misrepresented to align precisely with dominant colonial narratives or lambasted for failing to grasp the complexity of colonial governance. The Literary Gazette states directly its refusal to engage with such conversations since “into colonial politics, into discussions on slavery (now, we trust, nearly at rest for ever), or into Caffre quarrels, it is not our inclination to enter,” instead preferring to focus on Pringle’s descriptions of elephants and locusts.15 The parenthetical allusion to Parliament’s 1833 Act of Abolition (officially enacted on December 1, 1834) reveals a degree of exasperation with Pringle’s views of intracolonial relations. The Quarterly Review even scoffs at Pringle’s proposal of a South African parliament, an idea that reveals his “well- meant but narrow-minded views of colonial policy.” 16 And yet African Sketches as a whole is well received and recommended to readers as being “as useful as it is entertaining,” as affording “a g reat deal of curious and highly-interesting information concerning the state of society and manners,” and as providing a wealth of “pleasure and information.” 17 Such language suggests that, unlike Ephemerides, African Sketches possesses some use value despite its author’s more liberal sentiments. Reviewers repeatedly categorize African Sketches as promotional material for colonial expansion. Both the Gentleman’s Magazine and the Quarterly Review invite readers to compare the relative merits of settling in South Africa or Canada (with the Quarterly openly disparaging all Australian settlements). So, in short, African Sketches—regardless of the inclusion of such poems as “To Oppression” or “The Slave Dealer”—morphs into a guide for t hose considering emigration. The Quarterly concludes “that a f amily in middle life whose habits have been agricultural, who have some little capitalist command, and who are willing to sacrifice everyt hing in likeness of civilized society, beyond the pale of their own settlement,—cannot in any of our colonies find a situation where they might be more sure of a coarse abundance soon, and by-and-bye of accumulated wealth.” 18 South Africa, the Quarterly argues, is ideal for the middle-class agricultural laborer, which suggests the ready availability of unpopulated, arable land. No appeal is made based on adventure or cultural engagement, but rather promises “coarse abundance” in the material and fiscal wealth to be extracted from the African landscape. There is no acknowledgment of the land’s disputed availability to such European worlding. Instead, “our colonies” function h ere as an unqualified extension of Britain. In reviewers’ hands, African Sketches ironically
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promotes the same deceptive promise of economic prosperity that tempted Pringle to South Africa in 1820. It is difficult to reconcile such contradictory repre sentations of Pringle’s work as simultaneously simplistic on issues of colonial governance yet abundantly rich in discussing settlement potential. Even more difficult to reconcile is any attempt to read African Sketches as an endorsement for continued British emigration and colonization when the same South African poems of Ephemerides were repeatedly extolled for exposing British colonial despotism. Such seeming contradictions may be parsed out by turning to a final set of reviews for Narrative of a Residence in South Africa. With the posthumous republication of the second volume of African Sketches as the standalone Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (1835), contradictions within the reviews disappear as reviewers establish Pringle’s work—regardless of content—as providing indispensable insight into colonial South Africa. Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal titles their review “Glen-Lynden Settlement,” privileging Pringle and his fellow emigrants’ Scottish heritage over their current residence within the South Africa. In fact, Pringle’s financial motivations for relocating his f amily to South Africa are glossed over in f avor of a colonizing narrative: “When the government scheme of colonising the unoccupied territory of the Cape was promulgated, our author called the attention of his relatives to that colony.” 19 The only significant change from African Sketches to the Narrative of a Residence is the replacement of the poetry with a biographical sketch of Pringle by Josiah Conder (one of the aforementioned reviewers of Ephemerides), a replacement noted by nearly every review. The Monthly Magazine merely deems this new arrangement “judicious.” 20 The Metropolitan Magazine, however, retrospectively reveals intense dissatisfaction with African Sketches’ original inclusion of the poetry precisely b ecause of its genre. According to the Metropolitan, Pringle’s poems w ere “good as poetry, but still they w ere poetry, and, in the inaptency of the time to such food, they deterred many a reader from trying the prose part of the banquet.” 21 Again, the work’s evaluation depends upon its use value. Without the poetry, the work “w ill be found particularly serv iceable to all such as think of transferring their household gods [sic] to the country beyond the Cape.” 22 Without the poetry, the volume w ill find a broader readership as it will “form an admirable article in the juvenile library; while the general reader, and the friend of Missions and of mankind, will peruse it with equal delight and advantage.” 23 Narrative of a Residence more nearly aligns with a British worldview that includes South Africa as a site of colonial utility. Therefore, the inconsistency of the African Sketches’ reviews lies with the work’s multigeneric structure rather than its content. There are actually innumerable similarities between Pringle’s verse and prose representations of South Africa, but reader expectations of t hese texts as representative of their respective genres—verse and travel narrative—differ substantially. In his review of Ephemerides, Conder quips, “It has been reserved for
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Mr. Pringle to give us, not a bird’s eye view, but a bard’s eye view of the wild desert, and to make its barren wilds tributary to the fancy.” 24 The word “tributary” suggests that the poet masters the “wild” landscape through his poetic voice. However, Pringle’s poetry actually refuses to fit within this neat formulation, thereby contributing to its varied reception. When the Literary Gazette also praises Pringle’s ability to provide “a bird’s eye view of such a landscape,” the reviewer cites the sixth stanza of “Evening Rambles,” which opens: Spread out below, in sun and shade, The shaggy glen lies full display’d,— Its shelter’d nooks and sylvan bowers, And meadows flush’d with purple flowers: And through it, like a dragon spread, I trace the river’s tortuous bed. (106–107)25
The world seems spread at Pringle’s feet, a South African world that yields to such Gaelic-i nflected language as “glen” and mimics Eng lish pastoral poetry with its “sylvan bowers.” Such stanzas give rise to Conder’s praise of “the Author’s descriptive powers . . . exercised upon scenes till now unvisited by the Muse.” 26 However, t hese same critics either omit or ignore Pringle’s closing sentiments of the tenth stanza: But lo! the night-bird’s boding scream Breaks abrupt my twilight dream, And warns me it is time to haste My homeward walk across the waste, Lest my rash tread provoke the wrath Of natchslang coil’d across the path,— Or tempt the leopard in the wood, Prowling round athirst for blood. (110–111)
Descending from the hill above the valley, Pringle defamiliarizes the landscape. This is not out of distaste or malice as he describes his “homeward walk,” but this is also not an affirmation of power. Whereas the “bird’s eye view” may allow a perception of the South African landscape congealing with, even affirming, a Eurocentric worlding, the view from within the landscape challenges such mastery as completely illusory. The language even—especially the ominous “natchslang”—challenges the poet’s ability to make legible, much less available, the land to colonizing potential. Pringle, a devotee of William Words worth and himself admired by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, does not use his poetry as a simply fanciful or “charming” (to use reviewers’ descriptor of choice) vehicle for landscape description. Instead, in complete contrast with Conder’s assumptions, Pringle’s verse, as the Athenaeum ironically yet aptly observes, does “not [breathe] the artifice of poetry, but the solemn and lofty earnestness of
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truth.” 27 Pringle’s poetry, rather than his travel narrative, more nearly represents the diverse voices—human and nonhuman—of nineteenth-century South Africa than the purportedly comprehensive Narrative of Pringle’s six-year residence. How can a text radiate “the solemn and lofty earnestness of truth”? For a nineteenth-century text, Ephemerides exudes cultural awareness and sensitivity precisely b ecause of its medium, poetry. Travel narratives are exercises in restriction. There is a linear, time-bound expectation of the travel narrative that speaks from a singular subject position. Even as the narrative strives to represent diversity—in p eople, cultures, landscapes—it also subsumes t hese differences into a single cogent account that may be marketed and consumed by the reading public. Pringle’s Narrative of a Residence follows this model, regardless of authorial intent. Unlike travel literature that speaks from essentially one point of view, Pringle’s poetry depicts colonial encounters from multiple subject positions including a Scottish exile, a !Kung gatherer, a Xhosa prophet, an enslaved Khoikhoi herdsman, and a Boer militant. Within any travel narrative, such indigenous people as appear in Ephemerides would be largely dysphonic. Within his Narrative of a Residence, Pringle devotes two chapters to two African populations—t he Khoikhoi (“Hottentots”) and the Xhosa (“Caffers”). Though sympathetic throughout t hese chapters to the plight of the Khoikhoi and the Xhosa—often depicting and critiquing colonial encroachment and oppression— Pringle observes only. These chapters read as historical and anthropological studies that cite fellow Europeans but do not reproduce the indigenous voice. However, while Pringle’s Narrative may assume only one subject position—t hat of Scottish emigrant—he uses poetry to imagine the South African contact zone from diverse, often contradictory, perspectives. Though an imaginative exercise, Pringle’s poetry presciently acknowledges Mary Louise Pratt’s assertion, “If one studies only what the Europeans saw and said, one reproduces the monopoly on knowledge and interpretation that the imperial enterprise sought.” 28 The inherently imaginative or “fanciful” tenor associated with poetry (as clearly stated in Conder’s review) alleviates Pringle of any nationalist expectation to depict South Africa’s colonial potential. This freedom is important since Pringle’s imagination does not tend toward the idyllic but rather explores the more ominous aspects of colonial life. Through this analysis of Pringle’s critical reception, the poetry collection and the travel narrative emerge as dueling genres of colonial representation, with the poetic voice gradually diminishing in relevance as imperial ideology increasingly permeates British society in the 1830s and 1840s. I argue that particu lar literary genres either preclude or facilitate Pringle’s textual representation of and engagement with the rapidly changing South African contact zone. In defining what he understands to be the uniquely modern concept of “world picture,” Martin Heidegger asserts that when the world is “conceived and grasped as picture . . . an essential decision takes place regarding what is, in its entirety.” 29 How this
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world picture is made manifest is through representation, which, in the modern age, Heidegger understands “to bring what is present at hand . . . before oneself as something standing over against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm.” 30 So, in essence, Heidegger’s world picture is a defining represen tation of the world as a unified whole that always relates back to and is premised upon humanity. These assertions raise two essential questions. First, who is the “oneself” to whom Heidegger refers? And second, what forms of representation codify the world picture? Heidegger speaks of a world picture premised on a European humanist subject. As Betty Joseph argues, Heidegger’s notions make it possible for us, as scholars, to interrogate who and what appears in this world picture precisely b ecause “becoming picture for the humanist subject coincided with the devastation of other worlds, and that the world itself was staged through constitutive exclusions.” 31 The post-Cartesian creation of world picture coincides, of course, with burgeoning imperial expansion throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such expansion not only projects a Eurocentric world picture but also necessitates representation of the newly encountered world “to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm.” The West in general and Europe in particular is “the normative realm.” In her seminal work on travel writing and transculturation, Pratt—t hough never citing Heidegger—identifies travel writing at the heart of such reification of the European world picture. Travel writing, she argues, “gave European reading publics a sense of ownership, entitlement and familiarity with respect to the distant parts of the world that were being explored, invaded, invested in, and colonized.” 32 By the turn of the nineteenth century—t he period more applicable to the concerns of this essay—Pratt identifies sentimental travel writing as particularly insidious for its “strategies of representations whereby European bourgeois subjects seek to secure their innocence in the same moment as they assert European hegemony.” 33 On the one hand, Thomas Pringle is Pratt’s “seeing-man,” the “white male subject of Euro pean landscape discourse—he whose imperial eyes passively look out and possess.” 34 His Narrative of a Residence assumes, in instances, a simult aneously affectionate and patronizing tone in the presentat ion of professedly objective observations of the Cape Colony—a ll this despite equally clear critiques of British colonial practices. Take, for example, the aforementioned chapter on the Khoikhoi, which concludes: But the quiet and orderly demeanour of the great body of this long-maltreated people—above all the astonishing progress of the colonists of the Kat River, during the five years that they have been placed on probation as f ree citizens— the entire change of character in many formerly considered vagabonds, as soon as they were enabled to emerge from conscious degradation, and the door
248 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 of manly ambition was flung open to them—their self-government, their docility, their singular temperance, their industry, their ardour for religious and general instruction, and their steady good conduct—are facts which speak volumes, and upon which, to intelligent readers, I need not add a single word of comment.35
Pringle’s deferential tone to his “intelligent readers” captures the writer’s voice throughout the Narrative as he constantly seeks the knowledge and expertise of others more familiar with South Africa. For example, he often defers to English civil servant Sir John Barrow’s two-volume An Account of Travels into the Interior of Southern Africa, in the Years 1797 and 1798 (1801). Pringle also clearly admires the Khoikhoi but premises much of his admiration upon their passing through “the door of manly ambition . . . flung open to them.” Implicitly, Euro pea ns akin to Pringle have made such opportunities available. Moreover, the Khoikhoi “f ree citizens” are expected to assume the role of colonist and the attendant European standards of character. Pringle attempts to extract himself in the sentence’s final clause. He has already, however, situated the Khoikhoi in relationship to himself and to the European world picture. But Pringle was also a poet, and, in his poetry, this essay argues, an entirely different project emerges. The distinction between Pringle’s narrative and poetic projects stems, in part, from each genre’s ideological underpinnings, or lack thereof. Heidegger, again, is useful. In defining modern scientific research, he argues that research remains vital through “ongoing activity.” Such ongoing activity necessitates institutions, institutions that are so often the embodiment of a culture’s ideology. In asserting the similarities of research across the disciplines, Heidegger claims that “historiographical or archeological research that is carried forward in an institutionalized way is essentially closer to research in physics that is similarly organized than it is to a discipline belonging to its own faculty in the humanistic sciences that still remains mired in mere erudition.” 36 The travel narrative, so often complicit with imperial and colonial projects, is essentially institutionalized ongoing activity. (Here, I am thinking of the ways in which the East India Company promoted such ongoing activity through establishments such as the East India College or the East India Military Seminary or through the funding of translation projects that could benefit global trade negotiations.) Even as sentimental travel writing experienced a surge in popularity, Romantic-era travel narratives continue the late eighteenth-century trend, noted by Jonathan Lamb, of averting curious observations in favor of “the more disciplined . . . approach to scientific inquiry.” 37 Conversely, poetry—particularly poetry of the Romantic period—often seeks to reject such institutional associations. As such, Pringle as researcher / travel writer reifies colonial structures— however unwittingly—t hat Pringle as scholar/poet strives to complicate and subvert. Narrative of a Residence in South Africa projects a world picture that
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silences diverse voices to create a Eurocentric space, whereas Ephemerides strives to repopulate, with indigenous African voices, the same landscape evacuated by the travel narrative. Throughout Ephemerides, Pringle constructs mirrored poems that allow readers to understand colonial encounters from divergent perspectives. This mirroring evokes the exchanges occurring across the contact zone without necessarily privileging the poet’s subject position. In fact, Pringle frequently undermines readers’ expectations by directing their empathy toward native African populations rather than their European compatriots. One such inversion may be found in the mirrored poems “War Song of Makanna” and “The Caffer Commando,” poems that reflect upon the martial altercations that frequently occurred between the Xhosa and European colonists. “War Song of Makanna” is told through the Xhosa prophet Makanna’s voice as he urges the Amakosae people (today’s Xhosa) to expel the European colonists who have sought to diminish their freedoms. “The Caffer Commando” speaks in the moments immediately following a conflict between a European military expedition and a local Xhosa tribe. Alternating between the voices of European settlers and a military commander, the poem reflects cynically on the soldiers’ joy following the extermination of local villagers. Despite their stark perspectival differences, t hese poems bear one striking similarity. Contrary to the popular stories of cultural and economic reciprocity seen in sentimental travel literature—such as Mungo Park’s Travels in the Interior of Africa (1799)—Pringle’s poetry rejects narratives of positive cultural exchange and instead focuses on accounts of repeated cultural oppression. “War Song of Makanna” inverts readers’ sympathies by ascribing characteristics to the Xhosa that would commonly be attributed to Europeans, thereby challenging the assumed differences between “us” and “them.” In fact, the poem opens with an imperative—“Wake!”—t hat temporarily speaks to the Eng lish reader before urging the Xhosa to “wake!” Between the first line’s opening and closing proclamations to “wake!,” the Eng lish reader is situated alongside the implied Xhosa audience: Wake! Amakosae, wake! And arm yourselves for war. As coming winds the forest shake, I hear a sound from far: It is not thunder in the sky, Nor lion’s roar upon the hill, But the voice of Him who sits on high, And bids me speak his w ill! He bids me call you forth, Sons of great Cahabee,
250 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 To sweep the White Men from the earth, And drive them to the sea: The sea, which heav’d them up at first, For Amakosa’s curse and bane, Howls for the progeny she nurst, To swallow them again. (95–96)
Within t hese first stanzas, Pringle dismantles any stereot ypical perceptions of Africans as unequivocally pagan. He immediately distances the Xhosa from superstitious religious beliefs by showing how their justification for war derives not from the “thunder in the sky / Nor lion’s roar upon the hill” but rather from divine inspiration, “the voice of Him who sits on high.” 38 The prophet further motivates the people by alluding to present injustices to be avenged and by invoking their ancestry. These are the descendants of the celebrated warrior Cahabee. Th ese are a people with a historical past. And ultimately, it is the reclamation of their historic lands that Makanna and his p eople desire. Makanna does not inspire the p eople with the promise of European bloodshed, though the forthcoming war is described in detail. Instead, he urges them to return the colonists to their place of origin, “The sea, which heav’d them up.” This is not a call for racial eradication but rather a rejection of colonialism that situates the African space within a European world. The war song inspires the Xhosa to reject f uture enslavement. As the poem proceeds, Makanna outlines the choice before the Xhosa: To conquer or be slaves: To meet proud Europe’s flashing guns, And fight like warriors nobly born; Or crouch with base Umlào’s sons, Whom freemen hold in scorn. (96)
Makanna again alludes to the Xhosa’s noble heritage as reason to reject the shackles of slavery. But perhaps the most significant aspect of the poem is Pringle’s apt depiction of the complexity of the South African contact zone in Makanna’s recollecting the fate of other ethnic groups, such as the Khoikhoi, that have been made subservient. The landscape cannot be demarcated simply into colonizers and colonized but rather includes, at the very least, f ree Africans (the Xhosa), enslaved Africans (“Umlao’sà sons” or the Khoikhoi), and European settlers—a ll of whom are attempting to assert their right to the land. For the Xhosa, they are claiming a landed heritage. The last three stanzas of the poem imagine the conflict to come, one in which Makanna concedes that the “gaunt hyaenas” and “vultures” will likely “have glorious prey,” the deceased Xhosa having succumbed to predatory European ambitions (98). Although the death of
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the Xhosa seems inevitable against “Europe’s flashing guns,” Pringle depicts their commitment to uphold their ancestors’ and their own honor as “glorious” and admirable (98). It is this adherence to a moral code that Pringle’s mirrored depiction of “The Caffer Commando” lacks completely. For this poem, I refer to the Africans (the “Caffers”) as Xhosa since Pringle’s accompanying endnote places the poem in conversation with ongoing colonial violence against Xhosa communities. A commando, in colonial parlance, described a European military unit used to control, often violently, the f ree African population. Rather than immediately assuming the voice of a returning commando member, Pringle narrates first from the perspective of the settler. Like the war song’s careful distinctions between South Africa’s ethnic groups, Pringle does not present a homogenized group of Europeans but rather distinguishes between, and highlights the tensions among, the settlers and the military enforcers. Pringle begins in the settler’s voice so as to show the disconnect between the commando’s actions and their emotions. While Makanna encouraged the Xhosa to fight the colonists with a degree of gravitas, the returning commando reflects upon the annihilation of a local village as entertaining. Again, in using persona poetry, Pringle not only gives voice to the diversely populated contact zone but also invites his readers into the poem, not permitting them to assume the position of casual observers. He opens with the imperative: Hark!—heard ye the signals of triumph afar? ’Tis our Caffer Commando returning from war: The voice of their laughter comes loud on the wind, Nor heed they the curses that follow behind. For who cares for him, the poor Caffer, that wails Where the smoke rises dim from yon desolate vales— That wails for his little ones killed in the fray, And his herds by the Christian carried away? Or who cares for him, that once cultured this spot, Where his tribe is extinct and their story forgot? As many another, ere twenty years pass, Will only be known by their bones in the grass! (125–126)
The opening query functions both as further dialogic engagement with readers and as a moment of skepticism as the punctuated end of the first line subtly challenges the nature of the commando’s triumph. The speaker’s skeptical attitude persists. The commando’s “laughter,” derisive of the wailing that follows in its wake, casts the colonial altercation as sport. Pringle has already established, in “War Song of Makanna,” the Xhosa’s claims to a historical past. Here, the
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commando recklessly dismantles with seeming glee both the local Xhosa community and its associated culture, leaving b ehind only “smoke” in the “desolate vales.” Pringle again reiterates that native African populations “once cultured this spot.” The word “cultured” simultaneously embodies the Xhosa’s reliance on the land for their livelihood as well as the land’s embodiment of their cultural heritage. The commando has, “with fire, rapine, and blood,” decimated the Xhosa’s past, present, and future (126). With a tribe now “extinct,” “their story”—presumably in the form of oral history—is also erased, known only to the “bones in the grass.” The Xhosa’s present disappears with their livelihood “by the Christian carried away.” And, with the “little ones killed in the fray,” the commando precludes any Xhosa f uture. However, rather than continuing this denunciatory rant, Pringle allows the voice of the leading officer to condemn himself: “ ’Tis powder-and-ball suits t hese savages best: / You may cant about Missions and Civilization—/ My plan is to shoot—or enslave the whole nation” (127). The officer openly rejects the new modes of imperial ideology that increasingly typified the British colonies, namely the dual attempts to evangelize and civilize the Other. As Saree Makdisi notes, the Romantic era witnessed a shift in “the ethos of empire . . . from the preservation and exploitation of difference to the eradication of difference” through cultural assimilation and colonial governmentality.39 This is an ethos that Pringle’s commando repudiates. Nor does Pringle provide any justification for the commando’s recent raid. Th ese are not individuals addressing past injustices committed against the European settlers. Instead, the officer’s plan to “shoot— or enslave” reveals his assumption of the natives’ bestiality. Many of Pringle’s endnotes exist to make legible both African customs and landscapes. Yet one of the longest notes is appended to “The Caffer Commando.” This note serves, therefore, an alternative purpose: the creation of a space wherein a Xhosa man’s voice—not an African’s position ventriloquized by Pringle—may challenge the officer’s assertion without fear of reprisal. To do so, Pringle provides a transcript and English translation of a hymn written in the Xhosa’s “mellifluous language” as a pointed response to the commando’s summary rejection of “Missions and Civilization” (211). Despairingly, both “War Song of Makanna” and “The Caffer Commando” end with the consumption of indigenous bodies by wild animals. Whereas the war song’s conclusion demonstrates the Xhosa’s desire to return to the land rather than be enslaved, the commando’s raid has ensured that a “feast,” a word that often connotes celebration, w ill be provided to the jackals, wolves, tigers, lynxes, panthers, and vultures (127). Whereas Makanna depicts death as a sacrifice, the exterminated Xhosa bodies are left for animal consumption and denied any respect, even in death. Such sacrilege against the h uman body becomes even more poignant when read alongside the Xhosa hymn that places absolute faith in God: “He alone is a trusty shield, / He alone is our bush of ref-
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uge” (212). Pringle’s poetry suggests that there is no effective defense of the Xhosa from the colonizer. Regardless of his assumed voice, Pringle offers implicit and explicit critiques of British imperialism’s continued reliance upon native oppression and/ or enslavement to grow and sustain the empire. But rather than simply offering horrifying depictions or scathing critiques of slavery—both of which he provides in other publications—Pringle depicts South African tribes outside of slavery, yet coeval with colonialism. These are not populations temporally distanced from European civilization. By focusing on images of f ree Africans, Pringle not only humanizes and gives voice to the numerous ethnic groups present in South Africa—t hereby challenging Eurocentric worlding—but also reveals how colonialism infringes upon their freedoms even if they are not enslaved. Although Pringle’s poetry is sprinkled with stunning, often sublime, images of the South African landscape, his poetry constantly reminds readers that the Cape Colony is a contact zone rife with violence instigated primarily by Europea ns whose imperial world picture systematically excludes rather than includes. What does this multivocal representation of the South African contact zone accomplish? Remember Pringle’s desire that his volume “excite . . . t he attention of some of my countrymen to the condition of the Native Tribes of South Africa.” Pringle is d oing more than advocating for the abolition of slavery. He is questioning the way Europeans position themselves—literally and imaginatively— with respect to any culture seen as Other. By giving voice to individuals through persona poetry, Pringle resists the narrative tendency to subsume the Other into colonial hierarchy. But who are the “countrymen” to whom Pringle addresses his poems? It would seem clear that he is, in part, addressing fellow emigrants residing in the Cape Colony. However, Pringle published Ephemerides upon his return to London, which suggests a broader interpretation of “countrymen” that includes domestic Britons. I locate the most radical facet of Pringle’s poetic repre sentation of the South African contact zone within this broadly construed audience. Early nineteenth-century Britons, suggests Makdisi, w ere in the pro cess of “locating and clearing a space for a white, Western self who could be more effectively counterposed to the Orient out there.” 40 Pringle’s poetry disrupts this “clearing” or projection of the Heideggerian world picture in two ways. First, his poetry resists a depiction of South Africa as neatly divided into lands occupied by distinct racial groups. Instead, Pringle’s poetic personas constantly transgress arbitrary colonial borders. Second, Pringle does not resist the tendency to compare European and African voices but chooses to do so to the detriment of Britain’s self-fashioning. While Pringle’s poetry succeeded in drawing his countrymen’s attention to South Africa—as evidenced by the numerous laudatory reviews found in the
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Athenaeum, the Eclectic Review, and the Monthly Review—it would be difficult to argue that Ephemerides effected any immediate changes in the Cape Colony. However, the representational techniques that Pringle developed in Ephemerides may also be found in his edition of The History of Mary Prince. Pringle complements Prince’s short narrative with a detailed supplement that includes the correspondence of Prince’s former slavers, earlier acquaintances, and newly established British friends. He essentially creates a literary contact zone around Prince’s slave narrative. In so doing, Pringle makes it impossible for Britons to dissociate themselves from her account by displacing it into a colonial space outside the metropole. Instead, Pringle calls upon readers to engage actively with t hese materials, to enter into slavery’s discourse, and, as a consequence, to understand how British practices abroad—rather than Britons’ exposure to foreign cultures—were destroying any imagined cultural superiority. Pringle claims, at the end of his supplemental materials, that Britons’ “boasted liberty is the dream of imagination, and no longer the characteristic of our country.” 41 His presentation of Mary Prince’s narrative undermines the “new ideal of a white Eng lishness” that Makdisi sees Romantic-era Britons striving to assert. The History of Mary Prince had a galvanizing effect on the antislavery movement. I would argue that Pringle’s editorial practices contributed to this effect. But The History of Mary Prince is also a narrative and, as such, assumes many of the problematic characteristics of any travel narrative. Yes, readers are presented with a firsthand account of an unwilling and enslaved traveler. Yet Pringle corroborates Prince’s narrative with the voices of “white Britons” to assert the credibility of her account. In so d oing, Pringle the editor, rather than Pringle the poet, contributes to Britain’s civilizing mission by demonstrating how the enslaved Other might be absorbed into, and contribute to, the empire. As Makdisi argues, Romantic critiques of slavery “fit seamlessly into ongoing efforts to strengthen and revitalize the British empire; that is, efforts to shore up the empire’s moral resources and to prepare it for . . . an entirely new preoccupation of imperial politics, namely, a civilizing mission.” 42 In short, a desire for imperial cohesion simultaneously secured the passage of the Act of Abolition and ushered in a new era of colonial practices. It is, nevertheless, Pringle’s literary disruption of this desired cohesion that propels the abolition movement forward. Pringle’s polyphonic poetry allows South African voices to be heard in the same way that he brings the Caribbean voice of Mary Prince to the reading public. Pringle values the vocalization of the Other. However, as seen in the reviews of Pringle’s work, the travel narrative experiences broad popularity b ecause of the genre’s usefulness to colonial expansion. Prince’s story is heard and understood as a critique of slavery, not a challenge to colonialism. Accordingly, Pringle’s persona poetry, though ideologically congruous with his other writings, subverts
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nineteenth-century European worlding by means inaccessible to other literary genres, precisely because of genre.
Notes 1. Thomas Pringle, Ephemerides; or, Occasional Poems, Written in Scotland and South Africa (London, 1828), 213 (hereafter cited parenthetically by page number). 2. Throughout this essay, I rely upon Mary Louise Pratt’s term “contact zones,” which she defines as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation, 2nd ed. [London: Routledge, 2008], 3). 3. A. E. Voss, “Thomas Pringle and the Image of the ‘Bushmen,’ ” English in Africa 9, no. 1 (May 1982): 15–28; Damian Shaw, “Thomas Pringle’s Plantation,” Environment and History 5, no. 3 (October 1999): 309–323. 4. Shaw, “Thomas Pringle’s Plantation,” 311–312. 5. Damian Shaw, “Thomas Pringle’s ‘Bushmen’: Images in Flesh and Blood,” English in Africa 25, no. 2 (October 1998): 41. 6. Dirk Klopper, “Politics of the Pastoral: The Poetry of Thomas Pringle,” English in Africa 17, no. 1 (May 1990): 29. 7. As Shaw aptly notes, Pringle emigrates to South Africa at “a time which saw the strengthening of social revolution and political reform in Britain” and, therefore, a time that finds colonial government in flux (“Thomas Pringle’s Plantation,” 310). 8. Some of Pringle’s conflicts with the Cape governor Lord Charles Somerset stemmed from Pringle’s championing the freedom of the press. During his South African residence, Pringle launched a newspaper, the South African Commercial Advertiser, as well as South Africa’s first literary journal, the South African Journal. The newspaper was even suspended periodically by Lord Somerset because of its frequent colonial critiques. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate extant records of either the newspaper or the journal, which is why the cited reviews come exclusively from British periodicals. It is also possible, given that Pringle published all of his work in London, that t hese texts may not have been circulated widely in the Cape Colony. 9. Josiah Conder, “Art. IV. Ephemerides; Or Occasional Poems, Written in Scotland and South Africa. By Thomas Pringle. 12mo. pp. 220. Price 6s. London. 1828,” Eclectic Review 29 (April 1828): 344. 10. “Ephemerides, Or Occasional Poems, by Thomas Pringle; 1828,” Monthly Magazine, Or, British Register 6, no. 31 (July 1828): 77. 11. “Ephemerides, or Occasional Poem; written in Scotland and South Africa. By Thomas Pringle. London. 1828. Smith, Elder, & Co.,” London Magazine 1, no. 1 (April 1828): 144. 12. “colonial despotism: Ephemerides; or Occasional Poems, Written in Scotland and South Africa. By Thomas Pringle. 12mo. pp. 220. Smith, Elder and Co. London, 1828,” Atheneaum: Literary and Critical Journal 17 (March 1828): 261. 13. “colonial despotism,” 262. 14. Conder, “Art. IV. Ephemerides,” 351. 15. “African Sketches. By Thomas Pringle. 12mo. pp. 528. London, 1834. Moxon,” Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 904 (May 1834): 342. Throughout this essay, especially in discussions of Pringle’s poetry, the word “Caffre” or “Caffer” is often deployed. Throughout, I have used the word only as it appears in direct quotes or poem titles of the nineteenth c entury. In post-Apartheid South Africa, the term holds strictly pejorative associations and is often deemed hate speech. However, as Jochen S. Arndt convincingly demonstrates, though the term has been racialized since the sixteenth c entury (as first used by the Portuguese), it has a deep history of
256 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 definitions and connotations. The nineteenth c entury, in particu lar, witnesses the term’s complete transformation: “Whereas the word ‘Caffre’ represented a superior race of non- African provenance in 1800, it represented . . . a n inferior race of African origin in 1900 and a fter.” During Pringle’s 1820s residence, the term would have referred to t hose Africans “who possessed black skin coloration, spoke the still poorly defined ‘Caffre’ language, and resided somewhere north of the Orange river and east of the Keiskamma river.” So, the “Caffres” were defined as a specific race united by a common language (though with dialectical variations). It was this understanding of “Caffre” that held until the middle of the nineteenth century and would have been understood by Pringle. Arndt, “What’s in a Word? Historicising the Term ‘Caffre’ in European Discourses about Southern Africa between 1500 and 1800,” Journal of Southern African Studies 44, no. 1 (2018): 60 and 68. 16. John Barrow and John Gibson Lockhart, “ART. III.–1. African Sketches. By Thomas Pringle. 12 mo. London. 1834. 2. Ten Years in South African, including a particular Description of the Wild Sports of that Country. By Lieut. J. W. D. Moodie, 21st Fusileers. 2 vols. 8vo. London. 1835,” Quarterly Review 55, no. 109 (December 1835): 80. 17. “African Sketches. By Thomas Pringle. Edward Moxon. Dover Street,” Metropolitan Magazine 10, no. 38 (June 1834): 38; Barrow and Lockhart, “ART. III.–1. African Sketches,” 76; and “Critical Notices: African Sketches. By Thomas Pringle,” New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal 41, no. 164 (August 1834): 510. 18. Barrow and Lockhart, “ART. III.–1. African Sketches,” 95. 19. “Glen-Lynden Settlement,” Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal 126 (June 1834): 175. 20. “Narrative of a Residence in South Africa,” Monthly Magazine, Or, British Register 2, no. 7 (July 1835): 86. 21. “Narrative of a Residence in South Africa. By Thomas Pringle, Late Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. To Which Is Prefixed a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by Josiah Conder. A New Edition,” Metropolitan Magazine 27, no. 107 (March 1840): 83. 22. “Narrative of a Residence,” Metropolitan Magazine, 84. 23. “Narrative of a Residence in South Africa. By Thomas Pringle, Late Secretary to the Anti-Slavery Society. A New Edition. To Which Is Prefixed, a Biographical Sketch of the Author, by Josiah Conder. Small 8vo. pp. 356. 10s. 6d. Moxon,” Wesleyan-Methodist Magazine 14 (July 1835): 546. 24. Conder, “Art. IV. Ephemerides,” 345. 25. “Ephemerides; or, Occasional Poems, Written in Scotland and South Africa. By Thomas Pringle. 12 mo. pp. 220. London, 1828. Smith, Elder, and Co.,” Literary Gazette: A Weekly Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts 582 (March 1828): 163. 26. Conder, “Art. IV. Ephemerides,” 345. 27. “colonial despotism,” 262. 28. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 7. 29. Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Garland, 1977), 129–130. 30. Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture,” 131. 31. Betty Joseph, “Worlding and Unworlding in the Long Eigh teenth C entury,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 52, no. 1 (Fall 2018): 28. 32. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 3. 33. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 9. 34. Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 9. 35. Thomas Pringle, Narrative of a Residence in South Africa (London, 1835), 279–280. 36. Heidegger, “Age of the World Picture,” 125. 37. Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 77. 38. The Athenaeum’s laudatory review of Ephemerides spends considerable time emphasizing native religiosity: “The picture which Mr. Pringle draws of the native character, and
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which, from his ample opportunities of observation, t here is every reason to believe correct, is of the most prepossessing description. They believe in one Supreme Being, in his superintending Providence, and in the immortality of the soul” (262). These are not individuals in dire need of Christian salvation. In fact, given indigenous religious beliefs, the Athenaeum is l ittle surprised the Christian missions often fail to effect mass conversion. 39. Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 19. 40. Makdisi, Making England Western, 26. 41. The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave. Related by Herself. With a Supplement by the Editor. To Which Is Added, The Narrative of Asa-A sa, A Captured African, ed. Thomas Pringle (London, 1831). 42. Makdisi, Making England Western, 135.
Book Reviews Edited by Samara Anne Cahill
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen. The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age. Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 485.
Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen weave together the histories of the Dutch Republic and the Dutch printing industry in the seventeenth century in The Bookshop of the World. In their prelude, cleverly titled “Making Room for Books,” the authors explain how this work is “partly an exercise in reversing” the “historical invisibility” of the “world of cheap print” in the Dutch Republic because it takes “us closest to understand the heart and soul of this complex, contradictory society” (3). Indeed, they demonstrate how and why Dutch people purchased books for display as much as they did to read them. More broadly, they seek to offer a “definitive answer” to the question of what the Dutch publishing industry actually did (7). Although the title suggests this book is merely about the production and trading of books, the authors also explore maps, newspapers, and pamphlets in the Dutch Golden Age. Researching this tome was an impressive undertaking, perhaps not possible decades ago before the online catalogues now available. Pettegree and Weduwen researched in “eighty libraries and archives, spread across thirteen countries” for such Dutch papers (14). They sought printed government materials, like ordinances and proclamations in city and state archives in the Netherlands. Last, they benefitted greatly from the national bibliographical projects for books and scoured publisher stock and auction catalogues to find titles no longer available in libraries. In total, they “documented over 350,000 separate printings, around 300 million copies” (16). Th ese catalogues helped the authors find titles purchased by everyday Dutch p eople. Pettegree and Weduwen divide The Bookshop of the World into four thematic parts, each with four chapters. In the first part, they establish a foundational understanding of the working parts of the Dutch Republic and the printing industry. The first chapter provides necessary background on the founding of the Republic while introducing key industry figures, such as the Elzevier and 261
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Blaeu families and Cornleius Claesz. The authors also highlight Dutch innovations, including the book auction, networks of printers, and stock catalogues. The second chapter explores the pamphlet crisis in the 1610s, involving issues of the church and state. While the state prohibited the publishing of pamphlets, printers published them anonymously anyway because they were a source of income. Pettegree and Weduwen examine Dutch newspapers in the third chapter. Although Germans w ere first to print newspapers in Europe, the Dutch printed them much more inexpensively. They did so by using a “single half-sheet printed on both sides” (72). In addition to printing information from Dutch voyages to other parts of the world and government issues, the Dutch w ere innovative in printing advertisements in newspapers as well. Along with ads from public bodies and private individuals, printers also advertised books. The last chapter of part 1 delves into travel journals, maps, and atlases, further connecting the printing industry to Dutch exploration. Th ese publications served a vital educational role, allowing the Dutch to further invest internationally and imperialize. Each chapter of part 2 concentrates on one of the main arenas of the printing industry. For instance, chapter 5 focuses on the publication and distribution of religious texts. Pettegree and Weduwen explain the importance of devotional books, highlighting the number of them present on Dutch commercial vessels. While the books were not for sale, the Dutch did give them to indigenous peoples they encountered, such as t hose in Malay. Further, new translations of the Bible and the importance of Protestant catechisms kept printers busy. The sixth chapter examines the publication and sell of pedagogic literature. The authors emphasize the importance of education and significant literacy rates in Dutch society, likely linked to the rise of Calvinism. Pettegree and Weduwen highlight the roles of professors and students as writers and book consumers in the seventh chapter. Professors often built substantial scholarly libraries, so much so that university libraries remained quite modest. Universities required students to pay to print their dissertation t heses, and the students resented the cost. Chapter 7 explores how all levels of government generated a great deal to print. The authors assert that “the Dutch Republic developed a network of public information unrivalled in Europe, and unparalleled in its sophistication” (203). Although the True Freedom is not entirely the focus of all the chapters, the authors begin and end part 3 with the period of regent rule and republican government from 1653 to 1672. It was a time of g reat prosperity, giving the people of the Dutch Republic significant spending power. Pettegree and Weduwen state, “The True Freedom was thus a time when a rich culture could be richly enjoyed” (220). Chapter 9 explores this rich Dutch culture through poetry, theater, and literature. All these arts relied on and fueled the printing industry. The tenth chapter traces the role of artists in providing engravings for pamphlets and newspapers. The authors also examine Rembrandt’s book collection to explain
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how he “ended his life a solitary and diminished figure” (265). Pettegree and Weduwen shift to the international book trade in the eleventh chapter. Although titled “Bookshop of the World,” the chapter explores the book trade only in England, France, Germany, and Scandinavia. The authors demonstrate how the Dutch colonized the book trades in t hese countries in a variety of ways, from textbooks in France to Bibles in E ngland. The last chapter of the third part provides a broad survey of the collections in Dutch society. While ministers may have had modest collections, men like Johannes Thysius maintained substantial private libraries. Yet, the market in secondhand books made the art of collecting accessible to ordinary Dutch people as well. Part 4 turns to the end of the Dutch Golden Age starting in 1672. Chapter 13 delves into the printing of religious minorities, such as the Socinians, Catholics, and Jews, in the Dutch Republic. Built on trade, the Republic became a “polyglot nation” (323). Despite the banning of certain books, particularly t hose of the minorities, the Republic’s decentralized political structure made censorship efforts nearly impossible. Scholars’ publications and libraries are the focus of the fourteenth chapter. From jurisprudence and natural sciences to medicine and history, scholars wrote and collected books. Their writings advanced Dutch commercial prosperity and solidified Dutch identity. Pettegree and Weduwen argue, “In the Dutch Republic, with its many faiths and ideologies, history was a foundation stone of identity” (363). Despite the emphasis on trade and the role of the print industry in it in the Dutch Republic, the authors find a strange absence of an active business press. They claim the newspapers did not cover the nation’s commerce. However, individuals did place ads in newspapers and tradesmen did rely on a variety of professional books. The sixteenth chapter serves as this volume’s conclusion. It begins with the Dutch invasion of E ngland in 1688, noting the presence of a printing press on one of the fleet’s ships. The authors acknowledge the significant contributions of the Huguenots to the Dutch book industry after Louis XIV’s expulsion of them in 1685. It is in this final chapter that the authors provide any real discussion of w omen—only four pages out of a total of 407. They explain that “women clearly played an important role in the Netherlands as readers and consumers of the printed word, but evidence of this is far harder to retrieve than for men” (401). Pettegree and Weduwen identify three early eighteenth-century geopolitical events that brought about the decline of the Dutch economy: the Peace of Utrecht, the War of Austrian Succession, and the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War. The authors do not attempt to situate their work within any scholarly debates or in conversation with other historiographies so this book may not appeal to readers unfamiliar with Dutch history or the history of the book. Further, they assume certain knowledge on the part of the reader, such as other aspects of Dutch “predatory capitalism” (148). However, the brief timeline, ranging from
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1566 to 1713, near the back of the volume will be particularly helpful for nonspecialists. Despite the size of the book and seventy color illustrations, it is reasonably priced, making it fiscally accessible to a wide readership. The chapters are self-contained, so professors could readily assign them individually to undergraduate and graduate students in courses involving early modern Europe. Overall, this book tells the fascinating story of how Dutch people shaped the printing industry and how the printing industry shaped the Dutch Republic. Reviewed by Erica Johnson Edwards Francis Marion University
W. R. Owens, Stuart Sim, and David Walker, eds. Bunyan Studies: A Journal of Reformation and Nonconformist Culture. Number 22. Northumbria University, 2018. Pp. 164.
For students of seventeenth-century literature and religion, t here is an impulse to see two distinct and aesthetically distant periods. Taking a sort of structural cue from the title of Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside-Down, it’s easy to see—for instance—t he decline of the Cavalier ethos replaced by Libertine excess, or what T. S. Eliot diagnosed as a “dissociation of sensibility” that occurred in poetry a fter John Milton. Observing this contrast, for instance, we might oppose the serious, hopeful Anglicanism of George Herbert with the zealous and reactionary apocalyptic fervor of John Bunyan. As chronological and ideological poles of the seventeenth-century religious imagination, we follow the trajectory of Herbert’s Temple as he moves further and further inward, while from Grace Abounding to Pilgrim’s Progress, Bunyan and his protagonists keep g oing out, as his pilgrims’ travels resembles the progress taken by his pioneering piece of evangelical fiction that made him a new kind of literary celebrity. Bunyan Studies 22 refreshingly resists the tendency to see the years before Charles I death and a fter the Restoration of his son to the throne as aesthetically distant and unique. Rather, the political circumstances of the former deeply informed the latter, even if it provoked from its inheritors a need for ownership or revision. In particular, nonconformists like Bunyan saw poetry of the early Stuart reign not as monoliths to be admired, but clay to be molded through what Jenna Townend calls in her contribution, yoking the digital and corporeal technology, “cut-and-paste appropriative strategies” (59). In her essay and others, we find a precedent for our current technological imagination, a “cloud” so to speak, in a past where mediatory strategies could not be anything but physical. This says much about the character of late-century dissent, which assimilated a wide range of spiritual and literary practices. In addition to dissenters’ engagement with Herbert, this new volume takes on a variety of mediatory issues related to this special issue organized around “circulation, appropriation, and translation.” 265
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In concert, the essays teach us much about the religious present of Bunyan’s milieu and the ways its politically or theologically dissonant character nonetheless embraced a resounding spiritual consonance with their otherw ise combatant forebearers. The “re-” prefix resounds throughout the contributions: not only reformation, but also reappropriation, reclamation, rehabilitation, reproduction, and resistance. The first two essays by Helen Wilcox and Jenna Townend explicitly explore the reception of Herbert among late-century nonconformists. Wilcox’s “Voices and Echoes: Poetical Precedents from Herbert to Bunyan” shows that dissenters drew on, rather than rejected, Anglican predecessors such as Herbert and Abraham Cowley, but primarily by focusing on Hebraic translations or inspirations. Prominent dissenters such as Richard Baxter and Oliver Heywood as well as more obscure authors like Julia Palmer and Katherine Sutton turned to Royalist and Metaphysical verse “as a means of crystallising their most intense and enlightening spiritual experiences” (32). Wilcox locates a flexible sense of progressive and doctrinal assimilation that sometimes tweaks the original source in subtle ways. Townend’s “ ‘Sweet singer of our Israel: Psalms, Hymns, and Dissenting Appropriations of George Herbert’s Poetry” offers incisive close readings and comparative analysis to look closely at dissenting texts that included Herbert’s verse. In particular, she shows the surprising legacy of Herbert’s metrical rendering of “The 23 Psalme” through later adaptations and reproductions. Adaptations of Psalms “foster[ed] the creation of Dissenting devotional communities” (39), as appropriators “recogniz[ed] the capacity of psalms and hymns to focus both on the voice and heart of the individual believer, and to cultivate spiritual edification within a collective audience” (40). Again, Herbert’s language and reliance on individual belief is mobilized through a dizzying variety of texts to inform and create dissenting communities. And again, Herbert’s words are adapted and politicized to an alternate set of theological belief and liturgical, ecumenical ends. In particular, dissenters borrowed liberally from Herbert’s poems to “create a broader social meaning . . . through the effect of singing them in familial or congregational groups.” Herbert’s deeply personal verse is adapted for the collective, as “the ‘I’ of t hese hymns also becomes the spokesman for the outlook of an entire group” (57). Reading Townend and Wilcox, we can see an avenue for tracing the changing face of the seventeenth century through the strategic deployment of earlier poetry. Herbert’s poems, for instance, offered dissenters a model of individual spiritual inspiration while needing to be translated into a less erudite, more populist aesthetic. Sylvia Brown’s “Giving Away ‘Good Books’: Gifting Bunyan and the Reproduction of Dissenting Communities” and Xie Japeng and Su Yuxiao’s “Chinese Translations of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress” work together to show the travels of books by uncovering the networks they formed and w ere formed by. Brown
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follows surviving copies of Bunyan’s allegory as they passed through the hands of actors in “a web of social relationships” (64). Since by the nineteenth century, Bunyan’s book was generally seen not as dissenting rhetoric but as widely accepted Christian moral instruction, following its “progress” allows us to see mothers raising children, teachers rewarding apt pupils, and husbands wooing wives (such as the Baptist preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon). “As physical object,” Brown writes, “each copy of The Pilgrim’s Progress carries more than the story in it” (78). Much like the pilgrims in Bunyan’s spiritual allegory, copies of the physical text were “entangled agents,” part of “godly networks,” just as Bunyan himself was beneficiary of many gifted books that made his conversion possible. Japeng and Yuxiao track the progress of Bunyan’s work itself as part of a vast and complex moment when more permeable Eastern borders resulted in a globalized English literacy, finding forty-nine total works since William Muirhead’s first abridged translation appeared in 1851. Copies of Pilgrims Progress began circulating in the m iddle of the nineteenth c entury through American and European missionary efforts. After the imposition of a communist government in 1949, a new effort to disseminate biblical literature ensued. The most significant Bunyan translator of the nineteenth c entury, the Scottish evangelical William Chalmers Burns, worked on both a standard and classical Chinese version before other writers adapted his source text into editions more appropriate for differ ent dialects or even Chinese fictional traditions. Reading this exhaustive chronicle of translations over nearly two hundred years can be overwhelming, but it is also exciting for readers of Bunyan to see the different paths that Bunyan’s allegory has taken, and opportunities to track this cross-cultural exchange and its evangelical impulses. Written in lucid, accessible prose, this article would particularly be illuminating for undergraduates who encounter Bunyan in a survey to understand why Pilgrim’s Progress is not merely a literary classic but a phenomenon. Nathalie Colie’s “ ‘When Thou Dost Anneal in Glass Thy Storie’: Retelling Bunyan and Rehabilitating Dissent in Stained-Glass Windows” takes us from Bedfordshire to Edinburgh to illuminate brilliant stained-glass windows produced since 1900 that serve various purposes, including—in one exceptional case—commemorating victims of global conflict. Visitors to St. Mary’s Church in Harlington, Bedfordshire, can find an image of Bunyan “arrested for field preaching in this neighborhood” (104). As Colie resoundingly notes, the win dow offers a “new voice” to Bunyan through “glass, lead, and colour” (105). Colie’s work offers many rich comparisons to Townend and Wilcox, since Herbert’s poems w ere—to use her word—“rehabilitated” through l ater acts of allusion and inclusion, Bunyan’s image would find its place in the Anglican churches whose authority he challenged. For Colie, a word that might also be considered alongside “rehabilitation” is “remediation,” from the work of Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, which
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considers the representational strategies that new media allows. Bolter and Grusin theorize digital technology to think about the way mediation does not so much revolutionize as subsume, retaining the character and integrity of older media rather than replacing it. In the vivid example of stained-glass windows, we find visual art and the technologies of “glass, lead, and colour” working to do what Bunyan did in print. H ere, the ethical and evangelical character of Bunyan’s fiction becomes localized, moving from an allegorical idea to physical embodiment in specific civic and cultural spaces. If we take dissent (or Immanuel Kant’s “emergence from nonage”) to be an essential character for enlightenment, we see t hese essays locating its dissemination through material artifacts that each have an ideological purpose that, to adapt Brown’s phrase, carries more than the story with it. The essays in Bunyan Studies 22 do not engage much with the intellectual domain of media studies, and an understandable reason is that the new evidence of the legacy of Herbert and Bunyan is exciting and fresh. This evidence w ill certainly provide scholars of the period interested in viewing the Enlightenment as what Clifford Siskin and William Warner call an “event in the history of the mediation” w ill find many episodes worth thinking further through as moments in book history and the history of technology, or places where the subject of circulated, appropriated, and translated texts is the way that process occurs. Reviewed by Andrew Black Murray State University
Michael Edson, ed. Annotation in Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Lehigh University Press, 2017. Pp. 280.
As a physical object, this is a lovely book. The front and back covers consist of a black background, framed by a thin, bright orange ribbon. The front cover, behind a ticket-shaped rectangular space announcing the title and editor, is taken from the 1781 title page of William Collins’s Poetical Works, thoroughly annotated in the margins and center page by an anonymous reader. The cream-colored spaces of the Collins title page contrast elegantly with the darker enclosing background. Happily, the insides of the book, for the most part, achieve an equivalent value. The editor splits the contents into four sections: “Georgic Annotation,” “Nationalism, Antiquarianism, and Annotation,” “Varieties of Annotation,” and “Annotating the Canon.” The first chapter, “Annotating Georgic Poetry,” cowritten by Edson and Karina Williamson, analyzes the georgic form from John Philips’s “Cyder” to Charlotte Smith’s “Beachy Head.” The georgic, while extremely popular in the eighteenth century, is a genre difficult of definition. It can be seen as participating in quite two poetic traditions, didactic poetry (conveying knowledge and instruction) and loco-descriptive poetry (exemplified by Denham’s famous and influential prospect poem, “Cooper Hill”)—or, as one fluctuating between these two tendencies. Edson and Williamson find that annotation plays a significant role in establishing the georgic as a distinct poetic form—especially through the activity of tabulating allusions to Virgil’s Georgics. The section on Pope’s Windsor Forest skillfully demonstrates how annotation is capable of determining the poem’s modality as well as inflecting the poet’s reception: Warburton’s notes claim Pope as a classic in the tradition of the ancients, such as Virgil and Ovid. Wakefield’s emphasize the georgic status of the poem (even as they simultaneously questions this status), while Warton’s situate Pope as a British classic among such figures as Spenser, Drayton, and
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Milton. Edson and Williamson’s analysis works to elevate the note to a position nearly, if not in fact equivalent to the text itself. The first section concludes with William Jones’s chapter on William Falconer, a sailor turned poet turned lexicographer. His most famous poem, The Shipwreck, based upon the author’s personal misfortune in 1749, was widely popular and appeared in three separate editions. The poem is noteworthy because of its dense deployment of nautical terminology requiring heavy editorial annotation. Of further interest is how the poem’s commentary evolved over different editions into Falconer’s Dictionary of the Marine, a handbook of naval terminology that remained the standard reference u ntil the end of wind sail shipping. The second section contains three chapters. The first, by Jeff Strabone, features the curiously hyperbolic subtitle “How Robert of Gloucester Became the Founding Father of English Poetry.” Robert’s thirteenth-century Chronicle was afforded a critical edition by the Oxford antiquarian and scholar Thomas Hearne in the early eighteenth century. Treating the work as one of historical rather than literary value, Hearne provides copious annotation written in Latin. This linguistic choice, in concert with other paratextual elements, reveal Hearne to be presenting a Medieval text in classical terms, reflecting the general dismissiveness felt by most early eighteenth-century readers toward their “barbaric” past and Hearne’s effort to transcend this bias. However, later appropriations, such as in Johnson’s “History of the English Language” and Coleridge’s Christabel, reflect a change in literary and cultural taste. After midcentury, many readers began to embrace E ngland’s literary and linguistic Medieval heritage as part of its rich national bequest: tradition catalyzing the Romantic revival of the ballad and the notion of English nationhood itself. Robert’s Chronicle, of key importance to the eighteenth century’s understanding of its past, was eclipsed and eventually forgotten due to the nineteenth-century discovery and publication of Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Thomas Van der Goten’s chapter on Thomas Percy’s The Hermit of Warkworth and John Pinkerton’s The Bruce examines the similar territory of the role antiquarianism played in the formation of British nationalism. Van der Goten finds that the topographical annotation in these two pieces helped render a lost or forgotten landscape visibly legible. Alex Watson’s chapter on Robert Southey’s bizarre epic Madoc examines the annotation to suggest that this 1805 poem reflects a transitional moment in Southey’s evolution from a youthful radical to an older conservative. The third section, “Varieties of Annotation,” contains three chapters. David Hopkins begins with a brilliant reconsideration of “one of the major English literary texts of the eighteenth century,” Pope’s Iliad. He finds this t oday “a sadly neglected work,” in large part because it is not read in conjunction with Pope’s apparatus, especially its teeming annotation. Hopkins adroitly redresses this imbalance by surveying the notes topically, using them to dispel the many myths
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and misconceptions that have accumulated around the g reat translation over the past three centuries. To examine but a few examples, in light of recent scholars such as Joseph Levine’s who have attacked Pope’s erudition as “illusory” and his scholarship “nonexistence,” Hopkins emphasizes the poet’s careful sifting his notes the Homeric scholarship of his own day to reflect an accurate representa tion of the Homeric world and society. Furthermore, Hopkins uses the notes to demonstrate Pope’s deliberately considered and subtle choice of diction, aimed at bringing Homer alive to modern readers a poem as much as a translation— challenging classical scholar Richard Bentley’s snide dismissal, “It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer.” Tom Mason examines early Chaucer editions, including the 1687 revisal of Thomas Speght’s Renaissance version, as well as o thers by John Urry (1721), Thomas Morell (1737), and Thomas Tyrwhitt (1775–1778). He does not, however, proceed in what might be considered a comparatively linear. Rather, he parses the commentary found in them with references located in versions and editions of other poets. For example, collating a comment by William Dodd with an observation by Lewis Theobald on a Hamlet passage, “Sees what befell, and what yet may befall,” which Warton traces back to the Iliad, leads Mason to a look at Pope’s translation and Johnson’s Observations upon Macbeth, which itself enfolds a Dryden quotation within Shakespeare’s description of night in the Scottish play; Warton then returns to Pope’s note, which goes on to solicit Spenser. This dizzying assemblage is chronologically jumbled in the chapter at hand, yet, at its bare bones level, exemplifies what Samuel Johnson called a “genealogy of sentiment” in his preface to Shakespeare. The intertextual recommendations tend to be useful as well as impressive. Mason’s other examples are in their way quite fascinating and exhibit a careful reading of the authors displayed. He concludes by asserting the “general presence [of Chaucer] in eighteenth-century annotation.” This is an intriguing premise, one which, if substantiated by further evidence, would suggest a far larger influence by Chaucer on the century than has perhaps been previously acknowledged. Adam Rounce’s shapely and satisfying essay contends that Thomas Warton’s 1785 Poems on Several Occasions, devoted to Milton’s shorter verse (excluding the mini-epic and the closet drama), is “one of the most significant editions of English poetry in the eighteenth century.” Given that this period witnessed an explosion of new editions of English poems renders this a heady claim, especially when Warton’s lengthy headnotes and idiosyncratic methods of start and stop annotation are taken into account. Not only did this edition—in concert with Warton’s other projects—help facilitate a shift in the literary climate of opinion in mid-to late Georgian England, Rounce argues that it had an impact upon later editorial principles and procedures. Particularly innovative is Warton’s exploration of Medieval and Early Modern literary sources to trace the exuberance of Milton’s allusive diction—a critical activity that extends to a better apprehension
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of Milton’s epithets in his major works—as well as his “larger critical understanding of Milton’s influences, asesthetic [sic], and poetic technique.” While Rounce goes on to modify his praise by citing objections from other critics, ancient and modern, this reader was inspired to give Warton’s edition another, extended look. The book concludes with a section entitled “Annotating the Canon,” a title that seems hardly distinguishable from that of the preceding one. In any event, it commences with Mark A. Pedreira’s essay on the annotation of Zachary Grey upon Butler’s Hudibras. Samuel Johnson has observed, “Of Hudibras the manners, being founded on opinions, are temporary and local, and therefore become every day less intelligible and less striking” (Life of Butler). Grey, as an eighteenth- century editor, was chronologically much closer than later annotators, and hence his commentary, while not adjudicated by modern, “scientific” editorial methods, is invaluable to succeeding generations. Pedreira, however, chooses to examine Grey’s intended serv ice to his contemporaries. He specifically focuses upon Grey’s roles as a “scholar-editor,” literary historian, and literary critic. Wearing t hese hats, Pedreira contends, allows Grey to educate and inform midcentury Georgian readers of the classical sources found in Hudibras. In addition, Grey’s use of items such as A Collection of Songs contemporary to the poem that illuminate its historical context, while observations upon Grey’s critical dismissal of “monstrous Improbabilities” that may have tempted Butler satisfy the neoclassical dictum to maintain decorum and avoid “exorbitance.” Sandro Jung’s chapter on William Hymers and the editing of William Collins poems between 1765 and 1797 follows. Oxonian Hymers (b. 1758) emitted proposals for his Collins edition in 1783; however, his death in 1785 intercepted completion of his project. This effort appears to have gone largely unnoticed by later scholars; Jung examines an e arlier edition: John Langhorne’s of 1764, as well as Samuel Johnson’s (1781) and Anna Barbauld’s (1797) interventions, in light of Hymers’s unfinished manuscript, concluding that Hymers sought to contribute to the canonization of Collins by connecting him with the “Gothic” literary energies then coming into vogue with the more polished verse of English “classics” such as Milton and Pope. Barbara M. Benedict’s chapter concludes the volume. Taking a more expansive and general perspective, she examines the shifting functions of annotative practice in the eighteenth century, paying heed as well to other paratextual ele ments such as prefaces, epigraphs, indexes, and advertisements. She focuses specifically upon such examples as a midcentury edition of Gay’s Fables aimed at young people and Vicesimus Knox’s Elegant Extracts (1784), similarly intended for the moral edification of children, and others. Benedict’s analysis of the paratextual elements framing t hese works allow her to trace shifting attitudes from the mid-eighteenth c entury to the Regency era, from practical virtue to spiritual enfranchisement to an emphasis upon beauty as duty. (This last is but one
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step away from the famous Keatsian maxim, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty— that is all / Ye know on earth, and ye need to know.”) In conclusion, Edson’s collection w ill satisfy readers interested in eighteenth- century poetry, eighteenth-century editing of poetry, and the history and practice of annotation in general. In this respect, it performs an invaluable function, one that many eighteenth-scholars w ill wish to seek out. Reviewed by Anthony W. Lee Arkansas Tech University
Christiane Hertel. Siting China in Germany: Eighteenth-Century Chinoiserie and Its Modern Legacy. Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Pp. xiv + 258.
Siting China offers its readers a detailed introduction to the complex history of eighteenth-century chinoiserie as it emerged both in the visual and literary culture of Germany. More importantly, Hertel’s interpretation of major sites of Chinese-European hybridity makes a forceful argument for a critical revaluation of the German arts of chinoiserie. Although no German court had its own East India Company, chinoiserie— that is to say, the art of China, Japan, Persia, and India, and the European art it inspired in turn—became a dominant force in the rococo aesthetic in Germany. As a result, the German chinoiserie tradition was distinct from that in France and Britain. Rejecting the charges that without being seen to possess “a rational stake [in and by China] even of the most negative kind” (5), German chinoiserie was simply an exercise in “shallow escapism and courtly decadence.” Hertel explores the ways in which chinoiserie “made room for imaginative creations but also for reflection about cultural and historical difference” (3) and how it also concerned itself with German national and regional identities. In Siting China, Hertel concentrates on a select number of “sites” of interaction with chinoiseries in Germany to trace its arrival and impact in the eighteenth-century German states and its reception over the following centuries. In doing so she borrows voraciously from a plethora of different sources in a range of German media, as well as from British and Dutch literary and visual culture. Siting China is quite obviously impeccably researched, and Hertel marries together postcolonial and aesthetic theory in her criticism of architecture, interior design, decorative arts, portraiture, mural painting, prints, literature, and landscape gardening (among other art forms). The result is an innovative, sensitive, and convincing reading of German visual and material culture across three hundred years. Hertel’s approach differs from other work on German chinoiserie; she herself notes that current studies on chinoiserie in 274
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Germany tend to solely focus on German Sinophobia/philia in literature, rather than visual culture and chinoiserie as an aesthetic. In her introduction, Hertel outlines the four sets of concepts via which chinoiserie in visual culture was understood or seen to operate (and by extension through which it also participated in Sinophilia, and, later in Sinophobia). Each chapter explores one of t hose concepts, applying it in the analysis of one or two main sites of German interaction with Chinoiserie. Th ese chapters are in chronological order, beginning with the porcelain palaces of the early eighteenth century and ending with mid-twentieth-century literature that responds to eighteenth-century chinoiserie. The first chapter investigates superfluity and imitation in the porcelain collections of the palaces of Baden-Baden and Dresden. Here, chinoiserie’s appeal was in material excess, especially thanks to the discovery of hard-paste porcelain in the German lands at Saxony’s Meissen manufactory. This is evident in the mural of putti tossing china plates at Sibylla Augusta’s Rastatt Favorite Palace’s Blumenzimmer, which provides Siting China’s delightful cover picture. Such images reveal the allegorical potential of porcelain and played with the tension between its fragility and its expense. The second considers the “shifting frames” of chinoiserie over the course of the mid-to late eighteenth c entury at Hesse-K assel’s Wilhelmsthal and Wilhelmshöhe. Over this time frame, Hertel argues, chinoiserie’s orientalism became fused within neoclassicism. However, Hertel is also interested in the pairing of Africa with Asia (as well as in the contrasting of Asia and antiquity), as was the case in the design of Wilhelmshöhe’s garden village, Mulang. Mulang was from appearances a “Chinese colony” but initially operated as a “Moor colony,” and Landgrave Friedrich II seasonally employed three women of African descent who had moved from North America to Kassel with the Hessian auxiliary forces to live and work in Mulang with their children. The third chapter, “Afterlife: Romantic Translation in Chinois Dresden,” considers chinoiserie’s role as a mediator between the national/regional/local and the foreign on the one hand and between social classes on the other in early nineteenth-century Saxony. The chapter focuses on the Chinese Pavillion in Pillnitz, where Prince Johann met with friends to engage in a group translation of The Divine Comedy. Hertel identifies this period and the so-called Academia Dantesca’s mode of relating to chinoiserie as a prelude to Sinophobia and the racism of the German colonial mind-set. The final chapter, “Ancestry: Critical Gathering in Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar,” takes a different approach from t hose that precede it, being principally interested in the representation of German chinoiserie in a work of literature. Here, Hertel analyzes Mann’s references to chinoiseries in his 1939 fictionalized account of the aged Goethe’s reunion with the muse of his youth, Charlotte Kestner. Hertel discusses the imaginary Chinese ancestry imposed on Mann
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himself (by his friend, Agnes E. Meyer) and by Mann on Goethe in two extended inner monologues in Lotte in Weimar. Here, Lotte imagines Goethe and his hangers-on in a spectral vison as Chinese “grotesque cricketlike creatures” (150) around a porcelain pagoda. Hertel argues that in his dual pairings of Germans and Jews and of Germans and Chinese in Lotte in Weimar and elsewhere in his other writings, Mann’s “readings on China . . . fell for him on the side of political burden, oppression, and violence” (182). Hertel concludes Siting China with a discussion of Rococo, August Macke’s expressionist painting of 1912—t he final year of imperial rule in China. Rococo invokes the sites, figures, and shapes of German eighteenth-century chinoiserie; a w oman and a man in a conical hat next to a Chinese pavilion looking across a pond. Hertel points out that neither the c ouple nor the shepherd and his flock near them are reflected in the pond—instead, “both may well be the eighteenth- century creatures of the imagination of a modern park visitor who feels something is missing—or t here” (186). In this way, Rococo is (as Hertel argues in the introduction) “an elegiac witness to German chinoiserie’s long-lasting phenomenal status as a real fantasy” (9). Siting China is obviously not intended as an exhaustive catalogue of German chinoiserie; it is rather a collection of four reflexive essays with broad horizons. Despite this, as cliché as it may be to say so, Siting China is as sumptuously and beautifully illustrated as any coffee table book. There are some eighty-five black- and-white photographs and thirty-five color plate images. This level of illustrative quality befits such a serious study of chinoiserie in visual and material culture. However, while it was perhaps necessitated by the book’s format, the page layout—a wide outer margin with two unusually narrow columns of text— can at times make it slightly difficult to follow Hertel’s carefully constructed prose and unpick the thread of her arguments. Siting China offers not only what is quite evidently a major intervention in the study of German chinoiserie, but also a significant contribution to our understanding of chinoiserie as a phenomenon more generally. Reviewed by Stephanie Howard-Smith Independent Scholar
Bärbel Czennia and Greg Clingham, eds. Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century. Bucknell University Press, 2020. Pp. ix + 328. In her introduction to Oriental Networks, Bärbel Czennia warns the reader that “the network has always been a highly ambivalent image with positive and negative connotations, ranging from joyful participation to dangerous entrapment” (3). That warning is about the view that might be formed about various webs of connections of p eople, places, and events in a moral sense: global trade is welcomed by Adam Smith, but the slavery entailed in some of its aspects is lamented by William Wilberforce. However, that is not the only ambiguity surrounding the concept of network and networking. Already in the eighteenth century it was understood that the term could be applied to the structures of nonhuman entities—for example to cities and harbors in a complex transport system—as much as to groups of individuals connected in some activity. These ambiguities render the concept less useful than at first sight might appear: the contributions in this volume cover a wide range of subject matter, backed by in-depth scholarship, which are well worth reading in their own right and regardless of any conceptual straight jacketing. In the first section of the book the authors deal with trade between East and West in commodities, tea being the most prominent, but objets d’art gaining in importance as the craze for chinoiserie spread across Europe. Richard Coulton begins by exploring how the consumption of tea, drunk in China over millennia, became such a marker of British identity. Coming first through the Dutch East India Company to Europe, advertising its qualities was crucial to its widespread adoption and growing popularity in Augustan England. With Stephanie Howard Smith we move to ceramics and the mystery surrounding pug dogs. Although represented as originating in China with etchings of grandees attended by their pet pugs, European porcelain versions also existed. Chinese manufacturers soon learned to imitate Meissen figures of the dogs. Pugs thereby contributed to a complex exchange and mutual imitation between East and West. In 277
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her essay, Barbel Czennia takes us outdoors, noting that European plant collectors had long been searching for greens from the East, reputed among other t hings, to have medicinal value. Exotic plants became the rage in eighteenth- century England: Alexander Pope displayed a variety of them in his garden at Twickenham. L ater in the c entury, Warren Hastings, having returned from governing India, asks his agents t here to send him lychee, cinnamon, and custard apple seeds so he could create an Indian garden in his country estate. And Eastern objects also became the feature of garden landscapes; ornate statues of Hindu Gods were put up, rivaling the traditional classical statues to be found in the grounds of grand estates. The remaining essays in the book focus on the networking of people rather than networks that involve objects. Samara Cahill looks closely at the novels of Penelope Aubin. Aubin is shown to be something of an idealist, pitched against her rival in the realm of fiction, Daniel Defoe. H ere we are in the company of a writer who is not enamored at the spread of trade in luxury goods so much lauded by Adam Smith and David Hume. Instead Aubin relies on a Christian identity as the bulwark of national integrity. Christian redeemers w ill save the day turning the nation away from the immoral quest for material wealth that has become obsessive. Her characterization of Britain as a “hybrid” nation is surprisingly modern. Jennifer Hargrave shifts our attention to Robert Morrison, missionary in China. Without denying his connection to the proselytizing London Missionary Society and the East India Company (he was an employee), Hargrave highlights Morrison’s conversion to Chinese society and its culture. Through his scholarly interests, he befriends locals in a way not common to Western visitors to China. Concrete evidence of that commitment is in his founding of the Anglo- Chinese College with William Milne. We stay in China with Greg Clingham, who investigates the subject of the Macartney mission to Peking, 1792–1794, and the British plenipotentiary’s infamous decision not to kowtow to the emperor, said to have caused its failure. Clingham has uncovered evidence to show that the Chinese had decided not to engage in foreign trade ever before the British mission arrived. The mission could therefore never have succeeded. On the specific matter of the kowtow, the Chinese had agreed that it could be laid aside as a requirement in any case. Moreover, Clingham portrays Macartney as a skilled diplomat whose choice of gifts is aimed at putting the emperor on the highest possible pedestal as a connoisseur of Enlightenment science. The remaining two essays deal with Charles Lamb and the East India Com pany and Maria Graham. While Hargrave insists that Morrison’s distancing from the East India Company was based on genuine moral scruples, James Watt argues that Lamb’s resentment against the Honourable Company stemmed from a self-centered disappointment that he had not achieved sufficient status as a writer, hampered by the overwhelming workload he has to bear. Writing to
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Wordsworth, he complains that even when sleeping he is plagued by dreams of uncompleted business (171). In his essay on the South Sea House he seems to foretell the demise of the great trading empire which he reluctantly serves, albeit in a humble capacity. In the last essay in the book, Kevin Cope leads us into the world of “nearly forgotten” (221) Maria Graham. She is a true cosmopolitan, an extraordinary lady of various identities that begin in India where she accompanied her father. As well as the East, her globetrotting includes South America and Europe, but her early Indian experience colors the way she sees everyt hing, even the natural world. Mountains fascinate her (the sight of Table Mountain makes her speculate on the ethnic mix of the Cape): her narrative style is of the world traveler who has experienced e very kind of network on many continents. I have attempted in this review to indicate the many subjects covered in t hese essays. Oriental Networks is a richly researched and scholarly work that provides material for a g reat deal of further exploration. With their book written about Western experience of the East by Westerners, the editors plead for research approached from the opposite direction: by specialists with expertise in Eastern languages, literature, and cultures (24). Reviewed by Sir Malcolm Jack Clerk of the House of Commons (Retired)
Thomas F. Bonnell, ed. The Yale Editions of the Private Papers of James Boswell: Research Edition: James Boswell’s Life of Johnson: An Edition of the Original Manuscript in Four Volumes. Volume 4: 1780–1784. Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 454. Melvyn New, general editor of the Florida Sterne Edition and book review editor of The Scriblerian, has evoked legendary bibliographer Hugh Amory’s review of the Florida edition of Tristram Shandy in writing, “a competent reviewer of an edition must know enough to replicate at least some portion of the editorial and annotative work before rendering a judgment.” I have been editing The Annotated Rambler for more than fifteen years (with no end in sight); however, I can make no claim to replicating any portion of editorial duties to Boswell’s Life (although I have been reading it since 1984, have gone through it in full three times, and often listen to a spoken-word version when driving alone my car), let alone its MS version. Expertise for the latter falls to only a rare few h umans walking the planet that I know of: Bruce Redford, Elizabeth Goldring, Gordon Turnbull, and Thomas Bonnell. Thus, given my meager personal resources, it is a presumptuous task for me to review the volume at hand, the last installment of the Yale Research Edition of the MS Life. Nevertheless, I have been commissioned for the task, and, as Johnson observed when deliberating upon a title for his periodical essay series, The Rambler, as the now-standard Hill and Powell edition has it (1:202), “What must be done, Sir, will be done.” So be it. Before turning to volume 4, however, I feel compelled to mention, with honor and respect, Marshall Waingrow. He edited one of the most useful books in the correspondence arm of the Research Edition, The Correspondence and Other Papers Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson (2nd ed., 2001), one that allows us to consult the original letters from which much of the Life was drawn. This, along with the set of the MS edition of the Life, lifts the curtain behind which the cogs and wheels that went into Boswell’s massive creation. Waingrow edited the first volume of this set, and all later editors are indebted to him. He devised, with ingenious prescience, the protocols of the transcription system that w ere 280
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used in the succeeding three volumes. Volume 4 is testimony to the sustained power of his editorial acumen. Most respectable academic libraries w ill be likely to purchase this book, to complete the set begun in 1994. But why should students and academics want to make it part of their private collection? This question can be answered in a number of ways. Every reader who works with Boswell’s Life, or who is a serious student of it, cannot afford to ignore the four MS volumes, nor Waingrow’s edition of the correspondence. For starters (and for purposes of this review, focusing just upon the fourth volume), this book indisputably puts to rest the (unfathomably fierce—though I have my own theory) onslaughts mounted against Boswell’s biography by eminent Johnsonian Donald J. Greene. Greene’s claims are briefly summarized. Boswell, an inferior mind and lesser writer, largely just transferred his biographical narrative from his own personal notebooks. Hence, Boswell’s Life tells us more about Boswell than it does Johnson. And in the process of d oing so, per Greene, Boswell creates the myth, perpetuated later by Thomas Macaulay, of “Dr. Johnson,” the John Bull, Tory reactionary, who championed a “little E ngland” xenophobic insularity. Thumbing through the pages of the fourth MS Life, one is struck by how conscientious a writer Boswell in fact is. He does use his personal journals, but he uses them cautiously, checking them (along with the assistance of the magnanimous Shakespeare scholar, Edward Malone) against possible bias and distortion. Further, he copiously adapts materials from the friends and correspondents, subjecting these as well to the cautions of subjective interpretation. We have long known the assiduity with which Boswell corrected his text (see F. A. Pottle, The Literary C areer of James Boswell, Esq., 1929, 317–319); the MS edition of the Life demonstrates just how extensive and scrupulous this effort was. If the result does not confirm a wholly objective biography—and indeed, who has written one of these?—it demonstrates Boswell’s intention and effort to do so. Apart from the exorcism of Donald Greene’s ghost that continues to haunt the Life even today, t here are other cogent reasons why we should pay careful heed to this edition. Some of t hese include the m atter of deletions. One such may be found early on, at page 9. It was excised from a batch of recollections by Bennet Langton, placed near the beginning of volume 4 b ecause of Boswell’s absence from Johnson’s company for an extended time during this narrative period. The context is the topic of idleness and the folly of giving way to chimerical notions that obstruct study, such as the time of dining. Immediately following is this meditation on the proper time of year for engaging in particu lar activities: [A friend once attempting at philosophical refinement where some cucumbers w ere at supper expressed a doubt whether in our cold climates we should use them as being the growth of a warmer climate & not of ours they did not
282 1 6 5 0 –1 8 5 0 seem intended for us. Johnson, “I remember in my younger days I used to argue that a man should not walk with a stick, for if nature had designed he should walk with a stick he would have been born with a stick. Eat cucumbers Sir if you like ’em, del”] (4:9)
While this episode seems at one point congruent with the previous one left for inclusion in the final edition of the Life, on the proper times for eating, it is otherw ise jarring, dealing more with decorative seasonal differences rather than the main conceptual thrust, idleness. One sees h ere Boswell’s editorially scrupulosity in establishing a smooth and coherent narrative out of Langton’s larger farrago. However, we are fortunate to have Bonnell’s edition, for the reference to the seasons and human activity are explored differently elsewhere, such as in Rambler Idler 11 (see also Life, 5: index, “Weather and seasons”); this, like the topic of idleness (see, e.g., the title of his second periodical essay series, The Idler), was an important one to Johnson, and the specimen recorded in the MS Life merges with t hese Johnsonian topoi, tying an autotextual knot, if you w ill. Another interesting deletion may be found on Johnson and Boswell’s trip to Oxford, in 1784. They are accompanied by “two very agreeable ladies from America” (Life, 4:283). When the mother, Mrs. Beresford, revealed to Boswell that she was married to a member of the American Congress, Boswell cautions her against mentioning this to Johnson. This perhaps persuaded the company to simply listen. Johnson’s eloquence leads her to exclaim “ ‘How he does talk! Every sentence is an essay’ ” (285). In the original version, Boswell inserted a quotation from the first scene of Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens: He talked a g reat deal [which] I am very sorry; but I perfectly recollected that Miss Beresford was charmed; and though [MS 939] she did not exclaim so extravagantly as in the Play Then he would talk good Gods! How he would talk, she said to me “How does he talk./go on. E very>] but I am sorry I have preserved little of the conversation.” (MS Life, 4:201)
It is appropriate that Boswell excises this portion, for it was not uttered by Beresford nor Johnson. However, we are fortunate to have it b ecause of the resonance it has with Johnson’s literary taste. As Bonnell notes, the high praise bestowed upon the Rival Queens passage by Addison in Spectator 39, “What can be more Natural, more Soft, or more Passionate, than that Line in Statira’s Speech where she describes the charms of Alexander’s Conversation?” is behind the admiration. I further suspect that this dramatic moment likely is influenced by Dido’s verbal posture t oward Aeneas in books one and two of the Aeneid; if so, it likely heightens its beauty in Johnson’s intertextually expansive mind, a conjecture supported by Johnson’s love of “she-tragedies” as well as his verdict
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upon Lee as “this great author” in Rambler 20. As modern editors such as Stroupe and Cooke (1:214) note of The Rival Queens, it was played nearly every season from 1677 to 1863. Further, it is ornamented with verses from a favorite poet of Johnson’s, John Dryden’s “To Mr. Lee, on his Alexander.” Hence, despite its deletion, it serves us well as a glimpse into Johnson’s intellectual mind. The MS Life also permits identifications that w ere hitherto merely conjectural. For example, in 1784, Johnson is reported saying “An Authour of most anxious and restless vanity being mentioned ‘Sir’ said he ‘t here is not a young sapling upon Parnassus more severely blown about by e very wind of criticism than that poor fellow.’ ” J. W. Croker had conjectured the person to be Percival Stockdale, while L. F. Powell suggested Richard Cumberland. Because of the inscription “moi” next to the anecdote in the Boswell Papers, we now know it to be Boswell himself. The suggestion that the “Chief Justice—— , who loved a wench” and acquitted Bet Flint of theft is confirmed to be Justice Willes of previous conjectures. And Bonnell has offered identification of a figure that no one has hazarded to identify before. The “troublesome” “eminent foreigner” who made “many absurd inquiries” at the British Museum (Life, 4:14) is revealed to be either Louis de Boissy (1694–1758) or his son Lois Michel de Boissy (1725–1791) (see MS Life, 4:13n6). On the same page, Bonnsell usefully refers to a footnote in the Life (4:14n2) that enlarges upon the two stanzas of some doggerel by the Duke of Leeds that Johnson happened to memorize; the Life footnote enlarges upon the information found in the MS Life (4:14n4) but points to a further reference by Powell (Life, 4:478), rendering scholarly commentary on the stanzas nigh well complete. Such inclusivity is not always the case in the MS Life—if it w ere, the book might be infinitely amplified—but when it does happen, as here, the result is quite satisfying. At another point we are afforded a key to Johnson’s Midlands pronunciation (likewise found in David Garrick’s jocular mimicry: “Who’s for poonsh?”): Some time a fter this upon his making a remark which escaped my attention, Mrs. Williams and Mrs. Hall, w ere both striving to answer him. He grew angry and called out loudly, “Nay when you both speak at [once/woonce] once [MS 827] it is intolerable.” (4:77)
While perhaps insignificant in itself, the observation corroborates Boswell’s remark elsewhere: “such slight touches [render] a picture” (MS Life, 4:204). In sum, this is an invaluable book, one that should be of interest to Johnson, Boswell, the social, literary, and cultural world they occupied, and anyone interested in the processes of authorial composition. Reviewed by Anthony W. Lee Arkansas Tech University
Peter J. Aschenbrenner and Colin Lee, eds. The Papers of John Hatsell, Clerk of the House of Commons. Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2020. Pp. xiv + 230. The Papers of John Hatsell, Clerk of the House of Commons are introduced in a foreword by Sir Malcolm Jack, KCB, Clerk of the House of Commons, 2006–2011. That is followed by acknowledgments, a list of abbreviations, a stimulating introduction by the editors, and a note on editorial practices. The focus of the book, however, as the title suggests, is provided by Hatsell’s papers: selected correspondence and memorabilia. The volume concludes with a comprehensive Index. Many readers, though conversant with Hatsell’s Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons, may not have been previously aware of the wealth of interest and personal information in his letters and memorabilia which, as the editors note in their introduction, “complement the published works for which he was celebrated in his lifetime” and “offer a testament to Hatsell’s knowledge of high politics, which he shared with his readers through his observations on social and political change during the reign of George III” (16). Hatsell was clerk of the House of Commons from 1768 to 1820, though his deputy performed the work from 1797 onward (1). He retired with a generous financial settlement. Although the letters demonstrate his continued interest in the activities of the House and his insistence on exercising his right to decide on appointments to the clerk’s department (127–128), this situation was unprecedented in the Commons (6), and both the payment and conditions of tenure were, unsurprisingly, changed a fter his death (vii). The foreword places Hatsell’s career and writing into its political and constitutional framework—t he notion of parliamentary supremacy, though in that instance shortly before parliament’s authority was successfully challenged in the American colonies, the expulsion and reelection of John Wilkes on the bandwagon of “Liberty,” and the impeachment of Warren Hastings (viii)—though the letters and, sometimes compendious, memorabilia extend much more widely.
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The collection includes 138 of the 297 letters known to exist, and 62 memorabilia. The depth of scholarship and research that has gone into producing the collection is evident from the number of sources listed in the editors’ acknowl edgments and footnotes, and the breadth of their introduction. In the introduction, the editors cite Sir John Sinclair MP’s judgment, based on his thirty-one years of experience in the House of Commons, that Hatsell was enabled, on all questions of difficulty, to “solve any doubt that might have arisen,” and to display “a g reat deal of public spirit, and disinterestedness in a very trying situation” (5)—a standard that his successors remain committed to maintaining. The editors also offer insights into the four volumes of Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons, which deal successively with Privilege, Members and the Speaker, Lords/Supply, and Conferences and Impeachment (8–10). The majority of the letters are addressed to William Eden MP, a fellow M iddle Templar, and l ater Lord Auckland, Speaker Addington, u nder whom he “learnt the first rudiments of [his] Parliamentary knowledge” (4), the Clerk Assistant (John Ley), William Pitt the Younger, and Speaker Abbot (10). They cover a wide variety of subjects, sometimes controversial and sometimes purely social. The extensive footnotes, with which the editors supplement the letters, place the vari ous correspondents, and the events to which the letters refer, in context. The memorabilia demonstrate particularly clearly Hatsell’s involvement in high politics in the 1770s and 1780s, a period when he was also an active clerk of the House. As the editors note they “are also crucial for understanding Hatsell’s interpretation of the momentous political events through which he lived” (13). It is not feasible to detail here all the subjects that engaged Hatsell’s attention, but some examples should demonstrate the breadth of his interests. A number of letters reflect Hatsell’s occasionally leisurely approach to his profession. In 1768, in a letter to his deputy, he describes his proposed three-month journey through Europe (28), though his peregrinations did at least coincide with the Commons’ lengthy summer adjournment, and similar letters derive from his subsequent sojourns (33–36). Hatsell’s letters also help to demonstrate his committed approach to his responsibilities. In 1769 he wrote to John Wilkes, MP, to apologize for an embarrassing clerical error for which he admitted he was inadvertently the sole cause (29–30). And he shared the substantial emoluments he received from handling private bills—in fourteen years, a sixth of a million pounds—w ith his deputy (6–7). His letters also show that he was very conscious, and protective, of his rights—in particu lar, the nomination of Clerks (127–28). Hatsell had vast knowledge and experience of parliamentary procedure and his Precedents were widely consulted, including, among others, Thomas Jefferson (viin). His letters too contain advice on parliamentary procedure, which remains of interest today. In 1761, he wrote to Charles Jenkinson, MP,
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about the powers of the king in relation to adjournment (27), noting that “the King’s request that the House adjourn has never been refused, although Parliament can be recalled during prorogation” (ix). In 1796, he addressed Speaker Addington on the importance of established practice in procedure, and the requirement for vote to follow voice in any division (96–99). On international m atters, Hatsell wrote about the conciliation with America (42–48) and the loss of the American colonies, which he welcomed because it prevented the further enlargement of the patronage state (14). He also commented in several letters on the situation in France and the Napoleonic Wars (see, for example, 88–89, 91, 101–102). On domestic matters, Hatsell advanced complex proposals on using life annuities in the context of a forthcoming National Debt Reduction Bill (53–64). In a lighter vein, he recorded an anecdote about the respect in which Lord Nelson was held, explaining that when highway robbers realized whose coach they had s topped, they immediately rode off saying “no Man of Honour would attack Lord Nelson” (125). Hatsell also wrote about the difficulties of taxation, noting that “nobody . . . has Publick spirit enough to pay their money with alacrity, or even good humour” (111), a position which may not have changed much over the intervening years. Anyone interested in Parliament or more general events in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries cannot but feel exhilarated by reading Hatsell’s letters and memorabilia, even if some of his views make uncomfortable reading in more enlightened times. They w ill provide interesting new insights for both experts on the period, and for t hose less familiar with the momentous events of that time. In their introduction, the editors state that Hatsell’s “letters demonstrate not only the depth of his knowledge of the business of parliamentary politics, but also his profound understanding of politicians” and that “his Memorabilia help to demonstrate his ability ‘to discern the enduring constitutional significance of the political events in which he was closely involved’ ” (1). The Papers of John Hatsell is an erudite, entertaining, and profoundly interesting book. It is one that cannot but inspire readers to investigate further, events of which they might previously have been unaware. An unmissable read! Reviewed by Jacqy Sharpe United Kingdom House of Commons (Retired)
Deborah Heller, ed. Bluestockings Now! The Evolution of a Social Role. Ashgate, 2015. Pp. 254.
The exclamation mark in the title of this engaging and detail-rich nine-chapter edited collection calls attention to the book’s challenge to narrow definitions of the Bluestockings. The widely assumed definition of bluestocking is reflected in Wikipedia: A bluestocking is an educated, intellectual woman, originally a member of the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society from England led by the hostess and critic Elizabeth Montagu (1720–1800), the “Queen of the Blues,” including Elizabeth Vesey (1715–91), Hester Chapone (1727–1801) and the classicist Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806). In the following generation came Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821), Hannah More (1745–1833) and Frances Burney (1752–1840). The term now more broadly applies to women who show interest in literary or intellectual matters.
The first chapter, “A Copernican Shift; or, Remapping the Bluestocking Heavens,” by Deborah and Steven Heller, expands this definition by focusing on the concept of social role. Heller and Heller adapt concepts and methods from social network theory to process and organize the rich, dynamic, and occasionally confusing data related to Bluestocking affiliation. They argue that the Bluestocking phenomenon is broader than the name Bluestocking and the individual w omen typically identified as Bluestockings. Just as Copernicus removed the earth from the center of the solar system, Heller and Heller use social network analysis to depict a less Montagu-centric model of the Bluestocking universe. They show that the Bluestocking network developed not only as a result of a preexisting position in society, political leanings, or f amily connections but also very much due to shared interests. The Bluestockings w ere an “elective group” that “cut across primary groups created by clan and kinship ties, class and status, religious and party affiliations” and was shaped by “intellectual and cultural interests” 287
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(24–25). Another conception that Heller and Heller revise is about Bluestocking communication, which the authors contend consisted of both face-to-face conversation and mediated communication—t he latter having been often minimized in scholarship. The authors’ use of diagrams and methods not often found in literary studies is novel and visually persuasive. To chart the Bluestocking universe, they use a technique called “snowballing . . . , which looks first at the ‘core’ Bluestocking and their immediate associates and then looks to their associates’ associates and so on.” Thus by stressing the importance of and carefully studying the dynamics of “indirect interaction” (32–33), the authors show that the Bluestocking phenomenon was broader and more inclusive of interested individuals than is sometimes assumed. In chapter 2, “Bluestocking and the Cultures of Natural History,” Beth Fowkes Tobin challenges the strong association of the Bluestockings with the written word and with literary achievement. She notes that “we love to scoff at Dr. Johnson’s remark about Elizabeth Carter, who according to him, could ‘make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus, and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem,’ ” but our reaction to this apparently patronizing comment partly reflects our own biases about the lower value of activities within the domestic realm. Tobin thus focuses on the not-often discussed “intense and intimate engagement with art-making and collecting practices that required as well as produced knowledge about the natural world.” She wishes “to remind scholars and critics that the Bluestockings w ere not only skilled wordsmiths but w ere also skilled needleworkers, shellworkers, featherworkers, and apparently, according to Dr. Johnson, good cooks” (56–57). Tobin analyzes Elizabeth Montagu’s “Feather Room,” Mary Delany’s shellworks, and the work that took place at the Duchess of Portland’s Bulstrode as examples of serious l abor that required and helped to produce and refine knowledge of the natural world. The seriousness of their endeavors is captured in t hese women’s correspondence, for example Delany’s reference to the “toils of cleaning” shells in order to expertly prepare them to be used for decorative purposes (63). When present-day ideas about the divisions between disciplines are set aside, the Bluestocking contribution to knowledge about the natural world comes into sharp relief. In chapter 3, “Cosmopolitan Bluestocking,” Nicole Pohl expands the reference frame of the Bluestockings beyond Britain to trace the ways in which cultural transfer took place across geographic and cultural borders. Using correspondence and travel diaries, she explores in persuasive detail the Bluestockings’ international networks and exchanges, acknowledging “the special role played by the salon in forging an egalitarian intellectual culture that cut across divisions of rank, gender and nations” (71). Th ose international connections were enhanced by events such as the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which brought refugees to England, as well as by “cosmopolite merchants,” such as Montagu’s b rother Robert Robinson (1717–1756), who was a sea captain in the
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East India Company—as well as by the Germanic connections of the British royal family. While exploring the connections of the Bluestockings beyond Britain, Pohl also shows that they had strong British and Anglican identity and loyalties that prevented them from cultivating a radically cosmopolitan identity. In fact, the Bluestockings tended to view polite conversation partly as a patriotic instrumental for maintaining peace and liberty (86). In chapter 4, “The Sappho of Gloucestershire: Sarah Chapone and Christian Feminism,” Clarissa Campbell Orr invokes the ancient poet b ecause she dates the Bluestocking phenomenon to earlier than is conventional, using Chapone to “close several gaps in the historian’s understanding of the Bluestocking circle” (91). Campbell Orr takes a deep scholarly dive into two pamphlets published anonymously by Chapone, The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1735) and Remarks on Mrs. Muilman’s Letter (1750). In addition, she conducts a close reading of Chapone’s correspondence with Mary Delany, John Wesley, Samuel Richardson, and George Ballard. Her thought-provoking revised chronology highlights the importance of two institutions—t he English county and the dioceses—in facilitating network-building contacts (92). Chapone’s story also highlights the importance of Ireland and calls attention to a kind of feminism different than that of the other Bluestockings: “Chapone is important b ecause her feminism highlighted legal inequalities . . . and what undergirded her commitment to women’s rights was her theology” (95). In chapter 5, “John Burrows, Bluestocking Boswell,” William McCarthy reminds his fellow scholars that writing the history of the Bluestockings is still an open project. Within that project, McCarthy suggests, one of the main witnesses to consult would be “John Burrows (1733–1786), “close friend of Hester Mulso Chapone, tutor to Elizabeth Montagu’s nephew, guest at many a Bluestocking evening, and recorder of conversations he heard t here” (111). McCarthy issues a quest challenge to his fellow scholars: to keep looking for a missing folio that according to Burrows’s grandson contained records of conversations and anecdotes. To stimulate interest in the search, McCarthy reproduces an exciting fragment preserved in History of the F amily of Burrows: a “transcript” of a Bluestocking conversation that brings to life the personality of Montagu. This fragment makes Burrows appear in relation to the Bluestockings as Boswell was to Johnson. McCarthy thus hypothesizes that “if Burrows had outlived Montagu and been as indiscreet in publishing as Boswell was, we might know a great deal more about how evenings at Mrs Montagu’s went, listening in as brilliant t hings were said” (116). In this captivating and cleverly crafted chapter, allowing the fragment to speak for itself and captivate the readers, McCarthy certainly succeeds in persuading scholars that a search for the lost folio would be a worthwhile endeavor. Hester Lynch Thrale, or Hester Thrale Piozzi a fter her second marriage, is the subject of the next two chapters. She has been, however, a w oman often over-
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looked or minimized in Bluestocking studies. In chapter 6, “ ‘Thrale’s Entire’: Hester Lynch Thrale and the Anchor Brewery,” Michael J. Franklin uses a highly engaging and sometimes refreshingly ironic narrative style to tell the story of how Thrale’s unhappy marriage led to her involvement in the beer-brewing industry in the Southwark brewery that her husband owned. Franklin also studies Thrale relationship with Samuel Johnson, which was intellectually productive but also at times oppressive. Thrale responded to serious business errors made by both her husband and Samuel Johnson by taking the management of the brewery into her own hands. Thus Thrale was not only a w omen who was nearly constantly pregnant during her childbearing years but also one highly capable of action in the realm of business and industry—rescuing the brewery from financial ruin and expanding the association of Bluestocking to include practical impact in the real world. When, after her husband’s death, she married in 1784 the Italian musician Gabriele Piozzi, Hester found love, as well as creative and intellectual freedom from the imposing figure of Johnson. Franklin concludes with a heartwarming description the happiness that he infers this strong woman enjoyed following the death of her first husband: In 1795, Hester returned to the beauties of the Vale of Clwyd; at Brynbella, the macaronically named villa they built near her ancestral home of Bachegraig, she lived contentedly with her caro sposo. Piozzi was now “Thrale’s Entire” and her loving sheet-anchor to ride the storms of class and religious prejudice. She and Gabriel loved the wines of the Veneto, but we know from the Barclay Records—a regular order of eleven dozen bottles sent in crates—that “Fiddle” and her talented fiddler enjoyed an occasional glass of porter as Hester reflected upon the triumphs and tribulations of the Anchor brewery. (137)
In chapter 7, “Hester Thrale Piozzi, the Bas Bleu, and the Theatre,” Felicity A. Nussbaum explores what happened when Thrale Piozzi left b ehind the business of the beer brewery (which was ironically build on the site of the old Globe theater) a fter the death of her first husband and became involved in the theater (which she had not been able to even regularly attend during her first marriage and years of intensive child bearing). The Blues snubbed Thrale Piozzi due to her Italian catholic marriage, but Nussbaum also points to Thrale Piozzi to demonstrate that the Bluestockings’ involvement in the theater was more extensive than is often acknowledged. Nussbaum contends that “creative and intellectual w omen often shared intense social and professional interactions with actors, actresses, and the theatre during the later eighteenth century, and that t hose bonds reflect a shift in the importance of the theatre, as well as the growing wish of many women writers to associate themselves with contemporary celebrity along with lasting fame” (142). She concludes that “Thrale Piozzi represents an important transitional figure in her relationship to the theatre as the Bluestocking salon culture shifted from the ‘amicable collision’ of conversational exchange to greater
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public notoriety” (155). At the same time, Nussbaum explores Thrale Piozzi’s deep ambivalence about the public exposure and fame facilitated by the theater. In chapter 8, “Sisters Across the Centuries: Hannah More and Grace Irwin,” Patricia Demers imaginatively brings Hannah More (1745–1833) into dialogue with the Canadian novelist Grace Irwin (1907–2008). The two unconventional women, separated from each other by almost two centuries, both inventively found ways to do meaningful work within a male-dominated context. Both were energized by their protestant faith, and both w ere intellectually accomplished in how they managed to enact t hose beliefs in their earnest attempts to make a contribution to and reform society. In the section of the chapter titled “a sisterly salon,” Demers creatively narrates an i magined conversation between these two impressive women: “In an olive grove of their own devising, possibly a shaded bower in a cathedral close, I suspect that Hannah would start the imagined conversation, remarking on the outlooks they share” (172). Back from the time machine, Demers is “left to wonder about the mark of More and Irwin in the larger phenomenon of modernization” (173). She concludes that “what sets More and Irwin apart as citizens of their times is their overriding zeal to improve and serve, their engaged public stance as believers and doers” that transcends self-interest (174). Thus Demers’s chapter highlights the enduring social impact of the Bluestocking mind-set. In the concluding chapter, “Bluestocking Work: Learning, Literature and Lore in the Onset of Modernity,” Gary Kelly expands our understanding of who was a Bluestocking and demonstrates the relevance of the Bluestocking identity and of Bluestocking work to the present. While forward looking, Kelly’s chapter situates “work,” “learning” and other key concepts in the eighteenth-century context in a manner that works against anachronistic thinking and bias. For example, we should not take into account only what came to be considered as “high” literary achievements when it comes to assessing Bluestocking work. Kelly concludes that “inevitably, women from the Bluestockings to now have aimed to participate in modernization and shape modernity, in various and contending interests. Among the many potential meanings of Bluestockings now is the importance and value of learning, literature, lore and work of all kinds” (208). Altogether, the essays in this vibrant, extensively researched, well theorized, and innovative collection are energizing for learning and work. In t oday’s often divisive intellectual and political culture, one can draw inspiration from the idea that being a Bluestocking devoted to meaningful work may still be possible as an individual aspiration, not just as a product of class or social situatedness. Reading the essays in this collection made me want to participate in an enduring Bluestocking culture—which speaks to the persuasiveness of the book’s “Bluestockings now” concept. Reviewed by Gefen Bar-On Santor University of Ottawa
Eileen Hunt Botting. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in Frankenstein. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. 180.
Eileen Hunt Botting, professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, has been one of the leading public intellectual commentators during the COVID-19 pandemic. Early to media coverage of the pandemic, Botting published an op-ed piece in the New York Times (March 13, 2020) on Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826), a novel about an apocalyptic plague that ravages the global population. Further, as reported by Elyssa Cherney, Botting “spearhead[ed] the faculty opposition” to Notre Dame’s “invasive” measures and “rigid” position on excusing faculty who objected to returning to in-person classes at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (Chicago Tribune, July 1, 2020). As Botting argued, “Notre Dame isn’t a bubble. No campus is a bubble. Every thing we do will have consequences in the wider community” (quoted in Cherney). Botting’s public commentary focused on the ethical and political dimensions of relationships among individuals, the family, and the “wider community.” Her scholarly publications demonstrate t hose same investments while revealing the startling relevance of early modern political theory to the most pressing concerns of the twenty-first century. Botting’s career has progressed through a series of interlinked studies of the political theorization of women, children, and the family. Her first book, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (SUNY University Press, 2006), traced the significance of the family as a politi cal unit in Burke, Rousseau, and Wollstonecraft; Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights (Yale University Press, 2016) shifted focus from the family specifically to w omen; the current title u nder review, Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child (2017), uses Frankenstein (1818), written by Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, to explore not only the political identity of children, but also fraught debates about what constitutes “human” and “justice” in the twenty- first century. In Botting’s most recent book (Artificial Life After Frankenstein, 292
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Penn Press, 2020) she continues to develop her arguments about posthuman justice, again using Frankenstein’s Creature as a lens. Throughout her c areer, Botting has used the Wollstonecraft-Godwin-Shelley family of political thinkers as a touchstone for exploring larger issues of rights, citizenship, and the limits of the h uman. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child shows that Botting’s measured, logical, stepwise scholarly approach has produced a truly revolutionary intervention in the understanding of, and potential responses to, posthuman justice, speciesism, and cosmopolitan belonging. Botting’s background in political philosophy, and particularly her expertise in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, gives her particu lar insight into the intertwining of fiction and political theory in the work of Wollstonecraft’s daughter. Botting’s writing can also be a lot of fun. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child begins with a preface in which Botting recalls her childhood experience in the 1970s watching the “Creature Double Feature” on weekend TV and imbibing a lifelong fascination with the isolated monster we now think of as Frankenstein’s Creature. The preface and acknowledgments follow Botting’s fascination with the Creature from childhood into adulthood, the birth of her son, and the experience of motherhood. This move both personalizes the political philosophy bookended by these descriptions of family experience and tacitly recognizes the importance of micro-histories to correcting historical and archival erasures. Botting also makes a convincing case for using the lens of political philosophy in addition to the more usual science-fiction genre theory to explore the stakes of this modern myth (4). Some of Botting’s most important innovations are the concepts of ungendered mothering; nonreligious conceptualizations of the h uman; and the misopedia (hatred of c hildren) of the tradition of social contract theory that extends from Hobbes through leading Enlightenment political thinkers such as Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. The great problem of social contract theory, Botting argues, is that it centers the male political citizen as a rights b earer while ignoring children. This erasure of children has particularly cruel consequences for children who are multiply marginalized, such as stateless orphans, the disabled, or the posthuman child. In short, Frankenstein’s Creature embodies all these marginalized children—his superhuman physical strength, sense of injustice and deprivation, and ultimate murderous violence speak back to the historical silence on children’s rights. Chapter 1 focuses on the “specter” of the stateless orphan in the political thought of contract theorists from Hobbes to Shelley’s own day. This is by way of showing that, while Shelley was truly a literary thinker, she was deeply (though not uncritically) informed by her parents’ political theories and their own extensive reading in contract theory. Th ere is something centrally, scintillatingly provocative about excoriating some of the greatest male thinkers in the Western canon for denying the rights of children (chapter 1) while upholding two
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omen (chapters 2 and 3) who couldn’t even vote in their lifetimes as the defendw ers of human justice. Yet Botting is not being provocative for provocation’s sake—her conclusions follow logically, at times even drily, from the textual analysis of classics of political theory such as Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), Locke’s First and Second Treatise of Government (1690), Rousseau’s Second Discourse (1755), and Kant’s “What Is Enlightenment?” (1784), “Theory and Practice” (1793), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Moving from the seventeenth c entury into the eighteenth, Botting argues that for Rousseau, Godwin (Shelley’s father), and Wollstonecraft, “educational, economic, and political systems” make people “bad or monstrous”—a ll use the “metaphor of the monster”—yet it is only Godwin, in Political Justice (1793), who “identified bad government as the underlying cause behind the infection of bad education” (54). (Botting’s pre-COVID-19 use of “quarantine,” “diseased,” “corruption,” and “infect” in this section shows how logically eighteenth-century political philosophy lends itself to commentary on twenty-first-century political reality.) Finally, Botting defends the political value of literature arguing that that mode of writing can dramatize counterfactual narratives more expeditiously than can formal political theorization. Chapter 2 returns to Botting’s professional roots with an overview of Wollstonecraft’s philosophy of children’s rights—“the very first of its kind in the history of Western political thought” (63). Anyone familiar with Botting’s extensive scholarship on Wollstonecraft will appreciate this chapter’s pivot from discussing Wollstonecraft’s importance to the theorization of women’s human rights to her centrality to the theorization of c hildren’s rights. As Botting argues, “Wollstonecraft’s theory of children’s rights as indivisible from h uman rights is the most radical dimension of her political theory” and is “her most dramatic and insightful yet unsung contribution to the history of political thought” (87). This clarion call makes way for the even headier implications of chapter 4. Chapter 3 charts the “cascading” thought experiments that Shelley used to work through the rights of the child in Frankenstein. This chapter is the engine of Botting’s argument. It is tightly structured to show the interlocking of five thought experiments on deprivation and the rights of the child that Frankenstein models: “Motherlessness,” “Lovelessness,” “Mere Survival,” “Total Abuse,” and “The Scope and Limits of a Child’s Right to Love.” H ere, Botting engages modern and contemporary political philosophers such Hannah Arendt, Martha Nussbaum and Rosalind Dixon, and S. Matthew Liao, a theorist of children’s “right to be loved” whom Botting appears to view as her primary contemporary opponent to her theorizing of “children’s right to love” (93; emphasis in original; see also 15–16, 114, 125, 130–131 for further critiques of Liao). But it is chapter 4 that most spectacularly establishes Frankenstein’s Creature as a test case for the most pressing ethical concerns of the present day, including the rights of the disabled, the stateless, the nonhuman, and the posthuman
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(among them, the “Frankenbabies” of genetic modification). Botting rejects “pseudo-u niversal reasoning” in order to identify sympathy as a posthuman political issue and to valorize “interspecies care” (172–174). Her overview of eugenics, CRISP-Cas9 technology, speciesism, and the definition of cosmopolitanism in chapter 4 point to this chapter as a major intervention in the theorization of “posthumanitarian and post-speciesist justice” (175). Ultimately, Botting uses the case of Frankenstein’s Creature—an abused child—to explore and expand Nussbaum’s “frontiers of justice” (142) and to expose the “liminal place of children in Western legal systems” (157). Botting shows that while Shelley had no intention of writing a formal political treatise, she did something much more important. Shelley tacitly posed a question at once startlingly fundamental and startlingly novel: What are our political obligations to the most vulnerable? For Botting, the answer is that the “wider community” of humans (Botting qtd. in Cherny) is politically obliged to reject the “imperial implications” (162) of the “human.” Reviewed by Samara Anne Cahill Blinn College
Lee Jackson. Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football, How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment. Yale University Press, 2019. Pp. 320. Much of what we t oday recognize as modern has its roots in the Victorian Age. The Victorians experienced massive social and cultural changes stemming from the Industrial Revolution, the rise in urbanization, increased global trade, and advances in communication and transportation technologies, among many others. In Palaces of Pleasure, Lee Jackson traces how the Victorians created mass popular entertainment as we know it. Jackson’s book not only recounts how popular entertainments evolved, but also looks at the underlying social forces that shaped Victorian popular culture. There was often conservative backlash to new entertainments, including fears that the divisions between classes would erode, that w omen would be tempted to become “fallen,” and that unregulated entertainment would pose threats to older, more w holesome institutions, such as the venerable neighborhood pub. Jackson refers to this impulse to regulate as “utilitarian social engineering” (3), and it affected all of the new nineteenth- century entertainments in some way. Intrepid entrepreneurs, however, found ways to entertain their audiences. Most of t hese entertainments developed in London where the double phenomena of a rapidly increasing population and an expanding m iddle class led to more people with disposable income than ever before. The ways those people found to entertain themselves impact our popu lar culture still today. The book is divided into eight chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion. The first four chapters focus largely on indoor amusements that grew out of pub culture. In t hese chapters Jackson examines the development of gin palaces, “free-a nd-easies” (an intermediary between pubs and musical theaters), music halls, and dancing rooms. The next three chapters focus on outdoor and large-scale amusements, such as pleasure gardens, international exhibitions, and seaside attractions. The final chapter on the development of football (or soccer) is also about an outside entertainment, but it stands on its own in many ways, 296
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and it is indeed an exceptionally illuminating chapter. Jackson weaves through all the varied chapters a common narrative of a society struggling to create new entertainments in novel economic contexts and radically changing social realities. Jackson starts his study with a chapter on the gin palace, an apt choice to begin with because it highlights so many of the anxieties spurred by the new mass entertainments of the nineteenth c entury. Though the rise of the gin palace began in the eighteenth c entury, it was a source of great controversy in the 1820s and 1830s. Jackson argues that the drinking of gin posed an ominous threat in the minds of traditionalists who favored pub culture: gin houses featured easy access to and from the street, allowed men and women of all social classes to mix freely, had little comfortable seating, and served drinks meant to be consumed quickly. This was a far cry from the idea of a public house where t here was ample seating, tables and rooms to facilitate social segregation, and a culture of leisurely drinking. Jackson explains that the opposition to gin houses “represented a backlash against modernisation and commercialisation” (8) because they “were more like a retail shop” (9). In much the same way, both music halls and dancing rooms grew out of older pub traditions, and they also faced opposition due to their commercial nature and the notion that they encouraged sexual immorality. Yet it was not just conservatives nostalgic for pub culture who viewed t hese new entertainments with suspicion. Progressive nineteenth-century reformers, especially those in the temperance movement, often used legal maneuverings in Victorian England’s byzantine licensing system to shut down entertainment venues. In exploring the oppositions to t hese new entertainments, as well as the way that the demands of the populace made them profitable enough for entrepreneurs to overcome all obstacles, Jackson shines a light on many of the larger social and cultural changes taking place throughout the c entury. Jackson skillfully demonstrates how popu lar culture is never just mere entertainment, but instead reflects the conflicts and anxieties of the broader culture. The second half of the book is devoted to outdoor and large-scale entertainments. The chapter on pleasure gardens records how a Georgian-era phenomenon was essentially repurposed for Victorians, with elements of the m usic hall and dance room influencing this evolution. Jackson also uses this chapter to point out the changing sexual mores from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century, as many of the dimly lit areas of the pleasure garden were frequented by lovers—a phenomenon tolerated in the eighteenth century, but loudly decried in the nineteenth. Yet perhaps the best known of t hese large-scale entertainments are the g rand exhibitions, including the several iterations of the Crystal Palace, that remained internationally popular for over a century. These exhibitions reflected not only the growth of the global capitalist system and the economic and military might of the British Empire, but also a desire to
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provide both entertainment and education for a swelling urban population. Once again, Jackson insightfully links social developments with popu lar entertainment. The final two chapters, on the development of seaside tourism and soccer, strongly support Jackson’s assertion that many of the popular diversions so familiar to us t oday have their roots in the Victorian era. The chapter on seaside tourism expertly demonstrates how a pastime practiced for ages, swimming in the sea, rapidly became commercialized during the nineteenth century. Jackson notes how this industry benefitted from so many of the changes that the nineteenth century brought. He observes that “two transport revolutions— the steamboat and then the railway—slowly but surely democratised the seaside experience” (185). The seashore became a refuge for both the wealthy and the working class. Like so many other entertainment developments in the century, the erasure of class barriers became an object of g reat consternation, and the practice of swimming nude—a lways accepted in previous times—became a scandal that necessitated gender segregation and the development of “bathing machines” to shield swimmers from view. In addition to swimming, seaside communities began to develop other attractions along their coasts, such as aquariums and pleasure piers packed with amusements. By the beginning of the twentieth century, seaside resorts offered many of the same tourist experiences that we enjoy today. Jackson concludes his work with a chapter on the development of football, examining both the development of the game with its rules and leagues, and also its emergence as a business. The rules for football were first codified at elite preparatory schools, and graduates of t hese schools put together the first leagues. As the sport gained popularity, teams quickly learned how much money t here was to make by charging admission. Winning was an important part of building a fanbase, and teams quickly realized the advantages of using professional players. The players clubs brought in, however, w ere often working-class, and once again believers in social hierarchy w ere shocked at the thought of laborers rubbing shoulders with the upper classes. As the number of laborers playing soccer continued to grow, the game became more professionalized. Lee notes that amateurism “meant much less to new clubs with more working-class roots—or at least when the managing committee consisted of mill o wners, lawyers, accountants and other business-minded professionals who cared more about results than abstractions of gentlemanly conduct” (231–232). As with so many other popular entertainments in the nineteenth c entury, the development of football was driven by the profit to be made from the new urban masses, and it blurred the lines of class distinction. What began as an amateur amusement at the beginning of the century was a big business by the end of the Victorian era, and it had grown into a sport and a business model now familiar the world over.
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Jackson’s study expertly demonstrates how popular entertainments w ere s haped by broader social influences, and it is a valuable study for any scholar working in the fields of nineteenth-century studies, popular culture, or business history. The nineteenth c entury was a time of change, and the entertainments that people enjoyed were part of the economic developments of the c entury. The century began with pub culture, amateur sports, and localized entertainments, but it ended with mass entertainments—music halls and dancing rooms for large numbers of p eople, international expositions, and sports leagues with large crowds and professional athletes. Jackson succinctly states his argument in his conclusion, saying “The bustling, densely populated cities of the industrial revolution and a burgeoning consumer culture created a vast potential customer base for purveyors of goods and serv ices, including entertainment” (246). The industry they created resulted in the first forays to provide entertainment for very large numbers of p eople, and it is an industry that continues to grow to this day. Palaces of Pleasure does more than just record how Victorians amused themselves, it tells the story of the rise of mass society, of capitalism, and of a new world where the thirst for entertainment is insatiable, and the supply infinite. Reviewed by James Hamby iddle Tennessee State University M
John M. Gingerich. Schubert’s Beethoven Project. Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xvi + 358.
During the last four to five years of his life (1824–1828), Schubert composed a series of multimovement instrumental works in genres often associated with his famous contemporary, Beethoven. The impetus driving this venture, according to John Gingerich, was Schubert’s desire to establish himself as a serious composer in the eyes of the Viennese public, and one whose gifts w ere not l imited to the writing of mere songs, for which he was already quite well known. All in all, Schubert completed fourteen works in this so-called “Beethoven Project”: six piano sonatas (A minor, D. 845; D major, D. 850; G major, D. 894; C minor, D. 958; A major, D. 959; and B-flat major, D. 960), two piano trios (B-flat major, D. 898 and E-flat major, D. 929), three string quartets (A minor, D. 804; D minor, D. 810; and G major, D. 887), a string quintet (C major, D. 956), an octet (F major, D. 803), and a symphony (C major, D. 944). Although octets and string quintets are not commonly associated with Beethoven (notwithstanding his Wind Octet, Op. 103 and String Quintet, Op. 29), Gingerich speculates that Schubert wrote them b ecause he wanted to take advantage of opportunities for performance offered in the chamber music concerts arranged by the well-k nown violinist Ignaz Schuppanzigh (1776–1830). The title of Gingerich’s book, Schubert’s Beethoven Project, is therefore accurate only up to a point. How did all this start? What led Schubert to embark on this enterprise? Although Gingerich takes 1824 to be the turning point for the composer’s new venture into large instrumental forms, Charles Fisk takes it to begin in late 1822 with the composition of the Wanderer Fantasy and the Unfinished Symphony (Charles Fisk, Returning Cycles, University of California Press, 2001). As Fisk notes, this beginning coincides “at least approximately” with the onset of the composer’s illness, although he is reluctant to go so far as to claim that the composer was led to the venture b ecause of his syphilitic infection, despite the fact that the deeply unsettling mood of the Unfinished Symphony, with drama being 300
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brought to a new height and intensity in terms of the composer’s own musical outlook, would make such an idea an attractive one to contemplate (Fisk, 60). Indeed, one suspects that Gingerich also sees something of Schubert’s response to his illness in his Beethoven Project, for he devotes an entire chapter in the book to the year 1823—which he calls the “year of crisis”—when Schubert was hospitalized because of his illness. This chapter immediately precedes the discussion of the m usic that occupies much of the rest of the volume, thus serving implicitly as its essential biographical foundation. Indeed, as Gingerich notes, following the onset of his illness, Schubert began to incorporate referential bits from his songs about death into his string quartets. Of the seven chamber works that Schubert wrote during that time however, Schuppanzigh presented only three: the A-minor quartet, the Octet, and the B-flat-major piano trio. To Gingerich, this “paucity of performances” (77) is indicative of Schuppanzigh’s “misgivings” about Schubert as a composer of chamber music (73). Gingerich is being somewhat unfair however, for a count of three out of seven possible performances of Schubert’s chamber music by Schuppanzigh cannot reasonably be considered to be small, not to mention Gingerich’s ignoring of any considerations of programming and other factors pertaining to local conditions that Schuppanzigh would have had to consider. Nevertheless Gingerich seeks to bolster his claim by way of a quote from composer Franz Lachner (1803–1890), made many years a fter Schubert’s death, about Schuppanzigh’s advice to Schubert (after he had heard a reading of the D-minor quartet in Lachner’s apartment in early 1826) to limit himself to writing songs. Even if it did actually occur, that incident does not explain the fact that the following year (1827), Schuppanzigh included Schubert’s Octet and the B-flat-major piano trio in his concerts. If Schuppanzigh was unenthusiastic about Schubert’s string quartets, he did not appear to feel the same way about the composer’s other chamber works. In the chapter on the A-minor quartet, where he intermingles history with analysis, Gingerich hypothesizes that Schuppanzigh accepted the work for per formance because, unlike the two later quartets, Schubert’s h andling of sonata form in the first movement was “conventional” (105), that it was “designed to reassure rather than amaze” in order to show that the composer was capable of managing a form that Beethoven had made very much his own (106). Whether or not audiences of Schubert’s day actually listened to music in this structural way as a means of estimating a work’s quality Gingerich does not say. He does acknowledge however, by way of citing Scott Burnham’s work on Adolf Bernhard Marx (whose main writings on sonata form had relied mainly on Beethoven’s piano sonatas for examples) that “the force of Beethoven’s precedent” in analytical terms began only in 1845—twenty-one years after the premiere of Schubert’s A-minor quartet (A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and Method, ed. Scott Burnham, Cambridge University Press, 1997, 106).
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Schubert was of course influenced by Beethoven, not least in the Octet which he modeled on the older composer’s popular Septet, Op. 20. To Beethoven’s unusual instrumentation of violin, viola, cello, double bass, clarinet, bassoon, and horn, Schubert added a second violin to create a complete string quartet within the Octet. He further copied Beethoven in having not only the same number of movements—six—but also the same types of movements arranged in the same sequence. In emulating Beethoven in such a close fashion, Schubert was clearly indicating to his audience—especially since they would have known Beethoven’s Septet well—that he was undaunted at being compared to his great predecessor. As Gingerich argues, Schubert even sought to out-do Beethoven in his Octet, by giving the slow introductions to the first and last movements a weight and seriousness that the corresponding introductions in Beethoven’s Septet lack. Nonetheless, much as Schubert had wanted his contemporaries to compare him favorably with Beethoven, his request of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde to sponsor the premiere of his great C-major symphony was not well received. The symphony was premiered only in 1839 in Leipzig, over a decade a fter Schubert’s death and only upon the urging of both Schumann and Mendelssohn. Th ese details Gingerich recounts in a long chapter that serves as a preamble to an analytical discussion of the symphony’s first movement which forms the next chapter. In his discussion of the symphony Gingerich pronounces the work “heroic” and makes heavy weather of the label because certain traits of the first movement’s coda recall the corresponding codas of some of Beethoven’s “heroic” period works, such as the Eroica, and the fifth and seventh symphonies. Gingerich’s comparison here, which constitutes an attempt to draw Schubert into Beethoven’s highly idiosyncratic realm, is surely an overreach. The practice of a composer using other composers as models has been and, in all likelihood, w ill always be, an essential part of what composers do. Such a demonstration of influence can speak for itself without the need to beggar or exaggerate any essential significance. Considering the first three Beethoven Project piano sonatas, Gingerich discusses their connection to Beethoven’s similar works largely in terms of the roles such works played in domestic m usic making in 1825–1826, when Beethoven was still alive and D. 845, D. 850, and D. 890 were being composed. Beyond pointing out that Schubert adopted the four-movement plan favored by Beethoven, Gingerich says little regarding musical links between the two composers in t hese works. He does go into quite a bit of detail regarding publication issues however, providing valuable light on the state of the market for printed m usic and Schubert’s difficulty in selling his piano sonatas to publishers. The high point of Schubert’s efforts to establish his name more firmly with the Viennese musical public rested on his benefit concert which, because it was held on March 26, 1828—the anniversary of Beethoven’s death—may also be seen as Schubert’s way of paying homage to his predecessor. The program of the concert consisted of a mixture of Lieder, part songs and two instrumental works,
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including the Piano Trio in E-flat major, D. 929, the concert’s centerpiece. Sometime later, Schubert revised the last movement of the piano trio quite extensively when he was preparing the work for publication, eliminating as many as ninety-eight measures to make the musical argument tighter, even though the original version with the longer finale was well-received at the premiere. The reason for this revision, Gingerich postulates, was that Schubert was aiming to make the work “more Beethoven and less Schubert” (300) by letting “extra- musical pressures betray his own best muse” b ecause he had meant the trio to be an homage to Beethoven (301). Gingerich’s theory is, of course, a dubious one, for it is not uncommon for composers to shorten a previously completed work when revising it for a tighter musical argument. The final versions of Mendelssohn’s Hebrides Overture, Op. 26 and Sibelius’s Violin Concerto, Op. 47 are just two such examples. As is fitting for a book about Schubert’s late compositions, the closing chapter is devoted to music that Schubert wrote just a month before his death, in par ticular the string quintet. Much of Gingerich’s discussion is focused on the Adagio movement, whose opening section he describes as a “utopian” or “static dream tableau” (318). Arthur Rubinstein wanted this music to accompany him at the hour of his death, so moved was he by “its heavenly . . . peace and resignation,” which he first encountered in a performance in London in 1913 by a group of eminent musicians including Jacques Thibaud and Pablo Casals (Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years, Knopf, 1973, 409–410). Relationships between the quintet’s Adagio and the slow movements of the last two piano sonatas (in A major and B-flat major) are clarified by links, melodic and otherwise, that Gingerich points out. They lend weight, as far as this reviewer is concerned, to the notion that t hese instrumental slow movements are expressive of Schubert’s singular emotional state as he grieved over his terminal illness, which by then had already stretched for some years giving the composer an ever acute sense of his mortality. His so-called Beethoven Project, which he began following his contraction of his terminal illness, may be seen as an attempt to accomplish as much as he could as a composer while time was still t here. It was a way for him to cope with grief, to give his life a renewed sense of purpose and meaning while awaiting death. Reviewed by Seow-Chin Ong Independent Scholar
Edina Adam and Julian Brooks, with an essay by Matthew Hargraves. William Blake: Visionary. J. Paul Getty Trust, 2020. Pp. 168.
In his foreword to the catalogue, Timothy Potts, director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, identifies William Blake as “one of the most remarkable cultural figures of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries” (7). Highlighting Blake’s nonconforming identity as an artist who crossed visual and literary boundaries, Potts aptly draws on t hose art centers that have contributed to the current exhibition honoring Blake’s creative imagination in collaboration with Tate Britain in London. Editors Edina Adam and Julian Brooks further explain how this collaborative process with the Tate in London was achieved through loans of Blake collections from the Yale Center for British Art, the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, and the Blake scholar Robert N. Essick. A composite of illustrations throughout the book encompasses the historical, biblical, and spiritual aspects that pervade Blake’s imagination. The dichotomy of geographical and historical events from London to America reflects a union of the physicality and spirituality that underlies a mythological presence surpassing time and place. The expansive display of Blake’s artistry in poetry, paint, and illustrative printmaking is woven thematically throughout the catalogue and integrated with an historical significance of Blake’s visionary world. “It was into a restless world that William Blake was born in 1757,” explain the editors, as his life overlapped the reign of King George III (11). Blake’s awareness of his changing world is described through the details of his Dissenting background and “esoteric religious ideas” as the editors recognize how “anxiety about the turn of the c entury crystallized among Nonconformist groups, who interpreted concurrent historical events such as the American and French Revolutions as signs of an impending apocalypse” (13). His early education and development as a printmaker and artist began as an apprentice to the engraver James Basire who specialized in “antiquarian and scientific prints” (13). His later association with the Royal Academy of Arts enhanced his 304
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artistic sensibilities and familiarized Blake with a world of artists he would not have known from his upbringing. His seven-year apprenticeship followed by his enrollment in the academy laid the groundwork for his poetic and visual expression of the arts to be exhibited in a literary and artistic atmosphere that supported his work and provided Blake with the patronage to continue his deeply embedded philosophical principles. As the editors acknowledge, however, “Throughout his life, Blake lived in relative obscurity,” unable to achieve widespread recognition for his artistic talents and intellectual expression u ntil after his lifetime (15). Blake’s professional career as an engraver and a designer-engraver brought him into relationships with more radical thinkers of his time including the publisher Joseph Johnson, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, and the abolitionist John Gabriel Stedman. Many of his contemporaries embraced the work of the “old master printmakers” as did Blake in his emulation of t hese artists in his engravings of biblical themes. As the editors so precisely epitomize Blake’s artistic understanding, “To enter William Blake’s world is to journey into a deftly crafted, frequently morphing universe, replete with rich symbols, obscure mythologies, shape-shifting theatrical characters with exaggerated and wild gestures, and a combination of reality and fantasy unusual for its time” (17). Blake’s artistic and very recognizable style consistently shows the powerf ul imagery of the human figure, and universalizes the human experience with its unyielding emotions and unity of spirit. In her essay “William Blake’s ‘Bounding Outline’: On the Sources of Artistic Originality,” Edina Adam remarks on ancient and contemporary influences that shaped Blake’s work while delineating details of his illustrations and engravings that illuminate the originality of his imagination. Gathering visual and technical aspects of Blake’s past and contemporary mentors, Adam explores the painstaking process in which the artist developed his choice of media and composition as well as his style. Reminiscent of classical artists such as the Greeks and Romans, Blake devoted his art to recovering what he interpreted as the “the lost Art of the Greeks” (19). As Adam explains, “Blake’s idea of the deterioration of the arts was firmly rooted in a cyclical view of the history of art, according to which, art is a living organism that, following a period of growth, reaches its apex, then declines and ultimately regenerates” (20). Adam notably draws on a wealth of knowledge concerning Blake’s lack of access to original artwork from the classical period and his reliance on prints and his relationship with other artists such as Henry Fuseli, the Swiss artist who agreed with Blake on his recovery theory for reversing the decline of art from the sixteenth c entury. Blake’s attempts to restore the technique of fresco painting, however, and his attention to strong outlines and contours account for the manner in which he applied pigment “mixed with b inders other than oil, such as animal glue and gum, on a white priming layer” (25). While relying on past techniques in both
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painting and printmaking, Adam suggests that Blake’s misunderstanding of t hese classical techniques infused his originality. In his letter to Reverend John Trusler (1799), Blake defines how through his own artistic principle he perceives the world: “As a man is So he Sees” (26). How did the mystical work of William Blake (1757–1827) inspire the awareness of an American audience of art collectors? Matthew Hargraves’s essay “America’s Blake” traces the rising interest of American collectors from the east to the west coasts beginning with the Transcendentalists of the nineteenth century. Dominating the growing attention, notes Hargraves, were the elite Harvard circles in the 1870s. As he explains, “Their taste for Blake’s poetical works was essentially textual, having l ittle or nothing to do with the graphic or pictorial qualities inherent in his art, but his appeal to the spiritual life and individual freedom chimed with Transcendentalist concerns” (29). Prominent among the American collectors were New Englanders such as Alexander Gilchrist, biographer of the Life of Blake (1863), and his wife Anne Gilchrist; Horace Scudder, essayist on the artist; Henry Adams, son of President Lincoln’s ambassador to the Court of St. James; Edward William Hooper, treasurer of Harvard, and his mother Ellen Sturgis; and writers like Transcendentalist poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. As Hargraves points out, several factors contributed to Blake’s popular reception in American culture including “the gradual decline of British economic power a fter 1880s, the concomitant dispersal of British collections, and the shift of the world’s financial capital to New York City” (32). From J. P. Morgan to Henry Huntington, Blake’s collection of illuminated books attracted American bibliophiles across the country. Throughout the twentieth c entury private American collections continued to grow and, in particular, flourish as psychology and Blake’s mysticism formed an intellectual bond in the American culture and counterculture of the 1960s. Perhaps Blake’s depictions of archetypal figures and his ability to capture classical antiquity in a contemporary world also captured the imagination of a society as it did for Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), who illustrated children’s books and referred to Blake as “my teacher in all things” (34). The catalogue provides a comprehensive view of Blake’s poetic expression blended with his artistic interpretation of the human experience. As J. Robert Barth reminds us in his exploration of symbolic poetry, “What happens in the poem, for most of us, is what happens in any truly symbolic poetry, any ‘poetry of encounter’: we are drawn into the experience” (J. Robert Barth, The Symbolic Imagination: Coleridge and the Romantic Tradition, Princeton University Press, 1977, 101). Barth further remarks in his comparison to Blake’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, on the necessity of Christian symbolism to elucidate “a greater faithfulness to the mysteries of h uman experience” (Barth, 119). How the poet and artist Blake unifies Christian faith with the imagination in his works is most reminiscent of Coleridge. Many books have been written on the art, the poetry, the collections, and certainly on the life of this visionary poet, too numer-
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ous to list h ere. One publication on Blake’s contemporaries worth noting however, is a volume edited by Edith J. Morley on Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, and others, that situates Blake among the literary geniuses of his time. Perhaps the German artist Jakob Götzenburger, during his visit to England between 1824 to 1826, best captured Blake’s historic significance when he wrote, “I saw in E ngland many men of talent, but only three men of genius— Coleridge, Flaxman, and Blake; and of t hese Blake was the greatest” (Jakob B. Beer, Coleridge: The Visionary, Collier Books, 1962, 34). Blake’s works are organized thematically into categories of his artistic expression as “The Printmaker” (plates 1–25), “The Painter-Illustrator” (26–50), “The Painter-Poet” (51–63), “Blake’s Contemporaries” (64–71), “The Visionary” (72–97), and “The Mythmaker” (98–114). Following the plates is an exhibition checklist, a section for suggested further reading, and an index. The catalogue stands as a primary resource among a historical list of publications on Blake’s work and life. Reviewed by Linda L. Reesman Queensborough Community College
Frances B. Singh. Scandal and Survival in Nineteenth-Century Scotland: The Life of Jane Cumming. University of Rochester Press, 2020. Pp. 356.
On occasion, a story emerges from the past that seems completely out of place for its time. E ither the events encompass issues that feel uniquely modern, or the storyteller deftly humanizes the characters in a way that makes them seem to be more than simply historical relics. In the most recent telling of Jane Cumming’s life, both cases are apparent. Cumming’s experiences in Georgian Scotland have long fascinated observers, primarily b ecause she accused her teachers of carrying on a homosexual relationship. A resulting libel case elicited enough suggestive testimony to inspire a number of f uture historical studies, as well as a successful Broadway play. Frances Singh’s new biography brilliantly narrates each dramatic turn in this serpentine saga, giving perhaps the most detailed and thorough account yet of Cumming’s extraordinary life. Readers will marvel at the many twists in the tale, but the core of Singh’s biography chronicles the prelude and aftermath of Cumming’s accusation. Born in India at the end of the eighteenth century, Cumming’s life was destined to be complicated. Virtually nothing is known about her mother, other than that she was an Indian woman of color. Cumming’s father was a Scot in the employ of the East India Company. Like many biracial Anglo-Indians before her, Cumming was sent to Britain—a long with her brother and a servant—to escape the perceived limitations of Asia, and to take advantage of the perceived opportunities of the United Kingdom. Eventually, Cumming’s grandmother Helen placed her in the Edinburgh boarding school that would upend the family. Details are speculative, but the outcome was clear: while there, Jane Cumming claimed that her two female teachers w ere carrying on a sexual relationship. Helen immediately pulled her granddaughter out of the school, and spread the news to other parents, who followed suit. The school folded, and the teachers filed a libel claim against Helen. A fter eight years the case made its way up to the House of Lords, which finally decided against Helen, costing the family many thousands of 308
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pounds and deep social ridicule. Even before this judicial conclusion, however, Cumming’s name had been ruined, and she had little choice but to marry a schoolmaster carryi ng his own share of personal and legal baggage. It would become a tumultuous marriage that pushed Cumming even further to the margins of her Scottish f amily. Jane Cumming is a fascinating figure by any measurement, but current scholarly interest in multiethnic individuals in British history make her story especially engaging. Recent studies of biracial individuals who traveled from across the world to the economic magnet of Britain at the turn of the nineteenth century have demonstrated just how complex racial ideologies w ere at the time, especially within families claiming such members. This scholarship has opened up much larger discussions about the long history of people of color in Britain, as well as the ways in which such subjects were—and were often not—welcomed into white society. By and large, though, t hese accounts have been l imited by available sources. Sporadic correspondence, episodic attention, or a complete lack of documentation from the hands of the mixed-race individuals themselves, hinder the ability to sketch full profiles of t hose who crossed the globe. The libel suit involving Cumming, on the other hand, gives a tremendous amount of probing commentary on a young w oman’s emotional development, and the challenges of not being fully white in early modern Britain. Moreover, Singh’s meticulous attention to detail clears the path for a very deep exploration into Cumming’s struggles. The multiple t rials that came out of the original libel suit allows Singh to deconstruct both the racial and gendered dimensions of Cumming’s place in high Edinburgh society. Th ere is much to analyze, as judges reflected not only on Cumming, but on the very possibility of her accusation being true. Unsurprisingly, race mattered a great deal to t hose sitting in judgment. Singh argues that Orientalism saturated the case. Attorneys for the teachers attacked Cumming as a fabricator whose claims deflected her own, supposedly aberrant, sexuality. Notions of Indian hypersexuality doomed Cumming from the start, as her rival legatees insisted that Asian heritage pushed her to fall in love with one of the teachers and make up a story when advances w ere rebuffed. This opens up yet another helpful discussion in the book, as Singh effectively assesses how the taboo subject of lesbianism could be considered, yet ultimately deflected, in modest Scottish society. According to the judges, Asia was the proper home of same-sex relations, and they could be imagined into existence in Europe only by a former resident of the subcontinent. Singh carefully follows Cumming in the decades after the libel case to demonstrate how devastating the loss of reputation could be for a w oman of color in Scotland. Marriage to a scandal-prone schoolmaster was perhaps one of the few options that Cumming could take. When marital strife erupted, however, Cumming’s relatives were slow to help. Singh contends that this was an outgrowth of
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Cumming’s social marginalization after the sexual scandal of the trial, but the author is reluctant to attribute too much of this to racial prejudice. Instead, Singh explores the possibility of psychological distress caused by the turbulence of Cumming’s peripatetic life. Some scholars w ill bristle at her employment of modern psychological diagnoses, as Singh attempts to categorize the choices that Cumming made. But Singh tackles a number of current debates—about sexual fluidity, the suffering that can occur in certain adoption cases, the effects of sexual trauma, etc.—in order to provide an exploratory gaze into Cumming’s mind-set. These are intriguing speculations to consider, especially b ecause of Singh’s deep research into nearly every facet of Cumming’s life. Biography has been critical to expand the boundaries of our historical understanding, and the subjects who populate narratives of the past. Singh’s thorough scholarship makes an important contribution to that effort and reveals an early modern world that bears some astonishing similarities to the present. Reviewed by Daniel Livesay Claremont McKenna College
About the Contributors
Essayists Chris Barrett is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she joined the faculty in 2012, having finished her doctoral degree at Harvard University. Her research and teaching interests include early modern English literature, the lyric and the epic, poetry and poetics, geocriticism and cartographic approaches to literature, ecocriticisms, and new materialisms. She is the author of Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety, the third chapter of which won the Milton Society of America’s John T. Shawcross Award. She has also written essays and articles on topics including allegory, butterflies, compasses, epic, ether, fire, knock-k nock jokes, Milton, Shakespeare, Spenser, and w hales. Her research has been supported by the Newberry Library, the Folger Library, the Dumbarton Oaks Museum and Collection, and the Lilly Library at Indiana University. She is currently at work on a book project about early modern trees. Mita Choudhury is a professor of English at Purdue University Northwest in Indiana. Space and location, trade and empire, migrancy and globalization provide the backdrop for her work on the cultural productions of the British Enlightenment. As guest editor of a special issue of the South Atlantic Review on “Being Global: From the Enlightenment to the Age of Information,” she presented vignettes of ethnocentricity at the turn of the c entury as examples of the vexed legacy of the Enlightenment. Her latest book, Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire, describes the spatial dimension of British identity and proposes a critical vocabulary for studying public and private space through the lens of nation. This monograph builds upon her research over the last twenty-five years on Enlightenment globalism, modern systems of mediation, and the imperial imaginary in literary production. She is author of 311
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Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660–1800: Performance, Identity, Empire (2000) and coeditor of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (2002). Her current book-length work in progress is based upon the following premise: Exploitative European globalism, scientific “discovery” detrimental to human life, and the mammoth scale of displacement and dislocation of h uman and natural resources began in the eighteenth century. Matthew Goldmark is assistant professor of Spanish in Modern Languages and Linguistics at Florida State University in Tallahassee. He is a specialist in colonial Latin American literatures and cultures and gender and sexuality studies, with publications that range from transgender studies to the indigenous Andes and colonial intimacy. His current research project, “Forms of Relation: Kinship and Composition in the Colonial Spanish Americas,” examines the discourses of kinship that regulated and racialized peoples in Spain’s sixteenth- and seventeenth-century transatlantic empire. In support of this project, he has received fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, UCLA’s Center for 17th-and 18th-Century Studies, and the John Carter Brown Library. He is also at work on a second monograph that interrogates the role of pity in the constitution of Spanish empire. Jennifer L. Hargrave is assistant professor of English at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. She received her PhD in English from Rice University. She specializes in British Romanticism and its global entanglements. She has published in Eighteenth-Century Studies, European Romantic Review, Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, The Wordsworth Circle, and Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce, and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century (2020). Her current book project, The Romantic Reinvention of Imperial China, recovers the history of intellectual exchanges between the British and Chinese empires, showing how a literary examination of Anglo-Sino relations produces a new narrative of interimperial exchanges premised on intellectual curiosity as well as geopolitical gain. Betty Joseph is associate professor of English at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Her research and teaching center on eighteenth-century British literature, contemporary Anglophone literature, and critical theory with special interests in the novel, colonial/postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and globalization. She is the author of Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender and the recently completed monograph entitled From Empire to Anthropocene: Fiction in the Time of an Uncommon World. Recent essays include “The Expedient and the Emergent: Modes of Governmentality in the Colonial Outpost” in Postcolonial Studies; and “The Enlightenment’s Linguistic Dimension, or, How We Came to be Socially Constructed,” forthcoming in Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation.
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Billie Lythberg works at the junction of economics, anthropology, and history as a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland Business School, and is contributing editor for the arts of Oceania to SmARThistory and Khan Acad emy. Since 2005, she has worked with Māori and Pasifika artists, academics, and traditional knowledge holders to explore first exchanges between European and Pacific peoples and their legacies. Her first visit to the Wörlitz collection in Dessau depot was made possible by the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apārangi under a Marsden Grant; her second, to the Eisenhart in the Gartenreich, by the Kulturstiftung Dessau-Wörlitz. She coedited Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories and Collecting in the South Sea: The Voyage of Bruni d’Entrecasteaux 1791–1794, and cocreated the ten- part Artefact documentary series exploring taonga Māori in collections worldwide (Māori Television 2018 and 2020). David S. Mazella is associate professor of English at the University of Houston in Texas. His research has long pursued the genealogies of contemporary problems in the practices, writings, and institutions of the eighteenth century. To that end, he has published essays on Lillo, Sterne, Swift, Hobbes, and Hume, but also on pedagogy, assessment, and the politics of higher education. His book, The Making of Modern Cynicism, offers a cultural and conceptual history of “cynics” and “cynicism” in G reat Britain between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the period when the meanings of both terms drastically changed and “cynicism” itself became a politically charged term. His current book proj ect is a transnational literary and cultural history of the year 1771 as it unfolded in four cities (London, Edinburgh, Philadelphia, and Kingston, Jamaica). This annualized, geog raphically dispersed literary history should provide a very different perspective on genre formation and differentiation than more conventional, linear, and teleological accounts. This line of annualized research has led to a digital humanities study that elaborates and compares the authors, reading environments, and genre systems of t hese cities in the target year. Su Fang Ng is the Clifford A. Cutchins III Professor of English at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg. She has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard, the National Humanities Center, the University of Texas at Austin, Heidelberg University, All Souls College, Oxford, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison. She is the author of Literature and the Politics of Family in Seventeenth- Century England as well as numerous articles. She guest-edited a special issue on “Transcultural Networks in the Indian Ocean, 16th–18th Centuries: Europe ans and Indian Ocean Societies in Interaction” for Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, and coedited England’s Asian Renaissance. Her recent monograph Alexander the Great from Britain to Southeast Asia: Peripheral Empires in the Global Renaissance won the Renaissance Society of America’s 2020 Phyllis Goodhart Gordan Prize for best book in Renaissance studies.
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Felicity Nussbaum is a distinguished research professor at UCLA and the author of Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre. Among her other books are The Arabian Nights in Historical Context, coedited with Saree Makdisi, and The Limits of the H uman: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender. A former president of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, she has held NEH, Guggenheim, and Rocke feller Foundation fellowships. An essay on racial performance in Charles Dibdin’s The Padlock appeared in Charles Dibdin and Late Georgian Culture. She is currently writing plays on Hester Thrale Piozzi and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Daniel O’Quinn is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. His program of research follows two distinct yet intertwined threads: the study of performance cultures in the long eighteenth century and the vicissitudes of empire in a wide array of locales. He is the author of Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815, a wide-ranging account of diplomatic relations with the Ottoman Empire that arose from preparing editions of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Embassy Letters and The Travels of Mirza Abu Taleb Khan. He is also the author of Entertaining Crisis in the Atlantic Imperium, 1770–1790 and Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800. These two linked monographs explore how British imperial policy in India and in the Atlantic world was enmeshed with theatrical and political performance in the final thirty years of the eighteenth century. His current project, The Urgent Repertoire: Theatre, Affect, and the Realignment of British Culture, returns to this problematic in order to develop the theoretical tools required for comprehending how British culture aesthetically mediated the affective fallout from American decolonization. Elizabeth Sauer, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a professor of English at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, is past president of the Milton Society of America. Select publications include Emergent Nation: Early Modern British Nation in Transition, 1660–1714, editor; Women’s Bookscapes, coeditor; Milton in the Americas, coeditor; Milton, Toleration, and Nationhood; The New Milton Criticism, coeditor; Reading the Nation, coeditor; Milton and Toleration, coeditor, Milton Society of America book award; Milton and the Climates of Reading, editor, CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title; “Paper-Contestations” and Textual Communities in England; Reading Early Modern Women, coeditor, awarded SSEMW Best Collaborative Work. Ana Schwartz is assistant professor in the English Department at the University of Texas at Austin. She is currently completing her first book project, American Settlement and the Making of Modern Sincerity, and beginning work on her second, A Social History of the Soul. Her essays have appeared in and are under review at a range of journals in literary studies, such as Early American
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Literature, American Literature, J19, and New Literary History. Her research and teaching interests include American literature before 1900, poetry and poetics, literary and cultural theory, and ecocriticism. Brandie R. Siegfried was the Nan Grass Professor of English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. Her work focused on women writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, giving special attention to their contributions to natural philosophy, religious discourse, theories of art, and political life. She was a past president of the Margaret Cavendish Society and past president of the Queen Elizabeth I Society, and sat on the executive boards of both societies. Her 2018 edition of Margaret Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies with the Animal Parliament won the Society for the Study of Early Modern W omen and Gender’s Josephine Roberts Award for the Best Scholarly Edition on Women and Gender. She also coedited World-Making Women: New Perspectives on the Centrality of Women in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Culture and coedited God and Nature in the Thought of Margaret Cavendish. Besides publishing widely on Cavendish, she also published on Elizabeth I, Grace O’Malley, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Aemilia Lanyer. Professor Siegfried passed away in February 2021. The international scholarly community mourns the loss of this eminent academic. Daniel Vitkus holds the Rebeca Hickel Endowed Chair in Early Modern Lit erature at the University of California, San Diego. He is the author of Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 and of numerous articles and book chapters on the literature and cultural history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He has also edited Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England and Piracy, Slavery and Redemption: Barbary Captivity Narratives from Early Modern E ngland. He serves as the editor of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies. His interests include Shakespeare, early modern theater, Renaissance literature, travel writing, literary and cultural theory, Islamic culture and its representation in the West, and the cultural history of empire. His current research is focused on “Imperial Exchanges: Texts and Events in the Global Renaissance.” Lisa Walters is senior lecturer at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. She is the author of Margaret Cavendish: Gender, Science, and Politics, coeditor of Margaret Cavendish: An Interdisciplinary Perspective, and coeditor of the Restoration section of Palgrave Encyclopedia for Early Modern Women Writers. She has published a number of articles about Cavendish, Milton, Shakespeare, and early modern w omen. Much of her research focuses on the intersections between literature, science, politics, gender, and philosophy. Currently, she sits on the Editorial Board of American Notes and Queries and was recently president of the Margaret Cavendish Society. Previously, she
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was a postdoctoral fellow at Ghent University in Belgium and has held academic posts in Scotland, America, England, and Australia. Chi-Ming Yang is associate professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. She specializes in the literary and visual culture of race and empire. Her research on East-West cultural exchanges, chinoiserie, and Atlantic slavery spans the early modern period to the contemporary moment. Her book, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth- Century England, 1660–1760, is a study of the eighteenth-century European fascination with Asia. It examines how China became an intensely debated example of virtue amid England’s new consumer culture. Her new work on natural history and animal studies includes publications on rice bird migration and racialized porcelain. Her most recent book, on the childhood science fiction of Octavia E. Butler, is forthcoming. Reviewers Gefen Bar-On Santor is part-time professor in the Department of English, University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada. She has taught courses from the medieval period to the eighteenth century, as well as technical writing and lit erature and science. She also teaches academic writing for publication to professors whose primary language is not English at the University of Ottawa’s Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute. Her research and publication focus is the reception of Shakespeare in eighteenth-century Britain, as well as literature and science. Andrew Black is associate professor of English and philosophy at Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky. His work focuses on eighteenth-century rhetoric and literature. He is currently at work on a manuscript about rhetoric, orality, and orators in the eighteenth century. Samara Anne Cahill is the author of the monograph Intelligent Souls? Feminist Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century English Literat ure (2019) and the coeditor, with Kevin Cope, of Citizens of the World: Adapting in the Eighteenth Century (2015). She is the editor of the journal Studies in Religion and the Age of Enlightenment. Her research focuses on representations of Anglo-Ottoman relations, feminist orientalism, and rhetorics of otherness (particularly relating to gender, religion, and the environment). Erica Johnson Edwards is assistant professor of history at Francis Marion University in Florence, South Carolina. She teaches courses on European history, the Atlantic World, and historical writing. She is author of a monograph, Philanthropy and Race in the Haitian Revolution (2018). Her current research focuses on the symbolic importance of the Haitian Revolution and its leaders for rural Black Oklahomans.
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James Hamby is the associate director of the University Writing Center at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, where he also teaches courses in literature and composition. He is also the associate book reviews editor for Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. His dissertation, “David Copperfield: Victorian Hero,” studies how Dickens remade his autobiography to create a new hero for the Victorian era. Stephanie Howard-Smith completed her PhD, “Lapdogs and Other P eople: The Representation of Toy Dogs in Eighteenth-Century British Culture,” at Queen Mary University of London in 2018. Her published work includes an essay on the global circulation of pugs and porcelain in Oriental Networks (2020) and an article on the reaction of Londoners to a dog cull in 1760 in the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. She has taught at Queen Mary University of London, the University of York, and the University of Greenwich. Her current research interests are in canine health in Georgian Britain. Malcolm Jack has written widely on Enlightenment topics, publishing Corruption and Progress: The Eighteenth Century Debate in 1989. He has written on, and edited the works of, William Beckford and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. His interest in Portuguese history resulted in two books: Sintra: A Glorious Eden and Lisbon: City of the Sea. His latest book, To the Fairest Cape: European Encounters in the Cape of Good Hope (2019), explores the rich travel literature of the Cape. He was a visiting professor at Nanyang Technical University, Singapore in 2015 and has lectured widely in various universities around the world. He is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society, London and president of the Beckford Society and of the Johnson Club. He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2011 for serv ices to the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Anthony W. Lee’s research interests center upon Samuel Johnson. He has published six books and more than forty-five essays on Johnson and eighteenth-century literature and culture. He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Arkansas, Arkansas Tech University, Kentucky Wesleyan College, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Maryland University College, where he served as the director of the English and Humanities Program for three years. Daniel Livesay is associate professor of history at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California. His research focuses on slavery, race, and family history. He is the author of Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed-Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic F amily, 1733–1833, which won the Phi Alpha Theta Best First Book Award in 2018. He is currently working on a new book about old age among enslaved laborers in Virginia and Jamaica, titled Endless Bondage: Old Age in New World Slavery. His scholarship has been funded by
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the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and other organizations. Seow-Chin Ong received his PhD in musicology from the University of California, Berkeley. His main interests lie in music of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and his work has been supported by various agencies, including the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Philosophical Society. Linda L. Reesman has focused her scholarly research on the poetry and prose in England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With a particu lar interest in the Romantic poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, she has also examined the influences of social and marital relationships on the prominent writers of this period. This investigation led her research into the earlier eighteenth century of the Enlightenment with writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Her early academic c areer began with a study of the Romantic artists, where she developed an affinity for the works of William Blake as a precursor to her study of English literature. Jacqy Sharpe was a clerk in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom for over forty years. She worked both on Select Committees and in all the main procedural offices of the House.