The Wreckage of Intentions: Projects in British Culture, 166-173

The Wreckage of Intentions

ALEMBICS: PENN STUDIES IN LITERATURE AND SCIENCE

Mary Thomas Crane and Henry S. Turner, Series Editors

THE WRECKAGE OF INTENTIONS

Projects in British Culture, 1660–1730

DAVID ALFF

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Alff, David, author.

Title: The wreckage of intentions : projects in British culture, 1660–1730 / David Alff.

Other titles: Alembics: Penn studies in literature and science

Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2018] | Series: Alembics | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017010475 | ISBN 978-0-8122-4959-0 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: English literature—17th century—History and criticism. | English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | Industrial development projects—England—History—17th century. | Industrial development projects—England—History—18th century. | Scientific literature—England—History—17th century. | Scientific literature—England—History—18th century. | England—Civilization—17th century. | England—Civilization—18th century.

Classification: LCC PR431 .A39 2017 | DDC 820.9/004

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017010475

For Katie, as always

Contents

Introduction. What Is a Project?

Chapter 1. Improvement’s Genre: Andrew Yarranton and the Rhetoric of Projection

Chapter 2. Company in Paper: Aaron Hill’s Beech Oil Bust

Chapter 3. Projects Beyond Words: Undertaking Fen Drainage

Chapter 4. Inheriting the Future: Georgic’s Projecting Strain

Chapter 5. Swift’s Solar Gourds and the Antiproject Tradition

Coda. Imaginary Debris in Defoe’s New Forest

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

What Is a Project?

In 1652, an anonymous London pamphlet proclaimed the end of famine. The twenty-four-page Designe for Plentie reasoned that England could secure food in the time of want by forcing its landholders to plant twenty apple, pear, walnut, or quince trees on every "five pounds per annum" of arable soil.¹ According to this treatise, a law for compulsory arboriculture would restock the Commonwealth in the wake of civil wars that ruined tillage and emptied larders.² Woodwards would patrol nurseries, fine defaulters, and schedule common dayes when parishioners would harvest the trees.³ These statutory labors would supply produce, timber, firewood, and juice, which could be fermented into cider. Universal plantation promised to barrel so much cider that England could stop brewing beer, a beverage that devoured bread barley while seeding drunkennesse, disorder, and dangerous plots.⁴ Fruit groves would transform waste and wilde places into a veritable Garden of God that could fill stomachs and dazzle eyes.⁵ Beauty, abundance, civility, and even a taste of prelapsarian bliss all seemed within the grasp of this single law.

Despite its euphoric imagery and breathless reasoning, Designe for Plentie concedes that its vision may not materialize. The author bemoans the sluggishnesse of his countrymen, likening them to a cat who hungers for fish, yet her foot in water will not weat.⁶ He simultaneously fears detractors who would dismiss communal orcharding as a vain and trifling notion, a specious enterprise unworthy of state support.⁷ To shake apathy and forestall censure, Designe characterizes itself as a practical measure for the benefit of all Commonwealth citizens: "we have thought it our dutie to present an Assay of Plenty, which we call (A Designe or Project for Plenty) yet not a project of any private advantage to us; but of publique good and plenty unto this Nation."⁸ Designe anchors its self-justification to three nouns—assay, designe, project—that in the seventeenth century denoted both kinds of writing and modes of action. Assay frames the fruit scheme as a composition that subjects propositions to trial in the spirit of Montaigne’s essai. The author distinguishes his try at advancing the publique good from venal pursuits of private advantage, fashioning Designe as a tested article of national improvement rather than a vehicle for personal gain. Designe, the first word of the title, gives the impression of an elegant plan combining forethought and reason. The pamphleteer claims selfless motives and painstaking methodology to make credible his glimpse into future plenty.

The final term is project. Given its position behind the conjunction or, project at first sounds like the mere complement and trailing echo of designe. But then five words later project returns to displace assay and designe both: the Assay of Plenty becomes a project … of publique good. Project, in these two sentences, harbors universal plantation’s lofty but tenuous prospects: its singular ability to happen or not. The word reappears in the next sentence, following a pledge that fruit mandates will strengthen the realm if Parliament ratifies them: "Otherwise we shall but term it (The Embrio of Plenty, and the untimely Birth of good Desires) which had it come to perfection, might have yielded both pleasure and profit to many. And such a Project also it is, as is not without … good Reasons to speak for it; whereof we shall desire to make all rationall man partakers."⁹ Designe promises a radiant future while mourning its foreclosure. The author compares his project to premature human life at the same time he grieves its miscarriage: had it been completed, the plantation scheme might have benefited England, he reflects, entombing seeming opportunity in the past tense. But in the next sentence, Designe emerges from its gloomy report of prospective failure to again revel in present possibilities: "such a Project also it is. The italicized, capitalized word Project insists that universal plantation remains a viable plan. The invocation of this project" reinscribes eternal plenty within a subjunctive future achieved through the reader’s action.

But what is a project? Today, few readers will think twice about this word, which feels familiar, even self-evident in the context of our goal-oriented, enterprise-driven modernity. Such habituation was not yet possible in 1652, when project referred not only to the capacity of human ambitions to raise society, but also to alchemical procedures, optical displays, informational charts, and physical motions. One could hatch a project, in the sense of a scheme, jot down thoughts within a table called project, or map the project or schema of a book.¹⁰ Project was an even more versatile verb: things one could project included light on a surface, a philosopher’s stone in a cauldron, a three-dimensional figure on a two-dimensional plane, and any object—or projectile—through space. These denotations, alive if sometimes obscure today, derive from project’s heterogeneous etymology, whose strands include the Latin prōiectum, for a protruding object, and proicere, meaning to throw or propel, and the Middle French projetter, meaning to plan. The English word first appeared around 1450, though it would not see widespread use until the middle sixteenth century, the same period in which the Italian progetto and Spanish proyecto gained currency. It was in the 1500s that project, in its nominal and predicate forms, began to signify the work of conceiving and delivering future outcomes through discrete efforts.

By the early seventeenth century, project could refer also to the writing that proposed new enterprise. Designe for Plentie was just one of many works from this era that identified as a project according to the English Short Title Catalogue. Early modern Britain saw projects of war and diplomacy.¹¹ The word adorns petitions to abolish doctrinal tests and refine etiquette, to build libraries and administer lotteries.¹² William Penn proposed One Project for the Good of England (1679) to unify fractious Protestants against the common enemy of Roman Catholicism. The anonymous New Project to Make England a Florishing Kingdom (1702) singles out Catholics and Jacobites as national enemies and proposes an oath of abjuration to uproot them. Commercial projects endeavored to bolster England’s mercantile economy, cultivate rural land, sanitize London, popularize new commodities, and explore overseas territories.¹³

These visionary attempts to reform and redirect British society often raised objections, especially among those who had a stake in maintaining the status quo or who advocated alternative schemes, including their own. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, project began to connote deceit, hazard, and upheaval. The word could be used to praise the usefulness of inventions in agricultural and mechanical arts or condemn untoward schemes contrived to aggrandize their authors at the public’s expense.¹⁴ Distinguishing between projects that were benevolent and malicious, actionable and impossible, posed a stiff challenge to crown officials, legislators, parish officers, investors, and readers in general, who parsed a burgeoning mass of proposals through increasingly pejorative terminology.

Project took on a decidedly negative feel in the early Stuart era, when courtiers purchased royal patents in order to launch manufacturing projects that promised to cheapen staples like salt, starch, soap, bricks, and coal. Upon award, most of these fraudulent industrialists abandoned their pretenses of improving trade and instead sought to monopolize it, using patent protections to gouge consumers and amass fortunes.¹⁵ Less overtly egregious but equally controversial in the period were a string of patent-backed land improvement initiatives, like fen drainage, which sought to convert the flooded peats of eastern England into arable tillage. This venture promised to raise the value of Anglian soil but also enriched their investors to the detriment of commoners who derived their livelihoods from the partly flooded landscape.¹⁶ Projects became so suspect in the early 1600s that a need to identify and make culpable those behind them motivated the coinage of new terms: a projector (1596) was an author of projects, while projection (1611) and projecting (1616) signified the act of creating new schemes.¹⁷

Reviled for masking private greed in the language of civic uplift, the scheme-hawking projector continued to haunt discussions of national improvement long after the Caroline era that made this figure notorious. For instance, the English Commonwealth’s confiscation and repurposing of royalist land presented new opportunities for suspect projects.¹⁸ Walter Blith, author of The English Improver Improved (1652), the Interregnum’s most important compendium of agricultural proposals, conceded that there is such a scandall & prejudice among many of you against new projections.¹⁹ Blith had no patience for unfounded ideas in husbandry, though he attempts to redeem the inventive agrarian by characterizing God as the first projector of that great designe, to bring that old Masse and Chaos of confusion unto so vast an Improvement.²⁰ Conceiving of his own manual as a divinely endorsed effort to reform postbellum England from the ground up, Blith believed that applying written knowledge to the land would perpetuate the work of creation and advance the Republic’s grand political experiment. England needed new projects, he argued, even if their authors were not always upstanding citizens.

By the Restoration, project and its lexical derivatives conjured memories of both Caroline patent seekers and the architects of the failed Republic. In this atmosphere, the Royal Society of London, which was chartered by Charles II but steeped in the protocols of Interregnum scientific correspondence networks, faced critics like Henry Stubbe, who rallied his readers to oppose these projectors, claiming that even a peasant would dismiss the Royal Society’s superlatively ridiculous ventures as but projecting.²¹ Thomas Sprat anticipated these attacks in his History of the Royal Society (1667), which boasted that the society funded itself through member contributions so they would not be "contemn’d, as vain Projectors.²² Early modern scientists sought to distinguish their work from England’s tarnished tradition of scheming at a time when the word project" came to name an attack on the handling, financing, and authorization of natural knowledge.

In 1688, the Whig coup that replaced James II with William of Orange and Mary Stuart catalyzed a new period of speculative activity that the Cripplegate haberdasher and brick maker Daniel Defoe called a Projecting Age.²³ The formative event of this inventive era was the War of the Grand Alliance, which disrupted trade between England and the Continent, forcing the kingdom to develop self-sufficient agriculture and industry, as well as a modern financial infrastructure capable of subsidizing foreign military campaigns. The establishment of a central bank, national debt, lotteries, and recoinage in the 1690s encouraged a new generation of adventurers to seek profit through instruments like the joint-stock company. Defoe, who went bankrupt during these heady years farming cats to make perfume and financing marine salvage expeditions, acknowledged the benefits and perils of projects. His Essay upon Projects (1697) distinguishes between ventures that tend to the Improvement of Trade, and Employment of the Poor, and the Circulation and Increase of the publick Stock of the Kingdom, and those fram’d by subtle Heads … to bring People to run needless and unusual hazards.²⁴ Defoe celebrated the era’s projecting spirit while warning readers that the proposal could serve as an edifice for deceit. His entrepreneurial career and reflective writings exemplify England’s continuing ambivalence toward schemes and their claim on the public imagination.

By the time Defoe died in 1731 projection had become such an obvious, even inescapable approach to forging the future from at-hand resources that there was no longer any need to talk of a Projecting Age. The first decades of the eighteenth century saw projects graduate from a volatile release of ambition in response to particular historical circumstances to a reconciliation of resources and possibility that would be routinized and then taken for granted within the writing of governmental ministers, legislators, merchants, scientists, authors, and ordinary subjects. In Georgian Britain, even those like Jonathan Swift who sought to curb the freewheeling energies of improvement schemes often imagined their interventions as projects of a sort. The audacious enterprise that Defoe declared the singular theme of his era in 1697 had, by the time of his death, become a pervading, usually unremarked context for comparing present-day Britain to what it could become.

Whether worthwhile or foolhardy, fiscal or technological, crown-backed or republican, what all these early modern British projects shared was a written plan for action and the possibility of action itself. What I mean by written plan is a document, like Designe for Plentie, proposing that certain people do certain things. Action signifies the happening of those things through physical movements that extend mind into world, as Jonathan Kramnick defines it.²⁵ What distinguishes projected action from other forms of action is that it belongs to the future, and thus does not necessarily need to leave behind evidence of its planning. Designe for Plentie prescribes acts of legislation, labor, surveillance, and prosecution, packaged together as a bill of instructions for eliminating famine. But universal orcharding never took hold. No fruit bill came before the Commons. No woodward ever claimed parochial office. All that remains of the defunct Designe is its proposal, an embryonic plan that failed to become anything other than words and desire.

This book claims that even unenacted words mattered to the extent they tested new ways of being a society. Projects could benefit the world even by their miscarriages, according to Samuel Johnson, who praised authors for charting original courses in commerce and statecraft no matter how feasible.²⁶ Projection records a thinking through of possibility, even when those possibilities remain ultimately shut. In this vein, it shares with works of early modern natural philosophy a tendency to use hypothetical events and imaginary settings to report on reality. Amos Funkenstein has shown that despite their commitment to empirical witnessing, practitioners of the new science employed counterfactual conditionals to explain nature even when they do not describe it.²⁷ A conclusive demonstration of inertia, for example, would require a frictionless, obstruction-free universe, an unobservable if not downright counter-factual setting.²⁸ To circumvent the physical limitations of reality, natural philosophers developed imaginary experiments as a tool for the rational construction of the world, or as Elizabeth Spiller puts it, they made fictions function as practices for the production of knowledge.²⁹

Designe for Plentie tests its food supply scheme in the laboratory of an idealized future, wherein the shining virtues of parochial stewardship and Christian charity illuminate the need for cooperative planning. It creates a fictional world in order to adjust its readers’ imaging and understanding of reality, and thereby rally them to political action.³⁰ Similar to utopia—another rhetorical mode that presents fictional alternatives to the actual world—Designe’s horticultural vision activates a reform agenda that seeks to transcend the merely feasible.³¹ Imaginative proposals functioned as fictions insofar as they prescribed unreal phenomena through an artifice of rhetorical verisimilitude. It is no coincidence that Defoe’s Age of Projects shared the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century with what Catherine Gallagher calls the rise of fictionality, wherein a set of believable stories that did not solicit belief found conceptual stability and nonfactual credibility in the novel.³² At first glance, projection’s solicitation of trust seems to cross the novel’s program of training readers in an attitude of disbelief through its depiction of gullibility, innocence deceived, rash promises extracted, and impetuous emotional and financial investments.³³ But Gallagher shows how this interrogation of faith cultivates in readers a sense of cognitive provisionality, training them to take part in speculative activity in an age when no enterprise could prosper without some degree of imaginative play.³⁴ Both novels and project writing invited readers to explore hypothetical worlds for immediate pleasure and the promise of moral or monetary gain.

But projection was distinct from counterfactual science, utopia, and novelistic world making in that it endeavored not just to describe reality or modify behavior, but to make real the precise vision it advanced. Where literary genres serve to mediate and explain intractable problems, in Michael McKeon’s famous phrase, the project purports to solve them, or at least to explain away that which makes a given dilemma seem insurmountable.³⁵ Designe for Plentie makes the future constructible through human action precisely by framing itself as stirring prophesy and an implementable plan. In claiming that "such a Project also it is," the author instructs readers not to dismiss his pamphlet as mere description of what is and could be, but rather to create the very future its language portends.

This book examines the workings of such imperative enterprise and asks how, in the hands of early modern British readers, its former potential for action sometimes materialized, more frequently lapsed, and was usually forgotten. Wreckage of Intentions reads old proposals word for word to investigate the generation of futures that seldom got to exist. My study of visionary schemes and schemers uncovers the strategies of rhetorical persuasion, publication, and embodied action that made projection a unique and controversial cultural practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Approaching projects through the language, landscapes, data, and personas that they left behind reveals how writers sought to make proposed endeavor seem plausible in the context of the future, and how such argumentation was (and remains) vital to the functions of statecraft, commerce, science, religion, and literature.

At stake in the study of projection is an understanding of how eighteenth-century authors applied their faculties of imagination to achieve finite goals. The functional quality of their writing—their subordination of rhetorical creation to material objectives—may at first appear to discount projection’s literary and intellectual value. Jason Pearl traces a critical preference for escapist utopias over timidly incremental or naively grandiose projects on the grounds that the former seem like a more transcendent literary achievement.³⁶ Against this tacit consensus, I find mere blueprints to offer an unusually resourceful form of invention refined by the demands of enlisting investors, lobbying politicians, and selling goods—argumentative burdens that weighed less heavily on utopia. If projects seem incremental or naive to us, I argue it is because we are consuming them long past their expiration date. Old proposals confront problems that sometimes no longer exist with solutions that today can seem neither necessary nor desirable. Bound to the expectations of their present, projects often do little to accommodate us belated readers, struggling to grasp the world they sought to remake.

But it is through this disorienting anachronism that projection offers a unique entry point to history. By interpolating present-day readers as residents of early modernity, the proposal invites us to believe in a certain idea of the future that is by now historical (or, more often, counterfactual history). The expired scheme asks us to not know what is to come—to play the stranger to a world of enterprise whose fate we already know.³⁷ Rekindling the eighteenth-century projector’s long-extinguished imaginary therefore requires a recalibration of the interpretive practices that we normally bring to bear on this period. Given that the archives of projection generated so much obvious failure, it would be no hard task to pick apart their contents, ridicule their assumptions, disprove their expectations, trace their Whiggism, and unmask their profit motives. In short, I could bring to bear the full forces of ideology critique to uncover projection’s submerged commitments and presumptions of mastery. And when it is illuminating, I do just this. But more often, what this book attempts is not the critique of projects, but rather the revival of their former possibility by reimagining what once was dreamt as a sign of that culture’s understanding of itself and its capacity to change. Mine is a hermeneutics of salvage that gathers historical evidence in order to reanimate old enterprise. What this resuscitation contributes to eighteenth-century studies and culture studies more broadly is a demonstration of how to think with the past’s inadvertent posterity in the moment it tried to build an unknowable here-to-come that we are used to viewing through hindsight.

The specific past futures that I study originated between 1660 and 1730, a period when project retained its old associations with Caroline monopolists and parliamentary state building while amassing new connotations derived from discourses of science, finance, exploration, and technology. I argue that it was during these decades that projects became ubiquitous, assuming a foundational role in the making of Anglophone culture that they did not previously possess or have since relinquished. It was after the Restoration that projection engendered an adequately broad and self-reflexive discourse for Defoe to declare it the spirit of his age. By the 1720s, projects came to seem less like a notorious invention than an unavoidable practice and unquestioned social fixture. While authors continued to debate the value of particular schemes, they were less prone to attacking the project itself as a vehicle for ambition.³⁸ Defoe’s Age of Projects never really ended, though we have grown oblivious to its experience over the last three centuries. This book scrapes away the sediment of familiarity to remember the project as an eighteenth-century inheritance we use and inhabit daily.

Projects as Literature

My investigation of projects employs methods of literary inquiry, in particular close reading, genre criticism, book history, performance studies, and historicist analysis. Project writing belongs to the domain of rhetorical and literary criticism, I argue, because it attempts to make worlds out of words, words with the potential to remake the actual world. Borrowing the terms of structural linguistics, we can understand projecting as an act of signification in search of a referent. Until the moment that action is conjured out of language, when a proposal either becomes fact or burns out the fuel of its hopes, the project resides neither in nor outside of the material reality it would re-create. Bruno Latour equates this limbo stage with fiction in Aramis, a postmortem investigation of a twentieth-century project to build an automated transit system in Paris. A technological project is a fiction, he explains, since at the outset it does not exist, and there is no way it can exist yet because it is in the project phase.³⁹ Project for Latour is a mode of expression as well as the phase that Aramis inhabited when it hung between implementation and its ultimate scuttling.

As a discipline that knows its way around fiction, literary studies is well suited to grasp the imaginary ontology of projects that existed in made-up stories, fleeting fabrications, and predictions later proven false. Scholars of literature are also trained to recognize how arguments, like those made by projectors, could be cunning and self-aware. Though few of the proposals I have read display belletristic mastery, many employ conceits, modes of emplotment, and perspectival shifts that we have come to associate with poems, novels, and drama. Even some of the period’s most prosaic pitches for land banking and clover cultivation recycled passages from Virgil and staged dialogues between made-up discussants. They fawned over patrons in dripping panegyric and burst with dedicatory puff made of heroic couplets. Although most projects never became pleasing aesthetic objects, many at least sought to gratify the tastes of culturally literate readers.

The formal challenge of making unreal things seem real, or at least realizable, burdened project proposals with two incongruous missions: to deliver a believable report of practical ideas and to provoke readers with revelation. Proposals likened themselves to established enterprise at the same time they strove to appear fresh, even altogether newfangled. On the one hand, projects could not be bright ideas appearing out of the blue as Joan Thirsk observes, but instead clustered in places where facilities already existed to give the enterprise a promising start.⁴⁰ In this vein, Defoe presented a project to renovate England’s deteriorating highway system as an example of what Maximillian Novak calls the rediscoveries of ancient devices.⁴¹ Defoe summons memories of Britain’s Roman colonizers, excellent road makers who built a durable network of stone causeways across the island, to shame officials into renovating the kingdom’s rutted and mire-prone dirt tracks. His plan entailed the reclamation of a neglected legacy rather than a dauntless adventure in new public works.

On the other hand, projects had to offer an unthought-of solution to persistent trouble. They needed to break with tradition to position themselves as unique interventions—as writing that outsmarted a problem’s existing proposal literature. Like the eighteenth-century prose form that came to exemplify novelty, so much so that it derived its name from that word, project writing sought to be critical, anti-traditional, and innovating.⁴² These are the words of Ian Watt, who endows the novel with narrative procedures that conveyed truth to individual experience, an individual free from the body of past assumptions and traditional beliefs.⁴³ But unlike novels, which recorded past events, it was a view of the future that project proposals tried to make realistic. In pursuit of what we might call future realism, the projector surfaces inherited assumptions about society and its management. This exfoliation becomes credible through its ability to seem like disinterested testimony. The fictional qualities of proposals authorized projectors to guide readers through future prospects by inscribing such hypothetical events within some ‘reality’ that is cut off from the actual historical continuum.⁴⁴

Project writing uses distinct rhetorical conventions for visualizing the future as the direct result of present action. In promoting an as-yet unrealized vision, the proposal Designe for Plentie equates civic virtue with delight in nature, likens stewardship to statecraft, and even suggests that orcharding will play a consequential role in man’s redemption as it did in his fall. These devices help the author bridge the temporal and modal chasm between a forthcoming paradise of fruit and the moment of postbellum worry in which it was conceived. The challenge of suturing an indicative present to a subjunctive future forced projectors to become nimble rhetoricians. A Designe for Plentie warrants close reading not just for its provocative recommendations, but for its use of language to create belief.

Projection also invites literary analysis because so much of its historical evidence is contained within writing we understand as Literature with a capital L—poems, plays, novels, and songs. Projectors’ representations of the future engrossed a variety of authors in the late 1600s and early 1700s, whose creations usually illuminated the fissures between the conception and realization of schemes. Jane Barker’s Galesia declares in response to the sudden death of her suitor, Brafort, human projects are meer Vapours, carry’d about with every Blast of cross Accidents.⁴⁵ Milton’s Beelzebub upbraids the Congress of Pandemonium for projecting peace and war in book 2 of Paradise Lost.⁴⁶ Galesia characterizes courtship projects as the trifle of indifferent fate. Beelzebub perceives how oratorical projects license idleness, a want of the very action they endorse. The term, for Barker and Milton, implies a lacking response to grave ordeal.

Authors relished making a stock fool of the harebrained and vainglorious projector. Jonathan Swift’s Tale of a Tub (1704) presents Lord Peter, a projector and virtuoso who schemes to purchase continents, cure splenetic worms, and establish "a Whispering-Office, for the Publick Good and Ease of all such as are Hypochondriacal, or troubled with the Cholick."⁴⁷ Two decades later, Swift’s Gulliver would visit the Academy of Projectors, where he witnessed experimenters scheming to extract sunlight from cucumbers, weave garments from cobwebs, and transform excrement into food.⁴⁸ Gulliver’s experiences at Lagado comport with