Emery’s marked inflection of “varses” and “sarmons” places these materials in a pointed relation to literariness, with the accented words clearly intended to contrast the peddler’s matter with a legitimate standard against which it fell short. Yet if the proximate distinction between “varses” and “verses” marks the first as a debased version of the second, the proximity also blurs this same distinction, collapsing the space between legitimate and illegitimate forms just as the cheap broadsides hawked by the lame peddler work their way into the middle-class parlor. The conflicted irony of these accounts indicates the complexity of the poetic culture in early nineteenth-century New England, a time and place where varses and verses could mingle without strongly enforced rules of genre or taste.
The careers of “Old Urin” and Plummer also show how poems, when peddled by a local character, could deploy a wide range of meanings to elicit a wide range of responses. A poem’s circulation and the medium (or media) by which it traveled and was consumed shaped its value in important ways. Such meanings and values begin with the poems’ sources, the itinerant peddlers who “circulated the widest variety of printed matter available in America, a selection broader than all but the most daring bookstores sold.”7 The peddler’s “matter,” and the way he sold it, also shaped people’s experiences of media like print. Histories of the book in North America have detailed how “print” was itself mediated in early American culture. Michael Warner has argued that the “New England printing trade and its cultural settings were anything but monolithic” but were instead a decentralized and heterogeneous set of structures and relations, a point also made by book historians like Gilmore, David D. Hall, and Meredith L. McGill.8 These structures and relations could underwrite the institutional authority of the ministry and the state, or the cultural authority of writers like Alexander Pope and Isaac Watts, while also creating a “counterpublic print discourse in broadsides and cheap pamphlets” that depended “on an invisible worthlessness for its very existence. Not only did it have to be cheap in order to be hawked in the countryside, but in order to be counterpublic … it had to be ‘foolish,’ that is, without status.”9 If Pope or Watts stand atop a hierarchy of literary power, Plummer’s broadsides—cheap, lurid, hawked in the street and the countryside—would seem to lie at the bottom. But Emery and Whittier show that these poems clearly had value that was neither literary nor economic.
Their accounts also show that the broadsides hawked by peddlers like Urin and Plummer helped to establish the cultural meanings of poems among readers just as much as the works of Pope, Watts, Milton, or Byron. Worthington Chauncey Ford and Richardson Wright long ago noted that broadside poems, which were cheap to print, easy to distribute, and reliably popular, helped to sustain many printers by offering the prospect of steady sales with relatively small financial and legal risk.10 At the same time, broadside peddlers and their poems gave readers a relation to literature that was ephemeral, worldly, heterodox, and often illicit (a Newburyport writer alleged that Plummer also sold pornography, which may have been broadly true of itinerant peddling as a trade).11 These peddlers reached farm boys like Whittier and urbane readers like Emery, incorporating them into a shared poetic culture characterized by a heady delight in the cheap, the sensational, the timely, and the lurid. While “varses” and “sarmons” may have been marked as subliterary, their travels cut across distinctions in readers’ class, gender, and location, much more readily than the “verses” and “sermons” with which they were intimately connected. Broadsides and broadside peddlers therefore illustrate some of the ways in which “poetry” in the nineteenth century was not a single, coherent category with stable social meanings but was instead a hodgepodge of genres, formats, and media that engaged readers in many different ways. Whittier and Emery may have treated the peddlers’ “varses” with irony, but they also greeted their appearance with delight. This ambivalence can stand for a larger cultural relation toward poems in early American culture, and it is embodied in the figure of the balladmonger, whose vagrant relation to social and generic hierarchies enabled him (and his poems) to remain in and out of literature, literary history, and literariness.
Balladmongers and peddlers are interesting, I will argue in this chapter, not merely because they now seem exotic to a literary history defined by major authors and prose genres. Their exoticness was historical, and the challenges they posed to literature and literariness helped to define those concepts in a period of transition. I present two case studies: Jonathan Plummer, who lived and wrote in eastern Massachusetts from the 1790s to the 1810s, and Thomas Shaw, a poet from southern Maine who was active from the 1770s to the 1830s. Plummer published more than fifty texts, including a long autobiography. Shaw, on the other hand, printed fewer than a dozen poems, but these represent only a tiny fraction of his oeuvre—around two thousand poems—almost all of which resides in manuscript books held at the Maine Historical Society. Both authors sold their poems on itinerant peddling circuits, although only Plummer depended on peddling for his livelihood, and their poetic itineraries took them through a variety of settings and institutions in the landscape of turn-of-the-century New England.
It is difficult to judge how unusual or how common these poets were. Certainly, there were other author-peddlers from the early 1800s, like Mason Locke Weems, an agent for the Philadelphia publisher Matthew Carey who wrote many heroic biographies and invented the fable about George Washington and the cherry tree.12 In various archives, I have found similar poets from later in the century, such as A. W. Harmon (1812–1901), who, like Plummer and Shaw, published poems about murders, accidents, and Indian wars, along with songs about his own miraculous conversion, and George Gordon Byron DeWolfe (1835–73), the self-titled “Steam Machine Poet” of Nashua, New Hampshire, who wrote poems on demand (often claiming speed-writing records) and distributed them in railway depots.13 Poets like Robert Dinsmoor (1757–1836), the “Rustic Bard” of New Hampshire, and George Moses Horton (1797–1883), the “Colored Bard of North Carolina,” were endowed with a similar aura of unlettered prolixity, especially because of their eccentric relations to print-based norms of literariness.14 And, of course, many poets wrote prolifically despite rarely (or never) seeing their work in print (Emily Dickinson is only the most famous of these and not at all atypical in her scribal practices).15 Part of what makes Plummer and Shaw exceptional is simply the size of the archives they left behind: the large number of poems they wrote and the lengthy memoirs they recorded. Peddler-poets may be entirely unexceptional features of the nineteenth-century literary field—but this would make them all the more compelling, given the received history of American poetry, which usually begins with internationally celebrated authors like William Cullen Bryant or Lydia Sigourney. The balladmongers’ ballads, in contrast, are interesting because of the challenges they pose to literary history and literary criticism. Although Shaw and Plummer occasionally pop up in critical accounts of early American poetry, their work has always been dismissed as self-evidently worthless. So while scholars are once again taking seriously the work of Bryant, Sigourney, Longfellow, and other popular nineteenth-century poets, poets like Plummer or Shaw belong only to the archive, not the canon. In this way, the twenty-first century agrees with the nineteenth; as my readings will show, the publicness of their performances as poets caused conflict in their own time. That is, while they wrote poems and were sometimes well liked, neither were “really” poets, even to their contemporaries. This ambivalence throws into relief the ways in which poetic genres, authorship, and literariness emerge from, and fold back into, broader debates about public order and social cohesion; part of the animus against balladmongers came from the threat they were believed to pose to all of these. Thus, the cases of Shaw and Plummer demonstrate how local culture in the early national period was characterized by multifaceted engagements with poems, and their histories present an opportunity to interrogate early nineteenth-century “poetry” as a set of texts, objects, practices, and institutions.
The Yankee Troubadour
Jonathan Plummer was born in 1761 in Newbury, Massachusetts, a town located about thirty-five miles north of Boston, near the mouth of the Merrimack River. He was the son of a cordwainer