The Wreckage of Intentions. David Alff

from the fact that it at first obliges nobody to do anything. Yarranton’s sentence is in the conditional mode, but no one is responsible for satisfying any conditions—things simply will “be.” Yarranton evinces similar passive certainty in his later proposal to forge metal in Hampshire using iron stone buried at the mouth of the Stour River and timber from the New Forest: “If two Furnaces be built around Ringwood to cast Guns, and two Forges to make Iron, and the Iron Stone to be brought from the Harbour mouth out of the Sea up the River to the Furnaces, and the Charcole out of New Forest to the works, there being sufficient of decayed Woods to supply four Iron-works for ever; by these means the King makes the best of everything, and builds with his Timber being near and convenient.”¹⁰⁹ Furnace construction appears straightforward in this syntax. Forges will “be built” and raw iron “brought” through actions that later solidify into “means” of instrumental value. The omission of subjects makes Yarranton sound authoritative, not evasive. Eventually he attributes action to Charles II, a sovereign who “makes the best of everything,” but in reality makes nothing.

      Yarranton proposes to establish linen manufacturing in Warwick, Leicester, Northampton, and Oxfordshire through yet another passively voiced future-conditional sentence, except here, England’s Improvement transmutes the lack of specified agency into a positive gain: the creation of jobs. “And so it will be,” proclaims Yarranton: “There the Flax will grow, and be manufactured easily and cheap; part whitened there, and the Thread and part of the Flax sent down the Navigable Rivers to the several Towns to be woven and spun. And so there will be employ for the great part of the Poor of England. In such Towns where it meets with a settled voluntary Register, thence never will it depart.”¹¹⁰ The cloth spinning project presumes the execution of Yarranton’s other schemes for navigations and land registration. Once in place, these enterprises enable the linen industry to run itself: flax “will grow,” “be Manufactured,” “be sent down” rivers. A former draper’s apprentice, Yarranton predicts that central England would one day surpass Germany as Europe’s largest producer of cloth. He suggests that nimble-fingered children would make the best linens workers, following the example of German industrial schools that taught youngsters how to spin flax, weave bone lace, and make toys. “There the Children enrich the Father,” Yarranton lamented, “but here begger him.”¹¹¹ In the world of England’s Improvement, “employ” is improvement’s product rather than its animating force. Yarranton transforms children from cost burdens into wage earners, a measure that would stimulate population growth in the region.

      Given its capacity to make a speculative future feel like an inevitable extension of the present, passive syntax appears frequently in project writing. The subtitle of Coke’s England’s Improvements promises to disclose “How the Kingdom of England May be Improved.” Fortrey professes “no doubt but the people, and riches of the kingdom might be greatly increased and multiplied” if land were enclosed, mines expanded, and a fishery established.¹¹² “England, may be enriched,” declares William Carter, by banning the exportation of raw wool.¹¹³ His England’s Interest Asserted declares that “Cloathing must be purged from its Corruption,” in a syntactical construction that identifies neither what qualified as “Corruption” nor who would take responsibility for decontaminating the trade.¹¹⁴ Reynell treats England as a passive object in his assertion that “this Nation might be greatly advantaged by cutting of Rivers, and making them Navigable.”¹¹⁵ The kingdom, according to Reynell, possesses the means of advancing itself, so there is no need to identify the agents who would actually carry out the work.

      After denying the efficacy of its words, England’s Improvement appears also to refuse the agency of its author. This maneuver permits Yarranton to invert the means and ends of his project, imagining labor not as a prerequisite for projects but as projection’s salutary outcome. Passive voice also makes it possible for England’s Improvement to synchronize projects of industry, engineering, and policy reform within a single sentence, producing a momentary sense of coherent organization within a long and varied pamphlet.

      Schemes and Schemas

      England’s Improvement sprawls across two hundred pages and several fields of professional knowledge, from Irish forestry to London fire prevention. Incorporating such dissimilar material into a single piece of writing challenged Yarranton to make “improvement” encompass many actions and yet remain a legible ideal. He conceived of England’s Improvement not as a miscellany of separate proposals, but a methodical plan for concerted action. This was the goal at least. In its published form, Yarranton’s pamphlet feels neither methodical nor self-contained. To the contrary, England’s Improvement tries readers through its lengthy digressions and deadening repetition. The text speeds through some proposals—particularly those having to do with London—while lavishing minute detail on others. Yarranton defers to knowledgeable experts in some passages, addresses uninformed readers in others, snipes at known enemies and imagined critics elsewhere. While the pamphlet resists front-to-back reading, it nonetheless establishes a kind of order between the projects it unveils. When, for instance, England’s Improvement presents linen as the product of synchronized efforts to register land and cut rivers, it suggests that projects create their own conditions of possibility. This idea of reciprocity enables Yarranton to depict momentous changes in society as the result of incremental measures. Yarranton links one scheme to the proliferation of others in his description of how a land registry would reshape rural England: “the free Lands of England being put under a Voluntary Register by Act of Parliament: From the Credit whereof spring Banks, Lumberhouses, with all Credits necessary to drive Trade, Cut Rivers, the Fishery, and all things else that Moneys are capable of; and it will drive away the great fears and complaints rooted in the hearts of the People, as the decay of Trade, the growing power of the French, and much more.”¹¹⁶ The prepositions “by,” “from,” and “with” establish causal bonds between each measure. Appropriately enough, the former navigations engineer employs a hydrographical metaphor to liken the land registry to a spring that feeds the streams of lumber mills, river embankments, trade, and a fishery. The metaphor breaks off with the more literal suggestion that new institutions will enhance England’s global stature, neutralize the threat of French invasion, cheer a fearful and quarrelsome populace, and “much more.” Improvement is imagined as the outflow of interdependent enterprises whose benefits exceed articulation. The land registry will do much good, and through its tributary schemes, “much more.”

      Yarranton’s prepositions and water imagery establish spatial relations between projects to imply their harmonious interworking. Other projectors asserted improvement’s reciprocal nature more directly. Samuel Fortrey observed with aphoristic brevity that “people and plenty are commonly the begetters of the one of the other, if rightly ordered.”¹¹⁷ Carter identifies a “Connexion of Trades one to another,” predicting that England’s short-sighted exportation of raw wool would bring the poor to “desperate straits” and make them “uncapable of paying rent.”¹¹⁸ The cloth maker Joseph Trevers incorporates English commerce through the trope of the “body politique,” in which “one member depends upon another, and is serviceable to the other” producing “natural Harmony and Correspondence, even so doth one Trade, or occupation closely, and necessarily depend upon another.”¹¹⁹

      Thirsk traces a similar course of mutual causation in the writings of fen improvers. She observes that a growing market for coleseed oil in the early seventeenth century “was linked with drainage projects, which gave fresh encouragement to yet another group of inventors and projectors—those who were commending their designs for windmills and drainage engines.”¹²⁰ A hunger for oil drives the mechanical inventions that would eventually turn the fens into plantable land. One oil projector, John Taylor, employs the same logic of “fresh encouragement” in his Praise of Hemp-Seed (1620), which recounts how hemp cultivation both demanded and returned “labour, profit, cloathing, pleasure, food, Navigation: Divinity, poetry, the liberall Arts, Armes, Vertues defence, Vices offence, a true mans protection, a thiefs execution. Here is mirth and matter all beaten out of this small seede.”¹²¹ An entire civil society congeals in the kernels of this crop, claims Taylor, who reasons that hemp could nourish commoners, inspire artists, and punish criminals. Likewise, Richard