The Wreckage of Intentions. David Alff

a Clothier, a Woollen-draper, and a Country-Yeoman at Supper upon the Road.” This didactic conversation opens when the draper (a rural wool supplier) asks the urban clothier, “what News from London, old friend?”¹³⁹ “A bad Trade still,” laments the clothier, who blames the decline of his business on the rise of factors, drawers, and packers, an ambitious class of functionaries who allegedly seized control of England’s textile industry by setting themselves up as merchants and creditors. A third party, the yeoman, soon enters the conversation, interjecting that the health of his estate relied on the unfettered trade of drapers and clothiers, because “every Acre of my Land rises price, according as the Woollen Manufacture flourishes.”¹⁴⁰ The draper, in turn, salutes the yeoman for his “fellow-feeling in our misery,” an expression of solidarity through shared financial hardship.

      The decline of clothiers, drapers, and yeomen recalls the sorrow of Yarranton’s benighted mortgager. Their dialogue foregrounds the mutual dependence of pastoral labor and port markets, suggesting in this particular case that the traffic between Salisbury and London sustains both places. “Fellow-feeling” expresses a collective desire to restore England’s wool trade to its rightful directors.

      Yarranton’s discovery of universal interest finds an urban-focused counterpart in Nicholas Barbon’s 1685 pamphlet, Apology for the Builder. Barbon, a London-based insurance purveyor, calls for the construction of houses in London, a project that would stimulate tax revenue (and policy sales). His proposal addresses rural landholders who feared that a larger metropolis would drain the countryside of workers and raise the cost of labor. Like Yarranton, Barbon shows how urban trade consumes rural outputs, “Stones, Bricks, Lime, Iron, Lead, Timber … the Commodities of the Country.”¹⁴¹ The city vents and constitutes the matter of quarries, forests, pastures, and tillage, claims Barbon, who observes that new buildings would provide “habitations and livelihood for the Supernumerary and useless Inhabitants of the Country,” specifically, the younger sons of gentry and the children of peasants.¹⁴² A growing city, Apology concludes, puts surplus goods and bodies to work.

      Barbon characterizes building as an ancient vocation derived from the paternal obligation to shelter family. It is, he claims, the fundamental chore of a society committed to growing its population humanely: “New Buildings are advantageous to the King and Government. They are instrumental to the preserving and increasing of the number of the Subjects; And numbers of Subjects is the strength of a Prince: for Houses are Hives for the People to breed and swarm in, without which they cannot increase.”¹⁴³ Barbon compares London houses to teeming hives, colonies “instrumental” to the growth and maintenance of society. This trope, perhaps drawn from Virgil’s depiction of communally industrious bees in The Georgics, draws together city and country respectively as the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor. Apology uses the figure of the hive to unearth the city’s rural roots.

      Barbon invents his own metaphors while neutralizing others. He addresses a particularly nefarious “simile from those that have the Rickets, fansying the City to be the Head of the Nation, and that it will grow too big for the Body,” accusing that simile’s authors of themselves being rickets victims deluded by their search for companionable forms.¹⁴⁴ Barbon refuses this comparison and installs his own in its place: London is not the head of England, but rather “the heart of a Nation, through which the Trade and Commodities of it circulate, like the blood through the heart, which by its motions giveth life and growth to the rest of the Body.”¹⁴⁵ London, in this comparison, is no longer a peripheral bulging but a central pump that propels goods throughout England. The heart metaphor accommodates urban and rural interests, reconstituting the capital within a functional body politic. Barbon himself acknowledges the impact of his tropes, remarking “this simile is the best.”¹⁴⁶

      Yarranton’s dialogue and Barbon’s metaphoric surrogation authorize their proposals to voice universal interest. Both projectors endeavor to comfort readers by addressing them as improvement’s beneficiaries rather than its bystanders or victims. Recitations of shared values simultaneously marginalize detractors by depicting them as contrarian outsiders contriving to “shake their Interests.”¹⁴⁷ Yarranton imagines his future critics as improvement’s enemies, civic outlaws rather than reasonable opponents. England’s Improvement attempts to manage its own reception. This rhetorical self-fashioning would unravel in 1677, when Popish plots, Titus Oates, and possibility of exclusion made universal interest appear to be Yarranton’s most risible idea.

      Improvement’s Readers

      In 1679, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet mocking Yarranton and his ideas. A Coffee-House Dialogue; or, A Discourse Between Captain Y——and a Young Barrester of the Middle Temple stages a conversation between Yarranton (“Captain Y,” rewritten into his republican past) and a lawyer skeptical that “so good an Effect might be so easily wrought” from projects.¹⁴⁸ Captain Y badgers the attorney with outlandish claims that resemble but also exaggerate Yarranton’s original proposals: “we may beat the Dutch without fighting, pay Debts without Money, make all the Streets in London Navigable Rivers, harbour all the King’s Great Ships upon the top of an Hill, where they shall be secured from Wind and Weather, and from an hundred other Accidents, they are else obnoxious to.”¹⁴⁹ The fast-talking captain hands the barrister a sheet of paper calling for the establishment of a new club called “the Improvers of England” with a budget for “a pennyworth of Cheese, Bread, Beer and Mustard.”¹⁵⁰

      The barrister sees through Captain Y’s banter, exclaiming, “I say you have out stripp’d all the Poets that ever wrote.”¹⁵¹ Poetry here connotes quixotic imagination detached from material constraint. To “out strip” poetry would be to exceed all bounds of credibility. Captain Y surpasses the impracticality of poets, and shares with them the medium of writing. Coffee-house Dialogue exposes and makes farcical the tactics Yarranton employed to make England’s Improvement an actionable reform instrument. Where Yarranton characterizes himself as a dutiful subject of Charles II, the dialogue reminds readers of his rank in Cromwell’s army. Where Yarranton alleged to speak with plain candor, Captain Y relies on insinuations, “a little push, a wink, a nod, a smile, or Finger held up to the Nose,” suggesting that England’s Improvement mystified its contents to circumvent conflict.¹⁵² Where Yarranton touted the logical continuity between his proposals, the lawyer fails to see how Captain Y’s club proposal “is pertinent to our former Discourse.”¹⁵³ The barrister proceeds to degrade the credentialed engineer and savvy consensus builder into an aged buffoon, who vacantly charges his sharper conversant of being a “young man [who] cannot see so far as I do.”¹⁵⁴