The Wreckage of Intentions. David Alff

of Intentions opens with a vision of plenty. It closes by asking what Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain can tell us about the afterlife of abandoned enterprise. In the Tour’s third letter, Defoe enters the New Forest of Hampshire and finds there a plot of land he had projected to populate with refugees from the Rhenish Palatine in 1709. This settlement scheme came to nothing, leaving the author to rehearse his once-hopeful plans fifteen years later while walking through the exact wilderness he petitioned to improve. Defoe invests “this place” with foreclosed potential, an example of where an unfinished venture left its imprint on a literary record but not actual land. In assessing the signifying nonmatter of this wilderness, I ask why unenacted projects became an enduring obsession for period writers and hypothesize how such anecdotes could spur cultural historiographies better equipped to accommodate the unreal. I contend that an obsession with projection’s counterfactual histories is not something we impose on the long eighteenth century, but a possibility for salvage inscribed within its former blueprints.

       Chapter 1

      Improvement’s Genre

      Andrew Yarranton and the Rhetoric of Projection

      He begins with a Petition.

      —Thomas Brugis, The Discovery of a Proiector, 1641

      Early modern projects began as words that formed proposals to enhance society and make money. These written attempts at imagining and inspiring better worlds exhibited an array of persuasive devices, narrative scaffolds, grammatical tics, and habits of diction that constituted the project as a distinctive genre. There was no textual formula for initiating a project. There were, however, certain rhetorical tendencies that characterized the conception of new enterprise. This chapter shows how projectors devised argumentative strategies to shape England’s future during the reign of Charles II. It concentrates on the frustrations of one man, Andrew Yarranton, who proposed projects both to modernize a late Stuart society he thought backward, and to stabilize his own position within partisan conflicts stemming from the civil wars. This story begins with Yarranton’s rousing call for national improvement. It ends with his murder in a bathtub. What this tragedy makes visible is an idea of how projection worked as a process of rhetorical persuasion. By identifying the linguistic patterns that made projects recognizable in the seventeenth century, this chapter lays the groundwork for later examinations of the print forms that carried proposals, the actions that realized them, and the responses they provoked.

      When twenty of his majesty’s ships entered Dover Roads on May 25, 1660, the naval spectacle marked the end of Charles Stuart’s restless exile as well as Parliament’s tumultuous experiments in republicanism. Monarchy had returned to Britain, and with it the Anglican Church, public theater, and regal court life. The two decades following “the coming over of the king” also saw epidemic plague and devastating fire.¹ England would wage two costly wars against the States-General of the Netherlands. The slave-trading Royal African Company languished in the face of Dutch competition, and the Royal Fishery, a state-financed attempt to control the North Sea herring trade, collapsed altogether. Charles II proved a popular and dexterous leader but was so cash-strapped that he struck a secret alliance, the Treaty of Dover, with France’s Louis XIV in return for two million crowns. His brother, James, Duke of York, shocked the nation by converting to Roman Catholicism, inciting calls for his exclusion from the succession.

      Despite these trials, royalists argued that the Stuart Restoration had ushered an unprecedented era of sectarian healing and commercial growth. John Dryden compared Charles to a morning star that shone through England’s “sullen Intervall of Warre” to illuminate “time’s Whiter series.”² His Annus Mirabilis (1667) interprets English victory over the Dutch fleets at the Battle of Lowestoft and London’s spirited response to the Great Fire as evidence that “now, a round of greater years begun.”³ Another royalist, Thomas Sprat, claimed that “since the Kings Return” Parliament had passed more acts for beautifying London, repairing highways, digging canals, and founding industry “than in divers Ages before.”⁴ Citing the “present prevailing Genius of the English nation,” Sprat credits the king with organizing unprecedented civic efforts to recuperate a land supposedly left to waste during the Commonwealth and Protectorate eras.⁵ Restoring monarchy, he suggests, had not merely returned England to an antebellum age but had elevated it to a new and better state.

      Stirring pronouncements of rupture and return often compensated for the fact that the Restoration’s most enthusiastic acolytes and celebrated achievements first gained momentum during the Interregnum. Dryden lauded England’s rebirth after processing in Cromwell’s funeral.⁶ Sprat was the spokesman for a Royal Society that institutionalized models of knowledge production and correspondence outlined a decade earlier by Samuel Hartlib and his circle.⁷ The 1660s and 1670s were not an age of revolution. Given the compromises required to bring Charles back from the Hague, the era was actually more conducive to what Paul Slack calls “gradual, piecemeal change, not necessarily determined by any overarching theory or ambition.”⁸ The ideas belonging to the word “improvement” held that England need not behead a king, dissolve a parliament, or invoke the imminence of end times to achieve progress. Rather, it could better itself incrementally through reforms compatible with the broad political latitudes of the Stuart settlement.⁹

      Forward-thinking and incremental, improvement often materialized through projects, finite ventures meant to put England’s resources to better use. A project marked an attempt at improvement in the 1600s; indeed, it served as a popular vehicle by which the abstract ideals of social uplift could translate into concrete change. But in an era when improvement ideology was gaining widespread legitimacy as “a familiar item in English public discourse,” projects bore the lingering stench of patent monopolists, quack doctors, chartered dilettantes, and courtier parasites from the Tudor and early Stuart eras.¹⁰ Improvement required projectors to implement its progressive rhetoric through discrete investments of money, time, and labor. Projectors needed “improvement” as a slogan that could make reputable their schemes by affiliating them with Restoration England’s universal desire for betterment.

      One man who exemplified the tensions between the scandalizing ambition of projection and the respectable compromises of improvement was Andrew Yarranton. A native of Worcestershire, Yarranton applied his relentless energies to cutting canals, forging iron, making linens, and marketing clover as a fodder crop. He lobbied for England to establish a land registry, observed German tinplate manufacturing, and studied Dutch mercantile policy. For his innovations in industrial planning and finance, Yarranton has been credited as a pioneering navigations engineer, an early modern railroader, and even the inventor of political economy.¹¹ But when Charles Stuart stepped ashore at Dover Beach in 1660, Yarranton was also a veteran of Cromwell’s army and former sequestrator of royalist land. In 1662 he would be arrested for disobeying his lord lieutenant and later was accused of plotting to overthrow the king. Like his contemporary projector-improver Carew Reynell, who fruitlessly pursued patronage appointments, Yarranton struggled to keep pace with his age and so went about imagining a future that would vindicate his beliefs and talents.

      This future found fullest expression in Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (1677), a 216-page pamphlet that claimed to “chal[k] out the Way” for England to secure and strengthen itself during an “unsteady Age.”¹² Yarranton’s tract indeed charts a new direction for English society through a series of projects, though the image of a chalk line belies the work’s great length, complexity, and confusion. England’s Improvement consists of prose paragraphs, dialogues, letters, legislation, maps, and diagrams. It addresses topics ranging from land banking and forestry to firefighting, factory management, grain storage, and naval strategy, sometimes breaking off discussion of one subject to circle back to another.¹³ Yarranton’s frenetic display of knowledge makes England’s Improvement a mesmerizing but wooly case study in projection and improvement, a bricolage transformation of professional fluency into persuasive resource. England’s Improvement