Peopling the World: Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus 9780812296891

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Peopling the World

PEOPLING the WOR LD Representing Human Mobility from Milton to Malthus

Charlotte Sussman

u n i v e r si t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr ess ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright 䉷 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Sussman, Charlotte, author. Title: Peopling the world: representing human mobility from Milton to Malthus / Charlotte Sussman. Description: 1st edition. 兩 Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020] 兩 Includes bibliographical references and index. 兩 Identifiers: LCCN 2019034599 兩 ISBN 9780812252026 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. 兩 Emigration and immigration in literature. 兩 Population in literature. 兩 Great Britain—Emigration and immigration—History—18th century. 兩 Great Britain—Population—History—18th century. 兩 Great Britain—Colonies—History—18th century. Classification: LCC PR448.E43 S87 2020 兩 DDC 820.9/355—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034599

For Raoul

contents

Introduction

1

Chapter 1. A Race to Fill the Earth: Mobility and Fecundity in Paradise Lost

25

Chapter 2. The Afterlives of Political Arithmetic in Defoe and Swift

54

Chapter 3. The Veteran’s Tale: War, Mobile Populations, and National Identity

83

Chapter 4. Remembering the Population: Goldsmith and Migration

112

Chapter 5. The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population

138

Chapter 6. “Islanded in the World”: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man

157

Chapter 7. Prospects of the Future: Malthus, Shelley, and Freedom of Movement

178

Afterword

216

Notes

223

Index

255

Acknowledgments

265

Introduction

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out. My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul, My soul the father, and these two beget A generation of still-breeding thoughts; And these same thoughts people this little world, In humors like the people of this world: For no thought is contented. —Shakespeare, Richard II (1597, V.1–11) If the British colonies had never been planted, Mr. Malthus would never have written. —William Godwin, Of Population (1820)

When Shakespeare wrote Richard II, the adjective “populous” existed, but the noun “population” did not. In the two centuries that followed, however, “population” became an object of ever increasing interest, and the doomed king’s struggle to “people” the “little world” of his mind with “still-breeding thoughts” found many twisted mirrors in “the people of this world” as Britain devised schemes to populate its expanding territories with living souls. The verb “to people” reminds us how entangled the concept of population is with both reproduction and territorial expansion. As Richard imagines his brain as a “female” upon which his soul can beget “still-breeding” thoughts—an image that will find its nightmare echo in Milton’s Sin impregnated by Death—so those intent on peopling living worlds had to locate and encourage human

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wombs to generate self-reproducing populations. Richard by necessity confines his ambitions to the territory of his mind, but the ambitions of real-world proponents of peopling were farther flung, as they hoped to stake claims to territories in the New World by “planting” them with people. This interest in “peopling” now seems nearly defunct, a topic perhaps best reserved for speculative fiction about the discovery of new stars and planets. In today’s world, a world so saturated by nations, territories, and increasingly defended borders that the dispossessed are harried at every turn, the term’s encapsulation of mobility, fecundity, and territorial expansion is anachronistic, even quaint. And yet, of course, people, great numbers of people, are still on the move, made homeless by war, climate change, and racial hatred. Indeed, the unprecedented refugee crisis of the past decade has led many back to a trenchant passage from Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1948), in which she characterized post–World War II mobility as “migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere. Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth.”1 Arendt’s vision resonates powerfully today. We see many of the issues central to Peopling the World playing out again all around us: Who has a right to move freely across borders? Who has a right to unimpeded settlement? Who has a right to the state’s care and who will be denied it? And furthermore, what are the prerequisites for exercising these rights? Natality? Employment or investment of labor? A story of suffering that demands redress? Yet before we slip too easily into equivalencies between today’s world and the world of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, we need be aware of the shape of Arendt’s argument, a shape that, as we will see, had eighteenthcentury precedents. Arendt makes her point through reference to the implicit ideals of unimpeded settlement and freedom of movement: the “happier predecessors” of twentieth-century migrants—like French Huguenots—who found new homes and new states to which they could assimilate. Not only that: these “happier predecessors” are presumed to have had homes in the first place, secure settlements of which they were dispossessed. Appealing and affecting as this rhetorical turn is—and it is a turn at least as old as Oliver Goldsmith’s 1772 assertion that “A time there was ere England’s griefs began / When every rood of ground sustained its man”—I hope that the following chapters will offer a valuable counter-narrative. While one might say that

Introduction

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Peopling the World documents the formation of the modern mobile subject, that is true only with the understanding that all three of those terms are being redefined during the long eighteenth century: the nature of modernity; the experience of mobility; and the question of who counts as a subject and why. While we often consider secure settlement and free movement to be natural, if lost, ideals, I hope to demonstrate that they themselves are constructs, with their own history, and their own instrumentality in the expansion (and collapse) of empire. The story of that construction is integral to our understanding of the long eighteenth century. The colonies Britain settled in North America, the Caribbean, and, even earlier, in Ireland, provided evidence of the complex politics of population growth that Godwin claims underwrote Malthus’s 1798 prediction that humanity would be destroyed by its own reproductive success. In the years between 1597 and 1798, as we will see, the prospect of peopling the world shifted from a worthy endeavor to an impending catastrophe. In Paradise Lost (1667), Adam and Eve are promised that they will produce a “race to fill the world,” a thought that consoles them even after the trauma of their fall. By 1798, the idea that the world would one day be entirely filled by people had become, in Malthus’s hands, a nightmarish vision. Peopling the World considers how and why this shift in the representation of population expansion took place, examining British literature during the long eighteenth century with an eye for debates about the conjoined issues of fecundity and territorial expansion. Truly understanding that history, however, demands that we take seriously the connections between the imagined spaces of the mind and the practical projects of empire building. Richard’s scheme, like so many subsequently devised by real people, transpires entirely within his own head, in his imagination. Yet his impotent, solitary thoughts alert us to the intimacy between fantasy and policy in many actualized schemes for peopling the world. This book engages the role of imagination in social and economic policy, as well as the importance of literary forms—poetry, drama, and the emergent novel—in both shaping our understanding of the value of peopling and resisting the tenets of that project. Peopling the World demonstrates that such stories changed dramatically over the course of the long eighteenth century, as they rendered the mobility exacted by expansion visible, comprehensible, and memorable. Central to its explanation of those changes is the fact that, in the age of imperial expansion, projects of peopling almost invariably became projects for moving people around. We might even posit 1597, the year Shakespeare

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wrote Richard II, as a watershed, as it was in this year that an Act for the Repression of Vagrancy “provided that dangerous rogues should be banished overseas.” In 1603, a Privy Council order “exile[d] [such rogues] to Newfoundland, the East and West Indies, France, Germany, Spain, and the Low Countries, although in practice most were sent to the American colonies.”2 This act proposed that persons who were both homeless and unemployed— that is, “vagrant”—could become useful again to England by being involuntarily removed to new lands.3 In this deployment of population as a tool of empire, we begin to see the way mobile populations—including the landless poor, transported felons, and indentured servants, as well as African slaves— were crucial to English expansion during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. That period—sometimes known as “the long eighteenth century”—has often been characterized as a distinct era in British history, spanning the years between the restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the ascension of Queen Victoria in 1834. But it also marks the regime of a particular way of thinking about mobility, both inside and outside of Britain. These years were governed by a specific set of Poor Laws—the “Old Poor Law”—that enforced parishlevel poor relief by regulating the mobility of the landless poor. The same years, not coincidentally, were characterized by a particular set of tensions about the role of emigration in British colonial expansion. Although it is not a central focus on this book, they also mark the years of Britain’s greatest involvement in the transatlantic slave trade.4 During this era, it becomes apparent that “peopling” has two, often closely entwined, meanings: the (re)production of bodies and the holding down of territory. The term marks the crucial intersection of fecundity, mobility, and imperial expansion. When James Belich, in Replenishing the Earth, documents a “surge in British emigration” beginning in 1815, which corresponded with “a surge in emigration literature,” he highlights one piece of that literature, a prize essay by Thomas Arnold entitled “The Effects of Distant Colonization on the Parent State,” which inveighs against opponents of emigration by brandishing the words of Genesis: “And God blessed them, and God said unto them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it’ ” (Genesis 1:28).5 “Here,” says Belich, “was the creed of a new colonizing crusade.”6 Concerned as he is with what he calls the “Settler Revolution” of the nineteenth century, in which twenty-five million people emigrated from the British Isles, Belich does not document earlier uses of this allusion. Yet the same

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phrase had a robust life among seventeenth-century proponents of emigration. In 1624, for example, Richard Eburne, in “A Plain Pathway to Plantations,” wrote, “when finding a Country quite void of people, as no doubt in America yet there are many, we seize upon it, take it, possesse it, and as by the Lawes of God and Nations, lawfully we may hold it as our owne, and so fill and replenish it with our people”; and Samuel Purchas declared in 1625, “we have a natural right to replenish the whole earth.”7 And yet between these two moments—the early seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century—such rhetoric was rarely deployed. What happened in the years between these two celebrations of British mobility and fecundity? As we will see, they reveal that Britain had a much more complicated and vexed relationship to both emigration and colonial expansion than we have previously understood.

From Act of Settlement to Acts of Settling: Regimes of Mobility in the Long Eighteenth Century In 1828, a pamphlet protesting government-subsidized schemes to promote emigration from Britain evoked the style and subject matter of Jonathan Swift’s savage critique of Irish poverty and colonial oppression, “A Modest Proposal”: “If we were to attempt to export children, the supply would at once increase with the demand, and we should neither lessen our distress, nor diminish our population. Our wagons would be filled with ‘children for exportation,’ as at Christmas our coaches are with Norfolk turkeys.”8 The reappearance of these rhetorical techniques—the satirical dehumanization of children and their comparison to food—a hundred years after Swift’s tour de force reminds us that the problem of what came to be called “redundant” or “surplus” population occupied Britons throughout the eighteenth century and long predated Malthus. Most often the issue was linked, by both policy makers and the concerned public, with the possibilities for human mobility, or, more cruelly put, the exportation of bodies. Our ideas about European emigration to the New World have been retrospectively colored by the vast, voluntary migrations of the nineteenth century. We tend to starkly contrast the seeming freedom of those movements with the coercion of the slave trade. But our celebration of the former and our condemnation of the latter sometimes work to obscure the peculiar

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Introduction

status of the long eighteenth century in the history of human mobility. And yet this era of increased mobility has a number of important characteristics that reward our attention, including new varieties of both inter- and intranational movement. Some of these varieties were spurred by elective affinities, such as the spiritual desire to congregate based on belief rather than location. The meeting of like minds across great distances resulted in the traveling ministries of the Society of Friends and other religious groups. This need for free association based on ideas saw its most extreme outcome in emigration for religious freedom, such as that which produced the Massachusetts Bay colony. The peaceable movement for ideas, however, had a bloody counterpart in Cromwell’s New Model Army, a professional force whose lack of regional affiliation allowed it to be swiftly deployed anywhere in the British Isles. After Charles II’s restoration in 1660, these types of movement were succeeded by other forms of mass mobility. England no longer had a standing army, but it continued to fight international wars, recruiting and impressing soldiers who became a disturbingly unsettled population during times of peace. Migration spurred by religious belief also continued, as seen, for example, in the Wesley brothers and their Methodist followers. Other new forms of mobility were motivated not by ideological but by economic concerns, such as the general migration from rural to urban environments. London, for example, grew from 400,000 inhabitants in 1650 to almost a million in 1801. Economic gain also motivated secular emigration from England to the New World during the seventeenth century, with about 210,000 people emigrating to the American colonies between 1630 and 1660.9 While this surge of British emigration peaked during the 1650s, when about 70,000 people migrated, the demand for labor in the Caribbean colonies continued, precipitating the era’s most brutal form of mass mobility: the transatlantic slave trade.10 While this book only tangentially considers the history of British slavery, that catastrophic human upheaval should be considered as haunting, either explicitly or implicitly, all the other histories it examines. We can characterize the migrations of the long eighteenth century as occurring along a continuum of human agency, from completely voluntary (such as that of itinerant preachers) to completely involuntary (such as that of captured Africans sold into slavery). Conceptualizing them as a continuum allows us to remember that there was a vast gray area between those two poles, forms of movement that were neither entirely free nor entirely unfree, such as indentured labor, penal transportation, and subsidized emigration. In

Introduction

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the Atlantic arena, the era from approximately 1650 to 1830 was a regime of primarily unfree human movement, for British migrants and slaves alike. As Ted McCormick has noted recently, “forced migration was a conspicuous feature of early modern state formation and imperial expansion.”11 David Eltis claims that until the 1830s, “four out of every five migrants from both Europe and Africa sailed with the expectation of being in some kind of servitude at the completion of the voyage,” whether that servitude was indentured labor, a sentence of penal transportation, or slavery.12 “Servitude,” writes Aaron Fogleman, is the word “that best characterizes the status of the vast majority of immigrants to the new world in the era before the American Revolution.”13 Steven Pincus and James Robinson argue that many of these indenture contracts were bought out by the British government as a way of bolstering the colonial labor force, but such subsidized emigration still falls short of an ideal of free movement.14 Indeed, this research seems to show that, without detracting from the horrors of chattel slavery, it is still possible to think of slavery and European emigration as having a relationship that is different from the binary opposition in which they are often placed. We might posit slavery instead as the limit case at one end of a continuum of coerced movement and servitude. The language for describing such compromised forms of agency has never been well-formulated; developing such terms can help us better understand why the long eighteenth century tended to denigrate mobility even as it was increasingly dependent upon it. This mobility was both feared and needed. Ambivalence about mobility, and also about the prosperity of which it was both symptom and cause, permeated many aspects of British culture. London, for example, was decried as the monstrous head of an ailing body, but also celebrated as a nodal point in the great flows of global trade, enjoying, as Joseph Addison says, “the Harvest of every Climate.”15 The poor were imagined to be both a drain on national resources, and a vast untapped market for the consumerism that would power the British economy.16 Emigration, as we will see, was always a subject of controversy: at times something to be encouraged to fill the space of new territories, and at others something to be bemoaned, a sinkhole that consumed and destroyed the settled communities of Britain. The fact that most mobility in this era did not conform to the binary of free/unfree is central to the argument of this book. We tend to think of freedom as it relates to mobility as meaning the freedom to go where one wants, as freedom of movement, predicated on the right to cross territories and pass easily through borders. During most of the eighteenth century, however,

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Introduction

liberty more often meant the freedom to stay put—to be protected from the various kinds of “removal” prevalent during the period—not just the strictures of the Poor Laws, but also impressment into the army or navy, penal transportation (offered as an alternative to the death penalty), the displacements of land enclosures, the late-century Scottish “clearances,” or, in the form that marked the limit of the “unfree,” capture into slavery in Africa. This book argues that during most of the eighteenth century, mobility, or vulnerability to removal, was as much a marker of subalternity as race, class, or gender. For this reason, the same period that witnessed, and even normalized, so many new forms of large-scale mobility also came to value settlement ever more highly. We can see this evidenced in the Settlement Acts associated with the Poor Laws, the increasing emphasis on “home” and “nativeness” in cultural discourse, and in the empire’s increasing interest in settler colonialism. If mobility was politicized and policed in certain ways, then so too was settlement. Scott MacKenzie argues that the concept of “home” evolved out of an understanding of “homelessness” and not the other way around, and that its etiology can be found in “the body of texts that confront poverty in the late eighteenth century.”17 This archive, and the disparate claims that are made within it to legitimate a person’s right to settle, form a significant aspect of Peopling the World. The rights to settlement dictated by the various versions of the Poor Laws include rights based on natality, on contracted labor, and on kinship. But the application of these laws, and the assumptions about settlement they enshrined, were continuously contested, not only in Britain, but also in England’s colonies, where British settlement was underwritten by the removal of the indigenous groups previously occupying the land. Just as settlement cannot be understood as prior to mobility, so too colonial struggles over territorial occupation cannot be understood without an understanding of the struggles over settlement rights that gripped England itself during the long eighteenth century. As Paul Cefalu explains, “If we set a more or less monological or unified official culture against an alien native culture [in the colonies], we fail to register the internal divisions within the European culture itself.”18 Or, to put it another way, “The worlds of English land use and domestic policies are inextricably linked with those of overseas practices of dispossession through a world system.”19 And yet, while the ideology of “settler colonialism” has been the subject of much scholarly attention, the fact that an ideal of settlement was simultaneously under construction in England itself has rarely been brought into

Introduction

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conversation with that development.20 When it is, mobile figures or groups tend to be seen, at best, as persons who have been deprived of settlement, or persons suffering from a lack of attachment to place, or, at worst, as pernicious beings undermining the incontestable value of settlement. The theorist Hagar Kotef has termed this worldview the “sedentarist ideology of the nation-state within a factuality wherein people are, and were, always mobile.”21 This sedentarist ideological formation, however, occludes the way “social expansion has always been predicated on the social expulsion of migrants.”22 As Thomas Nail argues, “To view migration and movement as lack is also to conceal the conditions of expulsion required by social expansion. It is to treat migration as an ‘unfortunate phenomenon’ rather than the structural necessity of the historical conditions of social reproduction.” Nail calls his alternative perspective on the relationship of human mobility “kinopolitics,”—and the compensatory occlusions “kinophobia.”23 Thus the historical establishment of ideals of mobility and settlement can be seen as “complementary processes.” As Kotef explains, “Once this image of stability is established for particular categories of now-‘rooted’ people, it serves to facilitate their growing mobility. Movement and stability thus precondition each other. Finally, these particular categories are formed vis-a`-vis other groups, which are simultaneously presumably less rooted and yet constantly hindered.”24 Much of Peopling the World investigates how the lives of those “presumably less rooted and yet constantly hindered” were policed—by the Poor Laws, by penal transportation, and by emigration regulation, among other things. This focus helps us understand the degree to which the British Empire depended on the mobility of devalued populations, such as landless laborers, emigrants, and soldiers, during an era in which human value was increasingly associated with property, productivity, and settlement. The question of whether the mobility of labor is a form of freedom or a form of coercion—liberation or dispossession—lies at the roots of political economy, in the eighteenth century and in our own day. When persons are understood to be valuable in terms of their labor power, rather than their regional or religious loyalties, in theory they become portable. As we will discuss in Chapter 2, Marx credits William Petty with discovering “the valueform of the product of labour.”25 In many respects, this idealized portability becomes a key to a growing economy. Thus, Adam Smith complains, “The very unequal price of labor which we frequently find in England in places at no great distance from each other, is probably owing to the obstruction which the law of settlements gives to a poor man who would carry his industry from

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Introduction

parish to parish without a certificate.”26 Yet, seen from another perspective, the laboring poor were forced into the mobility of searching for wage labor by the enclosure of common lands and other forces that “[create] private property out of commonly held resources and land; in the process . . . generat[ing] a rootless population ‘free’ to sell itself into wage labor.”27 Alongside these economic conditions, the mutually constitutive ideological constructs of mobility and settlement gave rise to what Raymond Williams would call specific structures of feeling.28 These structures of feeling can be understood as regulating how affective attachment is configured or imagined, whether that attachment is to kin, to leaders, or to land. Thus, in Paradise Lost, we can trace a transition from attachment to place to attachment to person, the former predicated on natality and the latter predicated on conjugality. Eve learns that Adam, not Eden, is her “native soil,” and this consoles her for the exile from Paradise, enabling a narrative of human mobility. “We need not fear / To pass commodiously this life [of exile],” Adam tells her after the fall, “sustained / By Him with many comforts till we end / In dust, our final rest and native home” (10.82–85). Eve must leave the flowers she has raised in Eden, because they “never will in other climate grow”; since Adam and Eve’s “native home” is “soil” or “dust”—the material of their own bodies—their attachment to each other supersedes any attachment to place. That privileging of attachment to persons over attachment to place, however, evolved over the course of the eighteenth century to become something quite different. “Dust,” all that remained of a person after death, once interred in the landscape, became itself a place that exerted a hold upon the living. It became, that is, the grave—that site so important to eighteenthcentury literature and culture. Perhaps most famously, Thomas Gray depicts how forcefully the “frail memorials” of the poor “implore the passing tribute of a sigh” from all who view them (78, 80). In “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” such graves seem to have more to say than the living villagers: “Ev’n from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,” Gray writes, “Ev’n in our ashes live their wonted fires” (91–92). In this paradigm, settlement, or being at home, can be understood as the way person fuses with place after death, and the attachment of the living to that fused person/place. In this structure of feeling, when the poor leave their natal place, they seem to lose not only the capacity to settle but also subjectivity itself. In Oliver Goldsmith’s enormously popular poem, The Deserted Village, rural folk forced to desert their beloved Auburn pass silently through the “torrid tracts” of North America with “fainting steps,” beset by tigers, snakes, and tornados, while the land

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they have left becomes “a garden and a grave,” commemorating them even as they live unimaginable lives in the New World (343, 302). David Rollison articulates the difference between these two structures of feeling—attachment to person and attachment to place—by tracing the etymology of the word “region”: When “region” meant “to rule” in the epoch of the peasantry (whenever that was), the assumption was that the laboring population went with the land, and only moved if the lord wished it so. In the more populist constitutional milieu that emerged between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it became desirable to propagate the myth that the people stayed with the land because they were organically connected to it. Once upon a time, they were settled because the ruling class willed it. Now they were settled because they belonged to the biosphere.29 Thus Adam and Eve’s settlement in Paradise depends, quite literally, on their Lord; when He demands their departure, they move, leaving the other elements of that “region,” like Eve’s flowers, behind. But when Goldsmith’s villagers are forced to leave their land, they more resemble Eve’s flowers than Eve herself, withering in “other climates,” because their organic connection to their natal place has been severed. Again, paradoxically, we see settlement celebrated—or eulogized—even as British imperial expansion demands ever increasing mobility. A resolution of this paradox in sedentarist ideology can be glimpsed by the end of the period covered by this book. Physicalized over-attachment to place, particularly to graves, becomes pathologized, as in Wordsworth poems like “The Thorn” or “The Ruined Cottage,” while the memory of such attachments helps undergird an emergent conception of freedom of movement. Thus, a poem like Felicia Hemans’s, “Song of Emigration,” published in her Songs of the Affections in 1830, can characterize the feelings of immigrants voyaging toward a new home as “A mingled breathing of grief and glee” (2). The poem then splits those feelings into two gendered voices. There is a man’s voice, “unbroken by sighs,” and filled “with triumph” (3–4). And a woman’s—“A murmur of farewell” with a “plaintive tone” (8–9). The voices take turns expressing their sentiments, the male voice anticipating the joys of settlements—building new homes, accumulating wealth, hunting, naming rivers and mountains after himself, and never hearing a voice say “Hither, no

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Introduction

further pass!”—while the female voice provides counterpoint, mourning the things they have left behind—home, orchards, and church. The female voice even invokes Milton’s Eve, asking “But who shall teach the flowers, / Which our children loved, to dwell / In a soil that is not ours?” (47–49). It is tempting to read the male and female voices as contesting one another, with the female providing a critique of some of the ideologies of settler colonialism. It is she, after all, who suggests that their flowers won’t grow because the soil is not theirs, while the male voice imagines only vacancy: “a lake’s green shore, / Where the Indian graves lay, alone, before” (45–46). But it is also possible to read the contrapuntal voices as suturing together an ideology based on precisely this contradiction: that the song of freedom of movement is also one of regret. As Kotef suggests, such memories establish an “image of stability . . . for particular categories of now-‘rooted’ people,” which “serves to facilitate their growing mobility.”30 Unlike Goldsmith’s villagers, Hemans’s emigrants can migrate without losing their capacity to speak, because their very psyches evidence their capacity to settle. Once a subject emerges who can move without attachment to either place or graves, we begin to see something like the modern conception of freedom of movement. In his Commentaries on English Law (1783), William Blackstone records what Edlie Wong dubs a “right of locomotion,” proposing that “personal liberty consists in the power of locomotion, of changing situation, or removing one’s person to whatsoever places one’s own inclination may direct, without imprisonment or restraint.”31 In this way of thinking, migration was not a violation of one’s rights, but an exercise of them—not the imposition of state power, but autonomy from it. As William Godwin wrote in his retort to Malthus, Of Population, in 1820 (a passage to which we will return in Chapter 7): “As long as there is tyranny and oppression among any of the governments of mankind, as long as it is possible for a human being to come under the burthen of unmerited disgraces, as long as there shall exist a pride in men that disdains servitude, and a spirit of industry anxious to free itself from vexation and constraint, so long will emigration form a feature in the history of our race.”32 With the overhaul of the Poor Laws in 1834, Bridget Anderson writes, “There was a rebalancing of the response to the mobility of the poor. Being mobile and moving from one’s parish was increasingly about being ‘free,’ improving oneself through selling one’s labour rather than being ‘masterless.’ ”33 Improving oneself could include leaving one’s country: “Emigration assumed a totally new character,” one commentator wrote in 1819, “it was no longer merely the poor, the idle,

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the profligate, or the wildly speculative who were proposing to quit their native country.”34 This shift in attitudes toward emigration corresponded with a huge increase in numbers of people taking that path. “In the eighteenth century,” writes Belich, “about half a million people emigrated from the British Isles. In the long nineteenth century, 1815–1914, the number rocketed to 25 million.”35 Attention to representations of human movement during the long eighteenth century allows us to contest the familiar idea that the crucial event of the eighteenth century was the formation of the individual. We can see the period as an epoch of migration for large numbers of people, and the structures of feeling surrounding that dynamic.

David’s Cattle: The Politics of Numbering People Both aspects of that dynamic—the movement and numbering of people— were under construction during the long eighteenth century. We have already begun to explore how the era understood mobility. We turn now to conceptions of human aggregates during the long eighteenth century: that is, to the emergence of what we now call “population.” The most influential proponent for the importance of the birth of population has been Michel Foucault, who sees it as a manifestation of the emergence of what he calls biopower. For Foucault, biopower is “applied to the living man, to man-as-living-being, ultimately to man-as-species.”36 Biopower finds its object in a population, understood as “a set of elements that, on one side, are immersed within the general regime of living beings and that, on another side, offer a surface on which authoritarian, but reflected and calculated transformations can get a hold.”37 In applying Foucault’s ideas, scholars have emphasized different aspects of this formulation. Some, like Mary Poovey, have focused on the significance of the new kinds of calculations involved in producing the composite subject of the population, understanding their emergence as an important event in the history of epistemology. In A History of the Modern Fact, Poovey argues that a population is a “collective subject” whose “regularities would be the effect of the very mathematical operations that made counting seem to bridge the gap between particulars and generalization.”38 As Andrea Rusnock puts it, “the modern concept of population and its measurement were mutually constitutive.”39 Others have paid less attention to the epistemological construction of the population, and focused instead on the place

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Introduction

of biopower in the history of the exertion of state power over persons, particularly human aggregates. Achille Mbembe, for instance, calls biopower “that domain of life over which power has taken control.”40 Of course, the epistemological and the coercive aspects of biopower are tightly imbricated, as the passage quoted above make clear: calculations are made to show where state power is best exerted; and the exertion of authoritarian power shapes the contours of the aggregate that is calculated. We will see this imbrication played out when we discuss the history of British censuses and other state apparatuses of numbering in Chapter 2. But, as Robert Mitchell demonstrates, an ambiguity remains in Foucault’s work between the political and the biological: “it remains unclear whether Foucault intended population to be understood primarily in this political sense—as referring to biological characteristics of the people under the political control of a state—or primarily in a biological sense, as referring to biological aspects of the human species that have no necessary relationship to national borders.”41 This ambiguity alerts us to the tension evident during the long eighteenth century around creating and enforcing the borders of the population, as well as the passage of people back and forth across those borders. This is the issue that Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, in a slightly different context, term the “problem of population.” The problem of population provokes a growing tension between “the people” and “the population.” “Where the first concept [the people] refers to all members of the national community that can be construed as a single unified body, the second [the population] points to those who are included, whether permanently or temporarily, within the nation even as they are excluded from membership in it.”42 In other words, nation and population are not identical fields, and their boundaries were, as we will see, hotly contested. Within England, the tension between “the people” and the “population” is perhaps most obvious in relation to the Poor Laws, which adjudicated whose condition might be improved by receiving parish support, and who would be denied such support, and thus denied membership in the “people.” The fact that adjudication of who belonged to “the people” was articulated in relation to settlement and vagrancy, however, again alerts us to the role of mobility in the relation of “people” to “population,” and population to the state. As Ted McCormick reminds us, the transition between “populousness” and “population” grew out of seventeenth-century debates over the policies governing settlement and mobility through enclosure and improvement. “The path to population was a crooked one, originating in . . . the

Introduction

15

literature of ‘agrarian complaint,’ a Tudor discourse of depopulation directed against enclosure and improvement [that] forged much of the conceptual vocabulary for thinking about the roles, production, and distribution of functionally and morally defined multitudes that would be used by proponents of improvement, many associated with Samuel Hartlib, in the middle decades of the seventeenth century.”43 The importance of mobility to ideas about population is further emphasized when we understand how frequently those deemed undeserving of parish support were pushed beyond the borders of the nation. This either obviated their claim on the care of the state, or, in the case of military service, subsidized emigration, or government buy-out of bounties, made their claim on the state contingent on their mobility. In one sense, then, patrolling the borders of a “population” that is defined as the suture of a state and the human beings inhabiting its territory is precisely the emerging work of biopolitics as Foucault defines it. Yet the dark side of that dynamic in the long eighteenth century—the struggles over those borders, their ragged margins, the contested claims of those hoping to live inside them, and the fate of those cast beyond them—has yet to receive the attention it deserves. Peopling the World works to expose an assumption about mobility that underlies these accounts of the emergence of biopolitics. In “Governmentality,” Foucault argues that during the eighteenth century, “population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government”: “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its conditions, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means the government uses to attain these ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population.”44 Turning our attention to the fraught relationship between settlement and mobility in eighteenth-century thinking about human aggregates challenges the parameters of Foucualdian theory in ways that allow us to rethink the idea that “the improvement of the conditions” of population is the “ultimate end of government.” Most importantly, it enjoins us to consider that the population whose condition the government hoped to improve was a circumscribed and regulated group, not at all coterminous with the actual number of persons living in Britain and its territories. For all these reasons, as we will see in Chapter 2, it is impossible to separate the development of the apparatuses for numbering persons from either the increased mobility of British subjects or the national project of colonial expansion. For this reason, when the long eighteenth century thought about population, it thought of moving people around. Thus one goal of Peopling the World is to challenge the relatively static concept of “population” by reorienting us to

16

Introduction

the more mobile issue of “peopling.” The question of how the world should be peopled—and of who those people should be—brought the issue of mobility into conversation with the problem of how to number the people who are moving. Out of this intersection, I argue, the concept of population was born. Turning from population to peopling also allows us to see how central, and how complicated, the relationship of reproduction—the biological process of peopling—to mobility truly is. It also reveals the importance of gender roles and emerging ideas of sexual difference in the cultural understanding of peopling. Mobility has always been a gendered phenomenon, as A. L. Beier makes clear when he summarizes the circumstances of vagrant women thus: in the early seventeenth century, they were “basically of three sorts: those looking for husbands who had deserted them, prostitutes, and unmarried pregnant girls.” Vagrant women, in other words, were often rendered criminal by the vagaries of sexual exchange. The interchangeability of female vagrancy and unsanctioned female sexuality is brought home when Beier suggests that often “female itinerants were charged with prostitution rather than vagrancy.”45 Among the mobile poor, reproduction loomed as one of the chief activities in need of regulation by the state. Reproduction was “continually invoked alongside their supposed idleness and disorder; the refusal of labor so central to conceptions of vagrancy was linked to rhetoric accusing the poor of irresponsible sexuality, the production of too many children, and the rearing of these children into habits of idleness—all leading to a drain on the parish coffers in excess poor relief.”46 Yet even as these forms of “unsettled” female sexuality were criminalized, women’s reproductive capacity inside of marriage became more highly valued. Woman, Martin Luther said, is “needed to bring about the increase of the human race”: “whatever their weaknesses, women possess a virtue that cancels all: they have a womb and they can give birth.”47 Yet if women’s reproductive activities outside of marriage were considered vagrancy, their reproductive activities within marriage were not considered vagrancy’s opposite—productive labor. Instead, as Siliva Federici argues, women’s capacity to reproduce—their capacity to provide the raw materials, as it were, for the project of peopling the world—was naturalized, made to seem a natural resource. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “their wombs became public territory, controlled by men and the state, and procreation was directly placed at the service of capitalist accumulation. . . . The female body was turned into an instrument for the reproduction of

Introduction

17

labor and the expansion of the work force, treated as a natural breeding machine, functioning according to rhythms outside of a woman’s control.”48 Federici goes so far as to argue that the transformation of women’s reproductive capacity into a natural resource allowed “proletarian women [to become] for male workers the substitute for the land lost to enclosures. . . . Women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, lying outside the sphere of market relations.”49 These seem strong words, perhaps, until we remember the extent to which Eve’s womb, destined to carry “the promised Seed” (12.623), is supposed to compensate Adam and Eve for the land they have lost to divine enclosure, and the effort Milton’s poem expends on figuring Eve’s fecundity as a natural resource under the jurisdiction of her husband. In colonial settings, where, as we will see, the (re)production of English bodies was deemed an important way to take and hold territory, the harnessing of female reproductive capacity for the colonial state proved disturbingly difficult. That difficulty inscribed itself in the projects of enumeration that were so central to colonial control. Molly Farrell has recently explored the way “imperial control demanded an accurate account of human habitation and human reproduction, and this newly numerical social discourse revolves centrally around the bodies of women and children—bodies that have the potential to alter the count. . . . Numbers cannot freeze bodies into a stable count: they can only induce the act of counting, and this tension between the desire to enumerate and the mutability of bodies arises especially around the appearance of the reproductive bodies of women and children.”50 From the mercantilist schemes to encourage reproduction discussed in Chapter 2, to the state surveillance of infanticide discussed in Chapter 5, to the early nineteenthcentury Malthusian anxiety about the hyperfecundity of the poor discussed in Chapter 7, we can see this anxiety about the ungovernable space of the womb—vital to the project of peopling, but chronically unresponsive to government regulation—bubbling up at crucial moments. Throughout Peopling the World, I pay close attention both to the association of female vagrancy with unsanctioned sexuality, and to the harnessing of female reproduction to the needs of the expansionist state. Throughout the long eighteenth century, however, the project of peopling was everywhere shadowed by the brutal work of dispeopling. Thus even as we investigate the politics of reproduction, we must also acknowledge the way that mass death also benefited the expansionist state. This is the potent challenge to the Foucauldian idea of biopower presented by

18

Introduction

Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. Mbembe defines necropolitics primarily in relation to late colonial occupations, as “contemporary forms of the subjugation of life to the power of death,” although he does view eighteenth-century slavery as “one of the first instances of biopolitical experimentation.”51 Scholars have pointed to other crucial eighteenth-century deathscapes. The “vacant” lands the British were so eager to people in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for instance, had been rendered so by the genocidal reduction of indigenous people. As Molly Farrell has recently argued, writers about North America, through Benjamin Franklin in the mid-eighteenth century and even beyond, took as their “rhetorical starting point” the “fiction of empty habitable land available for humans to ‘fill’ it.” Peeling back the cruelly productive fiction of seeing such territory as empty rather than emptied allows us to “acknowledge the violence and suffering that is present, yet disavowed, in the population rhetoric of vacancy.”52 In this case, the state’s power is made manifest by the “vacant” territory it accrues from the deaths of the “enemy” bodies that once inhabited it. This too is a kind of necropolitics. As Felicia Hemans writes her “Song of Emigration,” American settlers will raise their “works onto many a lake’s green shore, / Where the Indian graves lay alone before” (45–46).53 Recognizing the complex resonance of eighteenth-century evocations of empty space explains the affective charge associated with vacancy during the period. We can see those resonances not only in the extraordinary popularity of Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, but also in Samuel Johnson’s assessment of the Scottish Highlands depopulated by rack-renting and clearances (a scene to which we will return in Chapter 4): “To hinder insurrection, by driving away people, and to govern peaceably, by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politics. . . . It affords a legislator little self-applause to consider, that where was formerly an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.”54 And we can see those resonances decades later in Malthus, usually associated with hyperabundance, whose “meditations lead him to an extraordinary counting of the missing, a calculus of absence,” as he “surveys a landscape of absences: the fields that might have been dedicated to corn and not cattle: the millions that might have lived; the lands that might yet be devoted to potatoes instead of corn.”55 Emptiness, not only in the colonies but also in the heart of Britain itself, became a resonant sign “of the subjugation of life to the power of death” that both scaffolded and haunted colonial expansion, internal and external, during the long eighteenth century.56

Introduction

19

Yet, as Mbembe explains, necropolitics is more complicated than a dichotomy between being allowed to live and being killed. Under an expansionist state, many are put into situations that are “death worlds”: “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead.”57 In the eighteenth century, this is most evident in New World plantations, the conditions of which Mbembe calls a “state of injury”: a “phantomlike world of horrors and intense cruelty and profanity.” But the fate of many others, if not that extreme, was still to die in the service of the very “people” to which they were denied full membership, whether as impressed soldiers in the Royal Navy or Merchant Marines, or as human screens between the British and their rival colonial powers. Some of the texts discussed in this book suggest that what we see in the deployment of persons from England’s internal colonies in the service of empire is a form of necropolitics. Thus, when Swift satirically suggests that the native Irish be “transplanted to the English Dominions on the American continent, as a screen between his Majesty’s English Subjects and the savage Indians”58 (a proposition we will discuss in Chapter 2), or when one of the characters in Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian asks “Do you think our auld enemies of England care a boddle whether we didna kill ane anither, skin and birn, horse and foot, men, women, and bairns, all and sindry, omnes et singulos?” (a question we will pursue in Chapter 5), we need to consider the extent to which the government hopes to extract surplus value not just from the labor of subaltern persons, but also from the expenditure of their lives in securing territory for the state. As we have already noted, it is the vulnerability of these groups to being moved that marks them as subaltern. Now we can see that another index of their subalternity is their vulnerability to being consumed by a necropolitics inflected by mobility, which challenges and extends that paradigm in much the same way it does for biopolitics. Both peopling and dispeopling are aspects of eighteenth-century large-scale mobility. Seeing the emergence of population in the context of both biopolitics and necropolitcs invites us to understand population as part of the history of mobility as well as the history of epistemology and sovereignty. Each chapter of Peopling the World focuses on a group of subjects vulnerable to coerced mobility: the landless poor (Chapter 1); the native Irish (Chapter 2); army veterans (Chapter 3); the rural poor displaced by enclosure (Chapter 4); the Scots (Chapter 5); humanity imagined under the pressure of pandemic (Chapter 6); and the poor again under the new Poor Laws of the

20

Introduction

1830s (Chapter 7). To initiate our exploration of the representation of such groups, the first two chapters provide complementary accounts of the intersection between population and mobility: the first focusing on legal and economic policy toward the poor in relation to Milton’s Paradise Lost; the second on the emergent science of political arithmetic as critiqued by Swift in his writing about Ireland. The first focuses on people, the second on numbering. These two chapters, plus a third, make up the first conceptual half of the book. They look at the concern prevalent from the Restoration to the mideighteenth century, triggered by the seeming superfluity of British population, to find a way for persons thought useless to the state—the poor, the Irish, and army veterans—to become useful again, usually by deploying them to “vacant” colonial spaces. The next three chapters, centered on Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian, and Shelley’s The Last Man, examine the shift in the second half of the eighteenth century to anxiety about depopulation and the effect of disease, murder, and dispossession on England’s sense of its identity in relation to its empire. Finally, the book turns to the work of Thomas Malthus, positioning it as an epistemological watershed as it reconceptualized peopling as a problem of time rather than space—a problem of futurity rather than territory. The first set of investigations begins with a chapter entitled “A Race to Fill the Earth: Mobility and Fecundity in Paradise Lost.” Milton’s epic poem was an explanation of how human value might be maintained despite involuntary mobility that was enormously influential throughout the long eighteenth century. This chapter investigates how the distinction between settlement and mobility was inflected by the biblical injunction to people the world. It embeds these issues in the context of cultural and political debates current in seventeenth-century England, particularly around changes to the Poor Laws. When we look at these issues together, Milton’s poem gives us a way of understanding the tension during the period between codifying mobility and valuing attachment to place. This chapter argues that Paradise Lost provides a story about labor, fecundity, and mobility that might be understood as consoling its readers in much the same way that Eve herself is consoled for her banishment by carrying the Seed of the future Messiah. The second chapter, “The Afterlives of Political Arithmetic in Defoe and Swift,” continues this exploration of representations of the overly mobile, landless poor, seen this time through the lens of political arithmetic, the statistical science that emerged during the mid-seventeenth century. It examines two very different literary engagements with political arithmetic and the

Introduction

21

apparatuses of numbering it inspired in the work of Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year incorporates bills of mortality (historical records of the causes of death in Greater London) into its fictional narrative of the epidemic-stricken city in 1665. The chapter argues that Defoe’s novel, rather than defining itself in opposition to these statistics, seeks to borrow and learn from their representational power. Swift’s writing about Ireland, including “A Modest Proposal,” also investigates the uses of political arithmetic, but turns explicitly to the issues of mobility and fecundity in the colonial arena. The chapter argues that Swift’s satirical tracts about the condition of Ireland provide a crucial critical purchase on the rhetorical effects of political arithmetic during this period. Turning to a group whose mobility was more associated with barrenness than fecundity, but whose very infecundity posed problems for the state, the third chapter, “The Veteran’s Tale: War, Mobile Populations, and National Identity,” looks at representations of army veterans. State employees whose usefulness to the state ended when they came home from war, veterans were one of the first and most persistent figures of what came to be known as redundant population. This chapter examines the representational problems that plague the narratives of discharged soldiers. As texts by Farquhar, Goldsmith, Smollett, Sterne, Wordsworth, and Scott illustrate, veterans (or those speaking on their behalf ) found it hard to make their stories intelligible to those at home. The narrative problems of soldiers’ stories spring in part from their enforced mobility. In a culture that was beginning to valorize a person’s relationship to place based on industrious labor, it was difficult to recognize or represent the perpetual mobility that the state sanctioned—indeed demanded—from soldiers. At the beginning of the century, that mobility could be understood as a kind of sexualized roaming, but by the end of the century, it had come to seem a tragic and irremediable dislocation. The next chapter, “Remembering the Population: Goldsmith and Migration,” examines the mid-eighteenth-century shift from a concern with the overabundance of useless population to a preoccupation with depopulation. It examines a cluster of issues surrounding colonial expansion and mobility in the lead-up to the end of England’s first empire: the debate about the cost of populating Canada, and related renewed concern over the consequences of the depopulation of rural areas in England and Scotland. In The Deserted Village, Goldsmith blames luxury for the ornamental enclosure that has displaced the villagers of Auburn, rendering the village an empty ruin. Luxury, he argues, sunders the ties between these communities and the places

22

Introduction

they have traditionally called home, rendering both land and people barren. Yet, at the same time, the pressures of western expansion in the Americas put the ideological borders of the nation, imagined as not fully coextensive with the empire, under interrogation. This chapter places Goldsmith’s 1770 poem in the context of his earlier political writings, and his novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766). It concludes with a consideration of Samuel Johnson’s reflections on the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands after 1745 in his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). In all these texts, the chapter investigates the problems of memory generated by this depopulation, and the kinds of narratives used to circumvent them. The fifth chapter, “The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian: Nation, Narration, and Population,” moves to the early nineteenth century and Walter Scott’s 1818 novel. This chapter examines the strategies by which productive populations were distinguished from useless ones during this period, and argues that this distinction coincided with changing ideas about the coherence of a British nation. The chapter also investigates the relationship between the legal surveillance of reproduction, exemplified by Effie Deans’s trial for infanticide, demonstrating the increasing demand for individual continence with regard to reproduction. The possibility of aligning reproduction with imperial need was one of the favorite fantasies of population theorists, positioning women’s bodies as crucial sites of experiment and surveillance. Inevitably, efforts to understand the way populations grew produced disturbing evidence of the misalignment of individual choices about reproduction and the need of the centralized state to treat population as an imperial resource. This chapter argues that a nexus of concerns around the intersection of reproduction, state institutions of surveillance, and new implementations of demographic science encompasses both Scotland and Britain’s more distant colonies during the early nineteenth century. The sixth chapter, “ ‘Islanded in the World’: Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man,” looks at the extremes that fantasies of depopulation could reach, focusing on Mary Shelley’s novel of 1826. Although it is named for the ultimate solitary individual, the novel devotes much of its energy to representing human aggregates. Set in the late twentyfirst century, the narrative recounts the extinction of humanity by a virulent global plague that leaves only one man alive. This chapter argues that the plague exerts pressure on the idea of national community by forcing a reevaluation of the numbers of people needed to continue a nation. The plague also intensifies human mobility, severing all local attachments as its survivors

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seek safety. By considering these issues, The Last Man engages with contemporaneous sociopolitical debates, reflects on the consequences of those debates for literary production and readership, and meditates on the possibilities for cultural memory in a peripatetic world. This chapter introduces a neglected historical context for the novel: the debates over emigration, especially state-aided emigration during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. The book concludes with a chapter entitled “Prospects of the Future: Malthus, Shelley, and Freedom of Movement.” While the first six chapters of Peopling the World examine various ways that peopling intersected with mobility, this final chapter examines Malthus’s crucial recalibration of the frame through which issues of population were understood. His work transformed thinking about population from a problem of space to a problem of time. While many of his interlocutors, including William Godwin, continued to see emigration as a solution to population pressure, Malthus urged his readers to give up “partial views of emigration” and consider “the whole earth instead of one spot.” For Malthus, the emptiness of the present-day world is inconsequential in relation to the inexorable drive of population to fill that world completely. This final chapter places Malthus’s debates with Godwin and others in the context of the changing understanding of futurity and mobility at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and considers the impact of this new Malthusian narrative on Mary Shelley’s second-to-last novel, Lodore (1836).

* * * I would have been pleased, on completing this project, to find that the dynamics it examines, particularly the categorization of migrancy as a form of subalternity, and the policing of that condition as a form of criminality, were archaic, and my study of them a somewhat dull excavation of an issue from the past. But of course this is not the case, and it has been painful to lift my head from the manuscript to find that conflict over human mobility has only intensified during the many years I have spent writing this book. In the ever-increasing incarceration and deportation of migrants in the Mediterranean, on the U.S. southern border, and elsewhere, we see renewed evidence of Kotef ’s formulation: the persecution of migrants as “simultaneously presumably less rooted and yet constantly hindered.”59 For those designated “less rooted” in this way, migrancy is, as it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth

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Introduction

centuries, a crime of status rather than a crime of action. As P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods argue in their analysis of the current crisis in the Mediterranean, “it is a mistake” to view “the violence that befalls so-called migrants to Europe as an effect of their transgressive act of crossing borders meant to exclude, of breaking the law . . . as an instance of contingent violence, a punishment for a transgressive act. This error is enabled by confusing the empirical with the structural.”60 To combat our tendency to think of border crossing as a collection of individual acts that can be empirically measured, we need only think of the current controversy over DACA, which targets children brought to the United States before they were old enough to make choices for themselves. For such people, crossing the border was not a voluntary action, but this lack of volition does not change the precariousness of their status. We struggle not over whether they have done something illegal, but over whether or not they are illegal. Even if, as I argue in the last chapter, we focus now on freedom of movement instead of freedom of settlement, one’s structural position in the regime of mobility shapes both identity and status. I wrote at the outset of this introduction that understanding the historical construction of mobility is essential to understanding the eighteenth century. I close by noting that those structures, which were part of the inauguration of modernity, enclose us still, and it behooves us, if we cannot get outside them, at least to understand them, lest we go on living in the eighteenth century for a long time to come.

chapter 1

A Race to Fill the Earth Mobility and Fecundity in Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is a poem of radical relocations. It begins with Satan’s fall into the burning lake and ends with Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Paradise. Yet it explores the problems of settlement and mobility with nuance as well as drama. “And now lead on,” Eve tells Adam near the end of the final book. In me is no delay. With thee to go Is to stay here; without thee here to stay Is to go hence unwilling. Thou to me Are all things under Heav’n, all places thou, Who for my willful crime art banished hence. (12.615–19)1 Eve’s words are both a declaration of love—a declaration made more poignant by the acrimony that precedes it—and a dazzling transformation of enforced mobility into its own kind of settlement. Eve, who has previously dreaded leaving Paradise, now tells Adam that “With thee to go / Is to stay here.” Their banishment, the “wand’ring steps” that take them out of the Garden, become, in her words, a form of “staying” put, simply because they move together. Adam is “all places” to Eve, and, as she speaks, her attachment to him takes the place of her attachment to the Garden, the land she has loved, and upon which she has labored. But why is their devotion, their conjugal bond, so tied up with this interrogation of settlement and mobility? And why does the poem stretch this moment out into six lines, emphasizing the paradoxical nature of Eve’s feelings with every deliberately jarring line

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break? Why is this transfer of attachment from place to person so important to the conclusion of the poem? In answering these questions, it is crucial to note that conjugality is not the only consolation for Adam and Eve’s banishment. As she leaves the garden, Eve is also comforted by knowing that generations of her offspring will eventually produce humanity’s redemption in the person of the Son; “By me,” she says, “the promised Seed shall all restore” (12.623). Many things are changed by the fall, but God’s promise that Adam and Eve will produce “a race / to fill the earth,” is not one of them. Eve’s reproductive power is given a special place in this project—her womb will bear the Seed of the future messiah and also populate the empty world. Thus, Adam and Eve’s relationship to peopling is gendered from the outset, and Milton’s poem spends significant time adjudicating who has control not simply of Eve’s body, but more specifically over her reproductive capacity and its deployment in the divine plan. This chapter investigates the entanglement of mobility and peopling—placing them in the context of cultural and political debates in seventeenth-century England. When we look at these two issues together, Milton’s poem gives us a way of understanding the tension during the period between codifying and valuing attachment to place and a need for mobility to power England’s growth as a global military and colonial power. Mobility—not only the mobility of labor within England, but also the spreading of English people to fill new colonial territories—became ever more necessary during this era even as it was increasingly denigrated and criminalized. Paradise Lost provides a story about labor, fecundity, and mobility that might be understood as consoling its readers and scaffolding the expansionist impulse in much the same way that Eve herself is consoled by her role in the project of peopling the world. Such consolation might well have been welcome, since Milton and his readers lived in a world that was experiencing human mobility unprecedented in both form and scale. As I discuss below, the seemingly increasing mobility of the poor was a concern throughout the seventeenth century. But by that century’s end, the inhabitants of England, Scotland, and Ireland had also witnessed the large-scale movements of troops across their lands in the battles of the Civil Wars, particularly those of Cromwell’s New Model Army, which had no attachment to any particular locality. The seventeenth century also saw the rise of independent and gathered churches; no longer tied to their parish churches, English men and women could chose to move great distances to follow their personal religious beliefs—some as far away as New

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England. Others, perhaps most famously from the Society of Friends, chose to leave their homes and families and become missionaries or itinerant preachers. And of course, England’s new colonial possessions in the Caribbean and North America provided new opportunities for movement spurred by economic motivations, as well as military and religious ones. All of these forms of movement held a vexed place in the sociopolitical life of the commonwealth. The power wielded by Cromwell’s New Model Army so worried the nation that control of England’s very modest standing army was given to Parliament, not the crown, after the Restoration, and even that control required a continually renewed Act of Parliament to maintain. The Conventicle Act of 1664, along with the other restrictions of the Clarendon Code, gave legal form to the anxiety produced by religious practices untethered to local attachments, an anxiety also demonstrated by the numbers of itinerant preachers, prophets, and missionaries prosecuted under the vagrancy statutes. And the debates over the desirability of emigration to the New World were, as we will see below, more complicated than generally acknowledged. In this context, Paradise Lost’s exploration of the forms of subjectivity that might allow and accompany successful mobility can be read as both valuable to contemporary readers, and potentially instrumental in shaping their own capacity to move. Milton’s relationship to imperialism and colonialism has been the subject of scholarly inquiry for several decades. Critics have explored his work’s engagement with England’s early seventeenth-century expansion into the Americas; with Cromwell’s Western Design and the conquest of Ireland; with England’s growing mercantile empire in the East; and with theories of sovereignty and empire more generally.2 Milton has been seen as both for and against empire, and its concomitants of servitude and slavery.3 Most of these accounts position Milton as looking back to the controversies of the early seventeenth century and interregnum, a focus I hope to challenge here by examining the connections between the story told in Paradise Lost and the controversies over colonial expansion after 1650.4 Furthermore, I take up a question that has been ignored by most previous accounts: how the poem might suggest continuities between the problem of mobile labor in England itself and the issue of colonial labor. To a lesser extent, scholars have also considered Milton’s engagement with early theories of peopling and the value of population, particularly the ideas of political arithmetic that emerged in the mid-seventeenth century in the work of William Petty and John Graunt (both of whom will be discussed

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in the following chapter). David Quint asserts that Milton distances himself from those ideas, while David Glimp argues that “Paradise Lost engages the kinds of questions and problems that political arithmetic sets out to address, but does so in a way that cannot be viewed in terms of an unequivocal endorsement or condemnation.”5 Neither critic pays much attention to the way the nascent statistical sciences and their accounts of “filling the earth” intersected with the concurrent debates over human mobility. Yet there is reason to believe that Petty and Graunt’s ideas about population arose out of debates about mobility, particularly the settlement and removal of the landless poor. As Ted McCormick points out, “Although the term appeared in Bacon’s Essays, ‘population’ in the sense of ‘the collected individuals in a given area,’ was little used before the eighteenth century. ‘Depopulation,’ by contrast, appeared in the mid-fifteenth century, and remained a major concern through the seventeenth. Throughout, it was associated with the progress of enclosure, the conversion of arable land to pasture, and the displacement of rural populations.”6 In what follows, I argue that Paradise Lost also derives much of its thinking about multitudes, peopling, and population from the dynamics of displacement, though the “rural seat” in this case is the Garden itself. Paradise Lost also reveals the way the dynamic of enclosure, displacement, and peopling is complicated by gender. In the Garden, Adam and Eve’s labor, if not their place in the divine hierarchy, is equal and similar. But when they are banished, and God encloses the Garden behind a wall of flame, their roles are differentiated. Eve’s value is centered on her reproductive power—her capacity to be the bearer of the Seed—while Adam’s is still centered on his agricultural energy and skills. We can see in this transition evidence of Silvia Federici’s argument that the seventeenth century ushered in a “new sexual division of labor” that defined “women in terms—mothers, wives, daughter, widows—that hid their status as workers, while giving men free access to women’s bodies, their labor, and the bodies and labor of their children. According to this new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to enclosures.”7 This enclosure of the female body—its redefinition as a natural, privatized space governed by a male partner—allowed it to be “turned into an instrument for the reproduction of labor and the expansion of the work-force,” supporting “the new concern with the accumulation and reproduction of labor power” that characterized the mercantilist era in which Milton wrote.8 In order to underscore the specificity of this regime of value, I turn at the end of the

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chapter to a narrative published some sixty years after Paradise Lost: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. At first glance, it is hard to imagine two more dissimilar figures than Milton’s Eve and Defoe’s Moll: Eve is a pastoral figure, Moll a creature of cities; Eve is monogamous, Moll anything but; Eve is perpetually youthful, Moll a creature who ages. Their generic contexts differ as well: Eve inhabits an epic poem shot through with elements of romance; Moll is the prototypical figure of a soon-to-be dominant genre, the novel. Yet these differences are instructive when we consider that both can be considered as figures for the landless migrant, and more specifically, as characters who illustrate the shifting value of fecundity for the vagrant female. As is perhaps already clear, settlement and vagrancy were mutually constituted terms during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as parishregulated poor relief was consolidated into law; this form of aid “inextricably combined the functions of providing relief and harrying vagrancy . . . the settled man or woman and the vagrant, the wanderer, were thus defined by their mutual opposition; each depends for its identity on the other.”9 Yet the century witnessed tremendous changes not only in the ways in which questions of mobility and settlement were legislated, but also in the ways they were culturally understood. While its first decades saw Poor Law legislation that increasingly criminalized and prosecuted vagrancy, the post-Restoration era ushered in a system of poor relief focused on settlement rights that would last until the 1830s. Thus, the century began with a seemingly overwhelming anxiety over the mobility of the poor, but concluded with a corresponding engagement with the criteria for “settlement”—the question of what would entitle the poor to relief and protect them from “removals.” Historians see the emphasis shifting over the course of the seventeenth century from the punishment of vagrancy (almost always synonymous with unemployment) to the adjudication of settlement (protection from coerced removal from a place even if a person was unemployed or too debilitated to work). Nevertheless, throughout the period, Milton’s options of “going,” “staying,” and going “hence unwilling” were as precariously calibrated for the impoverished and landless of England as they are for Eve. The dynamic of “removal,” however, was increasingly inflected by the problem of positioning labor where it might be most useful to the state. Crucially for the expanding empire, the position of maximum usefulness was not always close to home. Legislators began to see a use for the “idle” poor in England’s growing colonies. Thus, the 1597 Act for the Repression of Vagrancy, which abolished the death penalty for vagrancy, “introduced penal

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transportation in its place.”10 In this way, it was believed, “civilized England” would be “disburthened of its worst people.”11 “In 1614, James I granted his Privy Council the power to sentence convicted felons to transportation to the American colonies ‘as that in their punishments some of them may live and yield a profitable service to the Common wealth in parts abroad.’ ”12 This combined function of transportation as both punishment for the individual and a “profitable” tool for the imperial state resonates with the exiles of Paradise Lost. The poem describes Satan’s exile to Hell as the discovery and possible exploitation of new lands. Adam and Eve’s crime of violating the terms of their tenancy, which Adam at first thinks immediately punishable by death, is commuted to a sentence of mobility. Like many of the seventeenth-century poor, Adam and Eve become more useful elsewhere. But what “profitable service” can Adam and Eve offer God after their expulsion from Paradise? The explicit answer given by the text is that their service can be provided through their fecundity, by their capacity to fill the world. It is in these two moments—Satan’s colonizing of Hell and Adam and Eve’s populating of the world—that critics have perhaps most often seen Milton’s epic as commenting on aspects of seventeenth-century English colonialism. I argue that the nature of that comment becomes clearest in relation to a later text like Moll Flanders. Whereas Milton’s text is about the production of value through peopling—mobility that produces living labor—Defoe’s is about the extraction of value—mobility that accumulates the “dead labor” of others in the form of commodities. In what follows, I extend the consideration of both texts’ relationship to colonial ideology by paying attention to an often overlooked category: that of the landless poor, who, far from having an isolated or localized place in England’s colonial expansion, had a pervasive presence in that endeavor. This line of enquiry does not move away from the questions of empire and colonialism, but rather approaches them from a different direction, since the landless poor were mobile in two arenas: the metropolitan and the colonial. From the beginning of the seventeenth century, the movement of the poor inside of England was articulated with their movement outside of England— particularly to the British colonies in the Caribbean and North America.13 The first half of the seventeenth century was a period of significant emigration, which peaked in the 1650s. More coercive modes of Atlantic crossing flourished as well. In the 1620s, schemes for transporting the poor children of London were even discussed.14 The population of England was increasing in the first part of the seventeenth century, seemingly beyond the country’s

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ability to support it, and there was a widespread feeling that the surplus of England would find a use in the colonies, which desperately needed the labor. As the early seventeenth-century pro-emigration tract, A Good Speed to Virginia, explains: “Although the honour of the king be in the multitude of people, Pro. 14.28, yet when this multitude of people increaseth to over great a number, the common-wealth stands subject to many perilous inconveniences . . . [and governments] have sent their overflowing multitudes abroad into other countries and provinces . . . so we see the husbandman deal with his grounds when they are overcharged with cattell, he removes them from one ground to another, and so he provideth well for his cattell and his ground.”15 Thus, in the early decades of the seventeenth century, writes Abigail Swingen, “it was widely understood that there were always more servants to be had from England, or possibly Scotland and Ireland. . . . It seemed that colonial labor demand could only be met through channeling undesirable subgroups into indentured service.”16 In both theory and practice, England’s landless and unemployed were subject to coerced mobility that included movement across the Atlantic. In the seventeenth century, 75 to 85 percent of emigrants from England and Ireland went as servants.17 Thus settled vs. mobile is not a dichotomy that can be easily mapped onto the distinction between Britain and its colonies. Attention to the English poor’s vulnerability to coerced removal is important when we consider the global context of England’s seventeenth century generally, and Paradise Lost more specifically. We often think of the threat of being removed from a place as characteristic of the colonized world during this period, and this is certainly true to a brutal extreme with regard to American Indians displaced from their ancestral lands, and Africans captured and sold into New World slavery. Yet the problems of precarious settlement and coerced mobility resonated for European migrants as well. Anxiety about the ways in which one might claim the right to reside in a place without threat of removal was not exclusively a New World problem. On the contrary, it arrived in the Americas with the first European settlers and preceded the advent of largescale chattel slavery. British migrants, whether voluntary or involuntary, were haunted by the criteria for settlement that had emerged in England during the seventeenth century, and brought those fears and standards with them to Britain’s colonies. In both England and in the colonies, subalternity during this period was characterized by one’s vulnerability to removal. I want to emphasize, however, that such questions of mobility were rarely purely individual. That is, when the state considered how its least

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valuable subjects might offer “profitable service” to the “Common wealth,” it tended to consider them in aggregate, or, in the parlance of the day, one that recurs frequently in Paradise Lost, as “multitudes.”18 Like the question of human mobility, however, ways of thinking about multitudes underwent significant changes during the seventeenth century. While the beginning of the century was concerned with “specific, localized, and qualitatively defined ‘multitudes’ whose existence was bound up with particular legislative interventions,” the end of the century saw the emergence of the idea of a population as “an abstract totality crucial to national wealth and strength, a natural resource susceptible to knowledge and manipulation, and the foundation of any imaginable science of policy.”19 As with the question of mobility, the issue of population had implications not just for England’s strength at home, but also for its capacity to expand abroad: persons were needed not simply to “discover” new territories, and lay claim to them with arms, but also to inhabit them, to fill that newly acquired space with British bodies. Joyce Chaplin, in her study of colonialism in North America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, argues that the English believed that “if other nations had had great navigational prowess, better ability to discover mines, and swifter military control over native populations, the English could make up for lost time by planting themselves in America and breeding there.”20 Chaplin quotes the typical sentiment of propagandists: “Virginia’s high creole birthrate that would mean the children born there would ‘in small time become a Nation of themselves sufficient to people the Country.’ ”21 If the imperative at home was to be productive, the imperative abroad was to be reproductive. Paradise Lost, this chapter argues, provides a narrative that reinforces that ideology, solving the problems of mobility and peopling in terms of one another: the consolation for enforced mobility is fecundity; fecundity is given meaning by mobility.

Settlement and Mobility Central to the poem’s exploration of the tension between settlement and mobility is its interest in indigeneity. The poem theorizes what it means to belong to a place, to be native to it, in part by juxtaposing those ideas to the equally important term of “exile.” Yet what it means to be a native of a place in Paradise Lost is a complicated question. Unlike our usual understanding of the word, it cannot, in this poem, mean to live in the place where one is

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born. When Adam, for example, bemoans that his punishment for eating the apple is not death, but rather life “lengthened out / To deathless pain,” he wishes to “be earth / Insensible” and to “lay me down / As in my mother’s lap.” But Adam, of course, has no mother (10.774–75, 776–77, 777–78). Indeed, no one in the poem is born in the conventional sense of emerging from a woman’s womb: Adam is created out of clay; Eve out of Adam’s rib; and Satan claims to be the “birth” of Heaven itself. Thus, the poem’s exploration of the rights and identity conferred by indigeneity elides, by necessity, the question of paternity/maternity, and focuses instead on the fully grown person’s relationship to the place he or she inhabits. As we will see, the poem shares this interest in the meaning and value of indigeneity both with contemporaneous changes in the Poor Laws, and with debates about England’s colonial expansion in North America. In all arenas, we can observe a move away from natality as granting a right to settlement. Historians of the Poor Laws date increasing concern with vagrancy from what A. L. Beier calls “the de-sanctification of the poor” at the beginning of the Renaissance. “By 1400, many humanists believed that some types of poverty, far from leading to holiness, caused social disorders and should therefore be suppressed. . . . Religious feeling was evolving also. Although good works, including acts of charity, continued to be popular, many of the learned now questioned their spiritual value. They mocked friars and pilgrims as impious frauds. They rejected beggars and adopted St. Paul’s dictum that a good Christian worked to pay his way.”22 As the number of unemployed, landless poor rose in the following century, so did concern with their potential effect on social order. By the early sixteenth century, “unemployment was defined as a serious crime,” and Elizabethan Poor Laws were primarily concerned with hunting down and punishing those accused of it.23 The definition of unemployment, or “idleness,” used by the state, however, was quite broad. Persons without employment, as well as persons whose employment rendered them mobile and masterless, were deemed “vagrants,” a capacious category that included not only the mobile poor and beggars, but also pedlars and tinkers, military veterans and sailors, entertainers of various sorts, unlicensed healers, gypsies and the Irish. As this list makes clear, the Elizabethan Poor Laws treated vagrancy not as a crime of action, but as a crime of status; “vagrancy” was a designation derived from what one was (unemployed) rather than from something one did (stole or acted violently). As Braddick points out, “Vagrancy punishments were, on the whole, less severe than those for crimes to which vagrants might be thought liable—theft for example. The

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crime of vagrancy was to be capable of work but unemployed and mobile— those convicted of this were guilty of a state of being rather than a crime with a particular victim.”24 Braddick also notes that, “Vagrants were to be arrested, whipped, and sent home, where, if they were able-bodied, they were put into service. For the recalcitrant, houses of correction were to be established, and real troublemakers could be banished. Return from banishment was a capital offense.”25 For the persons who fell under the rubric of these acts, then, rootlessness—not having property or employment that tied one to a place— was often both the crime and the punishment for the crime. The nature of vagrancy was inflected by gender. Female vagrancy was more likely to be triggered by types of vulnerability specific to women, such as abandonment by errant husbands, or pregnancy outside of marriage. “Some unmarried girls took to the roads by choice to hide pregnancy; others because they were ‘encouraged’ by their parents; and still others because they were expelled by masters or the parish.”26 Once unsettled, mobile women were more likely to be read in sexual terms: among women, criminal prosecution for vagrancy and prostitution seemed to have overlapped and substituted for each other, making it hard to tabulate exact numbers of female vagrants.27 Yet, if the earlier part of the seventeenth century was concerned with criminalizing vagrancy, the later part shifted its focus to adjudicating settlement—establishing criteria by which a person could claim an attachment to a place. Although the parish system of poor relief was mandated from the late sixteenth century, it did not fully cohere until after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, when a nationwide system of support for the poor came into being. Under this regime, it became crucial to determine who had a right to reside in a place and a right to support from that place; conversely, the system developed means for determining who could be removed from a place. This system made parishes responsible for supporting the “deserving” poor residing within them, but not responsible for anyone who did not have a right to “settle” in that parish. In 1662, by way of codifying the necessary criteria for relief, parliament passed the Act of Settlement. This stated that parishes needed to provide relief for paupers who could claim a “settlement” in their parish. According to the 1662 Act, such a settlement could only be claimed by birth, or by renting a property for more than ten pounds per annum. If a person could not claim those things, or if he or she seemed likely to later become a charge on the parish, he or she could be removed to his or her parish of origin. In 1691, however, the Law of Settlement was revised to

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include other ways of proving a person “belonged” to a parish and was deserving of relief. These ways included holding parish office, serving an apprenticeship, or having a contract for employment for one year. The historian J. S. Taylor points out that after 1691, “a pauper was required to ‘earn’ a settlement, either directly or derivatively, through a husband, parent, or even grandparent.” He calls this change a shift from settlement by right of birth to settlement by merit. Merit in this case was defined as employment, and, increasingly, as waged employment. As Raymond Williams says in The Country and the City, “Much of the actual purpose of the laws against vagrancy was to force the landless to work for wages, in the new organization of the economy.”28 Thus the vagrancy laws can be understood as regulating the mobility of labor, rather than simply restricting it, allowing the workers to move into parishes in which they could find employment, but not allowing them to stay in places in which they could not find employment. As Taylor says, “Settlement by merit may be interpreted as transitional between a more rigid view of mobility and a more open one to follow.”29 Paradise Lost, begun in the 1650s and published in the next decade, was composed in the context of this shift in thinking about poverty, landlessness, and mobility. In what follows, I argue not that Milton comments directly on the Poor Laws or the Settlement Act, but that his work shares his era’s concern with why a person deserves to stay in a place, and under what circumstances he or she might find himself or herself vulnerable to being (re)moved. From this perspective, we can see that one important story Paradise Lost tells is a transformative one about indigeneity and belonging. It offers not a defense of settlement, but a narrative that makes mobility comprehensible and even valuable. Paradoxically, for a poem so concerned with topography and mapping, it transfers the idea of belonging from place to person. One way in which it accomplishes this is through an interrogation of what it means to be properly “native” to a place. It is perhaps not surprising that the character most concerned with his relation to his “native place” is Satan. In Book 1, he exhorts the other fallen angels: For who can yet believe, though after loss, That all these puissant legions whose exile Hath emptied Heav’n shall fail to re-ascend, Self-raised, and repossess their native seat? (1.631–34)

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“Native seat” here seems to mean the specific place the fallen angels were born to inhabit. In the context of Satan’s broken subservience to God, however, the phrase has an ironic ring. “Native,” according to the OED, originally meant someone born into a place as a bondsman to that place—owing fealty to the owner of the land: “A person born in bondage; a person born to servants, tenants, etc., and inheriting their status.” This sense, in which to be a native of a place was the opposite of possessing that place, was still current in legal documents when Milton wrote Paradise Lost. The more familiar sense, however, of a person born in a specific place, was also in use from the early sixteenth century, and the adjectival use, as in “native seat,” was in use from the fifteenth century. Satan, at least overtly, deploys the word in its more modern usage, associating it with autonomy (the angels will be “selfraised” in their re-ascent) and the right to settle. This sense of the word is strengthened by Satan’s assertion that the angels’ fall has “emptied Heaven.” They are exiles—no longer in their rightful place. His impiety is clear in his demand that the legions “repossess” that seat, as if anyone but God could claim “possession” of Heaven. Nevertheless, an intense connection to what they take to be their rightful place unites the fallen angels. Moloch echoes Satan in Book 2, when he urges continued war, declaring, “In our proper motion we ascend / Up to our native seat. Descent and fall / To us is adverse” (2.75–77). The idea that Heaven is Satan’s “native seat” is repeated again at the end of the book (2.1050). The same rhetoric returns in the description of the war in Heaven in Book 5, when Satan urges the angels to fight, “if ye know yourselves / Natives and sons of Heav’n possessed before / By none, and if not equal all, yet free” (5.789–91). For Satan, the idea of being a native of Heaven allows him to subordinate all other relationships to his original relationship to a place. He believes he has been “free” in this place, which is to say, not “possessed” by anyone. His removal from Heaven by God has abrogated his right of settlement. Once again, Satan asserts that the angels are “self-begot, self-raised / By our own quick’ning power” (5.860–61), not creatures made by God. The only progenitor Satan will allow is the place itself: the angels are “the birth mature / Of this our native Heav’n, ethereal sons. / Our puissance is our own” (5.862–64). To be native to a place is to originate there, by birth or other means; the identity granted by that origination cannot be altered—whatever crimes one has committed in or toward the government of that place, it remains one’s “native seat.” In Satan’s eyes, the right to settlement granted by natality cannot be abrogated. In the manner of the 1662 Settlement Act, Satan claims

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settlement by birth. No one—not even God—has the right to remove him from that place. Satan’s continued sense of being a native of Heaven perhaps explains the colonizing eye he turns on Hell. “Is this the region, this the soil, the clime / . . . this the seat / That we must change for Heav’n, this mournful gloom / For that celestial light?” he asks (1.242–45). Satan’s characterization of Hell as a “region” evokes the evolution of the word, which “moves from being a term denoting a realm of regnum of power, to one denoting a realm of nature” during this period.30 He sees Hell both as a place to be conquered, and as a place with its own ecosystem, to which the fallen angels are not native. As various critics have pointed out, the fallen angels cast a surveyor’s eye over their territories, mapping them out for conquest; they are on “On bold adventure to discover wide / That dismal world” (2.571–72).31 Satan explores his new territory like a merchant fleet (2.632, 636). He moves into Hell, not as a settler, but as an overlord. Profoundest Hell, Receive thy new possessor, one who brings A mind not to be changed by place or time! The mind is its own place and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell or a Hell of Heaven. (1.251–55) Satan, still focused on the possession of a place, vows to possess Hell, but thus far refuses to be considered a native of it. Not only is the mind “its own place,” but neither can it be changed by “place or time”; he remains the same being who inhabited Heaven. Yet even as he asserts identity’s autonomy from place, Satan remains caught in the binary between the two places he inhabits. He claims to be able to make Hell into Heaven, but when he later complains that “Which way I fly is Hell, myself am Hell,” he reveals that, for him, the mind is not truly autonomous, but is still defined by the place in which the body dwells (4.75). The full implications of Satan’s claims for nativity or indigeneity only come into full relief when set against Adam and Eve’s attempt to understand their own “nativeness” to the Garden. There is a tendency among scholars interested in Milton’s representation of colonialism to read Adam and Eve either as colonists or as natives.32 Critics have often pointed to the moment in Book 9 when Adam and Eve are compared to the indigenes of the New

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World—“Such of late / Columbus found th’ American so girt / With feathered cincture, naked else and wild” (9.115–17)—when arguing that Satan’s intrusion into the Garden is a colonialist act.33 Yet, as Paul Stevens notes, Milton’s analogy occurs at a specific moment in the poem, immediately after the fall, when Adam and Eve “in their shame” “look like the American Indians” and are “estranged” from Eden.34 Focusing too narrowly on these lines, moreover, ignores the fact that Adam is not “native” to the garden in this sense at all. He awakens elsewhere, and “stray[s]” he “[knows] not whither / From where [he] first drew air” until a “shape divine” leads him to “the garden of bliss, [his] seat prepared” (8.283–84, 295, 299). Whether or not Adam comes into consciousness in this place is less important than the charge he is given to “till and keep” the Garden once he is there (8.320). It is Adam’s labor that grants him the right to settlement in the Garden, not his indigeneity.35 Taking this into account, Evans argues that “Adam’s situation in Paradise Lost resembles nothing so much as an idealized form of indentured servitude. Placed in an earthly paradise by the ‘sov’ran Planter’ (4.691), he is destined to serve out a fixed term of ‘pleasant labour’ (4.625), at the end of which, by ‘long obedience tri’d’ (7.159), he may be given the status of an angel and allowed to dwell permanently in the terrestrial or the celestial paradise (5.500).”36 This is a compelling argument, but we need to be wary of the way it locates both servitude and the (implied) mobility of the landless laborer exclusively in the colonial arena. Both, along with the uneasy claim to settlement rights through labor, were as characteristic of the poor in England during the seventeenth century as they were of the American colonies—and indeed the same people moved through both arenas, as we have seen. God’s movement of Adam into the Garden to “till and keep” it thus makes him analogous to the landless poor in England, as well as to the “settlers of Virginia”: a doubled resonance that is not coincidental.37 When the word “native” does appear in relation to Adam and Eve, it functions as an adjective, at least through the beginning of the poem. Adam and Eve have qualities “native” to themselves: “native honor” (4.287); “native innocence” (9.373); and “native righteousness” (9.1056). Rather than themselves being the natives of a place, qualities are native to them. After they fall, however, the use of the term shifts. When Adam tries to convince Eve that their life of exile from Paradise will be sustainable, he uses the idea of natality, paradoxically, to demonstrate the unimportance of attachment to place; “We need not fear / To pass commodiously this life [of exile],” he comforts her, “sustained / By Him with many comforts till we end / In dust, our final rest

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and native home” (10.1082–85). This phrasing appears again in Adam’s response to Michael’s vision of the future conflict of Cain and Abel, though here “dust” as a “native home” has been compressed to “native dust”: “have I now seen death? Is this the way / I must return to native dust?” (11.462–63), he asks. Although the two instances share the adjectival use of “native,” the idea that dust is Adam and Eve’s “native home” is a very different claim than Satan’s claim that Heaven is his “native seat.” For one thing, “dust” here doesn’t seem to refer to a specific spot—Adam isn’t claiming that in death they will return to the soil of Paradise. When Adam uses the phrase “native dust,” dust appears to mean the constituent elements of the human body, not the soil of a specific place; when Adam and Eve find “final rest” “in dust,” they will only be returning to the materials out of which they were made.38 The phrase suggests that Adam and Eve can be considered native only to their own bodies, rather than to a place extraneous to those bodies.39 In this characterization of “our first parents,” Milton wrests the word “native” from its association with place to make it refer to something more human and corporeal. And yet, this somewhat counterintuitive idea of indigeneity doesn’t stand uncontested. Eve, perhaps inevitably, resists Adam’s definition, even after his exhortation to find comfort in their eventual return to “native dust.” Addressing the flowers she has tended in Paradise, she bemoans her fate of exile: “O! unexpected stroke worse than of death! / Must I leave thee, Paradise? Thus leave / Thee, native soil . . . ?” (11.268–70). Eve’s idea of “native soil” appears in some respects closer to Satan’s fervent allegiance to his “native seat” than to Adam’s assertion that dust is their “native home.” She seems to claim that she is a native to Paradise, attached to its soil, because she came into existence there. She is native to a place greater than, and different than, her own body. But as her apostrophe to Paradise continues, its focus narrows from the place in general to the objects of her special care. O flowers, That never will in other climate grow, My early visitation and my last, At ev’n which I bred up with tender hand From the first op’ning bud and gave ye names, Who now shall rear ye to the sun or rank Your tribes, and water from th’ ambrosial fount? (11. 273–79)

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In these lines, Eve’s claim to be a native of Paradise—which is also a claim that she should not be expelled from her native spot—is based less on birth than on labor. She deserves to stay in Paradise, she implies, because she has cared so assiduously for these flowers; they cannot travel, and neither should she. If Satan’s claim to be a native of Heaven is based solely on his coming into existence in that place, Eve’s claim to be a native of Paradise is based not only on that condition, but also on the value of her labor. Eve’s settlement, she believes, should be judged on merit—the merit of labor. Her mistake is understandable. Labor is one of the aspects of life in the Garden that is blessed by the divine. Adam and Eve praise God for making the day “which we in our appointed work employed / Have finished happy in our mutual help / And mutual love” (4.726–28). For Adam, the continuation of that labor is the least burdensome aspect of their cursed existence after the fall: “With labor I must earn / My bread. What harm? Idleness had been worse” (10.1054–55), he tells God. Joanna Picciotto points out that, “Although the fall disrupts their work schedule (rather than marking the start of it), the saving power of labor reenters the poem in a final simile, which suggests that what the first couple has experienced is all in a day’s work. As they leave to establish their new paradise, the angels glide behind them like ‘Ev’ning Mist / Ris’n from a River’ that ‘gathers ground fast as the Labourers heel / Homeward returning’ ” (12.587, 629–32).40 The implication of the simile is that labor is what makes a home; their home has been in Paradise, which they “till[ed] and [kept],” but when they labor elsewhere, that place will become a home. The implication is double-edged, however, as Picciotto also notes: “the open-ended wandering of this laborer [in the simile] tends homeward without leading anywhere in particular.”41 Although labor, like procreation, is not interrupted by the fall, it is severed from a claim to settlement or natality. As in the case of other seventeenth-century vagrants, the freedom Adam and Eve are granted to “choose” their “place of rest” is indistinguishable from their punishment. Thus, Eve’s mistake has been to assume that either her coming into existence or her labor in a particular place grants her the right to settlement in that place. She is wrong to think that her tending of her flowers protects her from being removed from Paradise once she has violated the tenancy agreement set up in Book 8, and her error is made clear to her in no uncertain terms. The Archangel Michael “interrupts” her lament in Book 10, and commands her not to “set thy heart / Thus overfond on that which is not thine” (11.288–89).42 Crucially, Michael corrects

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not only her physical claim to settlement, but also her affective connection to place. Eve should not become “over-fond” of a place to which she has no claim; she should direct her emotional attachments elsewhere. “Thy going is not lonely,” Michael tells her, assuming that loneliness is her greatest fear about moving; “With thee goes / Thy husband. Him to follow thou art bound. / Where he abides, think there thy native soil” (11.290–92). The archangel’s redeployment of Eve’s own phrase, “native soil,” emphasizes that what is at stake in this discussion is not simply a person’s relation to a place, but also the criteria by which a person can claim to have a relation to a place—the criteria by which a person can claim to be a native. Paradise does not belong to Eve, nor does she, intrinsically, belong to it. As Adam does in the previous book, the angel here circumscribes the area of human belonging to the human body. Adam is his own “native home,” and he is also Eve’s native soil, the only place to which she can validly claim physical and emotional attachment. Of course, the phrase is also literally true; Eve has been created out of Adam’s rib. The angel informs her that neither birth/creation nor labor grant her the right to claim Paradise as a native place. Adam is Eve’s only settlement. It is clear now why Eve’s acceptance of exile takes the form it does; “Thou to me / Art all things under Heav’n,” she says; “all places thou.” Belonging is figured as nativity (indigeneity), but that nativity has been transferred from place to person. Eve’s words echo her lyrical account in Book 4 of all the ways Paradise is “pleasant” in Adam’s company; “without thee” Eve tells him, nothing about the place “is sweet” (4.641, 642, 656). This earlier passage holds the balm of Adam’s presence separate from the “fertile earth” and “delightful land” (4.645, 652). The rhetoric of Book 12, however, collapses person into place: she is fertile; he is her land. In this way, Milton seems to go beyond the contemporaneous legal criteria of settlement of the poor, moving toward something that even more radically frees labor from land. This resolution also makes clear the degree to which mobility and settlement—or natality and exile—are gendered in the poem, perhaps even before the fall. When, in Book 9, Eve proposes that she and Adam labor separately in order to be more productive, he eventually agrees, telling her, in paradoxical terms later echoed in Eve’s final acquiescence to exile, “Go, for thy stay, not free, absents thee more” (9.372). But before giving in, he resists their separation in terms that adumbrate the final enclosure of Eve’s “native” space to Adam’s body:

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leave not the faithful side That gave thee being, still shades thee and protects! The wife where danger or dishonor lurks Safest and seemliest by her husband stays Who guards her or with her the worst endures. (9.265–69) The lines foreshadow not only the way Adam will soon faithfully endure “the worst” with Eve, but also the way the territory Eve can legitimately occupy will be reduced from the “paths and bowers” of Paradise to the space of the “shade” cast by her husband’s body. Adam literalizes the idea of her remaining by his “side” by emphasizing their corporeal connection: his side or rib has actually produced Eve. This plea is made in the name of Adam’s ability to “protect” Eve, but it has the effect of shifting her position from that of a fellow laborer to that of a “wife”—the value of her labor, as we will see, replaced by the gendered value of her fecundity. Adam’s mistake in Book 9 is to allow her to go, and thus for Satan to find “Eve separate,” and vulnerable (9.424). It is precisely this mistake that is redressed in Book 12, where Eve is convinced to consider Adam “all places” and her “native soil.” At that point, Eve is enclosed by Adam’s body, or, more liberally, by the space of the shade he casts, just as Paradise is enclosed by God’s flaming sword. As Federici suggests, Adam is consoled for the loss of the latter by his acquisition of the former, as Eve is consoled for the loss of her agricultural labor by the promise of her fecundity. For both Adam and Eve, however, one effect of this transfer of affective attachment from place to person is to deny the capacity of place to grant or even shape identity. Satan’s claim that Heaven has made him who he is, that Heaven has defined him by “birthing” him, or, conversely, that he himself “is Hell,” is part of his destructive hubris. In Paradise Lost, it turns out to be more proper to believe that person makes place, rather than place making person. When Adam, like Eve, laments leaving “this happy place, our sweet / Recess” (11.303–4), he mourns not the way labor has shaped his purpose and value, but a more ontological sense of being known by the place one inhabits. The Garden is the “only consolation left / Familiar to our eyes. All places else / Inhospitable appear and desolate, / Not knowing us nor known” (11.304–7). When they leave, Adam worries that they will lose this reciprocal relationship to place. He attributes a sentience to place here, longing to be “known by” the place in which he dwells. But in this, Michael tells him, he is mistaken. Places do not have their own individual subjectivity, through

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which they identify and shape their dwellers. Rather, all places are the same to the eye of God. God’s blessing is not confined to any single place; rather “His omnipresence fills / Land, sea, air, and every kind that lives” (11.335–36). Thus, the angel responds to both Adam’s and Eve’s objections by explaining to them that in God’s eyes the world is de-subjectified and homogenized; true belonging only inheres to relationships between people, who can be “imparadised in each other’s arms,” or in relationship to the divine.43 This message recurs in Michael’s description of the way God changes the topography of the world after the flood, moving even the Garden. The archangel tells Adam, “that God attributes to place / No sanctity if none be hither brought / By men who there frequent or therein dwell” (11.836–38). It is man’s presence that determines the value of a place, not the place that determines the value, or identity, of a man. Man “brings” “sanctity” to a place, rather than a place having sanctity in and of itself, or a place granting sanctity to a man. A place is sanctified by men’s activity there. “Frequenting” and “dwelling,” moreover, are different kinds of actions than being born in a place. What is celebrated in these lines is not indigeneity, but rather the transforming capacity of human habitation. The undifferentiated world that lies “all before them,” upon which Adam and Eve can “choose” any “place of rest,” replaces their belief in a mutually constituting landscape of Paradise, a place in which they were both “knowing” and “known.” Nativity, indigeneity to a certain place, is radically devalued. The concept of an identity not dependent on place—of a world in which the identity of person and place are not mutually determining—provides a narrative in keeping with, and enabling of, the increasing mobility of labor in seventeenth-century England.

To Be a Mother to Multitudes: Peopling in Paradise Lost It is this formulation of labor’s mobile and instrumental relationship to place that is Milton’s contribution to an ideology that enabled colonial expansion in the late seventeenth century. The rethinking of indigeneity also played an important part in the colonization of the Americas, ongoing as Milton composed his epic. In 1624, for example, Richard Eburne argued for the colonization of Virginia, saying, “It be the people that makes the land English, not the land the people.”44 But how were the people to accomplish that goal of “mak[ing] the land English”? Often as not, they were to do so by filling up the land with English people—and it is here that the problem of mobility

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intersects with the problem of reproduction. As Eburne continues, “when finding a Country quite void of people, as no doubt in America yet there are many, we seize upon it, take it, possesse it, and, as by the Lawes of God and Nations, lawfully we may hold it as our owne, and so fill and replenish it with our people.”45 As I noted at the outset, Adam and Eve are consoled in their exile from the Garden not only by conjugality, but also by fecundity. The discourse of procreation pervades the poem from beginning to end, involving not merely Adam and Eve’s own children, but also the eventual population of the entire earth.46 Eve will bear the Seed of the Son who will redeem the world, and her descendants will, along the way, fill up the empty world with people. The lines’ emphasis on the redemptive Christ represents a shift rather than a change in Eve’s value to God’s plan; filling the world has been Eve’s purpose from the moment she was given being, even when she is unaware of it. As Michael notes regretfully near the end of the poem, if the fall had not occurred, Paradise, “had been / Perhaps thy capital seat from whence had spread / All generations (11.342–44). The divine plan has always been to create out of Adam and Eve a “race to fill the earth.” From the beginning, Adam and Eve’s mobility and their (re)productivity are intertwined; just as Adam’s “wand’ring” (8.312) is halted by God’s gift of Paradise, so too is Eve’s wandering after she comes to consciousness arrested by the divine voice’s injunction to procreate. Just as Adam is hailed as “First man of men innum’rable” (8.297), so Eve is hailed as the mother of “multitudes.” Eve’s movement “with inexperienced thought” after awakening is errancy, but it is also vagrancy—both because she is unengaged in productive labor, and because it is mobility without (re)productivity. She is pleased simply by interacting with the “shadow” of herself. But Eve’s “vain desire” is immediately interdicted; a divine voice soon informs her that she herself is a copy, an “image” of someone else. This discussion of shadows and notshadows, of the reproduction of images, however, is quickly subsumed into the materiality of biological reproduction. Eve must be “inseparably” joined with Adam because “To him [she shall] bear / Multitudes like [her]self and thence be called / Mother of human race” (4.473–75). The instrument of reproduction will not be the eye, which sees “shadows” in still water, but rather the female body, which will become a “mother” and “bear / Multitudes.” The useless pleasure of reflection is transformed into the usefulness of reproduction, and pleasure is re-associated with reproductive sex. As we have seen, female vagrancy was often associated with sexual errancy during the period—whether prostitution or pregnancy out of wedlock—and it is

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this unsanctioned mobility that is restrained and circumscribed by bringing Eve back to Adam’s side, and into conjugality. “Our Maker bids increase. Who bids abstain / But our destroyer, foe to God and Man,” the poet editorializes later in Book 4; “Hail wedded love, mysterious law, true source / Of human offspring” (4.748–51). When Adam asks for a companion, it is specifically to “beget / Like of his like, his image multiplied” (8.423–24). Eve’s value, from her creation, is yoked to her status as a vessel for this multiplication. The injunction to fill the world precedes the fall, and survives it. Eve, looking for a way to outwit the curse, and perhaps remembering that there are non-reproductive pleasures to be had, suggests childlessness to Adam in Book 10. “If care of our descent perplex us most / Which must be born to certain woe,” she tells Adam, In thy power It lies yet ere conception to prevent The race unblest, to being yet unbegot. Childless thou art, childless remain! (10.986–89) She and Adam, Eve believes, can use their bodies to prevent further misery; it is in their “power” to leave offspring “unbegot.” But, as in her first moments in Paradise, she is again dissuaded from a non-reproductive life. Adam tells her there must be no more talk of “willful barrenness” that “savors only / Rancor and pride, impatience and despite”—conveniently forgetting that he also has lamented the pain now associated with reproduction, exclaiming, “Oh voice once heard / Delightfully, ‘increase and multiply,’ / Now death to hear!” (10.1041–43, 10.729–31). And so, as we have already seen, by the end of the poem, Eve learns to view fecundity as a consolation, rather than a source of pain: as evidence of her value, rather than as punishment; as a respected destiny, rather than as coercion onto an unwished-for path. She learns to accept the gendered definition of her value as a wife. Eric Song notes the resemblance between Eve’s declaration to Adam that “with thee to go / Is to stay here” and Achises’s declaration to Aeneas in the second book of the Aeneid: “Now, now there is no delay. I follow, and where you lead, there am I.” But where Virgil “sunders patriarchal commitments and conjugal love”—Aeneas leaving his wife Cruesa behind in Troy even as he brings his father and son—Milton sutures the two together. Aeneas will find a “place to rest” through conquest and a political marriage to an Italian

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princess; Adam and Eve will build their world by populating it with their own offspring.47 From the beginning of the poem, Adam and Eve’s offspring are imagined as solving the problem of a world that is too empty. “Our first parents” recognize that Paradise is for them “too large” and God’s abundance “wants / Partakers” (4.730, 731). But they are reassured by knowing that God “hast promised from [them] a race / To fill the earth” (4.732–33). The emphasis on “filling” here is important, since it implies that the world Adam and Eve enter is empty. It is here, critics have noted, that biblical doctrine and Milton’s representation thereof intersect with seventeenth-century colonial ideology. As Evans says, “According to one of the most sophisticated proponents of English expansion, John White, the process of colonization was a continuous one, analogous to the proliferation of the human race itself. ‘Replenishing wast and voyd Countries,’ he argued [in 1630], was warranted by God’s command to Adam in the opening chapter of Genesis to replenish the earth and subdue it.”48 Colonies could not be held as empty land; they needed bodies, literally, to occupy them (and to prevent other people from occupying them). Thus, John Pym, in the Short Parliament of 1641, proposes moving colonists from New England to the West Indies: “There are now in those parts [New England] at least Sixty thousand able persons of the Nation, many of them well armed and their bodies seasoned to that Climate, which with a very small charge might be set down, in some advantageous parts of these pleasant, rich, and fruitfull Countreys [the West Indies], and easily make his Majesty Master of all that treasure.”49 The idea that territories might be gained and held by “setting” bodies “down” in them permeates the first half of the seventeenth century, and one of its occasional consequences was the conflation of reproduction with military force. In 1650, Edward Williams, for example, hoped that settlement of the Carolina barrier islands would function as “an inoffensive Nursery to receive an infant colony, till by an occasion of strength and number, we may poure our selves from thence upon the Mayneland, as our Ancestor the Saxons from the Isle of Tanet into Brittaine.”50 A “nursery” that produced “numbers” of bodies could prove a powerful tool in the conquest of America.51 This idea of accruing territory by force of reproduction is taken to one extreme by Henry Neville in his possibly parodic utopian narrative, The Isle of Pines, published within a few years of Paradise Lost (1668). The Isle of Pines tells the story of kingdom founded on the radical increase in population. One man, George Pine, is shipwrecked on a deserted island with four women—

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three English and one African; from this sparse beginning, they eventually populate the island with ten to twelve thousand people. This is a narrative in which territory is claimed not through warfare, nor through productive labor (as Robinson Crusoe will later imagine), but rather through procreation alone. There is no need to labor on the Isle of Pines, and, says George Pine, “Idleness and fullness of everything begot in me a desire for enjoying the women. . . . In a year of our being there, all my women were with child by me.”52 Child-rearing itself is no labor, either physical or affective: “We had no clothes [for the children], and, therefore when they had sucked, we laid them in moss to sleep, and took no further care of them; for we knew, when they were gone more would come; the women never failing once a year at least.”53 Such practices beget a dynasty: “My wives having left bearing, my children began to breed apace, so we were like to be a multitude.”54 Pine’s last act is to “number” his offspring: “Which I did, and found the estimate to contain in or about the eightieth year of my age, and fifty-ninth of my coming here, in all, of all sorts, one thousand seven hundred eighty and nine. Thus praying God to multiply them, and send them the true light of the gospel, I last of all dismissed them.”55 His son says, “The country being thus settled, my father lived quiet and peaceable.”56 Thus, as Chaplin points out, The Isle of Pines sets out a powerful set of beliefs about English bodies: “their mastery over Africans, their tremendous breeding power, and their consequent ability to fill places that suffered population deficit. . . . As if Pine, an Adam with multiple Eves, had taken all too seriously the scriptural urging to be fruitful and multiply.”57 The women in The Isle of Pines, however, are more narrowly defined as vessels for breeding and bearing than is Eve; unlike Eve, they neither resist nor fully own the value of their reproductive capacity. The value of their fecundity accrues to Pine’s virility, not to them. Set against this narrative, we can better appreciate the affective force of Eve’s renunciation of her earlier forms of labor, and her embrace of the value of her fecundity. Nevertheless, Adam and Eve, like the inhabitants of The Isle of Pines, are set the task of populating an empty world. Thus, as in The Isle of Pines, their fecundity is not just a personal property, but also a natural resource of the world they inhabit. More hands are necessary to God not just because the plants need to be lopped back, but also because the Garden, and the world, need to be filled. In Paradise Lost, as scholars have noted, it is Eve who is most explicitly characterized as a resource—although it is perhaps more accurate to say that Eve’s future children are the resource, and Eve herself characterized as the generator of that resource. When Raphael dines

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with “our first parents,” he greets her in these terms: “Hail! Mother of Mankind! Whose fruitful womb / Shall fill the world more numerous with thy sons / Than with these various fruits the trees of God / Hath heaped this table!” (5.388–91). As David Glimp says, “The analogy Raphael draws between Eve and the trees reinforces the central assumptions of political arithmetic by rendering the persons Eve will produce as simply another form of Edenic wealth.”58 Moreover, like political arithmetic, as we will see in the following chapter, the analogy underscores Adam and Eve’s gendered relationship to the reproduction of those “numerous sons.” Eve, like the land, will be fruitful, while Adam, like God, will cause those fruits to grow. And yet the difference between Eve and the foliage of Eden is as important as their similarity. Critics have claimed that this comparison of Eve represents her oneness with or indigeneity to the Garden, but her later separation from her flowers, discussed above, makes clear the crucial difference between Eve’s fecundity and theirs: she is mobile, they are not. Eve here is akin to her flowers, but whereas they cannot be moved from their native soil, her “fruit” is portable, and will eventually “fill the world.” I have been arguing thus far that Paradise Lost celebrates peopling—the combination of fecundity and mobility heralded by Adam and Eve—and the worldwide population density it would seem to inevitably bring about. Yet we cannot come to this conclusion without acknowledging the nightmarish double of Eve’s fecundity given to us by the poem. Whereas Eve’s progeny, even before the fall, are imagined as “spreading” to fill the earth, the poem also imagines the population density produced by female fecundity as filling a single place to a horrifying degree. As Sophie Gee points out, Eve’s fruitfulness is mirrored in the reproductive capacity of Sin: “[Eve]’s ‘fruitful womb’ takes the reader back to Sin’s womb, ‘excessive grown’ and filled with ‘prodigious motion’ in Book 2. ‘Fruitful womb’ not only alludes to the bounteous meal given Raphael in Eden but ties this, unexpectedly, to the fruit Eve eats in Book 9, contaminating the metaphor of fruitful abundance with Satanic excess.”59 Sin’s progeny, produced by her rape by her own son, Death, are certainly excessive. Sin explains to Satan, Engend’ring with me of that rape begot These yelling monsters that with ceaseless cry Surround me as thou saw’st, hourly conceived And hourly born with sorrow infinite To me. For when they list, into the womb

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That bred them they return and howl and gnaw My bowels, their repast, then bursting forth Afresh with conscious terrors vex me round That rest or intermission none I find. (2.794–802) The difference between these multitudes and the multitudes that Adam and Eve will produce seems to be that while Adam and Eve’s progeny will move outwards, filling the world, Sin’s children crowd around her, “vexing” her and feeding upon her. The scene of the archangel eating the lunch Adam and Eve serve to him and the scene of Sin complaining about her children eating her contrast paradisal and hellish consumption: one “heaps” a table with fruits for consumption, while the other depicts painful self-consumption. They also suggest alternative directions for population growth: crowding into self-destructive density; and spreading peacefully to fill a world assumed to be vacant. While Paradise Lost clearly idealizes one of these images of fecundity and denigrates the other, it is also possible to see them as presenting contrasting ideas about population growth, particularly among the landless poor, current in the later seventeenth century. Through the first part of the century, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, the idle or vagrant poor were seen as a resource best deployed abroad. In 1647, for example, Benjamin Worsley advocated colonial emigration as a means by “whence . . . all the inconveniences coming from having many poore in a Kingdom begging—stealing— wandring lazily, and all Habits of idleness will be removed. And all Hearts made happy and gladded.”60 It is this theory of “purgative emigration” that critics have usually associated with Milton, although its most prominent spokesperson in the poem is Satan, who theorizes that humans are “A race of upstart creatures to supply / Perhaps our vacant room, though more removed, / Lest Heav’n surcharged with potent multitude / Might hap to move new broils” (2.834–37). As Glimp says, “Satan links the commonplace theory of why God created mankind to a frequently rehearsed argument, founded on the perceived superabundance of persons at home, for establishing English colonies in the New World. . . . The fallen angel intimates that God caused the revolt in heaven by mismanaging his kingdom, allowing the pressure of too many numbers to build, and that God now seeks to avoid the same errors through his colonial project.”61 In other words, in Satan’s eyes, Adam and Eve resemble the poor, who have lost their “settlement”—their right to inhabit a place—and must regain their value by making productive

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settlement elsewhere. Paradise Lost implies that their new value, and new right of settlement, will be earned as much by their fecundity as by their labor. Even as Milton was writing Paradise Lost, however, new ideas about the utility of the landless poor emerged in England. Attitudes about both the desirability and feasibility of the flow of English labor to the colonies began to change; the British poor became less likely to sign on as servants, indentured or otherwise; and social and economic thinkers became less likely to encourage emigration. Explanations for this shift in attitudes vary. The population of Britain contracted somewhat in the second half of the seventeenth century, increasing the demand for labor at home, while at the same time increasing wages. Perhaps not coincidentally, attitudes about the poor also began to change; “there was a mercantilist strain of thought in relation to the poor [at this time], in which they were regarded as idle resources rather than moral threat.”62 At home, the poor could provide both a potential work force and a market for consumer goods: density of population at home was seen by many as the key to prosperity, rather than “spreading” population out to acquire and hold new territories. John Locke, for example, believed that “numbers of men are to be preferred to largeness of dominions.”63 “Eloquent Whiggish economic writer Carew Reynell believed, along with other seventeenth-century Whigs, that ‘trade and populousness of a Nation are the strength of it.’ However, the basis of that strength, of trade and populousness, according to Reynell, was labor rather than land, manufacturing rather than raw materials. ‘It is the Manufacturers of a Commodity, that is in the general sale, that imploys people and produces the great profit.’ ”64 William Petty, about whom we will learn more in the next chapter, advocated what he called “full-peopling.” In his 1662 Treatise on Taxes and Contributions he wrote, “Fewness of people, is real poverty; and a nation wherein are Eight Millions of people, is more than twice as rich as the same scope of Land wherein are but Four.”65 In this context, there began to be something suspect about the eagerness to move English people to the colonies. One observer commented in 1651 that “we are upbraided by all other Nations that know that trade for selling our own Countrymen for the Commodities of those places. And I affirm, that I have been told by the Dutch and others, that we English were worse than the Turks, for they sold strangers onely, and we sold our own Countrymen.”66 Some economic theorists even hypothesized that the colonies were draining England of necessary population. “The political and economic writer William Petyt despaired in 1680, ‘England never was so

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populous as it might have been, and undeniably must now be far less populous than ever, having so lately peopled our vast American Plantations.’ ”67 Making sure that England itself remained “peopled” enough to drive new levels of production and consumption began to preoccupy some, if not all, policy makers and theorists. Milton’s narrative about mobility and fecundity—in which persons gain value through spreading to fill the world—thus inhabits a particular historical moment. For that moment, Paradise Lost provided a narrative that gave meaning to newly mobile subjects, their labor freed from attachment to place. That narrative bestowed gendered value on male and female subjects: women could understand their value in terms of their conjugal fidelity and their fecundity; men through their labor power, and through their capacity to protect (enclose) the “natural” resource of women’s reproductive capacity. It is this configuration of mobility and reproduction that I have been calling “peopling.” Milton’s accomplishment is to grant it affective power, a power that helped enable a specific phase of British colonial expansion in the New World. As the clash between Sin’s fecundity and Eve’s makes clear, however, that ideological formation was never uncontested, even in Milton’s own day. And, as the seventeenth century gave way to the eighteenth, new regimes of value emerged to supplant it. By way of illustrating this point, I’ll conclude by comparing the narrative of Paradise Lost to a narrative published some sixty years later: Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. Moll is born into vagrancy. Her mother’s pregnancy saves her from the gallows, but she is then transported to the North American colonies, to fill the shortage of labor we have noted there. Left behind in England, Moll has “no Parish to have Recourse to for Nourishment in [her] Infancy,” until “Compassion move[s] the Magistrates of [Colchester] to order some care be taken” of her (8–9).68 Like Eve, she prospers for a while through her labor (although Moll’s labor is mostly criminal), but is eventually forcibly expelled from her home. “In the Sixty first year of my Age,” she says, “I launch’d out into a new World, as I may call it, in the Condition . . . only of a poor nak’d Convict, ordered to be Transported in respite from the Gallows” (244). We will return to the role of penal transportation in peopling the British colonies in Chapter 4; for now, we will focus on the contrast between Moll’s journey into a “new World” and Eve’s. Moll’s value in that world is not, like Eve’s, to produce offspring who will reshape it with their labor. Rather, she accrues value through extracting capital from those territories through the labor of others.

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We can see the more circumscribed place accorded reproduction in Moll’s first journey to Virginia, when she discovers she has married her own brother and had children with him. In this instance, the conjunction of mobility and fecundity—both Moll’s and her mother’s—cannot be recuperated by the national project of expansion. Far from being a “natural” resource of fruitfulness, their reproductivity combines with their migrancy to enable incest, an experience so “unlawful” it renders “cohabiting with [her Virginia husband] the most nauseous thing . . . in the world” for Moll (78). Devastated by the revelation of their true relationship, Moll returns to England financially no better off than when she left. The difference between this account of peopling and the one we find in Paradise Lost is partially explained by Moll’s criminal status: unlike Eve, her reproductive capacity is not protected by her husband and enclosed by conjugality. Yet it’s worth noting that Moll enters into her Virginia marriage on the understanding that it is legal, and that her children will be legitimate. In other words, it is not Moll’s criminality that undermines this attempt at peopling the (new) world, but rather the narrative’s determination to show us the limits of peopling as a strategy for amassing colonial wealth. This interpretation is supported by the very different ending of Moll’s second journey to Virginia. Wise now in the ways of colonial production, she contrives, despite her status as a transported convict, to establish, in the company of her Lancashire husband, plantations in the Chesapeake. These prove very profitable: “We were now in very considerable Circumstances, and every Year encreasing, for our new Plantation grew upon our Hands insensibly, and in eight Year which we lived upon it, we brought it to such a pitch, that the Produce was, at least, 300 l. Sterling, a Year: I mean, worth so much in England” (267). The last clause is important, since Moll, unlike Eve, is able to return home. The editor of Moll’s tale tells us at the outset that “they both came to England again, after about eight Year, in which time they were grown very Rich” (6). Thus, Moll becomes a person of value to the commonwealth not through her fecundity, but rather through her ability to extract riches from the colonies through her business acumen and the labor of others and bring it home to “the firm Ground of my Native Country the Isle of Britain” (83). Again in contrast to Eve, Moll’s final allegiance is the “ground” of her “native country” rather than to any of her many husbands. As the editor tells us, Her application to a sober Life, and Industrious Management at last in Virginia, with her Transported Spouse, is a Story fruitful of

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Instruction to all the unfortunate Creatures who are oblig’d to seek their Re-establishment abroad, whether by the Misery of Transportation, or other Disaster; letting them know, that Diligence and Application have their due Encouragement, even in the remotest Parts of the World, and that no Case can be so low, so despicable, or so empty of Prospect, but that an unwearied Industry will go a great way to deliver us from it, will in time raise the meanest Creature to appear again in the World, and give him a new Cast for his Life. (5) Moll’s narrative demonstrates the way English people might distinguish themselves from those bodies needed to fill and work colonial territories. Labor—“unwearied Industry”—holds the promise not of shaping an empty world, but rather of return to the metropolis—a “delivery” back into “the world.” Not coincidentally, Moll Flanders also demonstrates the supplanting of the epic plot of exile with a novelistic plot of return (one we also see in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe), in which moral and economic value are extracted from the colonial arena and brought triumphantly back to the metropolis. In this new narrative, the roles are not as sharply gendered as they are in Milton’s. Or rather, Moll is best able to accrue value as a woman not through her reproductive capacity, which is never fully enclosed by the law, but rather through her “sobriety” and “industry.” Her fruitfulness is not entirely—or even primarily—biological, but rather in her production of “a story fruitful of Instruction.” And what it instructs its readers to do is to return rich to their native land.69 Yet, if the landless and criminal poor were to be rehabilitated and kept within (or brought back to) the metropolis, who was to be sent to people the expanding colonial world, to hold and keep British colonies for the crown? Who would produce the riches to be extracted from those arenas and brought home? Labor was, if anything, becoming increasingly necessary in the colonies at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century. The issue of exporting labor / getting rid of undesirables died down as the century progressed, but the problem of filling up space and supplying the colonies with labor remained, and perhaps even increased. As the seventeenth century drew to a close, people were still needed to fill and power the colonies, but the people to which the Empire turned were less and less the landless English poor, but subaltern persons and African slaves. We will look more closely at the subaltern bodies deemed fit to people the colonies for Britain— specifically the case of the Irish—in the next chapter.

chapter 2

The Afterlives of Political Arithmetic in Defoe and Swift

The Work was not of a Nature to allow them leisure to take an exact Tale of the dead bodies, which were all huddled together in the Dark into a Pit.

Thus Daniel Defoe describes the brutal aggregation of London’s dead during the plague epidemic of 1665, a mass burial so rushed and devoid of ceremony that it defies enumeration. His spare but haunting words set the stage for the concerns of this chapter, which examines the fraught relationship between “Tale” and “tally”—between narration and enumeration—in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, written in 1722, and Jonathan Swift’s Irish tracts of the 1720s. While the preceding chapter focused on the legal and economic discourse surrounding the intersection of population and mobility, this chapter examines how that intersection was understood through the emergent discourse of political arithmetic—the precursor of modern statistical sciences. That chapter looked at the way peopling could be considered an instrument of empire; this chapter considers how the new, and not unrelated, apparatuses of numbering could be used for the same purpose. Both Swift and Defoe are highly aware of the way those apparatuses are disproportionately applied to subaltern subjects: London’s poor in A Journal of the Plague Year, and the native Irish in Swift’s tracts. Their texts reveal that political arithmetic sustains a regime of settlement and mobility in which subaltern groups are, in Hagar Kotef ’s words, “simultaneously presumably less rooted and yet

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constantly hindered” in their movement.1 For London’s poor, that hindering manifests itself in the government-mandated quarantine Defoe advocates for the living, while Swift’s poor and vagrant Irish are imagined as placeholders in the Americas, serving as a screen between the English and colonists from other nations. Yet the projects of numbering that enable both quarantine and emigration—projects that imagine human communities to be made up of discrete, countable units—are always shadowed in these texts by the tendency of bodies under duress to devolve into undifferentiated and uncountable organic matter: Defoe’s dead, so “huddled” together they cannot be distinguished from one another, find their mirror in the infants Swift’s “modest” Proposer hopes to dissolve into a profitable supply of meat. Thus, despite their differences, both authors force us to understand the potential violence of enumeration when used as a method of managing subaltern bodies. In the history of British colonialism, projects of enumeration have been seen as one of the important ways in which Britain maintained both material and ideological control over its colonies, especially during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Benedict Anderson, for example, links the census to the map and the museum, identifying all three as “institutions of power which, although invented before the mid-nineteenth century, changed their form and function as the colonized spaces entered the age of mechanical reproduction. . . . Together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, the legitimacy of its ancestry.”2 The technological development of new methods for measuring human geography certainly changed the nature of census taking. Yet Anderson comes close to suggesting here, as do other scholars of nineteenth-century colonialism, that the statistical sciences existed in some kind of neutral or benign state in the metropolis before they were deployed in the colonial world. This chapter provides an alternative narrative. It looks at the ways in which population theory, and its attendant projects such as census taking, developed in the context of England’s consolidation of control over its first empire rather than originating as neutral metropolitan practices that were later exported as instruments of colonial domination.3 There may have been no official census of the English population until 1801, but censuses were carried out in all parts of the empire long before that date. William Petty completed an unpublished census of Ireland in 1659, and private citizens organized censuses of Scotland in 1755 and 1791. Government censuses of the Americas were completed even earlier—there were five censuses of Jamaica in the seventeenth century, two

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in the eighteenth, and “the first English attempts to collect precise data on a colonial population occurred in Virginia between 1623 and 1625.”4 Yet resistance to enumeration in England delayed the first national census until 1801. By examining Swift and Defoe’s interest in population theory in relation to both the imperialist preoccupation with statistics and English resistance to them, I hope to place colonial and metropolitan histories of population theory into a synchronic rather than a diachronic relationship, suggesting that projects of enumeration were first implemented in the colonial arena and were only later applied to marginalized or subaltern groups within England. Demography and colonial expansion may not be intrinsically connected, but they were intimate during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in significant ways. To understand this, we must consider the ideological consequences of schemes to study populations before “the age of mechanical reproduction.” Even if such projects took place wholly in “imagined space,” or were based on inaccurate numbers and methodologies, they created a powerful reservoir of rhetoric by which peripheral populations were distinguished from metropolitan ones.

“The Frame of a Whole State” The process of dividing a population into categories of relative worth and then calculating the value of each segment to the state was known in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries as political arithmetic. As Ted McCormick has recently defined it, “political arithmetic was a seventeenthcentury methodological innovation that brought the quantitative techniques and empirical spirit of the Scientific Revolution to practical questions of economy, society, and politics, paving the way for the recognizable social science of the Enlightenment.”5 As proponents of this new science flourished under the strong Restoration state, they imagined elaborate schemes for counting, increasing, and transporting populations. Few, if any, of these plans were ever put into practice, and this lack of concrete results has led a number of scholars to conclude, like John Brewer, that “the science of political arithmetic promised much more than it could deliver. . . . The plethora of numbers which populated the works of political arithmeticians concealed their suppositious nature and frequent inaccuracy.”6 Yet if we accept, as Ian Hacking suggests, that data about populations, accurate or inaccurate, is “seldom effective in controlling or altering the populations of study in the

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ways intended,” but rather has the “subversive” effect of creat[ing] new categories into which people had to fall . . . render[ing] rigid new conceptualizations of the human being,” we can begin to uncover the ideological effects of seventeenth-century political arithmetic.7 These effects were particularly apparent during the Restoration, in the decades immediately following the Civil Wars. John Graunt, for example, who in his Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (1662) tried to deduce the population history of London for the early part of the seventeenth century, found evidence for an English national identity in the numbers he collected. He observes: That but few are Murthered, viz., not above 86 of the 22950 [sic] which have died of other diseases, and casualties, whereas in Paris few nights scape without their Tragedie. The Reasons of this we conceive to be Two: One is the Government and Guard of the City by Citizens themselves, and that alternately. No man settling into a trade for that employment. And the other is, The natural and customary abhorrence of that inhumane Crime, and all Bloodshed by most Englishmen, for all that are Executed, few are for Murther.8 For Graunt, this set of numbers makes a visible moral distinction between the English and their European neighbors (though the English abhorrence of bloodshed seemingly does not extend to capital punishment). Graunt’s emphasis on moral and national characteristics needs to be understood in the context of mid-seventeenth-century controversies about identity and behavior. As Peter Buck points out, “after two decades of revolution and counter-revolution, it seemed clear that conflicts and divisions had so undercut the bases of existing order that new patterns for organizing the whole of civil society had to be worked out.”9 Such methodologies transmuted traditional ways of valuing bodies, such as religious or local affiliation, into a system based on modes of production.10 Thus William Petty divided the Irish into the following categories in his Political Anatomy of Ireland: “1. Such as live upon the King’s Pay. . . . 2. As owners of Lands and Freeholds. . . . 3. As Tenants and Lessees to the Lands of others. . . . 4. As Workmen and Labourers.”11 Mary Poovey shows that “these categories, which emphasize source of income, sought to transform the Irish into economic beings instead of religious, political, or even national subjects. In theory [this] . . .

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would encourage the Irish to see themselves as Petty saw them; and this perspective would enable them to realize that their true interest lay not in clinging to their Irishness but in embracing habits that would make them like the English.”12 Political arithmetic thus worked to erase the identities that had led to the conflicts of the Interregnum, even as it consolidated England’s domination of its colonial possessions. Indeed, even when a British census was instituted in the nineteenth century, it very rarely used religion as an identity category.13 It is because of the turn toward economic or class identities, and away from religious or feudal chains of affiliation, that the new statistical sciences have often been understood, following Marx, in terms of the development of a labor theory of value. Marx credits Petty with discovering “the value-form of the product of labour.”14 The specificity of this form of value “stamps the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character.”15 Yet the very historicity of identifying persons through the quantity and character of their labor demonstrates that political arithmetic generated new identities and dissolved old ones. From this important shift in modes of classification, moreover, another method of differentiating groups of people followed. When persons are understood to be valuable in terms of their labor power, rather than their regional or religious loyalties, in theory (and often practice), they become portable. Thus early population theorists often counted people for the purposes of moving them around—in imagination at least. The distinction between mobile and immobile populations became a significant aspect of the rhetoric that distinguished subaltern populations from dominant groups. Graunt, Petty, and their contemporaries were inspired in their demographic endeavors by the mercantilist assumption that “people are the wealth of the nation”: the belief that density of population would both power production and drive up prices. These writers made ample use of conventional metaphors comparing the state to a body. For example, Graunt calls the “Hands . . . the Father, as Lands are the Mother, and the Womb of Wealth.”16 Yet, as Philip Kreager points out, for practioners of political arithmetic, “it become possible to assign numerical values to the intrinsic proportionality of the political body.”17 Thus, these writers “expanded natural observations to the point where they could relate to political policies” (emphasis in original).18 As we have seen adumbrated in Milton’s suggested connection between the trees in Eden and Eve’s fecundity, population came to be seen during this period as a national resource,

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like arable land, or mineral reserves, to be husbanded or deployed so as to maximize national wealth. This new knowledge about populations, from the beginning, was understood as a way of augmenting state power by making the state more visible to itself. Indeed, the growing accuracy of information about the people of Britain enabled a number of profitable innovations, including the rationalization of government annuities and new methods for collecting taxes. Developed during the earlier part of the seventeenth century by Bacon and others, this interest in strengthening the state’s power by the collection of information persisted through the Restoration. Thus in 1648, Samuel Hartlib could write, “He that can look upon the frame of a whole state, and see the constitution of all the parts thereof . . . he only can fundamentally know what may and ought to be designed; or can be effective in that State for increase of [its] Glory.”19 And Graunt concludes, “a clear knowledge of all these particulars, and many more . . . is necessary in order to have good, certain, and easy government.”20 In retrospect, the state’s project of accruing knowledge, and transforming it into greater control of its inhabitants, seems to have been more of an ideal than an actuality during the period; the poll tax was badly administered in both 1660 and 1666, no census was taken in England, and trade records were not collated on a large scale until after the Restoration. If only as an ideal, however, the prospect of the state increasing its knowledge of its inhabitants raised a certain amount of concern, even among mercantilist theorists themselves. Such resistance was often articulated through the example of the disastrous results of David’s census, described in 2 Samuel 24. David, who counts his troops rather than relying on God’s will, finds his people punished with plagues for his disobedience. As Charles Davenant glosses the episode in 1698, “the sin David committed in numbering Israel might probably be this, that it looked like a second proof of rejecting theocracy to be governed by mortal aids and human wisdom.”21 Even Graunt confesses that he delayed his project because he “had been frighted with the misunderstood example of David.”22 But if numbering the population in England seemed dangerous, censuses and other experiments in demography were enthusiastically carried out in locations where the exertion of state power was less constrained: that is to say, in Britain’s colonial possessions. Such records of the colonial world, however, must be viewed in relation to metropolitan self-understanding. Colonial demographic inquiries worked toward two complementary goals. Scientific method functioned in the service of the state by providing the

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data that made visible the omniscience of the metropolis and on which an expansionist military policy could be based. At the same time, the state acted in the services of methodological experiment by giving scientists access to a world they viewed as simpler and more natural. This more natural human society often provided a point of reference against which metropolitan data might be measured. Graunt, for example, in his Essay on the Bills of Mortality, draws on these assumptions about the colonial world to make a claim about the rate of women’s mortality in London. After calculating that not three in two hundred women die in childbirth, Graunt argues that “If this be true in these Countries, where women hinder the facility of their Childbearing by affected straightening of their bodies, then certainly in America, where the same is not practiced, Nature is little more to be taxed as to women, then in Brutes, among whom not one in some thousands do die of their deliveries: what I have heard of Irish-women confirms me herein.”23 Here, the “simplicity” of the colonial world serves to confirm the complexity of the metropolis. Deeming the reproductive habits of the Americans “natural” and animalistic allows Graunt to deem the habits of English women “affected” and unhealthy. Furthermore, the comparison implies that the increasing wealth of the nation—its people—turns out to be, on one level, a problem of fertility. The value of peopling, which we saw couched in religious terms in Paradise Lost, is understood here as a socioeconomic algorithm. The most influential of the colonial experiments in demography, however, was Petty’s Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691). This document drew on the information Petty had gathered as Cromwell’s surveyor putting together the famous Down Survey (so-called because it was written down), and in nineteen different surveys of Ireland between 1653 and 1660.24 In the preface, Petty explains why the subdued and devastated human landscape of seventeenth-century Ireland provides appropriate evidence for his new science of “political economy.” He has chosen it “as Students of Medicine practice their inquiries on cheap and common Animals . . . where there is the least confusion and perplexure of parts.”25 For Petty, as for Graunt, Ireland is remarkable for its brutish lack of complexity. Here, too, that simplicity is valued for its ability to further the knowledge of the metropolitan scientist. Yet, as Petty proceeds to assign numerical values to the parts of that body, the implications of his findings for colonial policy become more apparent. Considering the losses of the “late rebellion,” he calculates: “The value of people, Men, Women, and Children in England, some have computed to be L70 a head, one with another. But if you value the people

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who have been destroyed in Ireland, as Slaves and Negroes are usually rated, viz., at about L15 one with another; Men being sold for L25 and children L5 each; the value of the people lost will be about L10,355, 000.”26 The emphasis on numbers in this passage, characteristic of the text, helps articulate certain elements of colonialist ideology during the period.27 Petty converts the deaths of human beings into monetary values in order to make clear the astronomical cost of colonial warfare, assuming that an account of England’s financial losses will have a greater impact on his readers than a description of the Irish dead. Thus, he puts forward an implicit argument against military solutions to colonial problems, one that lays the groundwork for the nonmilitary projects he proposes for Irish domination later in the volume. Yet he does so at the expense of Irish claims to equality as British subjects. Like Graunt, Petty defines the Irish population against the population of England and finds it less valuable unit for unit. At the same time, he brings the Irish into a relationship of equivalence with Africans, quantifying what was a fairly typical qualitative judgment of the era, and implying that all of England’s colonized subjects might be valued on the same scale. Implicitly, Petty also suggests that the Irish might be as usefully transported through the empire as “slaves and negroes.” Indeed, projections about the utility of moving groups of (primarily disadvantaged) people about, particularly with regard to peopling the colonies in the most profitable manner, predate, as we have seen, the first scientific attempts to quantify the inhabitants of England. Thus Petty’s ideas resemble schemes for population redistribution published as far back as early seventeenth-century pro-emigration tracts like A Good Speed to Virginia, which gives this advice: “Although the honour of the king be in the multitude of people, Pro. 14.28, yet when this multitude of people increaseth to over great a number, the common-wealth stands subject to many perilous inconveniences . . . [and governments] have sent their overflowing multitudes abroad into other countries and provinces . . . so we see the husbandman deal with his grounds when they are overcharged with cattell, he removes them from one ground to another, and so he provideth well for his cattell and his ground.”28 Here, the economic imperative to people the new colonies run by corporations and the assumption that people are a resource to be rationally apportioned work hand in hand, providing a new perspective on a dynamic, an important part of which was imagining persons as a nonhuman resource like “cattell,” we also discussed in the previous chapter.29 This conjunction of ideas proved durable; a few decades

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later in 1647, a contemporary of Hartlib’s, Benjamin Worsley, advocated colonial emigration to solve the problem of excess people at home: “All the poore in the Kingdomes may be this way maintained, all industrious willing laboring mindes in any Art, may be thus set aworke and releeved. Gentlemen and others of Estate undone by the warres may be here succored and not only some but All these may live plentifully and be inriched. Whence also all the inconveniences coming from having many poore in a Kingdome begging—stealing—wand’ring lazily, and all Habits of idleness will be removed. And all Hearts made happy and gladded.”30 Although these early seventeenth-century schemes are not based on the actual enumeration of particular groups, they imply that such information could be used as a basis for state-sanctioned or coerced mobility. Worsley’s sense that unfortunate or undesirable English people might be moved from one place to another relies, as we saw in the previous chapter, on the assumption prevalent during the first half of the seventeenth century that England suffered from a surplus of population, which might usefully be shifted to the colonies. By the later part of the 1600s, however, “it was . . . thought that England’s people were decreasing in numbers and hence not keeping pace with the nation’s capacity to produce.”31 Thus, when Petty advocates the redistribution of population, he does so with an eye toward consolidating the power England already held in Ireland, rather than moving people to the Americas. For example, in one of several schemes to exchange a certain number of English people for the same number of Irish, he suggests that half the unmarried marriageable women in Ireland be “transported into England, and disposed of one to each Parish, and as many English brought back and married to the Irish.” If, at the same time, English priests are brought into Ireland, then, “When the Priests, who govern the conscience, and the Women, who influence other powerful Appetites, shall be English, both of whom being in the Bosom of the Men, it must be, that no massacring of English, as heretofore, can happen again. More over, when the Language of the Children shall be English, and the Oeconomy of the Family English, viz., Diet, Apparel, etc., the Transmutation will be very easy and quick.”32 This passage makes clear connections between demography and colonial policy. The quantification of persons leads to assumptions about the transportable nature of subaltern bodies, both Irish and English (for it seems clear that the English women sent to Ireland will come from among the poor). That portability then becomes the key to a kind of biological conquest of Ireland. With so many female English bodies in control of Irish “appetites,” Petty

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concludes, “the Irish would never stir upon a National or Religious Account” (158)—thus securing the territory for England without further bloodshed. Petty relies here on a particular idea about gender as much as he does on ideas of mobility: in this formulation, English women will not people an empty land, but rather allow the state to harness their powers of both biological and cultural reproduction to transform the people already living in Ireland by influencing desire for sex, food, and consumer goods such as apparel. Petty’s suggestion here that the consolidation and rationalization of England’s power in the world rests on moving women around so they can reengineer family life later inspired him to devise more direct ways of increasing the transportable population of Ireland. These methods, which he never published, included dissolving marriages that did not result in children within six months, penalizing women who did not produce a child every three years, and providing cash rewards for women who could give birth to three children within three years.33 In these proposals, we can see the underlying mercantile assumption that a population should be run by the state as a merchant runs his business; reproduction is made equivalent to economic production, and profit accrues through a favorable balance of trade.34 William Temple, Swift’s early patron, for example, draws on this metaphor when he calls war, disease, and emigration “transitory Taxes upon the Bodies of Men, as the Expenses of War are upon their Estates.”35 The Irish held a central position in the debates over the relative value and tractability of populations throughout the long eighteenth century, from Petty’s surveys to the statistical accounts of the Royal Irish Academy in the 1780s, to the controversy over government recommendations for statesponsored emigration in the 1820s.36 The same interest in what we might call biospatial rationalism—the desire to organize the placement of bodies across territories in response to the needs of the state rather than the desires of the individual—played a role in the policies toward other parts of the British Empire as well. For example, turning his gaze toward America, Petty concludes his treatise on Political Arithmetick with a discussion of the “impediments” to England’s greatness. He notes that one “is the inequality of Shires, Diocesses [sic], Parishes, Church-livings, and other Precincts,” but argues that, “as these impediments are contingent, so are they also removable. . . . For may not the Land of superfluous territories be sold, and the people with their movables be brought away? May not the English in the America plantations . . . compute what Land will serve their turn, and contract their habitation to that proportion, both for quantity and quality? As for the People of

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New-England, I can but wish they were Transplanted into Old England or Ireland” (emphasis in original).37 As McCormick says, “political arithmetic emerges not as an early economics but as an ambitious art of government by demographic manipulation.”38 Petty’s idea of governing the empire by simply moving the right number and kind of people into the proper amount of space proved durable and alluring in colonialist thought. Ian Hacking argues that all Enlightenment censuses had the same goals; they asked, “how big is the population, and how might we influence its size,” and they told “the sovereign how to tax the subjects, and how many would be available for war.”39 He cites France’s census of its Canadian colonies in 1666 as an example. In the English context, too, these goals, from the beginning, were developed in relation to both colonial expansion and the consolidation of English power in the “internal colonies” of Ireland and Scotland. In addition to size and value, however, British demographic theorists often assessed the portability and directional flow of disenfranchised populations. One eighteenth-century reformer, for instance, said of Scotland, after the widespread economic changes and resulting mass emigration that followed the Jacobite revolt of 1745, that it might become “a People-Warren for supplying [the] King with brave soldiers and sailors and the more fertile parts of the kingdom with faithful servants of every description.”40 Unlike the contemporaneous enterprise of the slave trade, these seventeenth- and eighteenth-century schemes to enumerate, transport, and increase populations took place almost entirely on the level of fantasy. I would argue, however, that the rhetoric surrounding them generated new categories through which to identify groups of people—in this case, the subaltern groups we now think of as the colonized. That is to say, those groups of people we think of in terms of the conquest of their place of origin (their colonization) might also be considered productively in terms of their assimilation, both real and imagined, to the demographic schemes of political arithmetic.

The Afterlife of Political Arithmetic Britain’s enthusiasm for the projects spawned by political arithmetic was more or less confined to the decades of the Restoration. After the defeat of absolutism in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, interest in political arithmetic, with its emphasis on state control of information and direct intervention into

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private lives, waned considerably in England itself. Poovey points out that “as much as the monarch ceased to be the primary guarantor or steward of knowledge . . . theorists reconsidered the kind of knowledge useful for government. Administering self-rule in a market society involved understanding of human motivations, including the desire to consume, rather than simply measuring productivity or overseeing obedience.”41 The beginnings of this shift are visible in the projects of the 1690s. William III was keenly interested in gathering economic information. In 1696, for example, he ordered the reorganized Board of Trade to gather complete information about customs revenue. Yet hardly any of this information was ever compiled into useful tables.42 Similarly, in 1694, the English Parliament enacted a law requiring the enumeration of the inhabitants of England and Wales as part of a scheme to collect taxes on births, deaths, and marriages, along with annual fines on bachelors over twenty-five and widowers. But this law, too, although it was in effect until 1706, did not produce much in the way of quantitative information. Patricia Cline Cohen argues that there were a number of reasons why this attempt at census taking failed. Anxiety persisted about the consequences of reenacting the sin of David, but, on a more practical level, the government lacked enough sufficiently numerate employees to make census taking possible on a large scale. Furthermore, the people being enumerated seemed to resent the invasion of privacy involved in the census. When one William Wynne tried counting the inhabitants of Newark in 1697, “the common people of the town got together in a tumultuous and disorderly manner, and with stones, dirt, and other things, forct the said officer from his duty.”43 Most important, perhaps, discovering the actual numbers of people in England was not economically useful or interesting to the government unless a tax could be collected at the same time. This condition, understandably, increased resistance to the census-taking process.44 Instead of political arithmetic, scientific studies of human society in early eighteenth-century England tended to follow the example of William Derham’s Boyle lectures of 1713, Physicotheology; or, A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, from the Works of Creation, which used Graunt’s work on the bills of mortality as “clear evidence of ‘Divine Management’ in human affairs.” Thinkers of this school celebrated the ways in which man’s individual behavior in commerce and politics would result in the harmony and stability of English political life, without the need for large-scale government projects for disciplining and controlling populations. According to Peter Buck, those beliefs helped “justify the changes brought about by the 1688 Revolution, set limits on the

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economic and political conflict, and generally legitimate opposition to any further alterations in society and politics.”45 What we see in A Journal of the Plague Year (1726) and Swift’s Irish tracts of the 1720s, then, is not the birth of political arithmetic but its afterlife. Defoe examines the way statistics penetrate and shape social structures with an eye to harnessing their power for novelistic discourse, while Swift targets that penetration for satiric attack, emphasizing the capacity of statistical discourse not just to shape but to deform social relations, particularly in colonial arenas.

Huddled Bodies and Useless Mouths in A Journal of the Plague Year We can see the interface between these statistical projects and the reformation of behavior in A Journal of the Plague Year, which looks back to the events of 1665 from the vantage point of 1722. The novel’s narrator, H. F., attempts to describe not only his own experience, but also the experience of what he calls “the people,” “the generality,” and “the multitude.” The effort he must exert to do so is evident early on: The Face of London was now indeed strangely alter’d, I mean the whole Mass of Buildings, City, Liberties, Suburbs, Westminster, Southwark and altogether; for as to the particular Part called the City, or within the Walls, that was not yet much infected; but in the whole, the Face of Things, I say, was much alter’d; Sorrow and Sadness sat upon every Face, and though some Part were not yet overwhelm’d, yet all look’d deeply concern’d; and as we saw it apparently coming on, so everyone looked on himself, and his Family, as in the utmost Danger. . . . London might well be said to be all in Tears.46 In the shifting pronouns of this passage—as the face of London dissolves into every face, as those faces become a “we” and then shift back to a personification of the city—we can see the difficulties involved in a communal portrait. The outlines of London as a collective subject are also in question. London here is the “whole mass of buildings” spreading westward and on the south side of the Thames to ill-defined borders. One crucial issue with representing the aggregation that is London during the plague year is that so many of the beings that constitute it are dead. While H. F. can record his conversation with those living, as he does, with

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the plague, he struggles with how best to make visible and affecting the absence of the dead. As much as it is a journal—a day-to-day account of life lived during the plague—the novel is also a record of absent bodies—those lost to disease, and consequently lost to time. One of Defoe’s strategies for making this absence visible is the inclusion of many actual London bills of mortality, the best records of the numbers and causes of death in the city until the first British census in 1801. For many, the bills seemed to hold the key to London’s very identity. Graunt, for instance, believed the information derived from the bills would not only represent London, but also help manage it. He concluded that it was “necessary . . . to know how many People there be of each Sex, State, Age, Religion, Trade, Rank, or Degree, &c. by the knowledge whereof Trade, and Government may be made more certain, and Regular.”47 The connection Graunt makes here between certainty, regularity, and accurate counting is exactly what the plague disrupts. Throughout Defoe’s narrative, H. F. relies on the bills, including many in the narrative itself to illustrate the scope of events. And yet the sheer scale of the epidemic escapes statistical representation: “When the violent Rage of the Distemper in September came upon us, it drove us out of all Measures: Men did no more die by Tale and by Number, they might put out a Weekly Bill, and call them seven or eight Thousand or what they pleas’d: ’Tis certain they died by Heaps, and were buried by Heaps, that is to say, without Account” (237). The structure of this passage, in which H. F. simultaneously decries the inaccuracy of the bills, and registers their dogged attempt to keep track of the inhabitants of London (they continued to come out every week), is typical of the narrative. As we noted at the beginning of this chapter, the plague challenges the idea of discrete, countable bodies, turning the dead into undifferentiated “heaps” of biological matter. Yet, perhaps surprisingly, the narrator’s refutation of the bills’ accuracy in this situation does not result in a dismissal of their value and force. Instead, H. F.’s refusal to view statistics as neutral facts emphasizes their representational and affective power—their capacity to shape reality rather than accurately represent it. Indeed, discovering the inaccuracy of the bills has the paradoxical effect of revealing their representational potency—a potency that Defoe’s novel envies and hopes to share. In a world where all gatherings are gatherings of the dead, the bills of mortality hold out the promise of making a community of isolates visible to itself, to make absent members of that community visible again. As the plague decreases in strength, the narrative depicts a complementary dynamic between the bills and individual behavior: “as soon as the first

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great Decrease in the Bills appear’d, we found that the next two Bills did not decrease in Proportion; the Reason I take to be the People’s running so rashly into Danger . . . the audacious Creatures were so possess’d with the first Joy, and so surpriz’d by the satisfaction of seeing a Decrease in the weekly Bills, that they were impenetrable by any new Terrors” (226–27). In this case, the bills first reflect the city’s condition (the decrease in deaths), but then affect it, as people feel encouraged by the numbers to socialize without caution. This socializing causes the bills to reflect behavior once again, as that interaction increases the death toll. The best example of the bills’ capacity to represent London to itself comes near the end of the plague year: “It is impossible to express the change that appear’d in the very Countenances of the People, that Thursday morning when the Weekly Bills came out; it might have been perceived in their Countenances, that a secret Surprize and Smile of Joy sat on every Bodies Face: they shook each other by the Hands on the Streets, who would hardly go on the same side of the way with one another before.” (245) Here, the statistical tables not only produce an emotional effect worthy of a theatrical performance or a great sermon, but they also seem literally to re-forge the bonds of community, as the happy people begin to touch each other again. This capacity to affect the city’s behavior as a whole is something Defoe’s narrative envies. Acknowledging the limit of his own persuasive power, H. F. asks, “who am I that I should think myself able to influence either one Side or other?” and wonders “why we cannot be content to go Hand in Hand to the Place where we shall join Heart and Hand without the least hesitation” (176). His narrative lacks the power to produce the spontaneous earthly handholding he attributes to the bills of mortality. Yet even as he records the power of statistical representation, H. F. acknowledges that it is an influential fiction, rather than a transparent reflection of the city’s experience. In one of the most poignant moments of the novel, H. F. describes the way in which the recorders of bills are under the same pressures as the writers of Journals. “Now then, I say, that the Parish Officers did not give in a full Account, or were not to be depended on for their Account, let anyone but consider how men could be exact in such a time of dreadful distress, and when many of them were taken sick themselves, and perhaps died in the very time their accounts were to be given in . . . Indeed, the Work was not of a Nature to allow them leisure to take an exact Tale of the dead bodies, which were all huddled together in the Dark into a Pit” (99). H. F. suggests that novelists and statisticians share the same

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material difficulties, and aspire to the same goal: not merely to reflect, but to create a corporate subject. The homology between “tale” and “tally” is brought home. Moreover, as we noted at the beginning of the chapter, both face the near impossibility of counting (or taking account of ) discrete individuals in what constantly threatens to devolve into a mass of inchoate organic matter. Under such conditions, how can either a tale or a tally be coherent? Thus, the uneasy relationship between the narrator and the bills helps define the work of fiction in relation to the contemporaneous emergence of statistics. Ian Watt points to something “implicit in the novel form in general: the premise, or primary convention, that the novel is a full and authentic report of human experience.”48 Yet Watt is careful to emphasize that this completeness is a representational convention, and that narratives shape our perception of the world as much as they reflect it. By drawing so heavily on the bills of mortality, A Journal of the Plague Year stages an implicit comparison between demography and novel-writing as representational forms. Indeed, the novel’s engagement with the bills suggests that Defoe learned something from early forms of statistics about the way descriptions of “reality” shape the reality they describe. The parallel is particularly pointed in this case because the novel and the statistics have the same goal: to imagine London as a collective subject made up of (ac)countable beings. The realist novel of population, then, faces its greatest challenge in the shifting human shape of its aggregate subject, but imagines its greatest triumph in uniting with the statistical apparatus of the state to record the history of a “Body” of people. The history of the production of that aggregate body is the history of mobility confronted with the mechanics of confinement. Observers were fascinated by the growth of London during the eighteenth century; the metropolis held four hundred thousand people in 1650, and almost a million by 1801. It was the largest city in Europe, and ten times larger than any other English city. Many contemporary observers attributed its growth to migration from other parts of England during the upheavals of the seventeenth century. William Petty, for example, points out that “from 1642 to 1650 . . . men came out of the country to London, to shelter themselves from the outrages of the civil wars, during that time: from 1650 to 1660, the royal party came to London, for their more private and inexpensive living: from 1660 to 1670, the King’s friends and party came to receive his favours after his happy restoration: from 1670 to 1680, the frequency of plots and parliaments might bring extraordinary numbers to the city.”49 Defoe, in A Journal of the Plague

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Year, appears to agree with this analysis, and notes that after the Restoration, “this Conflux of the People, to a youthful and gay Court, made a great Trade in the City, especially in everything that belong’d to Fashion and Finery; So it drew by Consequence, a great Number of Work-men, Manufacturers, and the like, being mostly poor People, who depended upon their Labour” (19). The bills of mortality, Defoe’s chosen source for the number of deaths caused by the plague, in fact provided only a partial picture of this newly expanded metropolis. As M. Dorothy George points out, “the Bills . . . stood for the greater London of the seventeenth century. . . . Though they included the parishes of Bethnal Green, Bermondsey and Hackney . . . they did not cover the extensions of London in the west, notably Marylebone and St. Pancras.”50 Thus, the ill-defined borders of London are caused in part by a new flood of people into the city from the country. This mobility troubles the coherence of the corporate subject. The arrival of the plague serves to emphasize the connection between movements of people within Britain and the movements of people on a global scale. Its introduction into London seemingly results from the expansion of trade: “some said” it was brought “from Italy, others from the Levant among some Goods, which were brought home by their Turkey Fleet; others said it was brought from Candia; others from Cyprus” (1). This evidence of the global movement of traders is mirrored in the microcosm of London by the mobility of plague victims themselves, who are reputed to run “about the streets with the Distemper upon them without any control” (124). This continuous movement, of course, exacerbates the shifting nature of London’s population as an aggregate subject. Once the plague comes to London, it initially inspires the same movement out of the city that the Restoration inspired into it: “the City it self began now to be visited too, I mean within the Walls; but the Number of People there were indeed extreamly lessen’d by so great a Multitude having been gone into the Country; . . . In August, indeed, they fled in such a manner, that I began to think, there would really be none but Magistrates and Servants left in the City” (15). John Bender states that “H. F. considers the whole of London as a place of confinement bounded by hostile villages whose citizens allow no passage by road.”51 Yet, the novel’s concern with containment needs to be read as a response to the heightened human mobility both evidenced and triggered by the plague. Moreover, H. F.’s suspicion that under the regime of the plague only government officials and the working poor will remain in London reminds us again of Kotef ’s argument that it is the movement of those considered rootless that

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is most consistently hindered in such situations: servants vulnerable to the plague will run “about the streets with the Distemper upon them,” while magistrates adjudicate the confinement of quarantine. Under these conditions, H. F., like a good political arithmetician, urges the state to step in and take control of the mobility engendered by the plague. For, if “the best Physick against the Plague is to run away from it,” too many Londoners have run too late, after they have already been infected by the disease. The government needs to step in, and H. F. suggests these “Measures for managing the People”: “separating the People into smaller Bodies, and removing them in Time farther from one another, and not let such a Contagion as this, which is indeed chiefly dangerous, to collected Bodies of People, find a Million of People in a Body together” (198). H. F. does not imagine that human mobility can be halted, only that it can be rationally regulated. H. F. here struggles to represent human aggregation: the people are both “collected Bodies” and a collective “Body”—both single units and a larger whole. What marks this discussion as emerging from the era of political arithmetic, however, is the way that H. F. goes on to assign different values to different kinds of persons. He continues: I could propose many Schemes, on the foot of which the Government of this City, if they should ever be under the Apprehensions of such another Enemy [as the plague], (God forbid they should), might ease themselves of the greatest Part of the dangerous People that belong to them; I mean such as the begging, starving, labouring Poor, and among them chief those who in Case of Siege are call’d the useless Mouths; who being then prudently and to their own Advantage dispos’d of, and the wealthy Inhabitants disposing of themselves, and of their Servants and Children, the City and its adjacent Parts . . . would be effectually evacuated. (198) The passage distinguishes between the wealthy, who will “dispose” of themselves, and the “Poor,” who will be “dispos’d of” by the “Government of the City.” The wealthy will move themselves; the poor will be moved by others. H. F.’s suspicion that the plague will eventually reduce the city to “servants and magistrates” recurs here. What’s also interesting is that while the wealthy remain a collectivity with agency, the aggregated poor are metonymically reduced to a single body part: they are “useless Mouths.” This figuration of

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the poor as “begging, starving . . . Mouths” situates them primarily as consumers, even as they are also described as “laboring.” They are like Sin’s children in Paradise Lost, who “with ceaseless cry / Surround” her and “gnaw / [Her] bowels” (2.795–96, 799–800), a nightmarish image of the consumer public as a destructive scrimmage, whose place in mercantilist debates we discussed in the previous chapter. Unlike Milton, however, Defoe does not relegate such chaos to Hell, but instead envisions it as something that can “prudently, and to [the Poor’s] advantage be dispos’d of”—that is, as something that can be managed by government. This is continuous with the effects of the Poor Laws discussed in the previous chapter: the assumption that the movements of the landless poor will be regulated by the state to the benefit of the state. In H. F.’s fantasy of the procedures to be followed in future plagues, the borders of the aggregate “Body” of the people will be clearly delineated, and its movements easily surveyed. At the same time, though, the apparatuses of enumeration and valuation—distinguishing sick from well—evolve, in this projection of the future, into the exertion of governmental power over the “starving . . . poor.” The imagined confinement of these “useless mouths” needs to be seen not as stasis, but as a state of arrested mobility. The association the plague with a pathologized mobility is emphasized by the narrative’s descriptions of sociability during the epidemic. Although H. F. takes pains to deny it, the desire to spread the disease is supposed by many to be a symptom of the plague; some doctors say there is “a wicked inclination in those that were infected to infect others . . . a malignity not only in the Distemper to communicate itself, but in the very Nature of Man” (154). Sociability is only possible when the living imagine themselves to be dead. At the height of the plague, “looking at themselves all as so many dead corpses, they came to the Churches without the least caution” (175). Selfimposed isolation turns out to be the best way to escape the disease—and H. F. celebrates those individuals and families able to confine themselves to their own houses or ships (although, notoriously, he finds himself unable to emulate them). The plague thus both isolates persons and brings them back together as undifferentiated, decaying flesh.52 Defoe’s novel, as much as Swift’s “Modest Proposal,” is preoccupied with the tendency of persons to revert back to nonsentient organic matter. H. F.’s talismanic word for this dynamic is “heaps,” a word we have already noted, but which he uses with great frequency. He uses the word to describe dead bodies, as in “they died by Heaps, and were

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buried by Heaps”; he also uses it to depict living moving bodies, as when he notes that “sometimes Heaps and Throngs of People would burst out” of places like plague-ravaged Harrow Alley (177). But the word also serves to describe amounts of nonhuman material, such as supplies of coal; “ships deliver’d great Quantities of Coals in particular Places . . . in vast Heaps, as if to be kept for Sale” (220). The word points disturbingly to the way these agglomerations seem piled, not ordered, and emphasizes that their significance resides in their quantity, not their quality. As Gordon Teskey says of Milton’s use of the word in Samson Agonistes, “A heap is not just disorder; it is the violent negation of an order.”53 The continuity between animate and inanimate matter is not merely rhetorical; at the height of the plague, there is not much distinction between those bodies merged into heaps of the living, and those piled up in heaps of the dead: “many People had the Plague in their very Blood . . . and were in themselves but walking, putrified Carcasses”(58). These images of heaps of flesh—a nightmarish double to the idea of a communal identity—signal the limits of representation. Faced with the plague pit, H. F. can only stammer, “it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no tongue can express” (60). The encounter with political arithmetic thus shows Defoe two things. First, the representational power of numbers and tables. Even when these numbers do not tally with the truth, they tell a compelling tale—one a novelist can sometimes only envy. The second lesson, however, shadows the first: the project of collecting such numbers disturbingly evokes the dissolution of discrete, countable bodies, shining a light on spaces human bodies occupy as pure materiality rather than as subjects with agency.

Swift’s Irish Tracts While Defoe undertakes to represent the excessive destruction of bodies by plague, Swift forces us to consider the effects of their excessive multiplication. Like Defoe, Swift is concerned with the tension between confinement and mobility for subaltern bodies, though in Swift’s case, those are the bodies of the native Irish. Both, too, are fascinated by the fine line between amination and de-amination among such persons—the precarious point at which the body becomes, in Swift’s literalizing vision, merely meat. Both, too, link that precarious tipping point to the capture of those bodies by the schemes of enumeration and valuation typical of political arithmetic. Like A Journal of

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the Plague Year, then, Swift’s Irish tracts, with their critique of the implicit commodification and sanctioned mobility of Irish bodies under the regime of the new statistical sciences, register not his engagement with a current English preoccupation, but rather his consciousness of the afterlife of political arithmetic as a way of managing subaltern bodies. For Swift, this consciousness includes his sense that such interventionist schemes remained a danger for subaltern populations even after they had come to seem improper for those with greater social status.54 He may have been aware that just as censustaking efforts in England itself were sputtering during the 1690s, successful censuses were being carried out in England’s American colonies. In these arenas, the economic and administrative value of enumeration was clear: showing how many bodies were available to fill up occupied land and defend it. The same reorganized Board of Trade that was struggling to put together customs statistics for England requested and received census counts from Newfoundland, Bermuda, Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Rhode Island between 1698 and 1708.55 There were no census projects proposed for Ireland, but other options for population surveillance and control were explored. Concern over Presbyterian emigration from Ulster was acute enough in 1728 that “the lords justices instructed the law officers of Ireland to consider ‘what laws are in force for preventing the subjects of this Kingdom from Transporting themselves, and carrying away their Money and Effects abroad, and to Report . . . what Method is to be taken upon the said Laws, or in any other legal manner to prevent the same.’ ”56 It is at this historical juncture, then, that the invasive procedures of political arithmetic began to be understood as most appropriately applied to those at what Arjun Appadurai calls the “social margins.”57 There was one area of political arithmetic, however, that continued to fascinate British mercantile thinkers even after the Revolution Settlement: the idea that biological reproduction could be aligned with national productivity. Petty’s ideas about increasing reproduction through government intervention found many echoes in the work of later economic theorists, as is evident in the 1694 scheme for fining bachelors. In 1698, for example, Charles Davenant argued that privileges and exemptions should be granted to those who produced many children. In 1721, George Berkeley wrote that propagation should be encouraged “by allowing some reward or privilege to those who have a certain number of children; and on the other hand, enacting that the public should inherit half the unentailed estates of those who die unmarried

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of either sex.”58 Defoe took up the same idea in 1726, arguing that rationally speaking, no “Woman ought to be allowed to marry after her capacity for Child-bearing has left her. Such a Conjunction . . . loses to the World the Produce of one Man.”59 Swift may have been most familiar with such projects through the work of his early mentor, William Temple. Swift was Temple’s literary executor, and wrote the introduction to the multivolume collection of his works that included the essay “On Popular Discontents.” In this piece, Temple advocates “turn[ing] the vein of what we call Natural to that of Legal Propagation” by means of “a Law, whereby all men who did not Marry by the Age of Five and Twenty, should pay the third part of their Revenue to some Publick Uses, such as the building of Ships, and Publick Workhouses, and raising a Stock for maintaining them.”60 Taken together, these schemes suggest that the mercantile truism that “people are the wealth of a nation” has certain implications for sexual relations: that reproduction might be considered wage labor, and persons quantifiable units of national wealth. Their ideological force becomes apparent when we realize that, although they were primarily speculative in early eighteenth-century England, similar projects were put into practice in early nineteenth-century slave colonies. In Britain’s Caribbean colonies, for example, cash incentives to reproduce were often offered to female slaves during the period between the abolition of the slave trade in 1807 and the emancipation of British slaves in 1833.61 These projects were not very successful, but they represent another crucial instance of the colonial afterlife of political arithmetic. Swift’s interest, during the 1720s and 1730s, in the relation between the new statistical sciences and Ireland’s colonial status has long been known to scholars. Louis Landa first investigated Swift and “populousness” over seventy years ago, and George Wittkowsky put it succinctly when he claimed that “A Modest Proposal” was written under the influence of the “muse of political arithmetic” and is a sustained attack on the promises of mercantilist theories of population.62 There is a tendency, however, in investigations of these texts, to see Swift’s critique of British imperialism as confined to his objections to Ireland’s suffering under England’s mercantile policies. Placing Swift’s writings in a longer history of population theory reveals the broader implications of his anticolonial satire. His manipulations of the discursive elements of political arithmetic for satirical effect allows us to see the relationship between the scientific imagination and colonial expansion during the period.

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Swift’s best-known critique of the condition of Ireland, “A Modest Proposal” (1729), takes the idea that reproduction could be harnessed for nationalist ends and pits it against another tenet of political arithmetic, the quantifiable value of subaltern bodies in the process of empire building. In the Proposer’s horrifyingly objective calculations, procreation turns women into the producers of a profitable commodity. Yet in this case, that undertaking is articulated in relation to the relation of migration to vagrancy. These children, whose mothers are forced into “strolling” to beg for sustenance, will, unless another solution is found, become charges on their parishes. This problem of intranational mobility is currently solved by emigration. The Proposer begins by addressing the fate of “helpless infants . . . who, as they grow up, either turn Thieves for want of Work; or leave their dear Native Country, to fight for the Pretender in Spain, or sell themselves to the Barbadoes.”63 He further connects the situation of the poor in Ireland to the conditions of other British colonies by claiming that much of his information about eating children comes from “a very knowing American” (111). The “Proposer,” positioning himself in the mercantilist debates about the poor and consumer publics discussed in the previous chapter, works precisely to prevent the potential migration of these bodies to other colonial scenes; as consumable goods, they will be most economically useful in their home markets. In a pamphlet of 1730, Answer to the “Craftsman,” also written in the voice of the “modest” Proposer, Swift takes up the relation between the statistical sciences and government schemes to transport Irish bodies more explicitly. During the winter of 1730, French officers appeared in Dublin to recruit Irish soldiers, even though such practices were officially illegal. The November 7 issue of the Tory journal the Craftsman criticized this activity, and invited Swift to enter the fray by comparing it to the selling of babies as food.64 Swift took the opportunity to publish an “answer” that satirically considered not only recruitment, but also a number of other projects for making Ireland more productive by profitably getting rid of its excess population. The pamphlet is much concerned, as are many of Swift’s tracts of the period, with the harm done by English mercantile policies to the Irish economy. It begins by comparing the “exportation of live men” to the exportation of cattle, noting that both had been prevented by acts of the English Parliament.65 This point emphasizes that in Ireland, a common trope of political arithmetic, the rhetorical comparison of people to resources like cattle, has been literalized. Maintaining the voice of a progressive English economic

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speculator, Swift criticizes the Craftsman for attacking the king’s right to make an exception to the law. He then proceeds to figure the value of each Irish body that can be exported as a soldier “by computing the Maintenance of a tall hungry Irish Man, in Food and Cloaths, to be only at Five Pounds a Head” (174). Swift’s satiric appropriation of the language of political arithmetic here demonstrates that it functions as a rhetorical strategy with political effects, not simply an “objective” representation of material facts. A harsh satire of the principles of demographic science merges with Swift’s criticism of England’s economic policies in these passages as he imagines the bodies of the native Irish dehumanized, commodified, and exported. The pamphlet then launches into an alternative scheme for making the Irish economy more profitable, one rooted in the elaborate calculations of seventeenth-century political arithmetic. Its speaker argues that, “the profitable land is, I think, usually computed at seventeen Millions of Acres, all of which I propose to wholly turn to Grazing” (175). Clearing the land in this way, however, would necessitate the restriction of population. So, it suggests, “for fear of increasing the Natives of this Island, that an annual Draught, according to the Number born every Year, be exported to whatever Prince will bear the Carriage; or transplanted to the English Dominions on the American continent, as a screen between his Majesty’s English Subjects and the savage Indians” (176). Here, Petty’s vision of the profitable exportation of bodies to the empire is given a satirical twist. Irish bodies are reduced, as in “A Modest Proposal” and A Journal of the Plague Year, to almost pure materiality; if they are not considered food, then they are cannon fodder, or a kind of corporeal buffer zone between English colonists and Native Americans. These images subvert the dynamic of peopling we discussed in the previous chapter: here, British strength is bolstered and territories are claimed not by persons but by flesh. Death is privileged over birth, destruction over reproduction.66 Like the infants transformed into meat, the Irish bodies used as a screen accrue value through a necropolitical rather than a biopolitical calculation. They become part of a pool of organic matter, rather than discrete, thinking individuals. The liminality of the Irish as British subjects becomes clear; not only do they circulate as commodities among the nations of Europe, but they are also positioned between full English citizens and the “savage” peoples of America. For the conservative Swift, these economic policies lead not to progress, but to degeneration. He imagines Ireland under this regime returning to a kind of primitive pastoralism. Without the pressures of population, “the industrious

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Shepherd and Cow-herd may sit, every Man under his own Blackberry Bush, and on his own Potatoe-Bed, whereby this happy Island will become a new Arcadia” (176). The Irish will give up using money and trade with bits of leather, and they will pay their rents in hides, butter, and tallow. The proposer claims that only such a devolution in Irish society will allow the Irish to live “in Amity with our neighboring Bretheren [in England], for we have tried all other means, without effect, to that blessed End” (177). The argument of the pamphlet, then, is that the implementation of the progressive, rational discourse of political arithmetic will have the paradoxical effect of returning the Irish to their “Antient Manner”—a parodic extreme of rural self-sufficiency. The image of the native Irish as exportable objects, more valuable in the economic circuits of empire than they can ever be at home, occurs with some frequency in Swift’s Irish tracts. For example, in The Intelligencer no. 19 (1728), Swift makes a similar suggestion that the Irish can be used to “screen” the English from “wild Indians,” again calling attention to their liminal cultural position between “civilized” peoples and “savage” tribes. In “Maxims Controlled in Ireland” (1728), he ironically proposes that the Irish sell their “useless bodies” as slaves, like African nations, pointing out that the physical coercion of the slave trade and the economic hardships motivating Irish emigration, while different forms of imperial power, still both contribute to human commodification (60, 135). What’s striking about this repeated turn of argument is Swift’s implicit assertion that one consequence of Britain’s imperialism is that some places will be depopulated so that the bodies can be shipped around the world, wherever the empire’s need is the greatest. Swift criticizes political arithmetic and its role in mercantile imperialism from an Anglo-Irish perspective, and he never makes explicit claims for the equality, rights, or even personhood of the native, Catholic Irish who suffered most under English policies. Nevertheless, his conservative attack on human reification has significant anti-colonial force.67 Political arithmetic, with its calculation of numbers of human bodies and estimates of their cash value, works hand in hand, according to Swift, with the policies of empire building.68 Some writers on internal colonialism have argued that this kind of mobility gave rise to what Katie Trumpener calls a “transcolonial consciousness and transperipheral circuits of influence”: a way in which colonial subjects both assimilated the ideology of empire and established their value within it.69 This might very well be true, especially for Scots, and especially in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But attention to earlier colonial

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applications of the demographic sciences allows us to see that during the first part of the eighteenth century such portability was one way in which subaltern and dominant populations were distinguished from each other. Through a kind of spatial rationalism, a form of political arithmetic that “reduced virtually all . . . political and economic problems to questions of demographic proportion,” such groups were rendered subaltern not simply because of where they came from, but also in terms of their relation to that place; not just because of their place of origin, but because of their vulnerability to being displaced from it.70 Swift’s Irish tracts make visible these ideological consequences of the colonial afterlife of political arithmetic. Furthermore, looking at these texts in the global context of colonial expansion, which political arithmetic so often took as its concern, reveals Swift’s often overlooked awareness of the widespread consequences of England’s imperial designs.

English Resistance Conceptualizing subaltern populations as mobile populations, and theorizing enumeration as the first step toward a state-enforced redistribution of people, a redistribution that often implied violence, created visible ideological effects in the metropolis as well as the periphery. It contributed, for example, to the strong resistance to an English census during the eighteenth century. When a bill for the implementation of an English census was introduced into Parliament in 1753, some of the objections voiced against it, both in government and in the popular press, mirrored the problems of 1694.71 Superstitions about falling into David’s sin persisted, and there was a good deal of concern about how to employ enough literate, responsible enumerators to accomplish the task thoroughly. Members of Parliament were as much concerned with the intrusiveness of a centralized government as the inhabitants of Newark had been in 1697. William Thorton, the chief opponent of the bill, registered the threat posed by the new bureaucracy of the modern state to older aristocratic structures of authority when he declared: “I hold this project to be totally subversive of the last remains of English liberty. . . . If any officer, by whatever authority should demand of me an account of the number and circumstances of my family, I would refuse it; and if he persisted in the affront, I would order my servants to give him the discipline of the horsepond.”72 And Matthew Ridley rather hyperbolically declared that if any natural disaster followed the taking of a census, “it may raise such a popular flame

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as will endanger the peace, if not the existence of our present government.”73 These protests arose out of country, or gentry, opposition to centralized state power during the period.74 They can also be seen as part of the “wide-ranging discussion of English rights and liberties, claiming broad rights for ‘the people’ out-of-doors that became common currency in extra-parliamentary discourse” that Kathleen Wilson documents during the 1750s.75 A surprising amount of the debate over the census bill, however, centered on the state’s power to determine how and where populations should move in the context of colonial expansion. Some defended the project on the grounds that English census information would provide a “rule whereby to determine, where we should encourage or restrain the transmigration of people from one part of the British dominions to another.”76 Another member asked, “Do the gentlemen think, that it can be of no use to this society, or indeed to any society, to know when the number of its people increases or decreases, and when the latter appears to be the case, to enquire into the cause of it, and to endeavour to apply a proper remedy? Such a knowledge, I should think, would have been very necessary to us, at the time we undertook to establish a new colony in Nova Scotia.”77 This line of reasoning, however, proved oddly disturbing for Parliament and contributed to the motion’s defeat. How best to differentiate among the populations of Britain, determining which could be considered a resource to be fostered and manipulated like livestock, was still, in the 1750s as it had been in the 1660s and the 1730s, a matter of debate.78 One member, recurring to what we have seen to be repeated tropes in the rhetoric surrounding demography, bluntly asked, “To what end then should our number be known, except that we are be pressed into the fleet and the army, or transported like felons to the plantations abroad? And what purpose will it answer to know where the kingdom is crowded and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle? If this be intended, let them brand us like oxen and sheep, let them not insult us with the name of men.”79 Emigration, opponents claimed, was a matter for individual self-interest, not state intervention. As one speaker argued, “our people going or not going to America does not depend upon the public encouragement or restraint, but upon the circumstances they are in at the time.”80 This concern with individual economic choice suggests that these midcentury debates adumbrated the beginning of the end of mercantile policies and the gradual emergence of free market capitalism with regard to human mobility (we will return to the emergence of an ideal of individual freedom of movement in Chapter 7). Yet,

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given the imbrication of population theory and colonial policy during this period, one suspects that an important part of what opponents resisted was the idea that the English people should be subject to the same kinds of studies and manipulation as colonial populations. The emergent apparatuses of demography thus enabled the state to define both the relative portability of persons and the corresponding necessity for their confinement when their mobility subverted governmental management. Seeing both local subaltern groups and colonized peoples in these terms allowed the English to define themselves against the populations of the rest of the empire. The 1753 census bill failed; when a census was instituted at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was in the context of the governmental conviction, after the French Revolution, that England’s own population needed to be controlled. Notably more sanguine about state authority than the debaters of 1753, John Rickman, whose “Thoughts on the Utility and Facility of Ascertaining the Population of England” (1800) is widely credited with the British government’s decision to take the first census in 1801, argued that such a display of governmental penetration and supervision would discourage any recurrence of the radical protests of the 1790s: “We have seen the Government of England terrified by the attempts of certain obscure individuals, who could not have attracted its notice, but from a higher fear of more general disaffection. It would certainly tend much to the repose of any Government, if a general conviction of its inclinations and attempts to promote the public good should pervade the public mind.”81 The eighteenth-century ideological transformation of what had been seen as an invasive and coercive state gesture into a sign of benevolent, though inescapable, government presence is part of what enabled the colonial census projects of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But recovering the struggle to implement a national census and recognizing the roots of demographic projects in European colonial expansion helps explain some of the political controversy attendant on census taking in our own time. The importance of Swift’s and Defoe’s work lies in their excavation of the rhetorical power of the discourse of demographic theory, a force it retains even when detached from any accumulation of data. In Defoe, we can see the persuasive power of numbers, even when they are “inaccurate” or non-referential. Swift forces this gap between language and essence wide open, showing the independent political life of the tropes of political arithmetic. At times, Defoe seems to admire the persuasive capacity of numbers, a “modern” power he covets for novelists and other writers, while Swift’s protest is anti-modern, criticizing

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society from a perspective that refuses to understand persons as units of national value. Nevertheless, his demonstration of the political efficacy of parodying the economic dehumanization of persons resonated through the next century, if not beyond. Both authors also reveal the potential violence of political arithmetic or of enumerative projects more generally when carried out among subaltern or dispossessed groups. Even as Defoe uses the bills of mortality to bolster his own narrative authority, his advocacy of government regulation of the poor during the epidemic reveals that the differential valuation of social groups pioneered by political arithmetic finds one endpoint in the involuntary confinement of quarantine for “useless mouths,” and another in the innumerable, “huddled” “heaps” of the plague pits. Swift, too, traces a line between valuing the Irish in the terms laid out by political arithmetic, and the transformation of those vagrant and emigrant bodies into a pool of flesh, useful only as food, cannon fodder, or colonial placeholders. The principles of counting, in both cases, paradoxically lead to aggregations of humanity that might be measured, but never counted.

chapter 3

The Veteran’s Tale War, Mobile Populations, and National Identity

A retired old soldier is always a graceful and respected character—he grumbles a little now and then, but then his is licensed murmuring—were a lawyer, or a physician, or a clergyman, to breathe a complaint of hard luck or want of preferment, a hundred tongues would blame his own incapacity as the cause. But the most stupid veteran that ever faultered out the thrice-told take of a siege and a battle, and cock and a bottle, is listened to with sympathy and reverence when he shakes his thin locks, and talks with indignation of the boys that were put over his head. —Walter Scott, Guy Mannering (1815) For many a battle we then have been in, On board of a ship, thro’ France and thro’ Spain, But we settled the job when at WATERLOO, And now we’re come home, and have nothing to do. When there would be peace, we did understand, That the rich and poor would go hand in hand. But if you are starving, they’ll give no relief, You may eat what you will, instead of roast beef. —“The Tradesman’s Complaint” (circa 1815)

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Both of these authors imagine a soldier’s return home—Scott with bluff optimism, the anonymous ballad writer with blunt rage. The long eighteenth century witnessed an extraordinary number of such returns, as wave after wave of fighting men were disbanded after each successive war. Hordes of these figures flooded the highways at regular intervals during the period, in the brief intermissions from active war, and were imagined, with some justification, to be rootless, criminal, violent, and unsuited to honest work. At first, these discharged soldiers were objects of fear and contempt; then, as the public gradually embraced the project of international war and colonial expansion, they were transformed into objects of pity. Scott’s happy retirement was possible only for a lucky few—even among officers—and the government struggled to find a place, other than jail or the highway, for the majority. State employees whose usefulness to the state ended when they came home from war, veterans were one of the first, and most persistent, figures of excess population and hypermobility. The century was full of as many schemes for managing disbanded soldiers and sailors, as it was of plans to recruit them in the first place. Along with being a focus for population management, however, the problems of discharged soldiers underline the uneasy join between two aspects of British national identity, both under construction during the period: an idea of nation based on settlement, collective memory, and industrious labor; and an idea of nation based on expansion and military-colonial conquest predicated on mobility. Those who had journeyed forth to make the empire great ran the risk of being excluded from the fruits of success—both the literal and symbolic roast beef—once they returned home. Britain was almost continuously at war during the long eighteenth century, and the ever-increasing armies demanded by this conflict forced both the government and the public to imagine human aggregates: collected bodies of men ready to fight for their nation. When these armies took the field, it seemed to many that the resources of population were being channeled beneficially into the needs of the nation: that nation and population could be mapped seamlessly onto one another. During periods of peace, however, that fantasy dissolved. The persons who were recruited, or pressed, into the army were more often than not those who were otherwise seen as excess population: criminals or vagrants, “useless mouths” who were a drain on national strength. The figure of the soldier thus overlaps with and illuminates the issues surrounding the vagrant and impoverished we have discussed in Chapters 1 and 2. When soldiers were disbanded, they reverted to the same

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conditions from which they had been pressed. Such men were still imagined as aggregates, but now as unruly or dangerous mobs, a threat to the industrious citizens who made up the nation. In the anxiety surrounding veterans, then, we can see the misalignment of nation and population caused by regimes of mobility. The repercussions of this misalignment can be felt in the representational problems that plague the narratives of discharged soldiers. As many texts from the period illustrate, veterans (or those speaking on their behalf ) found it hard to make that “thrice-told tale of siege or battle” intelligible to those at home. Old soldiers, particularly those of the later part of the eighteenth century, are depicted as mute, incoherent, or amnesiac, incapable of resuming their previous lives and occupations. The narrative problems of soldier’s stories spring in part from their enforced mobility. In a culture that was beginning to valorize a personal attachment to place based on industriousness, it was difficult to recognize or represent the perpetual mobility that the state sanctioned—indeed demanded—from soldiers. At the beginning of the century, that mobility could be understood as a kind of sexualized roaming, as in The Recruiting Officer, but by the end of the century, it had come to seem a tragic and irremediable dislocation. The discursive effects produced by this deracination are captured most famously in Wordsworth’s “Discharged Soldier.” Solemn and sublime He might have seemed, but that in all he said There was a strange half-absence, and a tone Of weakness and indifference, as of one Remembering the importance of his theme But feeling it no longer. (141–46) Here, the soldier’s mobility—the poet encounters him on his journey home—seems to have robbed him of understanding. The emotional emptiness of the veteran’s words is depicted as a problem of memory: Wordsworth suggests that there was once a connection between his individual activity and the public good, but that it has gradually dissolved. Furthermore, as Alan Bewell points out, the “weakness” of both the soldier and his story are the result of his service in “the tropic islands”: the arenas to which military service took them sometimes made soldiers’ tales unwelcome, and unintelligible, at home.1 “The soldier’s radical unfamiliarity, his refusal to be domesticated,”

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David Simpson argues, trigger a “recognition that this flotsam of foreign oceans might be lapping at [the poet’s] feet.”2 Furthermore, the nature of military employment rendered the status of soldiers ambiguous in a culture increasingly committed to a labor theory of value. The government tended to treat military service as another form of wage labor, which could be terminated whenever the soldier’s job became obsolete. As the century wore on, however, the public began to feel that its method of simply turning soldiers loose at the advent of peace, and then signing them up again for new wars demonstrated a lack of gratitude for an activity that exceeded an ordinary contract for services rendered. The value of that excess, however, remained unclear. If the state did have a kind of perpetual responsibility for veterans, it differed from other, older forms of allegiance; soldiers secured their value not through allegiance to a natal place and its hereditary ruler—as did, say, the Highland clans England found so troubling during the eighteenth century—but rather paid (and often coerced) allegiance to an abstract entity: the nation.3 Such patriotic allegiance could not be entirely reconciled with a system of wage labor. As Sterne’s Uncle Toby, perhaps the century’s best-loved veteran, says, even as he defends warfare as the natural duty of man: —’Tis one thing, brother Shandy, for a soldier to hazard his own life—to leap first down into the trench, where he is sure to be cut to pieces:—’Tis one thing, from public spirit and a thirst of glory, to enter the breach the first man,—to stand in the foremost rank, and march bravely on with drums and trumpets, and colours flying about his ears:—’Tis one thing, I say, brother Shandy, to do this,— and ’tis another thing to reflect on the miseries of war;—to view the desolations of whole countries, and consider the intolerable fatigues and hardships which the soldier himself, the instrument who works them, is forced (for sixpence a day, if he can get it) to undergo.4 The gap between Toby’s two “things”—the soldier as fearless agent of “public spirit” and the soldier as a mere “instrument” hired for sixpence a day— evidences the representational difficulties surrounding military life. Soldiers seemed simultaneously reminders of an older form of value associated with perpetual personal allegiance, and an avatar of the newest forms of capitalist regimentation.5 For these reasons, representations of discharged soldiers are

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important indices of the eighteenth-century struggle to imagine the mobility of human aggregates.

The Sin of David: Armies and Population Ian Hacking argues that all Enlightenment censuses had the same goals: they told “the sovereign how to tax the subject, and how many would be available for war.”6 As we have seen, eighteenth-century opponents of enumeration often looked farther back to make their point, to the incident described in 2 Samuel 24. King David, rather than relying on God’s will, counts his troops before a battle. He then finds his people punished with plagues for his disobedience. One eighteenth-century poet explained the incident by focusing on the connection between David’s interest in numbers and the practice of war: “the Adversary of Mankind” “kindled in [David] an ambitious Mind / To know his Strength, and strongly him inclin’d / To number all his people, such as are / Fit to bear Arms, and Muster’d be for War.” He then concludes, “That since of Numbers David fain would boast / He of his Number Seventy Thousand lost.”7 This account of the sin of David reveals the way in which the motives and methods of enumeration were inspired, all too often, by the need for men to fill the armies of the expanding British Empire. Many projects of enumeration were geared to this end. Linda Colley notes that the Defense of the Realm Act of April 1798, which tried to ascertain the number of British men willing to fight in the event of an invasion, was “the most ambitious and precise taxonomy of its people since the Domesday Book,”8 and that the first national census, in 1801, was enacted because “in every war, especially in a defensive war, it must be of the highest importance to enroll and discipline the greatest number of men.”9 Britons were not unaware of this motive. As we noted in the last chapter, one opponent of the failed 1753 census bill asked, “To what end then should our numbers be known, except that we are to be pressed into the fleet and army, or transported like felons to the plantations abroad?”10 In the service of military supremacy and imperial expansion, then, Britain flirted with the sin of David throughout the long eighteenth century, focusing a good deal of its demographic inquiry and skill in population management on the expansion of its military. Amassing such an army was of the utmost importance because Britain was almost constantly at war during this period. As John Brewer demonstrates: “The fall of James in 1688 inaugurated the longest period of British

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warfare since the middle ages. Britain was at war with France, and allies of France, in 1689–97, 1702–13, 1739–63, and 1775–83. Sometimes referred to as the ‘Second Hundred Years War,’ this belligerent era culminated in the twenty-year struggle with post-Revolutionary France which ended with Wellington and Blucher’s victory at Waterloo. . . . Britain acquired a standing army and navy. She became, like her main rivals, a fiscal-military state, one dominated by the task of waging war.”11 The ubiquity of war re-forged British national identity along new lines. Colley claims that “the scale and duration of mass arming had a transforming effect upon British society that has hardly begun to be explored”: a transforming effect due in part to the way the British “came to define themselves as a single people not because of any political or cultural consensus at home, but rather in reaction to the Other beyond their shores.”12 In order to imagine their own collective identity, then, Britons both looked, and actually moved, beyond their national borders, enabling the kind of self-gratifying comparison superbly illustrated by Hogarth’s print Calais Gate, or the Roast Beef of Old England (1749), in which a crowd of French onlookers gaze enviously at an emblematic joint of beef. The scale of this transformation is important—“between 1680 and 1780 the British army and navy trebled in size”: more Britons than ever before traveled outside their homeland in the service of their nation.13 These increasingly large armies demanded great numbers of recruits. On the eve of the War of Spanish Succession, for example, Parliament declared its need to recruit an additional 13,000 men.14 The army, however, was notorious for its low pay, bad conditions, and high mortality rate. Private soldiers, one said in 1770, were “treated in a very disrespectful manner, exposed to many hardships, and by the meanness of their pay are put to the greatest inconvenience to subsist.”15 Thus, it was difficult to recruit the large numbers needed through volunteers alone. Desperate to find more soldiers, Parliament often offered pardons on enlistment to men accused of crimes. In December of 1708, for instance, 1,750 men entered the service in this way, and between 1776 and 1782, 953.16 Furthermore, through most of the century, Parliament passed a series of recruiting bills that allowed constables to impress “such able-bodied men, as have not any lawful employment or calling, or visible means for their maintenance livelihood.”17 Such acts were renewed in times of crisis up until 1780. Press gangs, trying hard to fill their quotas, could be very thorough indeed, not only scouring the streets, but also entering houses to pull out their occupants. As one pressed soldier recalled in 1756: “For above a Year before I left London, I durst not look out at Night, nor Walk

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the Streets in the Day, for Fear of being press’d, seeing so many go before me: But it happen’d to be my Turn at last.”18 Impressment was not a perfect instrument, however, and many caught in its snares did not actually end up in the army: they did not meet the minimal height standards for soldiers; they were able to prove that they had been pressed unfairly; they mutinied or were rescued by friends; or, they were simply able to escape.19 Yet the number of undesirable men who were handed over to the military, even if they didn’t serve, evidences the double purpose of military service during the eighteenth century: “While the magistrates and army officers might agree on the necessity of forcing men into the service, their interests were still somewhat opposed; military officers were interested in men who were physically and mentally capable of becoming good soldiers—they needed good fighting men—the civil authorities were interested in getting rid of vagrants and other undesirables and were less concerned with the needs and standards of the army.”20 Press gangs for the army (the “land press”) were no longer used after 1780, though the naval press continued into the early nineteenth century; opposition to the American war, and greater public participation in the political process had frayed the alliance between local civil authorities and the state upon which impressments depended.21 Despite the increase in bounties and other perquisites for volunteers, however, the army still had great difficulty recruiting the necessary number of men.22 Wellington’s army could recruit from those drafted into the militias, but most of “the men who enlisted in the army, or sold their services as substitutes in the militia, were drawn from the same level of society: the poor and unemployed.”23 Ironically, then, the military prowess out of which a new sense of national identity emerged was powered by the excess or surplus of the nation: its human waste. As the author of The Sailor’s Happiness wrote in 1751: the press gang “freed the nation of ‘idle and reprobate vermin by converting them into a Body of the most industrious people, and even, becoming the very nerves of the State.’ ”24 We can see the delicate relationship between war as a symbol and tool of national greatness and war as a solution for the problem of surplus labor in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer (1706). The play tells the story of Captain Plume, who, aided by the devious Sergeant Kite, comes to Shrewsbury to recruit men for the War of Spanish Succession, as Farquhar himself did. Once there, Plume pursues, and is pursued, by Silvia, who, after suddenly becoming an heiress, must procure her father’s permission to marry a mere soldier. She does this by disguising herself as a man, and getting her father, a magistrate, to give permission for her to enter the army. After the

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ploy is discovered, Plume himself leaves the army, to settle with Silvia on her father’s estate. In general, The Recruiting Officer obfuscates the economic structures of manning an army by persistently aligning recruitment with seduction. Not only is Plume’s courtship of Silvia carried out in part when he recruits her into the army dressed as a man, but two farmers also enlist because they are enthralled by Plume: “I can’t find it in my heart to leave him, he talks so finely,” says one.25 Indeed, the excess sexuality of military officers is seen as a necessary part of their value to the nation. As Silvia’s father, Balance, says: “were it not for the bravery of these officers, we should have French dragoons among us, that would leave us neither liberty, property, wife, nor daughter.— Come, Mr. Scale, the gentlemen are vigorous and warm, and may they continue so; the same heat that stirs them up to love, spurs them on to battle” (98–99). Structurally, too, Plume’s characterization as a rake allows him to be settled peacefully at the end of the play, giving up both fighting and libertinage to settle down to the life of a country squire.26 The sexual energy that allowed Plume to wage war successfully is re-routed into, and contained by, married life. The equivalence between military and sexual energy provides the groundwork for Plume’s easy transition between the two. At the same time, however, the play is unblinking in its assessment of “war’s usefulness in mopping up excess labour.”27 Just such a “mob” appears in an extended scene in “A Court of Justice,” revealing the ways in which the laws about impressment were manipulated to provide sufficient soldiers for Britain’s wars. When Kite, illegally, tries to press a man employed as a coalminer, one of the magistrates protests: Scruple: Look’ee, gentlemen, this fellow has a trade, and the Act of Parliament here expresses, that we are to impress no man that has any visible means of a livelihood. Kite: May it please your worships, this man has no visible means of a livelihood, for he works underground. (111) And into the army he goes. When Kite, again illegally, tries to press a man with a wife and five children, the wife complains that the army is just an inefficient way of controlling reproduction by the poor: Wife: Aye, aye, that’s the reason you would send him away: you know I have a child every year, and you’re afraid they should come upon the parish at last.

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Plume: Look’ee there, gentlemen, the honest women has spoke it at once; the parish had better maintain five children this year than six or seven the next; that fellow upon his high feeding may get you two or three beggars at a birth. Wife: Look’ee, Mr. Captain, the parish shall get nothing by sending him away, for I won’t loose my teeming-time if there be a man left in the parish. Balance: Send that woman to the house of correction—and the man— Kite: I’ll take care o’ him, if you please. (110–11) The man and his wife are separated. The state’s need for bodies to fight its wars works in tandem with its desire to curb the reproduction of indigents.28 The scene constructs a potent, if comic, image of soldiers as surplus population, only valuable to their nation by being removed from it. Yet, The Recruiting Officer also suggests that this woman’s “teemingtime” is necessary to a state so reliant on warfare. The parallel the play draws between recruitment and seduction is shadowed by an equally important equivalence between recruitment and reproduction. Plume notes that it is a “maxim” among recruiting officers “to leave as many recruits in the country as they carried out” by impregnating the local girls (20); arriving in Shrewsbury, Plume is informed that he has “got a recruit here you that you little think of”—“one that you beat up for last time you were in the country”—the child of “Molly at the castle” (15). And when Plume decides to leave the army to marry Silvia, he draws a strong comparison between his old occupation and his new one: “I gladly quit, with my fair spouse to stay, / And raise recruits the matrimonial way” (123). The Recruiting Officer thus makes a resonant link between population growth and military prowess: if wars are to be fought, they must be manned, either by those with enough love for their country to enter its military, or by those vulnerable to recruitment or impressment.

Veterans By using the conventions of the marriage plot, Farquhar is able to imagine an easy transition between military service and domestic life for Captain Plume. But there was no country estate waiting for most veterans of

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eighteenth-century wars. Despite recent scholarly interest in the degree to which war shaped Britain’s economy and culture during the long eighteenth century, little attention has been paid to the disbandment of the masses that made up these national armies. Due to persistent fears about the presence of a standing army, and a desire to keep costs down, as many men as possible were routinely discharged at the end of any given war throughout this period.29 Douglas Hay notes that 70,000 men were discharged in 1749; 200,000 in 1763; 130,000 in 1783; and 350,000 in 1818.30 Although only a small proportion of the total population, these numbers formed a much larger proportion of the labouring poor, and an even greater proportion of adult males in that class. A comparison of the numbers leaving the services with the number of families in the same occupational group suggests that the demobilization in 1763–4 increased the number of men in England who were heads of families (or who might be) by over 30 per cent in the same social class from which sailors and soldiers were drawn. (The corresponding figure for 1783 is some 20 per cent.) That social class was of course the poorest, and demobilization on this scale was not easily absorbed.31 These veterans typically were discharged in London or Portsmouth, given what back pay could be rustled up, sometimes allowed to keep their horses, and expected to make their own way home and back into civil society— though many were convicts and vagrants who had been pressed into service, and thus had no home to go back to. Half pay and pensions were available to officers, though notoriously difficult to actually attain.32 A few others could be recommended for the limited places in the “Invalid Companies” of the Royal Chelsea Hospital.33 The anxiety provoked by these figures persisted throughout the century. Contemporaries feared that disbanded soldiers, inadequately equipped to support themselves once they returned home, or even to get home at all, would turn to a life of crime—or return to the life of crime they had lived before they had entered the army to escape the gallows. In 1750, Horace Walpole wrote: “You will hear little news from England but of robberies. . . . The numbers of disbanded soldiers and sailors have all taken to the road, or rather the street: people are almost afraid of stirring after dark.”34 And historians have found evidence for this fear, noting that the crime rate repeatedly

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rose during times of peace.35 A related anxiety focused on the idea that military service rendered men unfit for the kind of labor expected in civilian life. “The age that makes good soldiers mars good servants,” one observer claimed, “canceling their obedience and allowing them too much liberty.”36 Thus, despite Britain’s growing reliance on its military prowess both economically and culturally, the fighting men who made this new kind of nation possible were regarded as a public nuisance, even reviled, throughout the eighteenth century.37 From the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, observers recognized that there was no easy way to reabsorb the military labor force back into civilian life. The state offered various small measures: a 1713 act allowed veterans to enter trades without serving apprenticeships; a provision to the Vagrancy Act of 1744 allowed discharged soldiers to beg if they could document their military service; and this was renewed after the American war and again in 1803.38 This problem was not new to the eighteenth century— discharged soldiers had been viewed as dangerous vagrants from the time of Elizabeth I.39 The increased drive for colonial expansion, however, added a new avenue for solutions. One expedient frequently tried, and funded by both public and private sources, was the possibility of resettling veterans in the colonies. There were two methods of doing this. One was to reward soldiers with land in the territories they had conquered (as Cromwell had done in Ireland). For example, a royal proclamation offered veterans of the Seven Years’ War land rent-free in the North American colonies, and similar measures offered land in Canada for loyalist soldiers after the Revolutionary War.40 The other was to subsidize emigration, and often to pay a fee or wage, to encourage jobless veterans to leave England for the colonies. Thus, in 1749, the port of Halifax in Nova Scotia was founded by discharged soldiers: “The number of men disbanded from fleet and army was so large that it was deemed prudent, in the interests alike of humanity and of public security, to make some provision for them. Accordingly fifty acres of freehold land, with an additional ten acres for every child, were offered to all veterans who would emigrate as settlers to Nova Scotia; their passage outward being likewise paid, and immunity from taxation guaranteed them for ten years.”41 This project had the double reward of shifting vagrants out of the metropolis, and expanding the Empire’s holdings abroad. A 1763 piece in The Gentleman’s Magazine suggests endowing single women with land in Canada, which they can bring as dowry in marriages to veterans, though there is no evidence this project was ever put into action.42

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The earliest scheme of this sort may have been that put forward by Thomas Coram, who would later participate in the Georgia project of charitable colonization, and found the London Foundlings Hospital. In 1713, he formulated a plan to help veterans of the War of Austrian Succession: they were to be subsidized by the government to form a settlement on the banks of the Kennebec River (now in Maine, then part of the Massachusetts Colony). In 1714, Coram wrote to the Earl of Orford explaining the reasons for the action: “There are now a good Number of disbanded Officers & Soldiers who having been bred up in the Wars from their Youths, have no Calling, or Trade to enable them to subsist here, are extreamly desirous to make a Settlement upon the said Land, which they apprehend to be for the Service of their Country, as well as for ye good of themselves and their posterity.”43 The Board of Trade approved the idea, in part because they saw advantages in it for the British Empire. On June 17, 1713, the Council of Trade and Plantations to the Lord High Treasurer wrote: “We are humbly of the opinion that the settling of the petitioners on the lands they desire will not only be a comfortable provision for the said disbanded officers and soldiers, and prevent their being in necessity for want of business and employment; but it will also be a great security to New England by having their frontiers strengthened by such a number of people.”44 But the scheme was never accomplished: the Massachusetts Colony did not want to cede control of the land; and at home the Jacobite Revolution of 1715 made the government wary of letting veteran soldiers leave.45 Coram helped Britain imagine, however, that the colonies could be a kind of third space, halfway between peace and war. Once there, veterans could establish their connection to a specific place through industrious labor in it, while demonstrating their allegiance to the national good by protecting other settlers from the Native Americans and French who also laid claim to the land. In this spirit, similar projects were proposed in almost every decade of the eighteenth century, into the nineteenth and even the twentieth.46 Efforts to curtail the mobility of returning veterans by routing then rooting them elsewhere were not particularly successful, however. As with all subsidized emigration schemes to Canada, veterans had a tendency to move southward, toward the higher wages (and better weather and land) available in the United States. One governor of Nova Scotia was convinced that “the Military” were “the least qualified from their occupations as Soldiers, of any man living to establish new Countries.”47 Nor did the government find it easy to settle discharged soldiers in industrious agricultural communities in the colonies.

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For example, after the War of 1812, the British government tried to establish settlements of discharged soldiers to facilitate building roads into the interior of Nova Scotia. In addition to land, the government offered seeds and implements and promised provisions for a year. The settlement, Sherbrooke, was established in 1816, but work did not proceed at the pace expected, and the government found itself extending its provisioning for over two years: “1816 was a poor year for even the best of husbandmen—and the ex-soldiers were left in as dependent a state as ever. There was no choice but to continue the rations at full rate. Biscuit, beef, pork were doled out daily, with ample rum to offset the winter cold.”48 Even these subsidies did not work, however, and when the government stopped the rations in 1818, only 86 of 250 original families were left, and a third of those were planning to leave soon.49 There were doubtless many reasons why such settlements failed, but one could say that the government’s efforts to curtail the mobility of veterans by settling them abroad were futile because the two forms of mobility—soldiering and emigration—were incommensurate. The movement demanded by military life, movement that was violent, constant, and subsidized, could not be transformed easily into the limited journey of emigration, a journey that was expected to end in self-sufficient settlement. The two ideas of what constituted membership in, and value to, a nation—private, settled industry, or patriotic mobility—could not be reconciled in the bodies of soldiers.

Nation and the Memory of War The most influential theory to connect the mass dynamics of national warfare to literary history is that put forward by Georg Luka´cs in The Historical Novel (1937). Focusing on the Napoleonic Wars, Luka´cs argues that “the inner life of a nation is linked with the modern mass army in a way it could not have been with the absolutist armies of the earlier period.”50 Although he overstates the degree to which the end of impressments created a citizen army made up of true volunteers—as we have seen, many early nineteenth-century soldiers were still drawn from the ranks of the vagrant, unemployed, and criminal— Luka´cs nonetheless provides a compelling account of the way widespread war transformed common ideas of national identity, and the impact of that transformation on literary history. Luka´cs argues that a new concept of national history developed along two axes—time and space. On the one hand, mass participation in warfare must be encouraged by the construction

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of an idea of nation based on a shared history: “If in place of the recruitment or pressing into professional service of small contingents of the declassed, a mass army is to be created, then the content and purpose of the war must be made clear to the masses by means of propaganda. . . . Such propaganda cannot possibly, however, restrict itself to the individual isolated war. It has to reveal the social content, the historical presuppositions, and circumstances of the struggle, to connect the war up with the entire life and possibilities of the nation’s development.”51 National history, then, is organized under the pressure of war; the idea that a people have developed over time in one place comes into being through the need to leave that place to fight. Luka´cs points out that a consciousness of national history is necessary to resist invasion, but he is most interested in the movements of armies. The enormous quantitative expansion of war plays a qualitatively new role, bringing with it an extraordinary broadening of horizons. . . . The whole of Europe becomes a war arena. . . . What previously was experienced only by isolated and mostly adventurous-minded individuals, namely an acquaintance with Europe or at least certain parts of it, becomes in this period the mass experience of hundreds of thousands, of millions. Hence the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them.52 This consciousness of history results from seeing world-changing events happening all around them, but also because they are able to compare their own history to that of the countries in whose territory they fought. For Luka´cs, the two axes thus work together seamlessly: international warfare begets the need for national history, and national history provides the rationale for international warfare; on the level of the human aggregate, geographical mobility produces chronological knowledge and vice versa. I wish to emphasize two things about Luka´cs’s theory here. First, that national identity arises not simply out of the collective recognition of inhabiting the same place over time, but through the comparative experience of seeing other places and cultures.53 Second, that both these dynamics beget a need for representation: a collective national memory must be constructed; and the mass experience of soldiers must be made intelligible and transferable.

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For Luka´cs, “the relative stability of English development during this stormy period, in comparison with that of the Continent, made it possible to channel this newly-awoken historical feeling artistically into a broad, objective, epic form”—a form realized in Scott’s historical novels.54 His argument has the interesting effect of privileging the hero’s return home as evidence “that the possibilities for this human upsurge and heroism are widespread among the popular masses, that endless numbers of people live out their lives quietly, without this upsurge, because no opportunity has come their way to evoke such an exertion of powers.”55 That is, the capacity of heroes to “recede” reveals their capacity to emerge.56 This idealized transition between war and peace allows Luka´cs to argue that a new kind of historical consciousness is forged by war, borne by returning soldiers. It seems significant, however, that he illustrates this point with reference to someone who is not a soldier—Jeanie Deans, who in Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian travels to London to save her sister, and returns to marry, raise a family, and cultivate a farm. Many narratives of eighteenth-century veterans, however, problematize this easy transition. Discussing the way narratives of Vietnam War veterans attempt to isolate the violence and chaos of war memories from the stability of peace, Michael Clark argues: “They relegate the specific, concrete contradictions involved in being a veteran at a particular moment in history to the realm of private experience and personal memory, and they divorce that realm entirely from the forms of social interaction that are represented as permanent and universal.”57 Accounts of veterans of eighteenth-century wars similarly tend to split the memory of war from life at home, in ways that render veterans voiceless or incomprehensible, not the bearers of historical consciousness Luka´cs imagines. A significant shift in attitudes toward veterans seems to have occurred at the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763. The public felt “the first stirrings of sympathy for those men whose valour had conquered new territories around the globe, and who now faced the bleak prospect of disbandment and poverty.”58 This sympathy, however, was inspired by an image of veterans as persons not quite part of the nation they had served. For example, “An Address to the Public in Favour of disbanded Soldiers,” published in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1763, describes a soldier’s fate in terms that justify his criminality: He must return to some vocation which he has forgot, or which is engrossed by others in his absence; he must sue for hard labour, or

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he may starve; If human nature cannot submit to that, cannot he lie down in a ditch and die. If this disbanded brave man should vainly think he has some right to share in the wealth of his country, which he defended, secured or increased, he may seize a small portion of it by force,—and be hanged. Has Britain no more gratitude than to reduce him to these hard extremes?59 The anger expressed here over the exclusion of soldiers from the national glory (and wealth) they have helped create is echoed in Smollett’s Humphry Clinker (1771). When the Bramble party encounters Lismahago, a Scottish veteran of the American battles of the Seven Years’ War, they at first treat him as a figure of ridicule. Soon, however, they find there is no hold by which an Englishman is sooner taken than that of compassion—We were immediately interested in behalf of this veteran . . . ; but our pity was warmed with indignation, when we learned, that in the course of two sanguinary wars, he had been wounded, maimed, mutilated, taken, and enslaved [by the French, then by Native Americans], without ever having attained a higher rank than that of lieutenant—My uncle’s eyes gleamed, and his nether lip trembled, while he exclaimed, “I vow to God, sir, your case is a reproach to the service . . . you have spent the best part of your life . . . your youth, your blood and your constitution, amidst the dangers, the difficulties, the horrors and hardships of war, for the consideration of three or four shillings a day.60 Lismahago, however, refuses this sympathy, and asserts his own agency, if not his patriotism, in having chosen a military life, even if his rebuttals are ironized by his general disputatiousness. The same complicated account of the patriotism of the discharged soldier appears in Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1761). In a letter subtitled “on the distresses of the poor, exemplified in the life of a private centinel,” the Chinese traveler Lien Chi Altangi listens to a story of extraordinary mobility, first generated by poverty, but not then resolved by either transportation or military service. Orphaned at age five, the centinel notes that since his father had been “a wandering sort of man, the parishioners were not able to tell to what parish I belonged, or where I was born, so they sent me to another

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parish, and that parish sent me to a third; til at last it was thought I belonged to no parish at all.”61 Arrested for poaching, he is asked to give an account of himself: “I began immediately to give a full account of all that I knew of my breed, seed, and generation; but though I gave a very true account, the justice said, I could give no account; so I was indicted, and found guilty of being poor, and sent to Newgate, in order to be transported to the plantations.”62 The centinel’s enforced mobility—from parish to parish, from job to job— makes him unable to give a satisfactory account of himself, and having no account condemns him to further mobility. After serving his time in the colonies, the centinel returns to England and is soon pressed into the army; discharged at the peace, he cannot work because of the wounds he sustained, and he enters the East India Company; invalided home, he is pressed again at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War, this time into the navy; taken prisoner by the French, he ends up on a privateer, and is wounded there. Despite this life of service, he remains an indigent beggar: “Had I the good fortune to have lost my leg and use of my hand on board a king’s ship, and not a privateer, I should have been entitled to cloathing and maintenance during the rest of my life, but that was not my chance; one man is born with a silver spoon is his mouth, and another with a wooden ladle.”63 Soldiering, here, is imagined as continuous with other forms of indigency; to be part of the underclass, or to be “declassed,” is to be vulnerable to enforced mobility, as we have seen in previous chapters. Altangi relates the story as an example of fortitude and patriotism, and the private centinel’s love of his country is indeed striking: returning from transportation, he proclaims, “glad I was to see Old England again, because I loved my country. O liberty, liberty, liberty! That is the property of every Englishman, and I will die in its defence.”64 Given the views on coerced migration Goldsmith expresses in The Deserted Village and elsewhere, the centinel’s optimistic misunderstanding of the events of his life, and Altangi’s naı¨ve acceptance of it, can be read as political critique. The mismatch between the British liberty the centinel would die to defend and the forced mobility that has governed his own life redefines “liberty” as the freedom to stay put. Lack of a settled home has deprived the centinel of the capacity to give a legally meaningful account of himself, and lack of an account has deracinated him; his love for his country has meant he has to leave it. Alan Bewell argues that the fragment Wordsworth first wrote as “The Discharged Soldier,” and later incorporated into Book 4 of the Prelude, responds to this sentimental portrayal of the pathos of veterans with an even

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sharper critique: “Where Goldsmith portrayed the private centinel ironically, as someone who, despite his victimizing, remains a card-carrying ‘Brit,’ Wordsworth allows the soldier’s silence, and his emphasis on maintaining social decorum in spite of his intense suffering to function as a form of resistance.”65 In contrast to the mobility expected of disbanded soldiers, this veteran strikes the poet first with his immobility, and yet is not the less deracinated for it.66 A man more meager, as it seemed to me, Was never seen abroad by night or day. His arms were long, and bare his hands; his mouth Shewed ghastly in the moonlight; from behind A milestone propped him, and his figure seemed Half sitting, and half standing. I could mark That he was clad in military garb, Though faded yet entire. He was alone, Had no attendant, neither dog nor staff, Nor knapsack; in his very dress appeared A desolation, a simplicity That seemed akin to solitude. (408–19) Celeste Langan argues that the veteran’s positioning constructs his identity—or lack thereof—in relation to his mobility. Noting that a discharged soldier was exempt from the Vagrancy Acts in 1803, contingent on his carrying a “certificate of his place of settlement, fixing the time it took to reach it at the rate of 100 miles in 10 days,” she writes: “Although the statute attempts to maintain a fundamental determination of identity by ‘place of settlement,’ that identity is now attenuated, localized only as the distance between here and there. . . . In this context, we may reread Wordsworth’s representation of the discharged soldier’s ghastliness as a symptom of this attenuated identity. . . . Stationed conspicuously in front of a milestone— that measure of progress and rates of speed—the discharged soldier seems to contravene its power sufficiently to determine identity.”67 In other words, the veteran’s enforced mobility, the government certificate that hurries him from “here to there,” is both signaled and undermined by his stasis—his social identity, like his body, only half propped up by the milestone. The poet seems concerned to represent the veteran as someone from whom something has been stripped. Although his “his military garb / though

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faded [was] entire,” his dress appears a “desolation,” something, that, like a battlefield, has been razed. The “de-” prefix shows up several more times in the earlier version of the poem: “He appeared / forlorn and desolate, a man cut off / from all his kind, and more than half detached / from his own nature.”68 The soldier’s solitude is not essential, but the end result of some process. It is unclear, however, what has produced the soldier’s detachment: the trauma of war, as Bewell argues, or the difficulties of returning home. It may be that the soldier’s attenuation has occurred, paradoxically, at the very moment that he tries to rejoin British society. If the army is a kind of mass experience, returning home atomizes that collectivity. Wordsworth, like Goldsmith, focuses on the unsatisfactory quality of the “soldier’s tale.”69 Here, however, the difficulty in making that account legible is not legal, but psychic. The soldier himself cannot find the connection between his hardships and national glory. In what seems almost a proleptic reply to Luka´cs, the veteran is dramatically ill-equipped to “recede” into the community. Indeed, the very circumstances of his return have stripped him of the capacity to carry any collective historical consciousness: he cannot even carry his own consciousness. Despite Wordsworth’s strong critique of the discharged soldier’s circumstances, however, the poem, in a manner characteristic of the discourse of sentimentality, individualizes his suffering. This sympathy places the veteran in the public eye, but isolates him more dramatically from his experience of war. If the problem with veterans was that there were simply too many to be absorbed by peacetime economic structures, so many that there was the potential for them to turn into dangerous mobs, these sentimental tales turn the dilemma inside out: the mass becomes singular, and fear becomes pity. Lismahago, for example, is incorporated into a farcical version of the marriage plot, but he remains an outrageous figure, outside civilian norms. Perhaps the best example of this strategy of psychologizing war memories occurs in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67). Here, Tristram’s uncle Toby spends four years bedridden after being wounded in the groin at the siege of Namur, during War of Austrian Succession. Visitors to his sickbed ask him for his story, believing that “the history of a soldiers’ wound beguiles the pain of it.”70 Toby, however, finds these inquiries torturous, “and the many perplexities he was in, arose out of the almost insurmountable difficulties he found in telling his story intelligibly.”71 Driven close to madness by his inability to give an exact description of the events at Namur, he devotes himself to building a scale model of the battle on his estate in Yorkshire. A potent image of the

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problems of representing the experience of war in civilian life, this scale model works as a kind of incongruously concrete memory, absorbing Toby’s energy and time. Yet, the model and the war itself are represented as Uncle Toby’s “hobby-horse,” a comic obsession that distances him from everyday life, even as it cures his wound.72 In a kind of parody of Captain Plume, the energy Uncle Toby used in the war cannot be converted into libidinous energy at home. Despite the elaborate sexual jokes Sterne builds around Toby’s home-built “battle-ground,” Toby himself is sexually incompetent: only the memory of war can still engage his vital powers.73 Far from being bearers of a new historical consciousness, part of a new national collectivity, the literary veterans of the second half of the eighteenth century find even their individual memories, their accounts, fractured and garbled by the transition between war and peace.

Coming Home, 1815 These images of discharged soldiers as comic or pathetic eccentrics, isolated individuals consumed by barely intelligible tales of war, were complemented, especially after the Napoleonic Wars, by images of soldiers as unruly mobs. Walter Scott, for instances, uses the connection between armies and excess population to explain the warlike and rebellious nature of the Highlands in Rob Roy (1817). Estimating the “military array of this Hieland country” to be 57,500, one character notes: “Now, sir, it’s a sad and awfu’ truth, that there is neither wark, nor the very fashion nor appearance of wark, for the tae half of the puir creatures; that is to say, that the agriculture, the pasturage, the fisheries, and every species of honest industry about the country, cannot employ one moiety of the population, let them work as lazily as they like, and they do work as if a pleugh or a spade burnt their fingers.”74 These “unemployed bodies” are kept at their chief ’s sufferance, “and there they are wi’ gun and pistol, dirk and dourlach, ready to disturb the peace o’ the country whenever the laird likes.”75 A kind of standing army, these men have been trained for war, for violence, rather than productive agricultural labor, and the land cannot support them anyway. They are useless, disruptive population. This explanation for unrest in the Highlands is compelling but anachronistic. The events of the novel take place in 1715, but the explanation has all the hallmarks of early nineteenth-century concern over surplus population: the belief that “honest industry” is the cornerstone of individual and

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communal value; that industry rather than feudal loyalty should cement the bond between persons and places; and the suspicion that a lack of industry will foster violence and disruption. Scott’s second novel, Guy Mannering (1815), however, contains a compelling account of the military as a utopian world where social value can be remade along new lines. The two male protagonists initially meet while in military service in India. Guy Mannering is a war hero: “he who relieved Cuddieburn, and defended Chingalore, and defeated the great Mahratta chief, Ram Jolli Bundleman”; Harry Bertram, the stolen heir of the Ellangowan estate, is one “whose genius has a strong military tendency.”76 While contemporaries viewed such “nabobs” with distrust, Scott’s novel presents them as upstanding citizens.77 Both Mannering and Bertram remember their time in the army fondly, and credit it with shaping their characters. Bertram, for instance, describes the British army as an ideal collectivity. Writing to his Swiss fellow officer, he says: And you and I, Delaserre, foreigners both,—for what am I the better that I was originally a Scotchman, since, could I prove my descent, the English would hardly acknowledge me a countryman?—we may boast that we have fought out our preferment, and gained that by the sword which we had not money to compass otherwise. The English are a wise people—while they praise themselves and affect to undervalue all other nations, they leave us, luckily, trap-doors and back-doors open, by which we strangers, less favoured by nature, may arrive at a share of their advantages. (112) The military allows Bertram to revise the idea of nation: membership and standing in the army is based on bravery and merit (ironized here as trapdoors and back-doors), not place of origin. Access to this community is still limited, of course; the social mobility Bertram lauds is based on a geographical mobility fueled by imperial expansion and domination. For white Europeans, though, the army breaks down important social boundaries. A Scotchman may not really be a member of the English nation, but meritocracies like the army make such distinctions meaningless.78 Most of Guy Mannering, however, is concerned with replacing this idea of national identity with an idea of self and community based on an essential connection to place. The novel gradually works to replace the new identity

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Bertram acquires in the army with his natal status as hereditary laird of Ellangowan. Thus, although Bertram does not actually resign his commission, the narrative contrives to strip him of his military identity, reducing him to the condition of the “discharged soldiers” we have seen. Robbed of his money and papers on his journey to Ellangowan, Bertram unintentionally commits a violent crime, and finds himself running from the law: “an arrest in a strange country, and while he was unprovided with any means of ascertaining his rank and character, was at least to be avoided” (237). He is rescued from this condition of vagrancy and criminality through the evidence of his face. Once Bertram reaches Ellangowan, other characters immediately comment on his uncanny resemblance to his father. “The very image of old Ellangowan,” says the family lawyer (304); “if the grave can give up the dead, that is my dear and honored master!” says another old retainer (305). Bertram’s standing as an officer was determined by his physical courage, but his status in Scotland is determined by another corporeal quality—the genetic repetition of his father’s features.79 Harry Bertram’s soldierly wanderings come to an end; and his ancient right to Ellangowan is reasserted, and with it the importance of continuous settlement to ideas of community. The inhabitants of Ellangowan finally recognize the missing heir in this way: Our friend, Jock Jabos, the postilion, forced his way into the middle of the circle; but no sooner cast his eyes upon Bertram, than he started back in amazement, with a solemn exclamation, “As sure as there’s breath in man, it’s auld Ellangowan arisen from the dead!” . . . “I have been seventy years on the land,” said one person. “I and mine hae been seventy years and seventy to that,” said another; “I have the right to ken the glance of a Bertram.” “I and mine hae been three hundred years here,” said another old man, “and I shall sell my last cow, but I’ll see the young laird placed in his right.” (399–400) In this episode the villagers reiterate, perhaps excessively, the length of their tenure on the land, producing a fantasy of continuous habitation. The status of that idea as a fantasy is revealed when we realize that this scene of recognition is not what allows Bertram to actually repossess Ellangowan, which has been sold to pay his father’s debts. Only after its current owner dies is he able

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to pay those debts and regain his inheritance. Even then, he needs the assistance of “a few bags of Sicca rupees” from Mannering, his wealthy father-inlaw. The spoils gained from displacing Indians on the subcontinent pay for the replacement of the heir at home. On an economic level, military and colonial expansion pay to support an idea of continuous settlement. Despite this miraculous instance of individual restitution, however, the problems of human mobility and mass displacement haunt Guy Mannering. Early in the novel, Harry Bertram’s father, Godfrey, evicts an entire gypsy village from his estate, and his son’s kidnapping seems for most of the novel to be a form of retribution for this cruelty. Readers have noted the connections between this episode and several historically specific instances of coerced mobility: the Highland clearances of the early nineteenth century and the concurrent displacement of indigenous peoples in India both resonate in the seemingly eternal homelessness of the gypsies.80 The narrative also connects the peripatetic, unruly gypsies to its military veterans, alluding in this linkage to the disruption feared from returning soldiers. Using the gypsies as uncanny doubles for the veterans allows the novel to solve the problems of mobility and “uselessness” associated with veterans by displacing those problems onto the gypsies. The gypsies’ roots in India had been discovered in the late eighteenth century, and Meg Merrilies, their leader in the novel, incorporates Indian elements into her dress.81 Yet, while the soldiers have journeyed to India and back, their mobility in the service of patriotism, the gypsies were believed to have left India in a perpetual diaspora, rejecting the link between settlement and coherent community implicit in early forms of nationalism. According to Katie Trumpener, “the Gypsies’ perennial ‘homelessness’ . . . became at once an innate failing and a virtually irreparable state.”82 Both veterans and gypsies thus exemplified the problem of “redundant” population in early nineteenth-century British culture: gypsies because they refused to settle and because of “the indomitable pride with which they despised all regular labour” (36), veterans because they had lost their use value to the State when they returned from foreign wars.83 Both groups also suffer from a peculiar corollary to an idea of nation that identifies people “in historical relationship to place”:84 that relationship must be constructed through “honest industry,” rather than feudal allegiances that keep loyal retainers around “ready to disturb the peace o’ the country whenever the laird likes.” That is the kind of retainer the gypsies traditionally have been to the Bertrams; “A kind of privileged banditti upon the estate of Ellangowan,” they have repaid the Bertrams’

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protection “by service to the laird in war, and, more frequently, by infesting and plundering the lands of the neighboring barons with whom he chances to be at feud” (37). Godfrey Bertram’s improving measures end that status, and reinforce their homelessness. The connection between soldiers and gypsies runs throughout Guy Mannering. For example, Harry Bertram’s military career is doubled by that of a gypsy, who illustrates the perils of military service just as Bertram illustrates its opportunities. One of the first signs of the “breach of peace between the house of Ellangowan and the gypsies of Derncleugh” occurs when a young man is “handed over to the captain of the impress service” (39). Although certainly not a central character, this young man, Gabriel, reappears, or is mentioned, at several crucial points in the novel. Even as Godfrey Bertram is expelling the gypsies, for example, he asks after the boy who has been pressed (43). Much later, the smuggler captain, Dirk Hattaraick, explains what has happened to Gabriel: “He went to the East Indies on the same ship with your younker [Bertram], and sapperment! Knew him well, though the other did not remember him. Gab kept out of his eye, though, as he had served the States [i.e., The United Provinces of the Netherlands] against England, and was a deserter to boot” (189). Thus, even as Gabriel and Bertram follow almost the same path, they are differentiated in significant ways: Gabriel is pressed into the military, while Bertram volunteers; Gabriel has neither patriotism nor loyalty—he fights against the British, and he deserts—while Bertram sings the praises of England and its armies. Fate keeps them close together, however, and Gabriel, returned to his old life of smuggling in Scotland, is the first to recognize Bertram when he reappears. This displacement of the criminality and vagrancy typically associated with veterans onto a gypsy double is one of the narrative strategies that allow Bertram to reassert his connection to Ellangowan, and reclaim an identity based on natal place. The doubling extends to Guy Mannering as well. Both Mannering and Meg Merrilies are represented as soothsayers, prophets whose predictions turn out to be accurate. Mannering, a young man, and not yet a soldier, accidentally shows up on Godfrey Bertram’s estate the night his heir is born. He does not know the family, and in compensation for their generosity in letting him stay the night, he uses astrology to predict the child’s future (39). Meg Merrilies, who helps with the birth, also predicts the child’s fate (43). Meg’s power as a prophet, however, is most fully demonstrated by her curse after the expulsion of the gypsies. As Godfrey Bertram passes them leaving the area, Meg “unexpectedly present[s] herself” (64): “She was standing upon

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one of those high precipitous bands, which, as we before noticed, overhung the road; so that she was placed considerably higher than Ellangowan, even though he was on horseback; and her tall figure, relieved against the clear blue sky, seemed almost of supernatural stature. . . . Her attitude was that of a sibyl in frenzy, and she stretched out, in her right hand, a sapling bough which seemed just pulled” (65). From this position, Meg accurately prophesies the fall of the house of Bertram, casting it as retribution for displacing the gypsies: “ride your ways, Godfrey Bertram!—This day have ye quenched seven smoking hearths—see if the fire in your ain parlour burn the blyther for that. Ye have riven the thack off seven cottar houses—look if your own roof tree stand the faster.—Ye may stable your stirks in the shealings at Derncleugh [the gypsies’ village]—see that the hare does not couch on the hearthstone at Ellangowan” (65). The force of Meg’s statement is emphasized by her relation to the landscape. She emerges suddenly from its most imposing features, capitalizing on the intimidating power of the overhanging banks. Thus, the enforced mobility of the gypsy community, their tenuous connection to the land they inhabit, contrasts with Meg’s intimate relationship to her environment, her ability to emerge from it, and to merge back into it. This uncanny relationship to the landscape is one of the tropes that unites Meg with the other returning soldier of the narrative: Harry Bertram. Though he does not prophesy, Bertram, under his alias as Brown, also “presents himself unexpectedly” several times during the narrative, first reappearing to Julia Mannering after their courtship in India, for example, by serenading her with her favorite “Hindu air” in the middle of the night. Thus, while at the beginning of the novel, Meg and one soldier, Mannering, are linked through their capacity to turn up out of nowhere and predict the future, in the second part of the novel Meg and another soldier are linked in their capacity to turn up out of nowhere and stir up the past. Indeed, Bertram is as much a haunting figure as Meg, emerging and triggering violent events. For example, during a winter’s walk around a frozen lake with Lucy Bertram and her suitor Charles Hazlewood, Julia Mannering records: “Such was our position, when, at once, and as if he had started out of the earth, Brown [aka Bertram] stood before us at a short turn of the road! He was very plainly, I might say coarsely, dressed, and his whole appearance had in it something wild and agitated” (207—emphasis added).85 In the ensuing struggle, Bertram accidentally shoots Hazlewood and sets in motion the events that restore him to his heritage. Meg’s final appearance, as she leads Bertram to the events that will unravel his past, repeats the terms of this dramatic entrance, even as

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it duplicates the scene of her prophesy: “And immediately Meg Merrilies, as if emerging out of the earth, ascended from the hollow way and stood before them. ‘It is here we should meet,’ she says, ‘on this very spot, where my eyes last saw your father’ ” (383—emphasis added). These gothic entrances, tinged with violence and terror, present both gypsy and soldier as if they had never left the land they were born to inhabit. The time between Meg’s prophecy and its fulfillment disappears, as she replicates the circumstances of her announcement. In these instances, it seems that the land itself holds so much memory that it conjures up the figures “emerging” from it. Bertram and Meg appear to have been hidden by vertical space rather than horizontal—to have been under the earth rather than wandering the globe.86 The novel thus exemplifies the capacity of individuals to emerge unexpectedly and perform heroic deeds. This dynamic, however, is not depicted in the realist key Luka´cs admires, but rather in the gothic register of the uncanny. Although they represent distinct communities (Meg the gypsies; Bertram, soldiers), they seem to emerge into the dramatic events of the narrative not from these groups, but from the land itself. Thus, when the conniving new owner of Ellangowan sees Bertram again, on the same spot where his father has died, he feels as if he has seen a ghost just released from an underground tomb: “His face, person, and voice, were so exactly those of his father in his best days, that Glossin, hearing his exclamation, and seeing such a sudden apparition in the shape of his patron, and on nearly the same spot where he had expired, almost thought the grave had given up its dead!” (245). Trumpener argues that “Guy Mannering is one of the first historical novels in which characters receive their fates as private, individualized tragedies, as random bad fortune, or as foreordained destinies, without a larger vision of themselves as pawns or actors in a larger historical process.”87 The consistently unexpected quality of the dramatic entrances staged by the narrative underlines this discontinuity between the collective and the individual, and the disjunction between mass experience and individual fate. Only the landscape itself seems capable of shielding characters from time; a kindly womb or grave that holds their memory for them. Thus, as Ian Duncan has written, in Guy Mannering, “history is troped in terms of place or setting.”88 The most striking instance of this narrative strategy is the unexpected reappearance of Derncleugh. Unknowingly returning to his birthplace, Ellangowan, Bertram finds himself lost in a snowstorm, and goes to find help. At the bottom of a deep dell, “He now found himself embarrassed among the ruins of cottages, whose black gables, rendered more

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distinguishable by the contrast with the whitened surface from which they rose, were still standing; the side-walls had long since given way to time, and, piled in shapeless heaps, and covered with snow, offered frequent and embarrassing obstacles to our traveler’s progress” (179). Here, the sharp outlines of the past rise up to perplex and entangle—to embarrass—our protagonist, black lines pushing themselves out of the snow like writing on a page. Finding a larger deserted building, Bertram encounters Meg Merrilies tending to a dying man. “She moistened his mouth from time to time with some liquid, and between whiles sung, in a low, monotonous cadence, one of those prayers, or rather spells, which, in some parts of Scotland, and the north of England, are used by the vulgar and ignorant to speed the passage of a parting spirit, like the tolling of the bell in catholic days” (180). Like Goldsmith’s “sad historian of the pensive plain,” whom we will discuss in the following chapter, Meg both shelters the remains of the living knowledge of the place, and ushers it into oblivion. The scene is liminal in many ways—inside and outside history, between life and death, part of the landscape, and removed from it. Yet Meg and Bertram are also connected by their shared mobility; this landscape is empty because they have been displaced from it. The memory of what happened to both Bertram and the gypsies can only be resurrected when they are re-inserted into this landscape, and conversely, the narrative asserts that Harry Bertram’s true identity can only be established through his connection to his natal place. Thus, the form of the historical novel allows Scott to work through the question of the “necessary” mobility of “redundant” populations that arose in the wake of the Napoleonic wars, displacing the disturbing mobility, lack of productivity, and propensity to theft and violence feared from discharged soldiers first onto virtuous nabobs of the late eighteenth century (oxymoronic as that concept would have been at the time), and then onto the gypsies. This displacement allows the novel to manage the contradiction of a nation that abjures mobility, even as it necessitates it, from armies, from emigrants, and from others.

Conclusion War has always posed a memory problem. When Telemachus visits Agammenon while searching for his father, Odysseus, he finds the king and his court so tortured by the memory of war, that Helen must prepare soothing drugs to ease the pain. The unprecedented military and colonial expansion

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carried out by Britain during the long eighteenth century, however, raised that problem in new ways. The number of men needed to serve in these everincreasing armies (and then later to settle the territories they conquered) was a primary impetus for demographic theory and national enumeration. The mobility demanded of these men by the state, leaving home and family in the service of their country, opened up new visions of what a nation might be. Such visions might be utopian, as is Harry Bertram’s account of a British army that gives membership and status to anyone brave and skillful enough to fight effectively. Or they might be nightmarish, as is Goldsmith’s account of the private centinel, doomed to be moved around endlessly by the nation he loves and serves. In any case, the mass experience of warfare in the colonies and Europe formed a new set of identities, and new kinds of narratives that were not easily assimilated to Britain’s peacetime self-conception. As Mary Favret puts it, “war became, for those experiencing it at a distance, a notfully-conscious awareness that could flare up and flicker out, even as they went about the routines of the day.”89 The state-sanctioned violence and mobility of war seemed to have almost no place in the ideal of private, settled, commercial industriousness at home. Thus, however valuable Luka´cs’s account of the role of mass armies in shaping modern forms of national identity might be for its foregrounding of the new importance of widespread human mobility, it cannot explain the way discharged soldiers came to stand for the discontinuity of experience and the difficulties of representing mobile populations during the long eighteenth century. As an alternative to Luka´cs, we might turn to Walter Benjamin, another theorist of the 1930s, who also sees mass warfare as a symbol of the dramatic advent of modernity. In his essay “The Storyteller” (1936), Benjamin asks in relation to veterans of the First World War: “Wasn’t it noticeable at the end of the war that men who returned from the battlefield had grown silent—not richer but poorer in communicable experience?”90 What poured out in the flood of war books ten years later was anything but experience that could be shared orally. And there was nothing remarkable about that. For never has experience been more thoroughly belied than strategic experience was belied by tactical warfare, economic experience by inflation, bodily experience by mechanical warfare, moral experience by those in power. A generation that had gone to school on horse-drawn streetcars now stood under the open sky in a landscape where nothing remained

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unchanged but the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force field of destructive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile, human body.91 Here, war crystallizes the trauma and rupture of historical change, but in a manner so violent that it cannot help but create silences around it. Such silences already seem to have been present during the long eighteenth century. We should remember, however, that the horrors of twentieth-century wars were yet to come for Scott, Sterne, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and the other authors I have discussed, and not underestimate their interest in finding ways to represent human aggregates under the pressure of historical change. Somewhere in between Luka´cs’s citizen-hero, expanding his horizons through war, and Benjamin’s isolated soldier, cowering beneath a violent sky, we find the discharged soldiers of the long eighteenth century, not bearers of a coherent national identity, but haunting figures of the fissures therein.

chapter 4

Remembering the Population Goldsmith and Migration

In the work of Oliver Goldsmith, problems of peopling and mobility are always linked through the issue of imperial expansion. Throughout his career, Goldsmith represented Britain as feeding its empire at the expense of its population at home—reducing parts of the country to empty space only suitable for commemoration. Colonial expansion, he believed, fostered a culture of luxury that in turn demanded further colonial expansion; and both these forces posed a threat to population growth—something Goldsmith, like earlier writers, felt was crucial to national strength. Goldsmith worked from the idea that Britain’s population was finite and limited, even shrinking, and believed that if it were tampered with, it could never be replaced.1 As The Deserted Village famously states, “a bold peasantry, their country’s pride, / When once destroyed, can never be supplied” (55–56). The mercantilist belief that “people are the wealth of the nation” persisted into Goldsmith’s day; in 1773, the York Chronicle reaffirmed that “the number of people constitutes the most valuable treasure of a nation.”2 As we discussed in the introduction, Foucault argues that this concern with “biopower” was one of the salient characteristics of the eighteenth century. During this era, Foucault states, “population comes to appear above all else as the ultimate end of government”: “the welfare of the population, the improvement of its conditions, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means the government uses to attain these ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population.”3 Social and state forces, in this view, needed to be mustered in an effort to increase population, and thus increase national wealth. Jonas

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Hanway, for example, in an appeal for a “regular, uniform, register of the parish poor” proclaims: “increase alone can make our natural strength in Men correspond with our artificial power in riches, and both with the Grandeur and Extent of the British Empire.”4 Yet the question of whether empire, nation, and population could all “correspond” was a vexed one throughout the period in which Goldsmith wrote. Whereas Foucault imagines the population and the government to be almost coterminous, eighteenth-century social commentators worried about the extent to which the two could be aligned. At times it seemed that the state aggrandized itself at the expense of its population, at others that “population” was exactly that for which the government refused to take responsibility. Throughout his career, Goldsmith was interested in representing what he called, in “The Revolution of Low Life,” the “aggregate,” whether in the form of the family, as in The Vicar of Wakefield, or the form of the rural settlement, as in The Deserted Village.5 During the 1760s and ’70s, however, when these works were published, the repercussions of the Seven Years’ War made the relationship between these smaller communities and the larger, more abstract, community of the nation difficult to determine. The imperial expansion Britain undertook as its prize for winning the Seven Years’ War brought with it a great influx of wealth. Goldsmith blames this wealth for the allure of luxury that threatens the virtue of the Primrose family, and for the ornamental enclosure that displaces the villagers of Auburn. Luxury sunders the ties between these communities and the places they traditionally have called home, sending them, increasingly atomized, into new territories. Yet, at the same time, the pressures of western expansion in America put the ideological borders of the nation, imagined as not fully coextensive with the Empire, under interrogation.6 Goldsmith, along with his contemporaries, questions whether such newly mobile populations could remain attached to the nation; or whether the impoverished aggregate, rendered useless population, would be exiled from it. The primary rhetorical tool upon which Goldsmith draws to represent the relationship between nation, population, and empire is the discourse of sentimentality. Sentimental conventions help him delineate the affective, rather than the geographical, borders of Britain. Goldsmith’s understanding of those borders, however, shifts over the course of his career. While earlier works like The Vicar of Wakefield and The Traveller suggest that sentiment might have the capacity to bind England and its far-flung colonies by creating networks of memory across space, later works like The Deserted Village tend

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to use sentiment to circumscribe the boundaries of home, anchoring memories of community in the past. At such moments, Goldsmith seems to have devised a kind of sentiment without people, which binds the poet to the past, but isolates newly mobile populations not only from their homes, but also from feeling itself. Community is relegated to memory, a memory lodged in the poet and his poem, rather than in the former members of that community, now reduced to units of population. Goldsmith’s pessimism about the fate of English community, marked by his privileging of the consoling memorial over the lost connection to living people, reveals a shift in the second half of the eighteenth century from a concern with the overabundance of useless population we saw in Milton, Defoe, and Swift, to a preoccupation with depopulation and the effect of dispossession, murder, and disease on England’s sense of its identity in relation to its empire that we will see not only in Goldsmith, but also in Scott, Shelley, and Malthus in the following chapters.

Husbanding Population Between the Wars In the years between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the beginning of the War of American Independence (1763–76), the good of the nation, the good of the empire, and the good of the population seemed to be particularly at odds. The wealth generated by Britain’s military victories seemed to many to foster a desire for luxury that threatened population growth by devaluing marriage and procreation. As one writer puts it, “Luxury is not only a Vice, but another great impediment to marriage. . . . Some, viewing city expenses in a married life, look upon entering into that state as chaining themselves down to perpetual Slavery, Poverty and Distress, and therefore avoid it.”7 And another observes: “What numbers of both sexes in our quarter of the globe are born, grow up and die without ever having children: How many abstain from marriage from humour, a contemplative and philosophical turn, love of retirement, an indolent or a pleasurable disposition! How many women from coldness, caprice, coquetry, and the not being asked! The increase of luxury has always been a hindrance to marriage.”8 In The Vicar of Wakefield, while Mrs. Primrose imagines that positions for her daughters as the paid companions in London for the “ladies” visiting Squire Thornhill will give them the opportunity to marry well, the scheme turns out to have the opposite intentions; it is a plot to “introduce[e] infamy and vice into

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retreats where peace and innocence have hitherto resided.”9 In the novel, as well as in the popular imagination, luxury and vice thrive in the city, while happy marriages and healthy children are made in the country. Urban luxury thwarted population growth, which, in turn, diminished national strength.10 To many observers, the damage done to population growth by luxury seemed directly connected to the state’s ill-advised colonial expansion into the territories it had gained in the Seven Years’ War. Thus, the critique of luxury often coincided with opposition to emigration. As one writer puts it: “Instead of being solicitous to people America in haste, it should be our ceaseless endeavour to cultivate or improve every waste spot of Ground in this Island, and by affording the greatest scope and encouragement to honest industry and useful arts, to extend home population to the utmost degree possible, because therein lies the only Source of all Riches and Power.”11 Political commentators debated whether it was in Britain’s best interest to acquire so many new possessions through conquest. Such new lands would need inhabitants, and while some thought that new acquisitions would expand Britain’s trading empire, others believed the effort to people them posed too great a threat of leaving a vacancy at home. As one writer said, with regard to Canada, “if Possession of the country should ever lead us to the thought of selling it, we shall become still greater sufferers by draining our own of its inhabitants.”12 Goldsmith joined the fray in opposition to expansion, writing in The Weekly Magazine in 1759: I see no reason why we should aggrandize our colonies at our own expense; and acquisition of new colonies is useless, unless they are peopled; but to people those deserts that lie behind our present colonies, would require multitudes from the home country; and I do not find we are too populous at home. All that are willing or able to work in England can live happy, and those who are neither able nor willing, would starve on the banks of Ohio, as well as in the streets of St. Giles; it is not the lazy or the maimed that are wanted to people colonies abroad, but the healthy and the industrious, and such members of society, I think, would be more usefully kept at home. To enlarge our territories, there in America, should not be the aim of our ministry, but to secure those we are already in possession of: Aye, but perhaps an opponent will say, if we people those countries, we shall have more tobacco, more hemp, and we shall be

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able to procure prodigious quantities of raw silk! Away then with thousands of our best and most useful inhabitants, that we may be furnished with tobacco and raw silk; send our honest tradesmen and brave soldiers to people those desolate regions, that our merchants may furnish Europe with tobacco and raw silk.13 Goldsmith distinguishes here between useful and useless population, and argues that populating America with the former will damage the parent country. Furthermore, he joins the question of emigration to a critique of luxury by arguing that colonial expansion replaces people with luxury goods: labor disappears into the west and only commodities return. Such an exchange is a further threat to population, since those very goods create the way of life that leads young people to shun marriage and children. Thus, the energy that should be directed toward biological reproduction and strengthening the nation is channeled into a process that merely transmutes useful people into useless products. Goldsmith includes in The Vicar of Wakefield a brief glimpse of the office of a Mr. Cripse (a real person), who “offers all his majesty’s subjects a generous promise of 30 1. a year, for which promise all they give in return is their liberty for life, and permission to let him transport them to America as slaves” (115). When George Primrose, at the nadir of his fortunes, encounters Cripse, he acknowledges, “I knew in my own heart that the fellow lied, and yet his promise gave me pleasure” (115–16). He is only saved from selling his labor and freedom by a chance encounter with an old friend. Yet, while George Primrose remains in England, thousands did emigrate from Britain to North America during this period. According to Bernard Bailyn, “In the years after 1760 transatlantic migration reached levels beyond anything seen before in British America, which is to say, beyond anything seen in the entire history of Europe’s and Africa’s connections with the Western Hemisphere”; driven by rising rents, enclosures and the collapse of traditional social structures, at least 125,000 people emigrated between 1760 and 1776.14 By the 1770s, many were convinced, as Goldsmith had been in 1759, that Britain would be dangerously depopulated by the departure of so many of its most “useful” inhabitants. Invoking Goldsmith in his arguments against emigration, Jonas Hanway wrote in 1775: “At this rate we must change our system, lower our interest of public funds, and lower our taxes, or we may have a deserted island, as well as a deserted village” (emphasis Hanway’s).15 In the last years before the War of American Independence, the government seriously contemplated

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a bill that would restrict the flow of workers out of Britain by instituting extremely high fees for the license to emigrate. The bill never reached Parliament, in part because of the war, in part because, in a significant early use of enumeration, the government decided to create and study a Registrar of Emigrants to help it determine if a licensing scheme was truly necessary.16 One source of this anxiety about emigration was a fear that the growing numbers of North American settlers would naturally begin to yearn for political independence. In retrospect, of course, this fear appears well founded, and it was already lurking in the controversies over the Seven Years’ War. While many believed that the increasing number of colonists could only help the empire by increasing the volume of British trade, others saw them as a threat: If . . . the People of our Colonies find no Check from Canada [i.e., having the French in Canada], they will extend themselves, almost, without bounds into the Inland Parts. They are invited to it by the Pleasantness, the Fertility, and the Plenty of that Country; and they will increase infinitely from all these Causes. What the consequence will be, to have a numerous, hardy, independent People, possessed of a strong Country, communicating little, or not at all with England, I leave to your own Reflections. I hope we have not gone to these immense Expenses [of the war], without an idea of securing the Fruits of them to Posterity.17 In 1729, Joshua Gee had argued that since “numbers of People have always been esteemed the Riches of a State, and as our Colonies of Carolina, Virginia, &c., are the most desirable of any in America . . . they will undoubtedly draw vast Numbers of People to settle there.”18 By the third quarter of the eighteenth century, however, it was becoming unclear whether the extension of those numbers into the Americas would enrich the State, or fracture it. In an effort to ward off the possibility that the population boom in North America would foment rebellion, the British government found itself caught up in localized struggles with its colonies over controlling the flow of peoples into the New World, a species of conflict evidenced by the changing policies toward the Georgia colony. Inspired by James Oglethorpe’s work in prison reform, Georgia was first imagined as a “charity colony,” that would provide a home for those recently released from jail and unable to find

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employment, along with persecuted European Protestants.19 In the colony’s charter, George II states: We are credibly informed, that many of our poor subjects are, through misfortune and want of employment, reduced to great necessity, insomuch as by their labour they are not able to provide a maintenance for themselves and families; and if they had means to defray their charges of passage, and other expenses incident to new settlements, they would be glad to settle in any of our provinces in America, where, by cultivating the lands at the present waste and desolate, they might not only gain a comfortable subsistence for themselves and families, but also strengthen our colonies and increase the trade, navigation, and wealth of these our realms.20 Such colonists would also provide a buffer zone between the Carolinas and Native American territories. The king imagines this new colony to be clearly within his domain: “we think it highly becoming to our crown and royal dignity to protect all our loving subjects, be they never so distant from us.”21 By the 1760s, however, the situation had changed. Georgia, eager to expand, and in need of new settlers, passed a bill to encourage settlement: any group of Protestant families exceeding forty in number would be “exempt from taxes, with the exception of those on slaves, and their tracts were to be granted and surveyed free of charge.”22 But this Act for Encouraging Settlers, passed in 1766, was disallowed and repealed by the Board of Trade in England in 1767. Writing to explain its decision, the Board said it could not allow such subsidies “when so great number of useful inhabitants of these islands, many of whom there is reason to fear are manufacturers, are daily emigrating to the American colonies.”23 The extension of Georgia to the west now seemed to threaten, rather than augment, the glory, even the coherence, of the British Empire. Thus, when Goldsmith imagines the former inhabitants of Auburn immigrating to a nightmarish Georgia, “where wild Altama murmurs to their woe” (344), he enters what had become a propaganda war on the benefits of emigration. Compare Goldsmith’s image of “matted woods where birds forget to sing / But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling” (349–50) with this letter from the proponents of the Act for Encouraging Settlers to that colony, published in the Belfast News-Letter in 1765: “The Land which I have pitched upon lies on a fine River called Ogichey, near to which I have my large Cow-pens of cattle settled, which will be very convenient for

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newcomers in to be supplied with milk cows; I can also furnish them with Horses and Mares, any number they may want . . . for nothing will give me more satisfaction than to be the means of bringing my friends to this country of Freedom.”24 It is likely that neither the impenetrable thickets of Goldsmith’s poem, nor the open, welcoming countryside of the settler’s letter were entirely accurate representation of eighteenth-century Georgia. The stark differences between them, however, reveal how fraught the question of colonial peopling was during this period. The pressures—and uncontrollable opportunities—of westward expansion in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War made Britain particularly anxious about husbanding its population during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. This concern affected another form of migration: penal transportation. Transportation had been a popular method of disposing of serious criminals since the Restoration, sanctioned officially by the state after the Transportation Bill of 1718. As many as fifty thousand convicts may have been transported between 1718 and 1775, representing as much as a quarter of all British emigrants to the North American colonies.25 Transportation was a profitable trade in unwanted bodies. A single merchant held the government contract at any given time; he was paid to transport each convicted felon, and also collected the profits of selling their services as indentured laborers once they reached North America.26 With a profit margin of roughly 26 percent, the convict trade was more profitable, if more limited, than the slave trade, which made a profit of less than 10 percent.27 Transportation had the advantages of all state-sponsored schemes for emigration; it rid England of a useless and disruptive segment of its population, while promising to make that population useful in colonial expansion. As with other segments of “useless population,” such as paupers and discharged soldiers, plans were formulated to create buffer colonies of criminals to protect colonists from the incursions of Indians and the French in the South.28 The potential for transportation not only to punish criminals but also to benefit the state was already understood in the Elizabethan era, when Richard Haklyut suggested that petty criminals be “condemned for certen yeres in the western parts,” where they might “be raised againe, and doe their countrie goodd service”: “they would keep their lives, and England their labour.”29 This idea persisted into the later eighteenth century: in 1776, when he was informed that transportation could no longer continue to the American colonies, Edmund Burke wrote, “Transportation always seemed to me to be a good expedient for preventing the cruelty of capital Punishments, the danger of letting wicked

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people loose upon the publick, or the infinite charge and difficulty of making those useful, whose disposition it is to be mischievous.”30 The threat of exile, and the horrors of transatlantic travel seemed to make transportation a good deterrent from crime, while the hope of being “raised again” supported the idea that it was reformative. The fortunes of transportation as a punishment, however, waxed and waned, and were tied both to issues of population growth and to the problems of colonial expansion in the Americas. In 1660, for example, transportation seemed an appealing way to boost the population of the West Indian colonies; but when concern about population growth increased in England at the end of the seventeenth century, it seemed better to pardon convicts who agreed to enter the army, than to send them off into the colonial arena.31 In Goldsmith’s era, transportation had come under renewed attack.32 Better sea routes, and the general prosperity of the North American colonies raised the specter of convicts not merely being reformed, but also being given a substantially better life through transportation. William Eden, an important opponent of the practice, wrote in 1771: “Every effect of banishment, as practiced in England, is often beneficial to the criminal; and always injurious to the community. The kingdom is deprived of a subject, and renounces all the emoluments of his future existence. He is merely transferred to a new country; distant indeed, but as fertile, as happy, as civilized, and in general as healthy, as that which he hath offended.”33 Moreover, by the 1760s, the precise relationship between Britain and its North American colonies was becoming less defined. Political unrest in the colonies meant that the empire could no longer easily unload convicts as indentured servants into their ports. At the same time, safer shipping routes suggested to many that condemned criminals would return to England and resume their life of crime. Thus the colonies seemed at once geographically closer and politically farther away. Despite the controversy, however, Britain continued to transport convicts to the Americas until the War of American Independence disrupted the practice; after a brief intermission, a new site for transportation was founded at Botany Bay. In the 1760s and ’70s, then, the congruence between nation and population frayed around the problem of westward expansion. To many observers, the British state seemed ready, by acquiring ever more colonial territories, to push the nation beyond the capacity of the population to support it. By allowing emigration by the poor, and the transportation of criminals, it seemed prepared to squander vital manpower in an effort to aggrandize itself

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on the imperial stage. At the same time, however, any attempt to maintain population at home by restricting movement to the colonies put the state in conflict with another aspect of national identity: the ideal of British liberty. Transportation had long owed some of its appeal to the fact that it spared Britons the sight of “Englishmen” as “Slaves on English Land.” Imprisonment at hard labor was thought to violate that ideal, since the “English are free, and should never be Slaves; they should not be accustomed to the sight of Chains which are the badges of Slavery.”34 Efforts to restrict emigration to America faced similar objections. When supporters of the failed census bill of 1753 argued that enumeration would provide a “rule whereby to determine, when we should encourage or restrain the transmigration of people from one part of the British dominions to another,” opponents responded that “our people going or not going to America does not depend upon the public encouragement or restraint, but upon the circumstances they are in at the time.”35 And when the government considered passing laws restricting emigration in the 1770s, one essayist wrote: “Personal liberty and the power of loco-motion, is the undoubted privilege and birthright of every individual. . . . [It] is not at all clear that the Parliament has a right to hinder the inhabitants of Great Britain from leaving it when they think proper.” Making explicit the similarity to transportation, he concluded that legally restricting emigration “would make the nation a prison, & the whole members of it prisoners, though not yet guilty of any crime.”36 Thus neither deploying population to secure its new territories in North America, nor using legal means to concentrate population at home allowed the state to align population management with an ideal of the British nation: nation and population seemed disturbingly out of kilter during this period. Indeed, in an equation that was to haunt Goldsmith, the state’s efforts to manage population, to turn it into an instrument of empire, instead dissipated and depleted it, producing imperial emptiness, rather than national plenitude. This view is crystallized by Samuel Johnson, when he reflects that most Scottish emigration resulted from the brutal laws enacted to put down the rebellion of 1745. Loss of population, he argues, is a high price to pay for national stability: “To hinder insurrection, by driving away people, and to govern peaceably, by having no subjects, is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politics. . . . It affords a legislator little self-applause to consider, that where was formerly an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.”37 The new possibilities offered by American emigration, then, revealed that in expanding as an empire Britain had potentially weakened itself as a nation.

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Family and Nation While Goldsmith’s consideration of population and mobility is best known through The Deserted Village, he is also concerned with problems of population in The Vicar of Wakefield, particularly in the family as a unit and producer of population. Dr. Primrose declares in the first pages of the novel: “I was ever of the opinion, that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single and only talked of population. . . . In this manner, though I had but six [children], I considered them as a very valuable present made to my country, and consequently looked upon it as my debtor” (18). Here we can see evidence of Foucault’s argument that during this period, the family became a “segment,” rather than a “model” for government: “from the moment when . . . population appears absolutely irreducible to the family, the latter becomes of secondary importance compared to population, as an element internal to population.”38 That is, the family is less often imagined in an allegorical relationship to the state, and instead comes to be seen, as the Vicar sees it, as part of a larger whole— the British nation. The family is necessary in the continued prosperity of the nation, and it is through the family that the nation is able to both cohere and expand. Although the Vicar also calls his family “that little republic to which I gave laws” (50), its allegorical quality is eventually overshadowed by its instrumental value. Dr. Primrose sees his family management (faulty as it may be) as directed toward that goal; his use of vocabulary of finance— “present,” “debtor”—marks his children as a national economic resource. The novel is interested in showing, however, that the alignment the Vicar imagines between family and nation is put under considerable pressure by the forces of luxury, and their attendant moral and economic deprivations. Although the novel’s concern with family unity and procreation is most legible, as I noted earlier, in the context of the contemporary concern with the effect of luxury on population growth, it also plays out in relation to the problem of mobility, which contributes to the Primroses’ difficulty in lending their strength to their nation. In a way that adumbrates The Deserted Village, the Primroses are forced by bad luck (and/or incompetence) from one habitation to another until the Vicar is imprisoned for debt. Along with these “migrations” (43), the novel includes accounts of his daughters’ abductions, Dr. Primrose’s quest to find his daughter, Olivia, and George’s journeys to London and the Continent. As the Vicar says, “The separation of friends and families is, perhaps, one of the most distressful circumstances attendant on

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penury” (44). The force that the novel relies on to hold the family together through these wanderings is sentiment. In particular, sentiment seems to ensure that family members remember each other, something that is ever more necessary in an increasingly peripatetic world. The way in which memory and sentiment allow the family to remain intact over distance is revealed by the letter George sends home from his military post: “I have called off my imagination a few moments from the pleasures that surround me, to fix it upon objects that are still more pleasing, the dear little fire-side at home. My fancy draws that harmless group as listening to every line of this with great composure. I view those faces with delight which never felt the deforming hand of ambition or distress! . . . But it is my fate to remember others, while I am myself forgotten by most of my friends” (157). His ability to conjure up the image of his family reading his letter with interest, his capacity, through memory and sentiment, to draw the scene in imagination, inspires George to write home, keeping his family ties intact across distance. The efficacy of this mode of imagination and memory can be seen at the end of the novel. After happy marriages are made for two of the Primrose children, the Vicar brings to life the scene from George’s letter. He has “the pleasure of seeing all my family assembled once more by a cheerful fire-side. My two little ones sat upon each knee, the rest of the company by their partners” (184). Thus, Foucault’s description of the place of the family within the economy of the state appears to be augmented in Goldsmith’s novel by an account of familial sentiment. Sympathetic bonds, strongest between family members, but potentially extended to other kinds of community, have the potential to mitigate the emotional entropy associated with mobility. This belief in sentiment seems to offset Goldsmith’s earlier critique of emigration; imagination and sympathy can hold families—and perhaps even larger communities like nations—together across space. Sentiment, nurtured in memory, focused on the family, may allow the far-flung members of the population to imagine themselves as part of a coherent unit. As is characteristic of the novel, however, George’s letter triggers a remarkable coincidence. The Primrose family receives George’s letter after the Vicar has been imprisoned for debt, and its receipt immediately precedes George’s own arrival in prison in chains for challenging Thornhill to a duel. The expansive, even elastic, ties of memory collapse into the enforced community of cohabitation in the prison. Yet, within these hopeless environs the novel imagines the emergence of a different kind of sentimental community, one that does indeed reach beyond the family. When the Primroses finally

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are reunited and restored to happiness, “a burst of pleasure now seemed to fill the whole apartment; our joy reached even to the common room, where the prisoners themselves sympathized” (179). The capacity of the Primroses’ familial sentiment to extend to the prisoners seems to confirm the ability of sentiment to produce the community. And yet, on a material level, the cohesion achieved by this sentimental community is bolstered, even enabled, by its confinement within prison walls. If Goldsmith’s contemporaries worried that restricting emigration would make the nation a prison, the novelist rosily imagines that the prison might become a nation. Dr. Primrose has made the prisoners susceptible to this kind of sympathetic reaction by replacing their degenerate habits with a system of labor and rewards. Focusing on this section of the novel, John Bender argues that Goldsmith makes a “case for reformative imprisonment involving supervised labor and reflective solitude” as a way of reforming criminals into selfmonitoring individuals.39 In relation to the novel’s concern with mobility, however, it’s worth remembering that advocacy for the reformative power of labor and imprisonment as an alternative to the death penalty arose as an alternative to what had been the era’s preferred non-capital method of punishing serious crime: transportation. In other words, the novel is interested in penal confinement not only as a means of reshaping individual subjectivity, but also a response to the massive outflow of people from England associated with both transportation and freer forms of emigration. Such confinement bolstered population on a national scale. In relation to the debate about transportation, then, the interest in penal reform Goldsmith shared with others in the 1760s, and expressed in The Vicar of Wakefield, can be seen as an interest in finding a use for prisoners at home, rather than squandering such population on colonial expansion. As one proponent of imprisonment at hard labor argued in 1735, “Thus Justice, managed as an Act of Mercy, by slow and yet effectual Methods, will bring Criminals to a sense of their Crimes, and beget in them such a Habit of Industry, as in the end will make them useful, if not honest, Members of the Publick.” Dismissing the threat to British liberty that might result from “inflicting any kind of Slavery on freeborn Subjects,” this writer continues: “Wherefore should we fear any worse Consequences from confining Felons to hard Labour at Home, in Respect to our Liberties, than we find at present from Transporting them Abroad to our Plantations?”40 In a similar vein, Dr. Primrose, after finding them profitable employment cutting pegs for tobacconists and shoemakers, takes pains to assert the utility of the convicts:

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It were to be wished then that power, instead of contriving new laws to punish vice, instead of drawing hard the cords of society till a convulsion come to burst them, instead of cutting away wretches as useless before we have tried their utility, instead of converting correction into vengeance, it were to be wished that we tried the restrictive arts of government, and make the law the protector, but not the tyrant of the people. We should then find that creatures, whose souls are held as dross, only want the hand of a refiner; we should then find that wretches, now stuck up for long tortures, lest luxury feel a momentary pang, might, if properly treated, serve to sinew the state in times of danger. (163–64) Although the Vicar does not mention transportation explicitly here, the phrase “cutting away wretches as useless” seems to refer to that practice; and idea that “wretches” might “sinew the state” seems to refer to the potential for military service from convicts. I am arguing, then, that the Vicar’s plans for reform need to be seen not only in relation to earlier practices within prisons, but also in relation to debates about the relative merits of imprisonment at hard labor and transportation. Goldsmith’s support of imprisonment at hard labor is congruent with his opposition to emigration; the “restrictive arts” of government are needed to keep the population at home. The Vicar’s efforts allow the prisoners to remain home, and use the prison walls, as well as sentiment, to circumscribe this community. Such sentimental bonds could not adhere if the prisoners were “cut away.” Bender goes on to argue that the kind of supervised, reforming confinement the Vicar organizes inside his prison corresponds with a particular narrative structure: The penitentiary as conceived during the later eighteenth century . . . is itself a narrative institution, structured on principle analogous to, and within the same epistemology as, the realist novel. Penitentiaries have regimes, schedules, disciplines; their inmates progress or regress, and they have stories not to be told upon release, or just prior to execution but to be lived out in the penitentiary itself. . . . The form prisons took when they were remade in correspondence to and collaboration with the period’s new systems of political and moral consciousness was narrative form of a distinctly novelistic kind.41

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“Novelistic” here seems to mean linear narratives about changes wrought in individuals by time: a definition of the realist novel, and of the eighteenthcentury novel, prevalent at least since Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel (1957). The Vicar of Wakefield, however, is at least as concerned with the cohesion of groups, preeminently the family, as it is with the psychological development of individuals; and as interested in the coherence of that “aggregate” through space, as it is with time. The elaborate, heterogeneous Primrose family portrait—so large it cannot be moved out of the kitchen—is only the most comic expression of the novel’s desires and difficulties in this regard. In light of those concerns, I would propose a different understanding of the narrative structure of The Vicar of Wakefield, one that emphasizes the way sentiment ameliorates, or at least disguises, the entropic forces of human mobility in Britain’s newly global economy—forces that worm their way into the events of the novel. At its conclusion, the Primrose family is brought together and expands through marriage through a series of coincidences so remarkable that the Vicar feels called upon to comment. When George’s former fiance´e Arabella Wilmot appears at the prison with her new fiance´ Squire Thornhill, believing that George has indeed left for America, the Vicar muses: “Nor can I go on, without a reflection on those accidental meetings, which, though they happened every day, seldom excited our surprise but upon some extraordinary occasion. To what a fortuitous concurrence do we now owe every pleasure and convenience of our lives? How many seeming accidents must unite before we can be clothed and fed? The peasant must be disposed to labour, the shower must fall, the wind fill the merchant’s sail, or numbers must want the usual supply” (174). With Goldsmith’s characteristic concern for “numbers,” this passage articulates both an economic and a narrative theory. Presumably, the peasant is forced to labor, rather than “disposed,” because he needs food, money, or both. But in this model, the economic forces that power production are equated with natural forces, such as rain or sun, and all designated “accidents.” A similar chain of accidents has consolidated the family at home. This view of the world allows the Vicar to concentrate on the sentimental reactions provoked by such meetings—in this case, Arabella’s “compassion and astonishment” (174)—and relegate the actions that have led to them to “fortuitous concurrence.” The passage therefore can be seen as a description of sentimental narrative form, in that it imagines the forces of the world, economic and natural, as something that happens to the sentimental psyche, subordinating action to reaction. Of course, we are probably meant to look slightly askance at the Vicar’s skewed

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view of the world. At the same time, however, this narrative form, by subordinating the reasons behind human mobility to the power of sentiment to overcome them—as it appears to do for George and Arabella in this instance—provides one way of assuaging the anxiety surrounding the management of population, particularly with regard to emigration. Unlike Adam and Eve, George and Arabella return, rather than finding a foreign place to rest. At the beginning of The Vicar of Wakefield, Dr. Primrose imagines that the “gift” of his children as a national resource establishes productive and supportive ties between the “little republic of the family” and the British state. Yet the events of the novel reveal the alignment between the family, nation, and population to be under considerable stress. The Primroses’ familial ties are subjected to strong centripetal forces, which threaten to fling them far and wide: poverty almost compels George into indentured servitude in the colonies, while Lydia and Olivia narrowly avoid seduction and abandonment. Rather than becoming the riches of the nation, the Primrose children seem on the verge of being reduced to that “useless” population that Britain was often eager to transplant to North America—a threat that only dissipates when their father gathers them directly under his sentimental eye. Despite the intervention of Sir William Thornhill, by the end of The Vicar of Wakefield, the ideal of a mutually supportive alliance between the family and the nation seems fragile at best—or rather, at its strongest when girded by prison walls.

“Stern Depopulation” In The Vicar of Wakefield, then, although sentiment seems at times to have the capacity to keep family ties intact over distance, it turns out to be most effective when concentrated on a single space, or when it otherwise obscures the vulnerability of human relationships to mobility. This tendency only strengthens in The Deserted Village. Here, Goldsmith uses the tropes and structures of sentimentality to build a memory of community and to tie that memory to British soil, rather than to the emigrants leaving it. Indeed, perhaps the most obvious thing one can say about Goldsmith’s most famous poem is that it is a poem that inveighs against emigration. It conducts its argument not only by depicting the horrors of the New World, but also by representing emigrants as exiles, whose affective ties to Britain are sundered

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by their departure. Critics have often argued that the sentimentality and abstraction of the poem function to blunt its political critique, but I want to point out the ways in which they also serve to consolidate a particular line of argument about colonial expansion and emigration. In the poem, sympathy and personified abstractions tend to be forces that act upon a person from without, rather than being generated from within.42 On both an aesthetic and a political level, then, sentiment and abstraction work to delineate and patrol the borders of nation. We can see these strategies already at work when Goldsmith redacts and repeats the views he expressed in the Weekly Magazine in 1759 in his long poem The Traveller, published five years later: Have we not seen, round Britain’s peopled shore, Her useful sons exchanged for useless ore? Seen all her triumphs our destruction haste, Like flaring tapers brightening as they waste; See opulence, her grandeur to maintain, Lead stern depopulation in her train. (397–402) In “Windsor-Forest” (1713), Pope had imagined a world in which colonial resources literally came into being to enrich the British empire: “For me,” Father Thames declares, “The Pearly Shell its lucid Globe infold, / And Phoebus warm ripening Ore to Gold” (393, 395–96).43 For Goldsmith, however, not only has such ore become “useless,” but its acquisition also drains England’s own “native” resources. The dynamic he represents is more a wasting away than an exchange: it is expenditure without return. Our sense of the evacuation of human agency is reinforced by the fact that rather than seeing the inhabitants depart, we see a personified depopulation arrive. Emptiness is given substance, made forceful in its own right. Only as the poem continues is that train of personification contrasted to a train of living people who vacate the land: “Behold the duteous son, the sire decayed, / The modest matron, and the blushing maid, / Forced from their homes, a melancholy train, / To traverse climes beyond the western main” (407–10). The contrast between the two groups is reinforced by the nearly repeated end rhymes: the maintenance of opulence banishes the inhabitants beyond the main. And yet the order of events presents depopulation as something that happens to them, rather than a condition their departure has created.

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Once this train arrives in the New World, however, it is split, reduced, or atomized to a single individual. Rather than describing the new communities established there, the speaker imagines a single “pensive exile, bending in his woe, / To stop too fearful, and too faint to go”; this solitary figure “Casts a long look where England’s glories shine, / and bids his bosom sympathize with mine” (419–22). In their reversal of agency, these lines have proved puzzling. The poet and the emigrant/exile are both literally outside of, and politically at odds with, “England’s glories.” Yet they are connected, at least hopefully connected, through sympathy, in a powerful one-on-one relationship. The poet projects the agency for this bond onto the emigrant, rather than, as one might expect, himself sympathizing with his own creation, whose exile is so much more materially brutal and permanent than his own. Yet the reversal of expectations has the effect of drawing both “long look” and sympathy back toward England, rather than outward. It’s worth noting, however, that in order to forge this sense of a British community beyond Britain’s shores Goldsmith abides by the conventions of sentimentality, and shrinks the population down to a single, feeling, individual. In Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, for example, another text of the 1760s, Yorick finds that “the multitudes of sad groups” distract him, and he must take “a single captive” to imagine the woes of emigration (97).44 Yet if The Traveller opposes emigration, it also allows a compensatory connection: although emigration leaves an unfeeling vacancy behind, an emigrant will miss the place he leaves, and, like George Primrose thinking of his family, that sentiment will continue to bind him to a national community. This passage in The Traveller is widely quoted as the “embryo” of The Deserted Village, yet the latter poem alters its deployment of sentimentality and presents a different view of the relationship between Britain and its colonies. Only six years separate the publication of the two poems, but in those years the repercussions of the Seven Years’ War and its intimations of the War of American Independence might have diminished Goldsmith’s hopes for a British community beyond British shores. To investigate the differences between Goldsmith’s two poems, we can observe what happens to the repeated use of “train” as a rhyming word. When the speaker, a solitary figure, returns to the depopulated village, he initially directs his sentiment not outward, toward the departed villagers, but backward, toward the populated past: “Remembrance wakes, with all her busy trains, / Swells at my breast, and turns the past to pain” (81–82). Again, sentiment is something

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that happens to the poet, not something he initiates. A personified Remembrance, however, takes the place of Depopulation as the significant impersonal force roaming the land. This shift makes the land seem full, rather than empty, but this fullness derives from memories of the past, drawing the poet’s imagination backward, rather than outward toward the villagers who have left. The speaker proceeds, with famously poignant nostalgia, to remember the village as it was. John Barrell has argued that the “sentimental radicalism” of The Deserted Village flows from its representation of the collective joys of rural life in the past—pleasures unconnected to the discipline of labor.45 “How often have I blest the coming day,” the reminiscing speaker says, “When toil remitting lent its turn to play, / And all the village train from labour free / Led up their sports beneath the spreading tree” (15–18). The community the poet remembers is structured by its relationship to place—to specific sites of communal interaction, like the alehouse, or this “spreading tree”—rather than understood in terms of its productivity or labor power. The poem posits a close alignment between nation and village in this idealized moment in the past: “A time there was, ere England’s griefs began, / When every rood of ground maintained its man” (57–58). When that connection between ground and man is disrupted—when the nation demands more productivity from both than simple subsistence—then the nation’s sorrows begin. With that disruption, too, the place itself seems to dissolve, hardly seeming to exist in the present; abandonment has sapped its energy and wrecked its structures. “Sunk are thy bowers in shapeless ruin all,” says the poet, “And the long grass o’ertops the mouldering wall” (47–48). As the ties that had structured village interaction disappear, Auburn’s inhabitants cease to be a community, and become instead a population, defined by their uselessness, silence, and dislocation. With this transformation, the nation, too, loses its shape, becoming a “bloated mass of rank unwieldy woe” (392). The proper relationship between the village and the nation has been disrupted by the “sickly greatness” of luxury (389), which reduces a community to a population, enforces the movement of that population to the colonies, and leaves the nation itself a “ruin” (394). Needless to say, then, the poem depicts the moment when the villagers depart with fierce poignancy. Good Heaven! What sorrows gloom’d that parting day, That called them from their native walks away; When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,

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Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last, And took a long farewell, and wished in vain For seats like these beyond the western main; And shuddering still to face the distant deep, Returned and wept, and still returned to weep. (363–70) With this evocation of the tragedy of severing native ties, the poem seems to question whether any form of migration—at least among the poor—can ever be considered free. Recent historiography, as we discussed in the introduction, has shown that it may have been right. For Goldsmith, emigration is a kind of coercive social violence, which reduces these villagers to the status of transported criminals, in terms of agency, if not of virtue. As Auburn’s “poor exiles” (365) make that transition from rooted community to mobile population, they also seem to shed their human characteristics, becoming a “melancholy band” of “rural virtues” (401, 398).46 At the same time, the land they have left acquires the attributes of a human being. In other words, as the poet shifts his attention from the past to the present, he also transfers his sympathy from the villagers to the abandoned land. He imagines that land as a fallen woman, deploying the conventions of sentimentality to direct sympathy. Here, the condition of the land is not imagined through personification, but rather given a human narrative through an elaborate simile. As some fair female, unadorned and plain, Secure to please while youth confirms his reign, Slights every borrowed charm that dress supplies, Nor shares with art the triumph of her eyes. But when those charms are past, for charms are frail, When time advances, and when lovers fail, She then shines forth solicitous to bless, In all the glaring impotence of dress. Thus fares the land, by luxury betrayed, In nature’s simplest charms at first arrayed, But verging to decline, its splendours rise, Its vistas strike, its palaces surprise. (287–98) The poet draws attention away from the present states of the countryside to its past, to that which it commemorates, by representing it through a sentimental narrative. The land is a woman betrayed by the seductions of luxury.

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This sentimental trope has the narrative effect of rooting sympathy in time and place, allowing the land itself to become the subject of regret and recrimination. If the emigrant of The Traveller misses the land he has left, in The Deserted Village, the land misses the emigrants. It recalls the moment we discussed in Paradise Lost when Adam extols the garden as the “only consolation left / Familiar to our eyes. All places else / Inhospitable appear and desolate, / Not knowing us nor known” (11.304–7). But where Milton’s poem teaches Adam and Eve to accept the need to make a home in “desolate” and “inhospitable” places, Goldsmith’s remains attached to the land’s point of view, allowing its former inhabitants to drift into silence and invisibility. For Goldsmith, the land has a greater role in establishing identity than does human community. As in so many of Goldsmith’s uses of sentimental paradigms, however, the agency is confusing. The land is a victim, and Goldsmith wants to present its current state as something done to it. And yet the vehicle of this simile makes the land culpable, a woman who deludes herself about her own attractions. Goldsmith’s reminder that “charms are frail” recalls Clarissa’s admonition to Belinda in The Rape of the Lock, that “But since, alas! Frail Beauty must decay,” women should “keep Good Humour still what’er we lose” (25, 30). In Goldsmith’s day, moreover, it was just this figure, the woman who preferred luxury to marriage and children, who critics argued shared the blame with those who enclosed land for England’s declining population: in this figure the two forms of barrenness thought to lead to depopulation and national decline are conflated. The description famously ends, “The country blooms—a garden and a grave,” reinforcing the feminized land’s shift from fecundity to barrenness.47 In its concentration of sympathy on a place in time, then, the poem loses its critique of global forces at work in its present. Marshall Brown has argued that Goldsmith’s repeated use of the word “train” reveals that “space is not just a circle, but also a line. And . . . the linearity of time is nothing other than the tragic fatality of history.”48 I would add, though, that the trains in Goldsmith’s poem are not merely abstractions of time, but also of people, and that they lead in one direction: toward westward emigration. For example, as in The Traveller, the train of people heads toward America, repeating the train/pain end rhyme. Again, Goldsmith deploys that paradigm of sentimentality, the fallen woman, imagining the fate of one former village dweller, “the houseless shivering female.” Opening up the possibility of sympathy between the individual and the group, the speaker asks, “Do thine, sweet AUBURN, thine, the loveliest

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train, / Do thy fair tribes participate her pain?” (337–38). He is asking both whether the rest of the village now suffers in similarly miserable conditions, and whether they, collectively, sympathize with this fallen woman. The answer, however, turns out to be: “Ah, no. To distant climes, a dreary scene, / Where half the convex world intrudes between, / Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go” (341–42). Unlike the group in The Traveller, the train here remains an aggregate. And perhaps for that reason, they are split off from sympathy with those that remain behind in England. The distance of “half the convex world” seems to negate the possibility of backward looks or sentimental ties. This severing is signaled by the relative silence of the scene. The voices of the emigrants are displaced by the river that “murmurs to their woe,” in a landscape dominated by silent birds and bats. This silence contrasts with the remembered sounds of Auburn’s past (113–26), its “cheerful murmurs fluctuat[ing] in the gale” before “the sounds of population fail[ed].” The great promise of emigration, that it would provide useful labor for the dislocated rural workers of England, is rendered moot by Goldsmith’s representation of the Americas. America is both too empty—empty of memory and sentiment—and too full—of vegetable, animal, and “savage” life. The emigrants do not labor or settle once they reach the new world; they wander terrified through an uncultivated wilderness. When that tie between land and people breaks, poetry itself leaves, deserting England, rather than trying to maintain the ties between Britain and its colonies. Still let thy voice, prevailing over time, Redress the rigours of the inclement clime. Aid slighted truth, with thy persuasive strain Teach erring man to spurn the rage of gain; Teach him that states of native strength possest, Tho’ very poor, may still be very blest. (421–26) Again, “prevailing over time” replaces prevailing over space. This description of the role of poetry implies that it is tied to a circumscribed idea of space, that it cannot be extended, even with the aid of sympathy, to comprehend both Britain and her faraway colonies. Rather than trying to stretch between them, it leaves with the emigrants, though there is no indication in the poem that poetry has helped them found new societies. In The Deserted Village, the nation, or indeed any kind of community, is constructed through time in

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place, rather than in the present across space. It is based on the ideal moment in the past “ere England’s griefs began, / When every rood of ground supplied its man” (57–58). If The Deserted Village tries to align small communities like the village to a larger idea of nation, then, it accomplishes this goal by tying community to place, by redirecting the energy of sentiment backward, rather than outward. The poem solves the problem of making nation, empire, and population correspond by relegating the idea of a population that was also a community to memory.

Bending an Eye on Vacancy “Stern depopulation” haunted the literature of the third quarter of the eighteenth century, when the figure seemed to crystallize the misalignment of nation, empire, and population. The state’s encouragement of luxury, its disregard for the traditional ties between persons and places, and its eagerness to funnel manpower into its new colonial territories—on the premise that what was useless in England would become “useful” in America—threatened to leave poignantly vacant patches on what many thought should be a densely populated landscape. Such spots were not merely empty places. Like Goldsmith’s deserted village, they often became powerful reservoirs of feeling, the inspiration for the imaginative recreation of other lives. These recreations did not usually focus on the lives lived by their former inhabitants in the present, however—lives taking place far away from their former homes—but rather on the past. The sentimental history Goldsmith gives in The Deserted Village replaces a kind of memory that promised an imaginative recreation across space, the psychic dynamic that allowed George Primrose to conjure up an image of his family. In an empire that now seemed too vast to be held together by such sentimental ties, sympathy might most usefully be directed temporally backward, to help construct a sense of a British nation held together not so much by living communities as by evocative historical sites.49 In his Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, published the same decade as The Deserted Village, Johnson records his visit to a ruined site of ancient learning: “Inch Kenneth was once a seminary of ecclesiastics, subordinate, I suppose, to Icolmkill. Sir Alan had a mind to trace the foundations of the college, but neither I nor Mr. Boswell, who bends a keener eye on vacancy, were able to perceive them.”50 Johnson here alludes to Hamlet, to Gertrude’s words to her son as he sees his father’s ghost approaching: “how is’t with

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you, / That you do bend your eye on vacancy, / And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse?” Johnson’s casting of Boswell as the melancholy Dane is comical, but his application of this familial revenge drama to the problem of seeing a vanished culture, one that can only appear as a ghost, is telling. When the party arrives at Icolmkill, Johnson further extols this capacity to imagine the past: We were now treading that illustrious island, which was once the luminary of the Caledonian regions, whence savage clans and roving barbarians derived the benefits of knowledge, and the blessings of religion. To abstract the mind from all local emotions would be impossible, if it were endeavoured, and would be foolish, if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses; whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings. Far from me and from my friends, be such frigid philosophy as may conduct us indifferent and unmoved over any ground which has been dignified by wisdom, bravery, or virtue. That man is little to be envied, whose patriotism would not gain force upon the pain of Marathon, or whose piety would not grow warmer among the ruins of Iona!51 Yet, out of his three choices—the past, the distant, or the future—Johnson here concentrates on the past: “local emotion” is indeed site specific. Rather than imagining the present-day lives of the descendants of those “savage clans,” lives now lived, as he elsewhere bemoans, in North America, Johnson sinks his sensibility into the past of this place, and feels his piety grow warmer in its ruins. In contrast to this warmth, the emigrant Scots themselves grow colder and dimmer, as they move farther away: “for a nation scattered in the boundless reaches of America resembles rays diverging from a focus. All the rays remain, but the heat is gone. Their power consisted in their concentration: when they are dispersed, they have no effect.” Casting an eye on vacancy, opening oneself up to local emotion, had come to mean imagining the past. One way in which The Deserted Village contributes to our understanding of this phenomenon is in its description of literature’s role in commemorating such empty spaces. In The Traveller, rural emptiness is conveyed by the awesome figure of “Stern Depopulation.” But Goldsmith’s later poem envisages such vacancy both in the tragic drama of personification and through

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the attenuation of metonymy. If the land begins as “some fair female, unadorned and plain,” its final representative is a solitary female figure tending Auburn’s grave: “She only left of all the harmless train, / The sad historian of the pensive plain” (135–36). The distinction between the personified Remembrance that accosts the speaker at the beginning of The Deserted Village and this “sad historian” evokes Pierre Nora’s distinction between history and memory. In the transition to the modern era, Nora argues: “Memory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition. Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. . . . History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer. Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”52 Goldsmith would certainly concur. History in The Deserted Village seems to be a meager and melancholy sorting process—a “wretched matron” “pick[ing] her wintry faggot from the thorn” (131, 133); memory is the lived experience stripped from the villagers when they “face the distant deep.” Yet this lodging of memory in the past also signals a shift in Goldsmith’s representation of the relationship between memory and imagination. The emigrants from Auburn have lost what George Primrose has: without a living community to anchor them, communal memory is displaced by history. The shifting location of memory helps explain why the speaker’s own encounter with “Remembrance” becomes the poem’s focus, displacing even the sorrows of Auburn’s exiles, who seem to feel less the farther away they move from Auburn. As Nora explains, whereas “a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity . . . would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself. . . . Our society—torn from its memory by the scale of its transformations but all the more obsessed with understanding itself historically—is forced to give an increasingly central role to the operations that take place within the historian. The historian is the one who prevents history from becoming merely history.”53 If the poem narrates not only the relocation of the villagers, but also the relocation of memory, the speaker’s experience of loss is itself a historical drama; as David Simpson says, “we cannot say that Goldsmith fabricates a historical analogue for a personal crisis, because the personal crisis (and to call it just this is to demean it considerably) is at all times historical.”54 The speaker of The Deserted Village might be said to take up the position Nora describes, a bulwark against a kind of historiography that is merely grave tending. His memory—significantly, I think masculine—

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can compensate for the vulnerabilities of a kind of material experience that has been coded feminine in the figuration of the land as “some fair female,” and its last inhabitant as a “wretched matron”: vulnerability to the seductions of luxury, vulnerability to the exigencies of material comfort. Yet, in the end, it is not so much that the speaker becomes, in Nora’s terms, a lieu de memoire, but that the poem itself does. Perhaps one of the most quoted texts of the eighteenth century and beyond, The Deserted Village became a particularly potent reference point for the debates about emigration that continued to rage through the early decades of the nineteenth century. Quoted in pamphlets like “No Emigration: The Testimony of Experience” (1828), the poem seems to distill and maintain a powerful feeling of what the attachment to place had perhaps once felt like, and convey a potent critique of mobility. Its very vagueness may have helped it become such a successful focal point for memory. “Contrary to historical objects . . . lieux de memoire have no referent in reality; or, rather, they are their own referent: pure, exclusively self-referential signs. This is not to say that they are without content, physical presence, or history; it is to suggest that what makes them lieux de memoire is precisely that by which they escape from history. In this sense, the lieu de memoire is double: a site of excess closed upon itself, concentrated in its own name, but also forever open to the full range of its possible significations.”55 Indeed the poem’s openness to a “range of . . . possible significations” allowed it to represent the complex emotions of attachment to place in contexts beyond the British. As Nikki Hessell has documented, the poem was translated into a number of the indigenous languages of Britain’s colonies during the nineteenth century, by writers who “emphasiz[ed] the radical potential of Goldsmith’s nostalgia” to convey the pain of their own dispossession at the hands of imperial expansion.56 In the next chapter, we will note the similar way critics have seen Scott’s novels functioning as a “collective point of reference for a multinational readership across and beyond the British Isles.”57 Goldsmith’s poem seems to have proved itself even more capacious, open enough for “indigenous readers [to see] in the verses not simply the literature of the colonizers but a model for considering responses to colonization.”58 Poetry in these instances supplements “local affection” on both the personal and the collective level.

chapter 5

The Emptiness at The Heart of Midlothian Nation, Narration, and Population

After Effie Deans is convicted of infanticide, one of the other characters in The Heart of Midlothian remarks on the seeming hypocrisy of that legal decision. Says Plumdamas, “Do you think our auld enemies of England care a boddle whether we didna kill ane anither, skin and birn, horse and foot, men, women, and bairns, all and sindry, omnes et singulos, as Mr. Crossmyloof says?”1 A reasonable enough assumption, one might think. Yet, Scott’s novel proves Plumdamas wrong about the value of Scottish bodies to England, and thus wrong about the nature of “internal colonialism.” Indeed, when the fate of Effie’s still-living child is revealed, it neatly refutes Plumdamas’s claim. Rather than dying at his mother’s hand, he has been purchased by “an agent in a horrible trade that carried on between Scotland and America, for supplying the plantations with servants,” that is, with “human flesh” (501). Unwanted, undomesticated, the child is commodified by a system that needs bodies to power colonial production. In this aspect of its plot, The Heart of Midlothian comes close to the vision of one eighteenth-century reformer, who thought Scotland might become “A People-Warren for supplying [the] King with brave soldiers and sailors and the more fertile parts of the kingdom with faithful servants of every description.”2 Scottish bodies acquire the most value in the process of imperial expansion not when they kill each other, but when they become portable units of labor. Although Effie’s child, called the Whistler, at first avoids being sold to the American colonies through his purchaser’s affection, a colonial destiny eventually overtakes him: the captain of the ship on which he escapes from

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Knocktarlitie sells him as a servant in Virginia (506). In a way, the Whistler takes on the punishment of banishment his mother has avoided: both the Duke of Argyle and Mrs. Glass expect Effie herself to “go over to America and marry well” (381). But no marriageable tobacco merchant such as “Ephraim Buckskin” (382), willing to absolve him of all guilt, awaits Effie’s child; instead, the Whistler is gradually absorbed into the colonial strife of the American colonies.3 The child does generate a certain amount of pathos and concern in the Butlers, his aunt and uncle, but when Reuben Butler tries to locate him he finds that “this aid came too late. The young man had headed a conspiracy in which his inhuman master was put to death, and had then fled to the next tribe of wild Indians. He was never more heard of; and it may be presumed that he lived and died after the manner of that savage people, with whom his previous habits had well fitted him to associate” (506). This information, coming as it does in the last paragraphs of the novel, may seem perfunctory, yet it performs two important functions in the novel. For one thing, in relocating the Whistler’s violence from the Highlands to America, the novel can be seen as displacing the disputes over the “inhuman” conditions of agricultural production which broke out in Scotland throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries into more distant colonial territory.4 The violence of banditry the child learns in the Highland glens turns out to be best “fitted” for the plantation world. For another, the novel, in demonstrating the Whistler’s seemingly inevitable trajectory toward the “savage people” of America, naturalizes the depopulation of the Highlands through emigration, coerced or otherwise. That is, it reimagines bodies like the body of Effie’s child as originally misplaced: not native, but exportable goods awaiting their appropriate market.5 Their eventual disappearance can then be read as their reabsorption into the colonial world, leaving the Highlands not depopulated, but returned to a more natural condition. In the sad and melodramatic story of Effie Deans, George Staunton, and their child, we can see the novel emplotting the extinction of colonial social structures on Scottish soil. In order to understand the relation between Effie’s trial and her child’s eventual fate—between the legal surveillance of reproduction and the mobility of subaltern subjects—we need to look at Scott’s novel in the context of the ideas of his contemporaries about how to measure and value the “units” of a nation, its people. Population theory, as we have seen, was concerned with the mobility of peoples, with ascertaining how and where certain groups might be shifted to better suit the empire’s needs.6 The problem of how to

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acquire information about individuals proved difficult, however. Would such data be voluntarily given or would it need to be coerced? The belief that state enumeration would be too intrusive was one thing that prevented the institution of a census in England itself until 1801, and a national registry system until 1837. In England’s colonies, however, there was no such fastidiousness about the ethics of enumeration. Censuses, both private and governmental, were undertaken in Ireland, Scotland, and all the American colonies well before the beginning of the nineteenth century.7 Many of these studies were concerned explicitly with how these populations might be moved around to better serve the empire. In eighteenth-century population theory, as we have seen, subaltern populations (both inside and outside England) are characterized not by being fixed in some isolated place, but rather by their potential for mobility in the circuits of empire. Thus, Scotland’s status as an “internal colony” is determined not only by the subjugation of its territory, but also by the vulnerability of its people to dislocation. Attention to the context of demographic theory, in this instance, troubles the conventional distinction between colony and metropolis in terms of the spatial model of “core” and “periphery.” As we saw in our discussion of Swift, some early population theorists imagined methods not only for enumeration, but also for fostering population growth. Indeed, the possibility of aligning reproduction with imperial need was one of their favorite fantasies, positioning women’s bodies as crucial sites for experiment and surveillance.8 Yet, this too presented difficulties. Thomas Malthus, for example, the era’s most influential population theorist, urged his readers to distrust the irrepressible, anarchic sex drive. We will return to Malthus’s work in Chapter 7, but for now it suffices to say that although he has a certain amount of faith that “a foresight of the difficulties attending the rearing of a family acts as a preventive check,” Malthus admits that “it would be hard indeed, if the gratification of so delightful a passion as virtuous love, did not, sometimes, more than counterbalance its attendant evils. But I fear it must be owned that the more general consequences of such marriages are rather calculated to justify than to repress the forebodings of the prudent.”9 As Catherine Gallagher has demonstrated, the paradigm-shifting insight of An Essay on the Principle of Population, that virtue may itself lead to personal and social misery, centers on female fertility: “Malthus . . . sees the unleashed power of population, the reproducing body, as that which will eventually destroy the very prosperity which made it fecund, replacing health

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and innocence with misery and vice. . . . The healthy, and consequently reproducing, body is thus the harbinger of the disordered society full of starving bodies.”10 Inevitably, efforts to understand the way populations grew and to enumerate them in a scientific manner produced disturbing evidence of the misalignment of biological reproduction with the needs of a centralized state. The publication of Malthus’s Essay in 1798, the recognition of the degree to which potato farming had spurred Irish population growth, and the pressure of soldiers returning from the Napoleonic wars fostered a growing public anxiety over the social effects of what was called “surplus” or “redundant” population, and debate over the virtues of government-sponsored emigration schemes for such people. Georg Luka´cs famously proposed that “the historical novel arose at the beginning of the nineteenth century at about the time of Napoleon’s collapse.” The participation of so many in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, and in the armies of the Napoleonic wars, he argued, provided “the concrete possibilities for men to comprehend their own existence as something historically conditioned, for them to see in history something which deeply affects their daily lives and immediately concerns them.” For Luka´cs, this “mass experience of history” is intimately connected with a contemporaneous “awakening of national sensibility.”11 Yet, this same historical juncture—the second and third decades of the nineteenth century— also produced a disjunction between the “masses” and “the nation,” articulated with regard to precisely those whom Luka´cs identifies as the bearers of historical consciousness—the veterans of the Napoleonic wars. These exsoldiers, as we have seen, along with the Irish, Scottish Highlanders, and other “unproductive classes,” made up what political observers of the time called “surplus population”—a human aggregate whose only value to the nation lay in the exportation of their labor. Scott’s historical novels, then, did not emerge at a time when “the masses” were being transformed seamlessly into nations, but rather during an era that extruded part of those masses in excess of “the nation” and called them (surplus) population. The distinction that emerged between nation and population, furthermore, helped structure the division between British colonies and the metropolis, representing it not in terms of space, but in terms of the relative mobility of inhabitants. A recognition of this historical context reveals crucial aspects of The Heart of Midlothian. Scott’s novel distinguishes between the productive and the surplus members of the Scottish population, yet reveals that both

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elements are subject to the radical mobility imposed by a labor theory of value. It demonstrates that the affiliations between persons and places need to be reimagined under the cultural pressure to make labor portable. The Heart of Midlothian tells two complementary stories about nation and population. The first concerns the isolation and exportation of colonial savagery, represented by the events surrounding the clandestine birth of Effie Deans’s child. That narrative is juxtaposed to the story of Jeanie Deans and Reuben Butler. The puzzling, pastoral end of the novel, as the two make a home for themselves on the edge of the Highlands, works to replace the “colonial” world of Effie’s “savage” child with a cohesive, “British” world, centered on productive labor, and the improved agriculture of experimental farming. The novel has been accused of eliding the impact of the 1745 rebellion on Highland culture. While this is certainly true, that omission is only part of the way it uses the strategies of historical fiction to retell the transition between the removal of the “savage” populations of the Highlands and the repopulation of those spaces by a more modern, “civilized” community. The story of Effie’s pregnancy, her indictment for child murder, and the resulting fate of her child can be read as a narrative about the futility of an untenable, because colonial, system of surveillance and population control. This interpretation is possible not simply because the family drama involving Effie Deans, George Staunton, and the Whistler ends in parricide; the novel also represents the consequences of Effie’s secret pregnancy and delivery as the effects of an antiquated legal idea about how to regulate reproduction. Effie is sentenced to death under an infanticide law dating from 1690 that declares that “if any woman shall conceal her being with Child, during the whole space, and shall not call for and make use of help and assistance at the Birth, the child being found dead or missing, the Mother shall be holden and reputed the Murtherer of her own child.”12 The suffering this law inflicts on Effie Deans is the most important motor of the plot of The Heart of Midlothian; it instigates her sister Jeanie’s journey to London to seek a pardon from the queen, a quest which takes up the bulk of the novel.13 Yet there is no ambiguity in the text about the justice of this law; without exception, its characters, even the judge who convicts Effie of the crime, condemn the statute (232). Indeed, one of the primary functions of the infanticide prosecution seems to be to remind the reader that the events related take place in the less civilized past. The novel includes a note telling the reader that “during the author’s memory a more lenient course was followed” as the sentence of death was commuted to banishment (528). George Staunton does not differ

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from the general opinion, except in his hyperbole, when he writes the magistrate: “There is a woman in your jail, fallen under the edge of a law so cruel that it has hung by the wall, like unscoured armour, for twenty years, and is now brought down and whetted to spill the blood of the most beautiful and most innocent creature whom the walls of a prison ever girded in” (182). Staunton’s image of the law as a kind of rusty armor places its attitude toward unwanted pregnancy in the vengeful, violent, even feudal, past. We might even say that the span of the law, 1690–1809 (Scott mistakenly cites 1803), marks out for the novel a period of turbulence in Scottish history, which was coming to an end at the time the novel was being written.14 The law’s archaism has to do with its conception of the mysterious, ungovernable space of Effie’s womb. As Ian Duncan says of the novel, “the maternal body appears as a foundational categorical problem for the allegory of national identity before it can become a solution.”15 The statute imagines female reproductive capacity as something that might work to subvert and outwit economic and social structures, to hoodwink both church and law, and therefore as something that needs to be reined in. What the law really pinpoints, and seeks to root out, is female secrecy, the capacity of reproduction to outwit surveillance. Judith Wilt has argued that, in its presumption of guilt, the law “violates its own nature to trace and publicly punish” infanticide: “for this the law and the fathers fear most of all, that a woman may recognize the man’s seed in her body as her enemy and reject it.” Part of the work of Scott’s novel, Wilt points out, is to make such a law, with its tacit acknowledgement of female violence, unnecessary, even unthinkable, by insisting on the primacy of female sympathy and mercy; “the novel in every significant event asserts, enforces, desires . . . the new ‘natural’ law: woman is the protector and forgiver of male lovers, children, parents, not their killer.”16 The contempt with which the novel’s characters regard the law suggests that they believe, as did Malthus, that “what at first might be dictated by state necessity is now supported by female delicacy”: that illegitimate births should be prevented by internalized social shame, rather than either individual or legal violence.17 In this belief, they anticipate institutionalized systems of civil registration, which came into effect in 1837, and substituted voluntary self-disclosure for the threat of legal punishment. This new conception of femininity certainly holds a particular idea of gender relations in place—but it is also important to the vision of Scottish national identity promulgated by the novel. The ideal of a compassionate, virtuous woman, whose fertility is sanctioned by law, and who consents to

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her own visibility to the state, enables the novel to reconceptualize Scotland not as a colonial space, but as part of a united British Empire.18 To see this, we need to recognize that the legal ideas instantiated by the 1690 law function not only as part of a history of attitudes toward women, but also in collusion with colonial systems of population control. If such forms of surveillance and punishment were no longer viable in England and Scotland after 1809, they still had some currency in other parts of the British empire. As with the census, governmental efforts to supervise and legally control reproduction were implemented to a greater degree in colonial spaces than metropolitan ones during the early nineteenth century. Infanticide, in particular, came to represent the kind of barbarous practice that demanded British imperial intervention. Thus, paradoxically, even as prosecutions for infanticide were decreasing in England during the late eighteenth century, concern over colonial infanticide increased.19 When evidence emerged in the 1780s that some groups in Benares practiced female infanticide, for instance, the East India Company forced members of those groups to sign a legal agreement not to kill their daughters.20 As Josephine McDonagh notes, such “cases demonstrate that the existence of infanticide in the ethnographic record became a measure by which English society could apprehend and celebrate its own humanity, sobriety and restraint.”21 This imperative to eradicate barbarous colonial reproductive practices persisted into the nineteenth century; Rashmi Pant points out that some aspects of the All Indian Censuses of the 1870s were influenced by “the concern to prevent female infanticide “Defending the usefulness of recording caste data . . . the Lieutenant Governor wrote in the first All Indian Census Report [1872] ‘had this distinction been given up the discrepancies in the sexes could not have been followed up in the way they have been, nor could it have been shown as the figures in the margin show, to what castes the stigma of infanticide can with the greatest certainty be affixed.’ ”22 Thus, the concern over Indian infanticide also serves to illustrate the connection between the surveillance of reproduction on the individual level and large-scale demographic inquiries such as the census.23 This link between reproductive legislation and census taking shows up again in the era of The Heart of Midlothian, in the context of the Caribbean slave colonies. After the slave trade was abolished in 1807, a system of registration for slaves was initiated in order to make sure that no slaves were being illegally imported into the islands; thus mandatory civil registration began in these colonies decades before similar population registries were begun in Britain. These registries, however, revealed that the number of slaves in the

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Caribbean was decreasing, and this realization added a new dimension to the debate over whether plantation slavery was a viable mode of production. The British censuses of 1801 and 1811 seemed to provide evidence “of consistent and rapid growth during the Industrial Revolution. They gave credence to the idea that sustained population growth, dependent solely on natural increase, was in fact ‘natural.’ ”24 Abolitionists were therefore able to argue that the decreasing populations in the colonies were a direct result of the “unnatural” state of slavery. Slave owners, although unwilling to accept this Malthusian argument from nature, still felt the need to try and reverse the decline, hastily instituting policies to encourage female slaves to reproduce the labor force. In other words, they tried to extend their power over the lives of slaves to include jurisdiction over the unruly, and ultimately intractable, space of the womb; many of the new laws passed during this period to ameliorate the condition of slaves were geared toward the protection of pregnant and nursing women.25 Extra-legal measures were applied as well; in 1816, Matthew Lewis, a Jamaican proprietor as well as the author of The Monk, was willing to offer the women on his estate a dollar for each child “which should be brought to the overseer alive and well on the fourteenth day.” Faced with the strange inefficacy of this gesture, “Monk” Lewis became convinced that self-imposed infertility represented the last bastion of resistance for female slaves; “I really believe,” he wrote, “that the negress can produce children at pleasure; and where they are barren, it is just as hens will frequently not lay eggs on shipboard, because they do not like their situation.”26 Lewis’s faith in cash incentives, in this instance, reveals his desire to make biological reproduction work in concert with economic production. It may seem odd that an era so preoccupied with the dangers of overpopulation would be exercised simultaneously over the evil of infanticide. Why not, as Plumdamas suggests, simply let subaltern populations kill themselves off ? As we will see, however, the proliferation of emigration schemes during the period, with their emphasis on the importance of portable laboring bodies to the growth and strength of empire, suggests that observers, with the notable exception of Malthus himself, were worried more by the misallocation of population than by absolute numbers. This concern links the interest in increasing the number of bodies in the slave colonies with the desire to shift redundant bodies out of Scotland, Ireland, and parts of England, and into the colonial arena. It seems precisely this fear that reproduction will not function in concert with national productivity, unless (or even if ) it is subject to legal or

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economic strictures, that The Heart of Midlothian attempts to ward off in its insistence that female compassion and probity will act as the internalized monitors of women’s responsibility to the national economy. In the cultural imagination of the period, this anxiety was coded as a colonial problem, and Scott draws on those associations in his description of Effie’s dilemma. There is no direct evidence that Scott had the difficult situation in Britain’s Caribbean or Indian colonies in mind when he criticized the 1690 infanticide law, nor is it accurate to say that by being prosecuted under that law, Effie Deans is being treated “like a slave.” Nevertheless, a nexus of concerns around the intersection of reproduction, state institutions of surveillance, and new implementations of demographic science does seem to encompass both Scotland and Britain’s more distant colonies during the early nineteenth century. Furthermore, Effie’s involvement with these systems puts her inside an economy which circulates bodies for profit within the British Empire. One thing that the novel allows us to discover in the course of Jeanie’s journey to London is the originary cause of George Staunton’s violence and irresponsibility. Staunton, it turns out, has been brought up in the West Indies, and “passed the first part of his early youth under the charge of a doting mother, and in the society of negro slaves whose study it was to gratify his every caprice. . . . Staunton acquired, even in childhood, the habit of regarding his father as a rigid censor, from whose severity he was desirous of emancipating himself as soon and absolutely as possible. . . . When he was about ten years old, and when his mind had received all the seeds of those evil weeds which afterwards grew apace, his mother died, and his father, half heart-broken, returned to England” (341–42). Later, his father sends him out of England, “but he only returned wilder and more desperate than ever” (342). Staunton’s moral instability is thus imagined as a colonial weakness, a flowering of the “evil weeds” of Creole culture: his aggressive attitude toward authority not merely Oedipal, but a slave owner’s jealous need for absolute sway. His moral instability is mirrored by an unproductive physical mobility. As Ruth Livesey says, “The most geographically mobile character in this novel, Staunton’s movements nevertheless lack volition, self-possession and direction.”27 Throughout Jeanie’s encounter with Staunton as he lies injured in his father’s house, the novel compares him to the doomed leaders of archaic systems of political domination. He pronounces “the word, ‘Remember!’ in a tone as monitory as it was uttered by Charles I upon the scaffold” (335), for example—his affect linked to the pathos of the condemned monarch. The novel also pictures Staunton “stretched on his couch like the

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Mexican monarch on his bed of live coals” (323), comparing his injuries and humiliation to the torture inflicted on the Aztec emperor Guatemozin by Cortez. Once she permanently ties her fate to his, Effie too is drawn into this colonial vocabulary of images. Meeting the Duke of Argyle by accident in her new identity, she writes Jeanie: “I suffered with courage, like an Indian at the stake, while they were rending his fibres and boring his eyes, and while he smiled applause at each well-imagined contrivance of his torturers” (424). In all these instances, the unhappy pair is envisaged as the relic of defeated systems of absolutism, a political structure the novel associates with the colonial arena. We can also read the fatal encounter between Effie’s child and his father as a figuration of colonial conflict. Like Effie and George Staunton, the Whistler, as he comes to be known, is described as a member of an obsolete tribe. He is “a tall, lathy, young savage, his dress a tattered plaid and philabeg, no shoes, no stockings, no hat or bonnet, the place of the last being supplied by his hair, twisted and matted like the glibbe of the ancient wild Irish, and like theirs, forming a natural thickset, stout enough to bear off the cut of a sword. Yet the eyes of the lad were keen and sparkling; his gesture free and noble, like that of all savages” (480).28 The Whistler and his parents are not the only characters compared to colonial subjects in The Heart of Midlothian: both Meg Murdockson and Duncan Knockdunder are described as “wild Indians” and Jack Porteous is called a “neger” (285, 437, 186).29 Yet the three do form a striking family portrait. If the father is imagined as a doomed and impotent wielder of arbitrary power, the son becomes the residual, resistant, savage object of that power: representative of a group—the ancient Irish—that has already disappeared. Thus, the Whistler’s murder of George Staunton is on one level an actual parricide, and is, on another, figured as the destruction of a colonial ruler by a colonial subject. It is an act of violence that is supposed to signal the removal of colonial systems of power from Scottish soil, but which also reveals what Ian Duncan calls “the violent contemporaneities produced by imperial modernization.”30 It is after this encounter that the Whistler begins his gradual disappearance into the American wilderness. This fate, I would argue, records Scott’s pessimistic take on the fate of Scotland’s surplus population during the period. The condition of the Scottish population in the later part of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth seemed to present a paradox. On the one hand, especially after the failed Jacobite uprising of 1745, large parts of the country, especially in the Highlands and Islands,

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appeared depopulated, even deserted, as economic conditions encouraged massive emigration. On the other hand, Scotland seemed overpopulated, suffering under the demands of an underemployed, undernourished population. This situation came about primarily through changing agricultural practices. Scottish population increased during the course of the eighteenth century, as the introduction of potato farming made it possible for the land to support more people than ever before.31 The depopulation of certain areas occurred at the same time, however, as Scottish landlords realized that sheep farming might be a better source of revenue than the rents of impoverished tenants. Thus, the population of places such as the Highlands grew even as available land decreased. As one observer explained in 1818: The system established in many parts of the Highlands, of engrossing farms, turning larger tracts of land into pasture, that were formerly cultivated, and supported the inhabitants; and the consequent depopulation in some parts, and the overpopulation of others, by gentlemen, who, sensible of the values of an economical moral people, and knowing the aversion of the Highlander to leave the land of his fathers, so long as he can remain in it, have allotted their dispossessed tenantry, small portions of uncultivated waste, where they subsist in a state bordering on starvation, and spend their labor on a barren and unthankful soil.32 Michael Hechter has argued that the hallmark of England’s relation to Scotland, Ireland, and Wales during this period was “a situation where the relative value of land surpassed that of labor.”33 Rural people who had hitherto been subsistence farmers were pushed to the edges of large sheep runs, or to the unpredictable fishing trade on the coast. The situation provoked a good deal of nostalgia and pathos, as John Sinclair records in 1825: “What can be more painful, it is said, than to see one person living in, and renting a property on which formerly one hundred inhabitants were reared to the state, and found comfortable subsistence? and to see a few shepherds strolling over the face of a country, which formerly was the nurse of heroes, the bulwark of their native soil, ever ready to brave danger and death in its defense?”34 Brutal clearances and evictions, such as those that took place in Sutherland in the second decade of the nineteenth century, were not the norm; still, the poverty and general misery of the Highlanders increased. They were crowded into poverty, integrated into the urban industrial work force, or absorbed into the circuits of empire.

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The best-known contemporaneous account of this situation is John Sinclair’s Statistical Account of Scotland. This work consisted of information derived from long questionnaires given to all parish ministers of the established church—Sinclair had the approval of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.35 After publishing the Statistical Account in twenty-one volumes between 1791 and 1799, Sinclair published an Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland in 1825. In this piece, he moves from empirical data based on place, as collected in the Statistical Account, to abstractions based on class, eventually organizing the Scottish population into twenty-seven categories based not on location but on profession. These groupings he then further divides into “the productive classes,” “the useful classes, which are indirectly productive,” and “the unproductive or useless classes.”36 Sinclair argues that the distinctions he makes in the Statistical Account are valuable because, Were full information obtained, respecting the numbers and situations of these several classes, leaving the Productive and useful to act and provide for themselves, the whole attention of Government should be directed to the useless or unproductive classes, and the means of enabling as many of them as possible, to earn their subsistence, independent of public aid. If that cannot be effected at home, the system of colonization, on a great scale, ought to be adopted; for retaining the idle, and the criminal in this country, is in the highest degree prejudicial to the public interests.37 Thus, Sinclair moves from local empiricism, to economic abstractions, to assumptions about the portability of persons. In the Whistler’s fate, we can see the logic of this system working, as his criminality renders him unfit for continued residence in Scotland. In his concern with the burden of useless population upon the state, Sinclair joins in the general anxiety about “surplus” or “redundant” population felt during the first decades of the nineteenth century, provoked by peace, potatoes, and Malthus. As Patrick Colquhoun argues, contemplating the end of the Napoleonic wars, “there cannot be a greater calamity than that which exhibits a surplus population, who must be clothed and fed—willing to labour, but without the means of finding employment”: That such a crisis is to be apprehended in this country no person will deny, who has looked accurately into the state of society, in all

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its intricacies and ramifications, and contemplates at the same time the period which has arrived when vast numbers must cease to receive the wages of the state, and when others, whose support depended on the continuance of war, and can no longer find the means of subsistence. In this situation, the multitude become desperate,—criminal delinquency pervades every part of the country; the demand for punishment increases; and the general happiness and comfort of the nation are abridged. The privileges of innocence are everywhere invaded, and the persons and property of the subject are rendered insecure.38 This account shares with Sinclair’s the assumption that the value of persons to their nation or country rests on their productive labor, rather than their local affiliations. Once they cannot contribute in that capacity, they are represented as portable. Thus Sinclair and Colquhoun, along with other writers on this issue, work to create a distinction between participants in the nation, and the units of a (surplus) population. Evidence of the evils of a redundant population seemed most visible to early nineteenth-century commentators with regard to the Irish, as Sinclair points out: [In Ireland] the people, from a scarcity of employment, are obliged to accept wages, on which they and their families cannot subsist; and the result is, such scenes of misery as cannot be contemplated without horror. To use the words of a report recently presented by a Committee of the House of Commons: “It is almost impossible in theory to estimate the mischief attendant on a redundant, a growing, and unemployed population, converting that which ought to be the strength into the peril of a state.” It is obvious, that the tendency of such a population to general misery must be rapid, in proportion to the facility of procuring human sustenance, leading to the boundless multiplication of human beings, satisfied with the lowest conditions of existence.39 Yet concern over the effects of “superabundant” or “redundant” population appears with regard to the Scots as well. Sinclair records that “in the small island of Eigg, also, containing 399 souls, no less than 176 persons

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emigrated between 1788 and 1790; the principle cause of which, we are told, was, the country being so overstocked with people, that the lands were unable to supply them sufficiently with the necessaries of life.”40 The most frequently proposed solution to the problem of surplus population was emigration.41 As the anonymous author of a Memoir on the Necessity of Colonization at the Present Period (1817) explains: “War has, of late years, thinned the ranks of mankind; but, inasmuch as the destructive sword is sheathed, and long it is hoped to remain undrawn, other means of provision and employment must be made out. The most obvious is that of colonizing, and at the present moment, can only be looked to as the means of salvation to the kingdom of Great Britain.”42 And yet the question of emigration forced demographic commentators to confront the tension between the idealized emotional ties between persons and places, and the reality of rural depopulation, urban growth, and increased international mobility. Under the pressure of this ideological contradiction, they searched for rhetorical strategies to resolve the gap between residual ideas of communal identity shaped by locality and emergent ideas based on economic utility. So Patrick Colquhoun, in a treatise of 1818, argues that it is precisely the local character of the Highlanders, “inured to all kinds of agricultural labour, and trained to habits of self-dependence,” that makes them “better calculated than almost any other people to contend with the difficulties of a new settlement.”43 And a writer named Thomas Arnold claims: Nor let it be said, that whilst we so highly extol the system of planting distant settlements, we are undervaluing the sanctity of local affection, or would release mankind from all those ties which bind them to the land in which they were born. We do not propose to destroy this feeling, but to extend its influence. For in every nation many will be found . . . who regard their country with aversion, and behold it only as the witness of their vices, or the scene of their misfortunes. To men like these, emigration to a distant region is like a new state of being . . . and thus by the happy magic of Colonization, all the energies of the intellect and of the heart are made to spring up in a soil, which before was overgrown with sloth and apathy.44 Thus, the “happy magic of Colonization” reconciles “local affection” with emigration. Colquhoun collapses local character into a labor theory of

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value—making Highland virtue a portable commodity—while Arnold puts the motility of attachment to place in the service of empire building. In the story of the Whistler, brief as it is, Scott undermines these utopian schemes for Britain’s surplus population. The Whistler’s removal to the American colonies reveals the radical portability of subaltern bodies under the regime of a labor theory of value. Yet, his “uselessness”—his incapacity to contribute to a productive imperial economy—cannot be ameliorated by the “happy magic of Colonization”: he remains resistant and destructive to the British colonial project until he disappears from view, “leading a conspiracy in which his inhuman master was put to death.”45 Furthermore, despite the novel’s happy ending, this portability is reflected in the Butlers’ story as well. Albeit to a lesser degree, they, too, are enmeshed in a system in which regional affiliations are remade for the benefit of national productivity. If the Whistler’s story provides a way to imagine the emptying out of the Highlands, then Jeanie and Reuben Butler’s residence there fills up those spaces with industry and peace. It would be inaccurate to call their settlement in Roseneath colonization, yet it does figure, in a utopian register, the remaking of “local affections” under the demands of industriousness. The end of the novel has always puzzled critics—its turn to the pastoral idyll often seems an escape from the historical particularities that power the opening sections, and a continuation of Jeanie’s story long after it has lost any dramatic interest.46 It is certainly true, as Jane Millgate and others have pointed out, that the final quarter of the novel obscures the social disturbances of the era in which it is set—notoriously mentioning the revolt of 1745 only as the cause of an increase of criminals in the neighborhood (462).47 Yet in eliding the history of the mid-eighteenth century, Scott is putting the form of the historical novel to good use—providing a utopian narrative in which the “savage” peoples of the Highlands are replaced by peaceable improvement without violence, and a useless population replaced with a productive nation. To this end, he transports the values of the late eighteenth century into the 1730s and 1740s, through the actions of the Duke of Argyle. Kerr is right to say that “Knocktarlitie can best be described as an improver’s pastoral.”48 Effie’s crime has shattered the ties that bound Jeanie and her father to their former home at St. Leonard’s, rendering it “detestable” to them (411). So, when the Duke of Argyle benevolently relocates Jeanie, Davie Deans, and Reuben Butler to Roseneath, his “beneficence” remakes the relationship between persons and places in two significant ways (409). In the manner of clan leaders after 1745, the duke imagines his “immense

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estates” as private property, rather than as the habitation of tacksmen and tenants who owe him fealty.49 He sets out to improve part of this expanse through experimental (and ultimately profitable) agriculture. Also after the manner of later dukes, he decides to import an industrious and energetic Lowlander to carry out his wishes. Davie Deans, in running the cattle farm at Roseneath, will be bound to the duke not by the archaic bonds of clan loyalties, but by a modern system of shared values and economic gain. The second duke thus seems to express proleptically the beliefs of the third duke, who wrote to the Chamberlain of Tiree in 1756, “I’m resolved to keep no tenant but such as will be peaceable and apply to industry.”50 Uncannily reflecting the setup in Knocktarlitie, as it remakes Highland culture in the circuit between Davie’s industry, Jeanie’s virtue, and Reuben’s rational religion, the duke goes on to advise the Chamberlain to “intimate this some sabbath after sermon.”51 This “Highland Arcadia” represents the triumph of improvement (432). Emptied without undue violence of its former occupants, inhabitants themselves imagined as no more native than the Deanses and the Butlers, this particular Highland glen is peaceably repopulated.52 Colonial power relations are successfully banished to the more peripheral spaces in which they belong, and Knocktarlitie becomes part of a Scotland that manages to keep its national identity, even as it maintains a peaceful relationship with England. This reterritorialization can already be glimpsed in a symptomatic moment during their move. Effie has been banished from Scotland for fourteen years, although she can live freely in England, the colonies, or the Continent. Yet, the duke’s lawyer suggests to David Deans that despite this restriction, she might be able to reside with her family at Knocktarlitie, because “the extensive heritable jurisdictions of his Grace excluded the interference of other magistrates with those living on his estates” and because “living on the verge of the Highlands, she might, indeed, be said to be out of Scotland, that is, beyond the bounds of ordinary law and civilisation” (410). Effie’s elopement forecloses this possibility; but in terms of the novel’s plot, Davie’s refusal demonstrates both that his family’s allegiance to the duke has nothing to do with his power to avoid the strictures of national law, and that Knocktarlitie is indeed part of Scotland. If Scotland is still regarded as a legally separate state, as evidenced in the terms of Effie’s banishment, Deans is nonetheless willing to abide by the decrees of the British Crown. In this way, the Butlers morally and politically inhabit a post-1745 world based on economic rather than feudal relations even as they move to Dumbartonshire in the 1730s (heritable jurisdictions were abolished in 1747).

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Yet, the establishment of this “improver’s pastoral” does not entail its isolation from the imperial economy that absorbs the Whistler, although its connections are somewhat subterranean. Significantly, the Butlers’ eventual purchase of their own land in the region is enabled by Effie’s money. Judith Wilt argues that this is the final form taken by female secrecy in the novel: “that secret sister’s wealth is crucial in the last reward of Jeanie’s virtue . . . the full domestication, more, the bourgeoisification, of Jeanie Deans Butler.”53 If we take into account the fact that the Staunton family money comes at least in part from the slave plantations of the Caribbean, however, we can also see the reinvestment of that money in the “improved” economy of the Highlands as proof that such colonial wealth bolstered the economic transformations of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. As Evan Gottlieb puts it, “the illusion of the ‘Highland Acadia’ is made possible only because Jeanie and Reuben are intricately involved in webs of illicit circulation that guarantee their privileged social and economic status.”54 The plot thus eventually replaces the transgressive secrecy surrounding the birth of Effie’s child with the culturally sanctioned obscurity surrounding the fueling of domestic economies with colonial funds. Ultimately, the circulation of bodies finds its mirror in the circulation of money. With this domestication of colonial wealth, Scotland takes its rightful place in the British Empire. Thus, attention to the context of the population debates, with their emphasis on the portability (and imperial profitability) of laboring bodies, draws our attention to the ways in which subalternity was constructed during this period. Rather than being understood as a pure product of colonization, in which subaltern persons are those whose native lands are controlled by others, in this reading, subalternity also is defined by the subject’s susceptibility to being moved, not only from his or her natal place, but perpetually. Those persons with the capacity for productive labor, like the Butlers, are assimilated to the imperial nation through such movement: those irredeemably useless, like the Whistler, move farther and farther away, in a kind of infinite regress. In contrast to many recent readings of Scott, which concentrate on his manipulation of time, I have focused here on questions of space and mobility, and on the way The Heart of Midlothian uses those concepts to distinguish between nation and population.55 And while the “improver’s pastoral” at the end of the novel may work to bind Scotland into an increasingly homogeneous British nation, the unresolved narrative of Effie’s child, who was “never more heard of,” serves to remind us of the ragged, unbound edges of that nation. Recognizing his story, which haunts, or shadows, the

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other plots of The Heart of Midlothian from beginning to end, reveals that the novel is not perfectly aligned with the project of forging a modern, imperial, state.56 For this reason, I want to conclude by briefly considering the role that literature itself played in the discourse surrounding surplus population and emigration during this period. As productive bodies were distinguished from unproductive ones throughout the British Empire, and moved around accordingly, literature functioned, at times, as the residual distillation of the local affiliations that were being lost. As Ruth Livesey explains, “Various forms of literature flourishing in the early 1800s—the national tales popularized by Maria Edgeworth, the village story, antiquarian collections of ballads and folklore, the work of the Lake Poets—were seen to foster a sense of local attachment in readers spread across and beyond Britain during the period. . . . Many writers were feeling towards a new understanding of being in place in what seemed to be a more mobile and fluid social world.57” In this way, literature seems both the product of, and the compensation for, the emptiness left by rural depopulation in Scott’s own representation of Scottish emigration. Discussing the Culloden Papers in the Quarterly Review in 1816, he writes: “In but too many instances, the glens of the Highlands have been drained, not of the superfluity of population, but of the whole of their inhabitants, dispossessed by an unrelenting avarice, which will be one day found to have been as short sighted as it is unjust and selfish. Meanwhile, the Highlands may become the faery ground for romance and poetry, or subjects of experiment for the professors of speculation political and economical.”58 The passage explicitly concerns Scott’s opposition to the clearances then taking place in the Scottish Highlands. In it, however, his engagement with contemporaneous debates about “superfluous” population is also visible, as he registers the paradoxical connection between overpopulation and depopulation in those areas during the early nineteenth century. Yet Scott’s last sentence reveals the odd intimacy between political and literary experimentation in such spaces. Left deserted, the Highland glens might end up inspiring new forms of either economic or literary production. Thus, the literary, as residue, offered up a rhetoric of resistance. The anonymous author of a pamphlet entitled No Emigration. The Testimony of Experience . . . (1828), for example, accuses the proponents of governmentsponsored emigration of having “too much considered the lowest classes as goods and chattels” and ignoring “the horrible misery which must be induced before such families are brought seriously to entertain thoughts of leaving,

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forever, the land of their forefathers, the society of all their living friends, and the graves of all those whom they once knew and loved.”59 This writer relies on poetry to capture the emotional consequences of demographic mobility, beginning his pamphlet with a long epigraph from Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village. This recourse to poetry to recall “local affection” is a strategy he might have borrowed from Sinclair’s own evocative description of the population shift from country to city: If the country should be depopulated, is it easy to replace its inhabitants? Or is it true, that “A bold peasantry, their country’s pride. When once destroyed, can never be supplied?” Whether this revolution in the state of our country will prove a national advantage, and whether a servile, pallid, and sickly race, brought up in the confined air of cotton-mills, with few attachments, and not trained up in virtuous principles, will compensate for our having lost the sturdy sons of our plains and mountains, or will furnish as loyal and virtuous subjects, as we formerly possessed, are questions which it must be left to posterity fully to determine.60 One writer scathingly called such thinking “the economics of Oliver Goldsmith.”61 Yet, the use of poetry here to articulate a political position seems important. As we noted at the end of the previous chapter, Goldsmith’s sentiment has the capacity to serve as a metonymy for all the pathos of the lost connection between people and places long inhabited by their ancestors. It is as if the emotionality of the couplet stands in for the lived experience of “local affection.”62 Ann Rigney makes a compelling case for Scott’s novels “generating prosthetic memory” by providing a “collective point of reference for a multinational readership across and beyond the British Isles.”63 The passage above suggests that such literary prosthetics extended beyond memory to other forms of affect surrounding place. As Scott also implies, once the people are gone from rural Scotland, only poetry will remain. The Heart of Midlothian, written just two years after his 1816 review of the Culloden Papers, might be said to usher in a time when “local affection” could more easily be found in books than in persons—when “faery ground[s] of romance and poetry” would provide a necessary supplement for places emptied out for the needs of empire.

chapter 6

“Islanded in the World” Cultural Memory and Human Mobility in The Last Man

Although The Last Man is named for the ultimate solitary individual, Mary Shelley’s novel devotes much of its energy to representing human aggregates, and to imagining populations. Set in the late twenty-first century, the narrative recounts the extinction of humanity by a virulent global plague that leaves only one man alive. Although it has sometimes been credited with inventing a new category of utopian fiction, science fiction, The Last Man describes few technological innovations; the main sociopolitical difference between its dystopian future and the early nineteenth century is the peaceful replacement of Britain’s monarchy by a republic. Before the plague arrives, the novel is primarily concerned with the differing political beliefs of the republican Adrian, the earl of Windsor (often thought to be based on Percy Shelley), and the autocratic Lord Raymond (often thought to be based on Byron, especially since the character leaves England to fight in Greece and the Near East). Because of its resemblance to Mary Shelley’s world and because it was written after the deaths of Percy Shelley, Byron, and others in her circle, The Last Man has often been read as a personal memoir written in the key of apocalypse.1 Yet the novel was also part of a vogue for last-man narratives in the first decades of the nineteenth century, which included a novel translated from French called The Last Man; or, Omergarus and Syderia, a Romance in Futurity (1806) and Byron’s poem “Darkness” (1816).2 Shelley’s work is unlike many of these, however, in that her title is something of a misnomer. The

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loneliness of the last man takes up a bare twenty pages of the almost fivehundred-page narrative; the rest are concerned with what Shelley calls “the silver net of love and civilization.”3 As it recounts the extinction of humanity, the novel necessarily describes the gradual unraveling of that net. The plague exerts extreme pressure on the idea of national community in particular, by forcing an evaluation of the number of people needed to continue a nation as a living community. Furthermore, it increases human mobility, severing all local attachments as its survivors seek safety. By considering these issues, The Last Man engages with contemporary sociopolitical debates and reflects on the consequences of those debates for literary production and readership. To illustrate this engagement and reflection, I introduce a piece of neglected historical context for the novel: the fierce debates over emigration, especially state-aided emigration, that took place during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Although emigration was seen to be a promising cure for the ills of overpopulation, its supporters, as well as its opponents, worried about the strain it would put on cultural and national community, two categories that did not necessarily overlap. The debates examined the extent to which communities were constituted by the territory they inhabited and the degree to which they were based on customs and traditions. This led to arguments over the difference between emigrants and exiles: between people still linked to the society they left and those cut off irrevocably from it. How far could someone travel from his or her native environment, it was asked, and still retain a connection to it? Shelley’s novel aligns itself, albeit in a strikingly pessimistic way, with those who opposed any encouragement of emigration. The Last Man takes up the issues raised by the emigration debates in terms of national and cultural community, using plague as a way to trigger and consider the movement of vast numbers of people. What is at stake is the relation between the abstractions of nation and culture and empirical measurements of population. Published in 1826, the novel appeared in the midst of widespread speculation about the value of such measurements in ascertaining the state of a society. As Mary Poovey has demonstrated, before 1800 “Britons manifested a pervasive indifference to numerical information, which seemed irrelevant to what many people considered ‘truth’ or ‘value.’ ”4 By the second or third decade of the nineteenth century, however, this indifference was challenged by what Ian Hacking calls an “avalanche of printed numbers.” Between 1800 and 1830, Thomas Malthus’s theories of population, in particular, aroused great controversy over the value of numbers in revealing

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truths about human society.5 Some scholars argue that in the intersection of this context and Shelley’s novel “we can start to see a Foucauldian biopolitics of population”: “a . . . seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.”6 I would agree with Hilary Strang that a Foucauldian idea of “ ‘life’ is central to the thought experiment the novel performs on the emergent biopolitical democracy.”7 But in this chapter, as throughout this book, I’m most concerned with the ragged margins of the “mass” defined as a population—and with the way human mobility subverts or undermines experiments of enumeration and aggregation. The peculiar kind of mobility involved in emigration was a crucial challenge to the “massifying” impulses of biopolitics, which both encouraged such large-scale movement and found it difficult to control. It was an important instance of the way politicians and commentators tried to reach concrete solutions to social problems that were evidenced by empirical measurements. Shelley’s novel engages with this issue by interrogating the extent to which absolute numbers of persons undergird the possibility of culture: Can there be a nation without citizens? Can cultural history be sustained in a single memory? Finally, bringing these questions about population back to its own status as a novel, The Last Man asks, can books exist without readers?

Nation From its first paragraph, The Last Man declares its interest in the fate of national communities in a world where population is reckoned globally. Its protagonist, Lionel Verney, introduces himself by saying: “I am the native of a sea-surrounded nook, a cloud-enshadowed land, which, when the surface of the globe, with its shoreless ocean and trackless continents, presents itself to my mind, appears only as an inconsiderable speck in the immense whole; and yet, when balanced in the scale of mental power, far out-weighed countries of larger extent and more numerous population” (9). At the outset, then, Verney imagines the world in its entirety as an “immense” and mostly “trackless” expanse, in which national boundaries all but disappear.8 At the same time, he recognizes that sheer numbers of persons, as well as territory, can determine the visibility and power of a country. Yet he concludes that a nation like England is constituted in “man’s mind alone” (9), what Benedict Anderson would call an “imagined community.”9 This first paragraph, then,

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provides two ways of registering the existence of nations: in terms of empirical measurements, such as territory and population, and in terms of “mental power,” the individual or collective capacity to imagine a nation. Already in some tension with each other, these two modes of representation are forced further apart by the plague. As the epidemic comes to England, The Last Man uses the imaginative force of mental power and empirical measurements to convey the state of the nation. Searching for appropriate figures, Verney moves between two kinds of metaphor: personifying England as a human body and comparing it to the inanimate spaces of a tomb or a grave. As the plague eradicates the need for trade, for example, he notes that “the great heart of mighty Britain was pulseless” (261). As he leaves, however, he addresses Britain as the “tomb of Idris [his wife] . . . Grave in which my heart lies sepulchred” (378). The two figures come head to head in lines from Macbeth—“Alas, poor country; / Almost afraid to know itself ! It cannot / Be called our mother, but our grave”— which make a London audience feel “a shudder like the swift passing of an electric shock” (282). This opposition between two types of metaphor reveals the difficulty in deciding the relative importance of persons and places in constituting a nation. On the one hand, the term England is so powerful, and names so many indefinable elements, that it is best represented as a person. This figuration works by imagining England as a single entity that stands for a human aggregate; when that population dips below a certain level, the nation becomes a corpse. On the other hand, the novel holds out the possibility that England merely names the space that a nation inhabits. Once the number of living persons there decreases, the space becomes a grave. The doubled figurative potential of the nation’s name, as personification and location, is underlined when Verney surveys its deserted landscape and remarks, “England remained, though England was dead” (363). In both uses of the word, however, the rhetoric that describes a nation seems closely tied to the population of that nation. The figure of the corpse or the grave manages the relation between nation and population by abstracting the multiplicity of people into a singularity: one body, one place. Yet Verney also tries to represent the condition of England in language more sensitive to the behavior of human aggregates under the onslaught of the plague. Realizing that the nation lives as long as it is inhabited by a certain number of people, he enthusiastically joins in his friend and leader Adrian’s plans “to congregate in masses what remained of the population: for he possessed the conviction that it was only through the benevolent and social virtues that any safety was

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to be hoped for the remnant of mankind” (307). This safety proves illusory; the plague soon decreases the number of Britons below the level at which they can maintain a coherent society.10 Using a different metaphor, this time an analogy for multiplicity, to describe that national death, Verney asks: “Have any of you, my readers, observed the ruins of an anthill immediately after its destruction? At first it appears entirely deserted of its former inhabitants; in a little time you see an ant struggling through the upturned mould; they reappear by twos and threes, running hither and thither in search of their lost companions. Such were we upon earth, wondering aghast at the effects of pestilence” (316–17). Soon he makes even clearer the importance of numbers not only to national coherence but also to human identity itself: “Man existed by twos and threes; man, the individual who might sleep, and wake, and perform the animal functions; but man, in himself weak, yet more powerful in congregated numbers than wind or ocean: man the queller of elements, the lord of created nature, the peer of demi-gods, existed no longer” (320). The plague underlines the difference between two meanings of the word “man,” as it has with the word “England.” “Man, the individual” is simply another animal; man “the lord of created nature” can only exist in numbers larger than three. It turns out that the ability to congregate, to form a unified whole of belief and purpose, is what has long characterized humanity; depopulation has turned the remnant of humanity into an aggregate, numbers without purpose or direction.11 In this section of the novel, then, nation and population are mutually defined. Without sufficient numbers, the nation becomes a dead body or space; without the governing idea of a nation, human interaction is reduced to the “animal functions” of doomed ants. Verney bemoans this interdependence in an elegiac apostrophe: “England, late birth-place of excellence and school of the wise, thy children are gone, thy glory faded!” Other nations, he explains, are known for their natural resources—American sugar, or the spices of the East—but England was famous for “thy children, their unwearied industry and lofty inspiration. They are gone, and thou goest with them the oft trodden path that leads to oblivion” (324). In this address, the idea of England is detached from its territory and environment and linked firmly to its inhabitants, its population. Yet, when the last survivors decide to leave England, Verney revises the figure, decouples population from nation, and allows the survivors to retain their sense of being a living community by jettisoning their ties to the nation. “Let us go!” he says, “England is in her shroud,—we may not enchain ourselves to a corpse. Let us go—the world is

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our country now. . . . The world is vast, and England, though her many fields and wide spread woods seem interminable, is but a small part of her” (326). England now becomes a grave for England’s corpse. By locating England’s mortality in her own territory, Verney raises the possibility that human community can survive the death of the nation, that it might be remade on a different principle in a different place. Strikingly, at this point in the narrative, he uses a number rather than a metaphor to designate this group. Adrian “lead[s] forth from their native country, the numbered remnant of the English nation. . . . Our numbers amounted to not quite two thousand persons” (330). The empirical and figurative descriptions of the nation disengage; the “numbers” move on, while England becomes a “depopulate” “corpse” (377).

Mobility The plague makes population, as a concept separable from nation or culture, a visible issue. As the nemesis of population, the plague reveals numbers themselves to be something worth conserving. The departure of the last two thousand people from England is only the most poignant instance of the way the plague increases human mobility. Long before this exodus, the novel is haunted by the inefficacy of political and corporeal boundaries and by the tenuousness of local attachments. The disease is the novel’s most compelling device for imagining a world in which no culture or community can remain isolated from others. Indeed, Shelley’s novel has most interested scholars recently for the way its concerns about the global spread of disease adumbrate our own.12 When the disease assumes global proportions, however, it produces another kind of international circulation, as “the spirit of emigration [creeps] in among the few survivors” (325). “The English, whether travelers or residents, came pouring in one great revulsive stream, back on their own country” (235). This immigration into England takes a sinister turn as the inhabitants of Britain’s former colonies return to England in search of safety from the plague. Reversing the trail of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century emigration, North Americans come to Ireland, then to Scotland, and finally begin to encroach on England. Their lawless spirit instigated them to violence . . . the ruin complete in one place, they removed their locust visitation to another. When

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unopposed they spread their ravages wide; in cases of danger they clustered, and by dint of numbers overthrew their weak and despairing foes. They came from the east and the north, and directed their course without apparent motive, but unanimously towards our unhappy metropolis. . . . They swept the country like a conquering army, burning—laying waste—murdering. The lower and vagabond English joined with them. . . . They talked of taking London, conquering England—calling to mind the long detail of injuries which had for many years been forgotten. (298) The invaders are stopped well before they achieve this goal, but the incident illustrates the novel’s sense that the plague exacerbates the conflicts between classes and ethnic groups and renders the geographic boundaries between them permeable. As we have already seen, the depopulating attack of the plague forces the novel to explore the discourse of populations, to search for a vocabulary for the sounds and movements of human aggregates. Again the narrative describes the social ruin wrought by the plague with a metaphor of multiplicity drawn from the insect world; these emigrants from plague are a “locust visitation.” This highly charged rhetoric enters a hyperbolic and racist register as it singles out the Irish, whose “disorganized multitudes” are “collected in unnatural numbers” (298)—the English dread “their disorderly clamour, the barbarian shouts, the untimed step of thousands coming in disarray” (300). As the plague makes the barriers between nations hypersensitive and vulnerable, societies lose their order, their rhythms, their civilization—their numbers become “unnatural.” Thus, this exaggerated mobility of what Shelley calls “emigrants” (296) puts as much pressure on the idea of the nation as does depopulation, by throwing a harsh light on the criteria by which persons are allowed entrance into a community. Significantly, this conflict is halted when a lone invader dies in the English leader Adrian’s arms. Echoing the narrative’s search for a unitary figure to represent the nation, “the fate of the world seem[s] bound up in the death of this single man” (303). Once the unruly aggregate can be understood in terms of a singularity, an ideal of human community is restored; “on either side the band threw down their arms . . . while a gush of love and deepest amity filled every heart” (303). Many critics note that this episode registers the novel’s defensive consciousness of England’s place in an expanding colonial economy.13 I would point to a more specific context as well. This vision of a superabundant,

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desperate, and destructive population entering and destroying English culture could have been drawn directly from the schemes for state-sponsored emigration that began to appear near 1800 and continued to appear until about 1830. This period marks out a specific phase in British emigration policy; as one historian says, “At an earlier time [such projects] would have been considered harmful; subsequently they were believed to have been ineffective.”14 From the beginning of the nineteenth century, public consciousness of “surplus population” increased, focused on the same groups that Shelley pinpoints: the Irish, the Scottish, and the English poor. Here were laborers without jobs, “superfluous” multitudes produced by the return of war veterans, by the clearing of land in Scotland, by the development of potato farming in Ireland, and by the advent of new industrial methods everywhere—a “problem” given a theoretical framework in Malthus’s writings. At first, private schemes appeared for transforming this “useless” population into a force that could contribute to national productivity. These plans invariably tied emigration to the project of English colonial expansion. For example, the Scottish landowner Thomas Douglas, Earl of Selkirk, funded the emigration of small groups of Highlanders to Nova Scotia in 1804 and to Manitoba in 1812. He claimed that this project “show[ed] the utility that may be derived from a class of people who have hitherto been lost to their native country. . . . Though of little service as manufacturers, it proves that they may be made excellent colonists.”15 Enthusiasm for emigration increased in the next decades.16 In 1814 Patrick Colquhoun celebrated English colonization, since it meant that “the means exist whereby ample provisions can be made for all classes of her redundant population, and that too in a manner which may be rendered not only profitable, but perfectly satisfactory to the individuals themselves.”17 After Waterloo, deteriorating economic conditions gave such schemes a greater urgency, and pilot programs of governmentsubsidized emigration from Ireland to Canada and South Africa were put into practice in 1823 and 1824. The debates such schemes provoked culminated in a series of reports in 1827 and 1828 from a parliamentary committee under the directorship of Byron’s cousin Wilmot Horton.18 By the beginning of the nineteenth century, emigration had generally come to be considered an individual right. Shelley’s father, William Godwin, for example, characterizes it as voluntary and beneficial in his final retort to Malthus, Of Population (1820): “One of the blessings indispensable to the welfare of man in society, is the prerogative he shall possess of removing himself from the yoke of a government that, for whatever reason, has become

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unbearable to him.”19 While Godwin argues for man’s right to renounce his nation, other writers on the issue sought to harness this kind of discontented “industry” for the state. The Earl of Selkirk, for example, represented emigration as a “salutary drain” of Highlanders “infected with deep and permanent seeds of every angry passion,” who would be given productive labor elsewhere.20 Like the seventeenth-century politicians we discussed in Chapter 1, these parliamentary committees explored the possibility that unemployed laborers, with their families, might be helped by the government to settle “empty” colonial land for Britain in South Africa and Canada. The committee’s opinions, and those of earlier commentators on the issue, drew on a labor theory of value. The utility of persons and their value to the nation are based on their ability to find productive labor and use the wages from that labor to pay their rent and other expenses. If they cannot, they are understood to be useless, and their connection to the nation is rendered tenuous, if it is not severed. Surplus population, thus, is population that can produce no surplus value for the state. By offering employment to such persons, emigration promises to resuture them to that entity; it is the “means by which this surplus population can be rendered useful to themselves and their country, by giving their industry a new and beneficent direction.”21 Paradoxically, then, the distance emigrants travel ties them more firmly to the nation they left. As Colquhoun optimistically explains: “The great national family of the United Kingdom is not confined to the British Isles.—It extends to all His Majesty’s subjects in every colony and dependency of the British Crown—and the productive labor of this extensive family is all more or less beneficial to the Empire at large, and particularly to the parent state, who possesses the monopoly of supplies of her produce and manufactures, and also of the whole exportable produce of the colonies received in turn.”22 This vocabulary of organized flow and monopoly, channeled through the embodying metaphor of a family, articulates a mercantilist ideal of population as a resource to be managed by the state. The conviction that persons should be valued in terms of their labor power therefore combines with an interest in the portability of their labor to produce a particular idea of national community. Membership in the nation is ensured by both industry and mobility. The parliamentary committees of 1827 and 1828 continued this concern for the rational distribution of labor over the British Empire. Their anxiety about the problem of surplus population was driven by the theories of Malthus, particularly his conviction that, unless checked, population would continue to grow exponentially, eventually outstripping

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food supplies. Malthus, an important witness for the 1827 committee, declared redundant laborers “a tax upon the community.”23 The committee took these views to support the project of subsidized emigration as a handy way of removing such laborers and so increasing national wealth. Indeed, the worst consequence of the surplus population crisis, the committee predicted, would be an uncontrolled flow of labor across territorial boundaries. The Third Report from the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom stated in 1827: Unless an early diversion be provided by Emigration to check the increasing irruption of the pauper population of Ireland, which now pours itself into Scotland and England with alarming rapidity, no other result can be contemplated, than the permanent deterioration of the English and Scottish labourer. . . . The question, whether an extensive plan of Emigration shall or shall not be adopted, appears to your committee to resolve itself into a single point, Whether the wheat-fed population of Great Britain shall or shall not be supplanted by the potato-fed population of Ireland; Whether Great Britain, in reference to the conditions of her lower orders, shall or shall not progressively become what Ireland is at the present moment.24 The figuration of population as a stream of persons susceptible to direction recurs here. The Irish are imaged as a liquid force that “pours itself” into spaces where it is not wanted, erupting inappropriately. Through such language, the committee drives home its point that population mobility without state direction threatens to destroy cultural boundaries, blurring the socioeconomic distinctions between England and Ireland. This is one of the anxieties played out in The Last Man, most explicitly in its description of the unwanted Irish and Scottish immigrants discussed above. Yet if the plague-driven invasion foregrounds the destructive effect of “unnatural numbers” on national integrity, most of the novel takes up the issue from the opposite perspective. That is, while the early nineteenthcentury debates about the benefits of emigration for the problems of surplus population asked whether having too many people might destroy national identity, Shelley’s novel asks whether the nation can sustain itself with too few people or even none at all. It takes to a terrifying conclusion the latent

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suggestion of pro-emigration literature that England might be better off purified of all disruptive elements. Both approaches to the problem of the relation between nation and population, however, converge on the issue of mobility. While proponents of emigration hope that a properly directed population stream (toward the colonies) will strengthen the nation, The Last Man provides a more radical and more pessimistic account of human mobility. The novel takes a paradigmatic problem of its time to an abstract and apocalyptic extreme. While Malthus theorized that disease was one of the natural checks on population growth, Shelley transforms disease into an “ocean of death” that absorbs the flood of human population (412). The initial invasion results from enforced and desperate mobility in the barbarians of the New World, in the Celtic fringe, and in the poor, but subsequent developments in the novel show that European nations are equally mobile. The most striking example of such generalized, involuntary mobility occurs when the last English survivors of the plague rather surprisingly renounce any attachment to the memories embedded in the depopulated landscape of England and make a “plan of emigration” (325). This departure shatters the novel’s most sustained and settled community, one based on collective memory, love of place, and shared cultural ideals. Early in the narrative, Lionel, his wife, Idris, her brother, Adrian, Lionel’s sister, Perdita, her husband, Raymond, the Lord Protector of England, and their children all gather to devote their lives to intellectual and familial pursuits in Windsor Forest and Windsor Castle: “Years passed thus,—even years. Each month brought forth its successor, each year like to that gone by” (92). Founded on domestic and cultural pleasures rather than on ancient traditions or collective industry, this tiny community nonetheless represents a national idyll. If Londoners are distraught ants after the onslaught of the plague, Windsor’s inhabitants before its appearance are as “gay as summer insects” (90). The community’s capacity to persist for years without alteration allows it to build a sense of collective, rooted, memory. Furthermore, its location recalls Alexander Pope’s invocation of the site in his great patriotic poem of 1713: “Thy Forests, Windsor! And thy green Retreats, / At once the Monarch’s and the Muse’s Seats, / Invite my Lays” (1–3).25 Even in the postmonarchical world of The Last Man, the “green retreats” of the forest nurture both government and culture. This community is first disrupted by the departure and deaths of Raymond and Perdita. Then the triumph of the plague completely uproots it. The motives for the group’s departure are mixed. In part, the group leaves to

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seek safety from the plague; in part, they go to assuage their hopelessness, seeking to “amuse for a time [their] despair” (325). Verney explains their sad difference from previous emigrants: To leave the country of our fathers, made holy by their graves!—We could not feel even as a voluntary exile of old, who might for pleasure or convenience forsake his native soil; though thousands of miles might divide him, England was still part of him, as he of her. He heard of the passing events of the day; he knew that if he returned, and resumed his place in society, the entrance was still open, and it required but the will, to surround himself once more with the associations and habits of boyhood. Not so with us, the remnant. We left none to represent us, none to repeople the desart land, and the name of England died when we left her. (325–26) Figuring this departure as involuntary, Verney reiterates the importance of community and communication to national identity. As we have seen Goldsmith do, Shelley here claims, that for England to remain part of the voluntary exile, not only must he be able to learn of events in his homeland, but he must also be remembered, “represented,” by those he left behind. These things cannot happen for the departing plague survivors; without continuous habitation of the place they left, the emigrants cannot carry the idea of the nation with them. The human body may be portable, but the nation is not. In this assertion, The Last Man seems to align itself with opponents to emigration. Much of this imagery, including the poignancy of leaving ancestral graves and nostalgia for the associations of childhood, might have been taken from the rhetoric denouncing government support for emigration. As one opponent of the parliamentary committee writes, “Those who can talk lightly” of emigration “but little consider . . . the horrible misery which must be induced before such families are seriously to entertain thoughts of leaving, forever, the land of their forefathers, the society of all their living friends, and the graves of all those whom they once knew and loved.”26 To illustrate this misery, he uses the poignant couplets of Goldsmith’s “The Deserted Village” as an epigraph, revealing the poem’s power as an anti-emigration work: Good Heaven! What sorrows gloomed that parting day, That called them from their native walks away; When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,

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Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last, And took a long farewell, and wished in vain For seats like these beyond the western main. (363–68) Another commentator rejects the promise that emigrants will be more firmly attached to the “national family” by their departure and asserts, “By those who support the system it has been assented that the appalling number of two millions of our fellow creatures should be exiled forever.”27 One writer takes this figuration of the emigrant as an involuntary exile even further, comparing the immigrant in North America with William Cowper’s vision of Alexander Selkirk, a model for Robinson Crusoe: Oh, Solitude! Where are the charms Which sages have found in thy face, Better to dwell in the midst of alarms Than reign in this horrible place.28 In these views, emigrants do not become a productive part of a larger, imperial community through their departure. Instead, they are forced into a profound solitude, cut off from the past and future of their original community. Like F. B. Head’s pamphlet, The Last Man furthers its critique of the consequences of global mobility through reference to one of the most important Enlightenment figures for the success and value of English expansion across the globe: Robinson Crusoe, who unlike Cowper’s Selkirk turns his solitude into productive labor and eventually into a kind of community. After he becomes the last man, Verney parses out an explicit meditation on the differences between himself and Defoe’s hero.29 It begins, “We had both been thrown companionless—he on the shore of a desolate island: I on that of a desolate world” (448). In this comparison, the novel uses the triumph of the plague to undermine the promise of productive labor to remake places and persons as emigrants journey out from England. Verney is “rich in the so-called goods of life”; Crusoe is “forced to toil in the acquirement of every necessary.” At first, freedom from labor seems the only good thing about Verney’s condition. But it hardly compensates for what Crusoe has. Verney continues, “Yet he was far happier than I: for he could hope, nor hope in vain—the destined vessel at last arrived, to bear him to countrymen and kindred, where the events of his solitude became a fireside tale. To none

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could I ever relate the story of my adversity; no hope had I” (448). By their contiguity in Verney’s thought process, Crusoe’s labor seems connected to Crusoe’s ultimate reunion with a larger community—his work, his survival, has a purpose. Verney’s idleness becomes an important element of his more drastic isolation: no amount of productive labor will ever change his condition. Here again we see the importance of communication and community to the value and legibility of human experience. Crusoe’s narrative will become a “fireside tale” for his “countrymen and kindred,” while Verney’s story will never be heard. So strong is his need for human contact that Verney declares, “The wild and cruel Caribbee, the merciless Cannibal . . . would have been to me a beloved companion.” As it is, he fears, “Shall I wake, and speak to none, pass the interminable hours, my soul islanded in the world, a solitary point, surrounded by a vacuum?” (449). Verney’s physical and psychic islanding sharply contrasts with two geographic islands: the “barren island” of England, whose name died when he left her (412), and Crusoe’s island, which reiterates the productive fiction that an isolated and distant individual can remain bound to a nation through fruitful labor and successful narration. As if in refutation of contemporary schemes to move people about for the betterment of empire, Shelley describes a peripatetic world in which no amount of productive labor will alter the fate of humanity. The Last Man’s exploration of the futility of human labor is characteristic of the last-man narratives of the early nineteenth century. Such narratives either show humanity’s destructive exhaustion of the world’s resources or posit that no amount of human labor and ingenuity can change the downward trajectory of the environment. One of The Last Man’s antecedents, a French novel by Jean-Baptiste Grainville, describes a future in which humanity has almost completely died out through infertility.30 Although the novel eventually transforms this predicament into a contest between secular and divine forces, it initially ascribes the death of humanity to the overtaxing of the earth’s resources: “The earth’s duration has exceeded the period marked by Nature, and those whom she has nourished, her own children, loaded with her rich gifts, have proved her parricides. They have hastily drawn from her bowels the very principles of life. Men, in reaping too much, have lavished away their strength and lost it.”31 Thus, human labor, instead of transforming the world for the better, has contributed to its destruction. Byron’s “Darkness” gives another grim account of the inefficacy of labor, this time in a universe subjected to a natural apocalypse. The poem describes a world in

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which “the bright sun was extinguished” (2). Faced with such conditions, humanity must expend its energy destroying everything it has produced: And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones, The palaces of crowned kings—the huts, The habitations of all things which dwell, Were burnt for beacons. (10–13) This enormous deconstructive labor is useless, however; darkness prevails.32 In Thomas Campbell’s poem “The Last Man” (1823), the sun also dies, even though beneath [it] man put forth His pomp, his pride, his skill; And arts that made fire, flood, and earth, The vassals of his will. (31–34)33 In contrast to these apocalyptic narratives, Shelley describes a future in which nature flourishes while humanity is destroyed. The very abundance of resources in The Last Man likewise demonstrates the futility of human labor in forestalling extinction.34 By bringing material on contemporary debates about emigration to bear on my discussion of Shelley’s novel and other lastman narratives, I suggest that these questions about the efficacy of labor are related to a growing consciousness of increased human mobility and its cultural consequences. The texts play out a historically specific anxiety about the consequences of industry’s failure to keep the “silver net” of society tightly woven over vast distances. Whereas Robinson Crusoe travels to America and returns to a Europe in which his labor has meaning and economic value, Grainville’s Omegarus journeys to Brazil to find Syderia (the last fertile woman), only to return to Europe and discover that any children from their union will contradict God’s plan for the apocalypse. Although Shelley’s The Last Man seems to side with those who opposed government encouragement for emigration, the novel depicts a world where mobility is inevitable and cannot be delimited to the superfluous and unproductive few. Even after he becomes the last man, Verney dedicates himself to perpetual travel. “A desire of wandering came upon me,” he says. “A solitary being is by instinct a wanderer” (453, 468).

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Memory Verney’s statement that “the name of England died when we left her” casts his departure as a tragedy of signification. Verney becomes a kind of antiAdam: not a powerful namer but a passive witness to global unnaming. Silencing an already fractured word, he asserts that England will no longer designate a nation once the plague survivors have left. The concept captures his imagination, and he repeats it: “we had quitted England—England no more; for without her children what name could that barren island claim?” (412). This formulation posits the nation as a linguistic construction; the nation makes a claim on human voices to name it—without those voices it reverts to being a piece of barren ground. The diminishing power of any single human voice as humanity disappears haunts the novel and emphasizes the importance of communication to human identity. As the survivors leave England, Verney imagines them dying “one by one, till the last man should remain in a voiceless, empty world.” The lament is poignant but odd; while he explicitly describes the absence of other voices in the world, he implicitly discounts his own voice: the last man will be voiceless, because he has no interlocutors. This prediction comes to pass; once alone, Verney bemoans “the vast annihilation that has swallowed all things—the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth” (267). When he tries to speak, he finds that “my voice, unused now to utter sound, comes strangely on my ears” (467). The diminishing number of human voices first erases the identity of the nation and finally threatens to render the last individual unrecognizable to himself.35 The novel’s persistent interest not simply in voice but also in community and audience underlines the way that most narratives about human extinction concern cultural memory—in the peculiar sense that they are written in the face of the extinction of memory. As many readers of the novel have noted, a story by the last man by definition has no audience: the events of Verney’s solitude will never become a fireside tale.36 When he writes that story, he can only address it to a community that has already disappeared, “the illustrious dead” (466). Tales of the last man must therefore produce elaborate narrative schemes to explain how the story is being transmitted to the reader. Many, like “Darkness,” are presented as “a dream, which was not at all a dream” (1). Shelley’s novel, in contrast, begins with an account of the narrator’s discovery, in Naples, of sybilline leaves bearing the history of the last man. Grainville’s The Last Man puts the problem more directly. As it begins, its narrator is waylaid by the “spirit of futurity,” who justifies his need

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to transmit the story by saying, “The last man will not have any posterity to know and admire him. I wish before his birth that he may live in memory.”37 These openings present the problem of the last man as the transmission of memory through time—a circuit that in this case must run backward. Placed in relation to the emigration debates and to the focus on human movement in Shelley’s novel, such narratives can be understood as being about the persistence of memory across space as well. Another moment from Grainville, in which a minor character, Ormus, decides to leave his home to accompany some of the other survivors, illustrates this issue: “ ‘Before I quit this place [he says], suffer me to engrave on these walls, “Here dwelt Ormus, contented!” But no,’ replied he, much affected, ‘that care is useless: no one will ever visit this spot, to read these characters. O cherished abode! Thou wilt no longer behold the face of man, nor hear his voice!’ As he said these words, he shed tears, and began his journey.”38 Once people remove themselves permanently from a place, writing on monuments becomes a useless form of cultural memory. Other literature of Shelley’s day is full of images of memorials that can transmit their meaning over vast expanses of time. Godwin, in his Essay on Sepulchres (1809), argues for the creation of a map of the “monuments of eminent men”: then “though cities were demolished, and empires overthrown . . . by means of [this map], at the greatest distance of time, everything that was most sacred might be restored, and the calamity which had swallowed up whole generations of men, might be obliterated as it had never been.”39 The kind of radical and universal human mobility posited by Grainville’s and Shelley’s novels precludes this method of reconstituting community. Monuments, even ancestral graves, cease to have meaning if no human eye will look on them again. Shelley’s The Last Man suggests that the hypermobility provoked by the plague destroys not only the future of a community but also its past, that it undermines cultural memory. This is adumbrated early in the novel, when Verney realizes that in a plague-ridden world, “one living beggar had become worth more than a national peerage of dead lords—alas the day!—than of dead heroes, patriots or men of genius” (293). The exaggerated value that the epidemic places on life in the present produces an unexpected equality among humankind.40 It also has the unexpected side effect of devaluing the past. Thus, depopulation undermines the importance of history, particularly national history: “We saw depart all hope of retrieving our ancient state—all expectation, except the feeble one of saving our individual lives from the wreck of the past” (412). In their struggle to survive, people dissociate themselves

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from a continuous culture, from the memory of its “ancient state.” They must journey forth into the world without nation and without history. This kind of cultural dissolution echoes the fears of nineteenth-century proponents of emigration. The emigration projects of the Earl of Selkirk were inspired, for example, by his finding “that the Highlanders were dispersing to a variety of situations, in a foreign land, where they were lost not only to their native country, but to themselves as a separate people.”41 His strategy of encouraging families and villages to emigrate together is fueled by the hope “that a portion of their antient spirit might be preserved among the Highlanders in the New World.”42 The kind of dispersal Shelley imagines, however, since it leaves only one man alive, obviates this possibility for preserving culture. At times it seems as if books will take the place of a living, continuous community as the repository of cultural memory for the last man. For a while, Verney is able to understand and legitimate his experience of solitude amid the ruined splendor of Rome by reference to his memories of novels: not only Robinson Crusoe but also Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Madame de Stae¨l’s Corinne (462).43 Indeed, Rome, with its massive buildings, galleries, and libraries, represents his last refuge from cultural oblivion, a place where “not . . . everything [is] forgetful of man; trampling on his memory” (460). Here Verney composes his own narrative, “a monument to the existence of Verney, the Last Man” (466), to stand among the other monuments of the decaying city. Yet as soon as he stops reading his writing, the futility of this monument too asserts itself (467).44 Still, the powerful consolation of books ensures that Verney continues to be a reader even after he has ceased to be a writer. He sets off on his final voyage out from Rome accompanied not only by the last dog, but also by volumes of Homer and Shakespeare, and he imagines “the libraries of the world . . . thrown open” to him (469). In this tableau of the smallest possible reading public, Shelley holds out the possibility of continuing cultural memory, of books as a kind of portable monument, at least as long as the last man lives. Yet even if Verney can maintain his connection to the literary past, Shelley’s plague threatens to limit narratives of the present. When he first sees a victim of the disease, Verney explains that the spectacle exceeds the paradigms of past literature: “The pictures drawn in these books [A Journal of the Plague Year and Arthur Mervyn] were so vivid, that we seemed to have experienced the results depicted in them. But cold were the sensations excited by words, burning though they were, and describing the death and misery of thousands, compared with what I felt in looking on the corpse of this unhappy stranger.

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This indeed was the plague” (259). Significantly, Verney devalues the cold sensations of literary identification even as he places the plague in a generic context. He hoped to understand the plague through novels about “the death and misery of thousands” but now realizes that experience trumps what he thought he gained from books. In this allusion, The Last Man self-consciously signals both its participation in a literary tradition and its departure from that tradition. In the novels Verney mentions, the failure of language in the face of the multiplicity of suffering is a recurrent trope. Defoe’s famous description of a plague pit, discussed in Chapter 2, concludes with this apology: “This may serve a little to describe the dreadful Condition of that Day, tho’ it is impossible to say any Thing that is able to give a true Idea of it to those who did not see it, other than this; that it was indeed very, very, very dreadful, and such as no Tongue can express.”45 Similarly, Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, confined to a hospital during Philadelphia’s yellow fever epidemic of 1793, exclaims, “O! how poor are the conceptions which are formed, by the fortunate few, of the sufferings to which millions of their fellow creatures are condemned.”46 In both novels, narrative finds its limit in the face of aggregates of suffering. Shelley’s novel tries in a different way to solve the problem of representing suffering: it distills the misery into a single figure—an unhappy stranger of whose individual body Verney can say, “This indeed was the plague.” This attempt to find a singularity to stand in for an aggregate echoes Verney’s search for an adequate singular rhetorical figure for the nation and his search for the resolution of the invasion crisis in the death of one man. Indeed, the rhetorical strategy of using one to represent many is The Last Man’s crucial, experimental departure from the genre of plague novels, one that it literalizes by imagining that the tradition of Western humanism might be maintained in the memory of a solitary individual. Yet this representational strategy produces its own problems. As we have already seen, in a mobile world, populations resist representation by any single figure for a nation, and, at the opposite extreme, a solitary man is a voiceless man. When he becomes the last man, that ultimate example of singularity, Verney recognizes his illegibility: “My person, with its human powers and features, seems to me a monstrous excrescence of nature. How express in human language a woe human being until this hour never knew! How give intelligible expression to a pang none but I could ever understand!” (467). His solitude brings him to the edge of narrative’s capacity to preserve and communicate experience. These passages press the point that language in the novel is predicated on communication—with none to listen to him,

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the last man is voiceless. The images of Rome in Corinne and Radcliffe’s Udolfo provided an important structure for travelers’ experience in the early nineteenth century, and Verney takes comfort in their accounts while he still sees what they describe.47 Once his story moves beyond the reach of such mutual understanding, it loses its intelligibility. The creature in Frankenstein is monstrous because society deems him so; Verney is monstrous because society has disappeared around him. Although the device of the Sybil’s prophecy brings Verney’s story from the future into Shelley’s present, his account is “unintelligible” and must be given “form and sustenance” by the narrator (7). Thus, a tale written by an emigrant from a vanished culture is found and “translated” by a tourist, who finds it while “wander[ing] through various ruined temples, baths, and classical spots” (3). This narrator enjoys the grim task of piecing together the apocalyptic story, since this task too becomes a kind of tourism, taking her “out of a world, which has averted its once benignant face” (7). Indeed, the desire for escape is an initial point of sympathy between the frame narrator and Verney, who also invokes a theory of real and imaginary travel as consolation to explain the wanderings of the plague survivors. “This scheme of migration,” he says, “would draw us from the immediate scene of our woe, and leading us through pleasant and picturesque countries, amuse for a time our despair” (325). Yet Verney’s narrative ends as he leaves Italy. He imagines sailing first into the classical literary past—“forgotten Carthage” and the “pillars of Hercules”—but then on to scenes supposedly inhabited by people outside the records of Western Europe, “the tawny shores of Africa” and the “spicy groves of the odorous islands of the far Indian ocean” (469). Revealing that this story eventually exceeds not just the chronological but also the geographic limits of its frame narrative, The Last Man investigates the limits of the existing genres of the Romantic novel.48 By introducing a third term, the emigrant, into the more conventional opposition between the traveler and the tourist, it questions narrative’s capacity to accommodate all kinds of mobility. Verney’s fate ultimately exceeds the function of travel as consolation. He is not a tourist, since he will never return home refreshed by foreign scenes. Nor does he match the image of the Romantic, Byronic traveler, concerned with self-discovery and personal change.49 Although Verney ends up a solitary voyager, sailing east, his journey has more in common with the mass movements of emigration westward than with the categories of travel and tourism. Of course, the comparison between his fate and that of an emigrant holds true in only the most pessimistic and attenuated sense: he is an emigrant who, in

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contrast to early nineteenth-century optimism, is not industrious, does not serve a faraway nation, and cannot regain his culture’s “antient state.” The roots of his mobility lie in the cataclysmic shifts of population precipitated by the plague. This difference in etiology from the more conventional travels of Romantic literature has significant implications for the viability of Verney’s narrative. That he ceases to write as he leaves Europe suggests that his narrative’s intelligibility for the nineteenth-century tourist who transcribes it lasts only as long as their geographic positions are congruent—that is, as long as both are in Italy. Once the path of the last man diverges from the ultimately circular path of the tourist, the narrative ceases. Thus, the frame of the novel reminds us of its preoccupation with communication, with a speaker’s need for an interlocutor. Without an audience, the last man has no voice; an audience can only hear him as long as his travels remain in the context of European cultural history. Ironically, Verney’s experience as a reader outlasts ours. This final, singular representative of humanity cannot write, but he can read. Although we run up against the end of his documentation of the literary future, he continues to preserve the literary past, reading Homer and Shakespeare on his perpetual voyage. The nineteenth-century debates about the fate of excess population and the merits of emigration find their most resonant echo in Shelley’s novel in this suggestion of the limits of the reading public. Insofar as it engages with broader debates about the value to the state of emigration, the novel seems to side with those who argued that emigration painfully stripped its participants of communal and individual identity. Furthermore, it posits that the emigrant’s departure may ultimately silence the name of the nation left behind. The novel’s most powerful image, however, is of a future in which radical human mobility is inevitable and universal and in which such pain is unavoidable and permanent. As it considers the consequences of this future for literary production, The Last Man intimates that the capacity for texts to bear cultural memory is as limited as the human communities that produce them. Proponents of emigration held that literature, particularly the novel, would reinforce the bond forged by productive labor between emigrants and the nation they had left. As Katie Trumpener has documented, many colonial administrators felt that when emigrants read their national literature, “the nostalgic homesickness this induce[d would] make ‘England’s Exiles’ better, more loyal subjects of the British Crown.”50 But Shelley’s novel of the future posits that literature is doomed not just by time but also by space. Shelley suggests that not all travels can be communicated, and she questions whether cultures can be remembered over the vast distances of the new globe.

chapter 7

Prospects of the Future Malthus, Shelley, and Freedom of Movement

Let no man seek Henceforth to be foretold what shall befall Him or his children: Evil he may be sure, Which neither his foreknowing can prevent And he the future evil shall no less In apprehension than in substance feel. —Paradise Lost (11.770–75)

So Adam responds to the panorama of future events the Archangel Michael shows him before banishing “our first parents” from Paradise. These are also the lines Mary Shelley chooses for the epigraph to The Last Man, even as her novel strives to make its readers feel the apprehension of “future evil” as strongly as does Adam. By using this passage to begin my final chapter I hope to highlight a crucial shift between Milton’s representation of peopling the world, and the one we encounter over a century later in Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population, first published in 1798. This shift can be broadly characterized as a transformation of problems of space into problems of time, and it strongly influenced nineteenth-century thinking about both mobility and population growth. The prophecy Michael relays to Adam begins with a geographical vista. The archangel leads Adam up the “highest” “hill” in Paradise, “from whose top / The hemisphere of Earth in clearest ken / Stretched out to th’amplest

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reach of prospect lay” (11.378, 377, 378–80). From this vantage point, Adam can see the world from “Cambalu” to “Guiana.” But impressing Adam with this vastness is only part of Michael’s purpose. He also aims to delineate a human destiny in which geography plays no small part, and to explain to Adam “what shall come in future days / To thee and to thy offspring” (11.357– 58). The subsequent vision takes its generic cue from Virgilian epic, but unlike the glorious future Anchises reveals to Aeneas in Book 6 of the Aeneid, Michael’s vision foregrounds pain, anguish, and bloodshed. It is so horrifying that it moves Adam to the lament quoted above. When Adam “to foresight wak[es]” and realizes that foreknowledge cannot prevent the horrors to come, he exclaims, “O miserable mankind! To what fall / Degraded, to what wretched state reserved! / Better end here unborn” (11.368, 11.500–502). Adam, of course, later recants his stance against procreation, but Malthus, writing in 1798, might well have agreed with his original sentiment, hoping to convince his own readers not to bring children into a lifetime of suffering.1 Yet Malthus’s mode of representing the value of future generations differs significantly from Milton’s. Whereas future prospects for Milton demand a visual perspective, for Malthus, such a prospect becomes an almost exclusively temporal concept. Under the “old” Poor Law, for example, he notes that “men are . . . allured to marry with little or no prospect of being able to maintain a family in independence.”2 This is a “prospect” that requires no high hill for understanding. It is constructed entirely in the mind’s eye, a vantage point of the imagination. Malthus hopes the poor man in his work will “wak[e] to foresight” through ratiocination, and that when he does so, he will leave his future children unborn. Thus, if futurity, for Milton, can best be imagined through the figure of a “prospect” overseeing a landscape of events, geography for Malthus is subsumed by and transformed into a question of time.3 This is precisely because futurity limits geographical expansion for Malthus in ways that have significant implications for human reproduction and the project of peopling the world. Foresight plays a significant part in these equations, but a very different one than the one Milton describes. This shift in emphasis from space to time in discussions of population is an important one, because, as we have seen throughout this book, the eighteenth century was most likely to consider the question of peopling as a question of geography. Such schemes continued into the nineteenth century, as we saw in Chapter 3, and will continue to consider in this chapter. But Malthus’s work generated an alternative, temporally oriented vision, one with

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its own implications for settler colonialism, as we will discuss in the afterword. By (re)-placing population growth in a temporal context, Malthus dramatically changes the way the problem could be understood. For Milton, the globe is an infinite space into which “all generations” will “spread” (11.343, 344). For Malthus, the globe is a finite space, and therefore the success of such spreading ultimately will be limited. To make those limits clear, in the second chapter of the Essay, Malthus lays out a narrative of the future, calculating what will happen to the population of England as people increase at a geometrical ratio and subsistence only increases at an arithmetical ratio: “at the conclusion of the first century,” Malthus states, “the population would be one hundred and twelve millions and the means of subsistence only equal to the support of thirty-five millions, which would leave a population of seventy-seven millions totally unprovided for” (75). Here, he unleashes the string of numbers that Mary Poovey argues made “Mathus seem the demonic spokesman for the end of moral knowledge and numbers the amoral vehicle of indifferent facts.”4 But Malthus then performs a crucial recalibration. Anticipating the usual eighteenth-century suggestion that the best way of helping those unfortunate millions would be to assist them in emigrating to more hospitable lands, Malthus immediately obviates that hypothetical solution. “To make the argument more general and less interrupted by the partial views of emigration,” he says, “let us take the whole earth, instead of one spot” (75, emphasis mine). Malthus’s point is this: one can no longer look at population as a local problem to be solved by geographical redistribution. To do so, he explains, is a fallacy, the fallacy of imagining the world as having infinite space, with infinite potential for expansion. Holding that fallacy allows one to mistakenly believe that local population pressures can be alleviated by global mobility. Not so, Malthus insists; we need to consider “the whole earth” at the same time, and worry instead about the inexorable increase of numbers over time. In other words, Malthus alters our understanding of futurity by revising what had been the conventional relationship between population expansion, territory, and temporality. Whereas previous theorists had imagined population expansion and territorial expansion as occupying the same temporal moment—the temporal moment of the present day—Malthus pries those issues apart and represents these developments as occupying separate epochs. As Maureen McLane trenchantly articulates, Malthus alters the relationship between enlightenment “conjectural histories” and what she calls “conjectural or hypothetical futurities.”5 For Malthus, in the Essay, problems of territorial expansion are relegated to the past, while population expansion occupies the

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future. Caught between these two dynamics, the present Malthus imagines is a time of limits: or, more precisely, an era that should be keenly aware of the swiftly approaching finitude of the world. Large-scale mobility—the tantalizing cure-all of “the partial views of emigration”—cannot be invoked as a solution for the human condition. Thus, although Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population was published in 1798, and therefore predates the texts discussed in the two previous chapters, it occupies the last chapter of this book because it represents an epistemic break not only in ideas about population growth, but also in ideas about human mobility and reproduction more generally. This break was not a sharp transition, in which everyone writing about population after 1798 did so differently than everyone writing before 1798 (as we have already seen in the work of Scott and Shelley). Instead, we can say that Malthus constructed a paradigm that gradually took ascendancy over others. My claim for Malthus’s innovative status is not new, of course. Catherine Gallagher, for instance, argues that there are aspects of Malthus’s Essay “that make a definitive break with earlier European thought on the subject, even that of the Enlightenment.”6 In revisiting the nature of Malthus’s innovation, however, I am most concerned with the question that I have pursued throughout this book: the way that representations of peopling are inflected by cultural assumptions about settlement and mobility. Whereas both The Heart of Midlothian and The Last Man turn to various forms of emigration to solve the problems they narrate, Malthus both underwrites and is underwritten by new conceptions about human mobility, its benefits to society, and the agency of the people involved. These concerns, and Malthus’s investment in them, return us to the questions discussed in the first chapter of this book in relation to Milton’s Paradise Lost, and allow us to see how cultural attitudes toward these problems evolved in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The first change is perspectival. For Malthus, the future can no longer be envisaged as a kind of geography, visible from a certain kind of prospect.7 The prospects Malthus enjoins us to consider are temporal, visible only in the mind’s eye. The tool we must cultivate for seeing them is a particular kind of imagination called foresight. Foresight, crucially, is not merely a question of calculation. Malthusianism may be all about numbers, but Malthus’s own writings are at least equally concerned with affect. As McLane demonstrates, while “Malthus’s argument proposes a theory about reproducing bodies, it is also, via ‘foresight,’ a theory of subjectivity and imagination. Malthus is one of the great, melancholy meditators on imagination and futurity.”8 In other words, for

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Malthus, population growth is never simply the result of a biological drive to eat and reproduce, but a complex interplay between preventive and positive checks. Preventive checks, as Malthus continually explains, are a matter of the mind. And thus the second facet of Malthus’s representational practice I discuss here has to do with the female correlative to masculine “foresight,” and how that affect, most often termed “delicacy,” helps curb improvident peopling, both at home and in the colonial arena. Malthus’s ideas about both geographic and sexual restraint were put under pressure by two problems of mobility hotly contested during the early nineteenth century: revisions in the Poor Laws and increasing emigration. In order to analyze this pressure, this chapter looks not only at Malthus’s 1798 Essay and its revisions, but also at Malthus’s involvement with, and his invocation by, two important early nineteenth-century debates about mobility: the emigration debates in Parliament in 1827–28 (already discussed in Chapter 6); and the passage of the New Poor Law in 1834. It is in Malthus’s strategizing around these issues that he perhaps most profoundly shifts our understanding of human mobility—or at least most deeply engages with a more widespread cultural shift, moving toward an individualized and subjectivized account of mobility and reproduction: what came to be understood as a right to individual freedom of movement. This chapter examines the problem of foresight and reproduction in Malthus’s Essay, and then investigates the deployment of that Malthusian perspective in Mary Shelley’s 1835 novel, Lodore. In Shelley’s novel, the Miltonic vision of a fecund Eve whose exile is assuaged by conjugality splits into two figures: a Miranda figure, rescued from unregulated fertility in the colonies; and a vagrant Eve, punished for both sexual and pecuniary profligacy. In these two figures—a mother and daughter in the novel—the close relationship between the problem of the domestic vagrancy of the poor and colonial expansion is again revealed. We will see, however, through looking at the intersection of Malthus’s ideas and Lodore, that this new paradigm had unexpected consequences for the relationship between gender, (re)productivity, and mobility, and for the project of peopling the world.

Overspreading the Earth: Population as Colonial Resource As we have seen, for most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the problem of expanding population was imagined as something that could be

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solved by territorial expansion. The conception of the globe as an infinite space went hand in hand with a certain idea of empire—one that envisaged the potential colonies as, if not empty of people, then at least as poorly used land that “needed,” indeed “deserved,” European cultivation. Perhaps the most vivid and influential image of the world as unpopulated, homogenous space was articulated in 1751 by Benjamin Franklin, in an essay entitled “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind.” Considering the phenomenal growth of the settler population in North America, Franklin mused: “Was the face of the earth vacant of other plants, it might be gradually sowed and overspread with one kind only; as for instance, with Fennel; and were it empty of other inhabitants, it might in a few ages be replenished with one nation only; as, for instance, with Englishmen.”9 As Nancy Isenberg notes, Franklin imagines that the American colonists will “spread outward and [fill] the available territory,” rendering “reproductive labor . . . an imperial asset.”10 Franklin’s figuration of people to plants may sound odd to us now, but it is consistent with the idea of people as a resource to be “planted” and then harvested that we have seen throughout the eighteenth century. And yet, with every successful war of colonial accumulation—as, for instance, with the Seven Years’ War (as described in Chapter 4)—there had been anxiety about how to muster the population to fill up new colonial possessions, and schemes about how to move people into those supposedly empty spaces. Even during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, after Britain’s first empire in North America dissolved with the War of American Independence, and before its second, in India, Africa, and the Antipodes, had come into being—a time when writers were preoccupied with the fall of empires— many still imagined the expansive spaces of the colonies as an escape valve, a second home, for British culture. Thus, when Edward Gibbon argued that the decline of the Roman Empire had been inevitable, he was careful to explain why a similar fate would never befall Britain. If threatened by barbarians, Britain would just pick up and move its civilization to America: “Should the victorious barbarians carry slavery and desolation as far as the Atlantic Ocean, ten thousand vessels would transport beyond their pursuit the remains of civilized society; and Europe would revive and flourish in the American world, which is already filled with her colonies and institutions.”11 These final volumes of Gibbon’s magisterial history were published in 1788, yet even then he imagined the world as relatively empty. He seems still to believe that there will be room in North America, despite the War of American Independence, for Britain’s “civilized society” to be preserved. Gibbon’s

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statement reworks the trope of “translatio imperii”—the idea that empire and arts had moved westward together from Rome, to flower in England, and then again in the New World—on which a good deal of Augustanism in the early eighteenth century had been based. As George Berkeley wrote in “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” (1726): “Westward the course of empire takes its way; the first four acts already past, / A fifth shall close the drama with the day; Time’s noblest offspring is the last.”12 Even after the loss of its North American colonies, this concept resonated powerfully for the British, who saw the Americas as a haven for the preservation of English culture. James Chandler argues that this interest in America providing a “new possibility for national afterlife” persisted through the first decades of the nineteenth century.13 But even as this faith in mobility persisted, it’s worth noting that the “remains” that Gibbon hypothesizes preserving aren’t any more heterogeneous than Franklin’s plants: they are the passive cargo of the vessels that “transport” them: not individuals, but a nameless, undifferentiated substance that somehow resolves into a personification of “Europe.” The appeal of translatio imperii lingers in Anna Barbauld’s poem “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven,” published years after Malthus’s Essay, but still part of an older way of thinking. In a way, Barbauld’s project is similar to Malthus’s: she is writing a history of the future, one that is no less a story of England’s inevitable downfall than Malthus’s own. Yet in other important ways Barbauld adheres to the rhetoric that sutured population growth to imperial expansion during Britain’s first empire and imagined the world as an empty place to be filled with (English) people. Like Franklin and Gibbon, she uses images of homogenous aggregation and personification to represent the spread of population. London in its heyday is “The mighty city, which by every road, / In floods of people poured itself abroad; / Ungirt by walls, irregularly great, / No jealous drawbridge, and no closing gate” (159–162).14 Emigrants are aggregated here into a flood of people. They are an attribute of a sentient city/culture, which uses them to “pour itself abroad.” The social structure, London, is the agent in this geographical and cultural expansion, rather than individual humans. The city is ungendered, but the imagery of being “ungirt” and “flooding” the world with people suggests a feminine fecundity—a benign version, perhaps, of Milton’s Sin.15 Later in the poem, Barbauld relies even more heavily on personification to recount the height of Britain’s national glory: “London exults: . . . / While even the exiles her just laws disclaim, / People a continent, and build a name: / August she sits, and

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with extended hands / Holds forth the book of life to distant lands” (305, 309–12). Here, territorial expansion seems enabled by the figure of personification. The exiles are inspired to “people a continent” and “build a name” by London’s laws. London has more human properties, more subjectivity, than the people who “flood” out of her, and it is this that allows successful cultural reproduction in the new world. Thus, for the radical Anna Barbauld, as for Gibbon, even after the War of Independence, North America can be envisaged as an empty continent that might be peopled by British men and institutions capable of preserving, in an imagined future exile, British culture and institutions. Barbauld subscribes to a stadial theory of civil society, similar to translatio imperii, the motor of which is an abstracted “Spirit . . . moody and viewless as the changing wind” (215, 217): Where’er he turns, the human brute awakes, And roused to better life, his sordid hut forsakes: He thinks, he reasons, glows with purer fires, Feels finer wants, and burns with new desires: Obedient Nature follows where he leads; The steaming marsh is changed to fruitful meads. (219–24) Here, the personified Spirit “rouses” man to subjectivity, and then a personified Nature follows that newly roused man. Of course, Nature’s pursuit here might be more accurately described as the earth being transformed by human habitation, as the unproductive marsh becomes “fruitful.” Spirit acts on man, who then acts on an unproductive landscape imagined as in need of his intervention. For Barbauld, the movements of this Spirit explain the rise and fall of empires—from Rome, to Britain, to North America, to the hope for a new home for liberty in Andean South America. Barbauld’s poem is certainly not pro-empire; it argues that empires only rise in order to decay. Yet, its capacity to imagine aggregates of people coming together as coherent communities—“to people a continent and build a name”—in a distant time and place is what gives the poem its visionary force. Thus Barbauld gives abstraction radical potential. As Laura Mandell demonstrates, Barbauld believed that “if people can be brought to see themselves as an aggregate of hands personifying Liberty, Equality, and Nation, a legitimate body of people will overturn oppressive norms.”16 But Barbauld’s rhetoric, like Gibbon’s, and to some extent Goldsmith’s (as seen in Chapter

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4), depicts population expansion as an undifferentiated resource fulfilling the needs of a supra-human entity (London, Europe, the Spirit) rather than as something resulting from the heterogeneous desires of individuals. This kind of figuration persisted past the publication of Malthus’s Essay in 1798. For example, Robert Torrens wrote as late as 1817, “To an old and populous country . . . a well-regulated system of colonization acts as a safety valve to the political machine, and allows the expanding vapour to escape, before it is heated to explosion.”17 As we move on to Malthus, it is important to note that this rhetoric of aggregation underwrote a particular theory of human mobility and (re)productivity—a theory which Malthus’s work helped undermine. The other connecting thread between writers like Franklin, Gibbon, and Barbauld is that they depict territorial expansion driven by population expansion as taking place in the speculative future—whether that future is Franklin’s alternate history, Gibbon’s post-Barbarian exodus, or Barbauld’s reconstructed British culture that will make pilgrimages, with “fond adoring steps to press the sod / By statesmen, sages, poets, heroes trod” (131–32). That future, as for earlier writers, is imagined in spatial rather than temporal terms. “Movement in Barbauld’s poem is developed not through a temporal, but through a spatial axis and change is thus represented not through a causal link of events that culminates in ruin as an outcome, but rather as a geographical movement westward as the spirit of progress repeatedly relocates the seat of empire.”18 That strong belief in the balm of futurity is particularly evident in Malthus’s most recognized interlocutor, William Godwin. In the final book of Political Justice, for example, in a chapter on “Objections to this system from the Principle of Population,” he writes: “Three fourths of the habitable globe are now uncultivated. The improvements to be made in cultivation, and the augmentations the earth is capable of receiving in the article of productiveness, cannot, as yet, be reduced to any limits of calculation. Myriads of centuries of still increasing population may pass away, and the earth be yet found sufficient for the support of its inhabitants. It were idle therefore to conceive discouragement from so distant a contingency. The rational anticipations of human improvement are unlimited, not eternal.”19 We can see here that Godwin’s faith in perfectibility is contingent on a belief not only in the unlimited space of the world but also in the temporal expanse of “myriads of centuries.” Indeed, it was precisely Godwin’s faith in a futurity fueled by virtually limitless arenas for English emigration that irked Malthus enough

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to begin the Essay on Population. With the ideas about the mobility of human aggregates expressed therein, he explicitly hoped to puncture Enlightenment ideas of national progress and imperial expansion that had been bolstered by the concept of an empty world that many centuries of reproduction could not fill.20 Malthus’s Essay flips that chronology on its head. To stunning effect, Malthus places the epoch during which territorial expansion can accompany population growth in the distant past. Trying his hand at the conjectural history popularized by the Scottish enlightenment, Malthus re-imagines the four stages of culture—hunter-gatherer, herder, agricultural, and cosmopolitan—as a story of population growth. Suvir Kaul has argued that such theories of the four stages of civil society “are inextricable from—indeed, enabled by—the vision of the world made available by mercantile and imperial expansion in the eighteenth century,”21 and Malthus exemplifies this claim by beginning his narrative with the “savage” culture of North American Indians, who he argues have very little population growth. “Misery is the check that that represses the superior power of population and keeps its effects equal to the means of subsistence” in this community, he claims, and then goes on to generalize: “Actual observation and experience tell us that this check . . . is constantly acting now upon all savage nations and the theory indicates that it probably acted with nearly equal strength a thousand years ago, and it may not be much greater a thousand years hence” (83). In a rhetorical move that Saree Makdisi, adapting the work of the anthropologist Johannes Fabian, describes as transforming some cultures into “spatialized temporal reference points for those capable of movement and progress,” Malthus places these hunter-gatherers in distant past.22 Or rather, he implies that in these groups we can “actually” “observe” the past, because such cultures are incapable of change. What seemed to be a geographical perspective, or “prospect,” is revealed to be a historical or temporal one. That is, when we observe such cultures, we are actually looking into the past. This strategy handily obscures the fact that these Native Americans occupy the same historical moment as their English “observers.” In Malthus’s hands “conjectural history” becomes, in Charles Withers’s phrase, “conjectural geography.”23 The argumentative benefits of such a strategy are realized when Malthus follows his analysis of the “savage nations” actually existing in the “now” with an analysis of “the next state of mankind,” one exemplified by shepherds living in the distant past (83). The triumphal progress of civilization deflects our attention from the fact that when shepherds succeed hunters, the past

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succeeds the present. Geography is subsumed by (a reconstructed) temporality. In this second stage, the one placed firmly in the distant past, Malthus reimagines the fall of Rome to barbarians, concluding that it resulted from population pressures among peoples in the second, “shepherd” stage of development: “Want was the goad that drove the Scythian shepherds from their native haunts, like so many famished wolves in search of prey. . . . Gathering fresh darkness and terror as they rolled on, the congregated bodies at length obscured the sun of Italy and sunk the whole world in universal night. These tremendous efforts, so long and so deeply felt throughout the fairest portions of the earth, may be traced to the simple cause of the superior power of population to the means of subsistence” (83).” Like the hunter-gatherers, Malthus depicts these groups as subject only to the “positive” check of misery, lacking the imagination necessary to act on the preventive check of foresight. They are aggregated and dehumanized—“famished wolves” who act as “congregated bodies.” Unlike the hunter-gatherers, however, who are incapable of change, these shepherds are a veritable engine of social transformation. Population growth among them sets off a series of developments that engenders history itself. It is at this stage, the herder stage, that Malthus identifies the dynamic relationship between fecundity and population expansion, and with that crucial intersection, the emergence of both enforced emigration and imperialism. As Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin put it, “Malthus did not simply use stadial theory, but reconfigured it to place population dynamics at its core.”24 “What renders nations of shepherds so formidable,” Malthus writes, “is the power which they possess of moving all together, and the necessity they frequently feel of exerting this power in search of fresh pasture for their herds” (83). As such nations prosper, “a more frequent and rapid change of place became then necessary. A wider and more extensive territory was successively occupied. . . . At length, the impossibility of supporting such a number together became too evident to be resisted. Young scions were then pushed out from the parent-stock and instructed to explore fresh regions and to gain happier seats for themselves by their swords. ‘The world was all before them where to choose’ ” (84). These are the first expansionist communities. Once their numbers become too great, some are pushed out to explore “fresh regions.” Malthus’s choice to end this paragraph with a line from Paradise Lost is striking, though the words resonate quite differently in this context than they do in Milton’s poem. David Glimp points out that the allusion

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“collapses Adam and Eve into their Vandal progeny,” recasting “them as both the historical precedent for and the first instance of the hyperfecundity that [Malthus] views as a threat to late eighteenth-century England.”25 And while this is true, it is also important to note that Malthus uses Milton’s words to suggest the emergence of individualized agency out of the congregated bodies of the shepherd hordes—these “young scions” will “choose” their own “happier seats.” This agency engenders emotion: these “Barbarians” hold “a prevailing hope of bettering their condition by change of place.” In the age of barbarians, the affective correlative of mobility is hope. The hope that mobility engenders then inspires population growth. “The constant habit of emigration” “unshackl[es]” “the mighty power of population.” And “the peaceful inhabitants of the countries on which [these Barbarians] rushed could not long withstand the energy of men acting under such powerful motives of exertion” (84). The barbarian epoch thus sees the emergence of both territorial expansion and the intimations of individualized agency and affect. Malthus implies however, that there is something barbaric in finding hope in mobility. For him, such hope is a remnant of the uncivilized past. Milton’s tag must be one of the most widely deployed quotations of the period, but Malthus’s use of it revises a particular narrative of the future even as it self-consciously rewrites our understanding of the past. Milton’s words describe Adam and Eve leaving Eden and entering an empty world with the explicit divine injunction to be fruitful and multiply, engendering a “race to fill the world.” This, as we saw in Chapter 1, was a divine prediction about fecundity that was very important to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century drive to settle North America. By using the line to instead gloss the shepherd stage of prehistory, Malthus turns a prediction about the future into a story about the past. Indeed, the allusion makes an implicit argument about what stories can be told about the future: the fecund wandering of Adam and Eve, Malthus implies, is no longer a useful way of understanding human destiny.26 When Malthus describes the “next state of mankind,” he returns us to the present, with “facts that come within the scope of every man’s observation” (86). In the present day, as we have already noted, he believes that territorial expansion cannot provide a long-term solution to population pressure. It is to this end that Malthus interrupts the first explanation of the principle of population in his 1798 Essay to criticize mass emigration. When he does so, he emphasizes the difference between the emotions of eighteenthcentury emigrants and their hopeful barbarian ancestors: “A great emigration necessarily implies unhappiness of one kind or other in the country that is

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deserted. For few persons will leave their families, connections, friends and native land, to seek a settlement in untried foreign climes, without some strong subsisting causes of uneasiness where they are, or the hope of some great advantages in the place to which they are going.”27 Scholars like Tim Fulford have accurately characterized Malthus as representing the problems of population by way of personification—pointing, for example, to the image of “gigantic inevitable Famine” that “stalks from the rear”—a practice we’ve also seen in his near contemporaries, like Barbauld.28 But what’s interesting in this description of emigration is that Malthus presents the pressure to emigrate, seemingly caused by population expansion and at its heart a mass phenomenon, not through abstraction, but rather through the emotions it evokes in individuals. In this, Malthus breaks with what had been the conventional representation of emigration through the rhetoric of aggregates that are subordinated to abstract supra-human entities like London or Europe. The adumbration of subjectivity we saw in Malthus’s description of the shepherd hordes comes to fruition here. His present-day emigrants are caught not between hunger and danger, but between “uneasiness” and “hope,” and are anchored to their settlement not by the land’s ability to produce food, but by their attachments to their friends and family and by a feeling of nativity. Contemporary emigration, for Malthus, is not a mobile force of “congregated bodies” as it was in The Last Man, but a phenomenon made up of a collection of individuals, each contemplating his local and familial attachments. By moving away from representations of aggregates, Malthus implies that in the present emigration is an individual choice most often made under duress. For all Essay’s focus on the “positive checks” of physical misery, it seems crucial here that, with regard to emigration, emotional anguish supersedes those concerns. And yet Malthus may have realized that his image of a reluctant emigrant was somewhat at odds with the political climate of his day. Even as he emphasized the pathos and futility of emigration in the 1798 Essay, the number of people leaving England began to tick upward as the nineteenth century began. Clearly, the barbarian “hope of bettering [one’s] condition by change of place” had not been eradicated in Malthus’s own day—far from it. Thus, in his revised Essay of 1803, Malthus expands his discussion of emigration, this time applying the conjectural history through which he’d understood the distant past to the present day, and imagining the dynamic of those Scythian shepherds in the modern world:

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As it is not probable that human industry should begin to receive its best direction throughout all the nations of the earth at the same time, it may be said that, in the case of a redundant population in the more cultivated parts of the world, the natural and obvious remedy that presents itself is emigration to those parts that are uncultivated. As those parts are of great extent and very thinly peopled, this resource may appear, on a first view of the subject, an adequate remedy, or at least of a nature to remove the evil to a distant period; but, when we advert to experience, and to the actual state of the uncivilized parts of the globe, instead of anything like an adequate remedy, it will appear but a very weak palliative.29 Malthus explains that emigration only seems an “adequate solution” to the problem of “redundant population” because it defers the impact of that population growth to “a distant period.” But the “actual state of the uncivilized parts of the globe” turns that seeming cure into merely a “weak palliative.” The miseries of the present cannot be cured through fantasies of unoccupied space, waiting to be peopled by Englishmen. In the 1803 edition, Malthus then goes on to list the difficult experiences of settlers in New World. In general, he argues, those who have the most motivation to emigrate have inadequate resources to allow them to do it successfully. Unless aided by wealthy individuals, or the state itself, “whatever degree of misery they might suffer in their own country from the scarcity of subsistence, they would be absolutely unable to take possession of any of those uncultivated regions, of which there is yet such an extent on the earth.”30 In other words, great tracts of the world may be uncultivated, but that emptiness cannot lead to the easy peopling that earlier writers had imagined. As Bashford and Chaplin point out, “Malthus’s Essay and the whole population question itself were tied up with the settler colonial project of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,” although Mathus himself “recognized the cost of all this replenishment in the new worlds.”31 In a move we have seen before, the Essay next pivots from considering the abstract spread of cultivation or civilization to imagining the individual sentiments of potential emigrants. Some blame those who choose to live in poverty if the resources for emigration exist. And yet, Malthus asks, “Is it then a fault for a man to feel an attachment to his native soil, to love the parents that nurtured him, his kindred and his friends, and the companions

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of his early years? Or is it no evil that he suffers, because he consents to bear it, rather than snap these cords which nature has wound in close and intricate folds round the human heart? The great plan of providence seems to require, indeed, that these ties should sometimes be broken; but the separation does not, on that account, give less pain; and though the general good be promoted by it, it does not cease to be an individual evil.”32 This image is a standard one for the period, almost cliche´: emotional attachments to places and persons are imagined as binding cords that restrain mobility, like the “silver net” Shelley uses to imagine civilization in The Last Man. But at the center of the image is the idea that the past is in a kind of tug of war with the future. Malthus focuses on individual emotional pain, juxtaposing it to the unfeeling monolith of the “general good.” He emphasizes the man’s consent. When it comes to emigration, such emotional pain has the capacity to trump the physical pain of hunger. We are reminded here of what Mary Poovey calls the “transitional nature” of Malthus’s concept of a population in relation to our current understanding of the term: “he wanted to count and measure behaviors whose regularities could be calculated; and also he wanted to assess this aggregate’s ‘happiness,’ an operation that required defining happiness instead of just manipulating numbers.”33 In the question of emigration, happiness seems to pull against the needs of the aggregate. Even in the 1798 edition, Malthus writes, “We know, from repeated experience, how much misery and hardship men will undergo in their own country, before they can determine to desert it: and how often the most tempting proposals of embarking for new settlements have been rejected by people who are almost starving” (145). Malthus emphasizes individual emotional experience over either the abstractions of the “general good” or the illusory temptations of unknown spaces. Moreover, this emotional experience is not the love or sexual desire he discusses elsewhere in the essay, but the “local attachments” a person can have to “their own country.” In Malthus’s Essay, emigration emerges not as an aggregated flow of people, but as the painful consequence of individual choice—not as the severing of relationships between people, but as a ruptured relationship to place. One clue as to why individuation would thwart the kind of aggregated mobility that might be helpful to the expansionist state is offered by James Grahame, a vociferous advocate of emigration who bemoans the disappearance of the tightly knit, hierarchical communities that fostered national expansion through populating new territories.34 Grahame believed that “Emigration . . . is the natural vent and remedy of redundance of population in

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the early stages of society, and indeed in every period, until the whole habitable world be fully peopled and cultivated.”35 But, he argues, that solution has been compromised by the dissolution of feudal ties. “Before the feudal relations and partial confederacies of the infancy of society have been completely dissolved by the maturing of the supreme civil institutions of a country, the poor are led out to emigration in numerous bodies, and headed and supported by the same leaders to whom they yielded dependence at home.”36 Without the leadership of such persons, who resemble Malthus’s barbarian princes, or the Earl of Selkirk, discussed in the previous chapter, “in that more advanced state of manners and government in which the subordinate political relations between the rich and poor are dissolved, when a rich man has more to lose by quitting his country than he can gain by putting himself at the head of a body of poor emigrants to a new colony, the season of emigration has passed away, and the opportunities of relieving a state by such a discharge are greatly obstructed.”37 Although Malthus and Grahame held different positions in the early nineteenth-century debate about emigration, they seem united in the belief that once a man considers himself as an individual, one whose greatest attachments are to the land rather than to his feudal lord, territorial expansion powered by emigration will be obstructed. As the historian David Rollison puts it, in slightly different terms: “When ‘region’ meant ‘to rule’ in the epoch of the peasantry (whenever that was), the assumption was that the laboring population went with the land, and only moved if the lord wished it so. In the more populist constitutional milieu that emerged between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, it became desirable to propagate the myth that the people stayed with the land because they were organically connected to it.”38 As we have seen throughout this book, the question of when such a “natural” connection between person and place “became desirable” and to whom was both mutable and contested. In Malthus, however, we can see the individuation of both movement and settlement as ushering in a new regime in human mobility. And yet the emotional uneasiness surrounding emigration did not extinguish the state’s need to use it as a solution to social problems. Even Malthus’s views on emigration were challenged by historical events. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, thousands of military veterans poured back into the labor market, and public concern over redundant population mounted. In this context, Malthus somewhat modified his views on emigration. In the 1817 edition of the Essay, he admitted that in such conditions, the “palliative” of emigration could be helpful.39 If, he writes,

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for instance, from a combination of external and internal causes, a very great stimulus should be given to the population of a country for ten or twelve years together, and it should then comparatively cease, it is clear that labour will continue flowing into the market, with almost undiminished rapidity, while the means of employing and paying it have been essentially contracted. It is precisely under these circumstances that emigration is most useful as a temporary relief; and it is in these circumstances that Great Britain finds herself placed at present.40 This admission of unusual conditions is certainly why Robert Wilmot Horton called Malthus as an expert witness for his parliamentary Committee on Emigration in 1826 (the same committee discussed in the previous chapter) to contribute to the debate on the value of state-assisted emigration. For this committee, Malthus turned his mind from individual pain toward the “greater good,” and testified that redundant labors were a “tax upon the community” and “that if they were to die or be removed, the wealth of the country would in no degree be diminished by their decease or removal.”41 Yet, Malthus’s later correspondence with Wilmot Horton reveals that he never believed that emigration could be a permanent solution to the problems of redundant population. He doubts, he wrote to Wilmot Horton in 1827, “whether a National System of Emigration, if adopted as a permanent measure, and on an extensive scale would not upon the principle of population, naturally occasion an increased proportion of births, which, in the case of any interruption from the separation of the colonies, or the expense [of emigration] being found too burdensome would increase the redundancy of the population.”42 In other words, any drain of population would be quickly replaced, and the world would inevitably become overpopulated, as Malthus had always believed. Godwin quipped that if America had never been discovered, Malthus would never have written.43 He meant by this that the central arguments of Malthus’s Essay depend on the supposed rate of reproduction among European settlers in the back country colonies of North America; these ratios provide Malthus with a standard rate of unchecked reproduction that he uses as the basis for his formulas. In other words, the rates of reproduction upon which Malthus’s formula were based were generated by Britain’s territorial expansion into American spaces they considered “empty.” As Malthus says in 1798, “the happiness of the Americans [settlers] depended much less upon

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their peculiar degree of civilization than upon the peculiarity of their situation, as new colonies, upon their having a great plenty of fertile uncultivated land” (197). Thus, the rates he asks us to consider as universal are based on a “peculiar,” and peculiarly colonial, situation. And yet, as we have seen, an opposing thrust of Malthus’s argument places such emptiness in a temporal context. That is, Malthus insists that the “empty” space on which his theories are based is irrelevant to present-day solutions to population pressure. His awareness of rapidly encroaching futurity means all expansion can only be a “weak palliative.” The consolations of space are doomed by time. But what also becomes apparent in reading Malthus’s discussion of the issue is that the mathematical formula is not the only thing that renders emigration undesirable. A change in structures of feeling accompanies the march of time—affective considerations coevolve with territorial ones. Earlier expansion, Malthus suggests, was made possible not only by the emptiness of space, but also by a form of social organization structured by the subordination of large groups to strong leaders—the feudal system, in Grahame’s words—and privileged the attachment of men to their leaders over their attachment to place. When humanity could move as “floods” or “hordes” under the leadership of “great men,” territorial expansion was successful. When those relationships decayed or dissolved, and man (and I use the gendered term advisedly, as we will see in the next section), became more attached to his locality, symbolized by memories, graves, or other “lieux de memoire,” the idea of emigration became more emotionally painful (as we saw in Chapter 4). In Malthus’s eyes, individualized local attachments had the potential to eclipse questions of the “greater good.” It is important to note, then, that although Malthus’s potential emigrant feels a kind of melancholy subjectivity not conducive to agency, it is central to Malthus’s argument that people are not the plantlike beings Franklin imagines (re)peopling the world, but rather persons who struggle to make choices for themselves. This interest in viewing the emigrant as an individual rather than merely a unit of the “greater good” proves an unlikely point of agreement between Malthus and Godwin. When Godwin replied again to Malthus in 1820, in his lengthy tome, Of Population, he elaborated the political values of mobility in terms of individual agency: “As long as there is tyranny and oppression among any of the governments of mankind, as long as it is possible for a human being to come under the burthen of unmerited disgraces, as long as there shall exist a pride in men that disdains servitude, and a spirit of industry anxious to free itself from vexation and constraint, so long will emigration

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form a feature in the history of our race.”44 Unsurprisingly, the affective valence of movement in Godwin’s account is very different from what we see in Malthus. A situation that engenders a kind of languid melancholy in the latter gives rise to pride and industry in the former. But we should note that Godwin, too, rejects the Franklinian mode of peopling. “It may be that I want the robust nerves of Dr. Franklin and Mr. Malthus,” he says (misreading, I believe, the latter), “but I own, if the human species were by some tremendous catastrophe swept from every part of the globe except this island, I should not like to witness the experiment, whether or no its present population could be replenished with Englishmen only.”45 Both Malthus and Godwin reject the idea of claiming a territory through an undifferentiated aggregate in favor of the variability of individual emigrants. Thus, as much as he marks the beginning of a new way of thinking about population, Malthus can also be said to mark the end of an old way of thinking about imperial expansion. In his eyes, the world was no longer “all before” the British in the same way it had been for Milton and others in the late seventeenth century. Instead, the world was a limited space, destined to reach the limits of the people it could support. In colonial arenas, as Bashford and Chaplin document, Malthus was keenly aware of the competition for that limited space between settlers and indigenous people.46 But we can also see in both Malthus and Godwin, albeit from opposite affective poles, the germ of a new way of thinking about emigration, a structure of feeling that arguably underpinned the “Settler Revolution.” This social shift highlighted the individual, and emphasized the way one could improve oneself by leaving one’s country. Josephine McDonagh notes a similar strain in Wakefield’s writing on settling Australia in 1829: “In the ‘Letter’ . . . people are imagined not as statistics but as moral agents and affective beings, who come together, have relationships, and create families which fire their ambitions and make them good citizens, or, as he puts it, ‘the best members of a new society.’ ”47 This shift in attitudes corresponded with a huge increase in numbers; “In the eighteenth century,” writes Belich, “about half a million people emigrated from the British Isles. In the long nineteenth century, 1815–1914, the number rocketed to 25 million.”48 Both the rhetoric surrounding mobility and the actual numbers of emigrants registered a new regime in ideas of mobility. We can see a concept of freedom of movement that pulls against the earlier ideal of regulation: not the heroic emigrant but the melancholy migrant, reluctant to move at the state’s behest.

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Foresight and Delicacy It is this shift toward emphasizing individual subjectivity that links Malthus’s discussion of emigration to his discussion of reproduction among the poor. Both emigration and a “preventive check” on reproduction are potential solutions to the miseries attendant on the pressure of expanding population. Both, too, in Malthus’s eyes, center on individual subjectivity. The emotional sensitivity that makes the potential emigrant reluctant to leave his “own country” finds its mirror in the emotional sensitivity of the suitor who is reluctant to marry because the expanding responsibilities of offspring would plunge his family into misery. Both fear a future revealed to them by the imaginative faculty Malthus terms “foresight.” Such foresight shows emigration to be a false solution to the problem of population pressure even as it fosters the “preventive check” of leaving potential children unborn. For earlier thinkers who imagined mobile persons primarily as aggregates, foresight had not been a necessary or desirable tool. The poor are connected to emigrants in another important way. The individuation of the emigrant, as we have seen, results in a nascent ideal of freedom of movement, albeit one that emerges paradoxically out of an attachment to place. It is this conceptualization that links Malthus’s theorizing about emigration—mobility out of England—with his critique of the Poor Laws—which concerns mobility within England. If the emigrant is urged to move despite his feelings, so too are the laboring poor. And if the potential emigrant is reluctant to move because of his consciousness of his place in time—his strong attachment to his memories of the past, and his uneasiness about the situations he will encounter in the future—then this is exactly the quality of which Malthus believes the poor have been deprived and hopes to foster in them: the ability to imagine the future and to make decisions based on those projections. Maureen McLane draws our attention to Malthus’s statement that “The laboring poor, to use a vulgar expression, seem always to live from hand to mouth. Their present wants employ their whole attention and they seldom think of the future”; here, McLane notes, “Malthus points . . . to the problem of time, the time of and in thought, as well as the time of and in labor.”49 The poor have no time to think, and so they reproduce. Malthus aims to reverse that dynamic. Malthus begins his critique of the Old Poor Law with a discussion of freedom of settlement. He addresses his criticism not to settlement in the

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broad sense, but to its legal meaning: the claim of the poor for relief in the parishes in which they reside, and the corresponding law that allows parishes to “remove” them if they deem this claim invalid. “The whole business of settlements,” Malthus declares in the 1798 Essay, “even in its present amended state, is utterly contradictory to all ideas of freedom. . . . The parish persecutions of men whose families are likely to become chargeable, and of poor women who are near lying-in, is a most disgraceful and disgusting tyranny” (100). The Old Poor Law allowed parishes to “remove” women whom they believed would give birth to children who would be a further charge on the parish, as well as whole families who they deemed likely to need relief in the future (these laws are discussed in Chapter 1). Malthus judges these suppositions about the future to be “tyrannous.” The only “palliative” that he can imagine for the “wants of the lower classes of society” is a “freedom of action” that would accommodate both movement and settlement based on individual decisions, rather than on the perceived future needs of the collectivity of the parish. “Were I to propose a palliative, and palliatives are all that the nature of the case will admit, it should be, in the first place, the total abolition of all the present parish-laws. This would at any rate give liberty and freedom of action to the peasantry of England, which they can hardly be said to possess at present. They would then be able to settle without interruption, wherever there was a prospect of greater plenty of work and a higher price for labour. The market of labour would then be free” (101). Not only the melancholy potential emigrant, willing almost to starve rather than sever his local attachments, but also the peasant hoping to “settle without interruption,” even though his family might be deemed “likely to become chargeable,” are “tyrannized” by a system that controls their mobility. Ironically, the legal system of “settlements” restricts the kind of “settling” that would rationally distribute labor by allowing workers to choose where to live. Malthus underscores the importance of such freedom of movement by representing his impoverished person, like his emigrant, as someone who needs to be acutely conscious of the stream of time. Whereas the emigrant is highly sensitive to the pull of the past, however, Malthus hopes to usher the poor into a new state, in which they are attuned to the “prospects” of the future. He wants them to enjoy the freedom to move to and settle in places where there will be work. It is such prospects— understood not as the view from a high hill, but as an individual imaginative projection into a future—which the present Poor Laws obviate. And yet Malthus’s ideal of “freedom of action” among the poor leans heavily on one arena in which mobility and settlement remained

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controlled—not by the state in this case, but, again, by individual subjectivity. In the 1798 Essay, Malthus describes the historical process by which women—like the poor woman prosecuted in her lying in—came to bear the brunt of social ire for the (re)production of “useless mouths.” Like Milton in Paradise Lost, Malthus provides an origin story for the social value of fecundity. That a woman should at present be almost driven from society for an offence which men commit nearly with impunity seems to be undoubtedly a breach of natural justice. But the origin of the custom, as the most obvious and effectual method of preventing the frequent recurrence of a serious inconvenience to a community appears to be natural, though not perhaps perfectly justifiable. The origin, however, is now lost in the new train of ideas which the custom has since generated. What at first might be dictated by state necessity is now supported by female delicacy, and operates with the greatest force on that part of society where, if the original intention of the custom were preserved, there is the least real occasion for it. (142)50 The outlines of this origin story for the enforcement of chastity— transgression, banishment, and the internalization of shame—remind us strongly of Eve’s story in Paradise Lost. Like Eve’s, the story of Malthus’s (every)woman turns on the right of settlement. When she is chaste, this woman is allowed to remain where she has settled; when she violates that community’s code of sexual continence, she is “almost driven” from that community. Yet, Malthus’s parable is also a strong re-reading of the expulsion from Eden. His woman’s right to remain depends not on her indigeneity, nor on her investment of labor (considerations we have analyzed in our discussion of Paradise Lost), but rather on her “delicacy”—her ability to foresee the consequences of sexual dysregulation. I would argue that such “delicacy” can be read as a feminized form of “foresight”: it names the cognitive process by which a woman imagines—indeed, feels—the possible repercussions of her present actions. And, as with foresight, delicacy is more common among “the part of society” in which “there is the least real occasion for it”—in other words, among the middle and upper classes. The poor have less “delicacy” because they cannot project themselves into the future.

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Thus, while Milton’s version of the biblical narrative of the regulation of sexuality in Paradise—a story whose “origin” had been “lost in the new train of ideas” even in Milton’s day—supports the value of fecundity, celebrating Eve’s role in “peopling the world,” Malthus’s drastically undercuts that ideal. As Catherine Gallagher trenchantly remarks, one of Malthus’s main contributions to the climate of his times was to argue that the healthy body, particularly the healthy female body, could be a detriment to society, rather than an asset. “Malthus . . . sees the unleashed power of population, the reproducing body, as that which will eventually destroy the very prosperity that make it fecund, replacing health and innocence with misery and vice.”51 Such is the danger of unregulated reproduction that the “community,” rather than suffer the threat of the “recurrence of the serious inconvenience” promised by bastard children, “almost” drives such women from society. Here, the community’s desire to restrict reproduction outside of marriage is allowable, if “not perhaps perfectly justifiable.” But as in Malthus’s accounts of mobility, we find here that something once done in the name of the collectivity of “the community,” the necessity of “the state,” or even the “greater good,” has been individuated and is now enforced by internal affect rather than external force. The emigrant’s melancholy finds its echo in the delicacy of the chaste woman. As this passage makes clear, however, Malthus believes that the regulation of fertility works differently among the middle classes than it does among the lower classes. In the middle classes, where Malthus asserts that female delicacy is an effectual force, male foresight makes men reluctant to draw women into the emotional misery of impoverished married life. As Frances Ferguson explains, “the ‘idea of grief ’ that comes to Malthus as he contemplates [the potential decline in social status of such a woman] is the most effective prophylactic in the Essay.”52 Maureen McLane expands on that idea of the prophylactic effect of emotions among the middle classes, particularly the mournful contemplation of the future, noting that “thinking is precisely not fucking”; in other words, “foresight is the great mental condom.”53 Glimp argues that “Malthus’s privileging of this governed personality may be understood as an elaboration of the connection Milton forges between appropriate reproduction and self-control.”54 Yet, while this may be true, it is important to note that in that elaboration, Malthus differentiates sharply between men and women with regard to the consequences of the failure of such self-control. Indeed, the most important difference between

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Milton’s narrative and Malthus’s may be the way Malthus splits the fate of the unchaste man from that of unchaste woman. Whereas Adam takes Eve’s sin as his own rather than be parted from her, Malthus’s man sins “nearly with impunity,” while his female partner is “nearly driven from society.” This, according to Malthus, only “seems” to be a breach of “natural justice”: for him, the divergent fate of the sexes is “the most obvious and effectual” method of preventing the “serious inconvenience to the community” posed by illegitimate children. For Malthus, a woman’s right to stay within her community—her right to settlement—is based on an internalized “delicacy” that constrains her sexuality. Unlike Eve, when she breaches that constraint and is banished from that community, she goes alone. Thus, instead of the complex set of paradoxes we analyzed in Paradise Lost, in which Adam becomes “all places” to Eve, and the conjugal unit itself becomes the couple’s “native soil,” community in Malthus’s Essay consolidates itself by threatening to banish the potential for unregulated fecundity present in the female body. As we saw in our discussion of emigration, attachment to persons (figured by Adam’s attachment to Eve) is trumped by attachment to place (in Malthus’s example, the attachment of the man to his community). Such views mirror the early nineteenth-century revisions of the Poor Laws. As Thomas Nutt notes of the passage we have been discussing: it “addresses many of the ideas ultimately expounded in the Poor Law Commission Report” of 1831.55 When the Poor Laws were revised in 1834, women lost the right to name the father of their child. They suffered whatever punishment or took whatever subsistence the state would lay out as individuals. When Malthus revised his essay in 1803, he stressed the role of natural law even more emphatically: “It may appear hard that a mother and her children, who have been guilty of no crime themselves, should suffer the ill conduct of the father, but this is one of the invariable laws of nature; and, knowing this, we should think twice upon the subject, and be very sure of the ground on which we go, before we presume systematically to counteract it.”56 In the earlier version, Malthus allows that the social punishment of women and children who are “guilty of no crime” is historically constructed, if, in his view, historically necessary. Here, that belief calcifies into the assertion of an “invariable” natural law. Such ideas were taken up by witnesses to the Commission. Edward Simeon is quoted in the Report from the Select Committee of the House of the Lords (1831) as saying: “The Bastard Laws proceed upon the principle of indemnifying the parish, by throwing the onus of bastardy upon the father. Now I believe that we shall never be able to check the birth

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of bastard children by throwing the onus upon the men; and I feel strongly convinced, that until the law of the country is assimilated to the law of nature, and to the law of every other country, by throwing the onus more upon the females, the getting of bastard children will never be checked.”57 The congruence between Malthus’s Essay and the structures set up by the 1834 Report reveal, according to Nutt, that “Where the old poor law had for centuries stressed the importance of paternal responsibility, Malthus provided the Commissioners with a theoretical and providential justification for shifting the entire burden of responsibility of illegitimacy onto the mother.”58 As Lisa Foreman Cody argues, these arguments instantiated the belief that “poverty arose from overpopulation and that women more than men were responsible for demographic growth.” Thus, “the single mother, one of the least powerful members of nineteenth-century English society,” became an “obvious figure for reformers to exploit as the corrupt and burdensome cipher who contributed nothing but another mouth to feed.”59 As we will see, in this figuration, errancy and vagrancy are joined in the body of the sexually dysregulated, or “indelicate” woman; or rather, woman becomes the sex most vulnerable to being unsettled.

Eves and Mirandas I have been emphasizing two aspects of the way that Malthus describes the peopling of the world: or rather, since Malthus is concerned to slow or curb such peopling, two ways in which he theorizes this can be done. The first is through the individuation of mobility—the proposition that both mobility and settlement can be seen as individual choices, rather than necessary submission to the “greater good.” This figuration is part of an argument against the state using emigration as a salve for population pressure at home. The second has to do with the policing of feminine “delicacy” as a way of curbing unregulated reproduction. Such delicacy is both a physical and an emotional state—both corporeal chastity and the psychological nicety that disdains downward class mobility. This delicacy must be protected, but if it is compromised, both Malthus and the new Poor Laws agree, the offending woman should be banished from her community and deprived of support. Such sanctions, however, work to protect communities more than women, since violations of delicacy are punished by the woman’s banishment from her community, condemning her to the physical vagrancy her sexual errancy has presaged.

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By way of exploring the complexities and potential contradictions of these Malthusian paradigms, I now turn to Mary Shelley’s 1835 novel, Lodore. In Lodore, we can see the way that individualized freedom of movement comes into conflict with the injunction to foster and protect female delicacy—both in the colonial arena and at home. The novel solves that conflict in an unexpected way: by reassigning both unregulated sexuality and unregulated mobility—both errancy and vagrancy—from the daughter in the text, Ethel, to her mother, Cornelia. Shelley manages this transposition partly by way of allusions, moving from comparing Ethel to Eve—the “mother of multitudes”—to comparing her to Shakespeare’s Miranda—a lost daughter who must be protected from violation. Meanwhile, her mother, Cornelia, for most of the novel, assumes the role of the vagrant, sexually dysregulated, feminine figure who must be exiled from community in order to make settlement possible. The figure of Eve, the woman who engenders multitudes in a new world, was more broadly under revision in Malthus’s era, just as she is in the Essay, and nowhere more strikingly than in Mary Shelley’s own work. Take, for example, Shelley’s famously dark version of a “new Eve” in Frankenstein. Like Adam, the creature beseeches his creator for “a creature of another sex, but as hideous as myself.”60 If granted this partner, he promises, he and his female companion will leave Europe and go to the “vast wilds of South America.” There, they will “make our bed of dried leaves; the sun will shine on us as on man, and will ripen our food.”61 The monster argues that this sort of emigration is “peaceful and humane, and you [Victor] must feel you can only deny it in the wantonness of power and cruelty.” But Frankenstein, who sees only the misery involved, cannot imagine how the creature and his mate will “persevere in this exile.”62 The monster presents himself and his mate as the new Adam and Eve. For them, as in Paradise Lost, relocation will be simultaneously exile and renewal, promising both isolation and the potential for a new kind of community. In Frankenstein’s eyes, however, the reproductive potential of the monster and his mate holds the opposite of redemption. He believes that their fecundity has the potential to overwhelm and destroy humanity. Recent critics have seen evidence of a new Malthusian logic of population in this episode, pointing out that it is only when Frankenstein realizes that “one of the first results of those sympathies for which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror” that he precipitously destroys his second creation.63 In

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this action, Maureen McLane understands Frankenstein to be asserting his identity as human against the competition for territory from the “nonhuman” populations represented by the creature and his future bride. Although Frankenstein himself never reproduces, McLane argues that “Victor’s refusal to complete the monster-mate does, at least for him, mark his re-entry into the human social body, one which is now imagined as persisting through time into ‘everlasting generations.’ In a roundabout and perverse way, Victor does traffic in a human reproductive economy, if only in his capacity to imagine future human generations under threat.”64 Thus, as McLane points out, Victor’s dismemberment of the half-created female, making sure her children remain “unborn,” represents his version of “foresight.” Although Mary Shelley considered traveling to the utopian settlements on the Susquehanna, she never did, her own freedom of movement restricted by her father-in-law’s demands.65 In fiction, however, she explores emigration to America in her second to last novel, Lodore (1835). While Frankenstein’s creature flees England only in imagination, the highborn Lord Lodore flees the consequences of his own misconduct—misconduct triggered by the appearance of evidence, in the form of an illegitimate full-grown son, of his youthful sexual profligacy—by actually leaving England for America. “I fly,” he says, “fly my country and the face of man; go where the name of Lodore will not be synonymous with infamy—to an island in the east—to the desert wilds of America—it matters not whither.”66 Lodore here enacts Malthus’s ideal of freedom of movement, making his own decisions about emigration based on personal reasons, not the greater good. The novel initially frames his decision in Miltonic terms: Lodore hopes, like the monster, to resettle his family in a new world. “Your lot will be cast in solitude,” Lodore tells his wife, Cornelia, as he informs her of his unilateral decision to leave England for America: “The wide forest, the uninhabited plain, will shelter us. Your husband, your child; in us alone you must view the sum and aim of your life” (126). But Lodore’s dream of an exile made bearable by conjugal companionship is as impossible as the monster’s: where the latter is thwarted by Frankenstein’s destruction of his mate, the former is frustrated by the dissolution of conjugal ties. Lady Lodore balks at her husband’s proposal, and not simply because she does not want to give up her life of vain and dissipated pleasures. She will not leave England because she, in contrast to Lodore, deems her attachment to her mother stronger than her attachment to either husband or child (102). This assertion of an alternative hierarchy of familial

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bonds makes Lady Lodore a kind of anti-Eve. She resists the relationship of family to mobility that insists she will “leave mother and father” and follow her husband, denying that he is her only “native soil.”67 Lady Lodore’s refusal to accompany him also transforms Lodore’s project of emigration and settlement. Without her, his project exemplifies the failure not just of the Adamic model of migration, but also that of the aristocratic feudal lord bringing his followers with him described by proponents of emigration such as Grahame. With only his infant daughter Ethel at his side, Lodore more resembles Shakespeare’s Prospero. The novel underlines this resemblance by emphasizing Lodore’s seeming ability create a paradise out of nothing. He retreats to “the furthest wilds of an almost untenanted portion of the globe” (now known to us as Ohio), and there, with an almost supernatural rapidity, “like magic, a commodious house was raised on a small height that embanked the swift river—every vestige of forest disappeared from its immediate vicinity, replaced by agricultural cultivation, and a garden bloomed in the wilderness” (61, 54). Lodore’s America, at least the rural area in which he settles, is almost as deserted as Barbauld’s or Gibbon’s. His local affections are directed to his own estates rather than to any community and no mention is made of the indigenous people who might have inhabited these spaces before Lodore’s house magically appears. Indeed, Lodore’s actions can be seen in terms of Patrick Wolfe’s paradigm of settler colonialism, in which it is “difficult to speak of an articulation between colonizer and native since the determinate articulation is not to a society, but directly to the land, a precondition of social organization.”68 Lodore’s right of settlement, in his own mind at least, derives both from the labor and from the affect he invests in this place: “he grew to love his home in the wilderness. It was all his own creation, and the pains and thought he continued to bestow upon it rendered it doubly his” (58). In these moments, Lodore uses the language of eighteenth-century pastoral to describe a Prospero-like ideal. Just as the villagers in Gray’s Elegy keep the “noiseless tenor of their way,” so too Lodore, for a while, enjoys the “unchanging tenor of his life” (56) in his “noiseless refuge” (58). The most important fact about his “refuge,” however, is that it is “all his own creation.”69 In his isolation, and his insistence on sustaining himself with the fruits of his own creation, Lodore seems less focused on biological reproduction than on reproducing a cultural ideal. In this, he resembles not only Prospero, but also Shelley’s father, William Godwin, or at least the version of Godwin we encounter in Malthus’s Essay, in which Malthus describes Godwin

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through reference to The Tempest, as imagining an unchanging, non-libidinal, utopia. Godwin’s ideas are so alluring, Malthus asserts, that “it is impossible to contemplate the whole of this fair structure [of Godwin’s ideas] without emotions of delight and admiration, accompanied with ardent longing for the period of its accomplishment” (132). However, Malthus asserts, Godwin has slipped into that fatal double of foresight, the pleasing fantasy about the future. The “moment” when Godwin’s dreams will be realized “can never arrive”: “The whole [of Godwin’s structure of belief] is little better than a dream, a beautiful phantom of the imagination. These ‘gorgeous palaces’ of happiness and immortality, these ‘solemn temples’ of truth and virtue will dissolve, ‘like the baseless fabric of a vision,’ when we awaken to real life and contemplate the true and genuine situation of man on earth” (133).70 Malthus uses the flourish of these allusions to strenuously distinguish between the Godwinian future—an epoch that will never arrive—and his own version of future thinking—“foresight.” Moreover, I would suggest that these allusions carry not only the accusation of magical thinking, but also the suggestion of a different regime of reproduction. Prospero, we should remember, not only constructs and tears down his own island kingdom, but also presides over his own regime of reproduction in that space. His daughter, Miranda, is a kind of anti-Eve—not going forth to people new spaces, but explicitly saved from reproducing in those spaces with the savage Caliban, who claims that, had Prospero not “prevented” him, he “had peopled . . . this isle with Calibans” (Act I:2). When Malthus represents Godwin as a Prospero, who, rather than making the choice to pull down his own “palaces,” will have those imaginary palaces forcibly deconstructed by an onrushing future, he also casts doubt on the capacity of such a regime to protect female sexuality and fecundity. And this closely resembles what happens to Lodore. For a while, he imagines himself as still working within the Adamic model. Raising his daughter Ethel in his magical house, Lodore “[draws] his chief ideas from Milton’s Eve” (65): “he cut her off from familiar communication with the unrefined, and, watching over her with the fondest care, kept her far aloof from the very knowledge of what might, by its baseness or folly, contaminate the celestial beauty of her nature. . . . A creature half poetry, half love” (65). They seem to live out the ideal Barbauld proposes in Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, in which “Milton’s tones the enraptured ear enthrall / Mixt with the roar of Niagara’s fall” (95–96). Playing the role of God in his own American Paradise, Lodore focuses on isolating and protecting his daughter not just

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from “contaminating” sexuality, but also from any kind of worldly knowledge. Theirs is to be an estate that stakes its claim to settlement through ideas rather than reproduction. And yet, despite Lodore’s care, reproductive sexuality cannot be repressed or avoided. When Lodore allows a young man into his home, he finds his plans for a non-reproductive Eden undermined. The youth attempts to seduce Ethel, and “Ethel listen[s]—Eve listened to the serpent, and, since then, her daughters have been accused of an aptitude to give ear to forbidden discourse” (75). Immediately after the attempted seduction, however, Ethel’s “delicacy” reasserts itself, and she feels “degraded and humiliated; and remorse sprung up in her gentle heart” (76). She tells her father about the events, and despite the seducer’s lack of success, their idyll is destroyed. Notably, it collapses because the attempted seduction changes their relationship to time, just as Malthus predicts the Godwinian utopia will collapse. Lodore had hoped to avoid the Malthusian necessity of foresight in matters of reproduction by keeping himself and his daughter in an eternal present. When he settles in America, he imagines the future as static state of protection, “in prospect [giving] up his whole life to the warding off of every evil from [Ethel’s] dear and sacred head” (67—emphasis mine). But after the attempted seduction, the flow of time, clearly aligned with the sexual maturation of the female body, reasserts itself. “The present, the calm, placid present, [flees] like morning mist before the new risen breeze” and “the future, with all its difficulties and travails, [presents] itself to his eyes” (76).71 Father and daughter’s reinsertion into the stream of time turns Lodore’s thoughts to the world he has left, and with the “natural impetuousity” of his disposition, he utterly abandons “the quiet abode” he has “reared in the wilderness” (76, 78). Both Lodore and Ethel treat this “migration” as Milton’s Adam and Eve treat their expulsion from Eden, which is to say, with a good deal of equinimity. “A few natural tears Ethel shed—they were not many,” the text tells us, and Lodore imagines that in his return to Europe, “The world was all before him” (76, 78, alluding to Paradise Lost 12.645, 646). But it is worth noting how Shelley’s allusions, like Malthus’s, change the valence of Milton’s words. Whereas Milton’s Adam and Eve are described in these terms while they look out into an empty wilderness, going hand in hand to populate the world, Lodore imagines the world “before him” to be a bustling, populous Europe, a place which he hopes will “save” Ethel from inappropriate colonial reproduction. And Ethel journeys to this world not with her husband, but with her father; not consoled by fecundity, but rescued from it.

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Thus, although he quotes Milton in this instance, Lodore’s return, or volte face, reveals that his priorities align more with Prospero’s than Adam’s. While Lodore may build beautiful, near magical, habitations in the wilderness, he cannot abide the idea of unregulated, hybridized, even savage, reproduction taking place within them. Ethel’s seducer is less a serpent than a Caliban, who if not prevented by Lodore, would have “peopled” Ohio with hybrid Americans—though it’s worth noting that the threat posed by the suitor is one of downward class mobility, rather than the miscegenation associated with Caliban. With this reversal, Lodore’s story turns out to be one of protection and return rather than one of risk and expansion. In his blocking of unsanctioned reproduction, Lodore resembles Frankenstein, but whereas Frankenstein preempts savage reproduction through the justification of species competition, Lodore rescues Ethel from unregulated fecundity on the basis of what Malthus would call “delicacy”—the foresight that will not allow her to “lower” her condition by imprudent marriage. The text confirms Ethel’s status as a woman who must be protected from being the vessel of hybridized reproduction in the New World when it explicitly compares her and her father to Shakespeare’s Prospero and Miranda. Preparing for their return to England, Lodore reveals to Ethel all the facts about her family of origin that he has previously kept from her. “As Prospero asked the ever sweet Miranda, so did [Lodore] inquire of his daughter, if she had memory of aught preceding their residence in the Illinois? And Ethel, as readily as Miranda, replied in the affirmative” (79–80). (Although, crucially for the novel’s plot, Ethel’s memories are faulty; she believes her mother to be dead when she is actually alive.) Later, Lodore “[speaks] of Longfield [his ancestral estate], and of her kind and gentle aunt to Ethel, and she, who, like Miranda, had known no relative or intimate except her father, warmed with pleasure to find new ties bind her to her fellow creatures” (155). It seems telling, however, that the daughter’s sexuality is once again occluded by this allusion. While the “creature” that Shakespeare’s Miranda delights in seeing in her “brave new world” is a handsome young man, the “fellow creatures” Ethel is pleased to discover are her aunt, and the inhabitants of her ancestral estate. Thus Lodore’s experiment in maintaining both his own autonomy and his daughter’s delicacy in the New World fails; moreover, it fails at the precise moment when peopling becomes an issue. While Ethel’s delicacy is preserved, it can only be preserved by returning her to Europe. The final nail in the coffin of this failure comes when Lodore himself dies in a duel resulting from his own youthful sexual indiscretions. Ethel returns to England alone.

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Nor does Ethel’s return “solve” the imbricated problems of female vagrancy and feminine delicacy in the ways her father wished. Although Ethel herself maintains her virtue, her story is inextricably linked to that of the mother from whom her father sought to sever her, and her mother’s story is characterized by eruptions of indelicacy and vagrancy. In other words, the problem of sexual incontinence is displaced from the daughter to the mother, but still affects the fate of both. In this way, as readers have remarked, the narrative of Lodore deviates from novelistic conventions. After the first volume ends with the death of the title character, the remaining two volumes of the novel follow Ethel’s travails in England, as she grows used to European society, falls in love, marries, and finally reconciles with her mother. Julie Carlson points out that the novel seems to self-consciously disrupt the conventional marriage plot by having the marriage take place at the midway point of the novel, rather than at the end, and then working through both the difficulties of marriage and the difficult reconciliation of mother and daughter.72 Indeed, in Shelley’s own mind, the mother-daughter plot held primacy over the marriage plot. She wrote to her publisher in 1833: “I do not know how briefly to give you an idea of the whole tale—A Mother & Daughter are the heroines—The mother who after sacrificing all to the world at first—afterwards makes sacrifices not less entire for her child—finding all to be Vanity; except the genuine affections of the heart.”73 Ethel’s ultimate fate rests not with her husband—who is too poor to provide her with a stable home—but rather with her mother—who through “sacrifice” can guarantee her daughter’s economic security. Lodore is throughout a novel of inheritance, since the first portions concern Lodore’s desire to have his daughter inherit a cultural ideal, while the final sections reimagine the question of inheritance as the mother’s capacity to ensure her daughter’s well-being. After answering the question of whom Ethel will marry—the question that preoccupied her father—the novel turns to the question of where Ethel will live—a question that can only be answered by her mother. Rather than a marriage plot, Lodore eventually provides a settlement plot. In some ways, the resolution of Ethel’s plotline is a return to the Edenic paradigm, a straightforward recuperation of the Miltonic plot of conjugal happiness—with the crucial difference that it involves a return to “native soil” rather than an exile from it. Where her mother, Cornelia, deviated from this paradigm in refusing to leave England with her husband, Ethel adheres to it with a vengeance. Once she marries, she demonstrates that she is willing to follow her husband anywhere despite financial troubles that force them to

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relocate many times. “It mattered little to Ethel whither they were going, or to whom” the novel tells us as they travel from temporary home to temporary home via coach; “Edward [her husband] was all in all to her; and the vehicle that bore them along in their journey was a complete and perfect world” (252). For Ethel, Shelley rewrites Eve’s vows without the paradoxes: “She was willing to go anywhere with him, and where he was, she also would be” (321). As the couple’s troubles mount (some apparently based on Mary and Percy Shelley’s own hardships) the novel even more explicitly compares their bond to Adam and Eve’s post-lapsarian life. They are “ ‘Imparadised’ by each other’s presence,” just as Milton’s angel tells our first parents they will be after they are banished, and like Adam and Eve, “no Eden was required to enhance their happiness” (296). After quoting at length from Milton’s description of Adam and Eve’s bower in Paradise, the narrative tells us that Ethel and Edward, “In their narrow abode—their nook of a room, cut off from the world, redolent only of smoke and fog—their two fond hearts could build up bowers of delight” because of the gift of “faithful and truehearted love” (297). Ethel has traded the filial isolation of her father’s American estate for the conjugal isolation of this small room in London. While Lodore’s failed experiment severed husband from wife, Ethel and Edward’s marriage reasserts the primacy of the conjugal bond. Ethel’s sexuality and reproductivity are regulated by marriage. She is an Eve who returns, a Miranda who finds married love at home. And yet the threat of vagrancy persists. As one recent scholar notes, “displacement manifests itself on the streets of London, and there, repatriation is its own form of alienation.”74 Even in marriage, Ethel and Edward are unsettled, moving from place to place spurred on by poverty. They consider re-emigrating to America. In this way, as we have seen in Malthus, and throughout this book, mobility out of England is connected to the mobility of the poor within England. But while the former is figured by the novel in terms of individual choice (such as Lodore’s), the latter is understood in terms not merely of regulating fertility, but more broadly in terms of disciplining feminine modesty and “delicacy.” We can see this in the way Cornelia—a woman who has already established herself as an anti-Eve by refusing to follow her husband to America—becomes the motor of the plot of settlement rather than the chaste Ethel. But, eventually, the consequences of Cornelia’s decision to renounce the bonds of marriage produce an eruption of vagrancy that reminds us, despite the class differences involved, of the poor women Malthus and other critics of the poor laws so deplore. Lady

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Lodore’s “delicacy” is in question from the moment she decides not to follow her husband to America, if not before, and suspicion about her virtue continues through various romantic entanglements over the course of the novel. Despite this, surprisingly, Shelley allows Cornelia to evolve into a sympathetic figure, thus, I would argue, critiquing a part of the Malthusian paradigms the novel explores. After an uneasy reconciliation with her daughter, Cornelia secretly gives Ethel and Edward “her jointure for the purpose of extricating Villiers [Edward] from his embarrassments” and allowing the pair to settle in comfort in Cornelia’s former home (370). When her lawyer protests, Cornelia declares that “The sacrifice . . . is not so great as you imagine. A variety of circumstances tend to compensate me for it” (370). Yet although she is spiritually buoyed up by this act, her financial renunciation plunges Cornelia into poverty and vagrancy. Having given up both funds and home to her daughter, Cornelia finds herself “alone, friendless, unknown, and therefore despised.” She “must shift for herself, and rely on her own resources for prudence to insure safety, and courage to endure the evils of her lot. To one of another sex, the name of loneliness can never convey the idea of desolation and disregard, which gives it so painful a meaning to a woman’s mind” (384). The strong gendering of loneliness in a novel so concerned with feminine agency and feminine duty is striking. For a woman to be solitary seems to mean not only that she will be unprotected, and thus “unsafe,” but also that she will be invisible, “disregarded.” A woman’s value is in relationality, but that relationality is only guaranteed by delicacy. Cornelia plans to leave London for Wales, where “sympathy, the charm of life, [would be] dead for her, and her state of banishment would be far more complete than if mountains and seas only constituted its barriers” (385). Her exile, and the mobility it implies, unexpectedly aligns with her late husband, Lodore. And, as happens with Lodore, stepping away from settlement seems to lead Cornelia toward social “death” (392). “Alone, poor, forgotten” (394), Lady Lodore falls ill on her journey from London to the countryside. In this condition, she is beset by emotional as well as physical pain, feeling “as if it were disgraceful, to find herself alone among strangers” (395). “Alone, unknown, and unattended,” she remains “for several weeks, at a country inn—under the hands of a village doctor—to recover, if God pleased, if not, to sink, unmourned and unheard of, into an untimely grave” (396). Her status undermined by both poverty and singleness, Cornelia can only survive through charity. Uncared for, tortured as much by her own shame and sense

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of disgrace as by her physical woes, Cornelia’s only option seems to be to resign herself to invisibility. When she first gives up her money and her home, Cornelia seems to take over the role of Eve from her daughter—although in this case she is the post-lapsarian Eve. Like Eve, she feels “as if she had fallen from her native sphere into a spot unknown, ungenial and full of storms” (395). But Cornelia also compares herself explicitly to Shakespeare’s “noble exile,” Richard II—a ruler who has been forced to renounce great power (384). Interestingly, Cornelia’s awareness of her exile becomes most acute when she visits her husband’s grave. Like Lodore, she feels her situation more strongly in temporal rather than spatial terms. At his grave, Cornelia finally expresses regret for her original action of not accompanying him to America: “never before” has she “felt so sensibly that she had been a wife neglecting her duties, despising a vow she had solemnly pledged, estranging herself from him, who by religious ordinance, and the laws of society, alone had the privilege to protect and love her” (439). In her banishment, Cornelia positions herself as a failed Eve, not in Milton’s context of companionship, however, but in Lodore’s—and the early nineteenth century’s more broadly—idea of the male protection of women through marriage. By not accompanying her husband, she violated his right to protect her. “There was a charm in these melancholy and speculative thoughts to the beautiful exile—for we may be indeed as easily exiles by a few roods of ground, as by mountains and sea. A strong decree of fate banished Cornelia from the familiar past, into an unknown and strange present. Still she clung to the recollection of bygone years, and for the first time gave way to reflections of scenes and persons to be seen no more. The tomb beside which she lingered, was an outward sign of those past events, and she did not like to lose sight of it so soon” (440). Cornelia settles near Lodore’s grave, and tries “to banish every thought of the future and to make the occurrences of each day fill and satisfy her mind.” Whereas the temporal rupture Lodore experiences when he decides to leave America dispels the present and sends him hurtling into the future, Cornelia’s sudden change of thinking “banishes” her from the past and mires her in “an unknown and strange present.” Like Malthus’s melancholy emigrant, however, she clings to the traces of the past, unwilling to move forward into the “vast torrent” of time (440). The parallel constructed here between Lodore’s exile and Cornelia’s suggests a surprising overlap between the heroism of the settler immigrant and

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the plight of the houseless female. Indeed, Cornelia’s oscillation between rootless wandering and melancholy fixity reminds us of perhaps the most familiar literary representations of female vagrants of the period: Wordsworth’s Margaret, descending into madness in her ruined cottage; the mourning woman in “The Thorn,” tragically attached to the grave of her child; or the “Female Vagrant,” who stands “homeless near a thousand homes” while she is “three years a wanderer round [her] native coast.” Of this last, Scott MacKenzie has argued that she helps construct a “modern concept of homelessness—as a state not simply ‘unhouzed,’ but constitutive of the very notion of home.”75 And this could also be said of the relationship of Cornelia and Ethel, in that the daughter’s “home has a supplementary relationship to [her mother’s] homelessness, rather than, as we might expect, the other way around.”76 Indeed, the most legible aspect of the congruence between Cornelia and Lodore is that their actions are undertaken to secure the domestic settlement of their daughter. The ruptures in both parents’ paths—Lodore’s return from America, Cornelia’s self-banishment from London—are part of their efforts to protect Ethel. Lodore’s return protects Ethel from the sexual threat of her suitor, whereas Lady Lodore’s sacrifice of status, reputation, and money secures Ethel’s domestic settlement in England, preserving her from the vagrant life into which she and Edward seem about to fall. Through her “sacrifice,” therefore, Cornelia takes on not only her daughter’s debt, but also the burden of potential vagrancy and sexual dysregulation that haunt Ethel’s experience of both the New World and the Old. In this way, Cornelia’s experiences demonstrate the role of the mobile, unregulated woman in consolidating the other bonds of community. And yet in Shelley’s novel, Cornelia’s story does not end with her burial in a forgotten grave. If Shelley were following the conjugal paradigm set up Milton, Lady Lodore would be punished, or even die, for her failure to follow her husband. Instead, although she does suffer emotionally, Cornelia is eventually redeemed through her love and sacrifice for her daughter, and by her daughter’s love for her. Cornelia stays hidden from Ethel for quite a while, but when the two are finally reunited, it’s a scene of tremendous pathos, and the climax of a novel that, as we’ve already noted, diverges from the conventions of the marriage plot: “Dearest mother!” repeated Ethel, as her eyes were filled with tears of delight, “I have found you—of all that have gone to seek you, I have found you; I deserve this reward, for I love you most of all” (444). Cornelia is even allowed a happy second marriage.

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Conclusion Malthus’s reputation is for thinking of about persons as aggregate populations, but he spends a surprising amount of time in the Essay thinking about individual subjectivity. He also presages the ideological underpinnings of the settler revolution by articulating an ideal of freedom of movement—for the poor and for the emigrant (overlapping categories, as we have seen). A revised plot of reproduction and a new valuation of reproductivity emerges to accompany this. No longer interested in an Eve who will be “mother to multitudes,” early nineteenth-century texts like Lodore follow Malthus in splitting that figure into an “indelicate” woman banished from her community for unregulated sexuality, and a Miranda figure, protected by others to secure domestic settlement. It might seem strange that the plot of return we see in Lodore emerges at the same time as a rise in emigration from England to North America. And yet both the novel and the new enthusiasm for emigration are structured around an ideal of settlement, which privileges attachment to land over attachment to a leader/husband, paired with an ideal of freedom, which privileges commitment to individual choice in matters of mobility over aggregated flows directed by the state. This is why it is so important that not only Lord Lodore but also Lady Lodore choose their own banishment and suffering and do so for the sake of Ethel’s “freedom.” Thus Malthus takes us from Acts of Settlement to acts of settling. He does this by transforming ideas of peopling the world, focusing his readers on the problem of time rather than the problem of space. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that this reorientation toward problems of temporality was a rejection of European territorial expansion. The “Settler Revolution” of the early nineteenth century was also structured by a particular form of temporality, one that links it to the Malthusian temporality of “foresight.” “Settler colonialism,” as Patrick Wolfe has influentially argued, “creates a new colonial society on the expropriated land base . . . settler colonizers come to stay. Invasion is a structure, not an event.”77 The structure of invasion, as Brenna Bhandar explains, privileges an “ideology of improvement”: “Improvement, whether it related to agricultural husbandry or increased commerce and trade, took on the cast of a linear, civilizational advancement. . . . The ideology of improvement is grafted onto emerging ideas of racial difference, providing both the rationale for the perceived inability of particular populations to enter the pale of industrious, civilized life, and the justification for the appropriation of their lands.”78 The idea of

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improvement is dependent on time: a place begins in one condition, “advances” to the next better condition, and so on, iteratively, into a limitless future. The authors of the “Dispossessed Eighteenth Century” posit that these ideas of improvement and advancement lead to a kind of “speculative possession”: expropriated land is not valuable for what it is now (“wasteland” by European definitions), but rather for what it can become, once “improved” by agriculture or other extractive economies. They identify “the mutually reinforcing spatial work of dispossession and the temporal quality of financial speculation,” producing “a spatial, settler expropriation that takes place simultaneously through spatial expropriation and through temporality in the form of speculation.”79 This idea of improvement as a kind of speculation turns the Malthusian emphasis on futurity into an optimistic form of foresight. Despite their differences, though, in both cases a particular kind of temporality undergirds territorial expansion.

Afterword

In her study of property law in settler colonies, Brenna Bhandar shares the words of a chief of the Tsilhqot’in Nation. Chief Roger Williams is “bother[ed]” by “the habit of government officials, of media, and even Supreme Court judges” of calling the Tsilhqot’in “nomadic.” “His people have lived on these lands for thousands of years,” he reminds a reporter in 2014, “while it is non-natives who are constantly moving and re-settling. And what could be more nomadic and transient than the extractive industry itself—grabbing what resources and profits it can before abandoning one area for another.”1 Chief Williams succinctly articulates the way both mobility and settledness are culturally constructed conditions, their definitions pushed by political forces to the point of paradox. A people who have remained in one space for thousands of years are called nomadic, while another who move from one exhausted territory to the next are deemed settled. As Chief Williams makes clear, definitions of who is “nomadic” and who is “settled” have never been neutral, and in the history of European empire in the Americas have always been tied to the expropriation of land from indigenous peoples by settlers.2 The aim of Peopling the World has been to excavate one history of those definitions: representations of mobility in the British Atlantic world from the mid-seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century. In this time frame, I have attempted to identify and explore what I have called a regime of mobility, one in which the ideal of freedom of movement evolved in paradoxical codetermination with an ideal of attachment to land. We leave that history teetering on the brink of a new regime of mobility. The scaffolding of this new configuration, emerging in the 1820s and ’30s, was constructed out of a number of interrelated elements: the explosion of European migration to the New World; the end of slavery in the British empire; the supply of contract labor from India and China; the advent of systematic colonization in Australia; and the newly systematized expropriation of land from indigenous peoples that began in 1830. Each is

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a complicated historical phenomenon that has received copious scholarly attention to which the present study cannot do justice. I do want to gesture to each one briefly, however, to suggest both continuities and ruptures between them and the histories I have delineated in the preceding chapters. The nineteenth century witnessed human mobility on a scale that dwarfs what we have seen in the previous hundred and fifty years. For millions of people, Malthus’s claim that emigration was a “weak palliative” was irrelevant, if not entirely laughable. A pamphlet by a Scottish colonist in Canada was still able to proclaim, in 1822, “The vision of quickly and thickly peopling the earth with our species brightens my imagination day after day.”3 In The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, Jurgen Osterhammel calculates that “No other epoch in history was an age of long-distance migration on such a massive scale. Between 1815 and 1914 at least 82 million people moved voluntarily from one country to another, at a yearly rate of 660 migrants per million of the world population.”4 As we noted in the introduction, James Belich posits that twentyfive million of those people came from the British Isles, as compared to only about half a million during the eighteenth century.5 If the period between the mid-seventeenth century and the early nineteenth century constituted a specific regime of mobility within the British empire—one characterized by relatively low British emigration rates and a relatively high level of coerced mobility—we can see clear evidence for its ending in this vast expansion in the scale of emigration. But if the numbers involved in the “Settler Revolution” belie Malthus’s belief that emigration would not relieve the socioeconomic problems of Europe, the language used to describe that mass movement conforms to his emphasis on emigration as an individual choice rather than a state necessity. The drive to understand nineteenth-century emigration as “free” is everywhere evident. The key word in Osterhammel’s description above is “voluntarily.” He goes on to define the very topic of his study—the nineteenth century—in relation to the advent of an era of (supposedly) free migration. A sharp break, not uncommon in the history of population, here permits a fairly exact periodization of the nineteenth century. The break occurred around the year 1820, with the rapid and almost total disappearance of the “redemption system” under which new male and female immigrants had undertaken to pay back the cost of their passage soon after their arrival in America. . . . The core of the

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redemption systems . . . meant voluntarily entering into a relationship of bondage. It remained legal until the early twentieth century, but soon dwindled in significance after 1820. . . . The American public, itself not long in the country, increasingly viewed this “white slavery” as degrading. . . . Conditions in Europe would still force millions to move across the Atlantic, but in the eyes of the law that emigration was now free.6 If the struggles of the previous era had focused on the freedom to settle, then the struggles of the coming era would center on how to render all movement, not matter how forced by circumstances, legally “free.” Significantly, though, Osterhammel pins this epistemic break between one historical period and the next to the experience of white Europeans. If redemption systems were now viewed as degrading for them, the “American public” had few scruples about the increasing use of “voluntary bondage” in the coolie system to bring cheap labor from Africa and India to the Americas. Thus, this emphasis on the purported freedom of human movement had everything to do with an evolving racial hierarchy of labor, one symptom of which was the end of British slavery in 1833. Britain’s involvement in the slave trade, the limit case of coerced mobility, has haunted every chapter of this book, and now shadows its conclusion. Britain abolished the trade in slaves in 1807, and emancipated its slaves in 1833, with a four-year period of apprenticeship. The abolition of slavery, however, did little to alleviate the empire’s need for cheap, nearly right-less labor in colonies. Out of this need, the coolie system was born: contract labor transported from India and China to the Caribbean and other sugar-producing colonies like Mauritius. After the abolition of slavery in the United States some thirty years later, the same labor issues applied there. According to Osterhammel, “the extent of this migration [of contract labor from China and India] was still greater than that of the transcontinental movement of Europeans.”7 In contrast to slavery, and in keeping with the growing ideal of freedom of movement we have traced here, the “freedom” of contract laborers was everywhere emphasized. Such freedom was central to the usefulness and legitimacy of this labor pool. As Nandita Sharma puts it in her study of the legal changes surrounding contract labor in Mauritius: “Early imperial-state regulation of the movement of labour represented as ‘free’ thus took place at the historical conjuncture of the end of slavery and investors’ continued need for a cheapened and legally disciplined workforce.”8 But as Lisa Lowe argues,

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The British described the Chinese workers as “free,” yet the men would be shipped on vessels much like those that had brought the slaves they were designed to replace. . . . The representations of indentured labor as “freely” contracted buttressed liberal promises of freedom for former slaves, while enabling planters to derive benefits from the so-called transition from slavery to free labor that in effect included a range of intermediate forms of coercive labor, from rented slaves, sharecroppers, and convicts, to day laborers, debt peonage, workers paid by task, and indentureship. The Chinese were instrumentally used in this political discourse as a figure, a fantasy of “free” yet racialized and coerced labor, at a time when the possession of body, work, life, and death was foreclosed to the enslaved and indentured alike.9 A new regime of mobility is thus constructed around an idea of freedom defined by contractual rather than physically coerced obligation. Of course, even as this new nineteenth-century regime of mobility shifted its focus from “freedom to stay” to “freedom to move,” a certain amount of state energy was still directed at rendering subaltern groups vulnerable to involuntary removal through legal and extralegal means. One might say that in the eighteenth century the purpose of most such removals, such as the Highland clearances, had been to provide a mobile population for territorial expansion (to provide settlers), while in the nineteenth century most such removals had to do with clearing indigenous peoples from their homelands (to provide settlements). The historian Catherine Hall posits that in the 1820s and ’30s, “a revolution took place in colonial thought spearheaded by such men as Robert Wilmot Horton and Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who dreamed of white colonial empires in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes.”10 But in these new sites of Anglo settlement, Hall goes on to argue “the new settlers wanted the land—labour was a secondary consideration.”11 And the possession of land, of course, was almost always contingent on the removal of indigenous people from their homelands. The two varieties of removal, European and colonial, however, are best understood, not in contrast, but rather in causal relation to each other. As Bashford and Chaplin point out, The removal of the Irish and Scottish poor with which Malthus was so engaged, their transformation into “emigrants” and “settlers,”

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connected the old world clearances with new world clearances of both land and people. . . . The Irish and Scottish “clearances” that so exercised Malthus are thus profitably brought into the same frame as the simultaneous (indeed, in some ways the consequential) colonial clearances in the Australian colonies. The very emigration, agricultural, and pastoral endeavors that Wilmot Horton’s Colonial Office and the colonial reformers proposed were the reason indigenous occupants were being removed, “exterminated,” and with some vigor in the 1820s and 1830s.12 Similar dynamics structure the clearance of Native American nations from the southeastern United States, which also took place during the key decade of the 1830s. As the historian Walter Johnson explains: “By 1840, the homelands of the Choctaw, the Chickasaw, the Creek, the Seminole, and the Cherokee had, through the military power and legal authority of the United States of America, been converted into a vast reserve for the cultivation of whiteness.”13 Even in such massive, racialized removals, however, the rhetoric of freedom of movement was crucial to coerced mobility. Johnson quotes the Choctaw chief, George Hawkins, dismantling the rhetoric of voluntary movement to show the choicelessness undergirding it for those who did not control the definitions of settlement. “Yet it is said that our present movements are our own voluntary acts—such is not the case. We found ourselves like a benighted stranger, following false guides, until he was surrounded on every side with fire and water. The fire was certain destruction, and a feeble hope was left him of escaping by water. A distant view of the opposite shore encourages that hope; to remain would be inevitable annihilation. Who would hesitate, or who would say that his plunging into the water was his own voluntary act?”14 In the face such an explanation, it seems wrong-headed to debate the degree to which human movement is “free” or “coerced.” Instead, we must turn our attention to who defines those states, and the apparatuses by which these definitions, like those of “nomadic” and “settled,” are enforced. It seems, then, that the attempt to construct a history of representations of mobility has led us into an investigation of settlement. Indeed, a crisis of mobility is always a crisis of indigeneity: as Hagar Kotef reminds us, “movement and stability . . . precondition each other.”15 The movement of one group into new territory prompts an evaluation of the claims those living there might make in order to stay there undisturbed: often enough, as

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in Australia and the southeastern United States during the 1830s, the claim of natality is not enough to protect a people from removal (a dynamic we first investigated on a literary plane with regard to Satan and Eve in Paradise Lost). In this new regime of mobility, modes of temporality complemented and extended settler jurisdiction over indigenous peoples. Mark Rifkin argues that “settler colonialism produces its own temporal formation, with its own particular ways of apprehending time, and the state’s policies, mappings, and imperatives generate the frame of reference (such as plotting events with respect to their place in national history and seeing change in terms of American progress). More than just affecting ideologies or discourses of time, that network of institutionalized authority over ‘domestic’ territory also powerfully shapes the possibilities for interaction, development, and regularity within it.”16 And, as we have seen in our discussions of Goldsmith, Scott, Shelley, and Malthus, even as the new (non)mobility of settler colonialism was enabled by a particular idea of futurity linked to foresight and improvement, it also demanded an idea of “pastness,” of memory, something on which to anchor its march into the future. And it is here that the dependence of settler ideology on the literary is perhaps clearest. Some literature of the period functioned as what Ann Rigney, borrowing the term from Alison Landsberg, calls “prosthetic memory.”17 The proper way of thinking about both past and future anchored settler (“settled”) behavior in the present. Where then do we leave the dynamic of peopling, the conjunction of mobility, fecundity, and territorial expansion that I have argued shaped the period covered by this book? One answer is to say that by the third or fourth decade of the nineteenth century it was reorganizing itself into the dynamic Foucault has termed the biopolitical. As hospitals, schools, prisons, and other state systems of surveillance and registration became more extensive and regularized, the verb of peopling could be more easily understood as the noun of population. And yet that ideal of a quantifiable whole, with distinct, enforceable, man-made borders, has always been shadowed by the porousness, conflict, and indeterminacy I have focused on in this book—the ragged, illdefined edges of the human aggregate where peopling is a contested project. Those shadows may now be encroaching further, as we watch the regime of mobility that emerged in the nineteenth century coming to an end. European ideas of settlement have depended on settlers’ capacity to shape the territory they inhabit. In Anna Barbauld’s words, in new worlds, “obedient Nature follows where [man] leads” and “the steaming marsh is changed to fruitful

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meads” (Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 224) 18 But we are now finding that this relationship to nature may be over. As the extractive economies inaugurated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries exact their inevitable price, the scale of human movement may also become unimaginable. If significant portions of the world become uninhabitable, so too will the scale of human movement become unimaginable. “In some parts of the world, national borders will become irrelevant,” Aromar Revi, the Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and one of the authors of a recent report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) told the New York Times in 2018. “You can set up a wall to try and contain 10,000 and 20,000, and one million people, but not 10 million.”19 The world Revi describes resembles nothing so much as the invasion of refugees from the plague in The Last Man we discussed in Chapter 6: migrants “came from the east and the north, and directed their course without apparent motive, but unanimously towards our unhappy metropolis . . . calling to mind the long detail of injuries which had for many years been forgotten” (298). “We are here because you were there,” Stuart Hall once said, and a new regime of mobility may give new resonance to his words.20 As we enter this new future, an understanding of the past (as both comparable and constitutive) may be necessary.

notes

introduction 1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 267. 2. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 162. 3. It is important to note that the era’s legal definitions of both “homeless” and “unemployed” are quite expansive. Among the groups treated as vagrants by the law were gypsies, players, traveling doctors, and the Irish. As we will discuss in Chapter 1, vagrancy was a crime of status rather than action. Settlement was legally contested in the same way. 4. I have written about these interlocking histories in “Historicizing Freedom of Movement: ‘Exile’ in Political Context,” in Revisiting Slavery and Antislavery: Towards a Critical Analysis, ed. Laura Brace and Julia O’Connell Davidson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 97–122. 5. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147. 6. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 148. 7. Both quoted in J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 17. 8. Captain F. B. Head, A Few Political Arguments Against the Theory of Emigration (London: John Murray, 1828), 50. 9. See A. L. Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), Chapter 1; Henry Gemery, “Emigration from the British Isles to the New World, 1630–1700: Inferences from Colonial Populations,” Research in Economic History 5 (1980): 216. 10. James Horn and Philip D. Morgan, “Settlers and Slaves: European and African Migrations to Early Modern British America,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 23. 11. Ted McCormick, William Petty and the Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 195. 12. David Eltis, “Coerced and Free Migrations from the Old World to the New,” in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives, ed. David Eltis (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 33–74, 33.

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13. Aaron Fogelman, “From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution,” Journal of American History 85.1 (1998): 43–76, 43. 14. Steven Pincus and James Robinson, “Wars and State-Making Reconsidered: The Rise of the Developmental State,” Annales 71.1 (2016): 5–36. 15. Spectator No. 69 (1711). 16. See, among others, Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire; Steven Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 69.1 (2012): 3–34. 17. Scott R. MacKenzie, Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 8. 18. Paul Cefalu, “Rethinking the Discourse of Colonialism in Economic Terms: Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Captain John Smith’s Virginia Narratives, and the English Response to Vagrancy,” Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000): 98. See also Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). And, more recently, Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin, 2016). 19. Jordana Rosenberg and Chi-Ming Yang, “Introduction: The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.2–3 (2013): 137–52. 20. Among the substantial body of work on settler colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetiecs of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999); Glen Coulthard, “From Wards of State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh,” in Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 56–99; Brenna Bhandhar, “Title by Registration: Instituting Modern Property Law and Creating Racial Value in the Settler Colony,” Journal of Law and Society 42.2 (June 2015): 253–82. 21. Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. 22. Thomas Nail, The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 7. 23. Nail, The Figure of the Migrant, 7, 12. 24. Kotef, 11. 25. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes, vol. 1. (London: Penguin, 1990), 174. 26. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 157. 27. Rosenberg and Yang, 148. 28. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Harper and Row, 1961). 29. David Rollison, “Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England,” Social History 24.1 (1999): 1–16, 6–7. 30. Kotef, 11. 31. Edlie Wong, “Bound and Determined: New Abolitionism and the Campaign Against Modern Slavery” (2015), https://www.opendemocracy.net/beyondslavery/edlie-wong/bound -and-determined-new-abolitionism-and-campaign-against-modern-slavery, accessed June 15, 2015. 32. William Godwin, Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in the Numbers of Mankind, being an answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on the Subject (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820).

Notes to Pages 12–18

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33. Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 25. 34. Quoted in Belich, 148. 35. Belich, 126. 36. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975–76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bartani, Allesandro Fontana, and Francois Ewald (New York: Picador, 2003), 242. Foucault distinguishes between the “anatamo-politics” of biopower, and the biopolitics that followed it, “where a population is controlled through the sciences of demography and statistics. Biopolitics assumed its power only in the nineteenth century, with the growth of hospitals, schools, prisons, and other bureaucracies, institutions that recorded and monitored information about their populations” (Andrea A. Rusnock, Vital Accounts: Quantifying Health and Population in Eighteenth-Century England and France [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002], 4). 37. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1977– 1978, trans. Graham Burchell, ed. Michel Senellart (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 74. 38. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 286. 39. Rusnock, 4. 40. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15.1 (2003), trans. Libby Mientjes, 11–40, 12. 41. Robert Mitchell, “Biopolitics and Population Aesthetics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115.2 (2016): 370. 42. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” American Literary History 20.4 (Winter 2008): 667–85, 682. 43. Ted McCormick, “Population: Modes of Seventeenth-Century Demographic Thought,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 39. 44. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti, rev. Colin Gordon, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 99–100. 45. Beier, 52. 46. Sarah Nicolazzo, “Henry Fielding, The Female Husband, and the Sexuality of Vagrancy,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 56 (2014): 335–53. 47. Quoted in Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 87. 48. Federici, 89, 91. 49. Federici, 97. 50. Molly Farrell, “ ‘Beyond my Skil’: Mary Rowlandson’s Counting,” Early American Literature 47.1 (2012): 116, 60. See also Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 51. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Mientjes, Public Culture 15.1 (2003): 11. 52. Molly Farrell, Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 207. 53. This concept of vacancy has come under significant pressure from indigenous scholars.

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Notes to Pages 18–29 54. Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick Cruttwell (London: Penguin, 1986),

55. Maureen McLane, “Malthus Our Contemporary? Toward a Political Economy of Sex,” Studies in Romanticism 52.3 (2013): 353. 56. Mbembe, 12. 57. Mbembe, 40. 58. Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts, 1728–1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 176. 59. Kotef, 11. 60. P. Khalil Saucier and Tryon P. Woods, “Ex Aqua: The Mediterranean Basin, Africans on the Move, and the Politics of Policing,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory 61.141 (December 2014): 60.

chapter 1 1. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). Subsequent line numbers in parentheses in text. 2. On expansion into the Americas, see J. Martin Evans, Milton’s Imperial Epic: Paradise Lost and the Discourse of Colonialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996); and Paul Stevens, “Paradise Lost and the Colonial Imperative,” Milton Studies 34 (1997), 3–21. On Cromwell’s Western Design and the conquest of Ireland, see David Armitage, “John Milton: Poet Against Empire,” in Milton and Republicanism, ed. David Armitage, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 206–25; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Eric Song, Dominion Undeserved: Milton and the Perils of Creation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). On mercantilism and the Far East, see Timothy Morton, The Poetics of Spice: Romantic Consumerism and the Exotic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). On theories of sovereignty, see Julie Stone Peters, “A ‘Bridge over Chaos’: De Jure Belli, Paradise Lost, Terror, Sovereignty, Globalism, and the Modern Law of Nations,” Comparative Literature 57.4 (Fall 2005): 273–93. 3. See Quint, Epic and Empire; Armitage; Mary Nyquist, Arbitrary Rule: Slavery, Tyranny, and the Power of Life and Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). 4. On the early seventeenth-century context, see, among others, Evans. 5. David Quint, “David’s Census: Milton’s Politics and Paradise Regained,” in ReMembering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987); David Glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 150. 6. Ted McCormick, “Population: Modes of Seventeenth-Century Demographic Thought,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 26. 7. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2004), 97. 8. Federici, 91, 16. 9. John Frow, “Settlement,” Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (March 2012): 4.

Notes to Pages 30–38

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10. Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 21. 11. Quoted in A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 150. 12. Abigail Swingen, Competing Visions of Empire: Labor, Slavery and the Origins of the British Atlantic Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 51. 13. David Souden, “ ‘Rogues, Whores, and Vagabonds?’: Indentured Servants, Emigrants to North America, and the Case of Mid-Seventeenth-Century Bristol,” Social History 3.1 (1978): 23–41; P. C. Wilson, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars, and Other Undesirables (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1992). 14. Robert C. Johnson, “The Transportation of Vagrant Children from London to Virginia. 1618–1622,” in Early Stuart Studies, ed. Howard S. Reinmuth, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1970), 137–51. 15. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1937), 5. 16. Swingen, 15. 17. John Donoghue, “Indentured Servitude in the Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic: A Brief Survey of the Literature,” History Compass 11.10, 893–902 (October 2013): 893. 18. See Ted McCormick, “Population.” 19. Ted McCormick, “Population.” 20. Joyce Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 116. 21. Chaplin, 180. 22. Beier, 4–5. 23. Beier, 5. 24. M. J. Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), 150. 25. Braddick, 108. 26. Beier, 53. 27. Beier, 52–54. 28. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 48. 29. J. S. Taylor, “The Impact of Pauper Settlement 1691–1834,” Past and Present 73 (November 1976): 42–76, 51, 66. 30. David Rollison, “Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England,” Social History 24.1 (1999): 1–16, 6. 31. On Satan’s colonizing eye, see Evans, Quint, Armitage, and Stevens; Bruce McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature 1580–1745 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 32. See Evans, Stevens; one exception is Song, who complicates the idea of natality, although in different ways than I do below. 33. See Evans, 43; Quint. 34. Stevens, 15. 35. Even Stevens conflates Adam and Eve’s habitation of the garden with their indigeneity (11). 36. Evans, 80.

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37. Critics have noted that the Garden resembles both an American colony and an English estate, but I want to emphasize that one aspect of this coincidence is the continuity of labor between them. Sophie Gee (Making Waste: Leftovers and the Eighteenth-Century Imagination [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010]) discusses the representation of “wasteland” in the poem, but without attention to the continuities between this issue in England and in the colonial arena. She also notes Milton’s own (passing) interest in using the landless poor to cultivate waste lands: “England has many hundreds of acres of waste and barren lands, and many thousands of idle hands; if both these might be improved, England by God’s blessing would grow to be a richer nation than it now is by far” (“Proposalls of Certaine Expedients,” in Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82], 7:338). 38. For an interesting discussion of these materials, see Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 115. 39. It is tempting to think of Milton’s formulation here as adumbrating Locke’s idea of self-possession: “Though the Earth . . . be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his” (1689). Yet, there is, as the derivation of the word discussed above makes clear, a difference between being “native” to one’s own person and having “property” in one’s own person: one is a category of settlement (and mobility), the other a category of production and profit—although, as we shall see, the two categories became increasingly entwined during the seventeenth century. For readings that compare and contrast Milton and Locke’s views, see Michael Zuckert, Natural Rights and the New Republicanism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994); Mary Nyquist, “Slavery, Resistance, and Nation in Milton and Locke,” in Early Modern Nationalism and Milton’s England, ed. David Loewenstein and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 356–400; Matthew Binney, “Milton, Locke, and the Early Modern Framework of Cosmopolitan Right,” Modern Language Review, 105.1 (January 2010): 31–52). 40. Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 472. 41. Picciotto, 472. 42. While there is a line of argument that views Adam as sovereign in the Garden (see Evans), or as the governor of a certain kind of colony, I would argue that this passage reemphasizes God’s status as the only “planter” of plantations, and Adam and Eve’s subordination and vulnerability to removal. Their vulnerability to being “expelled” is set up clearly in 8.332. 43. This investment in a homogenous, implicitly empty world, coexists with the poem’s manifest interest in topography and borders. See the cogent arguments by Julie Stone Peters and Bruce McLeod. 44. Richard Eburne, A Plain Pathway to Plantations, 1624. Quoted in Chaplin, 153. 45. Quoted in Evans, 17. 46. And beyond. Teskey notes that “the idea of a fertile and feminine chaos capable, if not of spontaneous generation, then at least of having its own proper generative power” appears several times in the poem (77). 47. Song, 108. 48. Evans, 40. 49. J[ohn] Pym, “A Speech Delivered in Parliament, by a Worthy Member Thereof, and most Faithful Well-Wisher to the Church and Common-weale, Concerning the Grievances of the Kingdom” (London, 1641), 38. Quoted in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies:

Notes to Pages 46–53

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Puritan Colonization from Providence Island Through the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly 45.1 (January 1988): 70–99, 88. 50. Edward Williams, “Virgo Triumphans: or, Virginia richly and truly valued” (London, 1650), [B4r]. Quoted in Chaplin, 130. Chaplin’s Chapter 4, “Domesticating America,” makes a sustained and convincing argument for the importance of British fecundity in seventeenthcentury colonial ideology. 51. The idea that multiple bodies are needed to hold territories shows up in Paradise Lost. David Glimp points out that even God is concerned with having enough (celestial) bodies to fill up Heaven, asserting that despite the loss of angels in Satan’s rebellion, “Yet far the greater part have kept, I see, / Their station, Heav’n yet populous retains / Number sufficient to possess her Realms” (7.145–47); Glimp, 146. Glimp makes an insightful argument about the differing perspectives on the “vacant room” in Heaven, 155–56. 52. Three Early Modern Utopias: Thomas More: Utopia / Francis Bacon: New Atlantis / Henry Neville: The Isle of Pines, ed. Susan Bruce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 197, 198. 53. Neville, in Three Early Modern Utopias, 198. 54. Neville, in Three Early Modern Utopias, 199. 55. Neville, in Three Early Modern Utopias, 200. 56. Neville, in Three Early Modern Utopias, 201. 57. Chaplin, 193. 58. Glimp, 153. 59. Sophie Gee, Making Waste, 57. 60. Quoted in Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 542. 61. Glimp, 16. Evans makes a nice connection between seventeenth-century writers who saw colonists as “England’s excrements” and Virginia as “a Port Exquiline for such as by ordure or vomit were by good order and physicke worthy to be evacuated from This Body” (Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625) and the “purgative overtones” of Satan’s expulsion from Heaven (34). 62. Braddick,118. 63. John Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, 1690. 64. Steven Pincus, “Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” William and Mary Quarterly 69.1 (2012): 20. Quoting Carew Reynell, A Necessary Companion; or, The English Interest Discovered and Promoted . . . (London, 1685), 18. Much of the interest in population density sprang from a desire to emulate Dutch economic success. See Wolfram Schmidgen, Exquisite Mixture: The Virtues of Impurity in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 7–11. 65. William Petty, Treatise on Taxes and Contributions (London, 1679), 16. See McCormick, “Population,” for a discussion of the importance of density of population to Restoration economic theorists. 66. George Gardyner, A Description of the New World (London, 1651), 8–9. Quoted in Evans, 79. 67. Swingen, 29. 68. Daniel Defoe, Moll Flanders (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 8–9. Subsequent page numbers given in parentheses in text. 69. Schmidgen argues that beyond celebrating Moll’s (and Crusoe’s) return to England enriched by their colonial adventures, Defoe advocated for the greater immigration and naturalization of foreigners to England. He believed “that the influx of foreigners into England was

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not only nothing new, but that it was also the key to English prosperity and power. The populousness of nations, he believed with many others . . . caused their prosperity” (Schmidgen, 8).

chapter 2 1. Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. 2. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991), 163. 3. See, for example, Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 117–18. 4. Robert V. Wells, The Population of the British Colonies in America Before 1776: A Survey of the Census Data (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 7. See also Michael Flynn, ed., Scottish Population History: From the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); B. W. Higman, “Slavery and the Development of Demographic Theory in the Age of the Industrial Revolution,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 170; Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 5. Ted McCormick, William Petty: The Ambitions of Political Arithmetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 5. 6. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 224. 7. Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5 (1982): 279–95, 280–81. 8. John Graunt, Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality, ed. and with an introduction by Walter F. Wilcox (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1939), 35. For information about Graunt’s methodology, see Philip Kreager, “New Light on Graunt,” Population Studies 42 (1988): 129–40. 9. Peter Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic: Civil Strife and Vital Statistics,” Isis 68.241 (1974): 67–85, 73. 10. For an analysis of the idea of transmutation in Petty’s work, see McCormick, William Petty, 193–205. 11. William Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland (1691); reprinted in The Economic Writings of William Petty, 121–231, ed. Charles Henry Hull (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), 561–62. 12. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 136. 13. Kenneth Jones, “Religious Identity and the Indian Census,” in The Census in British India, ed. N. Gerald Barrier, (New Delhi: Manohar, 1981), 73–103. 14. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 174. 15. Marx, 174. For more on Petty’s role in formulating this, see Mary Poovey, “The Social Constitution of ‘Class’: Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–56. 16. Graunt, 61.

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17. Kreager, 139. 18. Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626–1660 (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975), 444. 19. Quoted in Webster, 423. 20. Graunt, 79. 21. Quoted in Charles Stangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1966), 158. 22. Graunt, 67. For more examples from the period, see David Quint, “David’s Census: Milton’s Politics and Paradise Regained,” in Re-Membering Milton: Essays on the Texts and Traditions, ed. Mary Nyquist and Margaret W. Ferguson (New York: Methuen, 1987), 128–47. 23. Graunt, 43. 24. See Webster, 432. Also Nicholas Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). 25. Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland, 129. 26. Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland, 152. 27. Poovey’s A History of the Modern Fact discusses the rising authority of this kind of writing during the seventeenth century, with particular attention to Petty. In “The Social Constitution of ‘Class,’ ” she also demonstrates the way Petty’s formulations create “a rationalized—and rationalizing—system of representation that emphasizes the quantifiability and commodification of men and objects” for Irish and English alike (30). Poovey underlines the importance of colonial difference to that system to a greater extent in the article than in A History of the Modern Fact. 28. Robert Gray, A Good Speed to Virginia (New York: Scholar’s Facsimiles and Reprints, 1937), 5. 29. Cohen, 56–57. 30. Quoted in Webster, 542. 31. Mildred Campbell, “ ‘Of People Either Too Few or Too Many’: The Conflict of Opinion on Population and Its Relation to Emigration,” in Conflict in Stuart England: Essays in Honour of Wallace Notestein, ed. W. A. Aiken and B. D. Henning, (London: Jonathan Cape, 1960), 171–201, 173. 32. Petty, Political Anatomy of Ireland, 158–59. 33. William Petty, “Of Marriages &c.” in The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. the Marquise of Landsdowne (London: Constable and Company, 1927), 50–51. 34. Kreager, 135–36. 35. William Temple, “Of Popular Discontents” (written 1681, published 1701), in The Works of William Temple Bart., in Two Volumes (London: A. Churchill et al., 1720), 1:255–72. 36. Parker Bushe Gervase, “An Essay towards Ascertaining the Population of Ireland: In a Letter to the Right Honourable the Earl of Charlemont, President of the Royal Irish Academy,” Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy 3 (1789):145–53; Thomas Newenham, A Statistical and Historical Enquiry into the Progress and Magnitude of the Population of Ireland (London, 1805); Patrick Colquhoun, Considerations on the Means of Affording Profitable Employment to Redundant Population of Great Britain and Ireland, through the Medium of an Improved and Correct System of Colonization in the British Territories in Southern Africa (London, 1818). 37. Petty, Political Arithmetick, reprinted in The Economic Writings of William Petty, 233– 313, 302–3. There was a long-standing controversy about the usefulness of the New England colonies. See Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Errand to the Indies: Puritan Colonization from

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Providence Island Through the Western Design,” William and Mary Quarterly 45.1 (1988): 70–99. 38. McCormick, William Petty, 10. 39. Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5 (1982): 279–95, 289. 40. Quoted in Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 107. 41. Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 147. 42. Cohen; Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 157; Brewer, 224–25. 43. Quoted in Cohen, 35. 44. Cohen, 35–36; Poovey, History of the Modern Fact, 157–58. One text influenced by political arithmetic did result from this effort, Gregory King’s Natural and Political Observations and Conclusions upon the State and Condition of England (1696). 45. “In their hands Newton’s definitions of matter, motion, space, and time, and his demonstration of gravity’s universal operations were welded into a unified vision of society and nature,” Peter Buck, “Seventeenth-Century Political Arithmetic,” 83. Poovey also discusses the retreat from political arithmetic after 1688 (History of the Modern Fact, 144–50). See also Margaret C. Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1976), 162–201. 46. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year, ed. Louis Landa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 16. Further page references in this chapter will be to this edition. 47. Graunt, 78–79. 48. Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 32. 49. William Petty, “Another Essay in Political Arithmetic concerning the growth of the city of London” ([1683] London, 1757), 72. 50. M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century ([1925] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 36. 51. John Bender, Imagining the Penitentiary: Fiction and the Architecture of Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 73. 52. See Carol Houlihan Flynn, The Body in Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Scott Juengel, “Writing Decomposition: Defoe and the Corpse,” Journal of Narrative Technique 25 (Spring 1995): 139–53. 53. Gordon Teskey, Delirious Milton: The Fate of the Poet in Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 199. 54. Political arithmetic did reappear in the second part of the eighteenth century— divorced this time from the state. See Peter Buck, “People Who Counted: Political Arithmetic in the Eighteenth Century,” Isis 73 (1982): 28–45. 55. Cohen, 78. Despite the wealth of information Cohen supplies on this subject, she does not address why census taking was a more plausible venture in the colonies than in the metropolis during this period. 56. R. J. Dickson, Ulster Emigration to Colonial America, 1718–1775 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1966), 184. Dickson quotes from “Report, Law Officers of Ire. to Lords Justices,” November 2, 1728. He shows that controversy over Ulster emigration continued from 1718 to 1736 (181–91). 57. Appadurai, Modernity at Large. 58. Quoted in Stangeland, Pre-Malthusian Doctrines of Population, 160, 167.

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59. Daniel Defoe, Some Considerations upon Streetwalkers (London, 1726), 7; Felicity Nussbaum provides an illuminating discussion of the relation between reproduction and empire building with regard to Defoe’s Roxana. See Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 27–29. 60. William Temple, “Of Popular Discontents,” 268. Temple’s influence on Swift’s early political beliefs is taken up by R. J. Allen, “Swift’s Earliest Political Tract and Sir William Temple’s Essays,” Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature 19 (1937): 3–13. Swift’s satirical response to Temple’s ideas about literary history is explored by A. C. Elias. See Elias, Swift at Moor Park: Problems in Biography and Criticism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982). 61. B. W. Higman, “Slavery and the Development of Demographic Theory in the Age of the Industrial Revolution,” in Slavery and British Society, 1776–1846 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982). See also Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 62. Louis Landa, “A Modest Proposal and Populousness,” Modern Philology 40.2 (1942): 161–70; George Wittkowsky, “Swift’s Modest Proposal: The Biography of an Early Georgian Pamphlet,” Journal of the History of Ideas 4.4 (January 1943): 75–104. 63. Jonathan Swift, Irish Tracts, 1728–1733, ed. Herbert Davis (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 109. Further page references in parentheses in text. 64. “Such a Method of providing for Persons, whose Principles render them unserviceable in our Army, is indeed a little more charitable than a late Project for preventing Irish Children from being starved, by fatting them up, and selling them to the Butcher,” Craftsman, no. 227 (November 7, 1730), quoted in Herbert Davis, introduction to Swift, Irish Tracts (1971) xxx. 65. The Cattle Act and Navigation Act of 1663 restricted the export of Irish cattle to England, and prohibited direct Irish trade with British colonies, forcing the Irish to buy colonial goods re-exported from England. In 1667, cattle exports to England were completely prohibited; see R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Penguin, 1989). 66. This recalls the challenge of Mbembe’s necropolitics to Foucault’s biopolitics, as discussed in the introduction. 67. There is a great deal of debate over whether Swift had any sympathy for the plight of the rural, Catholic Irish he refers to in these passages. See, for example, Oliver Ferguson, Jonathan Swift and Ireland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,1962); Carole Fabricant, Swift’s Landscape (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), and “Speaking for the Irish Nation: The Drapier, the Bishop, and the Problems of Colonial Representation,” ELH 66 (1999): 337–72; and Claude Rawson, “A Reading of ‘A Modest Proposal,‘ ” in Order from Confusion Sprung: Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature from Swift to Cowper (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), 121–47. 68. Up to two hundred thousand people left Ireland for the Americas during the eighteenth century, though the country wasn’t depopulated to the extent Swift imagines (Canny, 130). 69. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 12. 70. McCormick, William Petty, 207. 71. See, for example, the anonymous pamphlet, “A Letter to a Member of Parliament, on the Registering and Numbering of the People of Great Britain” (London, 1753); and John

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Fothergill, “Some Remarks on the Bills of Mortality in London, with an Account of a Late Attempt to Establish an Annual Bill for the Nation,” in The Works of John Fothergill, M.D., ed. John Coakley Lettsom (1768), 2:107–13. 72. Quoted in M. Drake, “The Census, 1801–1891,” in Nineteenth-Century Society: Essays in the Use of Quantitative Methods for the Study of Social Data, ed. E. A. Wrigley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 20. 73. The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 14, 1747–53 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), column 1330. 74. See Buck, “People Who Counted,” 32–35. 75. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 200. Wilson also demonstrates that this libertarian sentiment was compatible with the enthusiastic patriotism in force during this decade of imperial war, “which perceived corruption from above threaten[ing] English people’s liberties and properties at home and abroad, simultaneously circumscribing popular liberties and England’s position in the world” (200). 76. Parliamentary History, column 1363. 77. Parliamentary History, column 1350. 78. Wilson discusses other debates in the period over which rights might be extended to colonial subjects. 79. Parliamentary History, column 1320. 80. Parliamentary History, column 1355. 81. Quoted in D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Great Demography Controversy (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1978), 109.

chapter 3 Notes to epigraphs: Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 111. “The Tradesman’s Complaint” quoted in Roy Palmer, The Rambling Soldier: Life in the Lower Ranks, 1750–1900 (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1977), 258 1. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 2. David Simpson, Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern: The Poetics of Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 94, 95. 3. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London: Pimlico, 1992), 313. Eliga Gould, “ ‘What Is the Country?’: Patriotism and the Language of Popularity During the English Militia Reform of 1757,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 119–34. 4. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy ([1759] Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1967), 443. 5. On this last point, see Colley, 298. 6. Ian Hacking, “Biopower and the Avalanche of Printed Numbers,” Humanities in Society 5 (1982): 289. 7. Thomas Ellwood, Davideis (London: printed and sold by the assigns of J. Sowle, 1712), 292, 293.

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8. Colley, 289. 9. Quoted in Colley, 289. 10. The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 14, 1747–53 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813), column 1320. 11. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688–1783 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 3. 12. Colley, 312, 6. 13. Brewer, 29. 14. Major R. E. Scouller, The Armies of Queen Anne (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 138. 15. Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 58. 16. Scouller, 114; Simon Devereaux, “The Making of the Penitentiary Act, 1775–1779,” Historical Journal 42.2 (1999): 424. 17. Arthur N. Gilbert, “Army Impressment During the War of the Spanish Succession,” Historian: A Journal of History 38.4 (1976): 689–708. 18. Quoted in Brumwell, 64. 19. See Gilbert, “Army Impressment”; Stephen Conway, “The Politics of British Military and Naval Mobilization, 1776–83,” English Historical Review 112 (1997): 1182. 20. Gilbert, “Army Impressment,” 706. 21. Arthur N. Gilbert, “Charles Jenkinson and the Last Army Press, 1779,” Military Affairs: Journal of theAmerican Military Institute 42.1 (1978): 7–11. 22. J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. 3 (London: MacMillan, 1910), 522–31. 23. C. W. C. Oman, Wellington’s Army 1809–1814 (New York: Longmans, Green,1913), 210; Edward J. Coss, “The British Soldier in the Peninsular War: The Acquisition of an Unjust Repuation,” Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Society for French History 18 (1991): 245. Coss argues that recruits for the Napoleonic wars were “predominantly unemployed artisans of one variety or another. Recruiting records from Middlesex in 1796, for example, show that 80 percent listed definable trades, the largest group being weavers and tailors, two of the occupations hardest hit by industrialization” (244). 24. Quoted in Nicholas Rogers, “Vagrancy, Impressment, and the Regulation of Labour in Eighteenth Century Britain,” Slavery and Abolition 15.2 (1994): 108. 25. George Farquhar, The Recruiting Officer ([1706] New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), 44. Subsequent page numbers in parentheses in text. 26. Both Orr and Gardner discuss the ways in which The Recruiting Officer represents a new social acceptance of the military officer in genteel life. Bridget Orr, Empire on the English Stage, 1660–1714 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Kevin J. Gardner, “George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer: Warfare, Conscription, and the Disarming of Anxiety,” Eighteenth-Century Life 25 (Fall 2001): 43–61. 27. Douglas Hay, “War, Dearth, and Theft in the Eighteenth Century: The Record of the English Courts,” Past and Present 95 (1982): 141. 28. This feeling persisted into the middle of the eighteenth century. See the angry responses Gould records to the Militia Bill of 1757: “In Lincolnshire, angry rioters claimed that the new Act showed ‘that the gentlemen just kept Poor men alive to fight for them’ ” (127). 29. See Lois Schwoerer, “No Standing Armies!”: The Antiarmy Ideology in Seventeenth Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974).

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Notes to Pages 92–97

30. Hay, 138–39; Brumwell argues that the figures for 1763 might be too high (294). 31. Hay, 139. 32. Scouller, 321–28. 33. Brumwell, 298–303. 34. Quoted in T. S. Ashton, Economic Fluctuations in England 1700–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), 53. 35. See Hay, Ashton. 36. Quoted in Ashton, 52. 37. The situation was somewhat different for sailors than for soldiers. Seamen could be more easily absorbed into the merchant marine during peacetime. Furthermore, the British Navy, which upheld the dominant “blue water” policy of the government, was viewed with more respect than the army during the period (Brewer). 38. Scouller, 325; Hay, 140; Celeste Langan, Romantic Vagrancy: Wordsworth and the Simulation of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 204. 39. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), 93–95. 40. Brumwell, 297. 41. J. W. Fortescue, A History of the British Army, vol. 2 (London: MacMillan, 1910), 268. 42. The Gentleman’s Magazine (1763): 120. 43. Collections of the Maine Historical Society, 2nd series: Documentary History of the State of Maine, ed. James Phinney Baxter (Portland, ME: Leavor-Tower Company, 1907), 343–44. 44. Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, July 1712–July 1714, ed. Cecil Headlam (London: Published by His Majesty’s Stationer’s Office, 1926), 190. 45. H. B. Fant, “Picturesque Thomas Coram, Projector of Two Georgias and Father of the London Foundling Hospital,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 32 (June 1948): 84; Ruth K. McClure, Coram’s Children: The London Foundling Hospital in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 18. 46. K. Fedorowich, “The Migration of British Ex-Servicemen to Canada and the Role of the Naval and Military Emigration League, 1899–1914,” Histoire Sociale-Social History 25.49 (May 1992): 75–99. 47. Quoted in J. S. Martell, “Military Settlements in Nova Scotia After the War of 1812,” Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society, vol. 24 (1938), 74. 48. Martell, 92. 49. Martell, 97. 50. Georg Luka´cs, The Historical Novel. trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 24. 51. Luka´cs, 23–24. 52. Luka´cs, 24. 53. Compare the statements of Ernest Renan, who argues that a nation exists by “the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories,” while at the same time, “forgetting, . . . even . . . historical error, is a crucial factor in the creation of a nation.” Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” trans. Martin Thom, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 19, 11. 54. Luka´cs, 31, 32. 55. Luka´cs, 53. 56. Luka´cs, 53.

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57. Michael Clark, “Remembering Vietnam,” in The Vietnam War and American Culture, ed. John Carlos Rowe and Rick Berg (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 185. See also Mary Favret on the difficulties of transferring knowledge of battle into civilian life: “Coming Home: The Public Spaces of Romantic War,” Studies in Romanticism 33 (Winter 1994): 539–48. 58. Brumwell, 292. 59. “An Address to the Public in Favour of disbanded Soldiers,” The Gentleman’s Magazine, March 1763, 119. 60. Tobias Smollett, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 183, 185. Smollett, who had served as a surgeon in the War of Jenkins’ Ear, knew the horrors and difficulties firsthand. See the description of the Siege of Cartagena in Roderick Random. 61. Oliver Goldsmith, Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 2, ed. Arthur Friedman. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 462. 62. Goldsmith, 461. 63. Goldsmith, 465. 64. Goldsmith, 462. 65. Bewell, 119. Bewell provides important context for this soldier’s return from “the tropic islands,” where Britain’s military suffered catastrophic losses from disease. 66. David Simpson analyzes a similar dynamic in Wordsworth’s “Gipsies”: Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), 22–56. 67. Langan 205. See also Simpson’s discussion of the soldier’s “aptitude” for “a sort of perpetual motion,” in Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 93. 68. William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 116. 69. Bewell, 445. 70. Sterne, 100. 71. Sterne, 103. 72. Sterne, 98. 73. Thomas Keymer argues that “Toby’s obsessional re-enactments indicate . . . a reprehensible enthusiasm for war” and provide a topical critique of England’s ever-increasing expenditure on the Seven Year’s War during Sterne’s composition of the novel. Yet, he is a pathetic figure, too: “The victim of an originating trauma that he is endlessly doomed to act out, Toby is a fictional precursor of the shell-shocked veterans of more recent trench warfare, helplessly fixated on the unspeakable past.” Sterne, the Moderns, and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 211. 74. Walter Scott, Rob Roy ([1817] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 305. 75. Scott, Rob Roy, 300, 301. 76. Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, ed. Peter Garside (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 91, 126. Subsequent page numbers given in parentheses in text. 77. See Philip Lawson and Jim Phillips, “ ‘Our Execrable Banditti’: Perceptions of Nabobs in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Albion 16.3 (Fall 1984): 225–41; and Tara Ghoshal Wallace, “The Elephant’s Foot and the British Mouth: Walter Scott on Imperial Rhetoric,” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 311–24. 78. Both Colley and Katie Trumpener (Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997]) discuss the importance of Scots to British colonial expansion, and vice versa.

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Notes to Pages 104–108

79. This process, by which the intervening years of colonial military service are forgotten so that the Bertrams’ continuous settlement at Ellangowan can be remembered, has been analyzed by Katie Trumpener as managing the novel’s anxious consciousness of British imperial expansion: “as Harry Bertram reconstructs his British infancy only to lose track of the intervening Anglo-Indian years in the process, the narrative replicates this new amnesia, losing its earlier interest in the connections between India and Scotland. . . . In the drama of homecoming, India is forgotten, and the Indian interlude comes to seem irrelevant” (Bardic Nationalism, 221–22). While Britain’s expanding colonial control of India is crucial context for the novel, the narrative links that investment strongly to the dynamics of military service. 80. See Graham McMaster, Scott and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Peter Garside, “Meg Merrilies and India,” in Scott in Carnival: Selected Papers from the Fourth International Scott Conference, Edinburgh, 1991, ed. J. H. Alexander and David Hewitt. (Aberdeen: University of Aberdeen Press, 1993), 154–71; Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism. 81. See Garside. 82. Katie Trumpener, “The Time of the Gypsies: A ‘People Without History’ in the Narratives of the West,” in Identities, ed. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 359. 83. The connection between soldiers and gypsies may be conventional: in The Recruiting Officer Sergeant Kite relates, “I was born a gypsy, and bred among that crew till I was ten year old, there I learned canting and lying; I was bought from my mother Cleopatra by a certain nobleman for three pistols, who liking my beauty made me his page, there I learned impudence and pimping; I was turned off for wearing my lord’s linen, and drinking my lady’s ratafia; and then turned bailiff ’s follower, there I learned bullying and swearing. I at last got into the army, and there I learned whoring and drinking” (3.1: 109–16). 84. Trumpener, “Time of the Gypsies,” 359. 85. Compare Simpson’s analysis of Wordsworth’s veteran: “The ghostly forms of Wordsworth’s broken men need not be read as simply the creations of an excitable narrator, but also can be taken to register the blunt existences of damaged and displaced human beings” (Wordsworth, Commodification, and Social Concern, 99). The project of Guy Mannering is to recuperate Bertram’s damage and displacement, of course, but his initial kinship to the Discharged Soldier is revealing. 86. The possibility that a landscape could hold the memory of the events that had transpired there was deeply felt in Britain during the years in which Scott wrote the first Waverley novels, and in a way inextricably connected to war and soldiers. The same year that Guy Mannering was published, Scott visited Waterloo, and wrote: To recollect, that within a short month, the man whose name had been the terror of Europe stood on the very ground which I now occupied . .. that the landscape, now solitary and peaceful around me, presented so lately a scene of such horrid magnificence— . . . oppressed me with sensations which I find it impossible to describe. The scene seemed to have shifted so rapidly, that even while I stood on the very stage where it was exhibited, I felt an inclination to doubt the reality of what had passed. (Quoted in Stuart Semmel, “Reading the Tangible Past: British Tourism, Collecting, and Memory After Waterloo,” Representations 69 [Winter 2000]: 14.) Stuart Semmel writes of this passage: “it was the disjunction between the historical scene and the surviving tangible environment that brought on Scott’s near-vertiginous sense that the

Notes to Pages 108–116

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battle might not have happened at all, given how difficult it was to grasp. The physical landscape offered the tempting prize of communion with history—but then snatched it away” (14). 87. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism, 185. 88. Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, and Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 111. 89. Mary Favret, War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 29. 90. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,” in Selected Writings, vol. 3, 1935–38, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Howard Eiland, et al., ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 143–44. 91. Benjamin, 144.

chapter 4 1. D. V. Glass, Numbering the People: The Great Demography Controversy (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1978). 2. Quoted in Bernard Bailyn, Voyagers to the West (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 52. 3. Michael Foucault, “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti, rev. Colin Gordon, in The Foucault Effect, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 99–100. 4. Jonas Hanway, “Serious Consideration on the Solitary Design of the Act of Parliament for a regular, uniform Register of the Parish Poor in all the Parishes within the Bills of Mortality” (London: John Rivingston, 1762), 26. 5. Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 3, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 197. 6. See Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 282–83. 7. Thomas Short, A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England and Several Countries Abroad . . . (London: W. Nicoll, 1767), 33. On Goldsmith’s opposition to colonial expansion, see Laurence Goldstein, Ruins and Empire: The Evolution of a Theme in Augustan and Romantic Literature (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977). 8. John Hippisley, “Essay on the Populousness of Africa” (London: T. Lownds, 1764), 5. 9. Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, in The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 4, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 77. Further references will be to this edition in text. 10. For a history of luxury, see John Sekora, Luxury: The Concept in British Thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). 11. Thomas Short, A Comparative History of the Increase and Decrease of Mankind in England and Several Countries Abroad . . . (London: W. Nicoll, 1767), 166. 12. “Letter from a Gentleman in the Country to his Friend in the Town. On his perusal of a Pamphlet addressed to two great men” (London: R. Davies, 1760), 12–13. 13. Oliver Goldsmith, The Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, vol. 3, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 33. 14. Bailyn, 24, 26. 15. Jonas Hanway, The Defects of Police (London: 1775), 200.

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Notes to Pages 117–124

16. Bailyn, 65–70. 17. “A Letter Addressed to Two Great Men. In a Letter to the Author of that Piece” (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1760), 50. 18. Joshua Gee, The Trade and Navigation of Great-Britain Considered (4th edition, 1738) Reprints of Economic Classics (New York: Augustus M. Kelly, 1969), xv–xvi. 19. Anthony W. Parker, Scottish Highlanders in Colonial Georgia: The Recruitment, Emigration, and Settlement at Darien, 1735–1748 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 19. 20. “Charter of the Colony” (1735), in The Colonial Records of the State of Georgia, Compiled and Published Under Authority of the Legislature of Allen D. Candler, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1904), 11. 21. “Charter of the Colony” (1735), 11. 22. Green, E. R. R., “Queensborough Township: Scotch-Irish Emigration and the Expansion of Georgia, 1763–1776,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 17 (1960), 184. 23. Quoted in Green, 188. 24. Quoted in Green, 186. 25. A. Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 27. 26. J. M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 504–5. 27. Ekirch, 77. 28. Joshua Gee in 1729: “by which means those vast tracts of land now waste will be planted, and secure from the danger we apprehend of the French over-running them.” Quoted in Curtis P. Nettels, The Roots of American Civilization: A History of American Colonial Life (New York: F. S. Crifts, 1939), 403. 29. Ekirch, 7. 30. Quoted in Simon Deveraux, “The Making of Penitentiary Act, 1775–1779,” Historical Journal 42.2 (1999), 405–33: 416. 31. See Beattie, 472: “A number of merchants with interests in Jamaica were given permission in 1661, for example, to take a number of pardoned convicts from the London jails (including the Surrey county jail) and to transport them to the island to help bolster its population”; and Beattie, 480. 32. Beattie, 541. 33. William Eden, The Principles of Penal Law (London, 1771), 28. 34. Quoted in Ekirch, 20. Note that similar arguments against holding slaves on English soil circulated at the time, culminating in the Mansfield decision of 1772. 35. The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803 (London: T. C. Hansard, 1813); column 1363, column 1355. 36. Edinburgh Magazine and Review 2 (July 1774), 514. Quoted in Bailyn, 53. We will return to the invention of the ideal of freedom of movement in Chapter 7. 37. Samuel Johnson, Selected Writings, ed. Patrick Cruttwell (London: Penguin, 1986), 360. 38. Foucault, “Governmentality,” 99. 39. John Bender, “Prison Reform and the Sentence of Narration in The Vicar of Wakefield,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987): 168–89, 171. 40. Eboranos [Thomas Robe], Some Considerations for Rendering the Punishment of Criminals more effectual . . . (1733), 47, 48. Quoted in Beattie, 550–51.

Notes to Pages 125–139

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41. Bender, 186. 42. On this tendency in eighteenth-century literature, see Adela Pinch, Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 43. Alexander Pope, “Windsor-Forest,” in The Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton, 1969), 65–78. 44. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy ([1768] Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 97. 45. John Barrell, The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 72, 69. 46. Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Pres, 2000), 119. As Kaul points out, the emigrants themselves eventually turn into a “band” of personified virtues, as “the poem rewrites its socioeconomic critique into the lexicon of ethical exemplarity.” 47. See Goldstein, 111. 48. Marshall Brown, Preromanticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 129. 49. See Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain, 1815– 1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 50. Johnson, 393. 51. Johnson, 393. 52. Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Memoire,” Representations 26 (Spring 1989): 7–25, 8. 53. Nora, 18. 54. David Simpson, Wordsworth’s Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (New York: Methuen, 1987), 25. 55. Nora, 23–24. 56. Nikki Hessell, “Antipodean Auburns: ‘The Deserted Village’ and the Colonized World,” Modern Philology 112.4 (May 2015), 658. 57. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8. 58. Nikki Hessell, “Antipodean Auburns: ‘The Deserted Village’ and the Colonized World,” 656–57.

chapter 5 1. Walter Scott, The Heart of Midlothian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 240. References are to this edition. 2. Letters of George Dempster to Sir Adam Fergusson, 1756–1813, ed. James Fergusson (London, 1934). Quoted in Eric Richards, “Scotland and the Uses of the Atlantic Empire,” in Strangers Within the Realm: Cultural Margins of the First British Empire, ed. Bernard Bailyn and Philip D. Morgan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 107. 3. Although she does not discuss the colonial implications of the issue, Andrea Henderson provides an illuminating reading of “the novel’s techniques for regulating the surplus energies of circulation [both economic and literary].” Romantic Identities: Varieties of Subjectivity, 1774–1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 130–63, 138. See also Evan Gottlieb, “ ‘To be

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at Once Another and the Same’: Walter Scott and the End(s) of Sympathetic Britishness,” Studies in Romanticism 43.2 (Summer 2004): 201–2. 4. Preeminently those in Sutherland. 5. The Whistler is not a native Highlander to begin with, but the offspring of an Englishman and a Lowland Scot. 6. See my discussion of Swift in Chapter 2. 7. See my discussion of the history of the British census in Chapter 2. 8. See Petty, “Of Marriages, &c.,” in The Petty Papers: Some Unpublished Writings of Sir William Petty, ed. the Marquis of Landsdowne (London: Constable, 1927), 50–51; William Temple, “Of Popular Discontents” (written 1681, published 1701), in The Works of William Temple, Bart., in Two Volumes (London: A. Churchill et al., 1720), 1:255–72. See also Mary Poovey, “The Social Construction of ‘Class’: Toward a History of Classificatory Thinking,” in Rethinking Class: Literary Studies and Social Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 15–56. 9. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population ([1798] London: Penguin Books, 1970), 89, 90. 10. Catherine Gallagher, “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Hemy Mayhew,” Representations 14 (1986): 84, 85. 11. Georg Luka´cs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah Mitchell and Stanley Mitchell (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983), 19, 24, 25. 12. The law is cited in full by Jane Millgate, “Scott and the Law: The Heart of Midlothian,” in Rough Justice: Essays on Crime in Literature, ed. M. L. Friedland (Toronto: University of Toronto Press), 112. 13. For an argument about the way this journey itself allegorizes the relationship between metropole and periphery, see Joseph Rezek, London and the Making of Provincial Literature: Aesthetics and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), Chapter 5. 14. The Scottish law, and a very similar law enacted in England in 1624, marked out a specific time period in early modern thinking about motherhood. Peter C. Hoffer and N. E. H. Hull argue that the laws arose out of cultural anxieties about the increasing population of landless poor in England. They argue that pressures of enclosures and rack-renting produced more prosecutions for infanticide. See Murdering Mothers: Infanticide in England and New England, 1558–1803 (New York: New York University Press, 1981), 27, 115. For more detailed information about Scotland, see Deborah Symonds, Weep Not for Me: Women, Ballads, and Infanticide in Early Modern Scotland (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). A relevant account of the colonial contexts of the statute’s repeal can be found in Josephine McDonagh, “Infanticide and the Boundaries of Culture from Hume to Arnold,” in Inventing Maternity: Politics, Science, and Literature, 1630–1865, ed. Susan C. Greenfield and Carol Barash (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 215–38. 15. Ian Duncan, Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 211. 16. Judith Wilt, Secret Leaves: The Novels of Walter Scott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 132, 126. 17. Malthus, 142. 18. Many critics have noted the novel’s concern with Scotland’s national identity. See Millgate; and James Kerr, Fiction Against History: Scott as Storyteller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Beth Newman intriguingly connects this concern with national identity

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to the thematization of novel reading in the novel’s preface: “The Heart of Midlothian and the Masculinization of Fiction,” Criticism 34 (1994): 525. 19. On decreasing prosecution, see Hoffer and Hull. 20. Asiatic Researches, or Transactions of the Society Instituted in Bengal, for inquiring into the History and Antiquities, the Arts, Sciences and Literature of Asia, vol. 4 (London: Vernor and Hood, 1799), 356. The agreement reads, in part: “whereas the British Government in India, whose subjects we are, have an utter detestation of such murderous practices, and we do ourselves acknowledge, that although customary among us (which God forbid) who shall be hereafter guilty thereof, or shall not bring up and get our daughters married, to the best of our abilities, among those of our caste, shall be expelled from our tribe, and shall neither act nor keep society with us, besides suffering hereafter the punishments denounced in the above Pooran and the Shaster.” 21. McDonagh, 220. 22. Rashmi Pant, “The Cognitive Status of Caste in Colonial Ethnography: A Review of Some Literature in the NorthWest Provinces and Oudh,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 24 (1987): 149. On the Indian census as colonial apparatus, see Arjun Appadurai, “Number in the Colonial Imagination,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996): 114–39; and Bernard Cohn, “The Census, Social Structure, and Objectification in South Asia,” in An Anthropologist Among Historians and Other Essays (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990): 234–55. 23. Following a different line of argument, Gauri Viswanathan also draws a comparison between Scott’s novels, ideas of family management, and the British census projects in India. See Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 153–77. 24. B. W. Higman, “Slavery and the Development of Demographic Theory in the Age of the Industrial Revolution,” in Slavery and British Society 1776–1846, ed. James Walvin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1982), 172. I draw on Higman’s arguments throughout this section. 25. See also Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). 26. Matthew Lewis, Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, Kept During a Residence on the Island of Jamaica (London, 1834), 125. 27. Ruth Livesey, Writing the Stage Coach Nation: Locality on the Move in NineteenthCentury British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 41. 28. T. C. Smout notes that before 1745, Lowland Scots often referred to Highlanders as “the ‘Irish,’ being unwilling even to admit them as Scots.” A History of the Scottish People 1560–1830 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1969), 332. 29. Saree Makdisi notes similar comparisons of Highlanders to the natives of Africa, America, India, and the Orient. See “Colonial Space and the Colonization of Time in Scott’s Waverly,” Studies in Romanticism 34 (1995): 159. 30. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, 102. 31. Smout, 358. 32. Patrick Colquhoun, Considerations on the Means of Affording Profitable Employment to the Redundant Population of Great Britain and Ireland, through the Medium of an Improved and Correct System of Colonization in the British Territories in Southern Africa (London: G. Smeaton, 1818), 33.

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33. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 83; see also p. 188 for Malthus’s discussion of the mutations of value that occur when cows replace people. See also Catherine Gallagher’s excellent discussion of a “biological economy . . . in which cattle ‘eat’ men” (97). 34. John Sinclair, Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland, with a general view of the history of that country (Edinburgh: Arch, Constable, 1825), 168. 35. See Scottish Population History: From the Seventeenth Century to the 1930s, ed. Michael Flinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 77–80. For an account of the relationship between Sinclair’s work and literary geographies, see Eric Gidal, Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015), Chapter 2. 36. Scottish Population History, 168. 37. Sinclair, Analysis, 168. 38. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire in Every Quarter of the World, Including the East Indies . . . (London: Joseph Mawman, 1814). 39. Sinclair, Analysis, 145. He quotes from “Second Report on the State of Disease, and Condition of the Poor in Ireland” (Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed, 7th June, 1819), 97. For this reason, Sinclair produces elaborate mathematical models that distinguish Scottish productivity from Irish (lack of ) productivity (420–21). 40. Sinclair, Analysis, 147. Emphasis in original. 41. See H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy 1815–1839: “Shoveling Out Paupers” (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). 42. Memoir on the Necessity of Colonization at the Present Period, 1. 43. Colquhoun, Considerations, 34. 44. Thomas Arnold, “The Effects of Distant Colonization on the Parent State” (Prize Essay, recited in the Theatre at Oxford, 7 June 1815), 28. 45. See Duncan’s argument that through such characters in Scott, “we intuit, darkly, that the British condition of modernity does not after all consist of an internally unified, civilized ‘nation,’ the product of an evolutionary graduation of discrete historical stages. It consists of a global network of uneven, heterogeneous times and spaces, lashed together by commerce and military force, the dynamism of which is generated by the jagged economic and social differences of the local parts” (Scott’s Shadow, 114). 46. Kerr (67–68) summarizes the history of bad opinion. Harry Shaw refutes the longstanding idea that Scott wrote the fourth volume simply to make money: The Forms of Historical Fiction: Sir Walter Scott and His Successors (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 241. 47. Millgate, 166. 48. Kerr, 67. 49. Smout, 349–50. 50. Quoted in Eric Cregeen, “The Changing Role of the House of Argyll in the Scottish Highlands,” in Scotland in the Age of Improvement: Essays in Scottish History in the Eighteenth Century, ed. N. T. Phillipson and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970), 11. 51. Quoted in Smout, 345. 52. McDonagh offers a similar reading of George Eliot’s Adam Bede, calling it “a Malthusian narrative . . . in which the world will be peopled by the vigorous and morally superior offspring of the civilized classes, whereas the barbarians . . . will be expelled by the nation and

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will eventually perish” (229). See also Ian Duncan, Modern Romance and Transformations of the Novel: The Gothic, Scott, Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 168–69. 53. Wilt, 141. 54. Gottlieb, 201. 55. See, for example, Makdisi; and James Buzard, “Translation and Tourism: Scott’s Waverley and the Rendering of Culture,” Yale Journal of Criticism 8 (1995): 31–59. In contrast, see Livesey, Stage Coach Nation. 56. The settlement at Roseneath would seem to align The Heart of Midlothian with some of the conservative, pro-Empire novels Katie Trumpener discusses, such as Christian Johnstone’s Clan-Albin (1815), in which a Highland glen is brought “new prosperity . . . through economic and agricultural reform,” and “becomes home to a new transnational British community.” Yet, the Whistler’s tale brings the novel closer to what Trumpener calls “more complex” narratives of colonial history, like John Richardson’s Wacousta (1832), which reveal that the “distance and emptiness” of the colonies “have no power to neutralize old angers or to dull the cause of vengeance.” Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 266, 273. 57. Livesey, 29. 58. Quarterly Review 14:28: 333. 59. No Emigration. The Testimony of Experience, before a Committee of Agriculturalists and Manufacturers, on the Report of the Emigration Committee of the House of Commons, Sir John English in the Chair (London: Longman, 1828), 11, 15. 60. Sinclair, Analysis, 170. 61. John MacCulloch, The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland, 4 vols. (London, 1824), 4.125. Quoted in Eric Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords, and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2000), 57. It is worth noting that in Goldsmith’s poem, poetry actually leaves with the emigrants, while the poet watches, dismayed. 62. John Barrell’s reading of the political importance of The Deserted Village is relevant here. See The Dark Side of the Landscape: The Rural Poor in English Painting, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 63. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8.

chapter 6 1. Almost all readings mention Mary Shelley’s lines in her journal in May 1824: “The last man! Yes, I may well describe that solitary being’s feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me” (Mary Shelley, The Journals of Mary Shelley, 1814–1844, ed. Paula Feldman and Diana Scott-Kilvert, vol. 2 [Oxford: Clarendon, 1987], 476–77). 2. Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, The Last Man; or, Omergarus and Syderia, a Romance in Futurity, 2 vols. (London: R. Dutton, 1806); Byron [George Gordon], “Darkness,” in The Complete Poetical Works, 7 vols., ed. Jerome J. McGann, vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 302. 3. Mary Shelley, The Last Man, ed. and with an introduction by Morton Paley (Oxford World Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 262. References are to this edition.

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4. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 282. 5. Poovey, 278–95; see also Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” trans. Rosi Braidotti, rev. Colin Gordon, in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 87–105. 6. Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France 1975–76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bartani, Allesandro Fontana, and Francois Ewald (New York: Picador, 2003), 243. Quoted in Ranita Chatterjee, “Our Bodies, Our Catastrophes: Biopolitics in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” European Romantic Review 25.2 (2014): 46. 7. Hilary Strang, “Common Life, Animal Life, Equality: The Last Man,” ELH 78.2 (Summer 2011): 420. 8. For another reading that emphasizes the ineffectiveness and ultimate ephemerality of national borders, in this case in relation to the atmosphere, see Siobhan Carroll, An Empire of Air and Water: Uncolonizable Space in the British Imagination, 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 135–39. 9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). 10. Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 305. 11. Compare Rousseau on the state as a free aggregation of people (Bk. 1, Ch. 6) and on the calculus of population and territory in measuring the state (Bk. 2, Ch. 10). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1978), 53, 73. 12. See Audrey Fisch, “Plaguing Politics: AIDS, Deconstruction, and The Last Man,” in The Other Mary Shelley: Beyond Frankenstein, ed. Audrey Fisch, Anne K. Mellor, and Esther Schor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): 267–87. Critics have tended to read the plague either allegorically (e.g., Mary Jacobus, First Things: The Maternal Imaginary in Literature, Art, and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1995) or in terms of Shelley’s historical context (e.g., Bewell). While both approaches have yielded illuminating readings of the novel, I am more interested in the plague as a narrative device that helps isolate and foreground the problems of population. 13. E.g., Bewell 306–7. 14. H. J. M. Johnston, British Emigration Policy, 1815–1830: Shovelling Out Paupers (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 1. 15. Thomas Douglas, Observations on the Present State of the Highlands of Scotland, with a View of the Causes and Probable Consequences of Emigration (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1805), 222. Neither project was very successful. See Eric Richards, A History of the Highland Clearances, vol. 2 (London: Croom, 1985), 36–43; W. A. Carrothers, Emigration from the British Isles (New York: Kelley, 1966). 16. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 459–63. 17. Patrick Colquhoun, A Treatise on the Wealth, Power, and Resources of the British Empire in Every Quarter of the World, Including the East Indies . . . (London: Joseph Mawman, 1814), 421. See also the anonymous Memoir on the Necessity of Colonization at the Present Period (1817), 1. For the emigration projects of the early 1820s, see Johnston. Shelley was aware of the massive emigration of Scots to the Americas. In her later novel Lodore (1835), Lodore settles for a time in Illinois, among “emigrants from Scotland, a peacable, hard-working population” (64).

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Lodore himself is described as an exile (53, 63) and an emigrant (59, 79), as we will see in the following chapter. Lodore, ed. Lisa Vargo (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997). 18. Johnston, 56. 19. William Godwin, On Population (London, 1820), 378. 20. Douglas, 124. 21. Patrick Colquhoun, Considerations on the Means of Affording Profitable Employment to the Redundant Population of Great Britain and Ireland, through the Medium of an Improved and Correct System of Colonization in the British Territories in Southern Africa (London: G. Smeaton, 1818), 3. 22. Colquhoun, Considerations, 31. 23. Great Britain, House of Commons, The Third Report from the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom, 1827, 29 June 1827 (London: HMSO, 1827), 38. As we will see in the following chapter, Malthus ultimately believed that emigration was a temporary remedy for the problem, which could only be solved by moral restraint (Johnston, 106–7). Both generations of Rom antic poets were familiar with the Malthusian controversy. Mary Shelley followed her father’s debate with Malthus and in 1818 wrote, “Malthus is the work from which all the rich have . . . borrowed excuses and palliations for their luxury and hardheartedness.” Quoted in Emily Sunstein, Mary Shelley: Romance and Reality (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 155). For the early Romantics’ engagement with Malthus, see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); for Malthus and the later Romantics, including both Shelleys, see Maureen McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 24. Great Britain, House of Commons, 5–7. 25. Alexander Pope, “Windsor-Forest,” in The Poetry and Prose of Alexander Pope, ed. Aubrey Williams (Boston: Houghton, 1969), 65–78. Percy and Mary Shelley also lived happily for a time near Windsor. Like the characters in The Last Man, however, they along with many of their family members and associates soon left England for Europe. 26. No Emigration: The Testimony of Experience, before a Committee of Agriculturalists and Manufacturers, on the Report of the Emigration Committee of the House of Commons, Sir John English in the Chair (London: Longman, 1828), 15. For a different reading of the departure from England, see Pamela Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 198–99. 27. William Hillary, A Sketch of Ireland in 1824: The Sources of Her Evils Considered, and Their Remedies Suggested (London: W. Simphin and R. Marshall, 1825), 85. 28. Quoted in F. B. Head, A Few Practical Arguments Against the Theory of Emigration (London: John Murrary, 1828), 38. 29. Shelley read Robinson Crusoe in April 1820. 30. Grainville, 35. For the work’s French contexts, see Henry F. Majewski, “Grainville’s Le dernier homme,” Symposium 17.2 (1963): 114–22. 31. Grainville, 74. 32. On the ecological implications of The Last Man and “Darkness,” see Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 186–87. 33. Thomas Campbell, “The Last Man,” New Monthly Magazine 8 (1823): 272–73.

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34. Melissa Bailes convincingly argues that “catastrophist ideas about extinction, cave theories, and natural cataclysms crucially inform Shelley’s text.” “The Psychologization of Geological Catastrophe in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man,” ELH 82.2 (Summer 2015), 689. 35. One of the novel’s early reviews recognizes this emphasis on voice and puts it in the misogynist framework of a woman’s need for chatter. The Literary Gazette wrote, “Why not the last Woman? She would have known better how to paint her distress at having nobody left to talk to” (Review of The Last Man, Literary Gazette, 18 February 1826: 105). 36. E.g., Barbara Johnson, . “Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse: Mary Shelley’s Last Man,” Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990): 129–73; Fisch, Mellor, and Schor, 258–67. 37. Grainville, 7. 38. Grainville, 194. 39. William Godwin, Essay on Sepulchres; or, A Proposal for Creating Some Memorial of the Illustrious Dead in All Ages on the Spot Where Their Remains Have Been Interred (London: W. Miller, 1809), 112. For readings of the relationship between The Last Man and the Essay on Sepulchres, see Esther Schor, Bearing the Dead: The British Culture of Mourning from the Enlightenment to Victoria (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 240; and Strang, 420–22. 40. On the challenge posed by that equality, see Strang. 41. Douglas, 2. 42. Douglas, 3. 43. On the importance of literary identification to the novel, see Jacobus, 116. 44. In her discussion of the monuments of Rome, Shelley may have been thinking of her husband’s grave and the lost grave of her child, William (Sunstein, 359). 45. Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year ([1722] New York: Norton, 1992), 53–54. 46. Charles Brockden Brown, Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793 ([1797] New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1962), 166. 47. James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 69, 110 –13. 48. Steven Goldsmith also discusses the pressure the novel puts on narrative form. Barbara Johnson emphasizes the generic and cultural significance of Verney’s departure from Rome. “Of Gender, Plague, and Apocalypse.” 49. On early nineteenth-century concern with the difference between travelers and tourists, see Buzard; also Chloe Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999). 50. Katie Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 257.

chapter 7 1. This is what Tim Fulford argues Coleridge believed about Malthus. “In Coleridge’s version, Malthus has colonized Milton’s text and so God’s new covenant with Adam is forgotten. Procreation remains sinful, spreading the living death of penury, woe and crime. Malthus, Coleridge seems to be implying, has perverted Milton and the bible.” Tim Fulford, “Apocalyptic Economics and Prophetic Politics: Radical and Romantic Responses to Malthus and Burke,” Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (2001): 366.

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2. T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population ([1798] Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1983), 99. Subsequent page numbers given in parentheses in text. 3. According to the OED, the spatial definition of prospect predates the idea of prospect as mental vision and as a idea of time by about a hundred years: “prospect, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2017, www.oed.com/view/Entry/153018, accessed November 11, 2017. 4. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 290. 5. Maureen McLane, Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 144. 6. Catherine Gallagher, “The Body Versus the Social Body in the Works of Thomas Malthus and Henry Mayhew,” Representations 14.1 (1986): 86. As Robert Mitchell demonstrates, there are also aspects of Malthus’s work which hew to a pre-enlightenment model. Whereas many late eighteenth-century thinkers were developing an idea of “population” as “a conceptual framework for discovering new facts about subgroups of large collections of people, facts that were in turn used to determine where, when, and how to apply state measures such as disease inoculation or fiscal policies,” Malthus continued to imagine populations in terms of universal invariants, the only one of which he was interested in was reproduction. This to some degree explains why both mobility and reproductive choice are such fraught issues for Malthus, since he sees in them an often tragic tension between the individual and an undifferentiated aggregate that might serve the greater good. See Robert Mitchell, “Population Aesthetics in Romantic and Post-Romantic Literature,” in Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism, ed. Jacques Khalip and Tres Pyle (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 267–89, 271. 7. Much has been written on the way the figure of the prospect informs eighteenthcentury ideas of authority and ownership. See, most importantly, John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730–1780: An Equal, Wide, Survey (London: Hutchinson, 1983). 8. McLane, Romanticism, 344. 9. Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.,” written in Pennsylvania, 1751, 55. “Hence the prince that acquires new territory, if he finds it vacant, or removes the natives to give his own people more room; the legislator that makes effectual laws for promoting of trade, increasing employment, improving land by more or better tillage; providing more food by fisheries, securing property, etc., and the man that invents new trades, arts or manufactures, or new improvements in husbandry, may be properly called Fathers of their Nations, as they are the cause of the generation of multitudes, by the encouragement they afford to marriage” (54). See also William F. Von Valtier, “The Demographic Numbers Behind Benjamin Franklin’s Twenty-Five Year Doubling Period,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 155.2 (June 2011): 158–88. 10. Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Viking, 2016), 66, 67. See also Molly Farrell, Counting Bodies: Population in Colonial American Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 203–4; and on the importance of this passage to Malthus, 196–97. 11. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, A One-Volume Abridgement by Dero A. Saunders (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 1981), 627. 12. Quoted in Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 31. 13. James Chandler, England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 468.

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14. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterview, ON: Broadview, 2002), 167. 15. Note the difference between personified London and the wartime mother Barbauld describes earlier in the poem, who is “Fruitful in vain”: The matron counts with pride The blooming youths that grace her honoured side; No son returns to press her widow’d hand, Her fallen blossoms strew a foreign strand. (23–26) 16. Laura Mandell, “ ‘Those Limbs Disjointed of Gigantic Power’: Barbauld’s Personifications and the (Mis)Attribution of Political Agency,” Studies in Romanticism 37 (Spring 1998); 41. 17. Major Robert Torrens, “A Paper on the Means of Reducing the Poor’s Rates and affording effectual and permanent relief to the Labouring Classes,” The Pamphleteer: Respectfully Dedicated to both Houses of Parliament (1817), in Romantic Period Writings 1798–1832: An Anthology, ed. Zachary Leader and Ian Haywood (London: Routledge, 1998), 52. 18. Jonathan Sachs, “Scales of Time and the Anticipation of the Future: Gibbon, Smith, Playfair,” Modern Intellectual History 11.3 (2014); 700. 19. William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1976), 769. 20. For a different account of how Malthus’s Essay undermines stadial accounts of history, see Josephine McDonagh, “DeQuincy, Malthus, and the Anachronism Effect,” Studies in Romanticism 44.1 (2005); 71. 21. Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, 130. It’s this connection that Godwin seems to be struggling to point out when he notes in Of Population, “The human species might have perished of a long old age, a fate to which perhaps all sublunary things are subject at last, without one statesman or legislator, through myriads of centuries, having suspected this dangerous tendency to increase” (viii). 22. Saree Makdisi, “Colonial Space and the Colonization of Time in Walter Scott’s Waverley,” Studies in Romanticism 34.2 (1995); 170. 23. Charles Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically About the Age of Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 24. Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 11. 25. David Glimp, Increase and Multiply: Governing Cultural Reproduction in Early Modern England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 179. 26. Of course Malthus is also part of the debate about whether ancient populations were more numerous than current ones, as discussed by Hume, etc. This is a debate about numbers, not space or expansion, so less relevant here. 27. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), edited with an introduction by Antony Flew (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982), 75. 28. Tim Fulford, “Apocalyptic Economics and Prophetic Politics: Radical and Romantic Responses to Malthus and Burke,” Studies in Romanticism 40.3 (2001); 119. 29. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), selected and introduced by Donald Winch using the text of the 1803 edition as prepared by Patricia James for

Notes to Pages 191–200

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the Royal Economic Society, 1990, showing the additions and corrections made in the 1806, 1807, 1817, and 1826 editions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 81. 30. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), 85. 31. Bashford and Chaplin, 7, 9. 32. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), 85–86. 33. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 287. 34. For the debate over emigration as a solution to the problems of the poor, see J. R. Poynter, Society and Pauperism: English Ideas on Poor Relief, 1795–1834 (London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1969), 267–69. 35. J. Grahame, An Inquiry into the Principle of Population, etc. (London: Hurst, Reese, Orme, and Brown, 1816), 104. 36. Grahame, 126. 37. Grahame, 127. 38. David Rollison, “Exploding England: The Dialectics of Mobility and Settlement in Early Modern England,” Social History 24.1 (1999): 1–16. 39. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), 88. The paragraph added to the 1817 edition is included on this page, 40. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (1803), 88. The paragraph added to the 1817 edition is shown on this page. 41. The Third Report from the Select Committee on Emigration from the United Kingdom, 1827 (Ordered by the House of Commons to be Printed, 29 June, 1827), 38. See Bashford and Chaplin’s account, 210–15. 42. Malthus to Wilmot Horton, November 8, 1827. Quoted in R. N. Ghosh, “Malthus on Emigration and Colonization: Letters to Wilmot Horton,” Economica (February 1963); 50. 43. William Godwin, Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in Numbers of Mankind, being an answer to Mr. Malthus’s Essay on the Subject (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Browne, 1820), 140. 44. William Godwin, Of Population, 378. 45. William Godwin, Of Population, 125. 46. Bashford and Chaplin cite Malthus’s warning in the 1803 Essay: “The right of exterminating, or driving into a corner where they must starve, even the inhabitants of these thinly peopled regions, will be questioned in a moral view” (9). 47. Josephine McDonagh, “Transported: Imagining the Colony with Edward Gibbon, Wakefield, and Charlotte Bronte” (unpublished paper). 48. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 147. 49. Maureen McLane, “Malthus Our Contemporary: Towards a Political Economy of Sex,” Studies in Romanticism 52.3 (2013): 40. 50. We have already glanced at this episode with regard to infanticide laws in Chapter 5. We return to it here to discuss female vagrancy. 51. Gallagher, 84. 52. Frances Ferguson, “Malthus, Godwin, Wordsworth, and the Spirit of Solitude,” in Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 117. 53. McLane, “Malthus Our Contemporary,” 346, 354. The greatest triumph of thinking over fucking perhaps occurs in Godwin’s answer to Malthus. It is also a failure of proper

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Notes to Pages 200–205

thinking about the future that Malthus condemns in Godwin’s theory about the progress of sexual reproduction. Godwin imagines that in the future, desire between the sexes will naturally decrease, alleviating population pressure. Indeed, Malthus’s image of a geographically and temporally finite world proved so compelling that Godwin revised his ideas when he replied to Malthus in his essay of 1801, “Thoughts Occasioned by the Perusal of Dr. Parr’s Spital Sermon.” While arguing (as Malthus himself later did) that population pressure could be assuaged by moral restraint, rather than the “strong law of necessity” embodied by war, famine, and disease, he also admitted that “the soul of England, as well as the surface of the globe, is limited, and contains only an assignable number of acres.” “I know that the globe of the earth affords room for only a certain number of human beings to be trained to any degree of perfection,” he says, “and I had rather witness the existence of a thousand such beings, than a million of millions of creatures burthensome to themselves, and contemptible to each other” (The Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, , ed. Mark Philp [Abington: Routledge, 1993] vol. 2, 196). Here, Godwin turns from the ideal of unlimited space to his belief that the sexual drive, and thus human reproduction, would diminish, to bolster his utopianism. 54. Glimp, 180. 55. Thomas Nutt, “Illegitimacy, Paternal Financial Responsibility, and the 1834 Poor Law Commission Report: The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” Economic History Review 63.2 (May 2010): 337. 56. Thomas Malthus, The Works of Thomas Robert Malthus, ed. E. A. Wrigley and David Souden (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1986), vol. 3, 519. 57. Quoted in Nutt, 284. 58. Nutt, 360. 59. Lisa Foreman Cody, “The Politics of Illegitimacy in an Age of Reform: Women, Reproduction, and Political Economy in England’s New Poor Law of 1834,” Journal of Women’s History 11.4 (January 1, 2000): 150. 60. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 99. 61. Shelley, Frankenstein, 99. 62. Shelley, Frankenstein, 99. 63. Shelley, Frankenstein, 114. 64. Maureen McLane, “Literate Species: Populations, ‘Humanities,’ and Frankenstein,” ELH 63.4 (1996): 980. Robert Mitchell amends this definition of Victor: “To describe Victor as a Malthusian is to describe him as someone who sees population as a homogenous mass characterized by only one fact, its reproductive rate” (“Biopolitics and Populations Aesthetics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 115.2 [2016]: 390). 65. Miranda Seymour, Mary Shelley (London: John Murray, 2000), 336. 66. Mary Shelley, Lodore (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 1997), 115. Subsequent page numbers given in parentheses in text. 67. For another version of the paradigm of the anti-Eve, see my “Epic, Exile, and the Global: Felicia Hemans’s The Forest Sanctuary” Nineteenth-Century Literature 65.4 (March 2011): 481–512. 68. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 2. 69. Erin Webster Garrett places Lodore in the context of British thinking about America during the 1820s and ’30s: “White Papers and Black Figures: Mary Shelley Writing America,” in Mary Shelley: Her Circle and Her Contemporaries, ed. L. Adam Mekler and Lucy Morrison

Notes to Pages 205–216

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(Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2010). Garrett discusses the connection between Lodore and Prospero on page 196. See also Chandler. 70. Malthus alludes to The Tempest IV.1, 451: the baseless fabric of this vision The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve, And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on. 71. Cynthia Schoolar Williams also notes a kind of temporal loop in the first volume of Lodore, as it recurs over and over again to the moment of Lodore’s emigration. She connects this to the era of the novel’s publication, as England balanced precariously between the fall of its first empire and the rise of the second—“the ‘present time’ of the novel is also suspended, retarding and resisting temporal progression during a period when England gathered momentum for colonial expansion”—a reading not incompatible with my focus on Ethel’s delicacy here. See Williams, “Transatlantic Loops and Urban Alienation in Mary Shelley’s Lodore,” in Urban Identity and the Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Fay and Leonard Von Morze (New York: Palgrave, McMillan, 2013), 165. 72. Julie Carlson, England’s First Family of Writers: Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, Mary Shelley (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), 122–24. 73. Mary Shelley, The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980–1988) 2.185; quoted in Broadview intro. 74. Williams, 165. 75. Scott R. MacKenzie, Be It Ever So Humble: Poverty, Fiction, and the Invention of the Middle-Class Home (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 151. 76. MacKenzie, 151. 77. Patrick Wolfe, “Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 388. 78. Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 73. 79. Chi-Ming Yang and Jordana Rosenberg, “Introduction: The Dispossessed Eighteenth Century,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 55.2–3 (2013): 137–52. Ian Baucom develops a related argument about speculation and the slave trade in Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capitalism, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

afterword 1. See Martin Lukacs, “The Indigenous Land Rights Ruling That Could Transform Canada,” The Guardian, October 21, 2014. Quoted in Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 73. 2. See, among others, Glenn Coulthard, “From Wards of State to Subjects of Recognition? Marx, Indigenous Peoples, and the Politics of Dispossession in Denendeh,” in Theorizing

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Notes to Pages 216–222

Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014): 56–98. 3. Robert Gourlay, General Introduction to a Statistical Account of Upper Canada. Compiled with a View to a Grand System of Emigration, in Connexion with a Reform of the Poor Laws (London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1822). Quoted in Alison Bashford and Joyce E. Chaplin, The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 211. 4. Jurgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 154. 5. James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Angloworld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 126. 6. Osterhammel, 155. 7. Osterhammel, 158. 8. Nandita Sharma, “ ‘The New Order of Things’: Immobility as Protection in the Regime of Immigration Controls,” Anti-Trafficking Review 9 (September 2017): 31–47, 43. 9. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 24. 10. Catherine Hall, “The Slave Owner and the Settler,” in Indigenous Networks: Mobility, Connections, and Exchange, ed. Jane Carey and Jane Lydon (New York: Routledge, 2014), 33. 11. Hall, 47. Hall’s article documents just how often these dreams of settlement were bankrolled by the compensation paid out to slave owners after 1837. 12. Bashford and Chaplin, 236. 13. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 31. Johnson goes on to note the imbrication of this forced removal with the coerced labor of slaves: “As it turned out, however, white social reproduction in the Mississippi Valley came very quickly to depend on the expansion of black slavery: the racial privilege of the ‘empire of liberty’ contained within it the seeds of the Cotton Kingdom” (31). 14. George W. Hawkins, “To the American People” (December 1831). Quoted in Johnson, 30. 15. Hagar Kotef, Movement and the Ordering of Freedom: On Liberal Governances of Mobility (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 11. 16. Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous SelfDetermination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 2. 17. Ann Rigney, The Afterlives of Walter Scott: Memory on the Move (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 8. 18. Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Kraft (Peterview, ON: Broadview, 2002), 167. 19. Coral Davenport, “Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040,” New York Times, October 7, 2018. 20. Quoted in Ida Danewid, “White Innocence in the Black Mediterranean: Hospitality and the Erasure of History,” Third World Quarterly 38.7 (2017).

index

Act for Encouraging Settlers (1766), 118 Act for the Repression of Vagrancy (1597), 4, 29 Act of Settlement (1662), 8, 34, 36 Adam: attachment to Eve, 10; conjugality and, 26, 44–45, 210; labor of, 28, 38, 40–41, 48; nativity and, 38–39, 41–43 Addison, Joseph, 7 “An Address to the Public in Favour of disbanded Soldiers,” 97 aggregate bodies, 69, 71, 73, 113, 157, 163 All Indian Census Report, 144 American colonies: census taking and, 55, 74, 140; emigration to, 6, 27, 116–18, 121, 133; fears of rebellion in, 117; Georgia colony, 117–19; indigeneity and, 43; Irish as placeholders in, 55; peopling of, 5, 18, 32, 46, 51, 115; population growth and, 194–95; preservation of British culture in, 183–85; relationship with Britain, 120; reproduction and, 60; settlement rights and, 31, 33, 38; transportation to, 4, 30, 119–20; veteran settlement in, 93; western expansion in, 22, 113. See also British colonies; New World American Revolution, 7, 93, 114, 116, 120 Analysis of the Statistical Account of Scotland (Sinclair), 149 Anderson, Benedict, 55, 159 Anderson, Bridget, 12 Answer to the “Craftsman” (Swift), 76–77 Appadurai, Arjun, 74 Arendt, Hannah, 2 Armstrong, Nancy, 14 Arnold, Thomas, 4, 151–52 attachment to person, 10–11, 25, 35, 41–42, 201 attachment to place, 10–11, 25, 201

Bacon, Francis, 28, 59 Bailyn, Bernard, 116 Barbauld, Anna, 184–86, 221 Barrell, John, 130 Bashford, Alison, 188, 191, 196, 219 Beier, A. L., 16, 33 Belich, James, 4, 13, 196, 217 Bender, John, 70, 124 Benjamin, Walter, 110–11 Berkeley, George, 74, 184 Bewell, Alan, 85, 99, 101 Bhandar, Brenna, 214, 216 biopolitics, 15, 19, 159, 221, 225n36 biopower, 13–14, 17 biospatial rationalism, 63 Blackstone, William, 12 Botany Bay, 120 Braddick, M. J., 33, 34 Brewer, John, 56, 87 Britain: Civil Wars in, 26, 57, 69; colonial expansion and, 1–3, 5–7, 11; depopulation fears in, 112, 116–17, 128, 134; emptiness and, 18; enumeration projects and, 55–56, 62, 64–65, 87; liberty and, 121; mass arming in, 88; mobility and, 70; national identity and, 84, 121; population and, 113; relationship with American colonies, 120; surplus population in, 152; wars and, 84, 87–91, 114; wealth in, 114–15. See also England British colonies: banishment overseas to, 4; census taking and, 55, 59–60, 74, 140; critique of acquisitions to, 115; emigration to, 5, 13, 30–31, 49; enumeration projects and, 55–56, 74; indentured servitude and, 31; indigeneity and, 33, 43; indigenous dispeopling and, 17–18, 31, 219–21; infanticide in, 144; labor needs in, 31, 53;

256

Index

British colonies (continued ) mobility and, 141; peopling of, 32, 43–44, 46, 61; population control in, 142, 144; reproductive capacity for, 17; resettlement of soldiers in, 93–95; settlement and, 8, 27; transportation of convicts to, 30, 119–20. See also American colonies; Caribbean colonies; territorial expansion Brown, Charles Brockden, 175 Brown, Marshall, 132 Buck, Peter, 57, 65 Burke, Edmund, 119 Byron, George Gordon, 157, 170 Calais Gate, or the Roast Beef of Old England (Hogarth), 88 Caliban (character), 206, 208 Canada, 21, 93–94, 115, 164, 217 Caribbean colonies: census taking and, 55–56, 144–45; peopling of, 46; reproduction incentives in, 75, 145; transatlantic slave trade and, 6; transportation to, 120 Carlson, Julie, 209 Cefalu, Paul, 8 census taking: American colonies and, 55, 74, 140; British colonies and, 55, 59–60, 74, 140; Caribbean colonies and, 55–56, 144–45; David’s sin and, 59, 65, 79, 87; England and, 58, 65, 79–80, 140; Enlightenment goals of, 87; in India, 144; Ireland and, 55, 140; political arithmetic and, 64; population theory and, 55–56; resistance to, 79–81; Scotland and, 55, 140; Wales and, 65 Chandler, James, 184 Chaplin, Joyce E., 32, 47, 188, 191, 196, 219 Citizen of the World (Goldsmith), 98 civil society, 57, 92, 185, 187–88 Clarendon Code, 27 Clark, Michael, 97 class identity, 58 clearances, 105, 142, 148, 155, 219–20 Cody, Lisa Foreman, 202 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 65 Colley, Linda, 87–88 colonialism: enumeration projects and, 55–56; indigeneity and, 43; internal, 19, 64, 78, 138, 140; invasion and, 214; population theory and, 81; reproduction and, 4, 17, 44, 46; territorial occupation and, 17, 20. See also settler colonialism Colquhoun, Patrick, 149, 150, 151, 164, 165

Commentaries on English Law (Blackstone), 12 communication, 168, 170, 172, 175–77 community: attachment to place and, 103–5, 113; cultural, 158; emigration from, 169, 172; human experience and, 170; imagined, 159; labor portability and, 165; memory and, 114, 127, 167, 172, 177; military and, 103; mortality bills and, 67–68; national identity and, 158–63, 168, 172–74; territorial expansion and, 158, 192–93 Conventicle Act of 1664, 27 Coram, Thomas, 94 Corinne (Stae¨l), 174, 176 The Country and the City (Williams), 35 Cowper, William, 169 Craftsman, 76–77 criminals, 88, 119–20, 240n31 Cromwell, Oliver, 6, 26–27 cultural memory, 173–75 “Darkness” (Byron), 157, 170 Davenant, Charles, 59, 74 David’s sin, 59, 65, 79, 87 Defense of the Realm Act (1798), 87 Defoe, Daniel: on immigration to England, 229n69; on the plague epidemic, 54–55, 66, 175; political arithmetic and, 54–56, 73, 81–82; on reproduction, 75; on statistics, 66. See also A Journal of the Plague Year; Moll Flanders; Robinson Crusoe depopulation, 28, 116, 128, 134, 139, 148, 155 Derham, William, 65 The Deserted Village (Goldsmith): aggregate in, 113; coerced mobility and, 10, 99, 122, 130–31; critique of emigration in, 127–28, 137, 168; emptiness and, 18, 135–36, 156; memory and, 136; place and, 133–34; point of view of land in, 132–33; population in, 112; sentimentality and, 113–14, 127, 129–31, 133–34 “Discharged Soldier” (Wordsworth), 85, 99 dispeopling, 17–19, 148, 155 displacement: indigenous people and, 17–18, 31, 105, 219–21; mobility and, 109; rural populations and, 8, 21, 28, 148; Scott on, 109, 155; vagrancy and, 210. See also clearances dispossession, 2, 8–9, 20, 114, 137, 215 Douglas, Thomas, Earl of Selkirk, 164–65, 174, 193 Down Survey, 60 Duncan, Ian, 108, 143, 147

Index Earl of Selkirk. See Douglas, Thomas, Earl of Selkirk Eburne, Richard, 5, 43–44 Eden, William, 120 “The Effects of Distant Colonization on the Parent State” (Arnold), 4 “Eighteen Hundred and Eleven” (Barbauld), 184 “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (T. Gray), 10, 205 emigrants: crime of status and, 24; foresight and, 197; individual agency and, 195–97, 202, 217–18; persecution of, 23–24 emigration: colonial expansion and, 4, 7, 30–31; debates over, 158; economic concerns and, 6; increase in, 13; as involuntary exile, 169; literary connections and, 177; mobility and, 159, 162–63, 217; nineteenth century, 4–5, 13, 55, 158, 166, 217; religious freedom and, 6; right to, 12, 164–65; state power and, 80; subsidized, 5–7, 15, 93–95, 118, 164, 166; surplus population and, 62, 141, 151–52, 164–65. See also forced migration; freedom of movement; peopling enclosure: depopulation and, 28; female body and, 28; land and, 8, 10, 14–15, 17, 28, 116, 242n14; in Paradise Lost, 17, 28, 41 England: census taking and, 56, 58–59, 65, 79–80, 140; Civil Wars and, 26; colonial expansion and, 26, 163–64; emigration from, 6, 19, 30–31; indentured servitude and, 31; national identity and, 57; necropolitics and, 19; population growth and, 120; settlement rights and, 8–9; surplus population of, 30–31; vagrancy and, 4. See also Britain; British colonies; Poor Laws enumeration: arrested mobility and, 72; availability of soldiers and, 87, 110; coerced mobility and, 62, 64; control over colonies through, 55; economic value of, 74; mobility and, 159; political arithmetic and, 73; population theory and, 158; redistribution of people and, 79; resistance to, 56, 65, 140; subalternity and, 79, 82. See also census taking Essay on Sepulchres (Godwin), 173 Essay on the Bills of Mortality (Graunt), 60 An Essay on the Principle of Population (Malthus): critique of emigration in, 189–92; emotional pain of emigrants in,

257

191–92; peopling and, 178; settlement rights in, 198; temporal context of population growth in, 179–81, 187–89; on unregulated reproduction, 200–202; on women’s fecundity, 140–41, 199 Essays (Bacon), 28 Evans, J. Martin, 38, 46 Eve: attachment to Adam, 10, 25, 41–42; belonging, in Paradise Lost, 41–42; conjugality and, 26, 44–45, 207, 210; fecundity of, 17, 26, 28, 30, 32, 42, 44–48, 51–52, 182, 199–201, 214; figure, in Lodore, 182, 203, 205–7, 212; in Frankenstein, 203–4; nativity and, 38–39, 42–43 Fabian, Johannes, 187 Farquhar, George, 85, 89–91 Farrell, Molly, 17–18 Favret, Mary, 110 Federici, Sylvia, 16–17, 28, 42 female delicacy, 199–202, 208–9, 211 female secrecy, 143, 154 female sexuality: criminalization of, 16; in Lodore, 203, 207–9, 214; Malthus on, 140, 182, 199–202, 247n23; restraint of, 140, 182, 199–201, 247n23; unregulated reproduction and, 200–201; vagrancy and, 16–17, 34, 44, 202 female vagrancy, 16–17, 34, 44, 209, 213 femininity, 143 Ferguson, Frances, 200 Fogleman, Aaron, 7 forced migration: colonial expansion and, 4, 7, 31; Goldsmith on, 99, 131; indentured servitude and, 7; landless poor and, 4, 31; transported felons and, 4, 30, 119–20, 124–25, 240n31. See also clearances; penal transportation; removal; transatlantic slave trade foresight, 179, 181–82, 197, 199, 204 Foucault, Michel, 13–15, 112–13, 122, 159, 221, 225n36 Frankenstein (Shelley), 203–4 Franklin, Benjamin, 18, 183–84, 186, 249n9 freedom of movement: contractual obligation and, 219; dispossession and, 2, 8; individual agency and, 12, 195–97, 202, 217–18; memory and, 11; mobility and, 7, 196, 219; place attachment and, 197; poor and, 197–98; racial hierarchy of labor and, 218;

258

Index

freedom of movement (continued ) regret and, 12; right to, 182; settlement and, 2. See also emigration French Revolution, 81, 88 Gallagher, Catherine, 140, 181, 200, 249n6 Gee, Joshua, 117 Gee, Sophie, 48 gender, 16, 28, 41, 143. See also women George, M. Dorothy, 70 George II, 118 Georgia colony, 117–19 Gibbon, Edward, 183–86 Glimp, David, 28, 48, 49, 188, 200, 229n51 Glorious Revolution of 1688, 64–65 Godwin, William: Essay on Sepulchres, 173; futurity and, 186; on individual agency, 195–96; on Malthus, 194; Malthus on, 205–6, 251n53; on moral restraint, 251n53; Political Justice, 186; on politics of population, 3; Of Population, 1, 12, 164–65, 195 Goldsmith, Oliver: on coerced migration, 99, 131; emptiness and, 135–36; on imperial expansion, 112–13, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 124–25, 128–29; on imprisonment, 124–26; memory and, 136; place and, 109, 132; representations of America, 133; sentimentality and, 113–14, 124, 127, 129–33, 156; settlement and, 2; on useful/useless population, 116; on veteran mobility, 99, 101, 110. See also Citizen of the World; The Deserted Village; The Traveller; The Vicar of Wakefield A Good Speed to Virginia (R. Gray), 31, 61 Gottlieb, Evan, 154 “Governmentality” (Foucault), 15 Grahame, James, 192–93, 195 Grainville, Jean-Baptiste, 157, 170–73 Graunt, John, 27–28, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65 Gray, Robert, 31, 61 Gray, Thomas, 10, 205 Guy Mannering (Scott), 83; displacement in, 109; military as utopian world in, 103, 110; military identity in, 104, 238n79; national identity in, 103–4; place in, 108–9; settlement in, 104–5; soldier mobility in, 105; soldiers and gypsies in, 105–9, 238n83 Hacking, Ian, 56, 64, 87, 158 Haklyut, Richard, 119 Hall, Catherine, 219 Hall, Stuart, 222

Hanway, Jonas, 113, 116 Hartlib, Samuel, 15, 59, 62 Hawkins, George, Chief, 220 Hay, Douglas, 92 Head, F. B., 169 The Heart of Midlothian (Scott): banishment of Whistler in, 138–39, 152, 154; colonial savagery and, 142, 146–47; emptiness and, 152–53, 155–56; historical consciousness in, 97; infanticide law in, 142–43; mobility in, 181; necropolitics and, 19; plantation slavery in, 144–45; regulation of reproduction in, 142–43; reterritorialization and, 152–53; value of Scottish bodies in, 138–39, 141–42 Hechter, Michael, 148 Hemans, Felicia, 11–12, 18 Hessell, Nikki, 137 historical fiction, 97, 108–9, 141–42, 152 The Historical Novel (Luka´cs), 95 A History of the Modern Fact (Poovey), 13, 231n27 Hoffer, Peter C., 242n14 Hogarth, William, 88 Hull, N. E. H., 242n14 Humphry Clinker (Smollett), 98 identity, 42, 58, 170, 172. See also national identity imperial expansion. See territorial expansion impressment, 88–90, 95 indentured servitude, 7, 31, 119 India, 144, 243n22, 243n23 indigeneity: colonial expansion and, 33, 43; displacement and, 17–18, 31, 105, 219–21; dispossession and, 137; in Paradise Lost, 32–33, 35–40, 43; Poor Laws and, 33, 38 individuation, 192–93, 195–97, 202 infanticide law, 142–45, 242n14 The Intelligencer no. 19, 78 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 222 internal colonialism, 19, 64, 78, 138, 140 Ireland: census taking and, 55, 60, 140; Civil Wars and, 26–27; colonial oppression in, 5; English mercantile policy in, 76–77, 233n65; English power in, 62–64; indentured servitude and, 31; political economy and, 60; rural displacement in, 148 Irish: as British subjects, 77; clearances of, 220; as colonial placeholders, 55, 78, 82;

Index emigration of, 78, 233n68; French recruitment of, 76; national identity and, 57–58, 63; Petty on, 57–58, 60–63; portability of, 19–20, 63, 77–78; poverty and, 5; as surplus population, 141, 150; Swift on, 76–77, 82; as vagrants, 33; value of population and, 61, 63 Isenberg, Nancy, 183 The Isle of Pines (Neville), 46–47 The Italian (Radcliffe), 174 Jacobite Revolution of 1715, 94 Jamaica, 55–56, 240n31 James I, 30 Johnson, Samuel, 18, 121, 134–35 Johnson, Walter, 220, 254n13 A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe): absent bodies in, 66; aggregate bodies in, 69, 71, 73; London in, 66–73; mobility in, 71–72; mortality bills in, 67–70, 82; numbering and, 54, 66, 69, 73; tale/tally in, 54, 69 Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (Johnson), 134–35 Kaul, Suvir, 187 Kerr, James, 152 kinophobia, 9 kinopolitics, 9 Kotef, Hagar, 9, 12, 23, 54, 70, 220 Kreager, Philip, 58 labor: British colonies and, 31, 53; efficacy of, 171; enslaved Africans and, 53; portability and, 145, 154; racial hierarchy of, 218; removal and, 29; reproduction of, 16–17; settlement and, 35, 38, 40, 43, 205; sexual division of, 28; soldiers and, 86; subalternity and, 53; value and, 9, 58, 142, 150–52, 165 Landa, Louis, 75 landless poor: colonial emigration and, 30, 49–50; cultivation of waste land by, 228n37; effect on social order by, 33; forced migration and, 4, 31; metropolitan mobility of, 30; mobility and, 4, 15; Poor Laws and, 4, 9, 12; population growth and, 49; removal of, 28–29, 31; settlement through labor by, 35, 38. See also poor Landsberg, Alison, 221 Langan, Celeste, 100 The Last Man (Grainville), 157, 172

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The Last Man (Shelley): colonial expansion and, 163; communication and, 170, 175–77; community in, 158–63, 165, 167–70, 172–74; critique of emigration in, 167–71, 173; cultural memory and, 173–74; futility of human labor in, 170–71; human aggregates in, 157, 163; impacts of plague in, 157–58, 160–63, 167–69; literary past and, 174–77; mobility in, 158, 162–63, 167, 173, 181; nation in, 161–62, 172; population in, 158, 160–62; representation of many in, 175; Robinson Crusoe reference in, 169–70; unwanted immigrants in, 166–67 Law of Settlement (1691), 34 Lewis, Matthew, 145 literature: colonization and, 137; commemoration of empty spaces in, 135; cultural memory and, 174–77; depopulation and, 134; emigration and, 4, 177; historical fiction and, 97, 108–9, 141–42, 152; lastman narratives, 157; local attachment and, 155; Romantic, 176–77; statistics and, 69; surplus population and, 155–56; utopian fiction and, 156 Livesey, Ruth, 146, 155 Locke, John, 50 Lodore (Shelley): emigration in, 204–6; Eve figure in, 182, 203, 205–7, 212; exile in, 211–13; female delicacy and, 208–9, 211; female sexuality in, 203, 207–9, 214; Miranda figure in, 182, 203, 206, 208, 214; Prospero-like ideal in, 205–6, 208; settlement in, 209–10, 214; temporal context of, 253n71; vagrancy threat in, 203, 209–10, 213 London, 6, 57, 69–72 Lowe, Lisa, 218 Luka´cs, Georg, 95–97, 108, 110–11, 141 Luther, Martin, 16 luxury, 114–15 MacKenzie, Scott, 8 Makdisi, Saree, 187 Malthus, Thomas: on absences, 18; on emigration, 191–95, 217; on female delicacy, 199–200, 208; foresight and, 179, 181–82, 197, 199; on freedom of action, 198–99; on freedom of settlement, 197–98, 214; on Godwin, 205–6, 251n53; on individuation, 191–93, 195–97, 214; Milton and, 188–89; on mobility, 189; on Poor Laws, 197; on

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Malthus, Thomas (continued ) population growth, 3, 140–41, 158, 165–66, 180, 182, 187, 194–95, 249n6; on sexual restraint, 140, 182, 199–201, 247n23; on social punishment of women, 201–2; temporal perspective of, 179–81, 187–89, 192, 195, 214; on territorial expansion, 180–82, 186–87, 196; value of population and, 178–79. See also An Essay on the Principle of Population Mandell, Laura, 185 Marx, Karl, 9, 58 “Maxims Controlled in Ireland” (Swift), 78 Mbembe, Achille, 14, 18, 19 McCormick, Ted, 7, 14, 28, 56, 64 McDonagh, Josephine, 144, 196 McLane, Maureen, 180, 181, 197, 200, 204 Memoir on the Necessity of Colonization at the Present Period, 151 memory: collective national, 84, 97; community and, 114, 127, 167, 172, 177; cultural, 172–75; in places, 108–9, 238n86; prosthetic, 221; sentimentality and, 113, 123–24, 127, 129–32; soldiers and, 84–85, 97, 102; of war, 109 middle classes, 200 Millgate, Jane, 152 Milton, John: on colonialism, 27, 30, 37–38, 46; on indigeneity, 43; on mobility and place, 20, 26, 51; on peopling, 27–28, 30, 178; on population growth, 49, 58; Samson Agonistes, 73; on settlement, 41, 43. See also Paradise Lost Miranda (character), 182, 203, 206, 208, 214 Mitchell, Robert, 14, 249n6 mobility: ambivalence about, 7; biopolitics and, 15; colonial expansion and, 11, 25, 43–44; continuum of, 6–7; dispeopling and, 19; emigration and, 159, 162–63, 182, 217; enumeration and, 159; freedom of movement and, 7, 196, 219; gender and, 16, 41; ideals of, 9–10; individuation of, 202; landless poor and, 4, 15, 31; militarycolonial conquest and, 84; multitudes and, 32; narrative and, 176; peopling and, 19; plague and, 22, 70–72, 162, 173, 177, 222; political arithmetic of, 54; poor and, 9–10, 29, 197, 210; population and, 15, 28, 141; population growth and, 180–81; reproduction and, 16, 32; right to, 2; settlement and, 32; soldiers and, 84–87; spiritual

beliefs and, 6, 26–27; state direction for, 166; subalternity and, 8, 19, 79, 139–40; uninhabitability and, 222. See also emigration; forced migration modernity, 110, 244n45 “A Modest Proposal” (Swift), 5, 75–76 Moll Flanders (Defoe), 29–30, 51–53 mortality bills, 67–70, 82 multitudes, 32, 48–49, 229n51 The Mysteries of Udolfo (Radcliffe), 176 Nail, Thomas, 9 Napoleonic wars, 95, 102, 109, 141, 149, 193 nation: military-colonial conquest and, 84; population as, 161–62; population theory and, 120, 139; portability of, 168; productive population and, 141–42, 145, 149–50, 152, 154–55, 165; settlement and, 84; surplus population and, 141, 150, 152, 154–55 national history, 95–97 national identity: British liberty and, 121; communication and, 168; community and, 158–63, 168; geographic mobility and, 96, 103; Irish, 57–58, 63; military-colonial conquest and, 84, 95; place attachment and, 103–4; population history and, 57; Scottish, 143–44, 153, 242n18; settlement and, 84, 95, 100, 105; warfare and, 88–89, 95–96, 103, 110 national memory, 96 national productivity, 74–75, 145–46 Native Americans: displacement of, 18, 31, 220–21; settler protection from, 77, 94, 118; temporal perspective and, 187 Natural and Political Observations Made Upon the Bills of Mortality (Graunt), 57 necropolitics, 18–19 Neville, Henry, 46–47 Newman, Beth, 242n18 New Model Army, 6, 26–27 New Poor Law, 19, 182, 201–2 New World: European emigration to, 5–6, 27, 31, 117; female delicacy and, 208–9; forced migration to, 4, 7, 31; necropolitics and, 19; peopling of, 2–5. See also American colonies; British colonies; Caribbean colonies No Emigration. The Testimony of Experience . . ., 155 Nutt, Thomas, 201–2

Index “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind” (Franklin), 183 Of Population (Godwin), 1, 12, 164–65, 195 Oglethorpe, James, 117 The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt), 2 Osterhammel, Jurgen, 217–18 Pant, Rashmi, 144 Paradise Lost (Milton): Adam’s labor in, 28, 38, 40–41, 48; attachment to person in, 10, 25, 35, 41–42; conjugality and, 24–25, 44–45, 201; displacement in, 28; enclosure in, 28; Eve’s belonging in, 41–42; Eve’s fecundity in, 17, 26, 28–30, 32, 42, 44–49, 51–52, 199–201; exile in, 10–11, 25, 30, 36, 41; foresight in, 179; indigeneity and, 32–33, 35–40, 43; mobility in, 27, 32, 44, 51; multitudes in, 32, 48–49, 229n51; native place in, 35–43, 49–50, 228n39; peopling in, 3, 25, 28–30, 178–79; Satan’s exile in, 30; Satan’s place in, 35–39; Sin’s progeny in, 48–49, 51; spatial context of population in, 179–80 penal transportation, 30, 119–20, 124–25, 240n31 peopling: biopolitics and, 221; concept of population and, 16; contestation of, 221; dispeopling and, 17; gender and, 28; New World and, 19; in Paradise Lost, 3, 25, 28–30, 44; reproduction and, 4; territorial occupation and, 2, 4, 17, 20, 26, 43–44, 46, 229n51; value of, 60–61. See also reproduction; territorial expansion Petty, William: on full-peopling, 50; on the Irish, 57–58, 60–61, 63; Irish census and, 55, 60; nonmilitary domination of Ireland and, 61–63; Political Anatomy of Ireland, 57, 60; Political Arithmetick, 63; on population of London, 69; on redistribution of population, 62–63; value of population and, 9, 27–28, 51, 58, 60–61, 77, 231n27 Physicotheology (Derham), 65 Picciotto, Joanna, 40 Pincus, Steven, 7 place: attachment to, 10–11, 20, 25, 42–43, 152, 201; freedom of movement and, 197; identity and, 42; memory of events in, 108–9, 238n86; national identity and, 103–4 plague: conflicts and, 163; David’s sin and, 87; destruction of bodies by, 72–73, 77, 82; literature and, 174–75; mobility and, 22,

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70–72, 162, 173, 177, 222; mortality bills and, 67–70; national community and, 158, 161, 172–73; population and, 246n12. See also A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe); The Last Man (Shelley) “A Plain Pathway to Plantations” (Eburne), 5 Political Anatomy of Ireland (Petty), 57, 60 political arithmetic: critique of, 78; decline of, 64–65; defining, 56; identity and, 58; mobility and, 54; population theory and, 56–57; reproduction and, 74–75; state power and, 56, 59–60, 232n54; subalternity and, 54–55, 76, 82 Political Arithmetick (Petty), 63 Political Justice (Godwin), 186 poor: freedom of movement and, 198; mobility and, 29, 197, 210; parish responsibility for, 34–35, 198; quarantine and, 55; settlement rights and, 29, 34–35, 197–98. See also landless poor Poor Laws: banishment of women in, 202; criminalization of vagrancy in, 29, 33–34; freedom of movement and, 197; indigeneity and, 33; mobility of landless poor and, 4, 9, 12; parental responsibility and, 201–2; population and, 14; revision of, 201–2; Settlement Acts and, 8. See also New Poor Law Poovey, Mary, 13, 57, 65, 158, 180, 231n27 Pope, Alexander, 128, 167 population: biopolitics and, 19, 159; biopower and, 13–14, 17; colonial expansion and, 32, 112; concept of, 1–3, 14, 16; confinement and, 81; government and, 113; mobility and, 15, 28, 141; as national resource, 58–59, 112, 115–16, 120, 128; peopling and, 16; portability and, 81; problem of, 14; redistribution of, 62–63, 79–80, 156; state power and, 56, 59, 63, 79–81; time/space in, 178–79, 189; as tool of empire, 4; value of, 9, 27–28, 51, 58, 71–72. See also surplus population population control, 142–44 population growth: disease and, 167; emigration and, 62, 141; imperial need and, 140–41; in Ireland, 141; landless poor and, 49; in London, 57, 69–70; luxury and, 115; military prowess and, 91; national strength and, 112; sexual restraint and, 140, 182; temporal context of, 179–81, 187–88, 195. See also Malthus, Thomas

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population theory: anticolonialism and, 75; census taking and, 55–56; colonial policy and, 81; imperial expansion and, 55, 140; mobility and, 139–40; political arithmetic and, 56–57; subalternity and, 140 portability, 62, 79, 81, 145, 152, 154, 168 Prelude (Wordsworth), 99 Prospero (character), 205–6, 208 prosthetic memory, 221 prostitution, 34, 44 Purchas, Samuel, 5 Pym, John, 46 Quint, David, 28 Radcliffe, Ann, 174, 176 The Recruiting Officer (Farquhar), 85, 89–91, 238n83 religious freedom, 6, 26–27 removal, 8, 28–29, 31. See also clearances; forced migration Replenishing the Earth (Belich), 4 reproduction: colonization and, 4, 17, 44, 46–47; imperial need and, 17, 140; of labor, 16–17, 28; legal surveillance of, 139, 142–44, 146; mobility and, 16, 32; national productivity and, 74–75, 145–46; state regulation of, 16, 142–44 Revi, Aromar, 222 Reynell, Carew, 50 Richard II (Shakespeare), 1, 4 Rickman, John, 81 Ridley, Matthew, 79 Rifkin, Mark, 221 Rigney, Ann, 156, 221 The Rise of the Novel (Watt), 126 Robinson, James, 7 Robinson Crusoe (Defoe), 53, 169, 174 Rob Roy (Scott), 102 Rollison, David, 11, 193 Romantic literature, 176–77 “The Ruined Cottage” (Wordsworth), 11 rural populations, 28, 148 Rusnock, Andrea, 13 The Sailor’s Happiness, 89 Samson Agonistes (Milton), 73 Saucier, P. Khalil, 24 science fiction, 157 Scotland: agricultural production in, 139; census taking and, 55, 140; Civil Wars and,

26; colonial wealth and, 154; depopulation and, 148, 155; emigration from, 121, 246n17; emptiness and, 152–53, 155; English power in, 64; as internal colony, 140; national identity and, 143–44, 153, 242n18; rural displacement in, 148. See also Scottish Highlanders Scott, Walter: on discharged soldiers, 84, 102–5; on displacement, 109, 155; historical novels of, 97; on infanticide law, 146; literary prosthetics and, 156; on memory in landscape, 238n86; Rob Roy, 102; on surplus population, 147; utopian narrative and, 152–54. See also Guy Mannering; The Heart of Midlothian Scottish Highlanders: clearances of, 105, 142, 148, 155, 219–20; depopulation and, 18, 139; emigration and, 151, 155, 164–65, 174; place attachment and, 86; rebellion and, 102, 139, 142; as savage population, 142, 147, 152–53, 243n29; as surplus population, 141, 147–48, 150–51. See also Scotland Selkirk, Alexander, 169 Semmel, Stuart, 238n86 sentimentality: British borders and, 113–14, 128; family and, 123–24, 126; memory of community and, 123–24, 127, 129–32, 134; mobility and, 126–27; prison community and, 125, 127; sympathy and, 131 A Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 129 settlement: colonial expansion and, 8; dispossession and, 8–9; freedom of, 197–98, 202; gender and, 41; ideals of, 2, 8–11; mobility and, 32; national identity and, 84, 95, 100, 105; transforming capacity of, 43; vagrancy laws and, 29, 34–35 Settlement Acts, 8, 34, 36 settlement rights: labor and, 35, 38, 40, 205; by merit, 35; natality and, 33; poor relief and, 8, 29, 34–35; struggles over, 8–9; vulnerability to removal and, 31 settler colonialism: enumeration and, 55; ideology of, 8, 12; imperial expansion and, 8; land and, 205, 214; temporal formation of, 180, 221. See also British colonies; settlement; territorial expansion Settler Revolution, 4, 196, 214, 217 Seven Years’ War, 93, 97–99, 113–15, 117, 119, 129 Shakespeare, William, 1, 4, 206 Sharma, Nandita, 218

Index Shelley, Mary: freedom of movement and, 204; on Malthus, 247n23; on mobility, 163; on portability of nation, 168; science fiction and, 157. See also Frankenstein; The Last Man; Lodore Simeon, Edward, 201 Simpson, David, 86, 136 Sinclair, John, 148–50, 156 Smith, Adam, 9 Smollett, Tobias, 98 Society of Friends, 6, 27 soldiers: as citizen-heroes, 97, 111; criminal pardons for, 88, 120; enforced mobility and, 84–87; enumeration of, 87, 110; historical consciousness of, 96–97; mobility and, 110; narratives of, 85; poor, 89; press gangs and, 88–90, 95; recruitment of, 88–91, 96, 235n23; as surplus population, 141; as unruly mobs, 102; vagrancy and, 84, 93, 100; as wage labor, 86. See also veterans “Song of Emigration” (Hemans), 11, 18 Songs of the Affections (Hemans), 11 stadial theory, 185, 188 Stae¨l, Madame de, 174, 176 state: body metaphors and, 58; control of mobility by, 81; luxury and, 134; political arithmetic and, 56, 60; population and, 56, 59, 63; redistribution of people by, 79–80; regulation of reproduction by, 16, 142–44; subsidized emigration and, 5–7, 15, 93–95, 118, 164, 166 Statistical Account of Scotland (Sinclair), 149 Sterne, Laurence, 86, 101–2, 129 Stevens, Paul, 38 “The Storyteller” (Benjamin), 110 Strang, Hilary, 159 structures of feeling, 10–11 subalternity: banishment and, 154; labor needs and, 53; migration and, 23; mobility and, 8, 19, 79, 139–40; political arithmetic and, 54–55, 76, 82; portability and, 62, 79, 81, 152, 154; territorial occupation and, 19; vulnerability to removal and, 31 surplus population: colonial expansion and, 32, 112, 180–83; emigration and, 62, 141, 151–52, 164–65; exportation of labor and, 141; literature and, 155–56; national productivity and, 164; nation and, 150; Scottish Highlanders as, 141, 147–48, 150–51; social effects of, 141, 149; soldiers as, 141

263

Swift, Jonathan: Answer to the “Craftsman,” 76; critique of British economic policies by, 75, 77; Intelligencer no. 19, 78; on Irish bodies, 76–77, 82; Irish migrants and, 55; Irish tracts of, 54, 66, 73–74, 79; “Maxims Controlled in Ireland,” 78; numbering and, 73; political arithmetic and, 54–56, 74–76, 78, 81–82; populousness and, 75; satire of, 5, 19, 66, 76–77; subaltern bodies and, 73–74, 76. See also “A Modest Proposal” Swingen, Abigail, 31 Taylor, J. S., 35 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 206 Temple, William, 63, 75 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 14 territorial expansion: community and, 192–93; forced migration and, 7; improvement and, 214–15; individuation and, 192–93, 195; infinite space beliefs, 180, 183, 186; mobility and, 11, 25, 43–44; needs of supra-human entity and, 185–86; numbering and, 54; peopling and, 3–4, 17, 20, 26, 32, 43–44, 46, 229n51; personification and, 185; population theory and, 55; reproduction and, 4, 17, 44, 46–47, 186; speculative future and, 186; surplus population and, 32, 112, 180–83; temporality and, 215. See also British colonies Teskey, Gordon, 73 “The Thorn” (Wordsworth), 11 Thornton, William, 79 “Thoughts on the Utility and Facility of Ascertaining the Population of England” (Rickman), 81 Torrens, Robert, 186 “The Tradesman’s Complaint,” 83 transatlantic slave trade, 4, 6, 53, 218, 254n13 The Transformation of the World (Osterhammel), 217 The Traveller (Goldsmith), 113, 128–29, 132, 135 Treatise on Taxes and Contributions (Petty), 50 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 101 Trumpener, Katie, 78, 105, 108, 177 utopias: military as, 103, 110; Scottish Highlands as, 152; sexual restraint and, 251n53; Shelley and, 157; surplus population and,

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utopias (continued ) 152; territorialization through reproduction in, 46–47 vagrancy: banishment and, 34; as crime of status, 33–34, 223n3; fecundity and, 29; female sexuality and, 16–17, 34, 44, 202; forced migration and, 4; mobility of labor and, 35; religious figures and, 27, 33; settlement and, 29; soldiers and, 84, 93, 100. See also female vagrancy Vagrancy Act (1744), 93 Vagrancy Act (1803), 100 value: of populations, 9, 27–28, 51, 58, 71–72; productive labor and, 58, 142, 150–52, 165 veterans: fear of crime by, 92–93; government curtailment of mobility, 94–95; hypermobility and, 84; management of, 84–85; mobility and, 99–101; public views of, 84–86, 92–93, 97–98, 101–2, 109, 236n37; resettlement in colonies, 93–95; return to civil society by, 92–93; state responsibility to, 86; subsidized emigration and, 93–94. See also soldiers The Vicar of Wakefield (Goldsmith): aggregate in, 113; emigration in, 116; family and, 122–24, 126–27; imprisonment in, 123–27; sentimentality and, 113, 125–27; urban luxury in, 114–15 Viswanathan, Gauri, 243n23 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 219 Wales, 65, 148 Walpole, Horace, 92 warfare: Britain and, 84, 87–88, 92; census taking for, 64, 87; discharged soldiers and,

84, 86; memory and, 109; military prowess and, 91; modernity and, 110; national history and, 95–97; national identity and, 88–89, 95–96, 103, 110; silence and, 110–11; surplus labor and, 89; value of population and, 61. See also soldiers; veterans Watt, Ian, 69, 126 White, John, 46 William III, 65 Williams, Cynthia Schoolar, 253n71 Williams, Edward, 46 Williams, Raymond, 10, 35 Williams, Roger, Chief, 216 Wilmot Horton, Robert, 164, 194, 219, 220 Wilson, Kathleen, 80 Wilt, Judith, 143, 154 “Windsor-Forest” (Pope), 128 Withers, Charles, 187 Wittkowsky, George, 75 Wolfe, Patrick, 205, 214 women: fecundity and, 199–200; female delicacy and, 199–202, 208–9, 211; infanticide law and, 142–43, 242n14; Poor Laws and, 201–2; portability and, 62–63; reproduction and, 16–17, 28, 140; responsibility for illegitimacy, 201–2; secrecy and, 143, 154; settlement rights and, 199, 201; sexual division of labor and, 28; surveillance of reproduction and, 142–44. See also Eve; female sexuality; female vagrancy; reproduction Wong, Edlie, 12 Woods, Tryon P., 24 Wordsworth, William, 11, 85, 99–101 Worsley, Benjamin, 49, 62 Wynne, William, 65

acknowledgments

This project has taken many years to complete, but it never would have been completed at all without the intellectual and emotional support—not to mention the patience, compassion, and forbearance—of my family, friends, and colleagues. Please know that any omissions below spring from faults in memory, not lack of gratitude. While writing this book, I have had the good fortune to work in two intellectually stimulating and supportive departments. Of my many wonderful colleagues at the University of Colorado, I want to specially mention Katherine Eggert, who in one brief and brilliant intervention—many years after I had left Boulder—helped me see the project’s final shape. Of my many wonderful colleagues at Duke, I owe particular debts of gratitude to Ranjana Khanna, Sarah Beckwith, Nancy Armstrong, and Lennard Tennenhouse. Kathy Psomiades and Rob Mitchell both read large portions of the manuscript, helped me talk through even more of it, and offered stalwart friendship and encouragement over the long haul. The final stages of the project benefited enormously from the intellectual community of the Migrancy Working Group and the Representing Migration Humanities Lab. My thanks to my co-conveners: Tsitsi Jaji, Corina Stan, Dominika Baran, Jarvis McInnis, Karen Little, and Sasha Panaram. Davide Carroza provided research assistance at a crucial moment. I would not have been able to write the final parts of the project without the space and community provided by Jennifer Ahern-Dodson’s faculty write-on-site program (not to mention Barbara Dickinson’s coffee). Students in graduate seminars at both Colorado and Duke helped me understand many of the topics and texts in this book. For most of my scholarly life, as a graduate school classmate, a fellow scholar, and finally a colleague, I was lucky enough to be able to rely on Srinivas Aravamudan’s critical eye, deep knowledge, and fine wit. I did not realize the extent of this reliance until after his untimely

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Acknowledgments

passing. This project, like the rest of my work, is indebted to his example and his friendship. In the early stages of the project, a Frederick Burkhardt fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies supported a year at the National Humanities Center. I am grateful to the staff and fellows there. Years later, the project was reinvigorated by my encountering Jonathan Sachs and Josephine McDonagh during their own time at the NHC. Laura Rosenthal, Teresa Feroli, and Jeremy Green read parts of the manuscript and offered invaluable advice. Lisa Moore, in an act of extraordinary generosity, read the entire manuscript in its penultimate form; the final version has benefited enormously from her insights. I am grateful for the patience and support of Jerome Singerman and the acute reviews from the anonymous readers for Penn Press, as well as the skill and efficiency of Lily Palladino, Kathryn Krug, and Melissa Stearns Hyde in shepherding the book through production. Versions of parts of this book appeared in PMLA, Cultural Critique, EighteenthCentury Fiction, and The Eighteenth Century Novel: Companion to Literature and Culture. The readers and editors of all these publications both sharpened my arguments and helped me see the book’s final form. The help and support of many others is less easily described but no less valuable. My communities in Boulder, Durham, and beyond have been lifesustaining, and I am grateful to, among many others, Laura Mandell, Doris Iarovici, Eileen Wade-Stein, Liz Paley, Hendey Hostetter, Chris Hopkins, Eileen Reynolds, Janice McCarthy, Mary Chapman, Lucas Sussman and Olivia Cottrell, and Jackie Cowan. My parents, Herbert and Elisabeth Sussman, were unshakeable in their belief that I would finish this project, even when I was not; my sons, Henry and Jacob, have given me all the unexpected joys of life outside of academia. Finally, my thanks to my lovely husband, Raoul Rubin, for the digital equivalent of typing the manuscript, and, even more, for the everyday miracle of a happy, loving life.