UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Cultivating Civilized Subjects: British Agricultural “Improvement” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Kathryn Lee Webber September 2012 Dissertation Committee: Professor Carole Fabricant, Co-Chairperson Professor David Lloyd, Co-Chairperson Professor Parama Roy Copyright by Kathryn Lee Webber 2012 The Dissertation of Kathryn Lee Webber is approved: __________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson __________________________________________________________ Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements To my mother, Linda Marie Hopewell (Webber), whose unfailing commitment to education made this and all of my academic pursuits possible. Thanks for the nights when you ironed my Peter-Pan-collared blouses and pleated skirts even though you had worked so hard and so many hours to support us. Thanks for making my lunch every day without exception—I should never have traded that apple for Cheetos. Thanks for giving us all of the tools to pursue our dreams, no matter what the cost. Thanks most of all for being a shining model of determination and dedication to one’s work. Whenever I have thought about giving up, I remember all of the things you have done, no matter how exhausted, to keep our family going. Know that I never took that for granted. Thanks are due as well to my committee members whose encouragement was indispensable. To Prof. David Lloyd, whose scholarship, even after countless readings, continues to speak to me and to challenge me to new horizons. Thank you for your incredible generosity in taking me on as a project. To Prof. Carole Fabricant, whose rigorous scholarship and fearless political commitment has guided me since my early days as a graduate student. Thank you for taking my work seriously and for helping me to be meticulous in my research and my writing. To Prof. Parama Roy, who is both personally and professionally someone I strive to approximate. Thank you for guiding me throughout my graduate studies. I hope never to lose the enthusiasm that was inspired by your course, Alimentary Tracts, my first at UCR. Thank you for emphasizing that one’s scholarship should contain a unique combination of kindness and firm conviction in its iv expression. To my entire committee, I could not have asked for a better combination of mentors during this process. It is apparent in my work that your interests have greatly inspired my thinking on many topics. I am grateful to have worked with scholars of such integrity and commitment. To Prof. Kim Devlin, who probably thinks I have forgotten about how important her teaching and research have been to my studies. I promise that I have never left James Joyce far behind. I have simply found another way to argue, as Bloom does, that “Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred.” Thank you for your support. To my teachers at all levels: I had the great stroke of luck to be raised and educated in the shadow of Vatican II with its enduring legacy of social justice and its focus on education. Teachers are criminally under-appreciated and especially those religious women who dedicate their lives to children. Thanks to Sr. Anne Regina—all fierce four feet eight inches of her—who taught me to read. To my other elementary teachers who always said I talked too much to the other kids—turns out that was just good preparation. To Notre Dame Academy, Hingham, the best place for young women. Thanks to Prof. John Peavoy, Prof. Michael Harper and, not least, to Prof. Rick Berg, my mentors at Scripps College. Prof. Peavoy, I imagine that heaven would involve a lively discussion with you or a viewing of an Orson Welles film on a summery evening on a Balch Hall veranda while you smoke your pipe (which I will not be able to smell). Prof. Berg: I know several fellow Scrippsies who would agree that you were an v inextricable part of their experience there. I don’t know that I realized it at the time, but I think your working-class sensibility was a much-needed lifeline for me in the world of a liberal arts college which I loved, but at which I felt distinctly out of place. I will never forget re-reading Jane Austen with you and realizing her novels were about capital—it was a seminal moment in my academic history which made me change my major and probably set me on the path to this Ph.D. To my husband, Mike Ferrante, whose unflagging patience, quiet strength, and overwhelming support guided me every step of the way. You have been my closest friend since we were eighteen (wow, time flies!). No one captures the idea of a partner better than you. There is no way to adequately thank you in words. I only hope that I can hold up my end of the bargain by being the person you see in me. May we never stop learning and growing together. Thanks also to my brother Jimmy and to my extended family whose warmth and humor always provided a welcome respite from the storm. Enduring graduate school would have been impossible without the friendship of Shannon O’Connell, Chrissy Crockett Sharp, Joanna Scott Bradfield, Helen Lovejoy, Sharon Tohline, Alison Walker, Jeremy Kaye and Jenni Keyes. Finally, I am very grateful for the efforts of my lovely proofreader and new mother, Dr. Joanna Scott Bradfield. vi In loving memory of William Joseph Hopewell (1926-1989) and Michael John Ferrante (1947-2010) Only the good die young. Raise a glass for me, wherever you are. Sláinte! vii ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Cultivating Civilized Subjects: British Agricultural “Improvement” in Eighteenth-Century Ireland by Kathryn Lee Webber Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, September 2012 Dr. Carole Fabricant, Co-Chairperson Dr. David Lloyd, Co-Chairperson This study argues that the rhetoric of improvement constituted a significant justification and motivation for British imperialism from the time of its early colonial projects, particularly those undertaken in Ireland. As the first chapter discusses, British interest in husbandry and agricultural science was spurred on not only by the profit- potential of its colonial acquisitions but also by the potent conviction in British cultural superiority. Jethro Tull’s husbandry manuals, amongst others, demonstrate that agriculture and the attendant logic of rationalized economics encapsulated British beliefs in specific modes of labor and socialization. Plantation, in Ireland and elsewhere, was simply the physical manifestation of the ideology of improvement while efforts to “rationalize” native cultures and economies, as with Ireland’s clachan system, served as its civilizational counterparts. The remainder of the dissertation looks closely at the role of improvement in Anglo-Irish relations with the Catholic Irish peasantry. The early part of the eighteenth century witnesses the rise of Anglo-Irish “patriotism” whose espousers viii were conflicted, on the one hand, by their growing awareness of their own subordination to British colonial policies and, on the other, by the prevailing belief in the inferiority of Gaelic culture. Anglo-Irish patriots like Jonathan Swift were forced to confront the violence of colonialism and the failure of improvement in Ireland in the form of recurrent famine. Their often ambivalent responses to such crises witness the complex relationship between the emergent theories of political economy and identity constitution. At the close of the century, Maria Edgeworth’s writings and those of her father’s illustrate the troubling extent to which British colonialism linked improvement and civility; as liberal advocates of the British Empire, the Edgeworths perceived it as the conveyor of an enlightened capitalized sensibility. Yet, their writings also evince concern about the refusal or failure of the peasantry to improve, presaging the concretization of identity occasioned by the increasingly transparent rhetoric of political economy coupled with the biologicization of difference in the form of racial theories. In tracing the genealogies of improvement rhetoric and political economy, Cultivating Civilized Subjects locates British imperialism’s attempts to naturalize difference within the discourse of capitalist development. ix Table of Contents Introduction 1 Jethro Tull’s New Horse-Houghing Husbandry: The Role of Modern British Agriculture in the Deployment of a Civilized Subject 19 Framing Famine: Swift’s A Modest Proposal and the Anglo-Irish Critique of Hunger in Ireland 107 The Edgeworths, Imperial Pedagogy and the Inculcation of (Economic) Virtue 167 Maria Edgeworth’s Ennui and the Gift of Agricultural Improvement 241 Conclusion 301 Works Cited 304 Appendix 315 x List of Illustrations “The Knave” 238 “The Slave” 240 xi Introduction Over one hundred years prior to the Great Irish Famine, in 1723, Robert Viscount Molesworth, former Privy Councillor of Ireland, published Some Considerations for the Promoting of Agriculture and Employing the Poor (1723) which centrally asserted that “[t]hat the whole of the Economy of Agriculture is generally mistaken or neglected in this Kingdom [of Ireland]” (3, italics original). For Molesworth, “improving” the state of Irish agriculture was much more than a technological matter. Indeed, it required a radical shift in nearly every aspect of Irish society. It was not simply that the Irish were “universally Ignorant of the English manner of managing. Tillage and Lands” (4); the stark differences in agricultural economy between England and Ireland were caused by deviations from proper behavior by Irish farmers. Molesworth notes that “an English Farmer on a small Holding (sometimes not exceeding twenty Acres) shall live clean and comfortably, Cloath himself Wife, Children, and Family decently; eat warm Victuals once every day, if not oftener; pay his Rent punctually; whilst the condition of the Irish Farmer on a large Farm, is the very reverse of all this” (5).