TRADE SECRETS: GEORGIC POETRY AND THE RISE OF FINANCE By Katarina Louisa O’Briain A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, Maryland May, 2018 © 2018 Katarina Louisa O’Briain All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT “Trade Secrets: Georgic Poetry and the Rise of Finance” reads neoclassical verse alongside artisanal manuals and works of political economy to argue that the language of craft labor provides a privileged medium through which to grapple with crises of the Early Enlightenment, from struggles over the Glorious Revolution to the aftershocks of the South Sea Bubble. Critics have long cast georgic, with its focus on agricultural labor, as an instrument of scientific improvement or mode of reactionary nostalgia for landed elites. But these accounts have overlooked a crucial, if perhaps quieter, story of georgic poetry, which lies in its heightened attention to craft understood as both material fabrication and formal workmanship. For John Dryden and Alexander Pope, the reticence of artisanal knowledge provides a strategy for dealing with the market pressures facing poetry and the other arts. It also allows these oppositional poets to make seditious claims without explicitly having to state them. By the time of Jonathan Swift and John Gay’s mock iterations of the mode, however, craft is less a salutary means of evading censorship than a well-worn method of political deception — craftiness, so to speak — practiced by politicians and financial projectors alike. Taking up and reinscribing the Machiavellian poles of virtù and fortuna, or skill and chance, which were foundational to Enlightenment British Republicanism, these writers look to georgic as a mode through which to meditate on the paradoxical relation between careful craft labor and the vagaries that remain beyond one’s control. In this respect, my project recovers a surprising antecedent to contemporary responses to environmental, social, and financial crisis, which continue to manifest, or attempt to overcome, that same melancholy combination of resistance and inevitability. The project ii ends with a coda on the role of accident in Frances Burney’s novels, which provide a crucial alternative to moral arguments for craft labor in the period. Directors: Jonathan Kramnick, Mary Favret, and Sharon Achinstein iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I wish to thank my advisors, Jonathan Kramnick, Mary Favret, and Sharon Achinstein, for helping to give me and this project direction over the past several years. A flawed and provisional document like the dissertation can’t really do justice to such amazing mentorship — or to such patience, generosity, and wisdom — but I will try to live up to it as I continue this research. Thank you to Tracy Glink and Sally Hauf for their hard work in making the English department run smoothly; to Chris Nealon for being willing to talk to me about the contemporary relevance of eighteenth-century poetry; and to Roger Maioli and Will Miller for making Hopkins an exciting place to work on the Enlightenment. I feel very lucky to have been in this department and am grateful to everyone past and present who has helped provide a sense of community in which to do what might otherwise have felt like individual and isolated work. For helping to fund this project I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Gloria Flaherty Scholarship in Eighteenth-Century Studies. The Lewis Walpole Library provided a fellowship for archival research, for which I am most grateful, and the members and directors of the Folger Library’s “Debating Capitalism: Early Modern Political Economies” inspired conversations which will continue to inform and direct the political context of this work. From Alberta, Baltimore, and elsewhere, Rowan Bayne, Claire Caplan, Jon Mottram, Fay Obenauer, and Izzy Obenauer were wonderful and crucial presences in my life. Thank you to Corrinne Harol, who has been a thoughtful and supportive mentor since my very first English class at the University of Alberta. Against all odds, Nora iv Lambrecht and Mande Zecca made Baltimore feel like home and me feel like a human being. I couldn’t imagine better friends or colleagues. I could never have dreamed of making a living studying literature without my incredible parents, Lulu and Kevin O’Briain, who did everything in their power to help me get here, even if they weren’t always sure why I’d want to be. This would not have been possible without their generous and tireless support or without that of my grandparents: Kay O’Briain, Luisa Vega, and Tanglaw Vega. Jeffrey Borchert has read the entirety of this dissertation more than once. I wouldn’t, and probably won’t ever, know where to begin to thank him for making this project and my life so much better. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iv Table of Contents……………………….…………...……………………………………vi INTRODUCTION: Craft and Contingency…………………………………………….……..1 ONE: Dryden’s Georgic Fictionality…………………………………………...…………34 TWO: Pope’s Chiastic Optimism………………………………………….……………...62 THREE: Swift, Anti-Formalism, and the Georgics of the South Sea…………………….106 FOUR: Mock Georgic and the Trivia of Industry………………………………………..142 CODA: Frances Burney and the Art of Accident……………………………………..….178 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………...….206 Curriculum Vitae……………………………………………………………………….240 vi Introduction: Craft and Contingency This dissertation tracks how georgic — most often understood as the poetry of farm labor — negotiates a crucial tension between careful craftsmanship and the contingencies of modern life, initially in neoclassical poetry and then later as the mode gets taken up by the rise of the novel and contemporary poetic protest. The project begins with a simple discovery: that the rhetorical strategies used by artisans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were shared and even directly adopted by neoclassical poets of the period. From vastly different social positions, poets and artisans turn to a reticent mode of language, replete with figures of repetition, elision, and enactment, to counteract contemporary demands for the dissemination of technical knowledge. This is not the usual story that is told about georgic, a mode more often defined in terms of scientific improvement or the reactionary nostalgia of landed elites.1 But, as I argue, this poetic turn to craftsmanship offered one possible solution to market pressures facing poetry and the other arts. British georgic flourished at a time when craft was in crisis. While artisans grappled with the demands of an incipient consumer society, the shift from mercantilism to early capitalism, and contemporary initiatives to publicize their trade secrets, poets were likewise dealing with new modes of literary manufacture, the shift from print to 1 On georgic and science, see Rachel Crawford, Poetry, Enclosure, and the Vernacular Landscape, 1700– 1830 (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 92–93; Frans de Bruyn, “From Georgic Poetry to Statistics and Graphs: Eighteenth-Century Representations and the ‘State’ of British Society,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 17.1 (2004): 115; and Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 22–29. On georgic as a physiocratic mode, see Kurt Heinzelman, “Roman Georgic in the Georgian Age: A Theory of Romantic Genre,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 33.2 (1991): 192. 1 patronage, and the rise of the book trade.2 Against the increasing commodification of both literary and material artifacts, poets take up craft — understood as both a specialized set of techniques and, in the formal register, “art” in the early eighteenth-century sense of “skill” — as a crucial marker of poetic value and a strategy for political dissent. Craft was not simply a mode of poetic opposition, however. Over the course of the period, writers become increasingly suspicious of the way that craft repeatedly ends up in the hands of those in power, a tool of deceit rather than protest. The latter half of the dissertation thus reads poetry on financial crisis and the rise of the consumer society as a response to the perils of craft aesthetics and politics. Throughout, this study argues for a more precarious view of the Enlightenment than the one espoused by stories of improvement, accumulation, and landed nostalgia.3 Often meditating on political, financial, and ecological crisis, georgic offers a melancholy mode of muted agency and backbreaking work that lives well beyond the Enlightenment. Georgic has a long history of being tied to protest. Within the more recent context of anti-capitalist and eco-poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, writers continue to turn to the structure of the georgic precept. Juliana Spahr and Joshua Clover, for instance, end their 24 Theses for the #Misanthropocene with a riff on the georgic how-to manual. Echoing T. S. Eliot’s more apocalyptic lines by announcing “This is how 2 Neil McKendrick dates the intellectual origins of the consumer society back to the 1690s. See The Birth of the Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb (London: Europa Publications Limited, 1982). 3 On the ideology of improvement in georgic poetry, see Markman Ellis, “‘Incessant Labour’: Georgic Poetry and the Problem of Slavery,” in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sarah Salih (New York: Palgrave, 2004), 45–59 and Karen O’Brien, “Imperial Georgic, 1660–1789,” in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), 160–79. 2 the misanthropocene ends,” the poem then veers into the more practical realm of instruction: Twentyone. This is how to set an oil well on fire. Rub and lean against it. Spread your front legs and swing your neck at it. The power of a blow depends on the weight of your skull and the arc of your swing.