The Opened Letter. Lindsay O'Neill

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СКАЧАТЬ Rural Ireland and Scotland were dirtier and duller than England. John Boyle described Cork by stating, “The Butchers are as greasy, The Quakers as formal, & the Presbyterians as holy & full of the Lord as usual: All Things are in status quo: even the Hogs and Piggs gruntle in the same cadence as of yore.”¹⁸ A similar view of Scotland emerges from a letter Perceval wrote about his brief stay there. After entering a tavern so smoky that, even though it masked “the stink,” he could not see the proffered glass of wine, and after avoiding the butter, which “was of 20 colours, & Stuck with hair,” he kept his gloves on to avoid the lice, ate, and promptly recrossed the border.¹⁹ Such depictions allowed Boyle and Perceval to show their correspondents that this was certainly not a world that they belonged to; the comedy comes from the incongruity of their presence.

      The world these individuals did belong to, however, was not strictly an English world, but rather one defined by a group of people usually centered in London. What concerned Boyle about Cork was its lack of excitement: everything is “as usual,” “in status quo,” and “in the same cadence of yore.” It was “dull, insipid, and void of all Amusement.”²⁰ Similarly, one of Hans Sloane’s Scottish correspondents declared that in Dundee he was “living in a corner of the world” and that Coupar Angus was “a Country place without Converse.”²¹ These correspondents wanted the amusement and converse they knew flourished in London. This was a world where cultural and social distance mattered more than specific geographic coordinates. They also knew that letters were a way to reconnect with that world. They mentioned their isolation and the dullness of their surroundings to explain the lack of content in their letters, to enliven them, and to remind their correspondents of their need for letters; they were their connection to the bustling centers of elite sociability.

      The fact that the same tropes surface in letters from the European continent supports the idea that letter writers saw themselves as connected by networks of sociability. Like writers in Britain, those who lived outside urban centers on the Continent worried what distance could do to their social or intellectual networks. Uppsala might have been a flourishing university town, but for Karl Linnaeus it limited his ability to join in the more lively and fast-paced intellectual discussions occurring in places like London and he envied those, like Peter Collinson, “who have a free & frequent Intercourse with your World.”²² British travelers also found the continental countryside less congenial than continental centers. On his trip to France in 1725, John Perceval and his brood went to Blois, but the dullness of the place soon sent them hurrying back to Paris.²³ These men valued ties to urban centers because they connected them to wider networks and centers of discussion.

      Worries about specific geographic origins remained, however. Superficially, members of the Scottish and Irish elite faced the same situation as their English counterparts. Both groups lived in their great houses when at their estates and all were spending less time on these estates and more time in London, and both were allowing power to flow into the hands of the local inhabitants.²⁴ Those with lands and titles in Scotland and Ireland found their ways to the centers of elite sociability. John Boyle, an Irish lord himself, declared that Bath was “full of Poetry, of Pamphlets, of Lords and of Irishmen.”²⁵ However, there is a reason he mentions the Irish separately. Their situation was different and much less secure than those with land in England. John Perceval continuously griped about the way the English treated Irish absentee landowners and constantly justified his English residency.²⁶ Men like Boyle and Perceval attempted to increase their sense of belonging by emphasizing their sense of disconnect from their location; they were not Irish or Scottish landlords, but rather members of a larger elite whose values and concerns were the same as those in London.

      Those living in the colonies attempted to reaffirm their sense of belonging by expressing a desire for urban life as well. While, as a whole, the North American colonies were becoming more urbanized, Virginia and other colonies still lacked urban centers and letter writers settled there lamented the fact.²⁷ William Byrd II hoped that shifting the capital from Jamestown to Williamsburg would “give people a relish for cohabitacion.”²⁸ But during his lifetime urban life in Virginia remained mostly a dream and he continued to depend on letters for urban news. From another corner of North America another correspondent in Rhode Island complained, “We have passed the Winter in a profound Solitude on my farm in this Island, all my Companions having been a lured five or six months ago to Boston, the great place of pleasure and resort in these parts where they still continue.”²⁹ Just as writers in Norfolk, Cork, and Dundee sighed over their lack of amusement and converse, colonial writers longed for cohabitation and “places of pleasure and resort.” William Byrd II attempted to close the gap by sharing the gossip of Virginia as he would have shared that of London. In one letter he delighted in telling the story of a Venetian courtesan who caused a scandal at a Virginia ball when her artificially inflated breasts deflated. However, he prefaced the story by admitting that due to the lack of gossip he often had to “lard a little truth with a great deal of fiction” when sending stories back to England.³⁰ The lack of urban sociability in the colonies, especially in Virginia, made it harder for the colonists to participate in a culture that defined status and belonging by one’s social performance and polish.

      One way to counter this concern was to make rural existence a positive trait. William Byrd II, especially, drew an idealized picture of rural Virginia.³¹ He sighed over his lack of gossip and confessed, “But alas what can we poor hermits do, who know of no intrigues, but such as are carry’d on by the amorous turtles, or some such innocent lovers?”³² Unlike Irish correspondents, Byrd could paint Virginian dullness as a positive attribute. Virginians might live like hermits, but they were innocent of many of the follies that enveloped urban dwellers. More often in Byrd’s letters it was London that was the dirty and dangerous spot. He exclaimed to a correspondent there, “Tis miraculous that any lungs can breath in an air compounded of so many different vapours and exhalations, like that of dirty London.” Virginia on the other hand had “pure air.”³³ It was in this same letter that Byrd famously declared, “Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and my herds, my bond-men and bond-women, and every soart of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on every one, but Providence.” Here was the ultimate pastoral retreat, detached from the pressures of the modern world and from the dependence on others that so marked the lives of Englishmen at home. The Irish could not follow suit. When John Boyle attempted to declare himself a patriarch, his friend in England replied, “Contend, my dear Lord, as much as you please for the justness of your simile, yet you are not at all like one of the old patriarchs.”³⁴ Byrd’s British correspondents lived so far distant from Virginia that they could not puncture his images as easily.

      Byrd pushed the old city and country divide farther by layering colonial rhetoric about the age of America on top of it. Virginia was an untouched virgin landscape, new and innocent. The age of the Americas was long debated, but there was a sense that even if the land itself was as old as that of Europe, it had not faced intense cultivation and that the society itself was in its infant state.³⁵ Peter Collinson believed that in 1762 the colonies were just starting “to Walk alone.”³⁶ Forty years earlier, Byrd insisted in his letters that if his correspondent could but smell the ground he would see it was “as if it newly came out of it’s makers hands.” On the other hand, English ground “has been tortured, and torn to pieces some thousands of years.” In his account no one in Virginia got consumption, the water was sweeter, the fire clearer, the plants more digestible, and the fruits “more sprightly flavoured,” the meats “more savoury,” and he declared that when they found them he was sure that the metals would “prove all ripened into gold and silver.”³⁷ He pushed his lavish praise to the point that Virginia became another Eden where colonists even avoided the curse of hard labor.³⁸ All this was hyperbole. The death rate in Virginia was high, they never found gold and silver, and Byrd’s slaves certainly did not think they had escaped the curse of hard labor.³⁹ But Byrd’s purpose was not to sell a true portrait of Virginia but to entertain his correspondent, and he also knew that since very few of them would ever come out to Virginia “larding the truth СКАЧАТЬ