Abstract
In this chapter, I focus on the material and spatial dimensions of the Yeoman, a discursively constructed subject within the pages of New England Improvement literature. I treat Massachusetts Improvement literature as a kind of symbolic landscape, to explore the subjects and social relations that manifest on it. The goal is to understand how Massachusetts Improvers saw the landscape they wanted to create, and the people they wanted on it, while identifying the social, economic, and political barriers that prevented that landscape from emerging. The figure of the Yeoman was moralized through the appropriate or inappropriate uses of material things and spaces, and I utilize depictions of farming as a means of probing this complex moralized framework. The Yeoman was also implicated and constituted within a symbolic regional geography that positioned New England as a free, White, market-oriented enclave, and against Southern slavery and decadence.
Surely here mass-communication is necessary and urgent, to bring news of the good life, and of the ways to get it, and the dangers to avoid in getting it, to the prejudiced, servile, ignorant and multiplying masses? If workmen are impoverishing themselves and others by restrictive practices; if peasants are starving themselves and others by adhering to outdated ways; if men and women are growing up in ignorance, when so much is known; if families are breeding more children than can be fed: surely, urgently, they must be told this, for their own good?
—Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1983, p. 333)
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Notes
- 1.
A description of the 1822 Middlesex Cattle Show included a toast at the end of the evening’s festivities. This toast, among other things, was dedicated to “Our fair country women—Let your daughters be educated for domestic housewives, and there will be less show, more substance, and fewer old bachelors” (“MIDDLESEX CATTLE SHOW” 1822).
- 2.
Coal also solved this problem to an extent in England, but coal was relatively uncommon in western Massachusetts until the arrival of the railroads around 1850 (Holland 1855, p. 423).
- 3.
Even the exception proves the rule. The Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company, incorporated in 1823, made inroads into lending cash to back-country farmers, but had to do so at incredibly slight rates of interest, and with incredibly generous repayment options that were often flouted (Dobkin-Hall 1984, p. 123; Thornton 2007, pp. 573–74).
- 4.
It is not at all clear whether there was such a sharp distinction in practical terms between Northern “free” improvers and southern planters. As Crothers has shown, there was intense interest in new agricultural techniques among Virginia plantation owners, as well as nearby free farmers (Crothers 2001).
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Lewis, Q.P. (2016). Excavating the Yeoman: Materializing the Idealized People and Landscapes of Improvement Literature. In: An Archaeology of Improvement in Rural Massachusetts. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22105-2_5
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