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 OTHER CAPITALS OF THE
NINETEENTH CENTURY
An Alternative Mapping of Literary and Cultural Space

EDITED BY RICHARD HIBBITT

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN MODERN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

Series Editors
Shane Weller
School of European Culture and Languages
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

Thomas Baldwin
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK

Ben Hutchinson
Centre for Modern European Literature
University of Kent
Canterbury, UK
Linked to the Centre for Modern European Literature at the University
of Kent, UK, this series offers a space for new research that challenges
the limitations of national, linguistic and cultural borders within Europe
and engages in the comparative study of literary traditions in the modern
period.

More information about this series at

http://www.springer.com/series/14610
 Richard Hibbitt
Editor

Other Capitals of the

Nineteenth Century
An Alternative Mapping of Literary
and Cultural Space
Editor
Richard Hibbitt
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK

Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature

ISBN 978-1-137-57084-0 ISBN 978-1-137-57085-7 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57085-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017940203

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

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 This book is dedicated to all those who uphold the founding values of the
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 Acknowledgements

Some of the essays in this volume are based on papers given at the 2014
Annual Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association,
which took place at New York University. I would like to thank the
Faculty of Arts at the University of Leeds for funding my participation
at the conference and for granting me a semester of study leave in order
to work on the project. I would also like to thank the Research Office in
the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at Leeds for funding the
translation of Chap. 7 of the book.
My thanks also go to the following colleagues at Leeds and else-
where: Philip Bullock, Peter Davies, Stefano Evangelista, Alison Fell,
Sarah Hudspith, Matthew John, Daniel Laqua, James Moran, Georgia
Newman, David Platten, Richard Robinson, Nigel Saint, Simon Sleight,
Andy Stafford, Stuart Taberner, Nicholas White, Janet Wolff and all the
members of the Writing 1900 Research Group.
I would like to thank Vicky Bates, Peter Cary, Ben Doyle, April
James, Ryan Jenkins and Tomas René at Palgrave Macmillan for their
support of the book. I am also grateful to Professor Ben Hutchinson at
the University of Kent, who suggested that the proposal might be sub-
mitted to Palgrave’s Studies in Modern European Literature series.

vii
viii Acknowledgements

Finally, I would like to thank all of the contributors to this volume

for their cheerful collaborative spirit. Their own acknowledgements are
included in their respective chapters.

Leeds, UK Richard Hibbitt

2017
 Contents

Introduction: Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century  1

Richard Hibbitt

Part I Beyond Paris

Local-Colour Literature and Cultural Nations  33

Josephine Donovan

They Fluttered like Moths: Exile and Cosmopolitanism

in the Work of Germaine de Staël and Georg Brandes  51
Lynn R. Wilkinson

Crossing the Bridge: Constantinople Crowds and the

Cityscape in Nineteenth-Century Travelogues  69
Hande Tekdemir

‘Marvellous Melbourne’: Image of a Colonial Metropolis  91

Timothy Chandler

Capitalising (on) World Literature: Brussels as Shadow

Capital of Modernity/Modernism  111
Theo D’haen

ix
x Contents

The Rise of a Small Cultural Capital: Brussels at the End

of the Nineteenth Century  129
Laurence Brogniez, Tatiana Debroux and Judith le Maire

Part II Rethinking the Centre

From Les Mystères de Paris to Les Mystères de Saint-Pétersbourg:

Transfers, Translations and Reconstructions  161
Anna Lushenkova Foscolo

(De-)Localising Capital: Lines of Flight from Zola’s

Mystères de Marseille  185
Michael G. Kelly

Bayreuth: Capital and Anti-capital  205

Nicholas Vazsonyi

Luminous Munich and Beyond: The ‘Schwabinger Bohème’  223

Margit Dirscherl

The Symbolist Novel as Transnational Capital  247

Richard Hibbitt

Index 267
 Editors and Contributors

About the Editor

Richard Hibbitt is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature

at the University of Leeds, where he directs the Centre for World
Literatures. He is on the executive committee of the British Comparative
Literature Association and is the assistant editor of its journal, Comparative
Critical Studies. His research interests span across English, French and
German literature from the early modern period to the present day, with
a particular interest in the late nineteenth century. These interests have
been developed through membership of the international research group
Writing 1900. His publications include the monograph Dilettantism and
its Values (Legenda, 2006), the co-edited volume Saturn’s Moons: W.G.
Sebald—A Handbook (with Jo Catling; Legenda, 2011) and articles on
Baudelaire, Bourget, Laforgue, Rimbaud, Rodenbach and Wilde.

Contributors

Laurence Brogniez is a professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles,

where she teaches literary history and comparative literature. She works
on artists’ writings (Ecrits voyageurs: les artistes et l’ailleurs, Peter Lang,
2012; Ceci n’est pas un titre. Les artistes et l’intitulation, Fage, 2014;
Entretiens d’artistes, Vrin, 2016) and was the curator of several exhibitions
at the Rops Museum in Belgium (Pulsion(s), 2012; En route!, Sur les

xi
xii Editors and Contributors

traces des artistes belges en voyage, 2014). Her research also focuses on
the cultural history of Brussels and more specifically on the literary geog-
raphy of the city and the artists’ studios (http://micmarc.ulb.ac.be). She
is currently Editor-in-Chief of Textyles (the journal of Belgian literature)
and has recently coordinated with Paul Aron the issue entitled ‘Brussels, a
literary geography’, 47 (2015), www.textyles.org.
Timothy Chandler is a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature
and Literary Theory at the University of Pennsylvania. His research
interests include nineteenth-century European culture, Marxism, and
aesthetic philosophy. He is writing a dissertation on the affective possi-
bilities of historical representation in Victorian literature.
Tatiana Debroux is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Cultural
Geography. After obtaining her Ph.D. on ‘Artists in the city. A retro-
spective geography of visual artists in Brussels (1833–2008)’ at the
Université libre de Bruxelles (December 2012), she coordinated for
three years an interdisciplinary project on culture, mobility and metro-
politan identity (micmarc.ulb.ac.be). Her following research project was
about the geography of art galleries in Paris and was hosted at the Ecole
normale supérieure, with a grant from the City of Paris. Current research
includes works on spatial dimensions of artistic activities (e.g. artists and
art galleries, artists’ studios and workspaces, arts districts), historical and
contemporary urban dynamics, and narrative cartography (fictional liter-
ature as a source for geographers).
Theo D’haen is Emeritus Professor of English and Comparative
Literature at the University of Leuven (KU Leuven), and earlier taught
at Utrecht and Leiden. He has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from
the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. His numerous publica-
tions include works on (post)modernism, (post)colonialism, American
literature, popular fiction and world literature. The following are his
recent publications in English: The Routledge Concise History of World
Literature (2012), and (with co-authors and/or co-editors) American
Literature: A History (2014), Cosmopolitanism and the Postnational:
Literature and the New Europe (2015), Major versus Minor? Languages
and Literatures in a Globalized World (2015), Caribbeing: Comparing
Caribbean Literatures and Cultures (2014), World Literature: A Reader
(2013), The Routledge Companion to World Literature (2012), The
Canonical Debate Today: Crossing Disciplinary and Cultural Boundaries
 Editors and Contributors xiii

(2011). He is Past President of FILLM, editor of the European Review

and the Journal of World Literature, member of Academia Europaea and
Corresponding Fellow of the English Association.
Margit Dirscherl is Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Queen Mary
University of London. Her research interests lie in nineteenth- and twen-
tieth-century German and European literature and history of thought,
particularly the transition from Romanticism into literary Modernism,
and Anglo-German cultural relations. She is a co-editor of the year-
book Angermion. Her publications include the monograph Heinrich
Heines Poetik der Stadt (Metzler, 2016), the co-edited volume Alltags-
Surrealismus: Literatur, Theater, Film (text+kritik, 2012) and articles on
Louis Aragon, Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig.
Josephine Donovan is the author of European Local-Color Literature:
National Tales, Dorfgeschichten, and Romans Champêtres (Bloomsbury,
2010), as well as, more recently, The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary
Treatment of Animals (Bloomsbury, 2016) and Women and the Rise of
the Novel, 1405–1726, 2nd edn. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). A com-
plete list of her publications is available on her website: https://english.
umaine.edu/people/josephine-donovan. She is Professor Emerita of
English at the University of Maine, USA.
Michael G. Kelly lectures in French and Comparative Literature at the
University of Limerick, where he is also director of the Ralahine Centre for
Utopian Studies. He has published extensively on modern and contempo-
rary French literature, with a particular focus on poetry and poetics. Recent
projects includes a volume of essays (edited with Daragh O’Connell) on
the question of transition in comparative literary and cultural studies,
Comparative Becomings. Studies in Transition (Peter Lang, 2017).
Judith le Maire is Professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles and
Vice-President of the Faculty of Architecture. She teaches the history,
theory and critique of architecture and is a member of the research
group CLARA and the Chief-Editor of its homonymous journal (cla-
rarevue.ulb.be). In her research, Judith le Maire is interested in partici-
pation and mobility in all its aspects, from the flâneur to the traffic on
ring roads, the audience’s flow in cultural institutions or the planning
of piazzas. She has coordinated journal issues and international events
about promenades and ring roads. As director of the MICM-arc project
(of which her co-authors Laurence Brogniez and Tatiana Debroux are
xiv Editors and Contributors

also members), she has worked specifically on scenic regulations in public

space and the development of urban skylines.
Anna Lushenkova Foscolo Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, is a
member of the research groups EUR’ORBEM-UMR 8224 (CNRS–
Université Paris-Sorbonne) and EHIC-EA 1087 (Université de
Limoges). Her research interests focus on the fields of genre and lan-
guage transfers between Russian, French and English literature from the
nineteenth century to the present day. These encompass in particular the
poetics of rewriting, translation, self-translation and transformation, as
well as the uses and effects of reading. Her doctoral thesis concerned the
representation of the artist as reader in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du
temps perdu [In Search of Lost Time] and Ivan Bunin’s Žizn’ Arsen’eva:
Ûnost [The Life of Arseniev: Youth].
Hande Tekdemir is Assistant Professor of English at the Western
Languages and Literatures Department of Bogazici University, Turkey.
Her research interests include urban theory and literature, detective fic-
tion and postcolonial studies. She has published on Walter Benjamin,
Edgar Allan Poe, Karen Tei Yamashita and Latife Tekin, along with a
number of articles on nineteenth-century travelogues on Constantinople.
She is currently working on a book project about the representation of
the Irish Famine in the Victorian novel.
Nicholas Vazsonyi is Jesse Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of
German and Comparative Literature, and Chair of the Department of
Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the University of South Carolina.
His first book, Lukács Reads Goethe (1997), was followed by two edited
volumes, one on German national identity formation between 1750 and
1871 (published 2000) and the other titled Wagner’s Meistersinger:
Performance, History, Representation (2003). His latest book Richard
Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge
University Press, 2010) was reissued in paperback and appeared in
German translation. More recently, he completed work as editor of
the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia (2013), became co-editor of the
German journal wagnerspectrum, and is currently under contract to co-
edit the Cambridge Companion to Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’
with Mark Berry.
 Editors and Contributors xv

Lynn R. Wilkinson is Associate Professor of Germanic Studies,

Comparative Literature, and Women’s and Gender Studies at the
University of Texas at Austin. Her research and teaching focus on
European literature and culture during the long nineteenth century,
women writers and Scandinavian film. She has published The Dream of
an Absolute Language: Emanuel Swedenborg and French Literary Culture
(1996), Anne Charlotte Leffler: True Women and New Women on the Fin-
de-siècle Scandinavian Stage (2011) and many articles on nineteenth- and
twentieth-century European literature and film. She is currently working
on studies of women intellectuals and Ingmar Bergman’s early work.
 List of Figures

Crossing the Bridge: Constantinople Crowds and the Cityscape in

Nineteenth-Century Travelogues
Fig. 1 Map of Istanbul by B.R. Davies (1840) 72
Fig. 2 The Hippodrome of Constantinople (1819) 75
Fig. 3 a View of the new bridge and Galata area from Istanbul,
1890–1893. Photograph by Abdullah Frères
b View of Galata Bridge and the Galata area from
Eminönü, 2004. Photograph by Hande Tekdemir 78
The Rise of a Small Cultural Capital: Brussels at the End
of the Nineteenth Century
Fig. 1 Scenic regulations defined for the Mont des Arts in 1904.
‘The relationship with the Lower Town is primarily visual.
From the Upper Town there is a view over the urban
landscape with the tower of the town hall in a live-line
from the Place Royale rising proudly above it’ (Meulder
and van Herck 2000, 43) 134
Fig. 2 Blueprint of Paul Otlet’s mansion, with an artist’s house
integrated (see written indications above, duplex/atelier
d’artiste) 136
Fig. 3 Maria Sèthe at the Villa Bloemenwerf in Uccle, in the
southern suburbs of Brussels. Photographer unknown
(Most probably Charles Lefébure) 141
Fig. 4 Victor Horta, Salle des fêtes de la Maison du Peuple,
c. 1896-1899, destroyed in 1965 ( (c) 2017 - arc.
Victor Horta - Sofam) 142

xvii
xviii List of Figures

Fig. 5 Brussels as part and central node of the network

of European capitals. Victor Bourgeois’ drawing for
Paul Otlet’s idea of global intellectual knowledge
cities’ network (Bourgeois 1932, 172) 147
Fig. 6 Synthetic diagram for a tentative definition of Brussels
as another cultural capital of the end of the nineteenth
century 149
Luminous Munich and Beyond: The ‘Schwabinger Bohème’
Fig. 1 [Greetings from Munich, city of art and beer!], c. 1917.
The ‘Münchner Kindl’, the child depicted in the postcard
with paintbrushes, is also the symbol on Munich’s coat
of arms. Courtesy of Hans Peter Mayer 226
Fig. 2 Illustration from Kubin, Die andere Seite. Courtesy of
Eberhard Spangenberg. ‘Das erste, was uns auffiel, die
Kleidung der Traummenschen—zum Lachen!—war
gänzlich veraltet’ (Kubin 2009, 62); [‘The first thing
to strike us was the Dreamlanders’ dress. It was so far
behind the times, it was a hoot!’] (Kubin 2014, 57) 238
 Introduction: Other Capitals
of the Nineteenth Century

Richard Hibbitt

Walter Benjamin’s renowned appellation of Paris as the capital of the

nineteenth century has an interesting genesis. The first version of his
exposé ‘Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX. Jahrhunderts’ [‘Paris, the Capital of
the Nineteenth Century’] was written in 1935 at the request of Friedrich
Pollock, co-director of the Institute of Social Research in New York, who
asked Benjamin to summarise the principal ideas contained in the Arcades
Project in order to attract potential sponsors (Benjamin 1999a, 955). The
result is a dense synopsis in six brief sections, beginning with an epigraph
taken from Paris, capitale de la France. Recueil de vers [Paris, the capital
of France: collected verses], an 1897 work in French by the Vietnamese
poet Nguyen Trong Hiep.1 Benjamin takes this title—which is both banal
and lyrical at the same time, given that it connotes the wonder of the
capital city of France as a source of poetry—and transposes it from place
to time, thereby creating a spatio-temporal approach to culture that fixes
Paris as the central locus of modernity. Moreover, Benjamin’s original
German expression takes on a further meaning in its English translation:
the term ‘Hauptstadt’ [capital city] also suggests the economic concept
of capital associated with Marx’s Das Kapital (1867), which became a
common term from the 1860s onwards (Hobsbawn 1975, 13). This
dual significance encapsulates the relationship between geography and

R. Hibbitt (*)
University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
e-mail: r.hibbitt@leeds.ac.uk

© The Author(s) 2017 1

R. Hibbitt (ed.), Other Capitals of the Nineteenth Century,
Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-57085-7_1
2 R. Hibbitt

economics intrinsic to Benjamin’s reflections on the emergence of urban

commodity capitalism in mid-nineteenth-century Paris.
Although Benjamin’s locution is by definition a hypothesis rather
than a statement of fact, its resonance has reinforced the ways in which
both Paris and Baudelaire are seen as emblematic of nineteenth-century
modernity. The notion of a capital city of the nineteenth century is of
course a chimera, subject to competing claims for different cities. Recent
scholarship drawing on cultural studies, history, literature and sociology
has made this supposition explicit. In the article ‘London: Capital of the
Nineteenth Century’, Evan Horowitz discusses how Benjamin ‘made
Paris the unofficial capital of the nineteenth century’, despite the facts
that England ‘was the real locus of industrial capitalism’ and London
‘provided Marx with the materials and the writing space for his mag-
num opus, just as the more fully industrial Manchester taught Engels the
brutal laws of capitalist survival’ (2010, 112). The particular significance
of Manchester is developed further in Janet Wolff’s essay ‘Manchester,
Capital of the Nineteenth Century’, which argues for the city’s exem-
plary position as an advanced nexus of industry, politics, commerce and
culture (2013). Here Wolff develops David Frisby’s insight that there is
a difference between industrial cities and capital cities, the latter being
institutional and administrative centres that foster a particular kind of
social interaction frequently characterized by ‘the cultural hegemony of
the bourgeoisie’ (Frisby 1985, 70). Industrial cities are not required to
play the same synecdochic roles as symbols of nations or empires, allow-
ing them a different kind of freedom. Moreover, newer or provincial
cities may not be subject to the same spatial, architectural and political
restrictions, as we will see in the case of Melbourne. As Horowitz points
out, London itself may paradoxically have been too advanced in compari-
son to Paris, where political upheaval and the co-existence of a powerful
bourgeoisie and a bohemian subculture led to a slower emergence of the
phenomena of ‘partial modernity’ that Benjamin describes (Horowitz
2010, 113–116).2
It should however be recalled that the instances of modernity identi-
fied by Benjamin in his writings on Paris are not solely technological—the
gaslights, cast-iron constructions, photography and advertisements—but
also existential, insofar that it owes much to Baudelaire’s attempts to
capture fugitive moments of modern life. Besides, Benjamin’s claims for
the special status of Paris are based not on the rate of industrial devel-
opment but on the particular elements of aesthetic modernity that he
 INTRODUCTION: OTHER CAPITALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 3

identifies with the Second Empire: ‘The phantasmagoria of capitalist cul-

ture attains its most radiant unfolding in the world exhibition of 1867.
The Second Empire is at the height of its power. Paris is acknowledged
as the capital of luxury and fashion’ (1999a, 8). Benjamin’s argument
is placed in a wider context by Patrice Higonnet in Paris: Capital of the
World, in the chapter ‘The Urban Machine’ on the myth of Paris as an
industrial city. Higonnet argues that although Paris in the second half
of the nineteenth century was less industrialized than Berlin, London
or New York, it was a centre not only for world exhibitions and the
grand magasin but also for artisanal production and investment in the
stock exchange (2005, 188–189).3 These initial comparisons show that
the notion of a ‘capital city of the nineteenth century’ is contingent on
the criteria used to define it: Paris may not have been the richest, most
developed or most populous of cities, but for Benjamin it epitomizes
the spectacular fetishisation of urban commodity capitalism conveyed
by the notion of ‘phantasmagoria’. In this respect, the origin of the title
in the work of the poet Nguyen Trong Hiep is most fitting, because
Benjamin’s appellation is based on an approach to history that combines
sociology with literary criticism, in its attempt to provide an alternative
form of historiography based on montage rather than a dominant single
narrative.
The present volume considers the notion of capitals of the nineteenth
century from a variety of different perspectives, looking not only at other
places but also at other interpretations of capital. In political terms, cit-
ies can function as regional, provincial, national or imperial capitals,
often simultaneously; some can be proto-capital cities within empires, or
city-states within federal or unitary nations; others, such as Manchester
or Marseille, take on a symbolic rather than political status. The histor-
ical factors in the nineteenth century that lead to the increased devel-
opment of nation-states and competing empires are reflected in these
different types of city. In the essay ‘The Metropolis and the Emergence
of Modernism’, Raymond Williams argues that modernism must be seen
not as a set of ‘universals’ but as the product of a historical moment
manifest in the development of the great metropoles: ‘This means, above
all, seeing the imperial and capitalist metropolis as a specific historical
form, at different stages: Paris, London, Berlin, New York. It involves
looking, from time to time, from outside the metropolis: from the
deprived hinterlands, where different forces are moving, and from the
poor world which has always been peripheral to metropolitan systems’
4 R. Hibbitt

(1992, 93). Taking a cue from Williams, the essays collected here explore
to what extent the ‘deprived hinterlands’ and peripheral ‘poor world’
possess different forms of capital. Williams shows how the metropolis
transcended the previous role of the large or capital city: ‘It was the place
where new social and economic and cultural relations, beyond both city
and nation in their older senses, were beginning to be formed: a distinct
historical phase which was in fact to be extended, in the second half of
the twentieth century, at least potentially, to the whole world’ (1992,
90). However, much of what he writes about the modern metropolis is
also applicable to rapidly growing cities such as Brussels, or to less indus-
trialised imperial centres such as Constantinople; similarly, the provin-
cial and the rural can also be sources of cultural production. Williams
emphasises the importance of the metropolis as a centre for migration
and a locus of creativity: ‘For it is not the general themes of response to
the city and its modernity which compose anything that can be properly
called modernism. It is rather the new and specific location of the artists
and intellectuals of this movement within the changing cultural milieu of
the metropolis’ (1992, 90). The significance of the cultural milieu, with
its affinities to Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, can also be dis-
cerned in other loci, as we will see.
In A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England,
his study of the anthropological turn in late English modernism, Jed
Esty takes up Williams’s notion of ‘metropolitan perception’, contrasting
it with what he describes as a process of ‘demetropolitanisation’ (2004,
3). Esty uses these terms to analyse the effects of the contraction of the
British Empire on late modernism, which he describes as part of a ‘decol-
onising dialectic’ (2004, 9). The relationships he considers between
metropolitan perception and demetropolitanisation, or between impe-
rial universalism and national particularism, are also useful for our discus-
sion of the obverse side of this historical process: the interaction between
the great imperial metropoles and the ‘provinces’ during the period of
growth after the Industrial Revolution. The dichotomy between met-
ropolitan and national/provincial also constitutes an example of the
concept of ‘core-periphery’, originally used in the 1950s by the econ-
omist Raúl Prebisch and the UN Economic Commission for Latin
America, in the context of a discussion of inequality in the global econ-
omy. The ‘core-periphery’ relational pair has been developed notably
by Immanuel Wallerstein in his theory of world-systems analysis (2004,
93). Wallerstein argues that the modern world-system, which he defines
 INTRODUCTION: OTHER CAPITALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 5

as a capitalist world-economy dating back to the long sixteenth century,

became in the nineteenth century a ‘geoculture that proclaimed the inclu-
sion of all as the definition of the good society’, while pointing out that in
practice this inclusiveness, based on the emerging notion of citizenship,
excluded many (2004, 60). As Benedict Anderson shows in Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, the
nineteenth century is also the age of nationalism in Europe, which he
identifies as the period between 1820 and 1920 (2006, 67). The nego-
tiation between the notions of geoculture and nation—a negotiation
that is of course acutely relevant to our own times—is also shaped by
and mediated through the concept of empire. Anderson’s study of the
ways in which different empires and dynasties adopted models of ‘official
nationalism’ provides us with another means of theorising the overlap-
ping relationship between central and peripheral metropoles, cities and
regions (2006, 83–111).
The core-periphery model, which is nuanced by the introduction of
a third term in the ‘semi-periphery’ to denote a space that shares quali-
ties of both (Wallerstein 2004, 28), is of particular relevance to our
aim to rethink the nineteenth-century cultural field. Although most of
the places discussed in the present volume exist in some kind of rela-
tionship to imperial capitals such as Berlin, London, Paris and Vienna,
they are by no means simply peripheral. The Copenhagen of Georg
Brandes is a good example of a semi-peripheral city, aware of both its
central position in Scandinavian culture and its peripheral relationship to
the cultures of Western Europe. The imperial capitals of St Petersburg
and Constantinople can similarly be seen as both core and peripheral in
their relationship to their own empires and to the West; Eric Hobsbawn
describes both Russia and the Ottoman Empire as ‘backward’ in com-
parison to the ‘central core’ of the European continent (1975, 23).
Hobsbawn also shows how the central European area stretching down
from Prussia to north-central Italy, composed as it was of heterogene-
ous principalities, city-states and regions, combined ‘characteristics of
the relatively “developed” and backward regions in various ways’ (1975,
24). Moreover, the significance of places such as Bayreuth and Coppet
demonstrates the central role of the geographically peripheral in the cul-
tural field.
In economic terms, the emergence of the metropolis and the
increased importance of the nation-state in the nineteenth century are
coterminous with the spread of capitalism, a process which Hobsbawn
6 R. Hibbitt

describes in The Age of Capital 1845–1875 as the ‘extension of the cap-

italist economy to the entire world’ (1975, 9). Hobsbawn argues that
the failure of the 1848 European workers’ revolutions and the increased
power of the bourgeoisie encouraged ‘the massive advance of the world
economy of industrial capitalism, of the social order it represented, of the
ideas and beliefs which seemed to legitimise and ratify it: in reason, sci-
ence, progress and liberalism’ (1975, 15). He shows how this advance
was manifest not just in financial speculation, culminating in the ‘boom
and slump’ of the 1870s, but also in the technological developments that
stemmed from the production of iron, leading to railways, transcontinen-
tal cables and the construction of projects such as the Suez canal and
cities such as Chicago (1975, 16). The link between the geopolitical and
the economic—or between the capital cities and the financial capital—
is developed by Wallerstein. Using Marx’s concept of ‘surplus-value’,
he shows how surplus-value flows from the periphery to the core in a
model of unequal exchange, to the extent that the relationship between
the core and the periphery can be seen as the degree of profitability of
the production process (Wallerstein 2004, 12, 28). According to Marx’s
general formula for capital, ‘[t]he circulation of commodities is the
starting-point of capital. The production of commodities, their circula-
tion, and that more developed form of their circulation called commerce,
these form the historical ground-work from which it rises’ (Marx 1999,
93). Our interest in this book is to examine not only the literal capital
that derives from the commercial circulation of commodities—money, as
Marx explains—but also the figurative capital accrued by certain places
and ‘cultural commodities’, irrespective of their monetary value.
It is with regard to the concept of figurative capital that Pierre
Bourdieu’s work on mapping the nineteenth-century literary field and
the field of cultural production in general is particularly useful. In The
Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, Bourdieu refers
to ‘capital in its diverse forms – economic, cultural, social’ (1996, 10).
The concept of ‘cultural capital’ designates a form of status and recog-
nition that can be accumulated not only by creative artists but also by
‘tastemakers’ such as critics, even if they are financially poor and belong
to the milieu of bohemia (57). Bourdieu also uses the concept of ‘sym-
bolic capital’, which seems frequently to be synonymous with ‘cultural
capital’ (111); although he does not distinguish explicitly between the
two terms himself, from the context of their usage one can surmise that
‘cultural’ refers to inherited capital as well as to acquired capital, which is
 INTRODUCTION: OTHER CAPITALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 7

also designated as ‘symbolic’ (74, 112, 258, 267). He tends to use the
terms ‘cultural’ and ‘symbolic’ interchangeably to designate the opposite
pole to economic capital—in other words, as a way of thinking about
the relationship between art and money—which is manifest in the second
half of the nineteenth century in an ‘inverse’ or ‘upside-down’ situation,
where artists can be both economically poor (and therefore dominated)
but symbolically rich (and therefore dominant) (82). Although writers
and other artists can possess all these types of capital to varying degrees
(262), it is the relationship between economic and symbolic capital that
characterises Bourdieu’s reading of the post-1848 French literary field,
where ‘consecrated’ writers attain a particular level of autonomy and
symbolic capital that encourages a dichotomous relationship between
commercial and critical success (77).4
The artworks produced by symbolically dominant artists are described
as part of ‘the new economy of symbolic goods’, which is initiated in part
by the theory of art for art’s sake and the principle of artistic autonomy
(136). Bourdieu considers that Baudelaire is the nomothète or ‘founding
hero’ of the principle of artistic autonomy, which he also associates with
writers such as Flaubert and Huysmans (62). Symbolic value is there-
fore an alternative to market value, although the initial ‘accumulation
of symbolic capital’ can in some cases lead to eventual economic profit
as well (142); conversely, economic capital can also be ‘reconverted into
symbolic capital’ if the artist acquires ‘the capital of consecration’ (148).
Bourdieu equates possession of the different types of capital with power:

The field of power is the space of relations of force between agents or

between institutions having in common the possession of the capital neces-
sary to occupy the dominant positions in different fields (notably economic
or cultural). It is the site of struggles between holders of different powers
(or kinds of capital) which, like the symbolic struggles between artists and
the ‘bourgeois’ in the nineteenth century, have at stake the transforma-
tion or conservation of the relative value of different types of capital, which
itself determines, at any moment, the forces liable to be engaged in these
struggles. (1996, 215)

The relationships between ‘agents’ or individuals (the French term

‘agents’ is retained in the standard English translation) and institutions
will be one of the key methodological approaches used to analyse what
Bourdieu refers to as their ‘habitus’, a concept that combines elements
of milieu, practice and behaviour (2013, 95). Bourdieu argues that
8 R. Hibbitt

habitus ‘is acquired and it is also a possession which may, in certain cases,
function as a form of capital’ (1996, 179).5 For symbolically dominant
writers such as Baudelaire, habitus as a form of capital is evident in their
attitude to artistic practice, irrespective of economic success. The notions
of field and habitus also constitute a transferable model for the analy-
sis of all forms of cultural production (1996, 214): although Bourdieu’s
analysis of the nineteenth-century cultural field is mainly concerned with
literature, his reflections on visual art (and to a lesser extent music) show
how the theory can work in practice, which is particularly fruitful for
interdisciplinary analysis.
Bourdieu refers to Benjamin only twice in The Rules of Art, on each
occasion citing approvingly Benjamin’s suspicion of the ‘fetishization of
the name of the master’ with regard to the origins of a work of art (1996,
229, 290). But there are areas of his field theory which suggest an inter-
esting overlap with Benjamin’s work on nineteenth-century Paris, such as
the reference to a ‘hierarchized space where the places – galleries, theatres,
publishing houses – which mark positions in this space by the same token
mark the cultural products that are associated with them’ (164). This
shared interest in a particular space and time returns us to the questions
of what was particular about Paris during the nineteenth century and to
what extent this form of modernity was reflected, refracted or even pre-
figured elsewhere. Bourdieu writes interestingly about the possibility of a
common habitus in a particular place at a specific time, while simultane-
ously rejecting any sense of a Hegelian cultural unity or Zeitgeist:

The fundamental question then becomes to know whether the social effects
of chronological contemporaneity, or even spatial unity – like the fact of shar-
ing the same specific meeting places (literary cafés, magazines, cultural asso-
ciations, salons, etc.) or of being exposed to the same cultural messages,
common works of reference, obligatory issues, key events, etc. – are strong
enough to determine, over and above the autonomy of different fields, a
common problematic, understood not as a Zeitgeist or a community of spirit
or lifestyle, but rather as a space of possibles, a system of different position-
takings in relation to which each must be defined. (1996, 199–200)

It is the investigation into a ‘common problematic’ that underpins the

present volume, which explores different manifestations of this ‘space
of possibles’ during what Eric Hobsbawn has called the long nineteenth
century, that is to say 1789–1914. When applied on a transnational scale,
Bourdieu’s distinction between the dominant and dominated elements
 INTRODUCTION: OTHER CAPITALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 9

of the cultural field constitutes a fruitful alternative to the core-periphery

model as a means to understand cultural hegemony. Although the core
and the dominant are often synonymous, Bourdieu’s field theory pro-
vides a way in which to locate value in the symbolic capital that exists in
semi-peripheral or peripheral sources.6 The essays collected in this vol-
ume are all concerned with identifying sources of capital in different loci
and forms, looking beyond Paris and other metropoles to provide a new
reading of the field. Many of them draw here on Pascale Casanova’s The
World Republic of Letters, first published in French in 1999, which is still
the most significant contribution to reading the nineteenth-century lit-
erary field from a transnational perspective. Casanova’s study acknowl-
edges its debt not only to Bourdieu’s concept of the field but also to
Fernand Braudel’s concept of an économie-monde, translated as either
‘world-economy’ or ‘economy-world’ (Casanova 2004, xii; see also
Wallerstein 2004, 17).7 She proposes a conception of transnational liter-
ary space that has its own geography, history and temporality; this space,
the eponymous world republic of letters, is interdependent on both poli-
tics and economics without necessarily being commensurate with either
of them. The concept of capital in its dual sense forms an intrinsic part of
this view: the geography of the world republic of letters is ‘based on the
opposition between a capital, on the one hand, and peripheral depend-
encies whose relationship to this center is defined by their aesthetic dis-
tance from it’ (2004, 12). This capital city is itself the home of the bourse
of literary values, where literary capital is accumulated: Casanova con-
flates the two meanings when she writes of ‘the construction of a literary
capital – a symbolic central bank, as it were, a place where literary credit
is accumulated’ (245).8
In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the capital city of
the world republic of letters according to Casanova is of course Paris,
which is posited not just as the centre of the international literary field,
but also as the Greenwich Meridian of literature. This Benjaminian
conflation of the spatial and temporal axes establishes a centre-periph-
ery model of a capital city with both suburbs and outlying provinces,
where Paris is able to consecrate literature with symbolic capital, be it
through criticism, translation or publication (2004, 21). Its hegem-
onic status is attributed not just to the gradual accumulation of literary
capital over several centuries, but also to the relative political freedom
or autonomy of the French literary field; Casanova writes that ‘[i]t is
through this very process of emancipation from national politics that
10 R. Hibbitt

Paris became the world capital of literature in the nineteenth century’

(2004, 87). Her one explicit reference here to Benjamin’s work on nine-
teenth-century Paris also comes in this context, acknowledging how The
Arcades Project ‘showed that the historical particularity of Paris was con-
nected with the demand for political freedom, which in turn was directly
associated with the invention of literary modernity’ (2004, 25). One
might argue that Benjamin and Casanova are making a similar point
about cultural modernity but from different perspectives: if Benjamin
sees nineteenth-century Paris as the capital of urban commodity capital-
ism, Casanova sees it as both ‘capital of the literary world’ and the ‘intel-
lectual capital of the world’ (2004, 25). A major difference between their
two perspectives on Parisian modernity is Casanova’s analysis of the role
it played in consecrating literature from around the world with symbolic
capital.
The validity of Casanova’s theory of transnational literary space has
been contested by a number of critics, notably by David Damrosch,
who sees it rather as ‘a good account of the operation of world litera-
ture within the modern French context’ (2003, 27, n. 6).9 But although
Casanova undeniably argues for the hegemony of Paris from the 1700s
up to the 1960s, it is worth noting her acknowledgment of the existence
of other capitals of the literary world at different times, from London
and New York to Barcelona and Frankfurt. In the section ‘The capital
and its double’, she also emphasises the role of Brussels in the late nine-
teenth century as an alternative to Paris with a greater openness to artis-
tic modernity; less hidebound by tradition and less reactionary, Brussels
was ‘able to consecrate avant-gardes at a moment when the French capi-
tal was beginning to lose some of its special and autonomous character’
(2004, 133). It is also important to recall Casanova’s argument that lit-
erary domination ‘cannot be reduced to a political balance of power’ or
viewed ‘in terms of a binary opposition between center and periphery’
(2004, 116), which allows for the possibility of greater cultural capital
existing in geographically peripheral areas at different periods. In the
section ‘The creation of capitals’, she makes some interesting remarks
about alternative centres existing within national or linguistic spaces, as
exemplified by Edinburgh and Glasgow or by Barcelona and Madrid; her
references to the ‘rivalry between two capitals’ and to the specific impor-
tance of port cities and university towns (Casanova 2004, 246) are illu-
minating for a number of the essays in the present volume, not only with
regard to Brussels, but also to Marseille.
 INTRODUCTION: OTHER CAPITALS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 11

Casanova writes of ‘the difficulties that specialists in comparative lit-

erature face in trying to establish transnational periodizations’ (2004,
101), because the different temporalities within transnational literary
space prevent a synchronic model of influence and reception; one of her
examples is Naturalism, which arrived in other countries long after its
importance in France had waned (101–103). However, it seems possible
to work effectively with the concepts of influence and reception while
simultaneously acknowledging these temporal disjunctures, as we will see
in the reception of different texts and genres, as well as in the example of
Munich, where the consecration of an avant-garde in the 1900s provides
a specific variant on the earlier Parisian model. In this respect, Franco
Moretti’s concept of ‘distant reading’ provides an instructive way of ana-
lysing commensurable phenomena in different national and linguistic
spaces at different times. Moretti’s preference for the term ‘world liter-
ary system’ to designate transnational literary space provides a variation
on Casanova’s concept of the world republic of letters: both critics adapt
the economic model of global inequality to their study of the literary
field, but Moretti’s analysis of the field’s systemic function emphasises
the interactions between core and periphery and reduces the importance
of the consecrating role of the hegemonic centre.10 His description of
the international market for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nov-
els shows how the core exerted a homogenising influence on the semi-
periphery and periphery:

Here, the crucial mechanism by which the market operated was that of
diffusion: books from the core were incessantly exported into the semi-
periphery and the periphery, where they were read, admired, imitated,
turned into models – thus drawing those literatures into the orbit of core
ones, and indeed ‘interfering’ with their autonomous development. (2013,
127)11

Moretti illustrates his argument by referring to the waves of epistolary

fiction, historical novels and mystères: this latter genre, known in English
as the ‘urban mystery genre’, will be analysed by means of several dif-
ferent examples in the present volume, using both reception theory and
‘distant reading’ to show how different literary spaces converted its eco-
nomic and cultural capital.
Bourdieu’s theory of the field has already been employed to explore
different aspects of transnational cultural production by means of edited
12 R. Hibbitt

volumes of essays. Anna Boschetti’s L’espace culturel transnational

[Transnational cultural space] (2010) encompasses a wide body of mate-
rial from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, taking its examples
from literature, opera, theatre, history, politics and publishing in Europe
and beyond. Organised according to categories rather than places and
periods, the book approaches transnational cultural production through
conceptual frameworks rather than national, linguistic, historical or
thematic perspectives. The concept of ‘cultural capital’ has also been
explored by the French cultural historian Christophe Charle, in a series
of three edited volumes that focus on the significance of particular loci
from the eighteenth century to the mid-1900s.12 Charle’s initial focus is
on Paris as an archetypal cultural capital in its relationship to the nation-
state, analogous with Berlin, Madrid, Rome, St Petersburg, Moscow
and a number of other European cities, particularly in countries such as
Germany and Italy where regional cities have possessed specific historical
importance at different periods (Charle and Roche 2002). Aware of the
inevitable limitations of his project, he describes his first volume as a ‘lec-
ture transversale’ [transversal reading] of the continent in order to estab-
lish a programme for future work (Charle and Roche 2002, 10). This
transversal reading can be seen as an attempt to establish a cross-section
of the field, given that any attempt at complete coverage would inevi-
tably become encyclopaedic. The subsequent two volumes in this series
(Charle 2004, 2009) explore the cultural significance of other loci and
phenomena, exemplified by essays by Michel Espagne on literary pilgrim-
ages (2004) and Véronique Tarasco-Long on the competition between
the Louvre and the Art Institute in Chicago (2004), as well as discus-
sions of fashion, travel guides and horse racing. Charle also warns against
the temptation to exaggerate the position of Paris as the archetypal
model: in emphasising the importance of ‘une comparaison decentrée’
[a decentred comparison] (2009, xv), he demonstrates his aim to com-
bine the centre/periphery model of cultural influence with a polycentric
model, illustrated by Béatrice Joyeux-Prunel’s essay on the circulation of
avant-garde painting and its role in European cultural politics (Joyeux-
Prunel 2009).
Our objective in the present volume is to provide an alternative map-
ping of nineteenth-century cultural space, drawing on the work of the
critics mentioned above as well as a number of other approaches. The
volume brings together specialists in comparative literature and cul-
tural studies, as well as in architecture, geography and musicology.
Another random document with
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Colonial dames
and good wives
 This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United
States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with
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eBook.

Title: Colonial dames and good wives

Author: Alice Morse Earle

Release date: August 31, 2023 [eBook #71532]

Language: English

Original publication: Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin &

Company, 1895

Credits: The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from
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Archive)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK COLONIAL

DAMES AND GOOD WIVES ***
 COLONIAL
DAMES
AND
GOOD WIVES
WRITTEN BY
ALICE MORSE EARLE

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN &
COMPANY
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
CAMBRIDGE
 Copyright, 1895,
By ALICE MORSE EARLE.
All rights reserved.
 TO
THE MEMORY OF THE COLONIAL DAMES

Whose blood runs in my veins

Whose spirit lives in my work

Elizabeth Morse, Joanna Hoar, Esther Mason, Deborah

Atherton, Sarah Wyeth, Anne Adams, Elizabeth
Browne, Hannah Phillips, Mary Clary, Silence
Heard, Judith Thurston, Patience Foster,
Martha Bullard, Barbara Sheppard,
Seaborn Wilson
 CONTENTS
Chapter Page
I. Consorts and Relicts 1
II. Women of Affairs 45
III. “Double-Tongued and 88
Naughty Women”
IV. Boston Neighbors 109
V. A Fearfull Female 135
Travailler
VI. Two Colonial 160
Adventuresses
VII. The Universal Friend 173
VIII. Eighteenth-Century 189
Manners
IX. Their Amusements and 206
Accomplishments
X. Daughters of Liberty 240
XI. A Revolutionary 238
Housewife
XII. Fireside Industries 276
COLONIAL DAMES AND
GOODWIVES.
 CHAPTER I.
CONSORTS AND RELICTS.

In the early days of the colony of Massachusetts Bay, careful lists

were sent back to old England by the magistrates, telling what “to
provide to send to New England” in order to ensure the successful
planting and tender nourishing of the new settlement. The earliest list
includes such homely items as “benes and pese,” tame turkeys,
copper kettles, all kinds of useful apparel and wholesome food; but
the list is headed with a most significant, a typically Puritan item,
Ministers. The list sent to the Emigration Society by the Virginian
colonists might equally well have been headed, to show their most
crying need, with the word Wives.
The settlement of Virginia bore an entirely different aspect from
that of New England. It was a community of men who planted
Jamestown. There were few women among the early Virginians. In
1608 one Mistress Forrest came over with a maid, Anne Burraws,
who speedily married John Laydon, the first marriage of English folk
in the new world. But wives were few, save squaw-wives, therefore
the colony did not thrive. Sir Edwin Sandys, at a meeting of the
Emigration Society in London, in November, 1619, said that “though
the colonists are seated there in their persons some four years, they
are not settled in their minds to make it their place of rest and
continuance.” They all longed to gather gold and to return to England
as speedily as possible, to leave that state of “solitary uncouthness,”
as one planter called it. Sandys and that delightful gentleman, the
friend and patron of Shakespeare, the Earl of Southampton,
planned, as an anchor in the new land, to send out a cargo of wives
for these planters, that the plantation might “grow in generations and
not be pieced out from without.” In 1620 the Jonathan and the
London Merchant brought ninety maids to Virginia on a venture, and
a most successful venture it proved.
 There are some scenes in colonial life which stand out of the past
with much clearness of outline, which seem, though no details
survive, to present to us a vivid picture. One is this landing of ninety
possible wives—ninety homesick, seasick but timidly inquisitive
English girls—on Jamestown beach, where pressed forward, eagerly
and amorously waiting, about four hundred lonely emigrant
bachelors—bronzed, sturdy men, in leather doublets and breeches
and cavalier hats, with glittering swords and bandoleers and fowling-
pieces, without doubt in their finest holiday array, to choose and
secure one of these fair maids as a wife. Oh, what a glorious and all-
abounding courting, a mating-time, was straightway begun on the
Virginian shore on that happy day in May. A man needed a quick
eye, a ready tongue, a manly presence, if he were to succeed
against such odds in supply and demand, and obtain a fair one, or
indeed any one, from this bridal array. But whosoever he won was
indeed a prize, for all were asserted to be “young, handsome,
honestly educated maids, of honest life and carriage”—what more
could any man desire? Gladly did the husband pay to the Emigration
Company the one hundred and twenty pounds of leaf tobacco, which
formed, in one sense, the purchase money for the wife. This was
then valued at about eighty dollars: certainly a man in that
matrimonial market got his money’s worth; and the complaining
colonial chronicler who asserted that ministers and milk were the
only cheap things in New England, might have added—and wives
the only cheap things in Virginia.
It was said by old writers that some of these maids were seized by
fraud, were trapanned in England, that unprincipled spirits “took up
rich yeomans’ daughters to serve his Majesty as breeders in Virginia
unless they paid money for their release.” This trapanning was one
of the crying abuses of the day, but in this case it seems scarcely
present. For the girls appear to have been given a perfectly fair
showing in all this barter. They were allowed to marry no
irresponsible men, to go nowhere as servants, and, indeed, were not
pressed to marry at all if against their wills. They were to be “housed
lodged and provided for of diet” until they decided to accept a
husband. Naturally nearly all did marry, and from the unions with
these young, handsome and godly-carriaged maids sprang many of
our respected Virginian families.
No coquetry was allowed in this mating. A girl could not promise to
marry two men, under pain of fine or punishment; and at least one
presumptuous and grasping man was whipped for promising
marriage to two girls at the same time—as he deserved to be when
wives were so scarce.
Other ship-loads of maids followed, and with the establishment of
these Virginian families was dealt, as is everywhere else that the
family exists, a fatal blow at a community of property and interests,
but the colony flourished, and the civilization of the new world was
begun. For the unit of society may be the individual, but the molecule
of civilization is the family. When men had wives and homes and
children they “sett down satysfied” and no longer sighed for England.
Others followed quickly and eagerly; in three years thirty-five
hundred emigrants had gone from England to Virginia, a marked
contrast to the previous years of uncertainty and dissatisfaction.
Virginia was not the only colony to import wives for its colonists. In
1706 His Majesty Louis XIV. sent a company of twenty young girls to
the Governor of Louisiana, Sieur de Bienville, in order to consolidate
his colony. They were to be given good homes, and to be well
married, and it was thought they would soon teach the Indian
squaws many useful domestic employments. These young girls were
of unspotted reputation, and upright lives, but they did not love their
new homes; a dispatch of the Governor says:—
The men in the colony begin through habit to use corn as
an article of food, but the women, who are mostly Parisians,
have for this kind of food a dogged aversion which has not
been subdued. Hence they inveigh bitterly against his Grace
the Bishop of Quebec who they say has enticed them away
from home under pretext of sending them to enjoy the milk
and honey of the land of promise.
I don’t know how this venture succeeded, but I cannot fancy
anything more like the personification of incompatibility, of inevitable
failure, than to place these young Parisian women (who had certainly
known of the manner of living of the court of Louis XIV.) in a wild
frontier settlement, and to expect them to teach Western squaws any
domestic or civilized employment, and then to make them eat Indian
corn, which they loathed as do the Irish peasants. Indeed, they were
to be pitied. They rebelled and threatened to run away—whither I
cannot guess, nor what they would eat save Indian corn if they did
run away—and they stirred up such a dissatisfaction that the
imbroglio was known as the Petticoat Rebellion, and the governor
was much jeered at for his unsuccessful wardship and his attempted
matrimonial agency.
In 1721 eighty young girls were landed in Louisiana as wives, but
these were not godly-carriaged young maids; they had been taken
from Houses of Correction, especially from Paris. In 1728 came
another company known as filles à la cassette, or casket girls, for
each was given by the French government a casket of clothing to
carry to the new home; and in later years it became a matter of much
pride to Louisianians that their descent was from the casket-girls,
rather than from the correction-girls.
Another wife-market for the poorer class of wifeless colonists was
afforded through the white bond-servants who came in such
numbers to the colonies. They were of three classes; convicts, free-
willers or redemptioners, and “kids” who had been stolen and sent to
the new world, and sold often for a ten years’ term of service.
Maryland, under the Baltimores, was the sole colony that not only
admitted convicts, but welcomed them. The labor of the branded
hand of the malefactor, the education and accomplishments of the
social outcast, the acquirements and skill of the intemperate or over-
competed tradesman, all were welcome to the Maryland tobacco-
planters; and the possibilities of rehabilitation of fortune, health,
reputation, or reëstablishment of rectitude, made the custom not
unwelcome to the convict or to the redemptioner. Were the
undoubted servant no rogue, but an honest tradesman, crimped in
English coast-towns and haled off to Chesapeake tobacco fields, he
did not travel or sojourn, perforce, in low company. He might find
himself in as choice companionship, with ladies and gentlemen of as
high quality, albeit of the same character, as graced those other
English harbors of ne’er-do-weels, Newgate or the Fleet Prison.
Convicts came to other colonies, but not so openly nor with so much
welcome as to Maryland.
All the convicts who came to the colonies were not rogues, though
they might be condemned persons. The first record in Talbot County,
Maryland, of the sale of a convict, was in September, 1716, “in the
third Yeare of the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King George.” And it
was for rebellion and treason against his Majesty that this convict,
Alexander MacQueen, was taken in Lancashire and transported to
America, and sold to Mr. Daniel Sherwood for seven years of
service. With him were transported two shiploads of fellow-culprits,
Jacobites, on the Friendship and Goodspeed. The London Public
Record Office (on American and West India matters, No. 27) records
this transportation and says the men were “Scotts Rebells.” Earlier
still, many of the rebels of Monmouth’s rebellion had been sold for
transportation, and the ladies of the court of James had eagerly
snatched at the profits of the sale. Even William Penn begged for
twenty of these rebels for the Philadelphia market. Perhaps he was
shrewd enough to see in them good stock for successful citizens.
Were the convict a condemned criminal, it did not necessarily follow
that he or she was thoroughly vicious. One English husband is found
petitioning on behalf of his wife, sentenced to death for stealing but
three shillings and sixpence, that her sentence be changed to
transportation to Virginia.
The redemptioners were willing immigrants, who contracted to
serve for a period of time to pay the cost of their passage, which
usually had been prepaid to the master of the ship on which they
came across-seas. At first the state of these free-willers was not
unbearable. Alsop, who was a redemptioner, has left on record that
the work required was not excessive:—
Five dayes and a halfe in the summer is the allotted time
that they worke, and for two months, when the Sun is
predominate in the highest pitch of his heat, they claim an
antient and customary Priviledge to repose themselves three
hours in the day within the house. In Winter they do little but
hunt and build fires.
and he adds, “the four years I served there were not to me so slavish
as a two-year’s servitude of a handicraft apprenticeship in London.”
Many examples can be given where these redemptioners rose to
respected social positions. In 1654, in the Virginia Assembly were
two members and one Burgess who had been bond-servants. Many
women-servants married into the family of their employers. Alsop
said it was the rule for them to marry well. The niece of Daniel Defoe
ran away to escape a marriage entanglement in England, sold
herself on board ship as a redemptioner when but eighteen years
old, was bought by a Mr. Job of Cecil County, Maryland, and soon
married her employer’s son. Defoe himself said that so many good
maid-servants were sold to America that there was a lack for
domestic service in England.
Through the stealing of children and youths to sell in the
plantations, it can plainly be seen that many a wife of respectable
birth was furnished to the colonists. This trade, by which, as Lionel
Gatford wrote in 1657, young people were “cheatingly duckoyed by
Poestigeous Plagiaries,” grew to a vast extent, and in it, emulating
the noble ladies of the court, women of lower rank sought a
degrading profit.
In 1655, in Middlesex, England, one Christian Sacrett was called
to answer the complaint of Dorothy Perkins:—
She accuseth her for a spirit, one that takes upp men
women and children, and sells them a-shipp to be conveyed
beyond the sea, having inticed and inveigled one Edward
Furnifall and Anna his wife with her infant to the waterside,
and putt them aboard the ship called the Planter to be
conveied to Virginia.
Sarah Sharp was also asserted to be a “common taker of children
and setter to Betray young men and maydens to be conveyed to
ships.”
The life of that famous rogue, Bamfylde-Moore Carew, shows the
method by which servants were sold in the plantations. The captain,
with his cargo of trapanned Englishmen, among whom was Carew,
cast anchor at Miles River in Talbot County, Maryland, ordered a gun
to be fired, and a hogshead of rum sent on board. On the day of the
sale the men prisoners were all shaved, the women dressed in their
best garments, their neatest caps, and brought on deck. Each
prisoner, when put up for sale, told his trade. Carew said he was a
good rat-catcher, beggar, and dog-trader, “upon which the Captain
hearing takes the planter aside, and tells him he did but jest, being a
man of humour, and would make an excellent schoolmaster.” Carew
escaped before being sold, was captured, whipped, and had a heavy
iron collar, “called in Maryland a pot-hook,” riveted about his neck;
but he again fled to the Indians, and returned to England. Kidnapped
in Bristol a second time, he was nearly sold on Kent Island to Mr.
Dulaney, but again escaped. He stole from a house “jolly cake,
powell, a sort of Indian corn bread, and good omani, which is kidney
beans ground with Indian corn, sifted, put into a pot to boil, and
eaten with molasses.” Jolly cake was doubtless johnny cake; omani,
hominy; but powell is a puzzle. He made his way by begging to
Boston, and shipped to England, from whence he was again
trapanned.
In the Sot-Weed Factor are found some very coarse but graphic
pictures of the women emigrants of the day. When the factor asks
the name of “one who passed for chambermaid” in one planter’s
house in “Mary-Land,” she answered with an affected blush and
simper:—

In better Times, ere to this Land

I was unhappily Trapanned,
Perchance as well I did appear
As any lord or lady here.
Not then a slave for twice two year.
My cloaths were fashionably new,
Nor were my shifts of Linnen blue;
But things are changed, now at the Hoe
I daily work, and barefoot go.
In weeding corn, or feeding swine,
I spend my melancholy time.
 Kidnap’d and fool’d I hither fled,
To shun a hated nuptial Bed.
And to my cost already find
Worse Plagues than those I left behind.

Another time, being disturbed in his sleep, the factor finds that in
an adjoining room,—

... a jolly Female Crew

Were Deep engaged in Lanctie Loo.

Soon quarreling over their cards, the planters’ wives fall into
abuse, and one says scornfully to the other:—

... tho now so brave,

I knew you late a Four Years Slave,
What if for planters wife you go,
Nature designed you for the Hoe.

The other makes, in turn, still more bitter accusations. It can

plainly be seen that such social and domestic relations might readily
produce similar scenes, and afford opportunity for “crimination and
recrimination.”
Still we must not give the Sot-Weed Factor as sole or indeed as
entirely unbiased authority. The testimony to the housewifely virtues
of the Maryland women by other writers is almost universal. In the
London Magazine of 1745 a traveler writes, and his word is similar to
that of many others:—
The women are very handsome in general and most
notable housewives; everything wears the Marks of
Cleanliness and Industry in their Houses, and their behavior
to their Husbands and Families is very edifying. You cant help
 observing, however, an Air of Reserve and somewhat that
looks at first to a Stranger like Unsociableness, which is
barely the effect of living at a great Distance from frequent
Society and their Thorough Attention to the Duties of their
Stations. Their Amusements are quite Innocent and within the
Circle of a Plantation or two. They exercise all the Virtues that
can raise Ones Opinion of too light a Sex.
The girls under such good Mothers generally have twice the
Sense and Discretion of the Boys. Their Dress is neat and
Clean and not much bordering upon the Ridiculous Humour of
the Mother Country where the Daughters seem Dress’d up for
a Market.
Wives were just as eagerly desired in New England as in Virginia,
and a married estate was just as essential to a man of dignity. As a
rule, emigration thereto was in families, but when New England men
came to the New World, leaving their families behind them until they
had prepared a suitable home for their reception, the husbands were
most impatient to send speedily for their consorts. Letters such as
this, of Mr. Eyre from England to Mr. Gibb in Piscataquay, in 1631,
show the sentiment of the settlers in the matter:—
I hope by this both your wives are with you according to
your desire. I wish all your wives were with you, and that so
many of you as desire wives had such as they desire. Your
wife, Roger Knight’s wife, and one wife more we have already
sent you and more you shall have as you wish for them.
This sentence, though apparently polygamous in sentiment, does
not indicate an intent to establish a Mormon settlement in New
Hampshire, but is simply somewhat shaky in grammatical
construction, and erratic in rhetorical expression.
Occasionally, though rarely, there was found a wife who did not
long for a New England home. Governor Winthrop wrote to England
on July 4, 1632:—
I have much difficultye to keepe John Gallope heere by
reason his wife will not come. I marvayle at her womans
 weaknesse, that she will live myserably with her children
there when she might live comfortably with her husband here.
I pray perswade and further her coming by all means. If she
will come let her have the remainder of his wages, if not let it
be bestowed to bring over his children for soe he desires.
Even the ministers’ wives did not all sigh for the New World. The
removal of Rev. Mr. Wilson to New England “was rendered difficult
by the indisposition of his dearest consort thereto.” He very shrewdly
interpreted a dream to her in favor of emigration, with but scant and
fleeting influence upon her, and he sent over to her from America
encouraging accounts of the new home, and he finally returned to
England for her, and after much fasting and prayer she consented to
“accompany him over an ocean to a wilderness.”
Margaret Winthrop, that undaunted yet gentle woman, wrote of her
at this date (and it gives us a glimpse of a latent element of Madam
Winthrop’s character), “Mr. Wilson cannot yet persuade his wife to
go, for all he hath taken this pains to come and fetch her. I marvel
what mettle she is made of. Sure she will yield at last.” She did yield,
and she did not go uncomforted. Cotton Mather wrote:—
Mrs. Wilson being thus perswaded over into the difficulties
of an American desart, her kinsman Old Mr. Dod, for her
consolation under those difficulties did send her a present
with an advice which had in it something of curiosity. He sent
her a brass counter, a silver crown, and a gold jacobus, all
severally wrapped up; with this instruction unto the gentleman
who carried it; that he should first of all deliver only the
counter, and if she received it with any shew of discontent, he
should then take no notice of her; but if she gratefully
resented that small thing for the sake of the hand it came
from, he should then go on to deliver the silver and so the
gold, but withal assure her that such would be the
dispensations to her and the good people of New England. If
they would be content and thankful with such little things as
God at first bestowed upon them, they should, in time, have
silver and gold enough. Mrs. Wilson accordingly by her
cheerful entertainment of the least remembrance from good
 old Mr. Dod, gave the gentleman occasion to go through with
his whole present and the annexed advice.
We could not feel surprised if poor homesick, heartsick, terrified
Mrs. Wilson had “gratefully resented” Mr. Dod’s apparently mean gift
to her on the eve of exile in our modern sense of resentment; but the
meaning of resent in those days was to perceive with a lively sense
of pleasure. I do not know whether this old Mr. Dod was the poet
whose book entitled A Posie from Old Mr. Dod’s Garden was one of
the first rare books of poetry printed in New England in colonial days.
We truly cannot from our point of view “marvayle” that these
consorts did not long to come to the strange, sad, foreign shore, but
wonder that they were any of them ever willing to come; for to the
loneliness of an unknown world was added the dread horror of
encounter with a new and almost mysterious race, the blood-thirsty
Indians, and if the poor dames turned from the woods to the shore,
they were menaced by “murthering pyrates.”
Gurdon Saltonstall, in a letter to John Winthrop of Connecticut, as
late as 1690, tells in a few spirited and racy sentences of the life the
women lead in an unprotected coast town. It was sad and terrifying
in reality, but there is a certain quaintness of expression and
metaphor in the narrative, and a sly and demure thrusting at Mr.
James, that give it an element of humor. It was written of the
approach of a foe “whose entrance was as formidable and
swaggering as their exit was sneaking and shamefull.” Saltonstall
says:—
My Wife & family was posted at your Honʳˢ a considerable
while, it being thought to be ye most convenient place for ye
feminine Rendezvous. Mr James who Commands in Chiefe
among them, upon ye coast alarum given, faceth to ye Mill,
gathers like a Snow ball as he goes, makes a Generall Muster
at yor Honʳˢ, and so posts away with ye greatest speed, to
take advantage of ye neighboring rocky hills, craggy,
inaccessible mountains; so that Wᵗᵉᵛᵉʳ els is lost Mr James
and yᵉ Women are safe.