The Dandy-Insect: Or, a Curious Case in American Antebellum Agricultural Journalism

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THE DANDY-INSECT OR, A CURIOUS CASE IN AMERICAN ANTEBELLUM AGRICULTURAL JOURNALISM Geertjan de Vugt ABSTRACT Histories of dandyism almost always begin with the life of Beau Brummell. More often than not, the dandy is seen as a European phenomenon. He is, moreover, seldom investigated as a political phenomenon. This article will offer a fresh perspective on the dandy in the early nineteenth century by presenting a detailed case study of dandyism in antebellum America. Around the time Beau Brummell was entertaining the British beau monde, a different form of dandyism could be observed in Albany, NY. Its manifestation was recorded and evaluated in a farmer’s journal, The Plough Boy. Careful scrutiny of the rhetoric employed in this journal shows that the nineteenth-century American perspective on dandyism was quite different from its comparatively ‘harmless’ image in Europe at the time, the phenomenon being viewed as a political force constituting a very real threat to stability, prosperity and overall psychological health, in short as decadent and potentially destructive.

Address for correspondence: Geertjan de Vugt, Mary Zeldenruststraat 55, 1091 DM Amsterdam, Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected]

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There is no subject that could not become the subject of poetry. While from a twentyfirst century perspective the appearance of poetry in an agricultural weekly might seem rather unexpected, not to say strange, poetry was in fact a common feature in the rural press in early nineteenth-century America. Indeed, it was so common that it caused a twentieth-century observer, commenting on the early American agricultural press, to remark: ‘rare is the agricultural periodical in which there fails to appear some form of poetry’.1 The common practice for articles, anecdotes and epistolary commentaries (that had previously appeared in newspapers or general magazines) to be copied and disseminated in agricultural weeklies such as The Plough Boy also applied to poetry. Often these periodicals would take over poems by people like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Sr. and John Langhorne which had first appeared in the metropolitan press. The poems selected tended to be rural in character, often advocating the ‘georgian’ ethics of a direct connection between the human body and the natural soil, or celebrating the development of new agricultural machinery. The interests of the ‘humble poets of the pre-Civil War period’ covered such a large field that, from a twentieth century point of view, one could argue that ‘relying on their myriad verses one might almost write a history of the rural life and thought of the time’.2 Although the case that is central to this article forms part of this rural history, it is not our intention to write a history of nineteenth-century agricultural life; nor are we pursuing

The Dandy-Insect

Keywords: dandyism, homespun, insects, politics of aesthetics, social pesticide

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Tilburg University

Cultural and Social History, Volume 12, Issue 2, pp. 197–215 © The Social History Society 2015 DOI 10.2752/147800415X14224554625190

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a history of agricultural thought. Our interest lies in tracing the genealogy of dandyism, and more particularly the political aspects of it, which so far have been largely ignored or not dealt with at all.3 This article offers a fresh (though perhaps not very refreshing) perspective on the dandy in the early nineteenth century as evidenced in the rural press in antebellum America. There the dandy figures prominently in a somewhat implicit political discourse on the ‘ideal community’.

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SOME GRACEFUL STANZAS ABOUT DANDIES AND FARMERS The poem central to this article, like so many others of its kind, was destined to sink into oblivion, along with its maker, never to be heard of again. If we now try to save this poet from this rather unfortunate fate, it is not because of the decided literary quality of his work, but rather because his poem, written in the form of a fable, provides us with a perfect entrance into the discourse on dandyism and its underlying ideas on politics and aesthetics circulating in Albany, New York, at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century. An analysis of the fable will furnish us with all the material we need for an inquiry into the political semantics of dandyism in antebellum America, which, in this case, revolves around one particular and very telling image, namely that of the dandy-insect. The article will offer a fairly literal reading of the poem, focusing on the image of the dandy as a pest threatening society, because this expresses quite explicitly how the author and no doubt countless others around him felt about the dandy at the time. There is not the slightest hint of irony in the fable. The author’s seriousness is perhaps best illustrated if the poem is viewed in the larger context in which it was published: an agricultural periodical that appeared between 1819 and 1823 in Albany, New York. Published in 1819, the fable was signed ‘Poker & Co’, but we now know it was written by William Ray, an American poet who ‘has written many pieces of merit, of more than ordinary merit’,4 and who according to himself suffered ‘among the Turks and barbarians of Tripoli [and] on the coast of Africa’. Less than a century later, however, he would only be known to bibliophiles.5 What we know about him today is very limited indeed. Apparently he started to write ‘verses at about ten years of age’, in the hope of becoming a great poet.6 Later on, he went into trade but soon went bankrupt. He was convicted as a result and had to go to prison. Upon his release from prison, he began to publish his poetry. He wrote ‘on ordinary and festive occasions, some lively, graceful stanzas’.7 Ray, who also published other poems with such revealing titles as ‘The Plough’, ‘The Altar’, ‘The Church’ and ‘Spring’, was a frequent and celebrated contributor to The Plough Boy.8 But, as one critic remarks, his poems ‘cannot be allowed any very high praise’.9 His most successful contribution, to be sure, was a poem entitled ‘The Plough Boy and the Dandy, a Fable’. This title, with its co-ordinating conjunction, presents a strange couple, as innocent as it seems to be, which will only later develop into a strong antagonism. Two worlds are conjoined – that of the farmer and that of the dandy – in the framework of a fable. However, contrary to what one might expect, what follows is not a short narrative featuring, as the title would suggest, animals representing certain human characteristics;

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Along with mosquitoes, bed-bugs and fleas, dandies are referred to as a pest, the worst even, serving no function whatsoever. This first stanza sets the tone for what is to follow. The fable talks about the plough boy on the one hand and the dandy as an insect on the other, and whatever it is going to tell us about the exact relationship between the two, it most likely is not going to be very favourable for the dandy. Yet, this is not the only reference to the animal world made in relation to the dandy. In the second stanza, the dandy is imagined as a goose hatched out ‘ovip’rous’, i.e. ‘from a tailor’s shop let loose’. But what is more important here are the first three lines of this stanza, in which the dandy’s extraordinary artificiality is emphasized: ‘But Nature never made the last; / In some factitious mould was cast / A thing which all outmatches’. Oddly enough, zoological imagery goes hand in hand with what would appear to be its opposite: a stress on artificiality. Then, in the third stanza, the insect metaphor, arguably the dominant metaphor throughout the fable, reappears. Here we read that ‘one of these insects’ chanced to meet a farmer boy. It should be noted that the dandy is subsumed under the generic category of insects rather than being compared to one insect in particular. Furthermore, it is in this stanza that the antagonism between the plough boy and the dandy, which is going to be the central theme of the rest of the fable, is introduced for the first time. The dandy and the farmer boy ‘run up smack together’. But only the dandy

The Dandy-Insect

Some say there’s nothing made in vain, While others the reverse maintain, And prove it very handy, By citing animals like these — Musquetoes, bed-bugs, crickets, fleas, And, worse than all — a DANDY!

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rather, as will become immediately apparent from the first stanza, it is the other way around: it is a fable about human characters, with one character in particular being described in rather unflattering zoomorphic terms. The fable consists of eight stanzas, all consisting of a couplet and four following lines of enclosed rhyme (e.g. AABCCB). With its irregular meter, the fable strikes one as a doggerel rather than an attempt at serious poetry. Nevertheless, one should not be deceived about the seriousness of its content. With its simple plot, its short length and its basic rhyme scheme, the fable was extremely well-suited to quick and easy memorization, and was thus easy to share. Its format was perfect for oral distribution, thereby extending its circulation beyond merely those who were able to read. Its straightforward content and easy-to-memorize structure made it relatively easy to get the message across and to have it circulated among a large audience. There is in fact a record of this practice involving the very poem we are currently concerned with, in which a ten-year-old boy from Auburn, to his father’s pride, was able to ‘rehearse in the presence of its venerable author, William Ray, the poem on the “Ploughboy and the Dandy”’.10 The poem commences with an enumeration of a number of annoying insects, the dandy being included as one of them.

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We hope that Dandies, after this, May warning take — for hit or miss, They must pull down their banners — Must strike to homespun common sense, Must doff their peak of insolence, And practise better manners.14

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will fall down, because the plough boy, not unlike Virgil’s ‘brawny [duris] farmer’,11 is ‘robust’. And he is, as the following stanza tells us, made of ‘mortal flesh and blood’ and ‘bones’: ‘For know that mortal flesh and blood / Outweighs a slim rag baby’. A new metaphor, that of the ‘slim rag baby’, a doll filled with straw,12 makes its entrance to once again emphasize the dandy’s artificiality and weakness: ‘bones are heavier much than straw’. As if relegating him to the insect world was not enough to dehumanize the dandy, the doll metaphor completes the process.13 Gradually, we see a complex imagery of the dandy emerging. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, which celebrate the farmer’s strength over the dandy’s weakness, the dandy’s ‘clean-wash’d vest’ gets ‘besmear’d with dirt’. The dandy is furious at the farmer boy because he fell and the latter beat him. The farmer boy ‘Dragg’d him along — head downwards, took / And hung him on a sign-post hook — / A spectacle for laughter’. The meaning of this degrading spectacle becomes clear in the final stanza, but its full significance can only be inferred after a careful analysis of The Plough Boy’s discourse. ‘The Plough Boy and the Dandy’, part of a collection of poems, is presented as a fable. And as with every fable, the cue as to its interpretation is given in the last stanza, where the final lesson to be drawn is formulated. With ‘The Plough Boy’ perhaps not quite in epigram fashion but tightly phrased nevertheless, as if the message was not already clear from the rest of the poem, we read:

The message is one of a deceptive simplicity and leaves virtually no room for interpretation other than a literal one: adjust yourself to the normative framework of the plough boy or else leave. This is what might be called expulsive poetry, in which the homespun way of living is presented as the only virtuous one. The attitude of the curious insect, the dandy, is in a somewhat paradoxical fashion characterized by artificiality and vice. But closer inspection reveals that in this last stanza several other things slip in and happen at the same time. The dandy is no longer juxtaposed with the plough boy through a continuing imagery of farming and of physical vigour typical of and necessary in a farming community. Rather, he finds himself in opposition to ‘homespun common sense’. Furthermore, what requires attention is that the narrator makes an appearance. While his literal presence has remained absent throughout most of the fable, he now all of a sudden pops up, in the first person plural. The ‘we’ suggests, and indeed implies, that the voice of the discourse is not simply that of William Ray, the longforgotten poet. Instead, Ray seems to be speaking on behalf of a larger collective, some kind of rudimentary form of community behind the thoughts and feelings expressed throughout the fable. The whole poem revolves around a single divide, hidden underneath the conjunction in the title. On the one side, we find the robust figure of the plough boy, a farmer, with

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a body made of bones, flesh and blood – a mortal body showing a remarkable vigour, a walking celebration of farm life, unassuming and hard-working. The imagery used to characterize the other side of this divide is somewhat more complicated, based as it is on an ostensible paradox. The family of dandies consists of useless and artificial creatures, and yet it is described using imagery belonging entirely to nature. Pictured as an insect made in vain, the dandy is associated with the lifelessness of a child’s doll – a rag baby without muscles, without bones, without flesh and without blood, falling on the wrong side of the dividing line between reason and unreason. Throughout modernity, both fictional and scientific accounts have employed entomological rhetoric. Writers and scholars did so in order to describe a world that seemed to be radically different from that experienced in everyday life and must remain so. Especially in the nineteenth century, with the rapid development of the microscope, a world that would otherwise have remained largely invisible to the naked eye became visible. The ‘insect world’, as it was called, came to weigh upon the literary and scholarly imagination. It was seen not as a literal world. Rather, the insect world functions as a trope that ‘effectively contains th[e] tension between microscopic fact and microscopic fancy, while speaking to the human imagination and its propensity – we might even say compulsion – to think about, to imagine, other worlds’.15 Insects, often described through the use of anthropomorphisms, obtained an emblematic status. Scholars of these tiny creatures often found ‘moral, allegorical, and instructional truths’ exemplified in the insect world, mirroring the grand scheme of things and thus teaching us about life.16 It is tempting to read the discourse of Ray’s poem as part of a larger entomological discourse that was veering more and more towards the minutiae of the world. Certainly, the dandy-insect in The Plough Boy has such a morally and politically emblematic status. And yes, the imagery of the dandy as an insect functions in the specific relationship between human beings and insects. Yet, The Plough Boy’s relation to a larger scholarly discourse and developments in optical media and increased visibility of the microscopic world is not unequivocally clear, precisely because it emerged, as will become apparent, outside of and in opposition to more established scholarly practices. The rhetoric used in the fable is not exclusively entomological in character, but the insect imagery is quite important in bringing out perceived aspects of dandyism that were felt to be a threat to society, revealing that the dandy was seen as a far more political figure in early nineteenth-century America than was the case in contemporary Europe. This article seeks to contribute to the history of dandyism seen from this perspective. The way the dandy is presented in this poem in early nineteenth-century rural America is an example of how entomological rhetoric produces a peculiar political image of the dandy. However, the picture remains incomplete until it is situated in the overall body of the journal in which it appeared. In the two volumes that make up the complete edition of The Plough Boy, the dandy-insect appears repeatedly, marking some of the most noteworthy passages in the magazine. A reading of these passages will provide us with an answer to the question regarding the ‘we’ in Ray’s fable and will enable us to grasp the phenomenon of the dandy in a political sense.

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A ‘TRANS-ATLANTIC MARO’ Although ‘The Plough Boy and the Dandy’ appeared in the single collection of Ray’s poetry published in 1821, the poem made its first appearance in a periodical, not one for belles lettres or any other literary gazette, those curious Wunderkammern of the nineteenth century, but one where one would perhaps least expect to find a fable on dandyism, namely The Plough Boy, an agricultural weekly published in the state of New York. This short-lived but pioneering journal was edited by a man named Henry Homespun Jr. As we now know, the man hiding behind this pseudonym was the antifederalist republican Solomon Southwick. Southwick was a truly chameleonic and powerful figure whose life and career were as ‘brilliant’ as they were ‘disastrous’.17 He was, like ‘many editors of that … period’, a true ‘office-seeker’. But, unlike many others, Southwick’s influence reached far beyond his personal sphere. Before he launched The Plough Boy, Southwick was a journalist working for the official mouthpiece of the Democratic Party, and hence had quite some influence in New York politics. He started his career ‘as a zealous democrat’ assisting his brotherin-law, who was running the Albany Register.18 In 1809 he became sheriff of the city and county of Albany, only two years later to become president of the Mechanics and Farmers Bank of the city of Albany. It was then that ‘gold’ was thrown ‘into his coffers … in unmeasured quantities’.19 Besides being the state printer, he also became regent of the university and later post-master of Albany, causing one of the commentators on the man and his activities to remark that this ‘demonstrates the almost irresistible influence, at that time, of Solomon Southwick’.20 The same commentator provides us with a picture of Southwick which subsequent authors writing about him could only repeat in similar words. He writes that Southwick was ‘exceedingly fascinating in his address, ardent in his pursuits, and almost irresistible in his persuasive powers’.21 Others call him ‘the autocrat of the political press in Albany’22 or draw attention to his literary production: ‘He was a genius and a poet but he lacked the capacity of keen discrimination which makes successful business men of the world.’23 Southwick’s influence, however, would be reduced almost to zero, years before he started The Plough Boy. His name was mentioned in connection with corruption involving a bank and although he was acquitted, his influence was gone forever. After this, some ‘regarded him as a weak man’ or ‘ridicule[d] him’.24 Writing with a ‘bold character, glowing pen, and ardent temperament’,25 he was known to be reckless in everything, guided by a ‘vivid imagination’ but ‘not governed by any system or fixed rule of action’.26 Besides being banker, printer, clerk, post-master and sheriff, Southwick was also a poet. Today he is mostly known for a long poem entitled ‘The Pleasures of Poverty’. His aim in writing the poem was to ‘shew that the stings of poverty are so many stimuli to the excellence in the arts of life; and that pleasure, in the rational sense of the term, is more equally diffused among mankind, than querulous, self-conceited, and discontented spirits, under the influence of mortified vanity, wounded pride, and narrow conceptions are willing to admit’.27 This ‘Trans-Atlantic Maro’, as one anonymous British critic called him not without irony, did not shy away from comparing himself with the bard of Avon.28 Quite in line with this comparison with one of the giants of

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The Plough Boy was the platform Southwick created for the publication of his own writings. And although his influence was already declining if not totally gone by the time he started the periodical, he continued assiduously to disseminate his thoughts on all kinds of current developments, those on farming among them. But as ‘a political journalist and sometime lawyer, he had no special qualifications to be a farm editor, and certainly no training in the sciences related to agriculture’.34 Yet he persisted. And thus one reads in the first issue of The Plough Boy that the magazine is devoted ‘to the useful arts, and particularly to that art which forms the basis of all others, and of civilized society’.35 In the very first editorial of that same issue, which obviously contains the programmatic outline of the journal, the reader is confronted with a remarkably interesting antagonism. In it, we find a so-called ‘homespun party’ being presented in opposition to the ‘family of Dandyism’. Contrary to what this opposition of parties would seem to suggest, the editor of the paper, who had otherwise manifested himself politically as an anti-federalist, tries to depoliticize this party rhetoric. With a characteristic gesture reminiscent of Benjamin Franklin, Southwick hid himself behind the name of Homespun. Where Franklin used this pseudonym to advocate a breakfast of Indian corn as opposed to English tea,36 so Southwick employs it to address a similar opposition, as will become clear below. Southwick starts out by emphasizing that a weekly like The Plough Boy cannot ‘descend into the arena of party, or become the champion of faction’, since its sole concern is the aim of the good of all.37 It is not party politics, but political and domestic economy that forms the basis for the paper. Nevertheless, Southwick concedes that if there is one party the editor might consider himself to belong to, it is the party of the plough boys or, as he also puts it, the homespun party. ‘[F]or theirs is the party’, he writes, ‘whose first leaders were the patriarchs of the

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INDIAN CORN VERSUS ENGLISH TEA, NO TO THE DANDY!

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the European literary tradition, and apparently unhindered by any sense of modesty, this American bard wanted ‘the American poetical fleet to look forward to the time, when they may launch upon the Atlantic, and wave their flags upon the Thames and the Hellespont’.29 Perhaps this was the reason one fellow countryman said that: ‘“The Pleasures of Poverty,” to say nothing of other able literary productions, certainly stamp him as an unusual bright man.’30 Critics in London and Paris, however, read these ‘Pleasures’ with ‘long-drawn-out contempt’.31 Although they feel he has chosen a good subject, ‘Mr. Southwick has not done it justice’. And the lines of the poem ‘are nearly all paraphrases of remembered scraps’.32 A French critic was equally disappointed, to say the least.33 Regardless of the criticism his literary pursuits evoked in Europe, it is clear that the influence of this at once brilliant and blundering party journalist and poet extended beyond his personal sphere, Albany, and even the United States. The Plough Boy, which he started some fifteen years before he published this equally despised as celebrated poem, obviously did not have the same wide appeal, but it is clear that the man’s writings did reach quite a few people and had a considerable influence on his readership in the state of New York.

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human race; and whose foundation is in nature; since the just and eternal God, not only created man equal, but gave him the earth for his inheritance, and the cultivation of it for his natural and most noble employment.’38 In Southwick’s rhetoric, Plough Boy and Homespun are interchangeable names standing for the same attitude towards life, for the same ethos:39 one in which the farmer is very much concerned with the strong ethical connection between natural soil and human body. One can already notice the pastoral semantics emerging from this quotation. It is no surprise, then, that the plough boy’s attitude to life just described should stand in stark contrast to the ‘refined sense of the Dandy, whether male or female’.40 To appear in an American weekly magazine on farming and related matters, the dandy must have travelled a long way from the European capitals to Albany, New York. However, considering the extensive and intensive exchange of literature, and thus also of ideas, between Europe and the Northern states,41 it is not so surprising that the dandy should appear not only in early nineteenth-century London and Paris but also in the state of New York. So far historians of dandyism have failed to take note of this and have exclusively focused their attention on Europe, where, in its beau monde, Beau Brummell was a celebrated figure. As a consequence, they have missed the opportunity to see the figure of the dandy in a far more political light. Long before the celebratory accounts of famous dandies were published that were associated with Regency England or the Parisian arcades – e.g. Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Du Dandysme et de Georges Brummell or Baudelaire’s Le peintre de la vie moderne – a far more negative discourse on dandyism could be found in antebellum America. The dandy in The Plough Boy appears as a ‘focal point of experience’,42 a point around which the experience of the homespun community crystallizes. He appears not only on the very first pages but also frequently throughout the rest of the two volumes, from the very first editorial, through numerous columns on homespun morality, to Ray’s poetry. By connecting all the instances where the dandy is referred to, we will be able to grasp how he features in an early nineteenth-century American discussion on how to live life and how to live it differently in a specific community. We will be able to find out how the dandy is experienced in terms of his (alleged) ethics (on how to live one’s life), politics (on how the community should be structured) and aesthetics (visibility), all of which are interrelated. To untangle this knot it is necessary to take a close look at the position and the role of the dandy in this weekly. Before we go into that, we first need to situate the periodical in a larger context showing how dandyism is connected to a specific ethico-political discussion in the first two decades of nineteenth-century America.

HOMESPUN, A PASTORAL (PO)ETHICS The end of the second decade of the nineteenth century saw the gradual emergence of the American agricultural press. Among the first agricultural magazines were the American Farmer, the New England Farmer, the New York Farmer and the Southern Agriculturalist. Together with these magazines, The Plough Boy constitutes a major example of the pioneering rural press in early nineteenth-century America.43 During

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the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the rise of agricultural journals created a wide circulation of knowledge at a time when ‘agricultural books were few in number and difficult to obtain’.44 Those journals often included a whole body of knowledge that had not yet passed the threshold of scientificity,45 but which, in its material form, nonetheless transcended the sphere of scattered traditional familial knowledge. The farming knowledge that circulated in these early agricultural periodicals contrasts with the scientific knowledge that was disseminated from the city, disconnected from the reality of the farmer’s lived experience. The dissemination of such new forms of knowledge regularly served a higher purpose through the proclamation of a specific moral attitude.46 The attitude that was advocated by the rural press – one of ‘honest labour’, discipline and practice in service to the community, a vita activa as one might call it47 – was often juxtaposed with the imagery of philosophers and scientists living in the city. Rather than dismissing scientificity, The Plough Boy and similar journals disseminated a different form of agricultural science, one that was directly related to their readers’ practice and to the soil on which this practice was exercised. In this way, agricultural knowledge was directly connected to an ethical attitude: a physical body working in and on a specific place in the world. Each in their own way, magazines like The Plough Boy or the American Farmer argued more or less explicitly for what is called the ‘georgian’ ethic of ‘honorable toil’, an ethic combining ‘sensory appeal with plain instruction’,48 based on Virgil’s Georgics.49 This idiosyncratic specific branch of pastoral ethics demands attention to be paid to the landscape and the lived experience of practice and work within it, as opposed to a more passive aesthetics in the form of a romantic, placid and calm landscape. Thus, the dissemination of new forms of agricultural knowledge went hand in hand with the support for this georgic way of living. The result of such a synthesis can be found in a periodical like The Plough Boy, which from its very first issue was characterized by an overtly moralizing attitude. In The Plough Boy, this moralization came about through a connection between the homespun ethic and the pastoral-georgic ethic. The merger of pastoral (po)ethics and homespun ideology has become a settled fact among historians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.50 In fact, the homespun ethos tied the household to the nation, a wholesome, sober and vigorous lifestyle standing in stark contrast to ‘British corruption and luxury’.51 Indeed, reading Benjamin Franklin’s call to stop drinking tea and to have Indian corn for breakfast is revealing in this respect. On the eve of American Independence, the homespun ethic was elevated to a political ideology.52 This distinctly anti-European, or in any case anti-British, sentiment, which was certainly part of the homespun ethos, in combination with a pastoral affectation, resulted in a celebration of rural virtue and led to a new vision of the young republic. Confident in what they felt were honest, down-to-earth, ethically superior American convictions, the farmers often thought of themselves as being in an elevated kind of in-between position.53 ‘As the patriarchs of the human race’, as one can read in the first editorial, they found themselves positioned between aristocrats and savages. The homespun ethics ‘provided an ideological haven from the artificiality of Europe and the rudeness of the American landscape’.54 As homespun was used in reference to

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home-made clothes, the homespun ethic was directly tied to an aesthetics of the body – a robust body dressed in plain, home-sewn clothes – a direct expression of thought through the body, thereby making the invisible (thought) visible. It is in such a context that Solomon Southwick claims: ‘The Homespuns and the Dandies are antipodes – the one is sense, the other is sound – the one is a substance, the other a shade.’55 By contrasting the ‘Homespuns’ and the ‘Dandies’ in this way, an aesthetic of the body is directly tied to an ethics of labour, and an ideal image of the community. Southwick’s whole journal appears to be set up around the homespun–dandy antagonism. In any case, it also structures The Plough Boy’s position on literature. As such, homespun poetry is to be understood in an exactly similar opposition to British literary production. In his later work, as we saw above, Southwick, himself not of unequivocal literary merit, sounded the call for an ‘American poetical fleet’ which was to cross the Atlantic and to put an end to European literary dominance. He did not hesitate to position himself as an American Shakespeare. But fifteen years earlier, in his own agricultural journal, he had someone else in mind. In a short essay, Southwick complains about British poetry and literary criticism making the United States suffer on account of ‘malicious sarcasms on the literary character of our country’.56 In words that remind one of Walt Whitman’s opposition to the literature of the Old World,57 he declares that it was time for an American Byron to stand up. Without any irony he claims that the poetry of William Ray could easily compete with that of the extravagant British poet. Yet, time has proven otherwise. Although they never managed to equal their British examples, the work of these two unfortunate men of letters affords one a good example for the study of the early nineteenth-century experience of dandyism.

If one had read William Ray’s fable as part of his collection of poetry, one would have missed the context in which it originally appeared, a context that is crucial for a correct appraisal. As The Plough Boy was part of the emerging agricultural press in the young American republic, its often implicitly formulated political position concerning the republic had to be teased out so that the way the dandy-insect rhetoric was used could be grasped in its full force. By explicitly introducing his periodical as not being concerned with politics, Southwick was taking a seemingly apolitical stance. But a journal like The Plough Boy was not operating in a journalistic vacuum. Like similar journals, it served as part of a larger ethical campaign, which in turn was tied to the political ideology of the ‘Homespun family’. In other words, the dandy figures as part of a well worked-out ethical, not to say political, discourse. The divide between homespun and dandy presented in Ray’s fable, with the respective associations of reason and unreason, nature and artificiality, and vigour and weakness being attached to the two sides, now turns out to be part of the articulation of a broader frontier. It is hardly possible to read the word ‘homespun’ without being reminded of its distinctly anti-European history.58 Obviously, the same applies to Southwick’s journal and Ray’s fable. With regard to poetry, it was Southwick himself who took a stand against British literary history. His call for a new homespun form of poetry – of which William Ray would most likely be

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the supreme example – cannot but be read as yet another way to re-emphasize the divide between the new vision of an American republic, based upon the georgian-pastoral way of living life in harmony with nature, and the opposite artificial and extravagant European way of living. In investigating how the figure of the dandy was employed throughout the rest of the journal, this context needs to be kept in mind. Only then will it become possible to see the full imagery of the dandy as a pestilence, as an insect that needs to be exterminated. Ray’s fable provides a good example of how dandies in The Plough Boy are not regarded as human beings. Rather, as can be gathered from a small piece simply entitled ‘Dandies’, they are seen as ‘trifling beings in the shape of man’.59 In other words, even though they look like human beings, they cannot be regarded as such. These beings whose predecessors, as Southwick believes, are the eighteenth-century macaronis and fops are ephemeral and find their only delight in dress. Their life is nothing but a ‘series of frivolous amusement and dissipation’ and the reader is to be warned against them, for dandies are not as harmless as one would wish they might be: dandies spread an idleness that is ‘infectious’.60 And in a letter written by someone calling himself ‘cousin Homespun’ it is pointed out that the dandy is ‘neither useful to himself, nor to the world’.61 The dandy represents the utmost in uselessness of all beings in the world, a creature ‘made in vain’ as one can read in the first stanza of Ray’s poem. Just as the macaroni was ‘one of the rarest of animals’ at a time when simplicity was in vogue, the dandy is likewise a corruptive symptom of a time when sobriety is considered a virtue. If the dandy is an insect, it is a rather curious one, an ‘insect’ that spreads a peculiar disease of frivolity and dissipation. An even more remarkable letter, perhaps, was written by a man named Oliver Oldentime. It provoked a telling reply from the editor of The Plough Boy. Oldentime laments the appearance of the foreign intrusion ‘of an upstart, dashy family, of a very different name and character, that eclipsed yours in the eyes of the vulgar, and fools of quality’. Obviously, the ‘family of the DANDIES’ is being treated here in the way they deserve, at least according to the author of the letter, that is, ‘with the utmost contempt’. Dandies, like dogs, are considered by ‘discreet people’ to be a ‘nuisance’.62 Therefore, parents should warn their children, their daughters especially, against these harmful, noxious beings and if possible prevent the girls from coming into contact with them. Again, the discourse of this agricultural journal links up with the warning voiced in Ray’s fable. As editor of the journal, Southwick could not but approve of Oldentime’s message. Nonetheless, Southwick pretends to be giving a critical appraisal of Oldentime’s remarks, focusing his argument on the exact same premise that we find expressed in the first stanza of Ray’s fable, presenting The Plough Boy’s philosophy in a nutshell: no creature is without any use in the world. It is a formulation that does not lend itself to many different interpretations. While it is phrased as a factual statement, it turns out that it is in fact interpreted, and should thus be read, as an imperative: no creature ought to be without use in the world. As a consequence, there must be a reason for the existence even of such a despicable creature as the dandy, so the editor wants his readers to believe. Thus he must be given a fair chance in the eyes of his observers. In words

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reminiscent of the fabled imagination, he once again describes the dandy with reference to the insect world:

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But still, as the smallest insects are not without their uses in the physical system, possibly the dandies may not be so entirely useless in the moral world … and yet we confess, that after half an hour’s cogitation, we have not been able to hit upon any useful purpose which they answer … The insects of our fields and forests are of real use; they devour carrion, which is not the least important, since the carcase of a horse or a dog … might spread pestilence through a populous neighbourhood. But the Dandies, instead of dissipating moral corruption create and extend it by setting examples of idleness, and by devouring the fruits of other people’s industry.63

As in Ray’s fable, the author is hiding behind the first person plural voice, the suggestion being that this is not just one man arguing, but some community (‘our fields and forests’) that shares the ideas expressed in The Plough Boy. And as in the fable, the image of the dandy-insect makes for a transition from the physical system to the realm of social norms. The entomological rhetoric of the insect world is clearly employed here in its emblematic function. Not only is the dandy reduced to the stature of a creature in an almost imperceptible world; he is, moreover, put on a par with insects on a moral level as well. Even the smallest insects, the farmer maintains, have a specific function in the pastoral world of the plough boy: they prevent the spread of pestilence. As we have seen, the exact opposite is the case with the dandy-insect, which is not only artificial but also not a real insect either. The dandy is depicted as a noxious animal that corrupts others. He acts like a parasite in a community in which hard work is seen as a virtue. And his parasitic behaviour leads to a corruption of the plough boy’s imperative. The dandy’s behaviour is contagious: ‘The dandies indeed, would be harmless, were it not for their idleness, which is always infectious’.64 With their being an infectious threat to the homespun community, the country needs to be delivered from these nuisances in order to restore it to ‘its pristine state of honest industry and moral integrity’.65 Labour, here, forms the marker of moral hygiene. If everybody were to function in the role for which he or she was made, the community would function in a proper and harmonious way. This, at least, is the underlying argument. Once again, this is explicitly expressed in a letter signed Probus Homo, a Latin synonym for ‘a man acting with probity and integrity, faithful to the laws, manners and oeconomy’.66 This letter was distributed widely in the Northern states of the young republic. After publication in The Plough Boy, it appeared in numerous papers in states such as Vermont,67 New York,68 Maryland,69 Connecticut,70 Massachusetts,71 New Jersey72 and Maine,73 an indication that the ideas articulated by Southwick and his supporters were getting widespread attention and indeed found a certain foothold. The pastoral community found in other articles of Southwick’s paper is referred to in similar terms in this epistle. In a short enumeration, Probus mentions the priest, the doctor, the lawyer, the philosopher and the statesman as each being born and fitted for the job he was to perform. As he writes to Southwick: ‘It is true that all things are justly entitled to the full worth of their merit in the scale of being to which they belong.’74 The reader cannot but be reminded of the old Platonist distribution of bodies and roles,

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which results in a harmonious community.75 In book 4 of the Politeia, Plato observes that everyone is allocated a specific role and place in the community according to his or her disposition.76 The ones born with good brains, for example, become philosophers, that is to say the rulers. In the case of The Plough Boy, the appropriate example is of course that of the ‘honest and enlightened farmer’ who provides a perfect illustration of how a person should function in the ideal community.77 Just as the cricket devours the products of the hard work of a colony of bees, so too the farmer gets up early in the morning to ‘diligently pursue his labour with cheerfulness and energy’. This image is juxtaposed with the image of a parasitic dandy, who, idle, moneyless and profligate, ‘will scoff and sneer at the industrious and worthy farmer’. The dandy, being the very opposite of the farmer, must be expelled from this community. ‘By much slothfulness’, the author writes, ‘the building decayeth, and through the idleness of the hands, the house drops down.’ And as Southwick warns the reader of his journal, the ‘Dandy spirit’ may easily lead to poverty ‘if not … degeneracy’,78 intentionally or not, echoing the words of the real Maro, who in his Georgics also warns that idleness of hands could lead to degeneration (degenerare).79 Ideas on the ideal community, here formulated as ‘the house’, abound in this letter signed by that ‘faithful man’. But his politics could not have been conceived without a certain aesthetic outlook. ‘To encourage and foster agriculture’, he writes, ‘it is necessary to draw a line of discrimination between the well-disposed and industrious farmer, who is an ornament to society, and the idle trappings of the modern Dandy who, by his habits, is the bane of society.’80 Taken literally, the farmer as ornament thus not only makes the community function properly, but also embellishes it. In this ideal community, the good and the beautiful are not two separate categories but the very same thing. Obviously there are political reasons for there not being any room for dandies in such a community. The dandy-insect is a walking reminder, a visible sign intruding on the pastoral community and telling the homespuns of the existence of a reality that is radically different from their own pastoral form of life. The dandy-insect reminded them not only of the European beau monde but also of Europe as the oppressor from which the young republic had just broken away. But the reasons why he should be expelled are not merely political. There is an aesthetic argument for the banishment of the dandy-insect as well. A quick glance at the magazine’s contents shows that the analysis of the dandy-insect provided remains incomplete without an investigation of a specific qualification generally attached to the dandy, namely that of extravagance. ‘It is asserted and substantiated by every sensible writer, and admitted by every reflecting reader … that the principal cause of the “many serious evils” with which our country is at present afflicted, is EXTRAVAGANCE.’81 This one reader of Southwick’s journal drew attention to the role of fashion in this matter. ‘Extravagance’, as he notes, ‘is not only countenanced but cherished by fashion’,82 something that some, as Thomas Carlyle would later sarcastically observe,83 believe comes first in the life of a dandy. And as Baudelaire half a century later would write, the dandy aspires to live and sleep in front of a mirror.84 Unfortunately, we are left without any descriptions of the dandy’s physical appearance in early nineteenth-century Albany. One can only speculate about

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the alleged sartorial excesses. The physical expression – the aesthetics – of the ideal community that Ray and Southwick imagined throughout the journal was one based on solid country virtues such as honest labour and social bonding. With its emphasis on sobriety, people’s outward appearance being characterized by vigorous bodies dressed in simple but well-made clothes, everything crossing the line of temperance would be seen as a sign of extravagance. But perhaps such a line was easily crossed. Yet, one cannot be sure, because The Plough Boy’s entire discourse is set up around that strong antagonism between homespun and dandy, leaving no room for anything in between. It makes one wonder whether there might have been a form of life that was not quite homespun but not quite dandy either. While this is a question that is impossible to answer, one may at least conclude that extravagance is the qualification attached to an aesthetics that does not fit the homespun community.

The image of the dandy that emerges from the pages of The Plough Boy is an image that has no equal in the history of dandyism. If the dandy is an insect, it is a most curious one. Rather than providing any information on the physical, natural appearance of this creature, the attribution of entomological characteristics to the dandy appears to serve a purely social function, presenting this manifestation of the male of the human species as decadent and degraded rather than cultured and refined. But there is more going on here. We are in fact dealing with a much more complicated rhetorical gesture. The comparison with other insects, it is true, allows Southwick, Ray and their readers to imagine the dandy in terms they were familiar with. At the same time, however, the employment of entomological rhetoric brings about a distancing effect, removing to a comfortable distance what is felt to be too close. One recalls that the dandy, strikingly familiar (‘in the shape of man’), is put at a distance, carefully kept at bay. The Plough Boy’s entomological rhetoric is not meant to focus our attention on the physical similarities between the dandy and the insect world, but is employed instead to attribute an otherworldly status to the dandy. Like insects, he comes from a different world, namely and more particularly, as we have been able to ascertain from a number of passages, from the exploitative and parasitic Old World. The dandy thus is other, and must remain so. He must be prevented from entering the community, or if he has already entered it he must be removed, chased away if necessary. The warning sounded in the fable can now be grasped in its full force. The rhetorical process is one of expulsion. In terms of the register of our case study, literature here can be said to function as a social pesticide. dandy-insects not only fall outside the allocation and distribution of bodies over the various roles and occupations, but also seriously obstruct and confuse the homespun system of normativity, thereby making the philosophy behind that system explicit.85 Its living principle, as has been argued above, is that of a ‘proper’ distribution of bodies in society, each according to their own nature. It is proper in the sense of it being clean and healthy, as well as beautiful. If this distribution is for some reason obstructed, the result will be degeneration. The poets of The Plough Boy thus postulated their ideal

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1. Albert L. Demaree, The American Agricultural Press 1819–1860 (New York, 1941), p. 180. 2. Ibid., p. 196. 3. A vast body of scholarly literature has been devoted to the dandy’s literary representation. See, among others, Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (New York, 1960); Leon H. Vincent, Dandies and Men of Letters (London, 1914); James Laver, Dandies (London, 1968); Michel Lemaire, Le Dandysme: De Baudelaire à Mallarmé (Montreal, 1981); Émilien Carassus, Le Mythe du Dandy (Paris, 1971); Roger Kempf, Dandies: Baudelaire et Cie (Paris,

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community – the ‘we’ of the voice in the fable as well as in the other articles and epistles – as a living whole. And only a community that sees itself as a living organism can fall ill.86 Every time the antagonism is employed, one finds an authorial voice in the first person plural presupposing a community that both addresser and addressee belong to. Hence, the “Co.” in the signature of the fable should perhaps be read not as company, but as community. The fable, a celebration of a farmer’s body aesthetics, combining his vigour with his pastoral morality, is the ultimate expression of the ideal homespun community. The farmer, well-disposed, honest, enlightened, robust, mortal but strong and most of all the living expression of common sense, was what future American citizens should set as their example, making him the hero of this fable. Although thirty years later in the work of Charles Baudelaire the dandy was to become the hero of modern life,87 the fate of this American precursor was different. Presented as a combination of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic features, the dandy becomes a politico-moral monstrosity,88 a monstrosity displaying conduct that obstructs and confuses the ideal distribution of bodies and tasks in the homespun community. Dissipation, idleness, amusement, profaneness, poverty, wretchedness and intemperance are the predicates assigned to the dandy, combined in an odd mixture with more pathologizing predicates such as moral corruption, devouring other people’s work, the bane of society, nuisance and infectious behaviour. All these elements, real or imagined and implicitly tied to (because of their being associated with) the Old World, are captured in the dandy-insect, threatening the homespun community not only with a moral crisis but more importantly with the general decline of that young community. But The Plough Boy’s discourse is a discourse of a paradoxical nature. With all its emphasis on the strength of the farmer boys, the articulation of the ideal homespun community is completely dependent upon the image of the weak other. In this sense, it parasitizes upon the parasite. Apparently the ‘Homespun family’ is not as strongly bonded as Southwick would have his readers believe. Liable to contagion, Southwick had to direct the gaze of his reader away from the temptation of European frivolities towards the homespun way of living. If the citizens of Albany would no longer stay within that partition to which they are assigned according to their ‘scale of being’, the homespun community, imagined or real, would no longer function as a harmonious whole and its rhythm would falter and eventually get stuck. This is what the dandyinsect hung on a sign-post hook signifies. It serves as a warning not only to other dandies but also to Albany’s own citizens.

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

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4. 5.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

1984); Marylène Delbourg-Delphis, Masculin Singulier: Le Dandysme et son Histoire (Paris, 1985); Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: The Dandy in Modernist Literature (Ithaca, NY, 1993); James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Manhood (Ithaca, NY, 1995); Rhonda K. Garelick, Rising Star: Dandyism, Gender, and Performance in the Fin de Siècle (Princeton, NJ, 1999); Susan Fillin-Yeh (ed.), Dandies: Fashion and Finesse in Art and Culture (New York, 2001); Melanie Grundmann, Dandiana: Der Dandy im Bild Englischer, Französischer und Amerikanischer Journalisten (Münster, 2009); Karin Becker, Le Dandysme Littéraire en France au XIXe Siècle (Paris, 2010). Henry Homespun Jr., ‘Homespun Poetry’, The Plough Boy, 1(9) (1819), p. 65. William Ray, ‘The American Tars in Tripolitan Slavery’, The Magazine of History with Notes and Queries, 14 (1911), pp. 5–7. Samuel Kettell, Specimens of American Poetry, with Biographical Notices, volume 2 (Boston, MA, 1829), p. 137. Clay Lukens, ‘American Literary Comedians’, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 80 (1890), p. 788. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘More Homespun Poetry’, The Plough Boy, 1(10) (1819), p. 77. Kettell, Specimens of American Poetry, p. 140. Henry Hall, The History of Auburn (Auburn, AL, 1869), p. 563. Virgil, Georgics (Oxford, 2006), p. 11. In Webster’s An American Dictionary of the English Language, which was published in 1828, one could find a definition of the dandy as ‘a male of human species, who dresses himself like a doll, and carries his character on his back’. Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language, volume 1 (New York, 1828), p. 54. For the specific dehumanizing function of entomological rhetoric, see Hugh Raffles, ‘Jews, Lice, and History’, Public Culture, 19(3) (2007), p. 525. Poker & Co., ‘The PLOUGH BOY and the DANDY, A FABLE’, The Plough Boy, 1(22) (1819), p. 169. And see also the single volume of Ray’s poetry: William Ray, Poems, on Various Subjects, Religious, Moral, Sentimental and Humorous (Auburn, AL, 1821), pp. 125–7. Adam Dodd, ‘Minding Insects’, in Raynald Harvey Lemelin (ed.), The Management of Insects in Recreation and Tourism (Cambridge, 2012), p. 34. Adam Dodd, ‘Popular Entomology and Anthropomorphism in the Nineteenth Century: L.M. Budgen’s Episodes of Insect Life’, in Liv Emma Thorsen, Karen A. Radar and Adam Dodd (eds), Animals on Display: The Creaturely in Museums, Zoos, and Natural History (University Park, PA, 2013), p. 155. Frederic Hudson, Journalism in the United States, from 1690 to 1872 (New York, 1873), p. 397. Jabez D. Hammond, The History of the Political Parties in the State of New York: From the Ratification of the Federal Constitution to December, 1840, volume 1 (Cooperstown, NY, 1844) pp. 190–1. Ibid., pp. 290–1. Ibid., p. 306. Ibid., p. 301. Hudson, Journalism in the United States, p. 331. James K. McGuire, The Democratic Party of the State of New York, volume 1 (New York, 1905), p. 88. Ibid. Judge Kent, cited in Hudson, Journalism in the United States, p. 280. Hammond, History of the Political Parties, p. 503. Salomon Southwick, The Pleasures of Poverty (Albany, NY, 1822), p. v.

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37. 38. 39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

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32. 33. 34.

Ibid., p. 5. Ibid., p. vii. McGuire, Democratic Party, p. 88. William B. Cairns, British Criticism of American Writings, 1815–1833 (Madison, WI, 1922), p. 180. ‘The Pleasures of Poverty’, Literary Gazette, 370 (1824), p. 116. L. Sw. B., ‘Les Plaisirs de Pauvreté’, Revue Encyclopédique, 22 (1824), p. 375. Donald B. Marti, ‘Agricultural Journalism and the Diffusion of Knowledge: The First Half-Century in America’, Agricultural History, 54(1) (1980), p. 34. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘Original’, The Plough Boy, 1(1) (1819), p. 1. Homespun, ‘“Homespun” Celebrates Indian Corn’, The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 2 January 1766; Homespun, ‘“Homespun’s” Further Defense of Indian Corn’, The Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 15 January 1766. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘Original’, p. 1. Ibid. I am following Jacques Rancière’s use of this notion: ‘the word ethos signifies two things: both the dwelling and the way of being, or lifestyle, that corresponds to this dwelling. Ethics, then, is the kind of thinking in which an identity is established between an environment, a way of being and a principle of action.’ See Jacques Rancière, Aesthetics and Its Discontents (Cambridge, 2009), p. 110. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘Original’, p. 2. See Sandra M. Gustafson, ‘What’s in a Date? Temporalities of Early-American Literature’, PMLA, 128(4) (2013), pp. 961–7. Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982– 1983 (New York, 2010), p. 3. Gilbert M. Tucker, Historical Sketch of American Agricultural Periodicals (Albany, NY, 1909), p. 72. Demaree, American Agricultural Press 1819–1860, p. 6. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, and the Discourse on Language (New York, 1972), p. 187. Benjamin R. Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, CT, 2009). Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1869 (Chicago, IL, 2003), p. 22. Frans de Bruyn, ‘Reading Virgil’s Georgics as a Scientific Text: The Eighteenth-Century Debate between Jethro Tull and Stephen Switzer’, ELH, 71(3) (2004), p. 661. The lines 457 to 474 of Book II are particularly revealing in this respect. There the farmer’s ethos is described as one of honest, pure, hard labour. See Virgil, Georgics (Oxford, 2006), pp. 43–4. See, for example, Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy; Cohen, Notes from the Ground; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York, 2001). Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, p. 1. Ibid. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1964), p. 23. Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun, p. 413. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘Dandies’, The Plough Boy, 1(3) (1819), p. 23. Homespun Jr., ‘Homespun Poetry’, p. 65. See, for example, Whitman’s Democratic Vistas in Walt Whitman, Whitman: Poetry & Prose

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28. 29. 30. 31.

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(New York: Library of America, 1996), pp. 953–1018. 58. This is the general tenor of several recent publications on the history of homespun, of which the aforementioned books by Michael Zakim and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich are the best examples. 59. Homespun Jr., ‘Dandies’, p. 23. 60. Ibid. 61. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘The Moral Plough Boy – No. III’, The Plough Boy, 1(3) (1819), p. 18. 62. Oliver Oldentime, ‘To Mr. Henry Homespun, Jr.’, The Plough Boy, 1(7) (1819), pp. 49–50. 63. Henry Homespun Jr., ‘The Moral Plough Boy – No. VII’, The Plough Boy, 1(7) (1819), p. 50. 64. Homespun Jr., ‘Dandies’, p. 23. My emphasis. 65. Homespun Jr., ‘The Moral Plough Boy – No. VII’, p. 50. 66. M.J.B. Gardin Dumesnil, Latin Synonyms with Their Different Significations, and Examples Taken from the Best Latin Authors (London, 1825), p. 93. 67. North Star, Thursday 1 November 1821; Vermont Gazette, Tuesday 20 February 1821; Vermont Centinel, Friday 16 February 1821; Vermont Republican, Monday 12 February 1821. 68. Dutchess Observer, Wednesday 28 November 1821. 69. Republican Star, Tuesday 15 January 1822. 70. Columbian Register, Tuesday 30 January 1821; Middlesex Gazette, Thursday 1 February 1821; Connecticut Herald, Tuesday 30 January 1821. 71. National Aegis, Wednesday 7 February 1821. 72. Centinel of Freedom, Tuesday 6 March 1821. 73. Bangor Weekly Register, Thursday 10 May 1821. 74. Probus Homo, ‘For the Plough Boy’, The Plough Boy, 2(31) (1820), p. 247. 75. For this reading of Plato, see Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator (London, 2009), pp. 1–25; Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis, MN, 1999), pp. 61–72; Jacques Rancière, The Philosopher and His Poor (Durham, NC, 2003), pp. 3–30. 76. Plato, Republic (Oxford, 1994), pp. 70–115. 77. In the history of dandyism this role would later be reserved only for the dandy. See my ‘Dandyism as Monumental-Political Ethos: Van Deyssel and the Walking Utopia’, Dutch Crossing: Journal of Low Country Studies, 37(1) (2013), pp. 57–78. 78. Homespun Jr., ‘The Moral Plough Boy – No. VII’, p. 50. 79. Virgil, Georgics, p. 12. 80. Ibid. 81. Leander, ‘To Matilda’, The Plough Boy, 1(15) (1819), p. 115. 82. Ibid. Original emphasis. 83. Carlyle opens his chapter on the dandiacal body with the following statement: ‘A Dandy is a clothes-wearing Man, a Man whose trade, office and existence consists in the wearing of clothes.’ See Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (London, no date), p. 244. 84. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Journaux Intimes’, in C. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome I (Paris, 1975), p. 678. 85. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological (New York, 1989), p. 118. 86. Willem Schinkel, ‘Dignitas non moritur? The State of the State in an Age of Social Hypochondria’, in Willem Schinkel (ed.), Globalization and the State: Sociological Perspectives on the State of the State (New York, 2009), pp. 1–22. 87. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne’, in C. Baudelaire, Oeuvres Complètes, Tome II (Paris, 1976), pp. 683–724.

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88. For the early nineteenth century’s obsession with monstrosities, i.e. mixtures of animal and human characteristics, see Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France 1974–1975 (New York, 2003), pp. 72–4. In this lecture series Foucault distinguishes between a juridico-natural monstrosity, that is, an eccentricity, an error of nature, and the juridico-moral monstrosity, a monstrosity of conduct that could be sanctioned by the law. Both these monstrosities appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. However, in the case of The Plough Boy we are not dealing with juridical issues, but with problems of aesthetics and politics only. As our analysis indicates, one may search for other monstrosities outside of the juridical sphere.

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