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Industry and Idleness in Colonial Virginia: A New Approach to William Byrd II

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Susan Manning
Susan Manning
Affiliation:
Susan Manning is a Fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge, CB3 9DF, England.
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Extract

The inception of American regionalism is routinely identified by scholars in either Robert Beverley or William Byrd II, both native Virginians who wrote intensely local works (The History and Present State of Virginia, 1705 ; The History of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina, Run in the Year of Our Lord 1728) which are amongst the enduring literary products of colonial America. The regional base of both works is immediately apparent in their subjects and setting; but to stop here is to leave critical questions unanswered, questions which have in recent years begun to be addressed by ethnographers and historians such as David Bertelson, Michael Zuckerman and Kenneth Lockridge. In particular, Lockridge's study, meshing biography, history and social psychology, has proposed an illuminating “reconstruction of Byrd's personality” from his writings, an account which stresses Byrd's cultural predicament as a provincial Virginian who strove to be an English gentleman. My purpose in this paper is not to challenge such an interpretation, nor to propose an alternative historical viewpoint, but rather to add the perspective of literary criticism to our reading of Byrd's prose itself. I shall argue that the “ southernness” of Byrd's writing is a characteristic less of his subject matter — his Virginian material — or of his biographical limitations, than of his style, and that the History of the Dividing Line charts enduring preoccupations of Byrd's writing career which reached perfectly self-conscious apotheosis in this, his most carefully composed and corrected work.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , August 1994 , pp. 169 - 190
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

1 See, for example, Bertelson, , The Lazy South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967)Google Scholar; Zuckerman, , “William Byrd's Family,” Perspectives in American History, 12 (1979), 255–311Google Scholar; Lockridge, , The Diary, and Life, of William Byrd ll of Virginia, 1674–1744 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

2 Lockridge, 12.

3 Byrd's library contained multiple copies of Montaigne's Essays, in the original and in translation. (See the catalogue reprinted by Bassett, John Spencer in his The Writings of Colonel William Byrd, New York, 1901: Volume IV, Appendix AGoogle Scholar.) It should be noted, however, that here and throughout this paper my design is not to document direct influences on, or of, Byrd's writing, but rather by comparative critical analysis to suggest the characteristic ways in which the issues of industry and idleness are taken up, developed and transformed in his prose to articulate a recognisably new, “non-English” literary voice.

4 The Essayes, or Morall, Politike and Militaries Discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne, Knight, transl. Florio, John (1603: Scolar Press Facsimile, Menston, England: The Scolar Press, 1969), Book I, 14–15Google Scholar.

5 In The Lazy South, Bertelson analyses the development of the trope of Southern “laziness” from the writings of the first colonial settlers to the post-Civil War period, to show how the burden of the accusation changed according to the cultural needs of the society's self-definition.

6 My summary of Byrd's career here stresses its external features of activity and achievement; for a different, psycho-biographical, interpretation based on Byrd's consciousness of failure to be an English gentleman and his need to rise to his father's expectations, see Lockridge, 21, 30 and passim. Zuckerman emphasises the “aimlessness” of Byrd's Virginia peregrinations in “William Byrd's Family,” 306–7.

7 See Bertelson, especially Chapter 4, and his discussion of Rev. Blair, James's Our Saviour's Divine Sermon on the Mount, pp. 111–113Google Scholar.

8 Writing the South: Ideas of an American Region (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18Google Scholar.

9 Lockridge describes “the very crypticity” of the diaries as “expressive” (p. 12). I hesitate to make as much as he does of writing that is simply “not there.”

10 Between 1715 and 1725 Byrd was twice in London, on typically double business as Virginia's representative to the English and on his own behalf (to sell his office as Receiver General of Virginia and to uphold his own political and pecuniary interests with the Crown against opposition from Governor Spotswood). Equally typically, though what took him to London was colonial politics and private business, what kept him there was personal pleasure and (following the death of his first wife in 1716) the search for a second Mrs Byrd.

11 Countess of Orrery (ed.), The Orrery Papers, 2 volumes (1903)Google Scholar. Reprinted in Davis, R. B., Holman, C. Hugh and Rubin, Louis D. Jr, (eds.) Southern Writing 1585–1920 (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1970), 111–13Google Scholar.

12 The Puritan Conversion Narrative: The Beginnings of American Expression (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983)Google Scholar.

13 The Spectator, (ed.) Bond, Donald F., 5 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), III, 538–9 (no. 411)Google Scholar.

14 The Spectator, III, 551–2 (no. 414)Google Scholar.

15 The History and Present State of Virginia, (ed.) Wright, Louis B. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 130Google Scholar.

16 See, for example, Bertelson, 67ff.

17 History and Present State of Virginia, 146Google Scholar.

18 The Spectator, III, 537 (no. 409)Google Scholar.

19 The History and Present State of Virginia, 296–7Google Scholar.

20 The Spectator, III, 537 (no. 409)Google Scholar.

21 Woodfin, Maude H. and Tinling, Marion, (eds.) Another Secret Diary of William Byrd of Westover, 1739–1741 (Richmond, Va., 1942), 318Google Scholar.

22 Quoted by Wright, Louis B. in The First Gentlemen of Virginia (1940; rpt. Charlottesville, Va.: Dominion Books, 1964), 165Google Scholar.

23 The Spectator, III, 529 (no. 409)Google Scholar.

24 “Anecdote of the Jar,” The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), 76Google Scholar.

25 The London Diary (1717–1721) and Other Writings, (eds.) Wright, Louis B. and Tinling, Marion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1958), 38Google Scholar.

26 Another Secret Diary, 280Google Scholar.

27 Another Secret Diary, 276Google Scholar.

28 My assessment again differs from Lockridge, who is inclined to see “Inamorato” as a painful, if stilted, exercise in self-exposure. I prefer to concentrate on the effects and implications of its careful literary poise.

29 Another Secret Diary, 277Google Scholar.

30 Another Secret Diary, 277Google Scholar.

31 London Diary, 185Google Scholar.

32 The Prose Works of William Byrd of Westover, (ed.) Wright, Louis B. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1966), 159Google Scholar. Subsequent references to the Histories are referred to by page numbers in this edition.

33 “The Idea of Order at Key West,” Collected Poems, 129Google Scholar.

34 “Autumn” The Seasons, (ed.) Sambrook, James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972), 174 (11. 562–4)Google Scholar.

35 Mandeville, Bernard, The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, (ed.) Kaye, F. B., 2 volumes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924; rpt. 1957), I, 183–4Google Scholar.

36 Beverley's literary motive was similarly to act as a stimulant to industry: “the extream fruitfulness of that Country is not exceeded by any other. No Seed is Sowed there, but it thrives, and most Plants are improved, by being Transplanted thither. And yet there's very little Improvement made among them, nor any thing us'd in Traffique, but Tobacco… Thus they [the inhabitants of Virginia] depend altogether upon the liberality of Nature, without endeavouring to improve its Gifts, by Art or Industry. They spunge upon the Blessings of a warm Sun, and a fruitful Soil, and almost grutch the Pains of gathering in the Bounties of the Earth. I should be asham'd to publish this slothful Indolence of my Countrymen, but that I hope it will rouse them out of their Lethargy, and excite them to make the most of all those happy Advantages which Nature has given them; and if it does this, I am sure they will have the Goodness to forgive me” (History and Present State of Virginia, 314, 319Google Scholar).

37 Another Secret Diary, 280Google Scholar.

38 With the ever-present seductions of indolence, Byrd staked out that line in every area of his life and writing. In his Discourse Concerning the Plague (1721), he recommends (with an incalculable degree of seriousness) moderation as a prophylactic against the plague. Excess in food and drink, and lack of activity, he writes, weaken a man and make him susceptible: “… an exact temperance, sobriety, and moderation in all our enjoyments… will abate the vicious humours of the body, and make us less dispos'd to receive the sickness.” In Britain, however, the author argues, people “suffer dreadfully by this disease, having commonly too great a complaisance for our dear bellies.” The English, here, take on the characteristics Byrd later ascribed to North Carolina's lubber-like population. As in the Dividing Line narrative, the moral message of moderation seems clear, but the uncertain tone renders it at best equivocal: Another Secret Diary, 437, 427Google Scholar.

39 The Fable of the Bees, I, 239Google Scholar.

40 Although Byrd died before the appearance of Thomson's The Castle of Indolence in 1748, there are striking similarities between the two works, not least in the ambivalent but potent compound of charm and danger which the idea of indolence held for both writers themselves. A possible common influence is Joseph Mitchell's poem “The Charms of Indolence,” published in 1722 (while Byrd was in London) and reprinted in Poems on Several Occasions (1729) at the time Byrd was beginning his revision of the journal following the conclusion of his commission. Lockridge, like other commentators, makes clear Byrd's fear and rejection of this “‘lazy’ society where gentlemen such as himself were neither needed nor respected,” (The Diary, and Life…, 139Google Scholar). My concern here is with the way in which this rejection co-exists in the prose with desire, and delight in, the realm of sloth and disorder.

41 Montaigne, , Essays, 14Google Scholar.

42 London Diary, 44Google Scholar.

43 The Spectator, III, 570 (no. 418)Google Scholar.

44 Ben Jonson had associated Lubberland and pork-eating explicitly in Bartholemew Fair: “Good mother, how shall we find a pigge, if we doe not look about for't ? will it run off o' the spit, into our mouths, thinke you? as in Lubberland?” (Bartholemew Fair, III, (ii)). Byrd may also have had Spenser's indictment of the ungodly as a herd of swine in mind:

“Said Guyon, See the mind of beastly man,

That hath so soone forgot the excellence

Of his creation, when he life began,

That now he chooseth, with vile difference,

To be a beast, and lacke intelligence.

To whom the Palmer thus, The donghill kind

Delights in filth and foule incontinence:

Let Grill be Grill, and haue his hoggish mind,

But let vs hence depart, whilest wether serues and wind.”

(The Faery Queene, Book II, Canto xii, 87).

45 “How to Tell a Story,” Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain, (ed.) Blair, Walter (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 241Google Scholar.