those readers who did not understand Yarranton’s proposals to support them. Another writer who invested macroeconomic phenomena with affective resonance was Blith, who campaigned for timber cultivation in Commonwealth England by telling the story of an aged widow: “I have heard of a poor woman that had two or three ash-trees in her Garden hedge, & a strong wind came and blew the Ash Keys all over the Garden, that at the Spring, her Garden was turned from that to a hopfull plantation of Ashes as green as a leek above the ground, the woman was at a great debat, to loose her Garden she was loth, and to destroy so hopefull a crop she was unwilling.”88 The germination of ash seeds presents a gripping dilemma: the “heard of” woman must decide whether to maintain her garden, a crucial chore given her poverty, or cultivate the accidental nursery, which might return greater sustenance, but only after the trees came to maturity and someone purchased their timber. The woman recognizes that over time the trees would prove more lucrative than vegetables, but she is hesitant to risk her livelihood in pursuit of future gain. Blith distinguishes between the conservation of private uses and the exchange of commodities, in this case through a timber trade that would likely dispose of the ash trees in London’s shipyards. The woman, in other words, must decide whether to maintain her austere existence or become the “English Improver” that Blith heralded: “at last she resolved to let them grow, and now her garden is turned into a nurcery, and she is turned a planter, and hath ever since maintained it to that use, and made many times more profit than she did before.”89 The parable of the ash keys rewards public-minded plantation. Remitting the fruits of the land to a national economy yields “profit,” an exchangeable surplus unavailable in the subsistence paradigm. Blith’s triumphant conversion of garden plot to literary plot furthermore suggests that even the most precarious members of society, here a “poor woman,” can contribute to the Commonwealth, helping to furnish England’s navy at a time when war with the Netherlands first loomed on the horizon.
Projectors like Blith and Yarranton recognized the power of allegories and anecdotes to make improvement concrete and personal. The ruined mortgager and reluctant orcharder solicit pity and admiration, even when the economic impasses they personify do not pertain to individual readers. Their narratives also stand in for explicit argumentation, limiting the instances in which Yarranton needed to make bald claims about the future, claims that would tip off his audience to the fact that they were reading a work in the disreputable project mode. Whenever possible, Yarranton tries to appear as if he is describing rather than disputing, composing narrative rather than building polemic. These performances reflect Yarranton’s anxieties over the usefulness of language for enlisting readers to his cause, anxieties he processes paradoxically by renouncing rhetoric altogether. A signature of project writing, I will now show, was a disavowal of projects and writing. Inspection of England’s Improvement reveals a text at war with its medium.
Writing Against Language
England’s Improvement derives legitimacy from its imagined interlocutors, who range from connected elites to the general reader. This unrequited correspondence liberates Yarranton to discuss his own improvement agenda with affable modesty: “I here not only present with these my weak Endeavors, for the vigorous Improvements of those unparalel’d Advantages, which the situation of our Climate, the Nature of our Soil, and the Constitution of both our People and Government affords us, in order to the making us every way great, beyond any Nation in the World.”90 Yarranton contrasts the “weak endeavors” of his prose with the possibility of “vigorous” improvement and “unparalel’d” advantage that the proposal raises. He confesses to feeble exposition through the possessive adjective “my,” while insisting that this scheming could make the entire realm “great.” Yarranton characterizes England’s Improvement as the unassuming vehicle for momentous change. It is a “humble Petition” meant to give rise to “so Glorious a Work.”91 The topos of modesty was an essential tool for projectors, who downplayed their rhetorical acumen to forestall skeptics who would portray them as cunning wordsmiths brandishing empty ideas. Many authors found that the most direct way to refute charges of rhetorical deceit was to disclaim persuasive advantage altogether.
Yarranton discounts his writerly talents by calling England’s Improvement a “humble petition” and “weak endeavors.” At one point, he breezily reduces his 216-page manifesto to “these few Sheets.”92 Fortrey likewise characterizes his England’s Interest and Improvement as an “unworthy Treatise,” claiming he felt “ashamed” that King Charles (his dedicatee) might waste time reading such an “undeserving paper.”93 Barbon calls his Discourse on Trade a “rough sketch.” John Blanch brushes off his Interest of England Considered (1694) as “this little Essay,” diminishing the proposal’s supposedly paltry substance to the status of mere attempt.94 Mary Astell claims that her Serious Proposal to the Ladies (1694) needs not “the set-off’s of Rhetorick to recommend it, were I capable, which yet I am not, of applying them.”95 Humphrey Mackworth performs a particularly jarring devaluation of his work when he likens England’s Glory, by a Royal Bank to “this little Brat.”96 These self-deprecating authors attempt to shift the reader’s attention from the rhetorical instrument of the proposal to the action it foresees, and in so doing to disown the act of proposing itself.97
Yarranton rejects the artifice of writing to assert the underlying value of his ideas. The purpose of his rhetoric was to remove the semblance of persuasion, and thereby return readers to the unmediated object Thirsk calls a “practical scheme for exploiting material things.”98 Yarranton’s professions of verbal inelegance actually exhibit deft understatement—he disclaims an argumentative mode to reinforce arguments, suggesting that there was substance to his proposals beyond the words they contained. Modesty functions as a mode of self-authorizing performance in England’s Improvement, as Yarranton’s “humble petition” refashions itself into the “unanimous Prayer of the Nation in General.”99 The generic transposition of “petition,” an individual plea to the state, to “prayer,” a request of God made on behalf of the nation, demonstrates how claims to plain speech facilitate the acquisition of political power.
A purported plain style could also distinguish new proposals from projection’s history of misspent eloquence, a notorious legacy personified by Elizabethan monopolists, Jacobean and Caroline patentees, and Commonwealth social planners. Yarranton understood it was crucial for England’s Improvement to appear not to belong to the degraded project tradition and therefore solicits “shelter” of Annesley and Player so that they could shield him from “the Arrows of Obloquy and Envy, that are usually shot at the Projector, be the Undertaking never so noble.”100 Yarranton confesses that others will call him a projector and denounce his ideas out of prejudice or jealousy. The archery metaphor implies that these obligatory assaults relied on tonal bluster and specious clichés, and often missed their mark, injuring some of England’s most capable and public-minded improvers.
Yarranton decries the perfunctory malice shown toward new enterprise and denounces those who rail against “my Project, as most will call it” despite its potential benefits.101 He nonetheless capitulates to this hostile readership by spurning project terminology. With the exception of one reference to an earlier river navigation scheme as “my projection,” Yarranton always substitutes less insidious synonyms like “Design” and “Undertaking,” terms that imply the possibility of action beyond proposal language without conjuring projecting’s incriminating historical associations.102 Yarranton’s denial of projects reflects the influence of writers like Blith, who wanted to be accounted a “poor and faithful Servant to his Generation” and not be “Scandalized as a Projector.”103 His self-conception also anticipates a distinction later drawn by Aaron Hill, the eighteenth-century poet and beech oil inventor, who claimed “the Business we are now upon, is no Project, ’tis a Discovery.”104 To escape its own wordy realm of projection, England’s Improvement organizes its diction and syntax to renounce fine rhetoric and proposing both.
Projection’s Passive Voice
