Figure 2. Map of Slane River from Andrew Yarranton’s England’s Improvement by Sea and Land. RB 148563, Huntington Library, San Marino, California.
Poor relief remained a central concern of projectors a century later. Reynell was one of several improvers who proposed a herring fishery on the grounds it would employ a staggering half million subjects.131 The fishery, he explained, was just one example of public enterprise that England could profitably undertake if “the Rich hoard not up their Money, but employ the poor people in general works, as building of Houses, Colledges, Bridges or the like.”132 Nicholas Hawksmoor goes so far as to suggest that his proposal for a hospital in Greenwich would prove advantageous even if it never served a patient, because even “vain Projects” like Egypt’s pyramids and Trajan’s pillar were useful in that they “employed vast Numbers of the Poor, in Building.”133
Reynell and Hawksmoor exploit images of poverty to promote their schemes. They make a persuasive resource of scarcity. Similarly, Yarranton’s proposal to establish a network of granary banks, seven-story brick buildings that would protect corn from vermin, aligns poor relief with industrial growth.134 Granaries, he predicts, would benefit “all the people that are imployed in these Manufactures,” by supplying them with “bread sufficient, without a charge to the Publick, and thereby the Commodities will be manufactured cheap.”135 A reason to feed the hungry is that it cheapens goods, argues Yarranton, who charges his project to “cheat the Rats and Mice, to feed the Poor, to preserve the Tenant, to pay the Landlord, to bring us several Manufactures, to prevent Law-Suits, to fetch out all Moneys now unimployed into Trade; and it will be, if done, as the Blood in the Body, it will so circulate in a few years, that Corn will be to England better than ready Moneys; and to have this so, is undoubtedly every Mans interest in the Kingdom.”136 This procession of infinitive statements explains how the erection of storehouses would monetize grain into currency “better than ready Moneys.” Yarranton predicts that corn, when secured from pests and freely distributed, would function as a unit of exchange similar to registered lands. The circulation of grain as money would ensure the availability of bread while stabilizing tenant-landlord relations, serving “undoubtedly every Mans interest in the Kingdom.” All men hold “interest” in this project because they belong to the same body, Yarranton’s simile suggests, and depend on the same flow of blood.
Virtually all improvers aligned their proposals with some notion of the public good. But only certain works, like Yarranton’s, were comprehensive enough to claim “every mans interest.” Projects “should be made as Universal as possible,” declares the like-minded Reynell, “and that it be universal, all particular Parishes ought to be employ’d in it.”137 Both Reynell and Yarranton solicit readers who are poor and rich, rural and urban, Anglican and nonconforming to fashion their proposals as expressions of universal interest. Though the bulk of his proposals belong to the countryside, Yarranton maintains the importance of cities as centers of trade, showing how the fruits of the fields busied the ports of London. Yarranton addresses the dangers of urban life most explicitly through a proposal to fight conflagrations, like the Great Fire of 1666, by constructing a system of semaphores and roping water cisterns to sleighs.138 The publication details of England’s Improvement themselves imply the reciprocity of capital and country: the colophon indicates that the work was composed by a Worcestershire native, Yarranton, published by a freeman in the London Company of Stationers, Robert Everingham, and sold in bookstalls in Cheapside and St. Paul’s Churchyard.
England’s Improvement stages unanimity across vocation and region in a fictive “Dialogue betwixt a Clothier, a Woollen-draper, and a Country-Yeoman at Supper upon the Road.” This didactic conversation opens when the draper (a rural wool supplier) asks the urban clothier, “what News from London, old friend?”139 “A bad Trade still,” laments the clothier, who blames the decline of his business on the rise of factors, drawers, and packers, an ambitious class of functionaries who allegedly seized control of England’s textile industry by setting themselves up as merchants and creditors. A third party, the yeoman, soon enters the conversation, interjecting that the health of his estate relied on the unfettered trade of drapers and clothiers, because “every Acre of my Land rises price, according as the Woollen Manufacture flourishes.”140 The draper, in turn, salutes the yeoman for his “fellow-feeling in our misery,” an expression of solidarity through shared financial hardship.
The decline of clothiers, drapers, and yeomen recalls the sorrow of Yarranton’s benighted mortgager. Their dialogue foregrounds the mutual dependence of pastoral labor and port markets, suggesting in this particular case that the traffic between Salisbury and London sustains both places. “Fellow-feeling” expresses a collective desire to restore England’s wool trade to its rightful directors.
Yarranton’s discovery of universal interest finds an urban-focused counterpart in Nicholas Barbon’s 1685 pamphlet, Apology for the Builder. Barbon, a London-based insurance purveyor, calls for the construction of houses in London, a project that would stimulate tax revenue (and policy sales). His proposal addresses rural landholders who feared that a larger metropolis would drain the countryside of workers and raise the cost of labor. Like Yarranton, Barbon shows how urban trade consumes rural outputs, “Stones, Bricks, Lime, Iron, Lead, Timber … the Commodities of the Country.”141 The city vents and constitutes the matter of quarries, forests, pastures, and tillage, claims Barbon, who observes that new buildings would provide “habitations and livelihood for the Supernumerary and useless Inhabitants of the Country,” specifically, the younger sons of gentry and the children of peasants.142 A growing city, Apology concludes, puts surplus goods and bodies to work.
Barbon characterizes building as an ancient vocation derived from the paternal obligation to shelter family. It is, he claims, the fundamental chore of a society committed to growing its population humanely: “New Buildings are advantageous to the King and Government. They are instrumental to the preserving and increasing of the number of the Subjects; And numbers of Subjects is the strength of a Prince: for Houses are Hives for the People to breed and swarm in, without which they cannot increase.”143 Barbon compares London houses to teeming hives, colonies “instrumental” to the growth and maintenance of society. This trope, perhaps drawn from Virgil’s depiction of communally industrious bees in The Georgics, draws together city and country respectively as the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor. Apology uses the figure of the hive to unearth the city’s rural roots.
Barbon invents his own metaphors while neutralizing others. He addresses a particularly nefarious “simile from those that have the Rickets, fansying the City to be the Head of the Nation, and that it will grow too big for the Body,” accusing that simile’s authors of themselves being rickets victims deluded by their search for companionable forms.144 Barbon refuses this comparison and installs his own in its place: London is not the head of England, but rather “the heart of a Nation, through which the Trade and Commodities of it circulate, like the blood through the heart, which by its motions giveth life and growth to the rest of the Body.”145 London, in this comparison, is no longer a peripheral bulging but a central pump that propels goods throughout England. The heart metaphor accommodates urban and rural interests, reconstituting the capital within a functional body politic. Barbon himself acknowledges the impact of his tropes, remarking “this simile is the best.”146
Yarranton’s dialogue and Barbon’s metaphoric surrogation authorize their proposals to voice universal interest. Both projectors endeavor to comfort readers by addressing them as improvement’s beneficiaries rather than its bystanders or victims. Recitations of shared values simultaneously marginalize detractors by depicting them as contrarian outsiders contriving to “shake their Interests.”147 Yarranton imagines his future critics as improvement’s enemies, civic outlaws rather
