of reality.
Projectors routinely paraded across the seventeenth-century stage in comedies and masques either as self-deluding dimwits or calculating villains. The chief antagonist of Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass (first performed in 1616) is Meercraft, a projector who plies his victims with schemes to manufacture leather gloves from dog skin, distill wine from raisins, and drain the Great Fen. Meercraft’s name puns on his prospective activities (“mere” in the British sense of “lake,” and thus also “lake craft”) and on his embodiment of empty artifice (“merely craft”). The protagonist of Richard Brome’s The Court Beggar (1653) is an aspiring projector, Andrew Mendicant, who invests in schemes to monopolize peruke sales, tax sartorial accessories, and construct a “floating Theatre” out of Thames barges.50 John Wilson’s 1665 play The Projectors targets the Royal Society for defrauding its patrons with unworkable experiments. Wilson’s play features a “projecting knight,” Sir Gudgeon Credulous, and a diabolical schemer, Jocose, who seduces him with the promise of fictitious whirligigs to drain the sea, devices to “stop up the Rivers,” and a “Horse-Wind-Water-Mill.”51
In eighteenth-century novels, an itch for projects could also afflict more complex literary personas: not projector caricatures, but rounded protagonists who also happened to project. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe reflects that while managing a plantation in Brazil, “my head began to be Full of Projects and Undertakings beyond my reach; such as are indeed often the Ruine of the best heads in Business.”52 Crusoe subsequently abandons his tobacco fields to sail for Guinea, where he has planned to buy slaves and increase his estate. This luckless journey ends in shipwreck on an island off Trinidad, where Robinson embarks on new “Projects and Designs” of survival, including his ultimate “Project of a Voyage to the Main.”53 Projects for Crusoe epitomize both the dangers of overreaching one’s station and the virtues of self-reliance in the face of danger. His adventures reflect Defoe’s ambivalence toward projects, which he concluded were as likely to bring about “publick Advantage” as “needless and unusual hazards.”54
Samuel Richardson took a darker view of projection in novels that punish those who scheme to shape the conditions of their being. Pamela Andrews conjures “designs,” “stratagems,” “enterprises,” “plots,” “contrivances,” and “projects” to escape Mr. B’s advances, which she terms “wicked Projects for my Ruin.”55 She calls her plan to flee B’s Lincolnshire estate by faking suicide and scaling the garden wall a “projected Contrivance.”56 Like Crusoe, Pamela conspires against a “ruin” that is the result of projects, not her own, but rather B’s lustful designs. Unlike Defoe, Richardson’s didactic plot forecloses on intended action: Robinson eventually reaches the mainland and returns to Europe—if not in the way he originally envisioned—but the bolting Pamela retreats when confronted by two grazing cows she mistakes for possessed bulls. Pamela struggles to escape entrapment; she attempts but cannot effect her liberation from external forces. In a tragic case of captivity, Clarissa Harlowe laments her subjugation to the plans of her family and suitors when she begs “that I may not be sacrificed to projects, and remote contingencies,” but she succumbs to Lovelace, who exclaims that “success in projects, is every thing.”57 One person’s scheme supplies another’s contingency according to Richardson, who makes “project” encompass both acts of heinous privilege and the struggle to withstand them.58
Defoe and Richardson tested the efficacy and wisdom of projects. Other literary authors conceived of their compositions as projects, acknowledging their participation in the speculative economies that resembled those they mocked. Jonson’s The Devil Is an Ass appears to condemn project-crazed Jacobean court culture when it renders Meercraft a contemptible villain. But then, in the epilogue, Jonson refers to his play as “a Project of mine owne,” framing his dramatic authorship as its own enterprise of public entertainment, social reform, and profit potential.59 Of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Andrew Marvell reflected, “I liked his project, the success did fear.”60 David Hume chastises “the vulgar, quacks and projectors” for their “magnificent pretensions” but also touts the virtues of pride for giving “us a confidence and assurance in all our projects and enterprizes.”61 These “projects and enterprizes” likely included A Treatise of Human Nature itself, which Hume subtitled “an attempt to introduce the experimental method of reasoning into moral subjects.”62
Projects in the 1600 and 1700s were both a popular theme in writing and a metaphor for understanding authorship as its own enterprise for accruing fame and righting an imperfect society. But overwhelmingly, literature from this period lends the impression that projects held, in Novak’s words, “a distinctly unsavoury connotation, being associated with unscrupulous schemes for getting money.”63 Therefore, it is crucial to distinguish between critical depictions of projection and actual projects under proposal or in progress. Lagado’s inmates and Lord Peter should not stand in for the self-reflexivity and sophistication of actual projectors, the subtlety of their rhetoric, the diversity of their addressees, and their understanding of the world as unreaped potential. Canonical literature has a tendency to flatten cultures of projection, rendering their authors transparently self-interested if not altogether criminal. In order to historicize rather than uncritically inherit these assumptions, my study keeps projects—proposals and the actions they incited—at the center. It was the temerity of visions like Designe for Plentie’s, I argue, that made projection such a controversial idea in early modern Britain, and an enduring basis for public debate and literary invention.
Projects Against History
The word “project” marks a historical attempt at becoming, an arrival of potential distinct from the stage at which an ambition ultimately succeeds or fails. To see Designe as a project is to return to the moment of its conception, when no one could know for sure what “universal plantation” might do to English soil and society. By accepting the author’s premise that “such a Project it is,” we recognize how this proposal imagined itself as a viable course of action at the moment it circulated. Approaching projects like Designe for Plentie today not as retrospective dead ends (things that did not happen) but rather as once-live opportunities (things that could have happened) compels us to share this uncertainty ourselves by screening what Richard Scholar calls “the hindsight that turns signs of a future story into the origins of the future that is our present.”64 In the case of Designe, escaping the trap of anachronism means considering fruit fiats as a conceivable element of the future, even if that future is now past, and we know it bore no fruit.
When read in light of their former potential, old proposals reveal a past in process. These writings can vitalize our conception of history by showing the impact of undertakings that were intended but unachieved. Even fantastical schemes for draining the Irish Channel and raising silk worms in Middlesex challenge what Michael Andrew Bernstein calls the “triumphalist, unidirectional view of history.”65 Such teleological perspectives underwrite not only much-questioned “Whig” narratives positing constitutional monarchy as the zenith of British civilization, but also the tendency of eighteenth-century scholars to find in this period the birth and rise of empire, capitalism, the novel, the self, the public sphere, the nation, and enlightenment. It is not my aim to contest claims of origin and upsurge, but to suggest that their preponderance implicates our desire to make the past a history of modernity—to find prefigurations of our ourselves and our experiences in the 1600s and 1700s. This pursuit founders on projection and the many thousands of schemes that failed to produce recognizably modern institutions and practices. While the proposals I examine invariably aspire to progressive ideals (to rise, discover, enlighten), their history is riddled with commercial busts, epistemological cul-de-sacs, and abandoned infrastructure. Projects simultaneously harbored the possibility of improvement and debris. They manifested forward-looking intention but also anticipated a form of wreckage incongruous with the positivist narratives we construct to explain this era and connect it to our own.
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