The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. CohenЧитать онлайн книгу.
of the wondrous interventions of God into human affairs and as a pretext to exhort audiences to repent while they still had time.43 Plummer’s “Elegy on the death of His Excellency Sir TIMOTHY DEXTER” combined several of the genres in which Plummer’s broadsides circulated. The elegy begins venally enough, with Plummer lamenting Dexter’s death as a loss of patronage: “Of this kind patron, I’m bereft, / He’s all his cash, and poet left.”44 Yet rather than aligning himself with Dexter’s fame, wealth, or position or casting his elegy as the security for Dexter’s future renown, Plummer takes Dexter’s death as an occasion to call all unrepentant sinners to account:
Figure 3. Jonathan Plummer, poet laureate to Lord Dexter. Illustration from Samuel L. Knapp, Life of Lord Timothy Dexter (Newburyport: John G. Tilton, 1852).
O let us solemn warning take,
And all our sins at once forsake,
Rememb’ring that’twill soon be said,
Of all of us, that we are dead!
Rememb’ring that quite soon we must,
Be mouldering into loathsome dust!
Ah! on this earthly, weeping shore,
My patron, Dexter, lives no more!45
The poem eschews the conventional maneuvers of neoclassical elegy and instead adopts the hortatory tone of millennial religion. The “Sketch of the character of LORD DEXTER” clarifies Plummer’s position: “by the kindness of God [Dexter] was generally a very triumphant conquerer; but in regard to the main business that he was sent into the world to transact I cannot positively say how it was with my deceased friend. I must confess that though I have hopes of him through the kindness of God, I am not without fears.”46 Fealty to his Lordship was no longer enough to blind Plummer to the more pressing needs of his calling:
This I do know courteous reader, that you & I will shortly follow the generous Dexter through the dark valley of the shadow of death, and appear before the judgment seat of Christ, at the judgment day, to be judged according to the deeds done in the body, whether they have been good, or whether they have been evil…. It may therefore be proper for us, while we indulge ourselves in proper reflections concerning the departed Dexter, to be very careful to consider our own ways.47
Not surprisingly, Plummer identified himself on this sheet as “a travelling preacher, & poet lauret to his Lordship,” and itinerancy thereafter defined his stance toward the public. In later broadsides, he titled himself, among other things, “a traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader,” “an independent traveling preacher,” “a lay Bishop extraordinary; and a traveling preacher, Physician, Poet, and Trader,” and “a latter-day Prophet, Lay-Bishop, traveling Preacher, Physician, Poet and Trader.”48 Yet while Plummer’s poems trafficked in cosmic revelations and global exhortations to repent, his subjects stayed local and timely, so that these later broadsides remained generically linked to news, scandal, and rumor, even while they also adopted the styles and modes of sermons, exegesis, and disputation. For instance, “Dreadful Fire at Portsmouth!” (1814) concerned many things, including
a great, and dreadful fire at Portsmouth (N. H.) that began to consume houses on the evening of the 22d of December, 1813. About 180 buildings, it is thought were burned. On the deaths of about 200 American and British soldiers, marines and sailors, and about 535 Creek Indians, killed lately in various battles. On the deaths of Captain Manour, and another man drowned in the Merrimack, and of Capt. John Brockway of Newburyport, Capt. Lambert and one Woodbury of Salem, Peter Queening, probably of Gloucester, one Nye of Hallowel, and 11 others belonging probably to Fish-island, in New York, drowned in or near the Atlantic Ocean. On the deaths of about 20 people who have died lately of the spotted fever in Vermont, and Newhampshire: on the death of one Norris, one Ring, and a young woman named Hovey of Hallowell, who lately perished in, or near the Atlantic: and on the deaths of one Smiley, who it is said cut his throat at Newington (N. H.) and one Phippes and a woman named Nichols, who it is supposed have killed themselves at Salem.49
The broadside collated local news items (the fire at Portsmouth), more personal local tragedies (the various suicides and deaths at sea), and also international dispatches from the ongoing war with Britain, including a lurid description of the massacre at Fort Mims, Alabama, which had taken place the year before. These tragedies and disasters all revealed divine providence:
Almighty Father! Potent God!
How awful is thy chast’ning rod;
When wicked men are lifted high,
And swords are drawn, and bullets fly,
And sins provoke thy potent hand,
To put destruction in a land,
And make proud sinners hopes expire,
By shewing of thy dreadful ire!50
The sermonic aspects of the poem and the narrative worked in tandem with their sensational features—this broadside also resembles a tabloid with a banner headline—to produce the idiom of latter-day prophecy that imbues the sheet as a whole. However, it is not the case that the lurid details satisfied one set of readerly desires, while the sermon and its providential interpretations satisfied another, higher set of desires; nor did the lurid details attract readers simply so that the providential interpretation could then moralize them. Instead, the work of divination—revealing the providential motive behind such a random assemblage of events—drove the dissemination and market orientation of the sheet just as much as did the shocking details and gruesome descriptions. As Plummer explains,
Being sent, courteous reader, through the surprizing grace of the loveliest of the lovely to preach and write concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation, I have found a great plenty of business, and although I have yet preached but little, I have found many of my works in print, very saleable indeed, insomuch that there seems to be much room to hope that my fickle efforts in that way have served by the blessing of king Jesus, to edify, comfort, and instruct many of the sons of men, and the daughters of women.51
The outlandish ambition of this self-description only partially overshadows the interesting theory of the market that it lays out: when Plummer states, “I have found a great plenty of business,” he implies both that he has preached and written often “concerning the gladsome tidings of salvation” and also that he has discovered numerous occasions for preaching and writing (i.e., many scandals, atrocities, and tragedies to print for a desiring public). The work of sermonizing, in other words, becomes the basis for collating various items about drownings, hangings, and the like. Tragedies and atrocities are not only instances of divine providence; rather, providential interpretation is also the pretext for spreading news about death, disease, and disorder. Thus, the genres of sermon and scandal work together to create Plummer’s “business” in the broadsides that he hawks and preaches.
With vagrancy its modus operandi, such poems dwelt beneath the domain of legitimate literature, and therefore, like slander or gossip, they could propagate themselves far beyond the control of truth, authority, or legitimate culture. It is worth remembering that itinerancy was one of the most controversial aspects of the eighteenth-century evangelical awakening, and in many eighteenth-century polemics on religion, itinerant preachers were often scathingly contrasted with the settled pastorate. Adopting a title like “an independent traveling preacher” therefore carried distinct implications for contemporary norms of public order. Similarly, the vagrancy of the peddler’s work, I think, accounts for the ambivalence and hostility directed against it, which surfaces most pointedly in the frequent references made about his “ballads.” Such references are surprising, since he never wrote any. All the descriptions that exist of Plummer speak of him as though he wrote, sang, and sold ballads, even though he never titled any of his texts as a “ballad” (so far as I have discovered), and though none of his poems resemble ballads in any formal sense. Samuel L. Knapp, a writer and lawyer in Newburyport in the first half of the nineteenth century, concluded that Plummer “grew up among