The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
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Much like the libels that Robert Darnton has excavated from the ancien régime, Plummer’s “dogril verses” excited “strange curiosity” into the characters of prominent men by virtue of their markedly subliterate form, “Ballads, &c.,” which in Bentley’s reference seems to mark both a genre and a format.29 This subliterariness feeds the text’s capacity to move around with a mysterious agency (it “was circulated” by unknown hands), spreading contempt and “strange curiosity” “to investigate all the exceptionable parts of every exceptionable character” by way of the gossip, slander, lies, news, and facts the sheet retells. Ironically, the vagrant retelling of gossip and slander sometimes ensnared Plummer, too: “A lie having got into circulation, concerning Jonathan Plummer, the pedlar, and poet, much like the following one, viz. ‘He’s an Hermaphrodite,’ this may certify, that I being a physician, have inspect [sic] the said Plummer, and found him to be wholly and properly a man”; of course, he attempted to contain this lie with yet another wayward broadside.30 Plummer’s peculiar relation to his texts and his readership comes from his being outside the standard of legitimate authorship or literariness. Neither printers nor booksellers nor authors served as the means of dissemination for poems like these; only “dogril verses” could move this way, and only a vagrant balladmonger could so move them.
Peddling and hawking—defined by itinerancy, salesmanship, the materiality of printing, and charges of scandal or the illicit—were important structuring principles for all Plummer’s published work. He was always on the move (he characterized himself as “a great traveler, and rarely to be found two days together, in one house”), meeting new people and exchanging tales, songs, sermons, and news with them.31 The sociability of peddling is at least as important as its material or economic features for understanding the cultural import of Plummer’s “Ballads, &c.” According to his autobiography, Plummer’s poetic ambitions did not originate from peddling, nor was peddling the only outlet for his poems. Despite the low status of his occupations (which included “acting the pedagouger,” “repeating select passages from authors, selling hol-ibut, sawing wood, selling books, ballads, and fruit in the streets, serving as a porter and post-boy, filling beds with straw, and wheeling them to the owners thereof, [and] collecting rags”), and despite having no formal education, Plummer managed to read extensively among authors like “Shakespear, Fielding, Juvenal, Dryden, Swift, Smallet, Stern, De Corvantes,” as well as the poems of Pope and Gay and the “tuneful works” of Allan Ramsey, which so “ravished my soul with such transporting joys” that “[I] soon attempted to write in poetry myself, and not without success.”32 As he gives it, he was grounded in the best authors of civility and politeness, a far cry from the rudeness of his own later work, and the primary value of this reading was the opportunity that it offered for sociable encounters, since he gained access to these authors through the private libraries of men and women of learning in the area. Reading was an occasion for conversation, and Plummer’s earliest poems fit a milieu of polite exchange among intimate acquaintances.
The experience of poetry as a mode of socialization was common for turn-of-the-century Newburyport readers, who had access to the most current English and European Romantic poets, as well as revered classics like the works of Milton, Watts, Thomson, Cowper, and Pope. Newburyport’s Social Library, founded in 1794, provided patrons an “easy method to obtain” “useful valuable works” like Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808), a poem that Margaret Searle, a young resident of the town, reread in 1809 “with renewed delight—I began it to Grandmother but it interested her so much she would not let me go on with it, she did not she said see the advantage of having one’s feelings so worked up for nothing…. I think this is a flower in Walter Scotts cap.”33 Searle read contemporary poems like Southey’s “After Blenheim” (1796), Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming (1809), and Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), among many others, usually in a setting characterized by group reading and the exchange of books among friends.34 Her reading history supports David S. Shields’s account of the improving effects granted to certain kinds of poems in a culture of civility and refinement.35
In her voluminous letters and diaries, Searle never mentions Plummer, although the two lived close by, and as a single woman, she was an example of the “sisters of the skies” over whom Plummer often rhapsodized in print. For women like Searle, he composed poems such as the Ovidian satire on “L.L.—transformed to a two quart bottle” and thematic allegories like “Self-Conceit,” which he recited for female acquaintances or exchanged through letters.36 This grounding in polite sociability is the unexpected genesis of Plummer’s mendicant, considerably less polite balladry. With some (apparently) successful poems under his belt, in the early 1790s, he began printing poems for sale. These addressed topics of national and international concern, such as a poem to George Washington printed in a local almanac; a broadside on the Haitian Revolution that included an extended narrative of the rebellion and a long poem addressed to white refugees, some of whom had resettled in Newburyport; and a broadside poem deploring the execution of Louis XVI, which he wrote “at the Request of many true Republicans” in an archly Federalist town that had tolled church bells to mourn the occasion.37
Plummer quickly gained a sense of his market: “I had found that serious writings commonly went off faster than others. I had published merry works of my own, and found them rather unsaleable. I had hypocritically composed elegy’s, &c. and sold them very fast.”38 Unlike the poems written for limited circulation among the educated ladies and men he knew, these broadsides offered sensational and melodramatic accounts of ongoing or recent events and were related much more closely to newspapers and pamphlets than to classical or neoclassical literary models like the poems of Pope, Dryden, or Ramsay (as we have seen, many even looked like newspapers).
But if Plummer’s choices of topic and style reflected his desire to write poems saleable in the local market, this market orientation only partly explains his subsequent career. In the mid-1790s, Plummer began addressing poems to Timothy Dexter, an eccentric leather-dresser who had made a fortune in trade and had become, by the 1790s, one of the town’s most notorious citizens. In 1793, Plummer published a note of congratulations to Dexter on his fortune, and Dexter rewarded Plummer with a new suit consisting of “a long, black, frock coat, with stars on the collar, and also at the front corners; this livery also was fringed, where fringes could be put; a black under dress, shoes and large buckles, with a large cocked hat, and a gold-headed cane.”39 Plummer hereafter named himself “Poet Laureate” to “Lord Dexter,” declaring, “I am, my Lord, in frost or summer, / Your Poet Laureat, Jon’than Plummer.”40 Despite the fact that he purveyed news and other goods, this claim to being a poet laureate in the equipage of Lord Dexter gave Plummer a much more antiquated role in the community, one that enabled a richly ironic contrast between the pseudo-aristocratic styling of his vocation and the genres of his verses.41
Figure 2. Jonathan Plummer, “The Tragedy of Louis Capet” (Newburyport, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
His addresses to Dexter, most of which were published in newspapers, accordingly called upon a pastoral register similar to that of his coterie poems and quite different from the sensationalized, reportorial language of his broadsides (although this poem, too, details the news of Dexter’s recent return to town).
Your lordship’s welcome back again—
Fair nymphs, with sighs, have mourn’d your staying
So long from them and me your swain,
And wonder’d at such long delaying:
But now you bless again our eyes;
Our melting sorrow droops and dies.42
During the period of this “laureateship,” Plummer began to have prophetic dreams in which a voice announced to him, in verse, his fortune and the fates of those around him. These dreams prompted a religious conversion, and his poems from this point forward adopted the language of providential utterance, using disasters and catastrophes—“terrible