Unsettled

by Fumerton, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9780226269566
• ISBN10: 0226269566
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Migrants made up a growing class of workers in late sixteenth- and seventeenth- century England. In fact, by 1650, half of England's rural population consisted of homeless and itinerant laborers. Unsettled is an ambitious attempt to reconstruct the everyday lives of these dispossessed people. Patricia Fumerton offers an expansive portrait of unsettledness in early modern England that includes the homeless and housed alike. Fumerton begins by building on recent studies of vagrancy, poverty, and servants, placing all in the light of a new domestic economy of mobility. She then looks at representations of the vagrant in a variety of pamphlets and literature of the period. Since seamen were a particularly large and prominent class of mobile wage-laborers in the seventeenth century, Fumerton turns to seamen generally and to an individual poor seaman as a case study of the unsettled subject: Edward Barlow (b. 1642) provides a rare opportunity to see how the laboring poor fashioned themselves, for he authored a journal of over 225,000 words and 147 pages of drawings. Barlow's journal, studied extensively here for the first time, vividly charts what he himself termed his "unsettled mind" and the perpetual anxieties of England's working and wayfaring poor. Ultimately, Fumerton explores representations of seamen as unsettled in the broadside ballads of Barlow's time.

Author Biography

Patricia Fumerton is professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament and coeditor of Renaissance Culture and the Everyday.

Table of Contents

List of Illustration	ix
Preface: Making Space for the Working Poor	xi
Acknowledgments	xxiii
A Note on the Text	xxvii
PART 1 Unsettled Subjects
Mobilizing the Poor	3	(9)
London's Economy of Unsettledness---and Beyond	12	(21)
Disguising the Working Poor Harman's Caveat	33	(14)
Unsettled Subjectivity the Virtual ``I''	47	(16)
PART 2 The Case of Edward Barlow
``Not Well Settled in My Mind''	63	(21)
Poor Men at Sea ``Never to be worth one groat afore a beggar''	84	(24)
Charting Barlow	108	(23)
PART 3 Toward a Lowly Aesthetics of Unsettledness
The Ballad's Seaman a Constant Parting	131	(22)
Epilogue Unsettling the New Global Economy	153	(4)
Appendix A: Edward Barlow's Family Tree	157	(2)
Appendix B: Inventory of George Barlow, 1686	159	(2)
Appendix C: Record of Edward Barlow's Mobility (On Land and Sea)	161	(13)
Appendix D: Will of Edward Barlow, Commander of the Liampo, 1708	174	(3)
Appendix E: On the Variation of the Compass	177	(6)
Notes	183	(30)
Selected Bibliography	213	(12)
Index	225