etc. Winter 2022
The Magazine of The Redwood Library & Athenæum
On Being the Eighteenth Century’s Posterity From New Shoes to Old Soles Back to the Future: Restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room Nari Ward and the Return of History Quarantine: Then and Now Bad Advice From Eighteenth-Century Conduct Books
WELCOME
CONTENTS
Dear Friends,
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While first wishing you good health and thanking you for your support of the Redwood, I bring us to the broad theme of this issue, helpfully introduced by Alphonse Karr. “Alphonse Who?”—he’s the obscure French writer who coined this old chestnut: “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.” Trite as it is, Karr’s aphorism nonetheless touches on the multiple operations that comprise historical understanding: the recognition of historical parallels; the placing of the past in dialog with the present; and the search for historical perspectives that can inform decisions beneficial to the future. Resuming the whole far more eloquently than Karr or Leca is Caribbean philosopher C. L. R. James, whose famous formulation calls us “to orient for the future only by comprehension of the present in the light of the past.” At this critical juncture in history, with change of every kind transforming our world, we’d do well to heed James and to act in the present while simultaneously looking back at history and forward to posterity. I can’t help but to think here of the compound eye of a fly, which transmits information from countless different points simultaneously, coalescing into one hyper-informed picture. Nor should we think for a moment that any of this is particular to our twenty-first-century context. It was required in every age, notably in the eighteenth century, a fast-changing world with striking parallels to our own. Hence our cover image, a cheeky riff on the exact process at hand by Joshua Reynolds, who looks at himself in a self-portrait that looks back at tradition by way of Rembrandt while gazing out into the future—in his case the future of British painting. I would return here to the humble fly, its compound eye, and its unlikely consonance with the interdisciplinary athenæum. For the great advantage of that peculiar eye, made up of a multitude of individual receptors, is that like the Redwood it affords a greater field of view. Accordingly, the present issue contains a varied menu of pieces across periods and domains, thus speaking directly to the other great advantage of the fly’s eye and the athenæum: an exceptional ability to apprehend motion. For the fly it’s to evade the swatter; for us to synthesize a world in flux. This is why the interdisciplinary approach the Redwood has promoted for nearly three centuries is now in vogue— another potent lesson from yesterday to help us today as we prepare for tomorrow…
On Being the Eighteenth Century’s Posterity John Sitter, Ph.D.
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From New Shoes to Old Soles Kimberly Alexander, Ph.D.
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Back to the Future: Restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room Benedict Leca, Ph.D.
1 2 Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D.
1 5 Quarantine: Then and Now Sean Doherty
1 7 How to Be Good: Bad Advice From EighteenthCentury Conduct Books Tabitha Kenlon, Ph.D.
2 0 Exhibitions at the Redwood
etc.
Winter 2022 | Vol. IIl, 1 redwoodlibrary.org Editorial Director Benedict Leca, Ph.D. Editor Patricia Barry Pettit
Benedict Leca, Ph.D. Executive Director
Design Pam Rogers Design
Mission Statement Founded in 1747 on the Enlightenment ideals of intellectual pursuit and civic engagement, and committed to lifelong, interdisciplinary learning, the Redwood Library & Athenæum generates knowledge in the humanities for the benefit of the widest possible audience with “nothing in view but the good of mankind.”
Redwood Library & Athenæum Board of Directors 2021-2022 R. Daniel Prentiss, Esq., President Frank Ray, Vice President Daniel Benson, Secretary M. Holt Massey, Treasurer Elizabeth Leatherman Marvin Abney Aida Neary Josiah Bunting III Waring Partridge Michelle Drum Janet A. Pell Jacalyn Egan Edwin G. Fischer, M.D.* Earl A. Powell III Jeffrey Siegal Michael Gewirz John D. Harris II *Honorary Board Member
chartered 1747 Redwood Library & Athenæum 50 Bellevue Avenue Newport, Rhode Island 02840 401.847.0292 redwood@redwoodlibrary.org @redwoodlibrary @theredwoodlibrary @RedwoodLibrary
Generously Supported by the Jarzombek Family: Mark Jarzombek and Michelle Drum Reprint of any content herein must bear following credit line: Originally Published in Etc., The Magazine of the Redwood Library & Athenæum Winter 2022 Cover: Reynolds, Sir Joshua PRA Self Portrait, 1747-48 National Portrait Gallery, London The Redwood Library & Athenæum’s commitment to environmental responsibility includes utilizing paper products manufactured through sustainable forest practices and using low VOC inks and solvents.
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On Being the Eighteenth Century’s Posterity by John Sitter, Ph.D. The New Yorker ran a cartoon fifteen years ago in which a man at a cocktail party says to another, “Why should I do anything for posterity? What has posterity ever done for me?” It was a surprisingly unoriginal caption. I had long heard the remark attributed to Groucho Marx. But eighteenth-century essayist Joseph Addison beat Marx by a couple of centuries. In the issue of the early newspaper The Spectator landing in coffeehouses on Friday, August 20, 1714, Addison writes that when it comes to thinking about future generations’ welfare, “Most People are of the Humour of an old Fellow of a College, who, when he was pressed by the Society to come into something that might redound to the good of their Successors, grew very peevish, We are always doing, says he, doing something for Posterity, but I would fain see Posterity do something for us.” Addison’s anecdote arises in a discussion of estate management that urges landowners to plant more trees on their properties. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ attention to woodland depletion is arguably the origin of what we now regard as
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Sustainabilty Studies, a subject I’ve taught for over a decade along with eighteenth-century literature. Addison was popularizing a concern that “the Increase of Forest-Trees does by no Means bear Proportion to the Destruction of them,” which had been sounded in England a half century earlier by John Evelyn. Best remembered today as a diarist, Evelyn was also the author of Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-trees, and the Propagation of Timber (1664). No small part of the concern for forest management was due to England’s naval ambitions. By the early 1700s, the construction of a large war ship could require 2,000 to 3,000 oak trees. Thus Addison’s worry “that in a few Ages the Nation may be at a Loss to supply itself with Timber sufficient for the Fleets.” Good husbandry should “therefore be inculcated…from the Love which we ought to have for our Country, and the Regard which we ought to bear to our Posterity.” Despite Addison’s quip that most people don’t want to think about posterity, he and his enlightened contemporaries seem to be thinking about it all the time, and not just in relation to trees, or only in England and Europe. Appeals to posterity are essential
Fig. 1. Galileo Galilei, etchings of the Moon, from Sidereus Nuncius, 1610
An ideal curriculum for cultivating a consciousness of posterity as energetic as our constricted moment demands—in other words, a civic education robust enough to help us think like stewards of the future—would have many parts, and a very significant one would be eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and history.
to the discourse of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. The uses of “posterity” are especially interesting in the eighteenth century because the word was shifting in meaning. Until about 1700, the dominant meaning of the word was one’s personal descendants, so that to speak of your posterity would mean your children and grandchildren. This meaning persists—it is still what the authors of the United States Constitution probably meant by their determination to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”—but the word was also coming more and more to mean succeeding generations generally, all those future people one will never know. The older and newer meanings compete in George Washington’s 1789 letter to the Pennsylvania legislature urging that “every American to extend his views beyond himself, and to bear in mind that his conduct will not only affect himself, his country, and his immediate posterity; but that its influence may be co-extensive with the world, and stamp political happiness or misery on ages yet unborn.” James Madison clearly had more than “immediate” posterity in mind when he urged that the history of the American Revolution be properly recorded because it holds “lessons of which posterity ought not be deprived.” Their times were so extraordinary that the Founders’ rhetoric does not seem hyperbolic. In less dramatic circumstances invocations of posterity may easily sound grandiloquent. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Swift parodied his own desire to be remembered by posterity by having the zany narrator of A Tale of a Tub simply dedicate the book outright to “Prince Posterity,” in the terms one might use to flatter a rich patron. A later Swiftian maxim on the subject runs, “It is pleasant to observe how free the present age is in laying taxes on the next. FUTURE AGES SHALL TALK OF THIS; THIS SHALL BE FAMOUS TO ALL POSTERITY. Whereas their time and thoughts will be taken up about present things, as ours are now.” Samuel Johnson, too, could cast an ironic eye on appeals to posterity, calling the approval of future generations one of those “consolatory expedients” with which neglected authors comfort themselves. But he also makes such appeals seriously. In an essay promoting academic scholarship, Johnson challenges the elite of his day to offer education some of the support that they shower upon military and economic activity: “while we are so anxiously diligent to secure property, and to deliver down our liberties and our privileges to posterity…we may likewise extend our care to more valuable advantages, and hand to them the lamp of science unextinguished.” Denis Diderot, general editor of the ground-breaking French Encyclopedia and Johnson’s contemporary across the channel, took the extreme secular position of declaring that for writers the hope of
posterity’s regard is the equivalent of aspiring to heavenly salvation. In Diderot’s phrase, for the artist or intellectual “le jugement anticipé de la postérité est le seul encouragement” (the anticipated judgment of posterity is the sole encouragement). But Johnson, Diderot, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, and scores of other intellectuals and poets shared the Enlightenment idea of posterity as a source of obligation (we owe something to future generations) and a possible judge (we will be vindicated or found wanting by them). Burke writes of the responsibility of high officeholders to both the “existing world” and “posterity, which men of their eminence cannot avoid for glory or for shame.” Posterity is a “tribunal, at which, not only Ministers, but Kings and Parliaments, but even Nations themselves, must one day answer.” Shortly before his 1729-31 sojourn in Rhode Island (three miles from the Redwood Library and Athenæum), the philosopher and later bishop George Berkeley linked America and posterity in the poem “On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America.” Berkeley anticipates the judgment of posterity by envisioning a new “golden age” in the new country, one that “By future poets shall be sung.” The poem’s most famous line is “Westward the course of empire takes its way,” and the association of America with the future strengthened during the Revolution. Founding Father Benjamin Rush defines American patriotism in proudly expansive terms: “It comprehends not only the love of our neighbors but of millions of our fellow creatures, not only of the present but of future generations.” If the love of millions who exist, though unseen, is a heady ideal, the love of generations who do not yet exist requires an even stronger act of imagination. Near the end of An Essay on Man, Alexander Pope had imagined something like the former, as the virtuous person’s love ripples out spatially into ever-widening circles: “Friend, parent, neighbor, first it will embrace, / His country next, and next all human race.” But expanding through time requires even greater energy. So great that a hard-headed Swift or Johnson or John Adams might think the possibility of such love unlikely. But if not love, perhaps the thought of future generations comes more naturally to us than we say. So at least argues contemporary philosopher Samuel Scheffler. His book Death and the Afterlife (2013) turns on a striking thought experiment: suppose you were given certain knowledge that 30 days after you died, the rest of humanity would also die. According to Scheffler, such knowledge regarding the earthly “afterlife” of our fellow humans would be demoralizing, regardless of family concerns or religious beliefs. It would be wholly disorienting because the assumption that humanity will outlast us as individuals is tied up unconsciously with how we assign value to many—possibly most— activities and customs. “To an extent that we rarely acknowledge,” r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 3
Some Large Additions to Common Sense (1776) Redwood Library & Athenæum Special Collections.
he concludes, “our conviction that things matter is sustained by our confidence that life will go on after we ourselves are gone.” If we still share the idea that keeping posterity in mind is essential to who we are, what do we not share with eighteenthcentury European and American thinkers? Mainly their confidence, I believe, or, perhaps more accurately, their lack of anxiety. This is not to suggest that all eighteenth-century writers or ordinary people regarded all “progress” as positive. The word “innovation,” which we now have trouble using without cheerleading, often meant something negative, as when in the late seventeenth century John Dryden wrote that “all other errors but disturb a state, / But Innovation is the blow of Fate,” or when Burke observed a century later of the French revolutionaries that “A spirit of innovation is generally the result of a selfish temper and confined views.” But generally, and especially in America, the eighteenth-century view of the future is more promising than ominous. Some would argue that our modern sense of futurity began to grow anxious after Word War II. Robert Heilbroner contended that in the later twentieth century, an “apprehensive” view emerged as it became harder to separate technology’s promises from its threats. He saw this change as due largely to the use and proliferation of nuclear weapons and the “environmental overload of global warming”—this in 1995. Whether one agrees with this interpretation, it is worth noting that the shift occurs during the period that environmental historians have come to call The Great Acceleration (and sometimes the Anthropocene Era), the period 4 etc. Win ter 202 2
from about 1950 to the present, in which global population more than tripled, real global domestic product grew about ten-fold, and human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide increased more than seven-fold. If a vision of posterity is good for us personally (as Scheffler argued) and, by extension, good for our civic life, can we find things in the past that might help restore an enabling tie to posterity, one not so haunted by apprehension? Burke would encourage us, as a general principle, to begin with historical reflection: “People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.” Retrospection and reflection are always healthy, but are there more particular eighteenth-century lessons? Does a period so relatively “innocent” of technology as the eighteenth century afford us anything to learn from its easier imaginative access to a vision of the future? A basic truth to keep in mind is that while our ancestors did not have our anxieties, they also did not have our gifts. They had nothing approaching our access to information, energy, and toolusing capacity. And there are no inevitable reasons why those gifts cannot be used with more wisdom and care, including care for those to come. A second lesson is that there is much to learn from their lack of blind faith in “progress” (undefined), “growth” (undefined), or a world without limits. While it is still true that many politicians and some economists remain allergic to any mention of limits, more circumspect heads may be starting to prevail. The eighteenth century can be instructive in this respect because it is not the nineteenth century: it precedes nineteenth-century European and American “Cornucopianism,” the view in which the horn of plenty always has more, and Romantic “Prometheanism,” in which human energy and technology can do anything, including somehow making more nature. We tend to take the Cornucopian and Promethean assumptions as traditional and natural. ( Julian Simon, still revered by some as a “conservative” economist, declared that “natural resources are not finite.”) But there’s an older tradition to recover, one with a measured view of posterity, offering guidance for a deeper development of our collective imagination. Contemporary political philosopher, Daniel Innerarity describes, in The Future and its Enemies (2012), our natural personal capacity for “futurizing” in terms similar to Samuel Scheffler’s; we are creatures who cannot help but anticipate and plan. Innerarity turns the discussion in a more collective direction to argue that our futurizing ability, like any natural capacity, needs to be cultivated to develop fully. Otherwise, it only endangers civic health: “If it is not trained, this anticipation works destructively: it atrophies, turns us into fanatics, into people who are unnecessarily fearful or excessively credulous.” An ideal curriculum for cultivating a consciousness of posterity as energetic as our constricted moment demands— in other words, a civic education robust enough to help us think like stewards of the future—would have many parts, and a very significant one would be eighteenth-century literature, philosophy, and history. What’s posterity ever done for us? The question is no longer rhetorical. The more we think about the cultural costs of an absent or enfeebled sense of the future, the more clearly an answer arrives: Just about everything. John Sitter, Ph.D. is the Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature, Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame and the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English, Emeritus at Emory University.
From New Shoes to Old Soles Stories in the Life Cycle of Eighteenth-Century Shoes by Kimberly Alexander, Ph.D. an object. Countless shoes end up in museums The lifecycle of shoes: what happens after Use it up, wear it and historical societies, telling new stories once initial purchase, years of wearing by an owner, or again. No matter in what condition or where perhaps a later repurposing for new uses? Shoes out, make it do, or whole shoes or fragments land, the life cycle of reveal exciting and unanticipated stories lingering a shoe carried with it many subtle nuances and in their eighteenth century soles. In the journey do without! meanings for the user and the finder. of a sparkling new pair of Georgian brocaded Attributed to Today, issues of sustainability, recycling, silk shoes, bits of which may ultimately end up numerous sources repurposing, with the goal of consuming fewer in a privy pit, or of new shoes found preserved in resources and of lowering our carbon footprint, a long-forgotten shipwreck, or even well-worn family shoes hidden behind walls, chimney breasts or in attics to challenge our obsession with fast fashion. Repurposing shoes is, in protect inhabitants, footwear is connected to stories of both the fact, something that we share with eighteenth-century shoemakers living and the long departed. Read as an artifact of material culture, and their customers. Delving into shoemakers’ account books, we the shoe has an unexpected ability to transform significance and see that one of the constant references is to the repair of shoes: meaning over the course of decades or centuries. One of the many resoling, mending uppers, repairing rips and bindings. Shoemakers features that makes the study of shoes so fascinating is that the very often did the same work that today is completed in a shoe repair value of footwear, whether held as a prized commodity of personal shop. One wonders if we will see a return to an appreciation of adornment or fulfilling the basic function of comfortable walking or this artisan skill as we think more carefully about the longevity laboring, lies in how they molded to the foot of the wearer with use. of our clothing. Although the impulses and rationale (high initial Of equal interest, once a pair of shoes outlived its useful purpose for outlay for textiles, uneven supply chain versus twenty-first century the wearer, it could be cut down and pieced for another pair, given environmental concerns regarding processing material, shipping away as a gift to a family member or trusted servant, or perhaps & production) behind repair and refurbishment in the eighteenth preserved as a “concealed shoe,” hidden as talisman to bring good century was different from our climatic concerns today, there is luck to occupants moving into a new house. Whatever the case, nonetheless a poetic dialectic occurring between their interest in the stories are compelling, elucidating the human connection with long-term use and our own. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century shoes. Courtesy, Warner House, Portsmouth, New Hampshire.
Photo: Andrew Davis
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A different example of repurposing is seen in a pair of rose Textiles in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries held their value long after a given style had ceased to be popular. Over and pink wool baby shoes, held in the collection of Historic Deerfield. over, we find examples of brocades, damasks, and woolens cut down These charming infant or toddler’s shoes are of a wool calimanco and made into smaller items: a child’s dress made from a mother’s (also spelled calamanco, callimanco) and date to 1763-68. An 1888 gown; a woman’s bodice or jumps fashioned from a man’s coat or note accompanies the shoes, stating that they were from the Root an earlier dress; a quilted petticoat transformed to bedspread, small family of Connecticut, worn by Wealthy Peck Bardwell. Recently bits into quilts, and textiles to shoes, needle cases and any number conserved, these tiny shoes were comprised of individual pieced of smaller belongings. It is not surprising, then, to find the example fragments, likely from an early textile. The original wool textile may of her mother’s silk brocade from a 1739 wedding dress refashioned have been part of a blanket or perhaps a woman’s petticoat, now worn and cut into small pieces for Bardwell’s for Deborah Thaxter’s wedding shoes in 1773. footwear. When the 21-year-old bride married Capt. One can learn so much from Before the American Revolution, shoes James Todd on 18 November 1773, her mother the way people wore their typically were imported from London, but were had died few years previously. Her mother, shoes, altered their shoes, and treated like commodities, whether customDeborah [Lincoln] Thaxter, was married on 29 saved their shoes, and this made or second-hand. However, by the eve November 1739. evidence allows us to explore of the Revolution, embroidered, brocade or The survival of these shoes, created using the dimensions of their a “repurposed” silk, most likely held personal damask silk shoes with high heels became seen everyday lives, adding voices significance and meanings not included in as luxury items challenging notions of frugality which frequently do not the current family record. While the mother’s among Patriot leaders. Indeed, by the 1760s, appear in traditional sources. c. 1730s silk brocade features a rosy peachBritish Americans had additional reasons to repair and refurbish. colored floral motif at the toes and bold plant forms associated with Rococo textiles, the form of the shoe is in “To wear their old cloaths over again, till they can make new ones” keeping with the changes found in the later eighteenth century: a Benjamin Franklin, February 13, 1766 longer shoe with a pointed toe and much smaller and narrower heel. During the decade leading up to the American Revolution, The decision to employ an approximately 30 year-old textile was as trade embargoes and non-intercourse agreements took root, clearly of the bride’s choosing. Memory of her mother was carried many women opted to have local repairs or updates made to their literally and figuratively into her new life via her new/old shoes.
Pattern-matched, brocaded silk shoes by London cordwainer, Jonathan Hose, c. 1770. The shoes were held secure by buckles. Hose sent thousands of shoes to British America where they were in high demand. These fine examples are in the collection of Historic New Engand.
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An example of a much-altered pair of mid-eighteenth-century shoes that began as heeled silk brocade buckle shoes. Subsequently, several decades later, the heels were cut down, and a series of ‘make do’ repairs are found on the interior and exterior including piecing and an ill-carved insole. Courtesy, The Warner House, Portsmouth, NH. (Photo: author)
footwear. Pointed toes were altered to round, tongues were changed from round to pointed, French heels were reclad with new fabrics. Benjamin Franklin’s testimony before Parliament on February 13, 1766 concerning the sentiments of the American colonists regarding the Stamp Act is one of the more famous moments leading up to the Revolution. The transcript is well known, revealing a polished, eloquent, and direct performance. Franklin’s words made it clear to Parliament that Americans were even ready to forego their purchases of British clothing and shoes. Throughout New England, there is abundant evidence of repair and remaking of shoes found in the day books of cordwainers such as Samuel Lane in Stratham, NH, Colonel John Welch of Plaistow, NH, the Pope family in Salem, MA, and countless more. This is further born out in the evidence of the shoes themselves. Reviewing New England collections of footwear from the mid-1760s-1780s, there are extant examples which, upon careful examination, reveal repairs and updating. Even after the Revolution, women like Sally Brewster Gerrish had the heels of her Georgian shoes cut down to be more in line with the neoclassical style of low-heeled slippers.
The meanings that footwear held for early New Englanders transcended shoes’ utility or even beauty. Shoes were prized, celebrated, and displayed as markers of fashionable taste and genteel sensibility. New Englanders refreshed, altered, and revamped them, making repairs as long as the leather held together. And, the stories that their shoes could tell—of hopes and dreams, successes and celebrations, losses and disappointments—are revealing. One can learn so much from the way people wore their shoes, altered their shoes, and saved their shoes, and this evidence allows us to explore the dimensions of their everyday lives, adding voices which frequently do not appear in traditional sources. Kimberly Alexander, Ph.D. is on the faculty of the University of New Hampshire where she teaches museum studies, material culture and American history. She has held curatorial positions at several New England museums, including the MIT Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum and Strawbery Banke. Her most recent book, entitled Treasures Afoot: Shoe Stories from the Georgian Era traces the history of early Anglo-American footwear from the 1740s through the 1790s (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
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Figure 1. Redwood Rovensky Delivery Room, 2021.
Back to the Future: Restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room by Benedict Leca, Ph.D. We have a tendency to speculate about what historic structures might have actually “been like” originally, especially their interior spaces, which are far more likely to have sustained alterations than exterior architecture. On one hand, this helps us to locate in time aspects of what we’re experiencing during a visit, and to reimagine the past with greater accuracy. On the other hand, it speaks to false notions of purity and stasis—because buildings, particularly those of long vintage as the Redwood, are living things, emergent and adaptable to the needs of their users. The main structure of the Redwood narrates this very process: a series of extensions added along the west-to-east axis over 275 years. There are of course fixed points in a building’s evolution that allow for informed, historically sound restorations. Such is the subject here: the Historical Preservation & Heritage Commissionapproved restoration of the Rovensky Delivery Room, the interior of the extension designed by George Champlin Mason in 1875 and endowed in 2006 by the Grace family in honor of the family patriarch, the industrialist John E. Rovensky (1880-1970). Visitors will now notice the radical before/after difference (Fig. 1). Gone are the shelved walls implanted in 1914 by the architect Norman Isham that projected into the main space from near each corner 8 etc. Win ter 202 2
and which partitioned the room, one specifically designed by Champlin Mason as an open-spaced art gallery, the first in Rhode Island. The story begins earlier, with another Newporter who had a distinguished career and long involvement with the Redwood: the portrait painter Charles Bird King (1785-1862). For it was in late 1861 that Bird King’s precarious health had forced him to execute his will preemptively and to transfer some “fifty or more [pictures]” from his Washington D.C. studio to the Redwood. Even if the Library had likely from early on been the recipient of art works, notably portraits in the eighteenth century, it is the absorption of Bird King’s collection that set in motion the need for a new wing specifically conceived as an art gallery. Here is the June 1865 affirmation of the ‘Committee on the Enlargement of the Library,’ which established the bedrock purpose and subsequent design of the 1875 addition: “The valuable collection of pictures already in the possession of the Library, and the equally valuable collection of statuary proposed to be donated to the Library by Edward King, Esq., indicate the necessity for a suitable hall, to be used as a gallery for works of art.” Thus a decade later, in 1875, and after some deliberations about
This
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of
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Redwood’s
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gallery as
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as both a library devoted to books and a museum displaying art.
Figure 2. Richard Bliss, Manuscript floor plan of Redwood Library, 1911.
which architect should win the commission, Champlin Mason was assigned to lead the erection of the new gallery. While none of the drawings survive, we fortunately have Redwood librarian Richard Bliss’s 1911 floorplan of the Library—drawn up three years before Isham’s alterations in 1914—to validate what we have now returned to (Fig. 2). There we see the Rovensky Delivery Room as a large, open, mixed-use space, labeled “Art Gallery” and also as the Library’s Delivery Room. At the time among the largest enclosed spaces in Newport, Champlin Mason’s addition partakes of elements long established in European picture galleries: a cavernous room of undifferentiated walls able to accommodate groups of paintings tightly hung, an unencumbered floor plan to facilitate visitor circulation, and the use of a central art work to anchor the space. With this in mind, one is inclined to see Isham’s intervention as
nothing short of a disavowal of Champlin Mason’s picture gallery. Indeed, we are told as much when Isham describes it as a text-centered reference area in his ‘Condition and Future Development of the Redwood’ report to then-Library VicePresident Roderick Terry: “It is proposed to fit the great room… as a reference and delivery room. The genealogical collections, and others which need to be grouped where the shelves are accessible, are to be put in the alcoves formed at the corners…” This effacement of Rhode Island’s first art gallery can be attributed to the Redwood’s bifurcated history as an athenæum— as both a library devoted to books and a museum displaying art. As many still do today, Isham clearly viewed the Redwood as fundamentally a library; and he had exactly the right, receptive patron in the bibliophile Roderick Terry. Their seeming unconcern with the art gallery can partly be explained by the fact that, then as now, the Redwood’s activities remained dominated by the workaday demands of the library function, notably by the needs of members who were largely readers, and by the ever present spatial considerations of book storage. The Redwood’s nineteenth-century footprint was much smaller than it is now, without the added wings and vaults, and this while it continued—as we do today—to ingest by gift and purchase a huge number of books. From 1861 to 1875 the Redwood took in nearly 12,000 volumes, a quantity that forced some of the stacks into the Delivery Room. In fact, the dual nature of the athenæum as library and museum demanded that Champlin Mason’s gallery be adapted to mixed uses from the outset. If the impetus in 1862 had been to erect “a gallery for works of art,” the Library’s needs in 1875 made the completed gallery ideal to provide “ample room… for pictures, statuary, and library purposes for many years to come.” One might have hoped a generation later, when Isham and Terry were in dialog about the now removed bookshelves, that they could have r e d w o o d l i b r a r y. o r g 9
Figure 3. Redwood Delivery Room, ca. 1880.
heeded the wisdom of the librarian Bliss, who, in a 1908 lecture, our house philosophy, we need our physical plant to match that historic mandate, established when Redwood Directors appended was remarkably clear-eyed about the art gallery despite being so invested in books. Bliss is the only historic source anywhere who athenæum to the Library’s name in 1833 and an art gallery to underlines art as integral to the athenæum model: “From the early its original building in 1875. In short, we needed to effect this days of this institution the word ‘athenæum’ was not a mere rhetorical restoration if we are to fully assume our charge as an athenæum. expression. The Library was intended to be the dwelling place of What compelled the restoration in a second instance also the divine Athena—the patron of science and qualifies as ‘existential’ but in the literal sense: art no less than of literature.” Tellingly, Bliss The matter instead turns first the financial sustainability of the Redwood describes the history of the room’s use as a on the existential question as a culture hub and civic commons. This sequence of inversions and reversions: “It was of touches directly on the interrelated issues what we entail as originally used as a reading room, but it was of visitor experience relative to community a multidisciplinary athenæum support, and of spatial flexibility in found difficult to warm it adequately in winter, to accommodate connection with revenue-generating special so it was turned into an exhibition room for designed events. Both reduce to our need to earn the portraits and curiosities. This addition is “art no less than literature.” a living beyond passively circulating the now used as a Stack Room…” What is most revealing from Bliss’s testimony isn’t just what beggar’s cup. With respect to the former, the objective was always we learn of the real world contingencies that drove the Delivery to reproduce the richly appointed décor of the historic Delivery Room’s past adaptations. Rather, it is the parallel with our own Room shown in the single vintage photograph that has come need to adapt it today, albeit for different reasons. Our concerns down to us (Fig. 3). The old world look of art works, statuary, and are no longer about heat in winter, and much less about the space vitrines interspersed within period furnishings in a soaring space is to store books. The matter instead turns first on the existential our calling card: a setting redolent of erudition and discovery that question of what we entail as a multidisciplinary athenæum enchants old and young alike and makes the Redwood a refuge for designed to accommodate “art no less than literature.” If the locals and an obligatory stop for any informed tourist. Here is a public humanities are our stock-in-trade, and interdisciplinarity new visitor marveling soon after the opening in 1875: “We enter 10 etc. Win ter 202 2
Photo: David Hansen
Figure 4. Reading area, Rovensky Delivery Room, 2021.
at once and find ourselves in a superb 250 people in our historic interior rather hall… with an arched ceiling rising up to than outside in a rented tent costing a a skylight…of ground glass [that] affords fortune. Likewise, with the space cleared a mellow and most agreeable light… the Rovensky Delivery room can host [despite pending finishes] the changes a major speaker with upwards of 175 are about so perfected that one can be in attendance, all seated in comfort in comfortable there even now, and when our new folding chairs and benefitting it is all completed may luxuriate.” Our from our recently-installed top-shelf own changes might be said to be a return sound system generously paid for by the to the future, for the past configuration Champlin Foundation. of offending bookshelves and no seating .........In conclusion, the resulting has now given way to an open gallery, restoration qualifies as one of those rare, delimited by encased vitrines on the happy instances where historical rigor in Figure 5. Casters of mobile bookshelves. perimeter, that facilitates the viewing the return to ‘what was’ accords exactly of the paintings and which features two seating areas where one with what is needed in the present. Generally speaking the inverse can read and contemplate shielded by strategically positioned is more often the case: the marring of historic spaces is often due bookshelves. (Figs. 1 and 4) to ill-advised enlargements of their usually restrictive dimensions. The placement of the latter satisfies important considerations The marvel here was that the original plan was an enlargement regarding visitor accommodations, notably by providing cover for in itself, aimed by design to satisfy the needs of art lovers, and those seeking a minimum of privacy while still wanting a view eventually of readers as well as visitors. However, after 1914, onto the activities at the Library. In that sense, they surpass what when Isham’s shelved projections were implanted, what had been some might lament in the removal of the 1914 bookshelves— furnished and used since its erection as a space of both art display even if they were very rarely used—that is, the two nooks in the and study had become neither a suitable gallery where to view nor room’s west quadrants. Reduced in size so as not to obstruct the an inviting place where to read. Members who today regularly daylight from the windows, the shelves duplicate the molding of use the Library can verify that until this new reconfiguration the those removed and make use of salvaged fluting to provide regular Rovensky Delivery Room had by and large been reduced to a flatly patrons a sense of familiarity and permanence. But more important transactional site where to return or check out books to take to the is that they are entirely mobile, as their construction features a Reading Room or directly home. We have now returned to the system of hidden casters that enables their movement or removal past, which has made us ready for the future. to accommodate special events, whether a wedding or a lecture Sources: (Fig. 5). Indeed, besides historical accuracy, the specific aim of the Champlin Mason, George Annals of the Redwood Library, (1891), pp. 224 ff. restoration was to yield complete flexibility: everything—including King, David, An Historical Sketch of the Redwood Library and Athenæum, (1876), 11. the front desk, itself on hidden casters—can be tucked out of sight Bliss, Richard, The Newport Libraries, (1908), pp. 35-36. in a few hours’ time. For example, with our added ability to move Benedict Leca, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the Redwood the Reading Room tables, the Redwood can now host a dinner for Library & Athenæum. r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 11
Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History by Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D.
It is customary to understand our modern, global sense of time as a universal, even natural, horizon of experience. Western time seems rational, neutral, and beyond the pale of history. Yet, a work of contemporary art such as Nari Ward’s Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca: On Time and the Return of History, recently gifted to the Redwood, suggests all such assumptions may be outrageously inaccurate (Fig. 1). In fact, our current temporal regime is a direct inheritance of European Enlightenment values, science and economics, such that the accelerated, 24/7 culture that we associate with global contemporaneity merely forms the tail end of a massive, global project of regulating time that began in eighteenth-century Europe. There, amidst modernization, urbanization and industrialization, a burgeoning working class was increasingly awakened by factory criers rather than the rooster’s crow, their working day measured by a plethora of (suspiciously slow) clocks.1 In the American colonies, public, mechanized time was already established when the Redwood was built in 1747, and wholly entrenched by the late nineteenth century, when the Ithaca clock company began producing tall case clocks in upstate New York. 2 Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca inhabits the casing of one such Ithaca clock, strategically altering the outmoded timepiece to prompt questions about how time lies embedded in colonial modernity’s regimes of progress and labor, rationalization and control. In this work, now on display at the Redwood, Ward marshals the vintage clock as a Trojan horse, appropriating its traditional facade and air of old-world luxury to install Bakongo culture, temporality and experience in the heart of the Redwood’s historic interior. This centering of African culture is long overdue, not only because the U.S. was built on the forced labor of Africans taken from the Bakongo and neighboring regions, but also because as Robert Farris Thompson, the late, great Yale scholar of the Kongo noted: you will never understand American culture if you don’t understand African culture. In Ward’s clock, the stately shell from Ithaca camouflages a series of covert operations that has transformed its interior: the 12 etc. Win ter 202 2
Figure 1. Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, grandfather clock case, copper nails, patinated copper panel, African statues, 87 x 18 x 10.5 inches, 221 x 45.7 x 26.7 cm. Redwood Library & Athenæum Special Collections.
clock’s face has been effaced and its insides removed, save a pendulum, trapped in a cavity. Here, deep within the clock’s insides, the artist has placed an image of historical trauma, then closed the door. The clock has now become a container of unspeakable truths, sent into the world to speak of containment (Fig. 2). The Enlightenment did not only bequeath our current horizon of time; it also gave rise to the notion of the “self as container,”3 an idea implicit in the influential model of the Cartesian subject as a thinking, self-reflective entity ruled from inside. The birth of the Enlightenment subject and subjectivity was thus the birth of the individual as a doubled, self-contained conceptual agent, a subject fortified from the objects of the world by a carapace of intellect that constituted humans as thinking subjects of culture, substantively different from, and superior to, the rest of the natural world. Not surprisingly, eighteenth-century clockmakers projected this notion onto the emblems of culture they built, designing standing clocks like human containers: an exoskeleton scaled to a person’s height, grounded by feet, rising to a central waist, with a clock “face,” topped by a “bonnet.” Hands keep time, but the clock as a whole “runs,” its fragile interior mechanics encased, womb-like, in a cavity protected by glass. The design of an anthropomorphized container like a tall case clock materializes not only the period conception of the bounded subject of culture as separate from the world of nature, but also encompasses the larger metaphysical yearning to “keep” and thereby control time through a material aesthetics of containment. But Ward’s clock exposes the ethics that underpins this aesthetics, situating the modern drive to contain and control time as continuous with a colonial-era, technocratic mindset of dominating the land, the natural world, and
Escape/Escapement
Photo: John Klippel
other humans. Hence in the central cavity of Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca, where one would usually find the working mechanism of the timepiece, one encounters a pile of West African sculptures crammed into the interior chamber. (Fig.2) The vertical pendulum, weighted by its circular bob, is trapped in their midst. At first, it might seem that the literal objectification of Black subjects into wooden sculptural objects (typically for sale to tourists) reproduces the violent logic of enslavement which turns human subjects into objects for sale. Yet Ward mobilizes such literal objectification to make a different point: to insert the Black body into the center of the clock as the veritable motor of modernity. If he highlights histories of enslavement, it is to repudiate standard narratives of U.S. history that explain increased production and greater wealth as a series of “natural” effects produced by technical progress, whether the cotton gin or better timekeeping. Ward challenges the notion that the miraculous inventions of white men purely account for the U.S.’s accumulation of wealth and power; instead, he inserts the Black body—contained, constrained, captured—at the heart of North American modernity. Here interiority becomes entrapment; European rationalism a cage; and the “womb” a hold.4
neutral theories as time. In so doing, he carefully elevates specific associations over pseudo-universal truths. For instance, the word “escapement,” especially in concert with “anchor,” might suggest for many white Americans maritime leisure; an innocent escape from the quotidian pressures of terrestrial life. But here such a reading is obliged to face the narrow limits of whiteness. Ward, by presenting a history of Black subjects transported from Africa by force, invites audiences to imagine how, for the descendants of enslaved peoples, the maritime architecture of miniaturization can never be a space of comfort, for it is fraught with memories of forced incarceration and enslaved labor. Likewise, the word anchor resonates with horror in this image, suggesting shackles weighing down limbs, anchoring people to a piece of metal in the hold of a ship. At the same time, the trapped pendulum renders any actual movement of the clock impossible, suggesting impasse or historical standstill. Time collapses around the contained Black body as an image that elides the past with the present, tethering histories of enslavement to its contemporary incarnation for Black subjects in the U.S.: incarceration.6
“The Four Moments of the Sun”
In the top section of the clock, Figure 2. Detail of Nari Ward, The sculpture’s title, Anchoring where the face is usually positioned, Ward Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca. Escapement; Ithaca, redoubles the emphasis on replaced the generic “Western” clock face entrapment by naming a counterspace of openness and flight that with a specific Kongo cosmogram (a cross within a diamond), renders all the more acute the claustrophobic space of unfreedom. thereby displacing linear time in favor of a central African Ward here mobilizes the clock’s literal mechanics to jog the viewer’s time-space schema: a map of the four cardinal directions that associative leaps: for the clock interior also traditionally houses divides the earthly and celestial realms, while also representing the escapement, the wheel-like mechanism that nudges the wheel the “four moments of the sun” as it moves across the sky.7 forward into motion, then dips down to pause its advance. It thus (Fig. 3.) Ward’s foregrounding of the rich and poetic Bakongo regulates its pace in a two-step rhythm of halt and pause, a push and temporal system doesn’t simply refresh a familiar dominant image pull that has paced Western timepieces for centuries. The “anchor” of time with an alternative African conception, it decenters the escapement typical of this Ithaca clock is a simple trident shaped universalist assumptions of Western time. part or “catch,” so named for its resemblance to the marine weight, Nari Ward did not encounter the cosmogram in central Africa which in the seventeenth century largely replaced earlier circular (where the Bakongo reside across Angola and the DRC) but in escapements. Ward’s title “anchors” time in its “escape,” reframing the American south, where Bakongo art, music and dance left technical notions and literal instruments, such as anchors and an indelible imprint. He remembers noticing it on a visit to the escapements, as metaphorical counterweights, or philosophical First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia, built in 1794 counterpressures that shape the space of Blackness and Black by a still enslaved population, and long presumed to have been a history. stop on the Underground Railroad. The church floor is “patterned” At the most abstract level, time is always inescapable, as everyone with multiple Kongo crosses, a design that masked the functional from seventeenth-century poets such as Andrew Marvell to Stephen “breathing holes” that allowed air into the four-foot crawl space built Hawking in his A Brief History of Time (1988) have affirmed.5 And to harbor runaways beneath the church floor (Fig. 4). In Anchoring its unstoppable course is usually, ultimately, felt through the body’s Escapement; Ithaca, Ward has embedded the circular incisions own clocks: the tick of the heart, the rhythm of breath. But Ward not in a floor, but in what appears more like a ceiling: an image seems less interested in such generalized truths than in recovering of celestial transcendence, where an array of glinting copper nail specific, embodied histories that affirm the widely divergent ways heads is scattered across the cerulean blue of the patinated copper. that individual gendered and raced bodies feel or apprehend the This radiant, heavenly image, when placed above a cavity of trapped subjective force of histories or theories, including such seemingly figures, radically cleaves the symbolic space into a spiritual realm r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 13
Figure 3. Detail of Nari Ward, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca. Figure 4. Photograph of the floor of the First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, 1794, showing “breathing holes” in the shape of the Kongo cross.
Photo: John Klippel
Figure 5. Bakongo artist. Power Figure (Nkisi Nkondi), 19th century, with 20th-century restoration. Wood, iron, glass, resin, kaolin, pigment, plant fiber, cloth, 33 7/8 x 13 3/4 x 11 in. (86 x 34.9 x 27.9 cm). Brooklyn Museum, Museum Expedition 1922, Robert B. Woodward Memorial Fund, 22.1421.
of transcendence and freedom above and an earthly hell of capture beneath. In this way, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca not only maps a cosmogram of the “four corners” as a crosscultural convergence of heaven above and hell below, but also recreates the architecture of escapement, recreating the body of the clock in the memory of the historic Baptist church of Savannah where, like so many other spaces of terror and escape, escapement lay above and hiding below. The sculpture imagines worlds in tissue-thin proximity, yet separated by life and death, connected only by the fragility of a breath.8 Ward delineates the Kongo cross with a radiant constellation of copper nails, a material that recalls Bakongo visual culture, often made with the copper abundant in the region; the nails here especially quote the nails used in the famous nkisi sculptures.9 Like the Ithaca clock, nkisi treat the body as a container, and as a burying ground or hiding place. In the nkisi, each hammered nail seals a covenant, oath, or legal agreement (Fig. 5). Inside the wooden figure, the stomach has been hollowed out to house potent objects such as medicine or herbs, often in turn, wrapped. Then a piece of glass or mirror is placed over the chamber to conceal and protect the contents. Even as Ward’s copper nails visually reiterate the nailstudded surface of the nkisi, his excavation of the clock interior and his insertion of powerful agents of trauma and memory in the cavity suggests the whole clock is a life-sized nkisi. In this way, Anchoring Escapement; Ithaca reimagines not just time (the manifest subject of the work) from a cross-cultural perspective, but also containment and interiority, smuggling global, contemporary counterarguments into Enlightenment ideals of order, universality and control. The resulting installation dislodges Western time from its pretension to universalism. And it questions 14 etc. Win ter 202 2
the ideals of containing time, the self and the world. The Cartesian fantasy of interiority—of the subject as fundamentally different from and superior to nature, and as born to dominate by projecting rational order onto the chaos of the world—collapses in Ward’s work. Interiority comes to suggest, instead, less a vaunted threedimensionality and fullness of self than a hopelessly inadequate, even infantile mode of hiding and repression, a removal from sight of a traumatic history due to the difficulty of confronting it. Ultimately, the sculpture, by materializing the restless flows and promiscuous exchanges of syncretic global cultures, concretizes the failure of containment as a strategy. Escape may be hindered by anchors of all kinds, but in a global present of dynamically mutating, ever-changing flows, aren’t leaks and spills inevitable? 1 In a landmark 1967 essay, British historian E.P. Thompson tied time to changes in labor and the emergence of capitalist societies. He noted workers complaining that clocks seemed rigged, moving slowly during shifts, and sped up during breaks. E.P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): pp. 56-97. 2 William Claggett had set up shop in Newport in 1716. 3 “We experience ourselves as entities, separate from the rest of the world—as containers with an inside and an outside.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press) 1981, 58. 4 Saadiya Hartman writes: “The slave ship is a womb/abyss. The plantation is the belly of the world.” Saadiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society (18:1): 2016, 1. 5 Andrew Marvell To his Coy Mistress, 1650s, “Though we cannot make our sun stand still; yet we will make him run.” 6 See Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (NY: New Press, 2010). 7 See Chapter 2, “The Sign of the Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art and Religion in the Americas” in Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art & Philosophy (NY: Random House, 1983). 8 The breathing holes form part of Ward’s larger engagement with this image, which has often stood alone in works Ward calls simply Breathing Holes, and which he has linked with incarceration such as Correctional Circle 1802 (2018). 9 The DRC is the second largest country in Africa, and the world’s fourth largest copper producer, with mines in the mineral rich Katanga.
Purchase of the clock made possible by the generosity of: Belinda Kielland, Mr. and Mrs. William L. Leatherman, Mr. and Mrs. John Rovensky Grace, and The Edward W. Kane and Martha J. Wallace Family Foundation.
Leora Maltz-Leca, Ph.D. Associate Professor, Global Contemporary Art Dept. Head, Theory & History of Art & Design, Rhode Island School of Design Curator of Contemporary Projects, Redwood Library & Athenæum
Quarantine: Then and Now by Sean Doherty
For all of the handwringing about the unprecedented conditions wrought by COVID-19, it is important to recognize that before the advent of modern medicine disease and death were a constant in the lives of our forebears. With more varied pathogens, and with more frequency, isolated epidemics routinely morphed into pandemics. We can gain an understanding of the historic regularity with which scourges emerged in Rhode Island from an 1881 survey article penned by Dr. David King, Redwood Library President during the years 1849-59 and one-time head of the Rhode Island Medical Society. He notes that outbreaks of small pox had arisen in 1743, 1752, and 1776; of yellow fever in 1793; and of cholera in 1832, 1849, and 1866.1 King was of course well placed to understand this history and the mechanics to defend public health since his father—also Dr. David King, and himself President of the Library (1830-1836)—had lived through and fought many epidemics. King Sr. is credited with the state’s first vaccination, along with the first treatment of a patient with yellow fever, as well as being the lead figure who extinguished the 1793 epidemic in Newport. It is during King Sr.’s presidency of the Redwood, in 1832, that emerged the cholera pandemic that the document pictured below addressed (Fig. 1), a fascinating period artifact recently purchased on eBay for the Redwood Special Collections. It is a printed circular issued by the Newport Board of Health sent to all surrounding Rhode Island municipalities—this one on July 7th, 1832 to the
health authorities in Warwick. The advisory aimed to caution against the cholera already prevalent in New York and to warn of the possibility of it appearing in Rhode Island, and also to assert the quarantine policies put in place to protect Newport. Newporters were already by that time aware of the danger, as the Newport Mercury had tracked the outbreak across the globe for over a year previous. First reported on 23 September 1830 as it ravaged Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, the epidemic had spread to Moscow within a month.2 In 1831 it reached into the heart of Europe, devastating Munich, London, and Paris.3 According to the modern historical study by G. F. Pyle, the cholera had then diffused outwards from the port city of Montreal and Quebec, spread down the Lawrence River and “continued until it reached Lake Champlain in the United States. However, in many instances the original point of departure was New York City.” 4 In an age when many contagious diseases, and notably cholera, were endemic, Rhode Island laws and legislation safeguarding public health—and the authority to enforce them—had been enacted from early on. The general assembly in Newport passed the first law, entitled an “Act to Prevent the Spreading of Infectious Sickness,” in 1711. Over time, a body of dedicated legislation accrued from which was adapted extensions to answer whichever infectious disease prevailed at a given moment. During the 1832 cholera outbreak, Newport’s City Council enacted the 1822 law,
Figure 1. A fascinating period artifact recently purchased on eBay for the Redwood Special Collections. It is a printed circular issued by the Newport Board of Health sent to all surrounding Rhode Island municipalities—this one on July 7th, 1832 to the health authorities in Warwick.
r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 15
And the episode gives us a whole new perspective on the severity of mandates when we consider the New York Evening Post’s report that in addition to the quarantine measures and penalty of a $300 fine for unlawful disembarkation, Newport “drew a cordon of militia around the city” who were “authorized to keep off the Cholera Morbus with gun and bayonet.”
Figure 2. Newport Board of Health cholera circular (1832), cover. Sent to Warwick Board of Health, July 7, 1832.
which sanctioned the election of a Board of Health, whose duties, powers and authority during a crisis superseded those of the town council itself. The Board “ha[d] a right to exercise by law, during the period for which they shall be the said town-council, …appointed for the preservation of health of the inhabitants.” 5 Accordingly, it was empowered “to carry into effect rules and regulations respecting quarantine, as to them that may appear necessary, to prevent the introduction of contagious or infectious diseases from other places.”6 Newport ordered quarantine regulations to take effect on 3 July 1832 in response to New York’s choleric cluster, and a few days later our document was printed and sent to Warwick, with other identical ones distributed across the state. One might first note the stated avowal of the need for a solidary response: “The Board [is] aware, that [the following resolutions] will be of no purpose without the Boards of Health in the different towns in this state, and Massachussets, act in concert.” Among the declarations was that all incoming vessels quarantine on the east side of Rose Island, until ordered otherwise, and “that no person or persons be permitted to land from any…vessel…without permission from [the] Board.”7 And the episode gives us a whole new perspective on the severity of mandates when we consider the New York Evening Post’s report that in addition to the quarantine measures and penalty of a $300 fine for unlawful disembarkation, Newport “drew a cordon of militia around the city” who were “authorized to keep off the Cholera Morbus with gun and bayonet.”8 16 etc. Win ter 202 2
In the end, the measures were only somewhat successful, as evidenced by a letter from Dr. William Turner of Newport to Dr. John Warren of Boston published in the Newport Mercury and reprinted in The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. Turner wrote that passengers contracted cholera even as they were among those who remained on board while anchored near Rose Island. When they disembarked one week after quarantine, they became ill and died.9 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9
David King, “State of Rhode Island” National Board of Health Bulletin 3 No. 11, 1881. 79. Newport Mercury, 25 December 1830. Newport Mercury, 14 January, 13 August 1831, G. F. Pyle, “The Diffusion of Cholera in the United States in the Nineteenth Century,” Geographical Analysis 1969, 61. The Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations (Providence: Miller & Hutchens, 1822), Section 10, 263. The Public Laws of the State of Rhode Island, Section 2, 261. Newport Board of Health, Circular, Health Office, Newport R. I. July 4th 1832 To the Boards of Health, in the States of Rhode-Island and Massachusetts, B. B. Howland, Newport Rhode Island: 1832. New York Evening Post, 9 July 1832. William Turner, “Cholera at Newport” The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal Vol. VII No. 2, August 22 1832, 26.
Sean Doherty is the Reference Librarian at the Newport Public Library, Newport, Rhode Island
How to Be Good: Bad Advice From Eighteenth-Century Conduct Books by Tabitha Kenlon, Ph.D.
In Fanny Burney’s 1778 roles in life, setting out how-to’s novel Evelina, the eponymous from cradle to grave: how to be a heroine writes letters to friends good daughter, sister, friend, and and family detailing the balls wife, mother, and widow, or old and parties she attends and maid. the people she meets there, By the eighteenth century, providing both an entertaining with increased literacy and record of eighteenth-century a booming print culture, many society and a certainty that books included discussions of young ladies of ages past would education, accomplishments, and be quite at home on Facebook, what reading was suitable for Instagram, and TikTok. They young women (spoiler—almost would use the platforms to show nothing; even the Bible was off their accomplishments— fraught with danger). Most dancing, painting, needlework, authors acknowledged that musical ability, even foreign women went out into society and Figure 1. The Mirror of the Graces; or The English Lady’s Costume languages, perhaps lip-syncing spoke to men, though this was (1811). to the latest Reggaeton hit. And rarely encouraged, necessitating regardless of the century, their elders would tell them they were warnings against flirting, trying to be funny, or appearing wasting their time and suggest they devote their energy to more too intelligent. useful occupations. After the eighteenth century, the conduct book continued to It does seem that one of the most enduring human characteristics evolve. Despite the Victorian glorification of motherhood, interest is the desire to tell people what to do, and especially women. In the in what was happening outside the home increased. The nineteenth eighteenth century, conduct manuals remained a favorite method century turned attention to etiquette and how women should for the creation and perpetuation of ideals of appropriate female behave on trains, in hotels and restaurants, and at public events like activity; while there are few twenty-first-century versions of books weddings, christenings, and funerals. Twentieth-century iterations like Sermons to Young Women ( James Fordyce, 1766) or Strictures of conduct manuals tend to be divided by subject and often blur on the Modern System of Female Education (Hannah More, 1799), the line between self-help and etiquette. Dating guides proliferate, present-day society is no less eager to advise and control the as does advice on relationships in general, beauty, career, travel, and behavior of women. finance. Unlike the vast majority of conduct books, the more recent Ever since conduct books first appeared in the late fourteenth contributions to the genre tend to separate religious and secular, century,the genre has evolved and been adapted to suit changing social imitating the society they address. expectations. Conduct manuals could be collections of cautionary tales, sets of instructions, sermons, letters, or conversations. They Women’s Brains: A Necessary Inconvenience Writers of eighteenth-century conduct manuals took it for were written by both men and women, and though they originally addressed primarily men, women quickly became their preferred obvious fact that “Nature” had endowed all women with beauty, audience. The books were often organized by virtue and vice: the charm, a desire to please, and some degree of intelligence. There importance of humility, piety, chastity, modesty, and industriousness, were, however, carefully delineated limits to the scope and contrasted with the dangers of pride, affectation, ostentatious dress, approved uses of that intelligence. Young women were permitted being too forward, reading too much, talking too much—too much to read improving books and encouraged to avoid frivolities like of almost anything, really. Authors also liked to focus on women’s the novel, which, like romance novels and films of today, were r e d w o o d l i b r a r y . o r g 17
In a sense, reading eighteenth-century conduct manuals shows us more about our present than the past. In these accounts of how women were supposed to act, we can trace a through-line to current expectations—and resistance.
Figure 2. Elizabeth Easton, Needlepoint sampler, 1795.
sure to give audiences misleading portraits of life and love. James Fordyce, in the aforementioned Sermons to Young Women (1766), characterizes novelists’ descriptions of love as “loose and luscious,” likely to “engender notions of love unspeakably perverting and inflammatory.” He is warning here against the extremes of emotion that reading might excite; it is difficult to be meek, modest, and chaste when one’s pulse is racing. If novels were verboten, what then should a young lady read? What should she learn? Such questions were a favorite topic of debate, and traditional conduct books typically presented conservative recommendations for female education, often focusing on moral rectitude rather than the acquisition of knowledge. Hester Chapone tried a combination, advocating an extensive familiarity with history, from antiquity to the present. In Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, Addressed to a Young Lady (1773/1793), she recommends talking about history with friends to better remember the facts, and is of the opinion that “it is thought a shameful degree of ignorance, even in our sex, to be unacquainted with the nature and revolutions of [ancient Greek and Roman] governments, and with the characters and stories of their most illustrious heroes.” Chapone encourages an in-depth study and an open mind. But she 18 etc. Win ter 202 2
also has a moralist strain, observing of Nero that “a human creature given up to vice is infinitely below the most abject brute.” Education for young women required justification; a lesson about virtue and vice ensured that readers were learning the right things. But subjects did matter. Pierre-Joseph Boudier de Villemert, in his apparently un-ironic The Ladies Friend (1771), cautions that “a few only” of the sciences are “within [women’s] reach,” and “the abstract sciences and knotty investigations […] might cloud their minds and blunt that keenness which constitutes a part of their excellence.” He presents science as not only too difficult for women, but also detrimental to their health. An additional risk of educating women was the possibility that they then might frighten away the men. Dr. John Gregory, in A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters (1774), advises, “if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding.” Gregory holds the party line: men are more important than women. He provides his instructions to his daughters so they will know how to be “most respectable and most amiable in the eyes of my own sex.” Everything a woman does, or does not do, should be weighed against the affect it will have on men. It seems that, at least in the eighteenth century, male egos require a great deal of coddling. But an additional fear among these writers is that education will distract a woman from her true purpose—marriage and children—either by rendering her unappealing to men or by diminishing her own interest in the role she was destined for. If a woman’s sole purpose was to marry and raise children, then all her energy ought to be on men, not on her own mind.
Wife Lessons
If a woman had one job—“wife and mother” was a package deal—and arranged marriages were no longer common, conduct manuals had to devote chapters to the discomfiting ritual of courtship. The concept of dating did not exist; young men and women would meet at carefully monitored social situations, be introduced, perhaps dance, and converse on tasteful topics. A woman who let a man know she liked him was a coquette. A woman who liked more than one man was a coquette. A woman who— well, you get the idea. Although women were generally told to be passive, they were reassured that the power of refusal was theirs; according to Mary Cockle’s Important Studies for the Female Sex (1809), “The privilege of man is to select—that of woman to accept or reject.” Conduct manuals cautioned women against declaring their preference for a man before he had made his feelings known; Gregory believed a woman need never reveal the extent of her love for a man, even if she married him, arguing that her acceptance of his offer of marriage was proof enough. While this line of thinking
demonstrates society’s belief that women had control over their marital prospects, the confidence is misplaced. Indeed, a woman might be permitted to say no to a man, but if a husband was her best hope for financial stability, her options remained limited. Regardless of the depth of a woman’s feelings for her husband, conduct books told women that a key part of the job description of “wife” was being a civilizing influence and creating an atmosphere at home that would keep men on their best behavior. Boudier de Villemert declared, “Man, as destined for deeds of strength and courage, has a roughness in his temper, which women alone can soften: there is [...] a sweetness capable of molifying [sic] that natural impetuosity, which, without such a connection, would quickly degenerate into ferocity.” This is a reversal in thinking, as innumerable conduct manuals of previous centuries portray women as dangers for men to avoid, shrews for men to tame, temptations for men to resist. While women might be grateful to no longer be thought of as the root of all evil, the new role is little better, as they continue to be held responsible for men’s actions. Before, if a man misbehaved, he could blame a woman for leading him astray. Now, if a man misbehaved, he could blame a woman for not keeping him happy and civilized enough. Some writers argued that a woman couldn’t be a good influence on her husband if her education was inadequate—an educated woman would be a better wife and mother. An anonymous writer published in The Matrimonial Preceptor (1797) complained that the “accomplishments” young women were taught (reading, writing, singing, dancing, and needlework) did not prepare them for the career of being a good wife; is it any surprise, he asks, “that a person thus brought up, should be so unfit for the conversation of a man of sense, for the partner of his joys and cares, or to share with him in the government of his family?” Conduct books promoted education only as a form of up-skilling that would better equip women to be companions to their husbands and teachers of their children. The word “education,” though, was often applied broadly and could mean anything from academic studies to needlework and dancing to religious instruction. The Mirror of the Graces (1811), which is primarily a guide to correct fashion and manners, encourages modesty and virtue, explaining, “We may safely teach a well-educated girl that virtue ought to wear an inviting aspect […] But we must never cease to remember that it is virtue we seek to adorn.” Clearly, the “well-educated girl” here has been taught all about the female virtues; whether she knows anything about history or science is beside the point.
Be a Woman
We seem to have gone in a circle, haven’t we? From what young women ought to read, all the way to how any education they receive should prepare them to be good wives and mothers. That is because for conduct book writers (and much of society), all roads women travel on ought to lead to marriage. Gregory speaks for almost every conduct manual when he declares his purpose is to explain what makes a woman attractive to a man. But we must remember, when we read conduct manuals, that they are aspirational texts—they are records not of reality, but of desire. If women were doing what they were supposed to be doing, the books would be redundant. Rather, moralists looked around them and saw decreasing parental influence in their children’s choice of marriage partner; women publishing novels, plays, and poems; and actresses becoming celebrities whose
Figure 3. Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Young Girl Reading, ca. 1769 National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
affairs with noblemen and royalty were on display in the newspapers. With society in such decline, the pen must be taken up to remind young women of their sacred duty and destiny to become virtuous wives and mothers. Some of them did, and some of them didn’t. In a sense, reading eighteenth-century conduct manuals shows us more about our present than the past. In these accounts of how women were supposed to act, we can trace a through-line to current expectations—and resistance. We still have books telling women how to catch a man, but we also have books about the pleasures of solitude and independence, the value of strong friendships, and how “bad girls” have broken rules and changed the world. So we can all of us read conduct manuals past and present, accept or reject the advice they offer, and continue to discover and redefine what it means to be a woman. Dr. Tabitha Kenlon has published widely on conduct manuals and other genres of eighteenth-century literature. Her book, Conduct Books and the History of the Ideal Woman, examines seven centuries of rules about women’s behavior and is available as an audio book (Blackstone, 2021) and an e-book (Anthem Press, 2020). She would like to thank members of the Women’s Studies Group 1558–1837 for their generous assistance finding the images in this article, and the American Council of the Blind’s 18th-Century Reading Group, especially Amy, Chanelle, Irene, Jeanette, and Peggy, for keeping literature alive during a difficult time.
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EXHIBITIONS AT THE REDWOOD Gifts from the Sea: Sailors’ Valentines by Happy van Beuren
Photo: K. Irving
An exceptional gathering of creations by Newporter Hope (“Happy”) van Beuren in the specialized art form of sailor’s valentines. Evolved out of the maritime crafts tradition of the Caribbean, and made using an array of shells, seeds and coral, van Beuren creates strikingly patterned ensembles that remind us of Newport’s enduring legacy as a city of artists and makers. Through April 1, 2022
Treasures of the Redwood
Harry Benson, The Beatles and Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) at the Fifth Street Gym, Miami, 1964.
In celebration of its 275 year, this exhibition will bring forth a rich selection of some of the Redwood’s unparalleled holdings, gathered over nearly three centuries of collecting and donations. Starting with rare, annotated works from the Original Collection, to a range of eighteenth-century materials, such as the famous Stiles map, period portraits and sculptures, manuscripts, furniture and artifacts. Also featured will be supremely rare works from the Cary collection of pattern and decorative art books, as well as the private notebooks of American portraitist Charles Bird King, a cache of rare French decorative drawings, and a range of books only known in a single copy from the Redwood. th
Harry Benson: Persons of Interest Harry Benson’s incisive photographs have captured the most important persons and events of the 20th century; from his arrival in America with the Beatles in 1964 to marching with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights movement to being next to Senator Robert F. Kennedy when he was assassinated; from photographing every US president from Eisenhower to Biden to covering Truman Capote’s legendary Black & White Ball, he is the most published photographer in LIFE magazine. Opening June 29, 2022
Opening June 17, 2022
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the Past and
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Become a Redwood Member redwoodlibrary.org/membership Tel: 401.847.0292 x 115
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