Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England

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University of Chicago Press, 2006 - History - 237 pages

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.

 

Contents

1 Mobilizing the Poor
3
2 Londons Economy of Unsettledness and Beyond
12
Harmans Caveat
33
The Virtual I
47
Part II The Case of Edward Barlow
63
5 Not Well Settled in My Mind
63
Never to be worth one groat afore a beggar
84
7 Charting Barlow
108
Unsettling the New Global Economy
153
Edward Barlows Family Tree
157
Inventory of George Barlow 1686
159
Record of Edward Barlows Mobility On Land and Sea
161
Will of Edward Barlow Commander of the Liampo 1708
174
On the Variation of the Compass
177
Notes
183
Selected Bibliography
213

Part III Toward a Lowly Aesthetics of Unsettledness
129
A Constant Parting
131

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About the author (2006)

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.

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