Eighteenth-Century Fiction

Over the course of its five chapters, The Wreckage of Intentions weaves a story about the fitful, ambivalent formation of England’s national and colonial identity through the projects—both those undertaken and those that lived only on the page—that sought to grow its wealth, feed its people, build its infrastructure, and free it from dependence on rival nations. Wreckage proposes that early modern projects, characterized by “a written plan for action and the possibility of action itself,” “tested new ways of being a society” through the telling of stories about what England could be (7). Rather than looking back at projects and projectors through the lens of historical outcomes, David Alff asks his readers to imagine themselves in the moment of possibility and promise that the eighteenth-century project represented. Reading projects in the spirit of their possibility counters the teleological temptation to read the past as/for the prefiguration of the present, where the present is taken as an inevitability: “Old plans enable us to recover history as a scatter plot of lived experiences and to appreciate how each unconstellated moment implied futures that we can recollect and learn from today” (15). At the same time, Alff’s history and anatomy of the rise of the “project” in early modern England helps us see the ubiquitous modern concept of the “project” in all its contingent historicity.

Though his examples are wide-ranging, Alff anchors his first three chapters in the histories and texts of three specific projects: Andrew Yarranton’s 1677 England’s Improvement by Sea and Land (a project never undertaken), Aaron Hill’s beech nut oil project of the 1710s (a project [End Page 455] that was begun but was ultimately abandoned), and the drainage of the Bedfordshire fens (a project that was completed). These deeply explored examples showcase the book’s greatest strengths. Alff excels at telling rich, textured stories about the people and projects that shaped the English landscapes (literal and literary) of Restoration and early Georgian England. He also excels at meticulous textual analysis. The most innovative part of The Wreckage of Intentions is its deep attention to “project-writing” as a genre unto itself. Previous scholarship on eighteenth-century projects has tended to focus on the content of particular kinds of projects (for example, agricultural improvement), or on the depiction—usually negative—of projects and projectors in poetry, drama, and satire. Such approaches have tended to leave aside the question of what makes a project a project in the first place.

The first chapter offers a breakdown of the linguistic, rhetorical, and figurative devices that distinguished the “project” as a genre of writing, enabling Alff to trace the influence of the projecting mode through other, seemingly unrelated genres of writing in later chapters. Project-writing represents a particular kind of fictionality, Alff points out, prescribing “unreal phenomena through an artifice of rhetorical verisimilitude” (6)— a claim that gestures toward a rich and underexplored vein of continuity between the rise of the realist novel and the age of projects. Similarly, Alff draws parallels between the project and the georgic as imaginative and literary forms that undertake the “staging and resolution of discord,” the “conception of a quarriable past and pliant future,” and the “imagination of rural land as wealth in potential” (117). Alff’s detailed literary and rhetorical analysis of the project persuasively supports the book’s argument for the centrality of project-writing to eighteenth-century culture, and it also opens the way for crucial insights into the nature of modern capitalism. The early modern project, in Alff’s telling, recurs over and over again to the idea of “reconciliation of profit motives with the public good” (20): the notion that the unique power of the project was to generate wealth, monetary and otherwise, that would simultaneously lift up all of England and line the pockets of the project’s investors. This aspect of the early modern project feels...