In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • What Is Improvement?
  • Timothy Sweet (bio)

The title of John Fea's The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (Pennsylvania, 2008) calls to mind Raymond Williams's critique of improvement in rural England. Williams identifies two primary meanings of "improvement," which were materially linked in the consolidation of the rural class structure during the eighteenth century but could be morally dissociated.1 Agricultural improvement, the getting of more value from land through a program of enclosure, drainage, manuring, crop selection and rotation, and other yield-boosting technologies, supported the social improvement manifested in a culture valuing taste and refinement. "Cultivation" bore a similar double sense, whose material connection has since become increasingly less visible as the rural economy has all but disappeared from sight. Indeed, as Williams argues, the moral claims of social improvement were turned against the material structure of economic improvement, beginning in the late eighteenth century with the writings of William Cobbett and continuing through the Victorian era. In the United States, that critique was famously taken up by Henry David Thoreau, especially in Walden, following a long New England tradition of concern for improvement.

Fea tells the eighteenth-century American story of Philip Fithian's intellectual and social improvement not in order to examine its connection to and detachment from material improvement—taking these for granted much as Fithian himself seems to have done—but rather to illustrate some other large claims about the nature of the Enlightenment in continental North America. Fea's primary claim is that "the Enlightenment was about self-improvement" (5). This gives an entirely different focus from those studies of rural American Enlightenment that address the question of modernity through agricultural improvement.2 Fea's focus on bourgeois social identity contrasts moreover with work that understands the Enlightenment in terms of politics, literature, science, and public culture.3

Philip Fithian lived in an American milieu in which material improvement [End Page 225] supported substantial social improvement. Philip's great-grandfathers had migrated from New England (one by way of Long Island) to take lands on the Cohansey River, New Jersey, in the late seventeenth century. His grandfathers established themselves as gentleman famers: landowners who used laborers, sometimes including slaves, to work their lands. Philip's uncle Samuel Fithian, a first son, inherited the largest portion of the family estate to become one of the wealthiest men in the region, with holdings valued at over £1500. Philip's father Joseph, a third son, was a middling farmer who did not work his own lands but employed laborers as well as his sons. In this family culture, Philip had to work hard as a boy but aspired to the status of gentleman. Improvement of land was especially evident in Cohansey in the reclamation of salt marshes along the Cohansey River through a system of banks and sluices. In addition to other seasonal farm work, Philip spent summers hauling mud and stones via canoe and wheelbarrow to repair and extend the banks, suffering mosquitoes and "the ague." By the age of twenty, and perhaps earlier, Philip was keeping a work journal in which he recorded the weather and daily activities.

As a first son, Philip stood to inherit his father's farm and with it his status as a gentleman. However, as Fea shows, a further path of social improvement opened to him within the religious culture of Cohansey. Led by ministers of four local Presbyterian churches, Cohansey experienced something of a religious awakening during the 1760s, whose sources Fea traces to a denominational reinvigoration following the reconciliation in 1758 of the Great Awakening split between "New Side" evangelicals and "Old Side" conservatives. Experiencing a conversion in 1766, Philip felt he might be called to the ministry and, although reluctant to leave the family estate and the Cohansey community, he set about persuading his father to send him to the College of New Jersey (which would soon become Princeton University). During this agonistic period, Philip began to keep another journal separate from his work journal, which began as a means of spiritual self-examination and became a literary and religious common-place book. At Princeton...

pdf

Share