“This is a strange book”: Re-Membering Local Democratic Agency in Bird’s Sheppard Lee

Midway through Robert Montgomery Bird’s Sheppard Lee (1836), the eponymous protagonist wishes to use his metempsychotic powers to escape the unhappy life of his third inhabitation, the body and life of Abram Skinner, yet he struggles to locate a spare corpse. His dilemma leads to a Swiftian proposal for a more profitable way to dispose of dead bodies: instead of burying them, convert them into manure (incidentally, a proposal that would in no way help Sheppard’s current plight). After calculating the conversion rate of bodies to manure and reckoning economic profits, his ruminations turn to the political sphere:

A similar disposition (to continue the subject) of their mortal flesh might be . . . required, in this land, of all politicians and office-holders, from the vice-president down to the county collector; who, being all patriots, would doubtless consent to a measure that would make them of some use to their country. As for the president, we would have him reserved for a nobler purpose; we would have him boiled down to soap . . . to be used by his successor in scouring the constitution and the minds of the people.¹

The initial musing considers useless all local and national officials with the exception of the Chief Executive, but also jocularly declares these representatives to be “patriots” who would readily lend their “consent” to having their dead bodies converted to manure. The narrative’s alternative proposal for the president’s dead body and its action on “the constitution and the minds of the people,” however, eschews distinctions of scale and disregards the need for compliance from either presidents or people. In the first sentence, the narrative favors concrete and agency-filled terms: the “mortal flesh” of these politicians and office-holders possesses patriotic feelings that lead to willful consent. The second transacts in more abstract registers and passive phrasing; a royal “we” stands ready to “have [the president] boiled down into soap” and expects the successor to carry out the regenerative cleansing not only on a specific document but also on the minds of a generalized “people.” As a whole, the narrator thinks little of politicians at any level. Yet the distinctions between the two sentences—concrete bodies, animated by collective or fellow feeling and actively participating in acts of regeneration, versus a nationalized political economy that relies upon deferral to corporatized abstractions that simply recycle the status quo—betray the novel’s more specific concerns with prevalent dysfunctionality in 1830s U.S. politics. The problem, the passage implies, can be found in the tendency for local agency and contingency to be subsumed in the abstractions and passivity of national life.

Appearing at a time of paradigm-shifting change in U.S. socio-political culture, passages like this one, and the novel more broadly, play upon the tensions of a democratic politics operating across a range of scales. This essay focuses upon the ways the novel illuminates problems tied to abstracting cultural forms associated with national community and the management-style procedures of mass-party politics and

Mortality: Robert Montgomery Bird’s Plan for Converting Bodies into Manure. “Sheppard Lee: fragments and notes,” undated. Ms. Coll. 108, Box 11, Folder 259, Robert Montgomery Bird Papers, Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, University of Pennsylvania.

their negative impact on ideals of democratic self-rule. While spending more of its satirical energies on targets needing exposure—both obvious and more obscured ones—Sheppard Lee also works through the figurative and literal challenges of regrounding democratic experience in ways that account for concrete bodies, their affective conditions, and their local agency. Published in August 1836, the novel arrived at a time of new investments in the nation, not only socio-politically and economically, but also in print and literary cultures. Material developments such as railroads, canals, and high speed printing presses were transforming the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life; the consolidation of the market economy engendered new conceptions of supralocal community and exchange; universal...