The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
War, took up peddling in the 1780s, and participated in several literary circles, although always as an interloper. In the 1790s, he began composing poems to sell among his other wares, and stories of his bizarre behavior, and possible mental illness or disability, began circulating along with his poems, pins, and tape. These stories were aided by two developments in Plummer’s life: his quest for patronage from the wealthy and eccentric merchant “Lord” Timothy Dexter and a religious awakening that prompted him to street preaching and millennial prophecy (like his contemporary Lorenzo Dow, he was also known for interrupting church services). After Dexter’s death in 1806, Plummer lived entirely on sales of his poems and other goods and actually accumulated a respectable estate. He was tolerated by town authorities and became a figure of fun, especially for his often-proclaimed (and always frustrated) desire to find a wife. He wrote, printed, and peddled his work continuously in and around Newburyport until his death in 1819.16
During his lifetime, Newburyport (which became a separate town three years after his birth) was an important trading and shipping post on the northern Atlantic seaboard, and Plummer’s career roughly fits the contour of the area’s economic rise and fall. The capture of Louisbourg in French Canada by New England forces in 1745 had ignited an upsurge of millennial enthusiasm throughout the region while also relieving coastal trade from the depredations of French privateers. The repeated forays of George Whitefield in and across the region during the second half of the eighteenth century helped to maintain a punctuated cycle of evangelical revivalism and economic speculation. By the time of Whitefield’s death—in Newburyport—in 1770, the town had become a regional center of shipbuilding and competed with Salem as the second-largest depot on the New England coast. Amid the imperial crisis and the onset of war, and particularly during the blockade of Boston, Newburyport was a base for piracy against British vessels, and a number of people in the town accumulated large fortunes from privateering. While many of these fortunes collapsed in the postwar economic depression, the revival of trade during the Federalist period brought wealth flowing back in, illustrated most spectacularly by the career of Plummer’s patron Dexter. Newburyport engaged primarily in the West Indies trade (one of the largest American rum distilleries was in town), but local commercial firms also maintained agents in England, Spain, Cape Verde, Brazil, Surinam, and Peru, situating the town in a circum-Atlantic constellation. Trade was flourishing enough in the 1790s that William Lloyd Garrison’s father, who had come to New Brunswick as an indentured servant, chose to settle there after working off his indentures. He thought Newburyport had better prospects than Boston; he was wrong. The town’s prosperity declined precipitously with the embargo of 1807, and a major fire in 1811 further checked commercial expansion. Economic growth would henceforth be seated further up the Merrimack, at the new mill towns of Lowell and Lawrence.17
Plummer’s work was imbued with the spirit of speculation and enthusiasm that characterized the era and the region, and despite his celebrated strangeness, his career aligns with the situation of the town. His poems generally focused on two kinds of topics, trade-related disasters (shipwrecks, fires, epidemics) and local scandals, usually involving the ministry. His texts were dotted with news from abroad gleaned from the town’s privileged position as an entrepôt of Atlantic trade, and they inclined toward millennial interpretations of events. The broadsides are difficult to categorize generically, because they often combined a prose account (always assuredly “factual”) with a “sermon” on the topic and one or two poems inspired by the same, tucked into the upper left or lower right corners of the sheet. Most included woodcuts at the header—standard black coffins for the most part but sometimes more elaborate designs. As in the case of “The Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” (1793), the sheet could strongly resemble a contemporary newspaper, and many seem intended to function in just that way, so referring to Plummer’s works as “poetry” is inexact.18
Beginning in the 1790s, Plummer hawked his broadsides and other goods and recited his poems at the base of Market Street, where most of the town’s printers and booksellers clustered. His recitations often garnered a crowd; a contemporary described him “having a voice strong, flexible, and euphonious,” although “spoiled by the affectation of being wonderfully pathetic.”19 He seems to have had working relationships with the printers in the neighborhood, because he was regularly able to get his work published. His bibliography totals more than fifty attributed items, at a time when booksellers’ catalogs featured few local authors and most broadsides were anonymous. Thus, his “authorship,” while eccentric to norms of literariness, was also exceptionally successful. His work usually appeared on the heels of some catastrophe, most accounts suggest it was popular, and this popularity tracked closely with the poems’ timeliness. “Plummer was wise enough to give only that which the occasion called forth, and never stereotyped or seldom published a second edition. He knew the signs of the times, and the tastes and habits of the public.”20 But Plummer sold these timely texts in tandem with almanacs, captivity narratives and other pamphlets, steady-sellers such as “A Dialogue Between a Blind-Man and Death” and Robert Russel’s Seven Sermons, popular verses like “Father Abbey’s Will,” and also remainders of his own unsold works.21 This stock of new and old matter made a distinctive blend of the historical and the contemporary. Plummer’s broadsides could be purchased individually for 4½ pence or in bundles at “2s. and 8d. per Dozen,” so it is possible that other peddlers sold his poems in secondary markets.22 Whittier’s reminiscences show that Plummer traveled into the surrounding countryside to sell his goods (the Whittier farm was about 10 miles from Plummer’s base of operations), and Plummer claimed to have marketed his work in Boston and Salem as well. Several of his poems were reprinted in newspapers in Pittsfield, Newport, and Providence, each more than 100 miles from Newburyport.
Figure 1. Jonathan Plummer, “Last Words and Dying Confession of Samuel Frost” (Newbury, 1793). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Although he contributed to almanacs and newspapers, the materiality of the broadside as the saleable item is crucial to the business of Plummer’s work. Broadsides were usually published as proclamations to be read aloud and posted or passed along to the next set of eyes, ears, and hands for further exchange through singing, recitation, and silent reading. This held true for all kinds of genres, from government announcements to ballads and elegies.23 Observing from Salem, the minister William Bentley noted during a yellow fever epidemic that “Plummer, a droll fool, has published an elegy upon the sufferings at Newbury Port … & hawkes them with success.”24 A broadside was cheap and easy to carry around, making it an ideal format for itinerant preachers, peddlers, and poets (all professions with which Plummer identified). Broadsides were therefore particularly adept at cultivating scandal, rumor, news, and prophecy, and the format drew from a long history of such associations: as one scholar of seventeenth-century New England puts it, a “discourse of sensationalism and immediacy [was attached] to the broadside format,” which derived from the “sensational stories of monstrous births, natural devastations, and unnatural deaths, as well as … the latest political and social developments” that were its stock-in-trade.25 In addition, because Plummer’s broadsides were not identified with specific printers (the colophon most often read “printed for the author”), they could incorporate personal material about prominent community members without much risk of legal reprisal. Plummer loved to name names and reflect on the peccadillos of the pious: one title was “Hints to Elder Pottle,” prompted by rumors that “Elder Pottle has for a short time lately lived rather too much after the flesh”; another was “Parson Pidgin, or Holy Kissing…. Occasioned by a report, that Parson Pidgin had kissed a young woman.”26 A third text, “Elegy On the death of the Rev. Mr. John Murray,” prompted Bentley to record angrily:
Was circulated here in the form of Ballads, &c. an Elegy & character of Murray of Newbury Port,—purporting to have been written by a Jonathan Plummer, in which by dogril verses & the curious character, the Hero of the piece is held up to contempt, & a strange curiosity excited to investigate all the exceptionable parts of every exceptionable character. It is not known here how many hands were concerned in it.27
While it is difficult to verify Bentley’s