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Provincialism and The English “Ancien Regime”: Samuel Pipe-Wolferstan and “The Confessional State,” 1776–1820
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 July 2014
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Imagine, if you will, a ship at sea. At a distance, it could be Jason and the Argonauts, or the Flying Dutchman, or even Captain Ahab. By the cut of its jib as it looms out of the mist, however, it seems rather to be a sieve, such as that in which the Jumblies once put forth. On the poop, sextant in hand, his grizzled features set in Churchillian grimace but instantly recognizable by the ancient Connecticut watchcap which tops them, stands—no, not Walter Mitty—but Hexter the Navigator. As a veteran of many earlier voyages, real and imaginary, he has a longer memory than his shipmates. He thinks this is a Liberty Ship, and he is trying to chart the course laid out in the sailing instructions, originally constituted by a long line of sea-lawyers and perfected by Victorian hydrographers. Right forrard, another ancient mariner, of the kind the lower deck calls Three-badge Killick (a leading seaman of long service who has never made it to Petty Officer), swings the lead. He is Plumb. In the crow's nest, bo'suns Tawney and Hill stand watch with their mates Stone and Thompson. As boy seamen long ago, they, too, were brought up on the old sailing instructions; but having, before the present voyage, served in capital ships, they consider that they have progressed far beyond such common lore. So wise are they indeed that they are convinced that this, too, is a Capital Ship, which, as everybody knows, can only sail forwards, and can therefore have only one destination. In the rigging, the rest of the fo'csle hands, a rabble of cabin boys and greenhorns press-ganged in 1968, who have barely passed for able seaman and still need the old guard to show them the ropes, likewise scan the horizon for the inevitable landfall and keep a weather eye open for that ill-omened denizen of these waters, Namier's Albatross. The intrepid helmsman, however, just as young but experienced beyond his years, knows better. Apprenticed to a line of tars that stretches back to old admiral Clarendon, he has learnt his craft the hard way, at the rope's end, and he has very little use for the sailing instructions of Liberty Ships or the great circle routes programmed, rhumb line by reductionist rhumb line, into the automatic pilots of their capital counterparts. He is Revisionist, a most unteleologic Ulysses, content (the journey not Ithaca's the thing) to sail his narrative barque (Narrenschiff?) before the winds of change for ever. Only one thing jars this whimsical homeric simile. Proof though he is against Circe and her reifications, our Ulysses has still his achilles' heel. Perhaps because he has come up through the hawse-hole himself, he has occasional bouts of nautical nostalgie de la boue: like Bertram, the sociologist of the sea in “Dry Cargo,” the Navigator's hoary parable on Doing History (another time, another voyage), he itches to pull on a pair of footnotes, go below and sample the bilgewater which, this being after all a sieve, slops around the hold.
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References
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60 The original diary is in the William Salt Library, Stafford. I am grateful to Francis Wolferstan Esq., the present master of Statfold, for his permission to microfilm this material, and to the late Denis Wolferstan, who shared with me not only his own knowledge of the diary, but also his ms. transcript of its final eight years.
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63 26 July, 7 June 1789.
64 7 December 1790.
65 29 October 1792.
66 5, 14 December 1792.
67 7–9 December 1792.
68 18 December 1792, 1 January 1793.
69 18 April 1794.
70 April 1792, 25 July 1794.
71 April 1793, 4 May 1794.
72 4 September, 16, 23 November 1794, 1 January 1795.
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76 Cf. Colley, “Apotheosis.”
77 The defection of the Leaveson-Gowers to Henry Pelham's Broad Bottom in 1744 in pursuit of their own advancement was stil the most resented event in recent Staffordshire political history, the main line of cleavagr in gentry relationships, and thus one of the chief links between people like Samuel and their Tory/Jacobite antecedents.
78 11 July 1799.
79 18 August 1799.
80 3 September 1797.
81 “Sometimes crippled by an excess of rich food, the magistrates from time to time put aside their industrious compilation of archives for the disciples of Sir Lewis Namier, and peered down from their parklands at the corn-fields in which their labourers hungered” (Thompson, , “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 [Feb. 1971]: 136CrossRefGoogle Scholar).
82 3 November 1806, 15 December 1807.
83 2 February 1800.
84 28 December 1806.
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88 18 September 1806.
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