An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure

Abstract

WRITING IN HIS FARRAGO SERIES FOR VARIOUS NEW ENGLAND PAPERS in 1790s, Joseph Dennie, one of early republic's most selfconscious Federalist aristocrats, described himself as a lover of the desultory a perennial lounger and author of works read by those wishing waste time.' There was nothing irreverent and very little playful about Dennie's declaration. Like most men of his day, Dennie took his leisure seriously as an effect of his social class, a straightforward extension of his entitlement and its responsibilities. The lounger, he wrote, belongs to 'the privileged orders' in society. If he adopts a capricious, airy style, if he seems to be renouncing toils of wisdom, it is not to abdicate ponderous duties of his wealth, but merely better to instruct lower orders in a language they will understand.2 By early 1830s when United States was aggressively refashioning itself on model of a laissez-faire meritocracy, static class hierarchy that Dennie presupposed had been cast into waste bin, rejected on principle by a culture suddenly infatuated with ideals of democratized opportunity and social mobility. Dominating popular fancy were self-makers and overreachers-Napoleon, Andrew Jackson, Common Man who worked his way from rags to riches-men who, like Emerson's scholar, conversed in rough and ready language which field and work-yard made.3 And yet idler did not disappear. At this same period there rose to prominence a number of