Spirited husbandry: The literature and science of agricultural improvement in eighteenth-century Britain

This study traces the slow emergence of agricultural science in Britain from the larger discourses of polite literature and natural philosophy beginning at about the middle of the eighteenth century. Rather than emphasizing science's status as cultural artifact, I demonstrate two things: the serious engagement of didactic literature with the project of scientific knowledge-making, and the multiple uses and persistent presence of conventionally "literary" forms in scientific discourse as it develops until mid-nineteenth century. The generic heterogeneity of these texts reflects important unresolved issues in the area of agricultural improvement. One of these, the tension between "book farming" and practical husbandry, relates directly to this period's larger epistemological shift from a model of truth guaranteed by prior authority to one in which knowledge derives from experiment, measurement and direct observation. Another is the undefined nature of this literature's audience. The wide range of class affiliation, resources, and education in the farming demographic, and the necessary involvement of all parties to successful improvement demanded of these writers considerable rhetorical flexibility in the transmission of agricultural knowledge.;Robert Dodsley's Agriculture (1754) and James Grainger's The Sugar-Cane (1764) serve as examples of works which, while seeking to meet the aesthetic standards for didactic poetry enunciated in Joseph Addison's influential "An Essay on Virgil 's Georgics" (1697), recognize and incorporate agricultural knowledge as a proto-scientific discourse. Hans Hirzel's prose moral portrait, The Rural Socrates (1770) and the late-century writings of Arthur Young and William Marshall on experimental husbandry, show this literature's growing impulse to shape and control its audience at a time when institutional forms of agricultural education were meeting with little success.;The literature of agricultural improvement in the long eighteenth century rewards investigation because of the extraordinary richness of the textual record both in quantity and quality, its relative critical neglect, and the peculiar difficulties attached to the process of turning agriculture into a discipline or profession---systematization in the face of variable geography, climate, and usage; centralization in the face of wide-ranging class expectations; and coherent expression, as agricultural discourse departs from the literary bias of its classical roots in Virgil's Georgics .