Captains of Charity: The Writing and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence

by Mary Kathleen Eyring

Overview

In this thematically rich book, Mary Kathleen Eyring examines authors whose writings were connected with their charitable endeavors, which addressed the worst by-products of the brisk maritime commerce in Atlantic seaport cities in the first half of the nineteenth century. She argues that charitable institutions and societies emerged in this era because they captured and contained the discontent of imperiled and impoverished groups, thereby effectively thwarting the development of a revolutionary class in America.

According to Eyring, the men and women who most successfully wrote about and engaged in benevolent work strategically connected their work with the affluence generated by maritime commerce. The water trades supported the growth of the American publishing industry, but they also generated both vast inequities in wealth and physically and economically hazardous conditions that, in the absence of a welfare state, required the intervention of benevolent societies. Laborers in Atlantic port cities barred from lucrative professions by gender, race, physical ability, or social status found a way to make a living wage by conjoining the literary with the charitable—and attaching both to a profit structure. In so doing, they transformed the nature of American benevolence and gave rise to the nonprofit sector, which has since its inception provided discontented laborers with a forum in which to express their critique of for-profit American enterprise, by imitating it.

In Captains of Charity, Eyring looks at writers who overcame their marginalized status by bringing together the strands of maritime industry, publishing, and benevolence. These include Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two black clergymen who managed a massive relief effort when refugees fleeing revolution in Haiti transported the yellow fever virus to Philadelphia in 1793; Nancy Prince, a free woman of color who sought her livelihood in the Protestant missions of Jamaica in the years immediately following Britain's emancipation of laborers in its Caribbean colonies; Sarah Josepha Hale, who parlayed the social influence she had gained as the founder of a seaman's aid society in Boston into a role as editor of the hugely popular periodical Godey's Lady's Book; and Sarah Pogson Smith, who donated the proceeds of her writing to such prominent charitable causes as the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and then capitalized on the goodwill this charity work generated among her wealthy friends in New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781512600995
Publisher:	University of New Hampshire Press
Publication date:	07/04/2017
Series:	Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

MARY KATHLEEN EYRING is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Brigham Young University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
“To be the medium of her charity”: Narratives of Vicarious Charity from Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793
Atlantic Publishing and Pathos: Literary Support for the Education of Maritime Laborers at America’s First Schools for the Deaf
The Economics of Evangelizing: Missionary Labor in A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince
The Profits of Maritime Benevolence: Sarah Josepha Hale and the Work of the Charitable Woman Writer
Conclusion: Charitable Currents
Notes
Bibliography
Index

What People are Saying About This

Nancy Siegel

“This well-written and approachable book will find eager readers in the fields of history, literature, economic history, social/cultural studies, religious studies, and gender studies.”

Susan Ryan

While a number of scholars have taken up the complications of American benevolence in this era, Eyring's choice of sites of inquiry and her keen attention to seldom-read primary sources make this a significant contribution to the field.... A coherent picture emerges of the circulation of benevolent activity within a coastal Atlantic world.

From the Publisher

“While a number of scholars have taken up the complications of American benevolence in this era, Eyring’s choice of sites of inquiry and her keen attention to seldom-read primary sources make this a significant contribution to the field. . . . A coherent picture emerges of the circulation of benevolent activity within a coastal Atlantic world.”—“While a number of scholars have taken up the complications of American benevolence in this era, Eyring’s choice of sites of inquiry and her keen attention to seldom-read primary sources make this a significant contribution to the field. . . . A coherent picture emerges of the circulation of benevolent activity within a coastal Atlantic world.”
“Eyring provides a wonderfully fresh (and particularly urgent) approach to understanding charitable or benevolent work within a broader capitalist economy.”—“Eyring provides a wonderfully fresh (and particularly urgent) approach to understanding charitable or benevolent work within a broader capitalist economy.”
“This well-written and approachable book will find eager readers in the fields of history, literature, economic history, social/cultural studies, religious studies, and gender studies.”—“This well-written and approachable book will find eager readers in the fields of history, literature, economic history, social/cultural studies, religious studies, and gender studies.”

Hester Blum

“Eyring provides a wonderfully fresh (and particularly urgent) approach to understanding charitable or benevolent work within a broader capitalist economy.”

Editorial Reviews

"While a number of scholars have taken up the complications of American benevolence in this era, Eyring's choice of sites of inquiry and her keen attention to seldom-read primary sources make this a significant contribution to the field. . . . A coherent picture emerges of the circulation of benevolent activity within a coastal Atlantic world."—Susan Ryan, author of The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence

From the Publisher