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In this essay entitled “The Political Economy of John Dyer’s The Fleece,” I make a particular case of reading the British Georgic. The georgic tradition in the British literary history is generally understood as a minor strain of eighteenth-century poetics, a neoclassical enthusiasm whose mannered expressions were outmoded almost as soon as the Industrial Revolution took place. Drawing upon Rachel Crawford and Kaul Suvir, I seek to rectify this long-standing assessment, to weigh its historical and ideological import, and to emphasize its centrality in the eighteenth-century British cultural life. I aim to contribute a fresh, original perspective on the British georgic by tracing it to Joseph Addision’s essay on Virgil’s Georgics that stresses the reciprocal effects of writing and spatial practices. I offer a particular generic procedure of the georgic poetry under the three rubrics of moral expression, spatial design, and geographic motion in order to contend that there is no georgic morality outside its geographic expression. By calling scholarly attention to the significance of turnpike road-making in the middle eighteenth century, I also put the poet’s eye into a network of turnpikes in the Trans-Severn accelerating the dissemination of commodities of the British wool industry into the world. When Dyer’s poetry speaks of the political economy of producing, distributing, and consuming the British national commodity of clothing through the labor of sheep shearing, Dyer combines a more extensive topography and a more unified sense of national community. My reading of The Fleece engages, however, in a critical topo-(s)-analysis as an attempt to re-provincializes the de-localized cartographic eye in its georgic modes to give universalizing vision to traffic, commerce, and empire. While Dyer represents the authority of a stable prospect standing on high, this point of view is derived from the interfusion of moral description and geographic motion as a particularly literary effect of the georgic procedure. As a poet, I claim, Dyer seeks ultimately to transfer a universe of moral precepts into a coherent body of written authority threaded through geographic motion. Dyer’s will to clothing is, then, a georgic practice of forging the new landscape of events with the soft wool of fleece.
