The Mind Is a Collection: Case Studies in Eighteenth-Century Thought 9780812291568

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The Mind Is a Collection

Material Texts Series Editors Roger Chartier Leah Price Joseph Farrell Peter Stallybrass Anthony Grafton Michael F. Suarez, S.J. A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

The Mind I s a C o l l e cti o n C a s e St u d i e s i n Eig h t e e n t h - ­C e n t u ry T h o u g h t

S e a n Si lv e r

u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-­4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-­free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Silver, Sean, author.   The mind is a collection : case studies in eighteenthcentury thought / Sean Silver.    pages cm — (Material texts)   Coordinates with an online site.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8122-4726-8 (alk. paper)   1. Collectors and collecting—History—17th century— Case studies.  2. Collectors and collecting—History—18th century—Case studies.  3. Museums—Curatorship— England—London—History—17th century—Case studies. 4. Museums—Curatorship—England—London— History—18th century—Case studies.  5. England— Intellectual life—17th century.  6. England—Intellectual life—18th century.  7. Imagination (Philosophy)  I. Title. II. Series: Material texts.  AM344.S58 2015  001.0942'09032—dc23 2015013299

Contents

Preface: Welcome to the Museum vii Introduction 1 Case 1. Metaphor 1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book — 2. John Milton’s Bed 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum

21 Case 2. Design 4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura — 5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble — 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet

56 Case 3. Digression 10. The Iliad in a Nutshell — 11. A Full Stop 12. A Conical Roman Tumulus — 13. The Reception of Claudius 14. Addison’s Walk

109

vi Contents

Case 4. Inwardness 15. William Hay’s Stone — 16. Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a Small Showcase 17. An Ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket — 18. A Blue-­Bound Copy of The Mysterious Mother

151 Case 5. Conception 19. A Blank Sheet of Paper (1) — 20. A Folio Sheet with Two Sketches of a Single Conception — 21. A Triumph of Galatea — 22. Joshua Reynolds, William Hunter

189 Case 6. Dispossession 23. A Shilling — 24. A Book of Accounts — 25. A Blank Sheet of Paper (2) 26. A Ring Containing a Lock of Hair — 27. The Lost Property Office 28. The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild

226 Conclusion 269 notes 275 index 355 acknowledgments 367

Preface: Welcome to the Museum

Welcome to The Mind Is a Collection. Gathered here are twenty-­eight exhibits from seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century London. Taken together, they tell a story about the development of modern theories of mind. Each of these exhibits is posed as a case study of a certain way of thinking—­objects assembled as the vehicle and proof for theories of cognitive work. The era spanning roughly 1660 to 1800 was a special period in philosophy and the arts; it witnessed the widespread development of what has come to be called philosophical dualism, the strange split between mind and body that now seems to most of us to be intuitive. The general account, as it was worked up by authors, philosophers, painters, and poets, runs like this: the mind is a disembodied entity absolutely and fundamentally unlike the messy physical world in which it finds itself. It observes the world from a distance; it takes in a batch of simple sensations; it reviews them—­comparing, arranging, combining, dividing; it husbands them up; it stores them for later recall. It tells the body what to do—­especially by way of gathering more sensations, for, in this scheme, the body’s purpose is to be a vehicle for the mind. This is not therefore just one dualism; it is a system of dualisms, whereby one thing is split into two: subject is parted from object and “me” from “mine,” but also conscious awareness is parted from the mind’s contents, the power of thinking from thoughts, ourselves from our memories. It is not just that the mind is understood to be separate from the body, or even that the body (in much the same way) is understood to be separate from its environment. It is also that the working parts of the mind (its “faculties”) are understood to be separate from the materials upon which they work (its ideas). These are the basic outlines of philosophical dualism, which, I am suggesting, is in effect several dualisms. We are the inheritors of this peculiar seventeenth-­century innovation. The problem with the dualist account of mind emerges when we realize that this rarified substance, this mind-­stuff, is so absolutely unlike the coarse

viii Preface

world in which we move and breathe that it offers no way of speaking about itself. There is a primal paradox here, a remnant of the violence of the dualist split. The mind comes with no instruction manual, nor any ready-­made vocabulary. The only way to speak about it, indeed the only way to conceptualize it, is through systems of metaphors that refer to embodied experience. Metaphor is the crucial route by which mind is made sensible; it is how a vocabulary and way of speaking is worked up in order to make the mind available to itself. It will become apparent, therefore, that this dazzling accomplishment, the work of an age to disengage mind from materials, came through a counterintuitive embeddedness. Theories of a mind separate from matter were repeatedly developed by tinkering with physical gadgets; the sovereign intellect was constructed in and shored up through dialectical relationships between persons and the places in which they lived and worked. This is the basic claim of this book, so it bears repeating. The doctrine of radical separation was elaborated through a series of profound entanglements: subjects entangled with objects, owners with property, awareness with memory, the power of thinking with thoughts, conscious awareness with the mind’s contents. Put simply, the fundamental split between mind and matter was established and confirmed through embodied engagement with crafted environments. This to-­and-­fro between models and minds, spaces of thinking and habits of thought, is what this book will mean by cognitive ecologies. A cognitive ecology is a system crafted to enable certain kinds of thinking, indeed, to confirm and to conform to a specific working theory of mind. Libraries count; so do workshops, notebooks, and collections. Museums offer the paradigmatic example—­for a “museum” is nothing other than an active space of thinking, the favored seat of the muses. The age is littered with people modeling their intellect on the spaces in which they worked. John Locke says the mind is like a cabinet; Joseph Addison compares it to a drawer of medals; Francis Bacon calls it a repository; Robert Hooke calls it a workshop. The thing to notice is this: Locke was a bibliophile, Addison a coin collector, Bacon an architect of libraries, Hooke a laboratory technician. The faculties and capacities of the minds that were invented there are roughly equivalent to what we might expect from any librarian in a library, conservator in a numismatic collection, curator in a museum, or artisan in a workshop—­because each space provided the vocabulary for the theory in the first place. And this means that philosophical dualisms have histories that are not confined to histories of ideas; their histories spread out into the material, cultural, and political beds in which they find themselves. We should, in other words, attend to Locke’s cabinet,

Preface ix

Addison’s medals, Bacon’s repository, and Hooke’s workshop, not as curiosities of museology, but as histories of ideas. These were the sites where the museum metaphor of mind was worked out in all its rigor. And they were also sites of profound entanglements, where conceptual systems were continually, dialectically returned for their material purchase and rhetorical force. The Mind Is a Collection offers an ecology of such ecologies. It is arranged as a series of case studies, forming an argument through the elaborations of objects in place, particular objects in the particular cases in which they were once found. “Case” is a term that will receive more attention in its place (Exhibit 16); for now it is enough to note that it means to capture two things at once. It means to signify the spaces in which thinking takes place—­a room, a cabinet, the skin, the skull. “Case” in this sense is the sort of thing one might find in a museum, a thing custom built to display objects or books (exhibit cases, book cases, and so on). But “case” also, as Ludwig Wittgenstein puts it, means to capture the whole world or situation that is implied by something as small as a statement or local relation: “the world,” Wittgenstein begins, is “all that is the case.” A legal case is defined by the slightest of evidence; a medical case is decided by the merest of symptoms. Partly, tracing these case studies will mean a wander or two through philosophy, especially in the empiricist legacy of John Locke. It will mean more than a few journeys through the so-­ called sister arts, curatorial forms like poetry, painting, and architecture. Each of these, it will appear, was imagined as the confirmation of a mind that works by arranging ideas. But it also means a renewed attention to active objects of thought; the material arrangements of things that were developed and then cast aside so as to launch the Enlightenment figure of the autonomous mind. The Mind Is a Collection brings to life a few of the collections left behind by this historical development, cognitive models that were used to separate cognitive activity from bodily work. And I should mention that by no means is this study the first to think of thinking as an embedded practice, or even of empiricist thought as itself arising from its various situations; John Locke, among others, was himself invested in the links between thinking and tinkering, mental discipline and the library arts. In other words, some of the very people we most commonly associate with the distinction between body and mind were also the earliest theorists of cognition as an embedded practice. This is why The Mind Is a Collection begins with the library and commonplace book of John Locke (Exhibit 1). The following twenty-­ eight exhibits provide the fabric of an argument. They trace epistemic dualism as an intimately felt experience and a

x Preface

philosophical belief. They do not exhaust the topic. How could they? Particulars are like that; more can always be found, and the ones we have are never enough. These twenty-­eight exhibits offer the merest trajectory or constellation, objects as points suggesting a larger picture of Enlightenment being. At the same time, if more can always be found, one never has quite the right ones. The particularity, even idiosyncrasy, of the objects in this collection is one of the many ways that gaps and cracks will be felt, emerging precisely in the imperfect fit of things one to another. I myself spent many years as a furniture maker, what in the tradecraft lingo is called a “joiner.” Mortise-­and-­tenon, dovetail, bridle, and key joints: my whole job was the seamless fit of one piece of wood to another. Nothing disturbed me more than a gap. And as a joiner, I had the luxury of not having to accept the rough fit of things. But the task of a curator is different; as a curator, you work with what you have got. You care for things, in all their irreducible particularity. Gaps are the frustration and promise of the labor. In telling the story of the rise of theories of the sovereign intellect, in proposing to recast this story in the concrete stuff its manufacture left behind, this museum will concentrate much of its attention on the craft of a few familiar figures. There will be, I trust, at least a few unexpected ecologies represented here—­but in general the first twenty-­two exhibits mean to undo the familiar account of mind over matter by concentrating precisely on its most familiar champions. The final six final exhibits are however different. These are asked to provide the conceptual weight to balance the museum’s first twenty-­two, indeed to call into question the fundamental assumptions of possessive individuals by unpacking the textures of dispossession. In this sense, these six are the most important—­and the least adequate to the burden they are made to bear. So, the seams will show—­which is another way of saying that much work remains to be done. If I had it to do over, I would have lavished more labor in finding objects fit for telling this other story—­the story of the dispossessed. But since I only discovered these precarious things through the archives of modern philosophy’s more familiar champions, I’m afraid these six exhibits will have to make the case by themselves. As someone who cares for all these things—­a “curator” in the word’s original sense—­I would ask you, as you read this book, to think of it like the virtual museum to which it refers. Like any caretaker, I invite you to wander. Please feel free to move quickly through some sections, seek out the ones of most interest to you, skip others altogether. Leave for coffee and return; your ticket is good for multiple entries. But, like any museum, this book also aims for a certain representative scope. As its curator, I flatter myself that it has a total story

Preface xi

to tell—­an argumentative arc intended to emerge implicitly through examples. I am tempted to say that the exhibits in this museum have been arranged according to the confidence with which they were owned. From Exhibit 1, the cognitive ecology of the architect of possessive individualism, to Exhibit 28, an object special to a man who wedged himself between possessions and individuals, The Mind Is a Collection passes from habits of ownership to patterns of dispossession. But this gets it backward; it is better to say that the museum passes from authors most confident in the systems they construct, to ecologies most attentive to the dynamic nature of embedded thought. The book means to turn possession inside out, moving from the confident possessors of things to people living wide-­eyed in the shifting marketplace of mental materials. As one form of authority recedes, the empire of things begins to emerge. By the time you reach the gift shop, this museum hopes to have emptied out possession as a meaningful way of thinking about thinking, opening up, in its place, a different form of ecological awareness. One more thing. This book is the exhibit catalogue for a collection of objects that can be visited online; the website has the same name as the title of the book. When you arrive at the museum, you will find images of exhibits, with short captions attached, and gateways to outside resources. The catalogue is here to explain the importance of these objects to the overall argument the museum has been assembled to pose. Also housed at the museum are objects mentioned in this catalogue but not illustrated here, an extended bibliography, and curator’s remarks engaging broader questions of the mind’s metaphors. Welcome to The Mind Is a Collection. Now, on to the museum . . .

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Introduction

Materials of Thinking The Mind Is a Collection approaches mental life from a material point of view; it begins from the start, redeveloping eighteenth-century British philosophies of mind as they looked to the world of things. The central strand of Enlightenment epistemology—a strand persisting in the modern era—leans against a certain guiding metaphor. In its most general form, the metaphor is this: the mind is a collection. This figure takes different forms, ranging from literary ornaments and the etymologies of concepts to elaborately intended material models and theories of brainwork. As a unifying trope, it also inhabits different shapes, different metaphorical sources or material models. If, in the Romantic era, the mind at work might be compared to a lamp or an Aeolian harp,1 in the Augustan period, the mind was more likely to be a museum, cabinet, library, or mere heap of particulars; it might be a treasury, repository, desk of drawers,2 bottle of spirits,3 or series of medals;4 it might also be a sink of detritus,5 a lodging house,6 a pen full of wild animals,7 or a sack of feathers.8 All of these models were differently in play—and voiced at least once—­but the grand metaphor was never quite new. This figure, which runs like a subterranean river, percolates up in numerous treatises, manuals, and handbooks on the anatomy of the mind.9 Imagining the mind “as a storehouse was a topos,” writes one authority on the subject, “but one with constantly changing imagery.” In fact, for some of the figures in this study, the mind was a storehouse of topoi.10 Container-­like, it is characterized by its contents; the mind, in short, is a collection. Let’s start with what this has meant for theories of the imagination. As it was understood in seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century Britain, the imagination was not a particularly creative power; it was not esemplastic, supernatural, or divine. As Joseph Warton put it, in the course of a defense and

2 Introduction

celebration of Alexander Pope, “All is imitation. . . . The geniuses, apparently most original, borrow from each other.”11 The writing process did not involve inspiration, at least as we understand it now—­though it was sometimes figured as a sort of conference with the muses, who give their name, after all, to the museum. In the recent words of Alex Page, the mind was thought to be “a rather passive organ, capable of receiving, of rejecting but not of initiating, disposed to appreciate, very much dependent on a well-­stocked memory.”12 John Dryden, a poet who claimed to find his inspiration in translation, did not understand the imagination as a creative faculty at all. His imagination, as he witnessed it happening, was the playground of sensory material; invention, as he understood it, was the finding out of images to match an argument.13 His mind was the sandbox of ideal objects that were collected, overseen, judged, and arranged by the twin and mutually countervailing faculties of wit and reason.14 “There is little reason,” Simon Stern has recently concluded, to suppose that “originality (understood as novelty or creativity) played even a tacit role” in poetic attribution or in the ownership of ideas, for originality was in any case thought to be the reworking of things already existing.15 The well-­ wrought poem—­or, indifferently, museum—­presents an image of the world that reflects what is already known; “all is derived,” writes Richard Hurd; “all is unoriginal. And the office of genius is but to select the fairest forms of things, and to present them in due place and circumstance.”16 This helps account for the popularity of genres that make no special claim to novelty, including imitations, translations, anthologies, abridgements, parody, and the mock-­epic.17 True wit, in this aesthetic, does not rely upon originality, or the spontaneous burst of genius. Poetic borrowing, which verges at times on plagiarism, is the very ground of poetic production. It shouldn’t surprise us, then, that the very idea of the mind as collection was itself borrowed—­not invented whole but inherited from many centuries of dominant sway. The conceptual core of the analogy originates in a persistent strain of Aristotelianism, transmitted to Restoration natural philosophy by way of Renaissance humanism, and becoming broadly enough shared through at least the first half of the eighteenth century and embedded enough in tradition that it often passed without comment.18 Aristotle imagines the mind as a treasury, storehouse, or repository; Zeno imagines a chest or locker, Thomas Aquinas a reliquary or treasury, Cassiodorus a system of pigeonholes and cages, Hugo of St. Victor a sacculus, or purse, Chaucer’s monk a monastery with a complex system of cells, each stuffed with books.19 For Edmund Spenser, the human brain might be allegorized as a vast library of histories;20

Introduction 3

for Robert Burton it becomes a collection, library, or monastery filled with cells; for Kenelm Digby, it is a string of beads or a bowl full of currants.21 This brings us almost up to date, for this is the tradition inherited by thinkers like John Locke, who was pleased to think of the mind as a cabinet, or Joseph Addison, who thought of the mind as a drawer of medals.22 All these accounts share a form; they all model mental activity on the observable features of collections of things. And they hinge on a certain conviction, repeating a particular phrase often enough that it almost becomes a password or shibboleth. This is the claim, often in exactly these words, that “there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses”: nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu. It is a thought as old as the Summa of Thomas Aquinas—­and indeed older, for Saint Thomas himself borrows it from a mistranslation of Avicenna, who had it from Aristotle.23 This is of course radically different from what the imagination has come to mean. The imagination in its Romantic form—­the active, energetic faculty called in the late eighteenth century “the god within”24—­was largely fashioned through an extended episode of forgetting, slowly disentangling the productive work of creativity from the collecting and collating processes which, in the eighteenth century, were thought to make it work.25 Edward Young, William Duff, and Robert Wood, three of the mid-­eighteenth-­century thinkers most commonly identified as forerunners of the Romantic spirit, all split their allegiances between the established, conservative activities of the imagination and an emerging sense that it contained untapped creative, restorative potentials. The modern reader can therefore be somewhat mystified by what seem to be the conservative aspects of works with titles like Young’s Conjectures on Original Composition, Duff’s Essay on Original Genius, and Wood’s Essay on the Original Genius . . . of Homer. Each of these essays begins by celebrating the mind’s capacity mimetically to reproduce the things of the world yet ends in what has become a familiar place: with the celebration of genius, autonomous invention, or creativity. This shift from the curatorial model dominant in the early eighteenth century to the organic model characteristic of Romanticism is most evident in Duff’s 1767 Essay on Original Genius, recently called by John Dacey “the first major inquiry into the creative process.”26 Dacey is thinking of what we mean by “creativity” today, but his reading of Duff at first seems unlikely, for Duff begins by advancing the conventional, conservative view. The imagination, Duff observes, is that faculty “whereby the mind . . . assembles the various ideas conveyed to the understanding by the canal of sensation, and treasured

4 Introduction

up in the repository of the memory, compounding or disjoining them at pleasure.”27 This is a clear example of the imagination in the eighteenth-­century sense, and the phrase would not be out of place in the mouth of Addison or even Francis Bacon. But then, quite suddenly, Duff’s essay takes a strikingly modern turn. Those of “a just and elegant taste,” Duff writes, are equipped to appreciate the same objects—­the example he gives is the Basilica of St. Peter—­ with attendant emotions very different from those experienced by someone “destitute of this quality.” The “difference,” he insists, is not in an acquired politeness or the discrimination learned through exhaustive education. It resides, on the contrary, in the “internal feeling,” which “must certainly proceed from the transforming power of Imagination, whose rays illuminate the objects we contemplate; and which, without the lustre shed on them by this faculty, would appear unornamented and undistinguished.”28 What is interesting to Duff is not the work of the imagination to collect, to assemble, and to dispose; he insists on its transformative potential, its ability to “shed light” as part of its own autotelic purpose. Indeed, he suspects that the imagination is weighed down rather than developed by experience, that the greatest poet is not the one with the greatest stock of images but the untaught genius: Shakespeare, for instance, or Ossian. The poet is no longer the careful conservator of imaginative materials, not the curator of a treasury of ideas; his imagination emerges as itself “an innate treasure,” working its visions from immediate contact with nature.29 Duff, like Young and Wood, therefore starts from the relatively common claim about the mind’s combinative powers, about its capacity to collect and to organize materials. He however bends his project toward the ultimately triumphant model of the imagination that is differently the engine of the works of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats, those poets who shaped nineteenth-­century English literature. The ways in which we mostly use the concept of imagination today—­as the mind’s special power to produce something out of itself—­are vestiges of this twist over the last half of the eighteenth century, and therefore represent a relatively recent shift in meaning in the twenty-­five-­hundred-­year history of Western art.

Collections As a metaphor, “the mind is a collection” is nearly as old as Western philosophy—­but conditions changed in roughly the middle of the seventeenth century, causing it to gain new purchase and conceptual weight. When

Introduction 5

someone like John Locke conceived of the mind as a cabinet, he was drawing from a long philosophical tradition; the figure of the intellect as a collection already counted nearly two millennia of influence when he made it among the foundational gestures of his empiricism. But Locke’s thoughts were also directed much closer to home; for while Locke spent parts of twenty years compiling his Essay on the Human Understanding, he spent a yet longer span of time compiling a remarkable library of books.30 When he remarks on the work of the memory to treasure up ideas, we should remember that he was what we would call a bibliophile; when he remarks on the importance of histories—­collections of facts—­in the operation of reason, we should attend to his indexing practices in a library stocked with books of natural history (Exhibit 1).31 This is what changed. Locke was a member of one of the earliest generations of private individuals with the means to amass large personal collections of books. Similarly, when Addison compares the mind to a cabinet of medals, we should take note that he was a coin collector (Exhibit 13); when he remarks on the paths that thoughts take, we should remember that he was a gardener, was busy planting at the same time that he was publishing his seminal treatises on both gardening and the pleasures of the imagination (Exhibit 14). When Joshua Reynolds constructed a model of mind as a gallery of images, we should remember that he assembled the single largest collection of paintings outside the Royal Collection and was, in the end, responsible for one of the era’s great experiments in this line: the Royal Academy of Art (Exhibit 21). Finally, as one additional example, when Horace Walpole speaks of wit as a caretaker—­as the careful arrangement and disposition of things in the mind—­we should remember that he lived in a house that was itself designed to be a flexible receptacle for his vast collection of antiquities (Exhibit 18). When he socked away china, Gothic antiques, coins, medals, paintings, and miniatures in his Twickenham villa, the stakes were higher than hoarding; he was participating in a practice of constructing, and exhibiting, one’s own way of seeing and grappling with the world. Indeed, he was constructing a working space of thought, made precisely to his taste. This was not merely a performance for a visiting public (though it was this also);32 it was a performance, too, for himself. Locke’s library, Addison’s medals, Reynolds’s gallery, Walpole’s villa: each of these is a cognitive ecology in a strikingly literal sense—­a space which not only was involved in habits of thought but which turned up as well in its caretaker’s models for mental work. Possibly against common sense, then, theories of the mind as a museum predated collecting, at least as the popular practice that collecting became in

6 Introduction

the eighteenth century. For it was only around the turn of the eighteenth century that collecting practices caught up to the models of mind that anticipated them. When Hans Sloane was born in 1660, London had only one museum of note open to the public. This was the quirky, cramped Museum Tradescantianum, the lifetime collection of the John Tradescants (father and son) that had been put on display in Lambeth in a building called the Ark.33 Collecting as a popular practice was therefore relatively new when Locke made bold to call the mind a cabinet, or when Robert Hooke called the mind a Repository. But by the time Sloane died, ninety-­two years later, it seemed only natural that he would leave his large and surprisingly diverse collection to the public. During Sloane’s long and productive life, he had accrued the collections of more than two dozen other collectors, putting together his own massive private museum, which was a resource to himself, his friends and his colleagues. In the same period of time, a dozen or so semipublic museums had sprung up in London and surrounding areas. The Tradescants’ museum had been acquired—­some say stolen—­by Elias Ashmole, but others had moved in to take its place.34 Numerous networks of collectors emerged—­whole cultures dedicated to the acquisition, arrangement, and appreciation of prints, shells, stones, coins, paintings, antiquities, and a range of other affordable collectibles.35 The effect was general—­a sea-­change in how people experienced the world. “In no previous age did writers,” Jean Hagstrum for instance reminds us, “possess such considerable collections of prints and engravings,” and, likewise, “in no previous period in English literature could a poet assume knowledge of great painting and statuary in the audience he was addressing.”36 So when Sloane’s will arranged the terms, and provided the vast and diverse core collection, for the foundation of the British Museum, it signaled what had already become apparent: the politics of possession were changing, and these were reflected in the collections appearing all over town.37 The standard account of the rise of the museum tells the story of the conquest of nature by professionalized collecting; over the course of Sloane’s lifetime, as this standard account has it, those small, intensely personal and idiosyncratic spaces, filled with the quirky, the odd, and the wonderful, gave way to professionalized, organized, and organizing endeavors. The trajectory of Sloane’s own collection would tend to confirm this.38 What before, these studies argue, was an exclusive practice that consisted mostly of the gathering of strange novelties for their own sake was subsumed by an organized and public practice, part of a larger, later bureaucratized, project of natural philosophy.39 This narrative is exactly the argument posed by Susan Pearce, in

Introduction 7

her influential On Collecting;40 it is compelling in part because it is the story often told during the Enlightenment, where widespread linkages between political Whiggism and Newtonian empiricism combined to craft a story of the progressive upsweeping of individual practices into national purposes.41 Yet the focus on large, institutional museums has obscured the persistence of living collecting practices that flourished outside the regularizing grid of natural historical inquiry. Some of these collections were indeed absorbed into much larger collections. Some were even purchased by, acquired by, or otherwise passed through the hands of Sloane himself (Exhibit 14, for instance). Other collections, however, continue even now to exist more or less as they were originally imagined, the husks of once living cognitive practices, the idiosyncratic spaces of thought. John Woodward, for instance, owned what he believed to be a Roman shield, which after his death passed from being the most curious of curiosities to being just a relatively minor example of late Renaissance art; it now sits, slightly dusty, in a less-­visited room of the British Museum.42 It has in other words been swept up into the professionalized telling of material history. But Woodward’s core collection, his collection of mineralogical specimens, persists as specified in the terms of his will; his rocks lie in their original cabinets, in a special room, set aside from the remainder of Cambridge’s geological collection at the Sedgwick Museum (Exhibit 6). Woodward’s museum was in its own way crucial in the development of modern geology, but the very fact that it stands apart, sealed in its own particular room, is one sign that it continues to tell a story different from that of the Sedgwick collection that enwraps it. (Adam Sedgwick, who held the Woodwardian Chair endowed by the will, was the person perhaps most responsible for modernizing geology—­but his story was not Woodward’s [Exhibit 7].) What is more, a collector like Woodward, especially irascible Woodward, would have bristled at the suggestion that his cabinet was only a failed experiment waiting to be rescued by mature geology.43 He had a different object in view. Indeed, this object is visible in the museum in a number of different ways, the organizing principle of the museum turning up in its arrangement, but also in several of the objects that the collection itself contains: object as object, thing as end. Looked at this way, Woodward’s collection captures a set of mental habits and a way of ordering the world. It is a relic of a life of activity. Many such collections survive—­a few in situ—­but they all perfect their own poetics, capturing the mind which composed them (and which they helped produce); they are the material relics of the activities in which the curatorial mind was engaged. When Woodward put pen to paper

8 Introduction

to describe his cabinet, or Alexander Pope his grotto, Reynolds his gallery, or Hooke his repository, it was with the conviction that the cabinet or grotto or gallery or repository had a particular, complete, and totalizing story to tell—­ which was in part a story of how each person saw the world and his place in it (see Exhibits 6, 7, 8, 11, and 21). Each of these places offered a materially contingent model of cognition, formalizing thought as embedded in, and routed through, materially constructed worlds.44 They are particularly metaphorically rich, spaces which are themselves instantly recognizable as metaphor (sketchbooks and ledgers of accounts, for example) or which are the material rudiments of master metaphors governing other, subordinate metaphors (books, libraries, cabinets). The library, Jennifer Summit notes, has long articulated a problem of knowledge meant to be understood as a basic problem of cognition; the library came to be not a mere sorting and storage unit but a material experiment in experiences of doubt and certainty. Libraries and librarians are in this sense historically and evolutionarily linked in mutually reflexive processes of “sorting, selecting, preparing, and internalizing information”; the library made possible a model of thinking based on the storage, recall, and arrangement of little nuggets of knowledge, differently called facts, information, or ideas.45 The same processes at work in the library might therefore be understood to be at work in the mind, a vocabulary developed among the objects of learning shifted into ways of thinking about intellection generally. Such a space actively enabled the “creative, rather than static” work of memory, providing a model of how a conservative faculty might be made productive.46 And, as the library made possible such a modeling, it responded as well to developments in how the mind was understood, a point made explicitly clear in John Evelyn’s “Method for a Library According to the Intellectual Powers.” Epistemological theory, in this respect, has real consequences for how the world is arranged, and vice versa, a process visible, for instance, in the library of John Locke (Exhibit 1).

Metaphor The empiricist revolution was not originally a revolution “out there,” as though it were a communal effort to create better rocket fuels or cancer drugs; it was, on the contrary, very much a revolution beginning “in here,” a project of mental discipline, meaning to match conceptual systems to an observable world of things. The central pillar of Bacon’s empiricist program was his effort to

Introduction 9

establish “in the human intellect . . . a true pattern of the world as we actually find it and not as someone’s own private reasoning hands it down to him.”47 The language appropriate to this project, as the argument goes, was suspicious of metaphor. The number of new philosophical languages developed in and around the Royal Society attests itself to the importance of matching labels to things, without the slippage introduced when words are made to do double work.48 In thinking about the place of metaphor in the empiricist project, historians of science have been quick to quote such moments as Locke’s eloquent attack on eloquence—­where Locke, among other things, derides the use of tropes and figures in the pursuit of truth. And, to the extent that he was generally uncomfortable substituting a more poetic word where a prosaic one would do (his own powerful deployment of images notwithstanding), this is a generally accurate description of the empiricist project. Locke insists, in a much-­cited passage, that “all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas, move the passions, and thereby mislead the judgment.”49 In this sense, Locke may be said to be echoing Francis Bacon, John Wilkens, Henry Power, and a host of scholars in the same, ultimately Aristotelian tradition, who were working to transform communication from a medium of persuasion to a medium of transmission, replacing eloquence, in the common formulation, with plain facts.50 Many of the passages in which the plain style is most eloquently defended are, however, themselves promoted by dazzling turns of metaphorical prose. Take, for instance, Robert Boyle’s famous defense of the plain style: “Our design is only to inform Readers,” Boyle insists, “not to delight or perswade them. . . . To affect needless Rhetorical Ornaments in setting down an Experiment,” he continues, “were little less improper than it were . . . to paint the Eye-­glasses of a Telescope.”51 Understood this way, metaphor would merely be, as Richard Rorty points out, like “using italics, or illustrations, or odd punctuation or formats. All these,” he writes, “are ways of producing effects on your interlocutor or your reader but not ways of conveying a message”;52 they are, in other words, relics of an age where communication was understood to involve rhetorical persuasion rather than the conveyance of a message. This is a keynote of the empiricist project; language in the empiricist mode is meant to be a medium for facts, information, or ideas.53 Yet Boyle’s appeal at the very least adjusts itself through a strikingly posed rhetorical ornament—­which Boyle himself surely recognized. Boyle in other words encourages us to be suspicious of metaphor through a suspicious metaphor; he paints his own

10 Introduction

eyepiece. This is the first way that plain anti-­rhetoricality itself leans on a set of rhetorical conventions, indeed encases itself in a rhetorical purpose, for its inbuilt work is after all to persuade.54 Boyle’s deployment of the showy metaphor of the painted eyepiece distracts attention from a different level of metaphorical work, threading its way through his prose.55 The focus on metaphor as a rhetorical choice ignores the more fundamental role that metaphor plays as a coordinating condition, a necessary and irreducible process in the grand project of producing, in the mind, an empirically true pattern of the world. This second form of metaphorical borrowing builds concepts out of bodily intersections with the world—­so, for instance, “perswade” means “make sweet,” “inform” means “give shape to,” “delight” leans on the Latin for “attract,” and so on. There are in fact two forms of metaphor to be considered, and distinguished from one another—­a point not lost on Boyle’s contemporaries. On the one hand, there is metaphor as a rhetorical substitution of one word or phrase (with all its attendant baggage) for another. This is the painted eyeglass. On the other, there is metaphor as the linkage between material world and ideal pattern, between sensory rudiments and their conceptual wages. This is “perswade,” “inform,” “delight.” The first sort of metaphor has its uses, even in the plain style, though it is met with general distrust. As Locke reminds us, such rhetorical substitution is “fancy passing for knowledge”; “what is prettily said,” Locke elegantly continues, “is taken for solid.”56 But the second sort is a necessary element in the linguistic linking of ideas and things, the guarantee, in fact, that mental work may be traced to a material foundation; it insinuates the central mandate of the empiricist project, to seek knowledge “in the consideration of the things themselves,” into the texture of the medium used to carry out that project.57 What is more, and this is really the critical thing, this second sort of metaphor was witnessed as the critical linkage making possible the construction of a mental reality patterned on the world of things. As Locke notes, “it may lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas.”58 This is, of course, a metaphor theory of language, which rises in the early empiricist tradition to underwrite conceptual knowledge generally.59 Metaphor registers the conviction that arises from our regular experience of the connections between objects and effects.60 Thomas Reid insists, disapproving the whole time, that the “terms and phrases, by which the operations of the mind are expressed in all languages . . . are drawn from supposed similitude of body to mind.”61 Reid’s project voices

Introduction 11

a doubt—­one that I share—­that metaphor itself invents a distinction between embodied action and conceptual understanding in order to stitch it back together; it may be, as an important counter-­strand of theorists have all along suspected, that there is in the end no reason to establish the distinction in the first place. This doubt is raised by John Milton (Exhibit 2), among others, and will be a recurrent theme of this book. For now, it is enough to note that metaphor is the critical mechanism that is made repeatedly to guarantee the answering of the mental world to the call of the physical, and vice versa. “Every word which is used to express a moral or intellectual fact,” Ralph Waldo Emerson would later remind us, is “found to be borrowed from some material appearance.”62 Indeed, “express” is itself such a borrowing (noticed by Milton), shifting patterns obtaining in a material source domain into a conceptual target: express means “breathe out,” and this is precisely what Emerson and Reid and Milton have done; they have breathed mental operations into language. As the earlier Samuel Johnson63 remarked in his correspondence with George Berkeley, the mind can only make itself known to itself through such “expressions (modifications, impressions, etc . . .)” which “are metaphorical,” which rely on relations between the sensory objects. This is how expression works—­just like “modification” or “impression,” two similarly vexed metaphors. “It is scarce possible,” Johnson concluded, “to speak of the mind without a metaphor.”64 Metaphor is in this sense the leaning of concepts on haptic experience; as it is true in cases of metaphor, so, too, is it true for “metaphor” itself, all along and right from the beginning, even for the person who inaugurates the claim that metaphor is a sort of “ornament.” This is the view of Aristotle, who lists metaphor among his list of rhetorical choices, thinking, of course, of metaphor in the sense of the painted eyeglass. As Paul Ricoeur notices, however, in order “to explain metaphor . . . Aristotle creates a metaphor, one borrowed from the realm of movement,” for “metaphor” simply means “transfer,” “translate,” or “carry across.” “The word metaphor” Ricoeur continues, “itself is therefore metaphorical because it is borrowed from an order other than that of language,” thereby offering a special form not just of language but of “all meaningful linguistic entities.”65 And where else could this other order be, for Aristotle or anyone else in his tradition, but in the evidence of the senses, which after all provide (by Aristotle’s account) everything that is in the mind? Where else might concepts be referred, but toward embodied experience, what Ricoeur calls “movement”? This haptic twist, the grounding of language in embodiment, has more recently been called the “bottoming out” of metaphor, where the endless cycles of linguistic reference, of conceptual frames

12 Introduction

defined by means of other, analogous frames, ultimately ground themselves in “an order other than that of language.”66 Such “absolute metaphors,” Hans Blumenberg elsewhere avers, are the “foundational elements of philosophical language.” They are “translations,” he insists (hearing the etymology of metaphor),67 which “resist being converted back into authenticity and logicality.” They touch a structured experience of being in the world.68 The critical thing to notice is that this work of metaphor, operating silently but continually to link sense to idea, idea to sense, does not fly in the face of empiricist rationality; it is in fact a product of the long empiricist movement, stretching from its very early formulation in De Anima and depositing itself in the seminal work of men like Boyle, Locke, and even Berkeley. For a wide range of eighteenth-­ century writers, the plain style emerged as a careful management of a language foisted upon metaphor, and was experienced as such. The plain style was in this sense an accomplishment in the management and rerouting of cognitive contact with the world through an inherited set of semiotic displacements, a revivifying of the dead metaphors of language.69 It is worth insisting on this because the usual story of cognition and metaphor starts with a handful of thinkers in the twentieth century. Beginning with Max Black, this tradition swept aside what they called the long-­standing “comparison” theory of metaphor (metaphor as painted eyeglass) in order to rediscover a different vector of metaphor as a fundamental element in cognitive work.70 But these insights have been built into metaphor from the start; witness Aristotle’s “metaphor,” as “carrying across.” And as Aristotle witnessed metaphor in these two forms, so too the major defenders of the plain style, Locke among them, generally avoided metaphor of the rhetorical sort, even while rigorously subscribing to a metaphor theory of language. Metaphor indeed provided the stability of meaning. Viewed in this context, these thinkers constructed a model of linguistic expression that looks to modern eyes strikingly like the seeds of a situated account of cognition. The difference is that Locke and others turned to metaphor in part to witness the distinction that they expected it to erase; metaphor helped shore up a distinction between mind and body even while it sought to coordinate them. The metaphor “the mind is a collection” historically emerges as a summary example of this tendency. On the one hand, it serves to distinguish mind from body, idea from thing: as the world is out there, so it is in here too, container to container. In this sense, metaphor developed out of the conviction that the mind was distinct from the collections it took for its models. On the other, it coordinates a more general linkage between object and idea, the assertion that the mind

Introduction 13

might be a true reflection or microcosm for the world it perceives.71 This is the latticework of metaphor, continually reminding us that ideas retain, and refer us to, their somatic origins. Accordingly, the widespread conviction that the mind was a collection helped invent the distinction between “out there” and “in here”—­even while relying for the distinction upon complex methods of stitching them back together. Metaphor, in this sense, creates the basic problem of epistemology that it seeks to solve, both opening and partially closing the question of how the mind comes to know the world in which it moves.

Cognitive Ecologies The traditional way to think of metaphor is as a one-­way vector from source domain toward the target or figurative domain.72 The most intuitive reading of Augustan theories of the mind’s conservative work is that they depended upon the material models available: the abstract flowing from the concrete, or, ideal superstructure building upon material foundation. In the special case of metaphor as what governs the production of ideas, the metaphorical turn would be said to import a host of material relationships into the grammar of the utterance. Indeed, thinking of metaphor as moving from source to target is a habit we inherit from the mental models of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not the least of which is Locke’s notion of ideas as originating in sensory experience. Conceptualizing metaphor in this way helps to explain the sudden flowering of certain instances of the argument: Hooke’s system of the mind as a repository (Exhibit 11), or Pope’s complex figure of the “toyshop” of Belinda’s heart (Exhibit 9). “The mind is a collection” would therefore smuggle into theories of mentation a host of practices developed in the accrual, storage, and display of artifacts: ideas are the objects of cognition; the mind is a sorting machine; mentation is chiefly analytical or comparative; and so on.73 There is, however, an additional twist, a reverse flow governing the market between material and ideal. When it comes to the guiding model of the eighteenth-­century mind, it becomes critical to remember that this model is more than a model, or, it is a metaphor that must be understood to double back on itself, producing the material foundation by which it is supported. When Pope described the mind with features like a chest of drawers (Exhibit 8) or Addison described the mind as though it were a garden (Exhibit 14), it was in part because Pope and Addison alike could point to actual chests of drawers and actual gardens by way of clinching their models.74 The twist is

14 Introduction

this: they were also designing chests and planting gardens with those same intellectual models in view. And so, changing at the same time as theories of mind were cognitive environments themselves. Opportunities to collect or to own surpassed and reshaped the metaphors that had long stood as models for the mind, just as mental models subsequently surpassed and reshaped the collections upon which they were based. Libraries, museums, cabinets, dressing tables, workshops, gardens, paper, desks, account books, and offices (Exhibits 1, 3, 6–7, 9, 11, 14, 18, 24, and 27) formed especially dense sites of the practical glossing of theory; collecting emerged as a performance of the root workings of intellection, the mind finding itself in place. And, as I have suggested, the reverse will prove to be true as well: theories were founded upon arrangements of things in space. The dialectical to-­and-­fro between material models and conceptual resources, the chicken-­and-­egg reflexivity of source and target,75 is prevalent enough in the literature that it marks a kind of keynote. It may even suggest a unified field of thought. Graham Richards, for instance, argues that only the trope of “mental machinery” makes a prehistory of psychology possible. Before George Henry Lewes and J. S. Mill, William James and Sigmund Freud, there was no science of psychology, no category under which to file books, no heading in a commonplace index; there was, however, a consistent strain of metaphorical, mechanistic modeling of the mind. Psychology, Richards remarks, is what makes thinking itself an object of thought, and it proceeds, in this early phase, by erecting material models in order to subject them to conceptual work. “The only thing that can be known about the soul or the human,” writes one authority on the subject, “are the technical gadgets with which they have been historically measured at any given time.”76 By shifting conceptual relationships onto material models, the intellect makes itself its own subject; the reflexivity afforded by metaphors of mind—­metaphors that displace cognitive processes into observable models—­offers a way of gathering up the materials of a field that did not yet recognize itself as such.77 So, too, commenting generally on the tendency of “social structures” materially to “reproduce” themselves, Pierre Bourdieu locates the central engine whereby folk models of mind witness themselves in their environments, and environments re-­emerge as folk models. “The mental structures which construct the world of objects,” writes Bourdieu, “are constructed in the practice of a world of objects constructed according to the same structures.” This is what he calls the habitus, a space of being structured to an experience, and this, too, is managed by a metaphorical commerce. Coordinating living space and living mind is,

Introduction 15

for Bourdieu, overseen by the continual flux of equivocally bidirectional metaphors; metaphor is, in this sense, the basic medium of the mind, what governs the passage from material to ideal and back again. “The mind is a metaphor of the world of objects,” Bourdieu concludes, “which is itself but an endless circle of mutually reflecting metaphors.”78 Libraries, cabinets, and museums hold a special place in the history of metaphor because they are themselves designed as source domains. In this special case—­in the special case of the metaphor for mind—­the metaphor’s semiotic vector doubles back on itself, the target domain shaping its particular, idiosyncratic sources in all their patterns and products. The cabinet, the museum, the library, and so on are therefore not to be confused as a single metaphor. They offer distinct source domains developed in consultation with developing, existentially felt models of the intellect. We might think of these as environments—­except that “environment” suggests a space or habitat distinct from the observer who stands within it, when anyone standing outside the system would argue that person and space evolve together. Environment is a lousy word.79 Better, then, to call these “ecologies,” studies of habitation or home.80 It is the nature of an ecology that it evolves just like any network.81 Changes in a part kick off responses in others. In a cognitive ecology, we would say that the tools of thought evolve along with the thinker, and vice versa. The hitch, the trick of the Enlightenment, is that these ecologies nurture theories of detachment; the mind witnesses itself in a series of innovations founded upon difference. Thinkers of the seventeenth century are often accused of having installed, at the very core of the new epistemology, a strange break between mind and matter, subject and object. Indeed, many of the names most commonly mentioned in histories of seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­century philosophy, fairly or unfairly, have become labels for certain kinds of dualism. Although an important countertradition exists,82 Gilbert Ryle traces the “dogma of the ghost in the machine” to René Descartes, making him stand for the distinction between res extensa and res cogitans; Rorty blames the tradition flowing from Descartes to Locke for showing that “mind was imaginable apart from body”; Steven Pinker is just one of many people who blame Locke for making mainstream the doctrine of the blank slate, even though he knows that the attribution is false.83 But there is a paradox here; these dualisms are founded on a more profound entanglement. The very distinction between subject and object, self and property, is elaborated in and through the embeddedness of intellect in its material surroundings. The development of the critical distinction between

16 Introduction

mind and matter, the dualist distinction that is the glory and achievement of the empiricist moment, was itself accomplished in the messy flow of cognitive activity through embedded practices—­a heuristic abstraction from curatorial habits. There is, in Timothy Morton’s recent formulation, no thought that is not an ecological thought.84 There is nothing in the mind, no, not even in the empiricist mind, which was not first in the sensorium.

The Design of the Book The reflexivity between minds and collections is the subject of this book—­ and it immediately raises a question of method. We in general think of the Enlightenment as articulating a false distinction between subject and object, thinker and thought, whereas later literary movements—­Romanticism especially—­represented an attempted return to a nostalgic organicism. This is why environmentalist criticism, or ecocriticism, often launches its project of establishing more fully ecological modes of thinking by returning to Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, and others of the High Romantic moment. The mind is not a mirror, the argument runs, that merely reflects whatever it sees; it is a lamp, which illuminates the very things it beholds. We are not collections of experiences but Aeolian harps, whose strings are plucked by the winds of Nature. One set of metaphors is replaced by another, which would seem to be more attuned to the effects that environments have upon the people through which they move, and vice versa. In a coarse-­grained sense, this is certainly true; this is after all the story Romanticism tells about itself. The one who toils and troubles with his books—­who murders to dissect, Wordsworth reminds us—­will “surely grow double”; he will split himself into mind and body, self and other. We are meant, on the contrary, to come forth “into the light of things,” to “let Nature be [our] teacher.”85 And a turn to metaphors that eschew distinctions between mind and matter, person and thing would seem to go a long way toward erasing the divisions installed by the metaphor theory of language in the first place. But a fine-­grained analysis tells a different story; the Romantic turn may indeed have hardened up distinctions between self and other, subject and Nature. Wordsworth’s argument in “The Tables Turned” is that the man in his study is profoundly disconnected from things—­like the “freshening lustre” of the sun, or the “sweet . . . music” of the woodland linnet. But a perverse reader might note that the scholar’s entanglements present the very problem to begin

Introduction 17

with. He is so deep in his reading, so embedded in his books, that he neglects what Wordsworth takes to be the world’s ebb and flow. Paradoxes abound; the reader is type and figure of the man who murders to dissect, thereby signaling a radical split from a living ecology, but he is nevertheless up to his elbows in gore in pursuit of the nature of things (see Exhibit 20), and this surely signals a different set of profound investments. The man in his study is himself capable of the sorts of turns of phrase that would certainly signal the kind of monism Wordsworth might have approved. It is he who asks Wordsworth to “drink the spirit breathed” from the authors of books, kicking off Wordsworth’s exhortation in the first place. There is a fine echo, here, of embodied practice, of ideas as the echoes of carnal engagement, for the scholar’s request hears the haptic memory of “spirit” in what is “breathed”; learning, even the learning of the sort beginning with the desire to speak with the dead, is as somatically intimate and vital as the inspiration and expression of air. What is more, Wordsworth, though he rigorously “let[s] Nature be [his] teacher,” who indeed “watches and receives,” while he “sit[s] alone . . . on that old grey stone” would seem at least outwardly to be even more profoundly disengaged than the man in the study, who is after all surrounded by, indeed filled with, the breath of others. We are left wondering, from this point of view, who has found an ecology, which is to say, a proper home. This is in any case the argument recently emerging from such authors as Timothy Morton, for whom the project of recovering an ecological way of thinking must begin before the Romantic movement in the arts. Morton’s project insists that the Romantic poets created an austere other—­a so-­called Nature—­which they taught us differently to idolize; his work aims to recover what it means to be embedded in an ecology, rather than conceptualizing an “environment” as some separate thing out there (“Nature,” “rocks and stones and trees,” or whatever). And while I fully agree with the laudable project of reinvigorating our sense of our connectedness to the world, the world we are so rapidly poisoning, it makes sense from the start to remember what an ecology is. An ecology is not some thing out there. “Eco” means home; ecology is a study of home. What interests us, to begin with, should therefore be the ways that people dwell in spaces and spaces respond to people such that, together, they become habitable to one another. Thinking ecologically means taking the whole network in view; it means thinking of models of mind evolving along with the environments in which they are entangled and embedded. Person and space co-­respond; this is a cognitive ecology. Better, then, to back up—­to that poem which ends with homesickness as

18 Introduction

its effect. Raymond Williams suggests that the best way to recover an ecology is to trace its fantasies of a distant past. The Mind Is a Collection starts in the context of Milton’s Paradise Lost, for Milton offers a means of thinking a big, interconnected world, of posing, in other words, an ecological vision (Exhibits 1–3).86 But it does this with a twist. For The Mind Is a Collection means to do intellectual history through material history, and vice versa. It proposes a renewed awareness of the crossings of material into ideal, ideal into material, sustaining a sensitivity to the ways in which an idea might repeatedly turn up in an object, or an object (or range of objects) might repeatedly constitute an idea. The story of the mind’s metaphors is a story of people’s dialectical bindings to the arrangements of objects they invented, and which paid them back by inventing those people in turn. This will certainly not be like other empirical projects of recovery—­an archaeology of mind-­stuff—­and not only because the objects of consideration, strictly speaking, no longer exist. That is, the stuff is sometimes still there (sometimes not), but what remains are the artifacts that were once part of a vital exchange, the husk of cognitive processes that remain archaeologically dormant. Revisiting these ecologies is not merely a project of reading, or even of consulting the tradition as it has been handed down to us. As Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer say of one of the first and principal of these ecologies (Exhibit 11), it was witnessed, even at the time, as signaling a new moment in cognitive history; henceforth, these authors note, “if one wanted to produce authenticated experimental knowledge . . . one had to come to this space and to work in it with others.”87 This is precisely what this book sallies out to do. The very messiness, the embeddedness of eighteenth-­century thinking in its environments—­the way, even, that people actively “grew double” from their libraries—­is this book’s most important resource. This story is distributed over twenty-­eight exhibits, which, for conceptual convenience, are organized into cases. Each of these cases (in the way that cases do) offers an argument through material proofs; it strives to materialize a different aspect of the embracing metaphor that hovers above them all: “the mind is a collection.” It begins with the cognitively important environments in which Locke and his near-­contemporary Milton dreamed big thoughts in the first place: the library Locke built over the course of a lifetime (Exhibit 1), and the bed in which Milton was believed to have composed Paradise Lost (Exhibit 2). Each of these places coordinated a theory of metaphor, beginning with Locke’s library, which offered him a material model of mental processes. The chapter ends with a magazine called the Museum, designed by its editor

Introduction 19

and publisher as a place where Locke’s theory of metaphor might be put to work, where ideas might be returned to images. This discussion is developed in the next case (“Design”), which looks at the kinds of spaces that might sustain and perpetuate linkages between matter and mind. These include a camera obscura, the first modern geological museum, the subterranean space where Alexander Pope displayed his rock collection, and an allegorical still life. Each of the spaces captured in these exhibits differently articulates the pressures of organizing things of the world according to a theory of cognition. Cases 3 and 4 put the brain on the ramble, examining theories of mind elaborated in two different vectors of motion. The third case looks at what it means to think of mental work as running along paths, or, put differently, to experience thinking as walking. Its major coordinating metaphor is “digression” (etymologically, to go or to walk aside); in pursuing this metaphor, this case exhibits the workshop of Robert Hooke, Robert Plot’s histories of the countryside told afoot, and Joseph Addison’s different attempts to model brainwork through vocabularies developed in his strolls behind Magdalen College, Oxford (Exhibits 11, 12, and 14). This is followed by a study of “Inwardness,” tracing attempts to come to terms with the rhetorics of embodiment through vocabularies borrowed from movement. Among the figures important in this case is Samuel Pepys, whose alma mater was Magdalene College, Cambridge; when walking one day from Magdalene, he drank some water from Aristotle’s well, and became the victim of a journey of a different sort, kicking off a heightened familiarity with his own medicalized interior (Exhibit 16). This sort of encounter with inwardness is the subject of the fourth case. The last two cases share a different task. Case 5 displays four attempts to arrive at the central, insoluble aporia of the empiricist epistemology. This is the problem of how anything new might appear from within a container-­like mind. That is, if the mind is only the sum of its contents, and its contents are merely what has been gathered from outside, stored, recalled, and rearranged, how might some new product of human ingenuity be said to come into the world? Author Laurence Sterne, anatomist William Hunter, and painter Joshua Reynolds each refigured this problem as a question of “conception” (Exhibits 19–22); this case considers the strategies they developed in their attempts to model conception in a physical system. Indeed, each differently, violently plowed through the bodies of others—­especially women—­in an effort to arrive at solutions to the questions of origins. This coordination of the bodies of other people suggests the contents of the book’s last case, “Dispossession.” The endlessly repeated account of the mind as a storehouse, though

20 Introduction

intended as a mere statement of things as they are, is in fact a sorting switch of power. The vast majority of people subject to British law did not share with mainstream theorists the same somatic ground for the development of mind as distinct from body. That is to say, the hungry, the poor, and the disenfranchised naturally constructed, and were constructed by, cognitive ecologies of very different sorts, which differently capture the regime of their immanent dispossession. The end of this catalogue means therefore to call its founding assumptions into question, noting that the very regime of possession, which makes it possible to think of the mind as a collection, is built on the shifting ground of immanent dispossession. The Mind Is a Collection therefore finds its way from Locke’s library (Exhibit 1) and Milton’s bed (Exhibit 2) to an eighteenth-­century lost property office (Exhibit 27) and a specimen of human remains now housed at the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons (Exhibit 28). All of these exhibits, this book argues, are environments where different sorts of thoughts made themselves at home. They are, in other words, home studies: ecologies. They are case studies in eighteenth-­century British thought.

Case 1

M e t aph o r 1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book — 2. John Milton’s Bed 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum

This book is the catalogue of a museum of embedded cognition, so what better place to start than an actual bed, especially a bed which is also a favored seat of the muses? The time is roughly 1663; the Stuart monarchy had recently returned to the throne of England, kicking off what is widely recognized as a rich phase of cultural, scientific, and economic development. The place is a dilapidated garret in St. Giles-­without-­Cripplegate, around the corner from Grub Street, a low-­rent district populated by writers. The poet is John Milton (1608–1674), now totally blind but at work on his most visionary poem. The best portrait of the author in his space of thinking is by Jonathan Richardson; Richardson was a minor portraitist, but his most influential image was possibly this brief verbal sketch of Milton, for it has given rise to numerous interpretations—­by Fuseli, Delacroix, George Romney, and others. Many of these interpretations capture Milton in an armchair, with a curtained bed merely suggested in the background, but Richardson is not so demure. Milton, Richardson writes, “frequently Compos’d lying in Bed in a Morning. . . . I have been Well inform’d, that when he could not Sleep, but lay Awake whole Nights, he Try’d; not One Verse could he make; at Other times flow’d Easy his Unpremeditated Verse, with a certain Impetus and Æstro, as Himself seem’d to Believe. Then, at what Hour soever, he rung for his Daughter to Secure what Came.”1 Who visited Milton, while he lay in his curtained bed? His daughter was there, but this was after the fact. Also present, we know because he says so, was Milton’s Muse. She was an inconstant bedfellow; Milton pleads in the invocation of Paradise Lost for her to “sing,” relaying to his amanuensis whatever would come. And while the daughter always arrived late to the event,

22 Case 1

the Muse was there before the fact; she kicks the whole machine into motion, “visit[ing]” his “slumbers nightly, or when morn / Purples the east.” This, then, is a museum in the word’s primitive sense: a site or seat of the muses. It provides one popular way of thinking about poetic production as a sort of “inspiration.” This is Milton’s word, which Richardson effaces: Milton’s Muse, elsewhere named Urania, the Muse of astronomy, “inspires / Easy [his] unpremeditated verse.” Indeed, the scene is so apt as a site of poetic inspiration that Milton himself painted a similar scene of dream-­work in the poem he composed with Urania’s aid (see Exhibit 2). All the elements are there: blindness and insight, poverty and inspiration, sublimity and the solitary seeker. This condensation of themes helps account for the popularity of Richardson’s description; Milton in his chamber would become a Romantic-­era set piece. But this is partly to misread the scene—­as Richardson himself would have known. Richardson believed the mind to be a collection of images, and painting to be a process of judicious culling and arrangement. What is more, Milton would have agreed. When Milton has Adam sketch for Eve his understanding of the mind’s work, it is a straight version of what Richardson would later theorize: the mind is a repository, and thinking is the arrangement of ideas. And while Adam surely overlooked some important details, Paradise Lost nevertheless also offers us a museum of this second sort: the allusive compendium of a world of learning. It offers us both: Urania and the library. It aims at once to recover the vision of an untroubled paradise—­an ecology in which “knowledge” is the only forbidden thing, in which angels descend to breathe visions into the minds of their recipients—­while at the same time offering the digested collection of an impressive lifetime’s worth of learning. It is, at once, the song that Milton’s Muse sings through him, while at the same time the epitome of what its author could bring to bear on the subject. And so meeting here are, seemingly, two theories of poetics: poetry as the product of musing—­of “inspiration”—­and poetry as the condensation of a life of study. They are, however, stitched together by a system of metaphors, the most embracing of which is the metaphor of the museum, which is itself at once material and ideal, collection of things and site of the muses.

Exhibit 1. John Locke’s Commonplace Book Angel etymologically means “messenger”; inspire means “breathe in.” The words are of course critical in Milton’s epic, but they also turn up, linked, in a

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1. An incomplete index from John Locke’s medical notebook for the years 1662–1667. Bodleian Shelfmark MS. Locke f.25. Courtesy Bodleian Library.

more surprising place, a philosophical treatise begun just as Paradise Lost was seeing its way into print.2 This is in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding—­but to see what angels and inspiration are doing there requires a bit of groundwork. And just as Richardson sketches Milton in a compositional ecology, so too Locke’s Essay stages the author in a place of thinking. Locke is discussing the “steps by which the mind attains several truths” when he proposes that the senses at first let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them, they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards the mind proceeding farther, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials

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about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.3 This is the core of Locke’s epistemology of “cognitive contact,” in which ideas rise directly out of encounters with material sensation;4 from the start, the mind is an empirical observer, receiving and storing experience in little nugget-­like atoms called ideas.5 Knowledge by this account would not seem to be a repertoire for the body moving in space, or an available set of strategic interactions with tools, or even a set of habits of deportment; it doesn’t seem to be of much use for playing an instrument (though Locke meditates on this elsewhere) or for walking, breathing, or swinging a hammer. It doesn’t provide much room for poetry or inspiration. The mind by this account is what develops general concepts from particulars, which is in turn equivalent to the working up of language from the things experienced by the senses. Francis Bacon, more than a generation earlier, had kicked off the project of the new sciences by calling for a thorough remodeling of learning; he insisted that the task of philosophy should be to establish “in the human intellect . . . a true pattern of the world as we actually find it.”6 Locke offers an epistemological system that makes sense of this task; Locke’s “empty cabinet” makes it possible to think of mental activity as a pattern for natural philosophical practice. The link between practice and concept is in this regard quite explicit; stocking the mind is like stocking the cabinet, mental processes leaning on a distinct set of habits, which will turn out to be elaborated in haptic engagements with the world. A strange habit has sprung up in our reading of Locke. We have learned to read him as an entry in a history of ideas, when his prose, especially when he touches nearest on the nature of the mind’s ideas themselves, embeds itself continually in a history of practice. Locke’s own remarks lead back toward embodiment, especially in spaces like his library; the pressure even of this passage is not toward abstraction, though this is the process it describes, but rather toward a set of learned movements. Locke insists that the acquisition of ideas, and even the development of reason, recalls and is formally equivalent to the material processes of sorting books in a library. Jules Law, elaborating Richard Rorty’s claims about the rhetoricality of metaphor (metaphor as one world-­ making choice among others) argues that the brilliance of Locke’s achievement is precisely the ambiguity of his figures; Locke, Law argues, deliberately leaves his metaphors unpacked.7 But Locke only appears to leave his metaphors unpacked while we confine ourselves to conceptual source domains;

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that is, his metaphors are only unpacked if we think that they refer us to an imagined set of relations. Locke’s own prose all along points us toward practical, embodied engagement with objects in space. This particular image works because the cabinet provides the working space where a relationship between the curator and a stable system of storage may become duplicated as a model for an internal relationship between the mind and its objects. Even while ideas rise from objects, Locke’s prose returns us to particulars. If you want to unpack his metaphors, you will have to unpack his library. So, does Locke represent the genesis of the empiricist dualism, as it is commonly argued, or a more profound embeddedness in the materials of thinking, as his own language insists? The paradox, felt even here, is that Locke’s figure of the mind as collection develops a distinction between the mind and its materials, even while itself resting on a complex set of entanglements with the environment through which that mind moves.8 It is one thing to claim that the objects of the world are ontologically unlike but systemically identical to the objects of the mind. This is how Locke is read, as advancing a theory of mind distinct from, rather than “abstracted” from, or even “much the same” as, the daily practices upon which Locke’s thinking continually leans. Locke advances, in this sense, philosophy as the mirror of nature, reproducing nature while nevertheless fundamentally unlike it. It is something else altogether to create this systematic difference by tinkering with physical models. This would be to install an internal division in the mind that bottoms out upon an intimately experienced and always evolving relationship between a curator and his things.9 These often-­remarked internal distinctions, differently articulated through abstract slashes like res cogitans/res extensa, soul/body, mind/brain, are established through shifting alliances between psychological theories and habits of work. Indeed, in his case, Locke builds this strange division with constant reference to curating a cabinet. And this is the beginning of a kind of entanglement. Locke bases his model of an autonomous mind on a dialectical interchange between models and theories, cabinets and minds, collections and concepts.10 “Man’s power,” as Locke sums up, and his “ways of operation, [are] much the same in the material and intellectual world.”11 Locke’s name therefore has come to stand for a concept of mind that would emerge as one of the chief legacies of Enlightenment empiricism, despite the fact that a return to his own habits tends to paint a much more complicated picture.12 Undoubtedly, Locke’s argument and its legacy helped introduce a warpage into mainstream ways of viewing the world. This is the system of the understanding as

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an observer among its objects, the mind consisting of, on the one hand, a set of faculties like reason and judgment, and, on the other, the ideal objects with which it works. And it establishes this through a complex web of metaphors, each of which leans on the memory of haptic practice. But our readings of Locke in general expect us to perform a more complicated transformative trick: at once to remember what it feels like to stock a cabinet with its objects, and to accept an etiology of reason which, in the end, will insist that it has no place for feeling. Take, for instance, Paul de Man’s influential reading of the Essay. “When Locke,” de Man convincingly argues, “develops his own theory of words and language, what he constructs turns out to be in fact a theory of tropes.”13 This seems exactly right. Locke’s curatorial mind is not only modeled on the labors of a collector in his cabinet; it also works, fundamentally, by modeling ideas on patterns observed in the stuff of experience, de Man’s “theory of tropes.”14 “Of course,” de Man continues, “he would be the last man in the world to realize and to acknowledge this. One has to read him, to some extent, against or regardless of his own explicit statements.” We are asked, therefore, to accept Locke as a foundational figure in the modern mobilization of metaphor, while we are encouraged to overlook the (metaphorical) rudiments on which his most conceptual metaphors are built. We are encouraged to treat him as a theorist of pure reason, when all his remarks remind us of thinking as a practice. Even while Locke reminds us of the embeddedness of thought in the stuff of the senses, we are asked to forget. The usual treatment of the history of the empiricist project, de Man’s remarks notwithstanding, is to note its general hostility to metaphor, especially when metaphor is imagined as a mere rhetorical choice among others.15 In this sense, metaphor is the stuff of poetry and stagecraft, what, in the conventional formulation offered by Thomas Tyers, “takes the hearer and reader by storm,” convincing “our passions . . . before our reason, which is too often made a dupe of.”16 But increasingly, recent work has drawn our attention to the ways in which thinkers were sensitive to metaphor as an important tool for organizing systems of ideas.17 This insight is in fact developed by Locke, though he avoids the word “metaphor” itself. “It may,” he remarks, lead us a little towards the original of all our notions and knowledge, if we remark how great a dependence our words have on common sensible ideas; and how those which are made us of to stand for actions and notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible ideas are transferred to

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more abstruse significations, and made to stand for ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v.g. to imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instill, disgust, disturbance, tranquility, &c. are all words taken from the operations of sensible things, and applied to certain modes of thinking.18 The double consciousness of Locke’s treatment of metaphor is on full display here. On the one hand, Locke goes out of his way in this passage to avoid even the hint of a rhetorical flourish—­while, on the other hand, he expects us continually to hear the origins of words as figures for sensible simples. It is not merely that sensible ideas are made twice “to stand,” or that ideas “rise” from the senses; these are of course things less proper to ideas than to the person having them, but this is merely the beginning of the ways in which ideas are, Locke insists, traceable to haptic or somatic dimensions of experience. Rather, he suspects that his whole vocabulary, and the conceptual field in which he thinks, might “depend” upon, that is, “hang from,” ideas first produced by the senses. “Apprehend” means “grasp,” “adhere” means “stick to”; “instill” means “put in by drops”; “disgust” means “averse taste”; and so on. And precisely here is the moment I mentioned before—­where language more appropriate to Paradise Lost turns up in the Essay: “Spirit,” Locke continues, means “breath”; “angel” means “messenger.” Words penned in Locke’s cabinet would not be out of place in Milton’s bed. Philosophical analysis in this account therefore begins to look like metaphor analysis, as metaphor emerges as the basic generative condition of intellectual life in the first place.19 While Locke has gone out of his way to avoid the word, what he is describing is the work of metaphor embedded in the intellect. Indeed, he offers us a definition without the proper name, going so far as to hide “metaphor” in its Latin equivalent, for what is “transfer” (“carry across”) but the Latin word for “metaphor,” Aristotle’s Greek word for the same sort of ferrying or “carrying across” of meaning from one realm to another?20 And what is an angel doing here, except as a figure for the carrying of messages from one ineffable realm to another? As Locke imagines it, the conceptual metaphor—­the mind as cabinet—­ governs the coordination of source and target domains across a range of subordinate metaphors, including the ways in which reason does its workmanlike labor, the lodging of ideas like books in the memory, the ways in which the mind is furnished, the paperiness of its inscription surfaces, and so on.21 In this sense, metaphor does not merely describe a linguistic flourish.22

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It captures a special category of brainwork. So when the recent cognitive turn in philosophy argues that conceptual work appropriates neural networks developed in bodily activity, that conceptual thought is overlaid on sensorimotor networks of neurons,23 it pursues Locke’s suggestion to trace the “originals of all our notions and knowledge” to their roots in the senses. It is not just that something else is carried across from the source domain of the metaphor to the target domain, or even that those domains are thoroughly blended; it is that the neural networks for the literal and metaphorical senses of a word seem to be partly shared.24 Metaphor, in this line of thought, emerges as the special, possibly unique condition in which the mind can hold two ideas superimposed at once. Metaphor causes sensory experience to overlap with conceptual relationships. It nevertheless, to a greater or lesser degree, appears to be the basic condition of language and knowledge acquisition, especially when that knowledge turns to thinking about the conditions of knowledge.25 As Mark Johnson puts it, “In a very strong sense, philosophy is metaphor.”26 One of Locke’s examples—­“apprehend”—­has recently received a great deal of attention in the laboratory, for the metaphor itself directly and dramatically relates embodiment to mentation.27 The word understood in its conceptual sense, something like “hold something in the mind,” clearly leans on a bodily engagement with the world, the reaching out and grasping of something. Recent empirical research on brainwork suggests that such a word as “grasp,” meant in its metaphorical sense, activates parts of the same neural networks that light up when someone grasps something bodily and materially.28 The implication is that overlapping sets of neurons fire whether the word is thought, written, spoken, or heard, but also when something is grasped, or even when someone else is seen to be grasping something—­actually or conceptually.29 The brain’s motor, visual, and proprioceptive circuits provide the ground of transfer where relations in space are bartered for relations between concepts. What is more, while it matters when a metaphor is mostly a dead one (as, for example, in the case of “apprehend”) many of the same general areas of the brain seem to be employed in conceptual as in related motor or proprioceptive processing.30 Embedded in etymology, Locke suggests, are clues to atavistic acts of intellection, for the web-­work of the symbolic catches up fragments of its aboriginal embodiment.31 Conceptual systems are overlaid on patterns that emerge in sensory experience, even when the words labeling those concepts do not always own those concepts’ metaphorical debts in an obvious way.32 As Locke puts it, “The dominion of man, in this little world of his own understanding,” is “much the same as it is in the great world of visible

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things,” his laborious intellect working on ideas much in the same way as a craftsman might work with his collection of materials.33 The cognitive theory of metaphor has come under fire for underestimating the extent to which culture may come to shape metaphor—­especially how context or situation may even map itself backwards into the understanding of and interaction with the material world.34 It seems to offer, in other words, little room for “socio-­cultural situatedness.” George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, for instance, argue that the fundamental experience of containment, childhood experiences with putting things in and out of boxes, and so on, shapes by the royal road of metaphor a host of conceptual structures—­not least our metaphors for memory, which include “filling the mind” and “retrieving information.”35 A number of studies on the embeddedness of exactly this metaphor, however, note that theorizations of containment tend to depend on inherited uses of containers, and that different cultures develop, therefore, strikingly different conceptual models.36 What we clearly need, then, is not a simplistic theory of concepts located immediately in rudimentary facts about the body but a nuanced theory that locates the haptic ground of conceptual metaphor in the mind’s elaborated and entangled relationship with its working environments. Speaking more immediately, we need a theory that locates thinking in its embodiment, thought as a property of an ecology. Especially in the case of a metaphor that becomes important for the mind’s understanding of itself (“the mind is a container”), what we need is a theory that can do two things at once. It must account for the way that an ideal system may be modeled on a material context at the same time that that material context is, in turn, modified by the ideal system doing its work. And it must do all of this while remembering that it is the system itself, the dialectical to-­and-­fro of the theory and practice, that makes it possible to think the mind/body split in the first place. This suggests, then, that we may usefully think of the two halves of Locke’s remarks as linked. On the one hand, Locke notes, concepts are borrowed from bodily experience; on the other, ideas are stored and coordinated in the mind similarly to how things would be stored and coordinated in the cabinet. It is worth remembering, at this point, Locke’s lifetime habit of collecting, organizing, and collating books. His working model of mind would refer us, in this sense, to shelving and sorting practices at work in the cabinet, a cabinet that he was quite possibly in when he penned the lines that now stand as some of the most famous in the Essay.37 Locke began composing his library while studying at Christ Church, Oxford, with an eye toward a career in medicine, and his early acquisitions are, not surprisingly, books on topics of theology,

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medicine, and chemistry.38 But he also invested heavily in books of natural philosophy and natural history, including what one scholar calls the single most complete private collection of the works of Robert Boyle.39 Locke’s holdings throughout, therefore, were heavily weighted toward those thinkers who would pave the way for thinking of the mind as a library: Aristotle and Cicero among the ancients, but also Francis Bacon, Thomas Willis, Robert Boyle, and Robert Hooke among the moderns, with a selection of such Renaissance humanist thinkers as Milton, Spenser, and Thomas Browne.40 Taken together, these volumes provide a compact history of the origin of Locke’s system of conceptual metaphorics (his theory of ideas as objects) from Renaissance contact with Greek and Latin originals. Indeed, Locke’s library contained the precise books, from Aristotle to Bacon, that would have allowed him to construct a reasonably exhaustive prehistory of the notion, expressed in the second book of Locke’s Essay, that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.41 This is of course a container theory of mind, the master metaphor of Locke’s epistemology. But this is library as content; we are interested in the library as metaphor, indeed, as ecology, as a place where Locke might elaborate the relationship between thinker and materials of thought. And this requires a more detailed return to the site of work, in order to establish one way that Locke’s philosophical system found its bedrock in a set of learned gestures and habits. Fragments of Locke’s library survive—­enough to reconstruct the elaborate systems he developed to tackle exactly the related problems of storage and coordination not just of books but of ideas. The library was elaborated over three rough phases: an early phase of acquisition, which was interrupted by a pair of extended visits to the Low Countries; a second phase of coordination, in which the books he continued to acquire while abroad and the books being held for him in England were together entered in an interleaved copy of Thomas Hyde’s Catalogus impressorum Librorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae;42 and a final phase, beginning after his return in 1688, when he was reunited with his total collection of books and set to put them in a meaningful, indexed order.43 These phases roughly accompany the years he began, worked up, and published the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, which he started in 1671 but completed only in 1688. I mention this at length for two reasons. The first is that Locke strove to achieve continuity in his library despite his shifting circumstances; it is a curious detail of his life as a collector of books that he seems never to have purchased a duplicate.44 This was made possible in part by the Catologus, which operated as a sort of epitome and vade mecum of the

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library itself. It is also partly because Locke continually had his library and its books in mind even during his separations from them.45 The second is to note that Locke’s elaboration, on the one hand, of the mind as a cabinet, and his development, on the other, of his cabinet as an increasingly stable repository of ideas, together suggest the dialectical to-­and-­fro that characterizes a cognitive ecology, a working space of thinking that, in Locke’s case, also provides the model for thought. Locke’s cabinet provided an apt metaphor for mind because the space was structured to match, in fact to materialize, the rudimentary and analytically prior metaphors underwriting Locke’s sense of how cognition works. These more rudimentary and hence capacious metaphors are different species of the same basic conceptual source domain: the mind is a container. In this analytically prior formulation, Locke imagines the mind as a sort of camera obscura—­a “dark room” that allows images to enter and fall upon a suitable surface like a wall or a screen (see Exhibit 4).46 The mind has the capacity, called “contemplation,” Locke writes, to hold a small set of such ideas “for some time actually in view.”47 This would be to perceive something (etymologically, “to take” or “to capture” it), and to extend or to attenuate that perception across time. It is as though the understanding stood within a miniaturized chamber, viewing images cast upon a two-­dimensional surface, contemplating them simply as they come and go. But contemplation on present sensory ideas is the exception rather than the norm; indeed, in his Essay Locke gives to “contemplation” the shortest space possible, offering little more than a barely ornamented definition. Indeed, he gives to “contemplation” a space appropriate to how long the mind is able actually to contemplate, without recourse to any supports. For, according to Locke’s system, we far more often “retrieve” ideas that are “laid up in store . . . when need and occasion calls for them.” It is for this reason that the dark room emerges as an important transitional metaphor. Locke almost instantly appends to the image of the dark room an extensive storage function: the mind, he notes, is just like such a closet with a small opening “would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there.”48 The development of his argument begins, that is, to situate itself in a more elaborated and embracing metaphorical context. This context is of course the library or repository, in which mental states, refigured as “ideas,” may be “laid up” or stored like “dormant pictures,” where they may either be recalled at will or turn up according to their own associations and affordances. The library, that is, offers to Locke what has elsewhere been called a “regimen of the mind.”49 It offers a way of visualizing, of making present to the mind as

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Locke understands it, a system of natural memory; it offers a solution to the problem posed by the theory of the mind as a chamber like his own, a solution to Locke’s concern that objects entering through that chamber’s small openings should, as he hoped, “stay there.”50 Taken together, Locke, his cabinet, and the library it contained provide the ecology in which Locke’s remarks about the cabinet-­like structure of the mind are immediately embedded. The network provides a way of speaking: the understanding with its ideas is like a curator in a cabinet. A second problem emerges, however, which Locke’s shelving system was not designed to handle. This is the problem of recollection—­and it is his solution to this problem that cuts to the core of Locke’s metaphorical theory of metaphors. As Locke puts it, a man who seeks but is unable to find “those ideas that should serve his turn, is not much more happy in his knowledge than one that is perfectly ignorant.”51 For the “business . . . of the memory,” Locke remarks, is not merely to store up impressions but “to furnish to the mind those dormant ideas which it has present occasion for.”52 This problem for the active and goal-­oriented mind, the one embedded in what he calls a “present occasion,” or, colloquially, a man’s “turn,” demands a system in which ideas are linked to the subject at hand. It requires, therefore, a related but distinct technology, for the ordering of knowledge as though it were a collection of things will involve more than the ability to store ideas in a stable, organized place. It also demands the organization and collation of ideas so that they can be integrated into present circumstances. What is wanted is a system where a context—­a “present occasion”—­might already suggest a shifting and adaptable constellation of related ideas or concepts, which nevertheless point back to the material and exemplary ground from which they emerged. The creation of links between present occasion and ideas of use, Locke insists, is partly a power that memory already has. Among the natural work of memory is the retention of associations between ideas, as those ideas are patterned by experience. This is an old idea, that turns up, among other places, in the Summa of Thomas Aquinas, who is in turn indebted to Aristotle’s De Memoria.53 The mind of itself creates groupings among ideas of things it witnesses together. But the development of such associations is also a capacity that can be mastered and perfected, and it is in the working out of this problem in the library that Locke put a traditional form to new use. He was the inventor of a new system of collating and storing extracts, a system that was destined to become, in part for the fame of its author, the most popular method for note taking until the end of the eighteenth century.54 This is Locke’s New Method

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of Common-­placing. Locke’s copy of Hyde’s Catalogus was geared toward the regular filing away of the matter of knowledge, but his series of notebooks laid out by the New Method worked that knowledge up into patterns and systems for their instant, motivated use. It provided therefore a second set of metaphors, overlaid upon the first, which helps explain how things witnessed in the world are liquidated into the materials of thinking.55 Like the library, the commonplace was an old technology when Locke encountered it. It emerged through Renaissance humanist practice, developed out of theories of poetics as they were understood to have been conceived by Cicero and Quintilian (see Exhibit 2).56 The book of commonplaces (topos koinos in Aristotle’s Greek or locus communis in Cicero’s Latin commentary) provided the backbone to the Scholastic brand of philosophical inquiry and the classical style of rhetorical disputation alike.57 Cicero, especially as he was received in Locke’s England, understood the development of oratory to hinge on what he called “inventio.” This category meant to include more than merely the discovery (invention in its etymological sense) of a happy order or the spontaneous development of an effective turn of phrase; it expanded over the Renaissance to include the gathering, storage, and recollection of examples with an eye to their use in narrative or argument.58 All of this counted as “inventio.” The commonplace, as Locke encountered it, was a heuristic device dedicated to the kind of rhetorical making that inventio demanded;59 the “declared purpose of  .  .  . the serious commonplace book,” as it has recently been put, was “action,” specifically for “the better arming one’s arguments in speech or writing.” It was organized to store examples according to arguments already well known.60 The humanist commonplace was based on inherited categories; largely because it was geared toward disputation in traditional questions of ethics and theology, the Renaissance commonplace began as a sort of grid of traditional topics, and it located examples to fit.61 Many of these commonplaces, indeed, were printed volumes already filled in, minor encyclopedias with prepared entries and suitable for a wide range of cultural work; numerous early modern and premodern writers—­Montaigne, Shakespeare, even Milton62—­have been shown to have relied on such prepared commonplaces. Culling examples from a wide array of sources, traditional commonplaces were harnessed to a recognizable polemic end, gathering examples and rhetorical resting places as the mirror of a Renaissance cosmos, assembling in small the proof of the divine order of the world. They offered a relatively standardized way of dividing up the realms of knowledge.63 As Ann Blair puts it, “Explananda . . . become ‘commonplaces’ in the technical as well

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as the colloquial sense: in being selected from their original source and entered into the commonplace book [extracts] become self-­evident truths.”64 Locke’s innovation was to convert the commonplace into a machine for developing abstract categories themselves.65 He thereby turned a form dedicated to the repetition of the Renaissance worldview into a tool for the new philosophy and its inductive methods—­or, in other words, “abstraction” as a natural process of intellection.66 Locke at most titled commonplace volumes according to inherited categories—­physica, theologica, medica—­but his indices, where the real organizational work of recollection was prepared, were organized according to the present state of his learning, his interests, how he had already learned to understand the world, and, in general, what he observed as he read. The system begins with Locke reading; when he comes across a passage that seems important to him, he considers (in the words of an eighteenth-­ century editor) “to what head the thing [he] would enter is most naturally referred; and under which, [he] would be led to look for such a thing.”67 Armed with a single word (“Epistle” is Locke’s apt example), Locke consults his index. Here, heads will be gathered according to their first letter and following vowel, so it is necessary to begin by seeing if there are other Epistolary notes already entered. Had there already been an entry in “Ei,” Locke would have found the page number in the index, and turned to that page. Finding “Ei” empty, however, he turns to the first blank page in the book and copies out the passage verbatim. When he is finished copying, he inserts the head in the margin, and turns back to the index, where he writes the number of the page in the commonplace book under “Ei.” Some of Locke’s many imitators developed ways of reintroducing categories back into the index itself; one user, for instance, inserted heads in superscript in the index: “Go—­13Gold coin, 21Gold Mine,” and so on.68 Locke simply wrote these categories in the margins of each page, whereby, in his words, “the Heads present themselves at First Sight.”69 It is worth pausing to make the point explicitly. Locke’s index was by no means the only technology whereby mental models were realized in curatorial practices—­and curatorial practices in the vocabularies of intellection. But between Locke’s space of work and his theory of the intellect we may witness a cognitive ecology at work, where the logics of abstraction are distributed between keeper and collection. More than one of Locke’s contemporaries instantly recognized the metaphorical work of his commonplacing system; John LeClerc for instance begins his celebration of Locke’s commonplacing system with the advantages it has for the development of the mind. In his preface to the pamphlet containing

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Locke’s indexing system, LeClerc categorically confounds the commonplace with the “Treasury or Store-­house” of the “Memory”; similarly, he programmatically confuses the index with the faculty of “Judgment.”70 This is because the index provides a place for the dialectical elaboration and systematization of Locke’s epistemology, especially of the relationship between the faculty of the understanding and its mental materials. Each commonplace entry involves two separate acts of transfer. First, a quotation is selected as an epitome of a text, and then, as part of the process of putting it in the commonplace, a single word is developed to pose it as part of an abstract category. These two transfers anticipate Locke’s sense of the mind as a collection: the “senses at first let in particular ideas, to furnish the yet empty cabinet,” Locke remarks; thereafter, the mind, “by degrees growing familiar with some of them,” “abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use of general names.”71 The first variety of transfer in the commonplace, from book to notebook, echoes the work of the senses, identifying ideas that can be stored as facts.72 The second, however, begins to capture the intellect as an emergent property, developing only when the store is full enough that reason may begin to arise alongside the categories of thought. This latter process is what is properly called “abstraction,” for it is the method “whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all the same kind.” But it clearly leans against “abstraction” in its other meaning, the summarizing of the contents of a book. It may be, Locke elsewhere surmises, that there are “species” existing in the world prior to experience. But it is the mind, in its curatorial habits, that develops general names—­“abstracts” them—­from the materials of thinking. The commonplace is therefore itself a measure of “the use of reason,” which, Locke remarks, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.”73 Reason, writes Charles Taylor, is for Locke “above all a property of the process of thinking, not of the substantive content of thought”;74 nor does reason stand somehow apart from its work. “Reason,” in Locke’s idiom, develops through the curatorial compilation and organization of “its materials.” Locke’s headings are the trick whereby past contexts anticipate present occasion; the index is where Locke’s metaphors of abstraction bottom out, for it is the site where he might witness himself working out new abstract categories from the raw material of the old. There is, however, an important reverse movement, which finds these abstractions reinstalled at the site of the collecting activity in the first place. The tricky thing is how to identify passages ripe for abstraction, even while in the act of reading. As anyone who has compiled an index will know, the development of these general ideas or

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heads comes secretly to bear an important formative function, slipping back into the reading process. Just as the development of names for general heads in the commonplace will provide “general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such ideas” in the future, so too, Locke remarks, we “take for the perception of our sensation” that which is in fact “an idea formed by our judgment.”75 So, for instance, our repeated exposure to convex shapes, Locke observes, teaches us that what appear in the eye to be certain flat disks of light will actually turn out to be spheres if handled and turned on all sides.76 Prior work by the judgment to compile the mathematical notion “sphere,” abstracted from numerous past experiences of flat disks, sneaks so swiftly into experience that by the time fresh sensations reach what Locke calls the “presence chamber” of the mind, they are already altered by the organizing work of the judgment.77 We do not see flat disks and then figure out that they are spheres; we simply see spheres. What appear to the intellect to be passively received sensory ideas are already shaped by the “workmanship of the understanding.”78 Shaped by “conformity with our own experience,” the understanding participates in a secret way in constructing the world it beholds.79 So, too, rather than arriving late to a field of examples already assembled, the index of Locke’s commonplace is already entangled in the project of compilation, for it is the categories emerging there that help Locke identify the abstracts to copy in the first place. The explosion of indices in printed books was a sign of the times, of the reorganization of knowledge as content.80 But in Locke’s case, and in the cases of the thousands of people who adopted his method, we may say that their science produced the tail that it itself grasped—­ collected matter suggesting index headings that in turn suggest new matter to collect. The index is not merely a method of collation and organization; it is also a system of reading.81 What begins as a local conception of abstraction in the material habits of collection ends up getting smuggled into how Locke perceives the very activity of thought; what begins as the mere development of general names from observed particulars—­abstraction, in other words, as itself an abstraction—­ends up becoming, in the way of all abstractions, a judgment passing as a perception. Locke’s indexing system is a system suited to the mind he understood himself to have: one that collects nuggets, files them away, and develops general names according to the ideas it possesses. Likewise, the theory of mind he develops is one suited to, and metaphorically founded on, the filing systems through which he did the work of thinking. He does not go quite so far as to suggest that reason itself is a mere offspring or epiphenomenon of the storage

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of ideas—­that it rises autogenetically out of the mere accrual of facts. Nor does he suggest that we may choose freely the way that we divide up sensations into objects or abstracts. Though the “contents” of the mind “are derived from experience,” and therefore particular to the individual and his social context, “the psychological,” remarks Graham Richards, “stays formally fixed,” arriving in the end at seemingly essential and universal rules and methods, the very rules and methods it is the work of the Essay to discover.82 Indeed, Locke’s optimism is in the end anchored by the notion that collections of the same simple ideas will suggest the same abstract ones, providing, Locke hopes, a vocabulary for rational discourse.83 In his intellectual practice, however, he discusses perfectible but ultimately idiosyncratic methods of storage, sorting, and recall as the routes to discoveries about the world. And in this system, the labor of abstraction, the work of commonplace linked to library, ends up providing the master metaphor governing his epistemology. The mind as cabinet and cabinet as mind end up unconsciously coordinating a host of subordinate operations about the workmanlike nature of the intellect. What starts out as a mere metaphor, a work of judgment, slips back in as a structuring condition, shaping not only how the mind witnesses itself but also the way that it organizes its environment. The final sign of this dialectical process is the Essay itself, which emerged, in the end, as what Locke called “a copy of my own mind, in its several ways of operation.”84

Exhibit 2. John Milton’s Bed The networks of metaphor elaborated in Locke’s cabinet provide a way of returning to the question of who visited Milton behind the curtains of his bed. Present there was his Muse, who “inspires / Easy” his “unpremeditated verse.” But also crowding Milton for his bedcovers were masses of poets, philosophers, writers, and thinkers who provided the grist of his deep reading. Like so many of his contemporaries, Milton was a keeper of commonplaces. Among the handful of his manuscripts that have survived the passage of time is a commonplace book owned, compiled, and consulted by Milton in his literary and poetic practice. Composed mostly of passages of political importance, the commonplace—­now at the British Library—­is a folio manuscript originally consisting of 126 leaves, of which more than half remain unused.85 It contains entries ordered only by the order in which Milton encountered them in his reading and thought to copy them or have them copied for him. The surviving

2. Milton, poised between his amanuenses and his museum. Eugène Delacroix, Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to His Daughters. © 2014 Kunsthaus Zürich. All rights reserved.

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commonplace limits itself only to the three contemporary branches of moral philosophy—­“Ethicus,” “Oeconomicus,” and “Politicus”—­among which it is most heavily invested in the last. It contains, therefore, quotations from Machiavelli and John Speed, historical exempla and excerpts from church historians, and remarks on ethics and politics generally. There was nothing particularly revolutionary in the form of the commonplace; unlike Locke, Milton did not propose a flexible indexing system, working up “heads” as his thinking evolved. Milton’s choice of topoi, writes Ruth Mohl, is after traditional categories, dealing with political and moral questions.86 It was accordingly useful to Milton in forming rhetorical answers to traditional political and religious questions, which is exactly how he seems to have used it. Over the course of his lifetime, Milton would develop a profound sensitivity to the entanglement of minds with places—­an embedded monism. But this is not what he inherited, or where his thinking started. Milton cut his teeth on the Aristotelianism of Christ’s College at Cambridge, where he began keeping his first set of commonplaces.87 The Cambridge curriculum he experienced was generally Aristotelian in the late Continental and Scholastic tradition;88 Aristotle’s De anima and Parva naturalia composed by far the greatest part of the proto-­psychological theory Milton learned,89 though he was exposed as well to later works in the classical and medieval line elaborating Aristotle’s epistemological insights: Cicero’s philosophical and rhetorical works, Hermogenes’s Ars Rhetorica, and so on.90 Milton’s commonplace was one element of an inherited way of thinking, the Ciceronian, ultimately Aristotelian model of mind in which “invention” is the ranging of the mind over its stock of images.91 Milton himself remarks on the Ciceronian use of the commonplace in his essay The Art of Logic (1672); any rhetorical and logical inquiry begins, he insists, at the commonplace, gathering useful materials, and organizing them into an efficient design.92 The crucial point, the keynote equally for the influential strand of poetics passing through Milton and, in the event, to the empiricist project generally, is just that there is nothing in the mind but what is first in the senses. Although this would later be voiced by Locke and others, it finds its way into the British curriculum through medieval Scholasticism; as Thomas Aquinas phrased it in the Summa, nihil in intellectu est, non quod fuerit prius in sensu.93 All mental work merely manipulates objects received through the wide portals of the eyes, ears, nose, and so on. This is clearly not a theory of poetic creation from inspiration; it is the theory of poetic creation as the just rearrangement of things already collected and available to the intellect. “There is no proceeding in invention of knowledge,”

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as Cambridge-­trained Francis Bacon puts it, “but by similitude”; invention is entirely limited to the right ordering of things in the mind resembling things in the world.94 At least, this is how Milton’s poetics were experienced in the eighteenth century. The workmanlike poetics implied by the Aristotelian cognitive model were admired by more than one of Milton’s eighteenth-­century critics. Samuel Johnson, for example, remarked that Paradise Lost displayed “the united force of study and genius; of a great accumulation of materials, with judgment to digest, and fancy to combine them: Milton was able to select from nature, or from story, from ancient fable, or from modern science, whatever could illustrate or adorn his thoughts.” In reading Paradise Lost, Johnson concludes, “we read a book of universal knowledge.”95 Where, then, is the room for inspiration? What use could a Muse possibly be to a mind like this, except as a shallow figure for the mind’s rote work of selection?96 This is precisely the question motivating a crucial moment in Paradise Lost—­in which the ultimate action of the poem depends upon a scene of instruction. Words in Adam’s mouth could almost be in Francis Bacon’s, John Locke’s, or a tutor at Milton’s Christ’s College in Cambridge, for it is here that Milton offers the clearest statement of this standard version of the mind’s work. Eve has just awoken, troubled and half-­seduced in a dream, the blush of her excitement still on her cheeks; Adam offers her his understanding of the mind’s structure, organizing it into reason and its lesser faculties. “In the Soule,” Adam reports, Are many lesser Faculties that serve Reason as chief; among these Fansie next Her office holds; of all external things, Which the five watchful Senses represent, She forms Imaginations, Aerie shapes, Which Reason joyning or disjoyning, frames All what we affirm or what deny, and call Our knowledge or opinion; then retires Into her private Cell when Nature rests. Oft in her absence mimic Fansie wakes To imitate her; but misjoyning shapes, Wilde work produces oft, and most in dreams, Ill matching words and deeds long past or late. (5.100–113) Milton offers a relatively straight version of the faculty psychology that traces its origins to Aristotle; the conceptual work of Reason hangs on the imaginations

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summoned by Fancy because thought is conducted entirely through the manipulation of mental materials. Adam assumes that Eve’s fancy is operating autotelically, spinning “Wilde work” out of “words and deeds” summoned up from her (still very new) memory. He asserts a theory of the mind’s faculties as though they were discrete from the materials upon which they work; what is more, it is a fantasy of control—­of the clear possession of ideas—­which is only complicated when Reason retires. An Aristotelian before the fact, Adam has in other words summarized what someone might have learned at Cambridge in the first half of the seventeenth century. Over the course of his life, however, Milton adopted a nuanced ­monism—­a development that became important to how he understood the mind’s work. The depth of his commitment has been the subject of debate, but the outlines of this more sophisticated sense of the mind’s debts to the body (and vice versa) are suggested by the very fact that Eve rises from bed with a blush; the intellect is entangled in bodily experience, motions in the mind finding their way even to the surface of the skin. Adam perhaps silently assumes that a bed, in a grotto, is a retreat from the world, where reason and fancy can work uninterrupted. As Milton well knew, however, a bed does not offer a retreat from the world; it offers a different form of engagement. As Milton has his Muse, so Eve has a visitor; and as Milton, inspired, would wake in the morning, calling his daughter to report what he has heard, so Eve calls Adam to relay what she has witnessed. The first Muse was not Urania; it was Satan, who was during the night discovered by Ithuriel and Zephon, Squat like a toad, close at the ear of Eve Assaying by his devilish art to reach The organs of her fancy, and with them forge Illusions as he list, phantasms and dreams, Or, if, inspiring venom, he might taint The animal spirits that from pure blood arise Like gentle breaths from rivers pure, thence raise At least distempered, discontented thoughts, Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires Blown up with high conceits engendering pride.97 Two theories of dream-­work are offered, here; Satan indifferently puts each to the test, intent only on subverting what he takes to be the even tenor of Eve’s untroubled sleep. In the first version, Satan is attempting directly to

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access Eve’s imagination, bypassing the wide way of the senses directly to implant ideas there. This presents the imagination as a laboratory—­what Robert Hooke in virtually the same year compared to a “suppelex” or workshop (Exhibit 11); in this account, Satan is a dualist, for the mind is its own place, functionally isomorphic with a laboratory, even if ontologically unlike. In the other, however, Satan is a monist, attempting to work directly through what appears to be a distributed soul. Here, it is not particular “organs of her fancy” that count but Eve’s blood, breath, hopes, aims, and desires. It is a question of “taint[ing]” her blood as a way of altering her “spirits.” Woven throughout Milton’s alchemical trope of dream-­making, governing the sublimation of words to ideas, is “spirit”—­that tricky word Locke takes time from his remarks on metaphor briefly to unpack. It is possible, though by no means necessary, that Locke was thinking of Milton’s poem when he remarked on “angel” and “spirit” (“messenger” and “breath”) as examples of metaphor and its instruments; Locke after all had more than one copy of Paradise Lost in his library, and he was sympathetic to at least some of Milton’s politics. In any case, the circumstances of Eve’s dream display a similar set of metaphorical crossings. Satan “inspires venom”; Eve’s “animal spirits” are raised “like gentle breaths”; her desires are “blown up”; and so on. Satan appears in Milton’s account not just a bit like a minor poet, or like a poet who is like an alchemist; “spirit” leans on an etymological borrowing widely employed in imagining the poet’s breath as the motive force for returning life to formless matter. Or, to put a finer point on it, Satan appears formally like Eve’s Muse, “breathing” into her ear in the same way that Urania might inspire a poet to write. The paradox is that if there is any figure who insists on his own disembedded intellect, it is the very agent working so assiduously upon Eve’s; Satan’s first sin is to misrecognize and to disavow his relationships with and among the other angels, and his continued pride all along hovers around his own compact faith that his “mind is its own place.”98 Satan’s first sin was his experiment in philosophical dualism. What at first looks like a straight version of the Scholastic dualism Milton inherited gives way to a more complexly entangled ecology; a simple theory of the mind as a container gives way to a more nuanced sense of thinking as an ecologically embedded activity. This shift, in the course of the poem, parallels Milton’s own intellectual development, over the course of his life. Milton arrived at an integrated sense of the intellect as an emergent entity, what Stephen M. Fallon calls his “ontological integrity.”99 The critical passage in defense of this mature monism also appears in Paradise Lost; unlike the dualist system

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put in the mouth of Adam, this passage has also become an important one in establishing a prehistory of ecological writing, the so-­called greening of Milton.100 It is Raphael speaking, offering a metaphysical system. The world is: . . . one first matter all, Indued with various forms, various degrees Of substance, and in things that live, of life; But more refined, more spirituous, and pure, As nearer to Him placed or nearer tending Each in their several active spheres assigned, Till body up to spirit work, in bounds Proportioned to each kind. So from the root Springs lighter the green stalk, from thence the leaves More airy, last the bright consummate flower Spirits odorous breathes: flowers and their fruit Man’s nourishment, by gradual scale sublimed To vital spirits aspire, to animal, To intellectual, give both life and sense, Fancy and understanding, whence the soul Reason receives, and reason is her being. . . . 101 The image Milton settles upon is appropriate to Adam’s garden, but this is not, in itself, what marks this as an ecological thought. The path that Milton traces here, from substance to spirit, is the clearest articulation of Milton’s monism; Adam and Raphael are bound to one another by their shared substance, differently “refined” according to the different “spheres” to which they have been “assigned.” No matter, no spirit: only the complex mutual dependencies of “one first matter” differently “indued.” As Milton puts it, in his De Doctrina, “Man is a living being, intrinsically and properly one and individual. He is not . . . produced from and composed of two distinct and different elements.” This is a rejection of the classical dualism of the Schools, the commonsense position he is at pains to complicate. “On the contrary,” Milton concludes, “the whole man is soul, and the soul man: a body, in other words, or individual substance: animated, sensitive, and rational.”102 The pressure of Raphael’s speech to Adam, the sense it produces, is multiply upward, and looks in this sense to be a different route to the upward pressure Locke calls “abstraction”; it borrows from an embodied vocabulary to describe the passage from cruder forms of matter “up” to spirit in its greater

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refinement. And it repeats this pressure in an image, a stalk bursting upward into fruit, from earth to matter and qualities more rare. Like the “spirits . . . breathe[d]” by the flower, so the things of the world give gradual way to things intellectual. This is what Milton calls “aspiration,” the relentless drive of things more grossly material toward more “vital spirits.” The sublimation of thing to thing, root to stalk to flower to spirit, may in fact be more subtle than even the simile suggests; it seems that precisely the spirit expressed by the flower, though naturally “indued” with different form, becomes “spirits  .  .  . intellectual,” the stuff of reason and the soul. Adam and Eve tend the garden; it repays them with the substance of mind. Here, then, lies the kernel of something formally like the system Locke worked up out of the stuff of his library; “reason,” he reminds us, “becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment.” The difference is that Raphael has no particular interest in developing a dualist system out of his embeddedness in his ecology. Reason, the stuff and substance of the soul, is in this sense linked immediately through sublimation to the (flower) bed in which it finds itself. But if the pressure of the passage is upward, drawing in the end from the observed tendency of spirits and steams to rise, the movement of the passage is nevertheless equally, reciprocally downward, not only because the eye follows it down the page. Milton begins with an idea—­or, let’s say, an inspiration; this idea is a monistic system linking flower and beast to angel and God, drawn upward by the aspirational love of Christian piety. But the passage does its work twice, once tracing out the system of things, and again putting it in a complex image. Raphael puts it this way: when it comes to matters of universal law, of truths that “surmount . . . the reach / Of human sense,” Raphael’s linguistic resources are the same as the resources available to the Muse who visits Milton in his bed. Such matters, which after all evade the immediate evidence of the eye, must be “delineate[d] . . . / By likening spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” Milton captures here the basic Renaissance faith in the equivalence between the visible and invisible worlds, the way in which, as one scholar puts it, “every kind of representation . . . has a twofold semantic status, a literal and a transcending, tropical one.”103 The earth is “the shadow of heav’n,” and “things therein / Each to other like” (5.571–76). But he has bent this Renaissance theory of correspondence towards his own sense of a monistic plenitude. As Lana Cable puts it, speaking of Milton’s “paradoxical . . . commitment” at once to the affective content of sensory materials and the rhetorical exploration of concepts, “even apparently nonsensory language depends on a linguistic construct of ‘dead’ metaphor”; it is the work of Milton’s poetry and prose tracts,

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what Cable calls his “carnal rhetoric,” continually to rediscover and to revivify the dead metaphors that turn up, revenant-­like, everywhere in Milton’s verse. Milton has, in the words of Phillip Donnely, “present[ed] his monism within the poem so that a dualist orthodox reading of the epic is still possible.”104 But this is an incomplete account of Milton’s commitment to a fully articulated monism, in much the same way that we have already seen dualist accounts fail to capture their more profound entanglements with their material models. For Milton, concepts emerge not as the abstractions of sensory impressions but as the linguistic aspirations of sensual experience; “inspiration” is the name for the spiritual fullness that kicks the process back along its reverse vector. Poetry, like Creation, runs metaphor in reverse, downward from idea to image, returning “spiritual” to “corporal.”105 This is why Milton sees fit to put his poetic system, this monism stretching from root to fragrance, matter to spirit, in the mouth of an angel. “Angel,” Locke remembers, means “messenger,” and it is Raphael that can carry inspiration back to its figures, putting the idea in words. Like Aristotle or Locke after him, Raphael turns to a more embracing metaphor to provide the explanatory framework of language itself—­that is, “expression”—­for what is “corporal . . . expression” but a bodily breathing out, a turn to carnal shapes to bear or to imply spirit? When Raphael insists that he must “liken spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best,” what is he doing but breathing out (“expressing”) what he has already breathed in (“inspired” or “aspired . . . spirit”)? We may better, therefore, say that Milton provides here one sense of poetry as the native articulation of a complex ecological entanglement, thinking as thinking through things, rising up from brute matter to spirit, and back from spirit back to matter via the metaphors that can best bear their angelic burden. Milton, like Raphael, transfers a series of ideas to metaphors, which repay him by being reliberated as ideas. This creative dwelling in and through a world of available images is the essential work of poetry in a cognitive ecology; inspiration is the name of its emergent apotheosis, the dazzling moment where the fullness of spirit is put back into expression. From ideas to things to ideas, inspiration to expression and back again: Milton provides a sketch of the poet at home in his poetic resources. Milton in his bed has in other words thought himself into Adam in his Eden. And “Urania,” the Muse of astronomy, is Milton’s name for spirit’s special emergent property; inspiration is the condition of the mind dwelling richly in its cognitive bed.

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Exhibit 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum We will have further opportunities to reflect on Milton’s importance to eighteenth-­century theorizations of embedded cognition (see, for instance, Exhibit 14). For now, I want to remain quite local—­tracing embeddedness in the word’s most mundane sense. Milton’s bed makes one more appearance in the historical register, before finally sinking from view. This is in the collection of Mark Akenside (1721–1770), a Newcastle-­born physician with aspirations as a poet, who by dint of learning and hard work installed himself at the center of mid-­century belles lettres.106 Collecting came naturally to Akenside. He had studied in Leiden in the high period of that city’s market for technical and scholarly books; it was possibly there that he began building his library in earnest.107 When he returned to London, he established himself as an important member of a circle of virtuosi and antiquaries who met at Tom’s coffeehouse in the Strand. He became well known to booksellers, by whom his “comments” were enough “cherished” that he was granted the privilege of reading “gratis all the modern books of any character”—­and was given, according to this contemporary source, any book that “struck him with a powerful impression.”108 Partly through such gifts, Akenside became widely recognized as an important collector of antiquities and the typical objects of one sort of virtuoso collection.109 He was noted, for instance, for being a “curious collector” of prints, which he left, upon his death, to his “very intimate friend” Jeremiah Dyson.110 No catalogue of Akenside’s collection survives—­it died with Dyson—­so it is impossible to know how extensive his holdings might have been; he seems, however, freely to have shared it with acquaintances, one of whom remarked that it contained “capital prints from the most eminent Painters of Italy and Holland, which he illustrated [that is, described] with admirable taste.”111 Though little is known of Akenside’s sizable private museum, the interests and idiosyncrasy of his collection are suggested by a gift he received mid-­ career. Sometime in 1760, Thomas Hollis gave to Akenside the bed reputed formerly to have belonged to Milton, in which, if the account can be believed, Milton was visited by his Muse.112 Hollis admired Milton for his politics; he explicitly hoped that Akenside would pen a poem in the Miltonian tradition as compensation for the gift. It was a question of inspiration—­and the bed was the critical mechanism. Hollis hoped that Akenside, “believing himself obliged, and having slept in that bed,” would be “inspired to compose a poem in Milton’s honor.” Unfortunately for Hollis, Akenside himself was just at

3. Title page of The Museum, ed. Mark Akenside (London: Robert Dodsley, 1746). Apollo, as a figure of poetry, is seated between his inspiration and his messenger. Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.

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that moment switching allegiances, blown by the winds of political change to the politics of the new ministry. Akenside, who reports say “seemed wonderfully delighted with the bed, and had it put up in his house,” seems therefore likely to have appreciated the bed as a legacy of a different sort.113 Certainly, speaking in a general way, the gift flattered Akenside into thinking of himself as a poet of the stature of Milton. But it also came to stand as a reminder of the formal similarities between poetry and dreaming. The terms of Hollis’s bequest make this much clear. It was a question not of politics but of poetics; Akenside dreamed of himself as the proper inheritor to Milton for sympathies between their practices as poets, not least because Akenside was working in a similar tradition of the imagination as an entangled form of memory work. Akenside got his break in the world of literature roughly a decade before Hollis’s gift. This was when he was named editor of Robert Dodsley’s The Museum: Or, the Literary and Historical Register. Dodsley was a friend to the circles of collectors and writers that included Akenside; his own literary tastes likewise leaned toward descriptions of collections. As one of his first literary works, Dodsley penned a one-­act farce on the contents of a toyshop; as one of his last, he compiled the first published set of remarks on the holdings of the British Museum.114 The Museum in many ways extended these tastes—­which is why Akenside was such a natural editor for the project. Published from early 1746 to late 1747, the Museum was intended as a literary magazine, a “museum” as site of the muses. It generally declined simply to list rare things or curiosities, strange sights, and local exhibitions. There were other magazines that offered descriptions of strange and rare things in London, such as the long-­running Gentleman’s Magazine.115 But the Museum was, right from the start, designed as an anthology of poetry, histories, literary reviews, and moral essays, intended from its inception as a compendium of concurrent tastes and a mirror of its age.116 It evinced a mainstream aesthetic, in which Dodsley’s implicit convictions about the parallel pursuits of poetry and collecting were repeatedly put on display. This is why it is called a “museum”—­a collection that privileges literature and the arts. And, as the engraving on the title page suggests, it understands literature as the fruitful junction of inspiration and a messenger: Apollo, in his bower, is poised between Clio, the Muse of history, who will breathe her spirit into his ear, and the angel-­like Hermes, ready to relay the poet’s song to Akenside’s list of subscribers. After accepting Dodsley’s offer to manage the Museum, Akenside began calling himself its “Keeper,” modeling his task as specifically curatorial, perhaps even modeling himself after the Keepers of institutions like the Repository of

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the Royal Society. His own contributions to the magazine were addressed to a circle of like-­minded collectors, not least in his numerous reviews of foreign and English books. He was, according to James Tierney, “consciously attempting to aid English collectors in the purchase of significant works for their libraries.”117 But editing a journal almost certainly suggested curating a collection because Akenside already thought of literary production and critical judgment as activities of his own deeply curatorial intellect. Akenside was in many ways defined by the powers of his memory. He was well known for “a memory of extraordinary power, and perfect readiness in the application of its stores.”118 Indeed, writes his first biographer, his memory “was at once discriminative and comprehensive.” He was said to have “retained all the riches of art, science, and history, legislation, poetry, and philosophy; and those he would draw out and embody to suit the occasion.”119 In this vein, Akenside was admired as a poet for his ability to return ideas to sense—­drawing them out and “embodying” them; his memory was the source of his chief effects as a poet. Samuel Johnson, for instance, insisted that if “Akenside was a superiour poet both to Gray and Mason,” it is because of his “uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, [his] young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them.”120 Thomas Campbell admired Akenside’s “skill” in “delineating the processes of memory and association,” and the “animated view” he gives of “Genius collecting her stores for works of excellence.”121 “If little invention is exhibited,” Alexander Dyce would later aver of Akenside’s poetry, “the taste and skill with which the author has selected and combined his materials are everywhere conspicuous.”122 Akenside was less admired, in other words, as a poet of inspiration, though this has often been claimed by succeeding generations, than he was admitted to be an able conservator of his imaginative resources, effective at fleshing concepts out, “embodying” them in images. Among Locke’s list of the metaphors which remind us that abstracts may be traced to embodied experiences (“imagine, apprehend, comprehend, conceive . . .”), “imagine” emerges as a special category. The organization or manipulation of images is in Locke’s system the basic instrument of the intellect. The imagination is the stage where sensible ideas are liberated, by way of the word, into concepts. It is where the “transfer” occurs, for it is where sensory perceptions of material things are handed over to the work of the understanding. It is the stage where metaphor is made possible, where sensory rudiments are witnessed by the mind and sublimated into ideas.123 But there is another way, in poetic practice, in which imagination emerges as the antonym

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for metaphor understood as abstraction, for “imagination” is more generally understood as the faculty that summons up images in service of the concepts they are made to represent. This is what Akenside and his contemporaries called “embodiment”: the idea is “embodied” in an image. Imagination in this sense denotes the reverse work of metaphor, providing a return road to sensory experience; it for this very reason suggests a set of rules and practices for poetry and the arts, a way of imagining expression as the distribution of images in service of a pattern or design. It is this reverse vector that made Locke, despite his distrust of fancy, an important figure to poets and painters of the Augustan mode. Locke’s Essay links a wide range of practicing poets, painters, authors, and artists of all sorts, each of whom differently agreed that the materials of sense are, in the end, the stuff of creative expression. Akenside’s longest poems, what he called his epics, draw directly from the empiricist tradition elaborated by Milton, Locke, Pope, and, most important, Joseph Addison (Exhibits 12 and 13). Aside from standing next to Addison on the library shelf, Akenside’s inheritance is signaled by the titles of his two longest, best-­known compositions: The Pleasures of Imagination (1745) and its recast version with the slightly altered title, The Pleasures of the Imagination (1772). Each differently owes intellectual debts to Addison’s 1712 Spectator essays of the same name—­so much so that Akenside, despite explicit homage, was more than once accused of plagiarizing details from Addison’s essay.124 But it would be hard to know how else Akenside might proceed—­for Akenside was all along a poet who thought of himself as an able curator of images, who worked by fleshing out ideas. The nineteenth-­century critic John Aikin remarks that, if Akenside was “an original writer,” he “merit[s]” that title “by the expansion of the plan” of Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination,” “and by enriching its illustrations from the stores of philosophy and poetry.”125 Indeed, in this sense, Akenside extends a principle of borrowing that, we will see, was a keynote of Addison’s poetics; as Addison remarked, and as Akenside exemplified, “Wit and fine Writing doth not consist so much in advancing things that are new, as in giving things that are known an agreeable Turn.”126 Akenside was working with and through a theory of imagination as a curatorial function—­the imagination as collecting in order to recollect objects of sense.127 Take, for instance, the clearest exposition of what, exactly, the imagination is, from his Pleasures of the Imagination: For to the brutes Perception and the transient boons of sense

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Hath fate imparted: but to man alone Of sublunary beings was it given Each fleeting impulse on the sensual powers At leisure to review; with equal eye To scan the passion of the stricken nerve Or the vague object striking: to conduct From sense, the portal turbulent and loud, Into the mind’s wide palace one by one The frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms, And question and compare them.128 At the moment that he theorizes the imagination as a storehouse of ideas, and the human act of aesthetic appreciation (and judgment) as an imaginative act of “review,” Akenside recalls from his resources a material metaphor to realize it. This is the basic pattern of his poem. His basic move is to “imagine” abstracts, a habit that at times develops a metronomic regularity. It is perhaps fair to say that his thoughts on the imagination remain hopelessly abstract until he lights upon the “palace” as a visual or spatial metaphor to recollect his argument, returning the abstract idea to its material rudiments.129 The form Akenside chooses—­the mind as palace—­is a conventional one, husbanded perhaps from Locke’s “presence room” (see Exhibit 1), the three-­turreted palace of Spenser’s Temperance, Addison’s “Pleasures of the Imagination” (Exhibit 14), Adam’s remarks on fancy in Paradise Lost (Exhibit 2), or any number of treatises on the operation of the soul (see, for example, Exhibits 4 and 11). The palace, presence chamber, throne room, and so on, have multiply stood for the relationship between reason and the fancy—­so much so that the image becomes by Akenside’s moment a commonplace, indeed a commonplace that Akenside expected his readers to visualize while reading. Perhaps Akenside is repeating a poetic technique he learned from Raphael, “delineating” his “spiritual to corporal forms, / As may express them best.” This pattern in any case emerges for Akenside as a consistent conceptual trope, a coordinating condition governing the operations of imagination; the imagination under its curatorial aspect is marked by its return to a collection of ideal objects—­as they rise or are arranged under the poet’s review. For Locke, metaphor governs the progress of sensations to abstracts; for Akenside, it governs the movement whereby abstracts are returned to sensation. The “complicated resemblance existing between  .  .  . the material and immaterial worlds,” as Akenside elsewhere avers, “is the foundation of

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metaphor,” and in his poetics metaphor itself is repeatedly put to the task of imagining this resemblance.130 The most embracing of these images is, for Akenside, the “palace” with its ideal objects on review. Naturally, then, when Akenside encounters an epistemological crux, he follows the path worn by Raphael; he follows the route of metaphor back to the ground of intellection, tracing his way from difficult questions of process back to images drawn from the material world. He returns concepts, via the return-­route of metaphor, to their material affordances. This is the great power of his poetry, which seeks sensory, bodily marked experience as the proper site for intellectual work. He therefore rediscovers the subterranean tendency of Locke’s epistemology to insist on the material origins of intellect, indeed on mind and reason rising into being simply from the hoarding up of material impressions. So, for instance, when Akenside offers a portrait of a young poet, we receive a virtual summary of Locke’s theory of the mind as the entelechy of its material impressions, his story of how the powers of the intellect and its self-­awareness emerge out of the accrual of ideas. The young poet gathers and retains images no less accurately than “th’ expanse / of living lakes” reflects “the bord’ring shade and sun-­bright heav’ns” or than “the sculptur’d gold . . . keeps the graver’s lively trace.”131 These are clearly unequal examples, held together only by Akenside’s syntax—­but taken together they offer images of the mind’s image-­making and -­storing capacities; combined, they offer a description of the “mixt treasures” over which the “child of fancy oft in silence bends,” and the very working of the mind as an organ of storage and manipulation. With the collection of such images, “the mind / Feels her young nerves dilate: the plastic pow’rs / Labour for action,” rising to self-­awareness of its autotelic capacities in an obvious rehearsal of Locke’s remarks on judgment as an emergent property of the mind’s collection of ideas. Like Locke’s ideal man, Akenside’s poet is limited to the sorting and variation of the “diff’rent forms” summoned up from memory—­or, Akenside suggests, spontaneously offered up by memory itself. It is in this sense that “imagine” provides abstraction’s opposite. As a poet, Akenside suggests, reposes in the company of the images internal to his mind, a “design / Emerges” from the hurry of phantasms, and he “breathes / The fair conception . . . / Into its proper vehicle.” This provides a new, fully realized world of sensory rudiments, remediated in paper, paint, or clay, becoming “to eyes or ears / An object ascertained,” once again to be witnessed by a new observer. As readers, we arrive late. “Line by line, / And feature after feature,” Akenside insists, “we refer / To that sublime exemplar whence [poetry] stole / Those animating

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charms,” the “conception” or “abstraction” that the poet has “breathed” back into material being. The active work of imagination reverses the Lockean vector of intellect, for what Locke understands as the “abstraction” of “concepts” from images assembled in the imagination to words, names, species, and general ideas is returned by Akenside to the “picturing” of “conceptions” or “abstractions.” While Locke expects the mind to coordinate a kind of “transfer” or “metaphor” from image to idea, Akenside expects the imagination to articulate a “reference,” a “ferrying back” to the original experiences of the senses. From Locke’s “transfer” we have arrived at Akenside’s “refer.”132 Aside from the poetic epistle, there is no single conceit in the Museum more common than the dream. As a site of the Muses, the Museum is a collection of dream work. The dream, under the system elaborated by Akenside, offers a formal justification for the organization of images; dreams relay a sponsoring idea or conception through sensory materials. Moreover, it offers the promise of an arrangement seemingly in the absence of intention, the pure shifting of a moral truth or concept back into the material figures that might be thought to have produced it in the first place. Inspiration for poems like these emerges from outside the poet. Addison, for instance, falls asleep musing on a coin; he dreams the coin’s adventures (see Exhibits 12 and 21). Elsewhere, he falls asleep after reading a collection of letters about people deserving of fame; this offers the justification for his allegorical dream of the “Table of Fame” (Tatler 81), a vision of Fame’s allegorical high table of worthies. Akenside reads Addison’s “Table of Fame” just before drifting off to sleep—­or so he says; his essay in the Museum is the record of the dream that followed. Each of these records a certain kind of inspiration—­of the sort Hollis no doubt expected Akenside to experience in Milton’s bed. The notion is that a conception or extended idea gathered from an arrangement of objects in waking may, autotelically, generate a corresponding arrangement of objects for the delectation of the intellectual eye. This is creativity as a sort of borrowing, inspiration as abstraction from objects of the senses. The dream record, in the curatorial aesthetic of the eighteenth century, is the opposite of what we might expect; unencumbered by the demands of discourse or the requirements of polite form, it emerges as more methodical, more austerely systematic than the highly rhetorical performances of forms like the poetic epistle.133 Akenside’s dream begins with Akenside dozing over Addison’s essay; he has been “amused” with the “pleasing Manner in which” Addison has “introduced” fame and its subjects, dwelling in Addison’s vision until he “formed [his] own Mind” to “composure and stillness.” This composure is refigured

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in his dream as an “immense Plain,” where Akenside “walks” until he meets an allegorically overdetermined “Figure of great Dignity.” Thomas Campbell, writing in 1820, remarked on what he called the artificiality of Akenside’s “figures”; he insisted that Akenside’s “illustrations for the most part only consist in general ideas fleetingly personified.”134 This is certainly what is going on in Akenside’s dream essay; figures emerge as a function of the idea they are made to reproduce. This “Figure of great Dignity” is Akenside’s Muse, the figure of his inspiration; it leads him “immediately” to a “very spacious Building,” where a review of similar figures will be assembled. Here, the poet arrives to a sort of palace where will be put on review what he would later, in his Pleasures of Imagination, call the “frequent, pressing, fluctuating forms” of imagination work.135 Striking about the dream is the way that it strives to create order from disorder, proceeding from an odd mixture of ornaments and “innumerable Crowd[s] of People,” a confused and uncertain “Crowd of Figures,” to a severely ordered and numbered arrangement of historical persons seated in order around a table.136 The dream, once its sponsoring figure is introduced, does not vary from the single effort to arrange particular, historically real people around a single table, according to their varying celebrity. The dream in fact becomes more rather than less systematic as it wears on, perfecting the allegory as it assembles its figures. This is how Akenside’s imagination works; it arranges figures according to the design of an idea, or, put differently, a museum according to his Muse. The full contours of the poetic process are on display in Akenside’s dream essays. “The Table of Modern Fame” is a straight form of the genre, taking its rise out of, and offering as though in epitome, the materials immediately at Akenside’s hand. Akenside had for several months been occupied compiling reviews of histories and biographies for the Museum;137 his learning and mental development during this intense period of composition is registered in the many reviews of historical and natural philosophical treatises he had been reading. But it is also to be registered in dream essays like this one, which repeat that reading in small. Akenside’s dream vision is overrepresented by people who would have been called the “moderns,” including several members of the New Philosophy. Bacon takes his place near Fame, displacing Columbus. The dreamer insists that the “Discovery of a new World” was “but a slender Acquisition of crude Materials” that are “improv’d and perfected in that immense World of Human Knowledge and Human Power . . . discover’d” by the natural philosopher. Galileo, Harvey, Newton, and Locke are also seated there, with Milton and Pope. Except for a brief scuffle among comic authors,

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ending the dream by waking the dreamer, the essay concludes with the relatively elaborated entrance of Milton, the “blind, old Man,” who enters with the “Air of an ancient Prophet,” supported (and emblematically represented) by the “Genius of England.” Milton is the last to enter, and hence is seated at the end of the table. But in the way that the essay strives to order its materials, in fact to put disordered public materials into the greater order of the dream space, the mutability of Milton’s position, and indeed of fame generally, is corrected in the discourse which accompanies his entrance; the dreamer’s “Conductor” insists that Milton will “continually ascend . . . in the Goddess’s Favour,” in order “at last [to] obtain the highest, or at least the second Place in these her Solemnities.” Joseph Warton celebrated the essay as among the Akenside’s chief accomplishments, a signal example of his particularly curatorial mind. “The guests,” he notes, “are introduced and ranged with that taste and judgment which is peculiar to the author.”138 Like the “throne of the goddess” of Modern Fame itself, which is “composed of different Materials, laid up in a beautiful Architectonick Manner,” the dream means elegantly to order mental materials according to a single, attenuated idea. And these guests, in the style of a battle of the books, are personifications of the biographies and histories Akenside had been reading. This dream, and Milton’s place in it, help signal what made Hollis’s gift so welcome. Dry as this dream is, it offers a full portrait of Akenside in his cognitive bed. Eve’s bed is haunted by Satan, but Milton’s bed (like Akenside’s, which it was to become) is inhabited by crowds of poets, authors, thinkers, and statesmen. It is the place where collections of things, whether by reading or the wide way of the senses, are posed in meaningful arrangements and returned to language. Wordsworth is unfair in claiming that because the scholar in his cabinet “drinks the spirit breathed / From dead men” that the scholar must therefore be of “their kind”; it is through conference with the dead that poets like Akenside found themselves most fully inspired. What Akenside inherited from Locke and Milton was in the end a set of convictions about language as metaphor, sustaining distinctions between body and mind, even while guaranteeing the embeddeness of ideas in haptic experience. This is what caused it to resonate for Akenside, for the bed was the very site where Milton was reputed to have done his most exacting cognitive work.

Case 2

Desig n 4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura — 5. Raphael’s Judgment of Paris 6. A Gritty Pebble — 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria — 9. Venus at Her Toilet

Exhibit 4. Robert Hooke’s Camera Obscura Let us, then, let fall the curtains of Milton’s bed, and return for a moment to the dark room that John Locke carried around in his head. Locke mentions it in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while discussing the origins of knowledge; “external and internal sensation,” he insists, are the only passages . . . of knowledge to the understanding. These alone, as far as I can discover, are the windows by which light is let into this dark room. For, methinks, the understanding is not much unlike a closet wholly shut from light, with only some little openings left, to let in external visible resemblances, or ideas of things without: would the pictures coming into such a dark room but stay there, and lie so orderly as to be found upon occasion, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, in reference to all objects of sight, and the ideas of them.1 This passage is well known because it summarizes the critical claim of Locke’s epistemology, its governing rule and the order toward which all its remarks tend. There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses, Locke insists, and the admittance, sorting, storage, and arrangement of objects within a container-­like space summarizes the work it may do.2 And the figure doesn’t only turn up here. Locke’s cabinet shows up repeatedly in the Essay;

4. “An Instrument of Use to take the Draught, or Picture of any Thing,” in Robert Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations (London, 1726). Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.

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it underwrites his lengthy and carefully argued rejoinders to Edward Stillingfleet;3 it reappears in an even stronger and more compact form in his last book, the unfinished Conduct of the Understanding: the mind is a “secret cabinet within.”4 This cabinet, then, is more than a figure; it is a coordinating condition for what the mind can and cannot be thought to do. It provides the possibility of thinking about thinking at all, turning complex questions of being and intentionality into distinctions of within and without, inside and outside, contained and uncontained. The cabinet is Locke’s most powerful and seductive conceptual metaphor. So, how did this container-­like space get there? That is, how did Locke’s image of the mind’s dark room arrive in his mind, if the mind contains nothing but sensory materials and its own reflections? One possibility is that Locke is merely describing the mind’s native structure, the facilities that make it possible to accept and to sort ideas in the first place. This would be to understand the “dark room” as something innate to the mind itself—­even, perhaps, an innate idea, something lurking there even before the mind thinks it. This, however, poses problems; the Essay was after all begun in an effort to dispel the doctrine of innate ideas. A less radical but related possibility would be to accept the “dark room” as a mere metaphor describing powers already existing; the dark room would in this sense be one metaphor among others, used instrumentally to describe a set of affordances the mind would have had anyway. But Locke himself has already described the understanding as an emergent property, growing stronger and more evident as the mind becomes stocked with ideas (see Exhibit 1). That is, it remains to be seen how a mind could include some things while excluding others, much less how it could make the distinction between “in” and “out,” without the more categorical ideas of rooms, closets, and containers of all sorts. In light of Locke’s imperative to trace ideas back to their originals, his insistence that it would help us correct our understanding if we chased our conceptual vocabulary back to its haptic grounding, we should perhaps rather entertain a third possibility. Perhaps Locke’s whole system, the room that seems to evade the system of categorical distinctions that it enforces, is itself a function of its own emergent logic. Perhaps the dark room is not a mere metaphor among others but something more intimately felt than this, a structuring condition and space to be dwelled in. Locke after all did not invent the idea of the dark room; he witnessed it at work, or, in other words, experienced it. For this dark room, even as a private image of the mind to itself, had a very public circulation, at once as an optical gadget, and as a space where the intellect might be put on display.

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Had we timed it right, we might have caught Locke, possibly already carrying an imperfectly figured room in his head, seated at a public assembly, setting eyes on a technical device that was making the rounds of the Royal Society.5 This device was the camera obscura, and it would come to offer the organizing center of Locke’s epistemology, the very place where a working relationship with the environment is hardened up into a stable structure.6 The device is simple; it is essentially a pinhole camera, and can be produced in any conveniently sized, sufficiently dark room—­the meaning, after all, of “camera obscura.” Light passing through a tiny hole or conveniently sized lens is projected, dimly, on the wall opposite, where a strikingly clear but inverted epitome of the world is made to appear.7 Over the course of the late seventeenth century, camera obscuras appeared in a wide variety of models and formats; to the pinhole was added a lens, and to the dark room a mirror and later a semitransparent screen of oiled paper. By the turn of the eighteenth century, the camera obscura had become a familiar sight; in the year of Locke’s death alone, encyclopedist John Harris offered a detailed account of the device for popular use, a “Mr. Marshall” began selling a version of the camera obscura in his shop on Ludgate Hill, and Newton’s Opticks demonstrated its employment in optical experiments.8 The device had its practical applications. When Robert Hooke presented a design for a portable camera obscura to the Royal Society, it was exactly with an eye to its “use to take the draught of a picture of anything.”9 This was not his first; he had previously pitched two such devices, first in 1668, and again in 1680. But his last was his most ambitious. Hooke was trained as a draughtsman, having among other things served as apprentice in the studio of the painter Peter Lely; as his sketchbooks and illustrations attest, he was himself brilliantly accomplished in capturing the outlines of things (see Exhibit 10). The goal of the portable object, as Hooke delivered it, was to unfold the technique of drafting into its components; it was to take the art of design out of the head and put it in a tool. The purpose of Hooke’s “picture box” was explicitly to make possible the accurate depiction of objects in the field by people untrained in the art of drawing, rendering one stage or aspect of the brokerage of images an automatic process. But the camera obscura had philosophical attractions, too. First, it models the work of the eye, which condenses a world of light into a picture on the retina.10 Several things had to happen for this to be possible. For one, people had to begin thinking of the eye as a lens combined with a receptive surface—­ cornea and retina. Prior to early seventeenth-­century thinkers, including

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Johannes Kepler and René Descartes, theory was likely to think of the eye as a mere container for an absorptive “vitreous humour”;11 but after Kepler and Descartes, the new science was most apt to think of the eye as an instrument, working by focusing rays of light on its back surface.12 From this shift was developed an epitome theory of vision, that is, the eye as a machine for capturing compact but precise pictures of things; Hooke, for instance, describes the interior globe of the eye as a “microcosm, or a little World,” perfectly answering, point for point, the visual field it confronts. This is quite explicit. “When a Hemisphere of the Heavens is open to its view,” Hooke concludes, the eye “has a Hemisphere within it self.”13 For every point in the field of view, there is a corresponding point in the back of the eye. Locke agreed with Hooke that the critical juncture between mind and world was “far from being a point”; rays of light “strike . . . on distinct parts of the retina,” where they “paint” a “figure”—­the bigness of which Locke is at some trouble to estimate.14 These are theories of vision made possible, as Svetlana Alpers and others have noted, by experiments conducted with the camera obscura. Locke’s theory of optics, like Hooke’s, depended upon practical modeling; in this way, experiments with scopic gadgets affected abstract theories of vision.15 But this is only the first move the camera obscura makes possible, and Hooke’s design, which manages to slice the camera neatly in half while leaving its operator (Hooke himself?) neatly intact, additionally implies the strange doubling that must occur for the object to make epistemological sense. By isolating images from objects, the camera obscura offered a model for the mind separate from matter, in which a metaphorical eye—­the “eye of the understanding”—­presides over sensory images.16 Locke is quite clear about the similarities between eye and mind; “impressions made on the retina by rays of light” produce isomorphic “ideas in the mind.”17 It is from the senses, Locke therefore insists, that the “white paper” of the mind derives its “vast store,” and all the “endless variety” of ideas that have been “painted on it.”18 Images from the eye fall on a surface in the mind, upon which the judgment or understanding goes to work. From a painting in the eye to a painting in the mind, thinking was a matter of an internal eye consulting its store; henceforth, thinking could be imagined as the mind ranging over its perceptions. Hooke himself, in the same document in which he most fully links the optical camera obscura to the physiology of the eye, describes the mind as just such an open space, with the eye of the soul presiding over its objects (Exhibit 11).19 And so the camera obscura was apprehended as a metaphor virtually simultaneously as it was understood as an ocular gadget; to the extent that it was witnessed as

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a model for the eye, it was also adopted as material ground for an epistemology. It established, in Jonathan Crary’s account, “categorical relations between interior and exterior, between light source, aperture, and screen, and between observer and representation.” It shifted distinctions between inside and out to an epistemological register. It emerged, in other words, as “a sovereign metaphor for describing the status of an observer.”20 The connections between Hooke, who presented several models of the camera obscura to the Royal Society, and Locke, who may have witnessed one or more of them there, may be strengthened, for they shared a mentor.21 This was Thomas Willis. Willis was a founding member of the Royal Society, but even before his days in London, he was part of the critical Christ Church group of scholars and natural philosophers that at different times included Hooke and Locke. Willis knew the slippery wetware of the brain better than anyone; he had pioneered the difficult surgical techniques making it possible, for the first time, to lay aside the lobes of the brain and penetrate to its delicate, ringlike vascular core. But despite the mess of fat and nerves with which he was left, he clung still to a chamber theory of mentation.22 Embedded in the brain, he surmised, is a “callous body” like a “white Wall.” In his Discourses Concerning the Souls of Brutes, Willis puts the matter this way: “Sent or intromitted by the Passages of the Nerves,” Willis writes, are the “Images or Pictures of all sensible things,” which are made to fall on this callous body.23 For each philosopher, it is as though the optic nerves from retina to ventral cortex carried perfect images, fiber-­optic-­like, and cast them upon a cartilaginous membrane. This specially textured reception surface, receiving impressions from without, produces “Perception[s],” that is, “Imagination[s] of the thing felt.” Willis, in his own poetic turn of phrase, calls this interior space the “Chamber of the Soul, glased with dioptric Looking-­Glasses.”24 With allowances for Willis’s tradecraft, the brain surgeon has here anticipated the poetic image that would turn up in Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination (Exhibit 3); Akenside surmises a “wide palace” of the brain, where images are staged and rearranged. And, through the mediation of more discrete metaphors—­or are they more material gadgets?—­Willis’s thoughts would descend directly to a series of similar spaces: Locke’s “dark room,” for instance, or what would become Hooke’s strikingly realized “Repository” of the mind (see Exhibit 11). Were the drawing of Hooke’s camera obscura more rigorously exact, then, were it to have bisected the man just as neatly as it bisects the beak-­like gadget in which he stands, we might have seen a second camera obscura, impossibly miniaturized, at work behind the large eye of the viewer.25 The first is made of

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ground glass, deal board, and oiled paper; the second is made of a strangely glass-­like eye, curved bone, and sensitive membranes. In the first case, the camera obscura is an optical model; in the second, it is a model for mental work. Reproduced on the other side of the eye, invisibly, the camera obscura becomes a figure for judgment or awareness; indeed it becomes a figure that splits judgment from the objects it contemplates, producing consciousness as a tiny eye presiding over images from which it is half-­screened. Like Descartes26 and Willis before them, Hooke and Locke differently offer versions of what has more recently been called the “homunculus fallacy”; it is as though a little person were sitting in front of a screen inside the head, watching a picture show on display. Just as the eye offers, in Hooke’s words, a “microcosm, or a little World” of the field of view that confronts it, so, too, this microcosm is put on display for the delectation of the understanding, the “Eye of the Soul” within.27 The homunculus thesis seeks to solve the problems introduced by a dualist epistemology, especially the critical problem of how sensory perceptions might cross the gap from matter to ineffable mind (and how, in turn, desire may be put into action); it solves these problems by shifting them up one level, to a mystical relationship between the mind and its ideas. The difficult conception of how ideas are received by the eye is shifted into the difficult question of how ideas are received by an internal eye. The critical question is not solved, however (see Locke’s remarks in Exhibit 19); it is merely kicked down the road, deferred perhaps until more precise instruments are available to unpack the mind’s strange commerce. The homunculus thesis is typically understood as a fallacy. But we might look at the problem slightly differently; rather than looking at Locke or Hooke’s claims as profound dualisms, it makes sense to think about the networks that produce them, the patterns of modeling that express more profound entanglements. The mind finds itself in its environment through a heuristic twist. Experience models a mind through a readily available technical object, one that, as the engraving of Hooke’s gadget makes clear, swallows up and enwraps even the work of the hand. The value of models is not their exhaustive explanatory power; their value lies precisely in the thinking they make possible, an excess potential arising out of an initial metaphorical conjunction.28 The analogical hunch takes on a life of its own, giving way to a whole host of possibilities and realizations; this is precisely why models are good to think with.29 It is not that the eye of the understanding merely contemplates images; the work of the hand to design, to cut the world back to recognizable objects, distinctions, and lines is shifted into the process of witnessing. In this sense, the

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homunculus fallacy is not a fallacy at all; it is the natural extension of a mind being crafted in its environment. It is the proof that thinking is an ecological product—­even when that product slashes an ecology into subject/object, viewer/view, mind/matter, but also understanding/memory, conscious mind/ materials of thinking. Gadgets like the camera obscura, as metaphors and analogies, helped shape and make sense of the texture of experience. Locke remained skeptical, however, of the extent to which the materiality of the metaphor could be extended. When one thinks of the cathedral church at Worcester, Locke elsewhere remarks, no actual cathedral church pops into one’s head, nor any material similitude; when one thinks of a dark room, no actual dark room carves its way into the stuff of the brain. “When our ideas are said to be in our memories,” Locke remarks, “indeed they are actually nowhere.”30 But, precisely because it organizes a way of speaking, of what can be “said to be in our memories,” Hooke’s design or Willis’s “chamber” with its dioptric glasses offers a neurophysiology of epistemic dualism: “in” versus “out.” It offers a vocabulary, a way of speaking. How else would the mind speak of itself, other than through images that it had experienced? How else to speak about what is “in” the mind or “in” the senses, other than through a figure that was incorporated there? And so Locke can comfortably speak of contemplation as “bring[ing] in sight,” or ideas as “objects . . . imprinted” in memory, despite his suspicion that there are no materially isomorphic changes in the brain.31 In this sense at least, Locke is like Willis, characteristic of the mainstream epistemology of his moment. Like Willis, Locke adapts a physical space as the basis for reimagining the mind as an entity within and depending upon the “crankling… superfices” of the brain—­with (in Willis’s words) its many “Cells” or “Store-­houses.”32 Locke’s contribution is to gain control of the metaphor, insisting that it must be learned in the same way as anything else; it is acquired through the senses—­by “experience,” which stocks the mind with its vast store—­though no actual space seems to be present there. This is how the camera obscura reigns as a metaphor, once for the eye, and again for the understanding. It is a metaphor for metaphor, metaphor’s model. But just as metaphor was important to poets, authors, and artists for the way it enabled a reverse flow, returning ideas to their haptic ground, so, too, Hooke’s camera obscura was clearly less intended to model a mental process than to enable a certain kind of practical activity. It was a device designed to allow the capturing of ideas in images, of, in other words, designs. This is to say that it was built less as a model of the mind (this in some ways was

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merely an accidental effect of the object), than it was built as a practical gadget useful to a process of thinking already imagined to be taking place within the head. It isn’t enough that it merely takes an image, as though a toll at a custom house, on its way from oculus to eye; nor is it enough for it merely to capture, as though by chance, an image which will depart as soon as the whole gaudy contraption is swung around to a different field of view. It must also create the possibility of stilling that image down and capturing it. This is why there is room for the artist’s hand, bearing a pen, within its dark room. Hooke’s design has made room for art, turning the observer into what, in his day, would have been called the “designer,” the one who draws. And, as Hooke elsewhere avers, the importance of drawing is not so much to make it possible to communicate ideas to others; the principal importance of being able to design well is to allow artists to see their own ideas on paper.33 The screen is not merely a passive surface; it is the site of an interaction between the stuff of perception and the hand that carves back into it. Hooke’s design reminds us of the activity of perception, which, etymologically, means to “take”; Hooke’s eye ceaselessly seeks, culls, sorts, and arranges.34 Seeking and taking is after all the very purpose of Hooke’s object; it is an object designed to allow a traveler “to take a draught of a picture of any thing.” This raises a final point about the engraving of Hooke’s design. Hooke’s man, enclosed in his own little world, is set against something that appears at first to be superfluous, a picture of a setting where the camera may be employed. It is clearly not London, where Hooke’s camera obscura (if it was built) might have been found; it is not a meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. It is a view of a bit of foliage in the foreground, a small island town or fortification in the middle distance, and a larger landmass beyond it; it is either the sort of thing that an Englishman might see on the ramble, or what might be instantly summoned up in the engraver’s mind, merely to make clear the camera’s work out of doors. The camera obscura, write Lance Mayer and Gay Myers, was “considered especially useful for rendering in two dimensions the complex lines of recession in a landscape.”35 The English observer endlessly divided the wilderness into bands or zones of space—­foreground, middle dis­ tance, and far distance; this, too, was what the camera obscura was good for: for streamlining complex fields of color and movement into discrete breaks and outlines of things.36 The drive to divide was more than a pictorial convenience; capturing an outline, especially in the case of complex landscapes, was more than a convenient way of representing some thing in itself. Delineating landscape was about, in the words of John Barrell, “the world conceived

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of and grasped as though it were a picture.”37 There is no word in English, Barrell observes, to refer to a view of the outdoors that does not conceive of it as already pictorial—­that is, a “landscape,” a word that marks what one scholar on the question calls “a felt difference unrecuparable by the usual designators of place.”38 This felt difference, this endless superadded partitioning, is something added by the eye that picks and chooses, isolating out certain things according to their present purpose. And it is therefore ideological; it was historically connected, Barrell compellingly demonstrates, to contemporary struggles over land rights, the division and enclosure of commons and wastelands into agricultural plots. The elegance of design, the outline in the image, would appear, therefore, to be the discovery of a familiar ideology in the world ordered as the eye is accustomed to see it—­when the observer is to be recognized in the image itself.39 We are prepared to see, then, that the engraving of Hooke’s design is a function of the machine it represents; as we gaze at it, we should imagine ourselves gazing at a sheet hung up in the darkness, with an oculus projecting light onto its reverse side. We are looking at the design of a camera obscura. It offers part of a network to think with, and it therefore involves us in a host of peculiar implications. Any way you look at it, the screen is the critical thing, serving, like a slash, as the figure for separating then linking subject and object, thinker and thought. Part of this is purely optical. As Hooke puts it, in thinking about optics, there are always “two different cones” to be considered—­one emerging from the projecting or “inlightning body,” and one condensing upon the “Body inlightned.”40 Naturally crossing, like a three-­ dimensional chiasmus, the work of the screen is in effect to slice these competing cones one from another. Blank paper, razed tablet, or white linen (see also Exhibit 19): the screen stands or appears to stand between the object and the viewer, between, in the language of the device, the oculus of the camera and the eye of the beholder. But this slicing is also epistemological. Meeting on the screen of the camera obscura are pairs of principles, brought automatically into alignment. Crossing on this screen are things like object and idea, nature and design, the tangled aesthetic impulses of the arts under the empiricist regime. That is the side of nature, of the order of the things projected on the back of the page. If there is a design on that side of the sheet, it is the design of natural law, ordered by Creation. Nature is in this sense not what is visible on the screen; it is what is behind it—­the design of things in the absence of design—­and it is for this reason that nature, personified, is often represented as though it were behind a veil, curtain, or screen (see Exhibits 17–20). This

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is the side of the lens-­like eye guiding the hand of the artist and author;41 this is the realm of design, which flows from ideas to a field of view. It is the special work of the screen continually to hold these concepts in tension and alignment. The camera obscura, remarked Samuel von Hoogstraten, offered a “truly natural painting.”42 When John Cuff in 1747 undertook to sell a new batch of camera obscuras, he hired a Grub Street poet to write copy; this poet pitched it as a special device for making visible the key terms in the exchange between objects and ideas. “Say, rare Machine,” the poet begins, “who taught thee to design? / And mimick Nature with such Skill divine?”43 Design and nature are continually crossed and confounded on the same screen that seems to keep them apart: in the world of the camera obscura, nature is crossed with art, object with idea. This case puts design on display, which is another way of saying that it is interested in attempts to make visible the nature of things. “Design” makes its way into English through two routes. On the one hand, the word arrives through the Continental tradition of the visual and literary arts, in which the “design” is a rough sketch or disposition of parts. Design, in this sense, means a pattern. As a schematic, the engraving of Hooke’s camera obscura is just such a design. It is not interested in precisely what such a machine would be made of, how it would be built, or where it could be carried. It does not concern itself with particulars and it is incapable of failure.44 On the other, “design” arrives to eighteenth-­century England with a borrowed French meaning of an intention. For instance, Hooke’s camera obscura was imagined with just such a design in mind; lurking behind the object is a desire to capture and collect accurate images of things. It is motivated by the general project of collecting and cataloguing. Taken in this mixed sense, rediscovered in the mixed sense of “plan,” “scheme,” and other closely allied concepts, “design” means the arrangement of things according to an idea. As Locke himself puts it, design means an arrangement of things “by reference to those adjacent things which best serve to their present purpose.”45 If we return to the engraving of Hooke’s instrument, which is clearly also a plan or blueprint, we may see this schematic impulse at work; presented here is the arrangement of components—­a lens, a white sheet, an observer, a curved deal board, an eye, a hand, and so on—­that isolates and makes possible the essential function of the device.46 It is the arrangement of things according to an intention. Like so much else in the age that produced it, this little anonymous engraving is a product of the philosophical device that it displays; it is the world as seen through a camera obscura.

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Exhibit 5. Raphael’s The Judgment of Paris According to the standard account, theories of “design” emerged in and among the trades, especially as new native crafts made their way into the market. Prior to the blossoming of consumer culture in the mid-­eighteenth century, as this account has it, England had no established craft tradition of design. The patterns of things like textiles arrived from Paris or Italy, and were only subsequently applied in domestic production.47 But when the history of design is broadened to include “wider cultural concerns with the related concepts of ordering, planning and scheming,” a different tradition emerges.48 A glance at art historical manuals, like Jonathan Richardson’s Two Treatises, or the Earl of Shaftesbury’s remarks on the design for The Judgment of Hercules, reveals a rich tradition of design thinking.49 Richard Checketts goes so far as to argue that the development of design as such links Shaftesbury’s definition of the painting as what delivers “one single Intelligence, Meaning, or Design” with a manufacturing praxis elaborated by painters and engravers like William Hogarth.50 That is, the understanding of design that would turn up in the manufacturing trades over the last half of the eighteenth century focuses on design precisely because design all along articulated a tension between ideal patterns and messy particulars, between intention and realization.51 Even as early as Locke’s remarks, design all along represented the moment when the clean-­ handed thinker muddled into the mangle of practice, when the mind’s eye elaborated itself in complex negotiations with the material world—­or, in other words, where the hand is reintroduced in the space of the camera obscura. Like the British tradition of design in manufacturing, design in the arts arrived in England from a Continental tradition, brought back from France and Italy by travelers in the early years of the Restoration. Among these was John Evelyn.52 During his lifetime, Evelyn published three treatises on aesthetics—­a study on engraving called Sculptura, and translations of Roland Fréart de Chambray’s Idea of the Perfection of Painting and his Parallel of the Ancient Architecture with the Modern. Taken together, these three treatises constituted, in Evelyn’s words, a complete “design” of the “three Illustrious and magnificent Arts,” which, “like the three Graces,” were understood to lean upon one another.53 Sometimes linked also with gardening, poetry, and sculpture, these together constituted the so-­called sister arts, each of which was understood differently to relay ideas—­that is, “designs”—­through arrangements of things in the world.

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5. Marcantonio’s engraving of The Judgment of Paris, from the design of Raphael (1511–1513). H,2.24 © Trustees of the British Museum.

The first of these treatises, Evelyn’s Sculptura, does not mean sculpture in the modern sense of the word—­though he suggests that there might be homologies between the forms. Rather, Evelyn reminds us that “sculptura” descends from the Latin for “cutting,” and then defines it as that “art, which takes away all that is superfluous of the subject matter, reducing it to that form or body which was designed in the idea of the artist.”54 The treatise was based largely on the collection of prints and illustrations Evelyn either saw or purchased while on the Continent. It ostensibly offers a history and description of the art of “cutting or graving of brass, copper, and other metals”—­but in fact it is strangely bare of interest in the intricacies of engraving itself. His history does not take any interest in the particularities of medium, dispensing with them as the trappings of “matter.” It does not mention that engravings are made in wood or copper and transferred to paper, or that they are related to developments in the printing press, or that they are reproducible without the successive intervention of the artist. In fact, Evelyn seems loath to mention the material conditions of engraving at all. Instead, the tenor of his argument is that engraving—­“sculptura”—­is the reproduction of ideas reduced to their

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essence. It is a question of design, and this is why engraving is such a particularly valuable art. Engraving is the elimination, by cutting, of all that is superfluous, in order to reveal an idea lurking within a visual field.55 It is not just that engraving forgoes the clutter or distractions of texture and color—­which, Evelyn insists, can anyways “be conceived” from the “splendor and beauty in the touches of the burin.”56 Rather, engraving strips away everything “superfluous” until it reveals the ideal origin of its design—­that which was “designed in the idea” of the artist, the “prime conception of the workman.”57 Evelyn is less interested, therefore, in engraving as a medium of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, than as the next best thing to minds communicating ideas directly. Nor is an engraving an imperfect art form, a cheap way of distributing facsimiles of an original; it dispenses with the crudeness of more elaborate forms, arriving nearer to the ideal realm that constituted, in Evelyn’s system, the true content of art. The perfection of engraving as an ideal art was, for Evelyn, strikingly exemplified by a certain print of The Judgment of Paris, a collaboration between Raphael and his favorite engraver, Marcantonio Raimondi.58 Not only did The Judgment of Paris represent, to Evelyn’s eye, the prime conception of an artist particularly known for his designs; it was in fact believed to refer to no original painting at all, no completed table or detailed drawing.59 No original has survived, and so it seemed to Evelyn’s contemporaries to have been engraved on copperplate by Marcantonio directly from Raphael’s design, relayed either through what Roland Fréart calls Raphael’s “Sprezzo”—­his initial sketches—­or directly from ideas communicated between artists. It appeared therefore to be an engraving of a painting which never existed, and which, according to Evelyn, survives as the immediate record of a pure idea, of Raphael’s unadulterated “design.”60 The fable is this: Paris, ignorant of his own identity as prince of Troy, is herding sheep on the slopes of Mount Ida when he is approached by three goddesses. In order to settle a dispute, each of the three goddesses differently asks Paris to select her as the fairest. Athena sweetens the deal with an offer of wisdom; Juno offers him wealth and power. Each goddess, after all, is the emblem of the virtues she offers. Paris is however ultimately swayed by Aphrodite’s offer of sexual love; in exchange for granting her the prize for the fairest of Olympos, the golden apple of Discord, Aphrodite gives him the woman in the world most celebrated for her beauty. The gift, however, bears an unlooked-­for freight, not unlike the horse later to show up before the gates of Troy. Aphrodite’s gift is Helen, and Helen is already married. Her eventual elopement, orchestrated by Aphrodite on Paris’s behalf, will activate a complex network

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of reciprocal promises between military and political leaders.61 The story is of course well-­known; the judgment of Paris, though he could not have known it at the time, will turn out to be the meteor of the Trojan War, plunging the Mediterranean rim into ruinous conflict. It will kick off the events culminating in the anger of Achilles, Odysseus’s fraught return to Ithaca, and the flight of Aeneas to Rome: the major subjects of epic literature. Paris’s choice—­his “judgment”—­is therefore an almost trivial moment, at the crossroads of vision and desire, which nevertheless brings into focus the full sweep of epic history. Because of the history it condenses, this moment was to become the favorite of a wide range of moralists, fabulists, and painters; Raphael treated the subject, but so too did Rubens (many times), Lucas Cranach the Elder, and Claude Lorrain, to name just a few whom Fréart and Evelyn might possibly have seen.62 Helmut Nickel, expressing a common position, argues that the popularity of this scene is no doubt “due to the fact that for the display of piquant nudes it was an even better choice than the Three Graces,” because it “not only offered the chance of presenting three undraped female bodies in three different postures . . . but also put them in teasing contrast with . . . fully and properly dressed males.”63 But the popularity of the subject seems on the contrary not to have been for the erotic potential of the three nudes but for the moral lesson the fable was continually used to tell. It was a position already old64 when Alexander Ross in 1647 read Paris’s choice as a moral allegory of “beauty and Venereall pleasure” weighed against their ideal alternatives. Given over to the pleasure of the body, Paris refuses Juno’s offer of “power” and “wealth,” and (what is worse) Athena’s of “wisdome” and honor.65 Paris’s decision, as many eighteenth-­century critics read it, is consequently a failure of judgment: he is too interested in the flesh; he fails to subordinate the figures themselves, the things of this world, to the lesson or allegory they are meant to carry.66 In The Judgment of Paris, we may see a curator at work, indeed several curators, arranging figures according to their different ideas. For one thing, the image is composed of figures borrowed from ancient Roman sculpture, bas reliefs, and ceramics; this is the first thing that announces it as a curatorial composition, the work of an arranging eye.67 But it is not, as Fréart sees the engraving, the eye of the viewer that organizes the arrangement of figures, or even the viewer that implies the vanishing point of its perspective. Through a complex consideration of angles, axes, parallels, and horizons, the relative sizes of figures, the twisting of torsos and the oblique slopes of shoulders, Fréart argues that the true point of vision is not where a standard account

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of Renaissance perspective might anticipate—­that is, is not in the eye of the spectator.68 On the contrary, the viewer is something contained in the picture itself. “The Subject of this History being chiefly about Sight,” Fréart insists, “the Paynter could not have plac’d the Visive point more judiciously, than in the Eye of Paris.” Raphael has placed Paris in profile, Fréart argues, specifically to reduce vision to a single point only, as “Geometricians teach us in their Optics, where they represent Vision or the function of Seeing, by a radiated Pyramis with an Eye fixt upon it.”69 We might think, here, of the second cone of Robert Hooke’s formulation (Exhibit 4), the one that condenses on the “inlightned body”70; in Paris’s eye is reproduced the full field of the perspectival scene. But, more than this, we have caught him just as he is making his choice, as he is, in other words, arranging history. This helps account, Fréart believes, for the turning of the bodies of the three goddesses. At the center of the chaos on display, where history is being composed out of the matter of classical prehistory, is the single form of the goddess of love. The principal figures of the piece all are turned toward her, as she at once receives the twin objects of her victory: the laurel crown and the apple of Discord. Paris has his designs; motivated by a bodily response to the three nudes, he reaches into the scene to arrange history. Read as a moral allegory, The Judgment of Paris is about a failure of judgment. Paris fails to see with his intellectual eye; what instead he sees is what is available to the eye of the senses. He chooses the only goddess who offers a version of what she displays. And if Nickel is right that numerous viewers enjoyed the painting for its contrast between clothed men and nude women, the voyeuristic thrill it offers, then those viewers are essentially seeing the scene as Paris sees it, and not (as Raphael encourages us) seeing the table as an opportunity to see Paris seeing.71 Perhaps taking his warning from the very scene on display, Fréart does not locate the truth of the visual arts in what is available to the eye; it is not to be found in coloring, the handling of human anatomy, or other aspects of what he calls “the Mechanical Arts.” Painting is instead to be considered a “demonstrative science,” which arranges its “matter” according to the “rules of geometry.” “The image itself,” writes Peter de Bolla of images like this one, “instructs the eye.”72 To witness the Judgment of Paris is to stand both inside and outside Paris’s point of view; to see The Judgment of Paris is to see, and hence to judge, the judgment of Paris, Paris’s single pupil as the sedimented fund of his world, and his hand, all intentionality, reaching back to arrange things to his liking. Raphael’s design is particularly accomplished because it strives to put

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perspective on review, to show us how Paris makes a picture. This is what James Elkins suggestively calls an “object oriented” use of perspective; we are witnessing Paris in the mangle of practice as he (unwittingly) constructs a world.73 In this sense, The Judgment of Paris is formally like the engraving of the camera obscura: Paris’s eye forms one perspectival “pyramis,” while the body of Aphrodite offers its natural counterweight. The handing off of the apple signals Paris’s designs—­where he reaches into the scene to craft it according to his idea. But there is a final twist, as Fréart sees it, where the eye of the Enlightenment meets the arrangement of the Renaissance—­for the very organization of a tableau according to an idea is the province of Raphael’s design. These are his words; “Design” is not only the “veritable Principle and only Basis . . . of Painting,” it is also “the universal Organ and Instrument of all the politer Arts.” Without it, painting becomes “a meer Chymaera and confusion of Colours.”74 The essence of art, according to the apologist for Raphael, is not what is made by a craftsman but what is designed by the “clean-­handed genius” who arranged an intellectual tableau in the first place.75 “Everie understanding… knoweth,” opined Sir Philip Sidney, that “the skill of ech Artificer standeth in that Idea, or fore conceit of the worke, and not in the worke itselfe.”76 It is design that forms the real object of art, and the techniques that closest approach this ideal pattern—­the arts that most capture this design without the imperfections of matter—­are therefore the most technically accomplished. Raphael’s critical trick, as it was witnessed by Fréart and Evelyn, was to put the viewer outside the view. Paris sees with embodied purpose; the viewer sees with dispassionate judgment. Raphael’s design is to show us Paris’s. It is just as though we are seeing an anamorphic picture from the wrong spot; through the obliquity of false perspective, we are made to stand outside history.77 In one of the critical passages in his lecture on the fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan addresses anamorphosis explicitly. In a study beginning with one of the iconic images of Raphael’s generation, Lacan observes that painting in the end has no particular fidelity to realism, nor does it use the real things it hopes to represent as its materials. The painter means to display a way of ordering things—­what Evelyn and Fréart called a design—­for which the things themselves are merely the means. His “search” or “quest” is less about an aesthetic effect, in this sense, than it is to make the risky passage between an idea and a disposition or arrangement.78 As Lacan puts it, the painter’s ambition is to “sustain and vary the selection of a certain kind of gaze”—­which is to say, an ethics or an idea or a way of seeing, rather than merely a spot from which a thing may be seen.79 The “gaze” as Lacan understands it is not on the side of the viewer

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who looks; it is the arrangement of things in the field of view, a way of seeing looking back at us. The painting, Lacan insists, “looks at me”; it projects its light “in the depths of my eye”; and in the depths of his eye are reproduced the geometric relations that the painting first established. It is not, for Lacan, that a viewer necessarily wishes to see herself seeing herself; nor is it true that an artist is endlessly interested in representing herself in the visual field (like Milton’s Eve, half-­seduced by her own reflection). The field need not capture the image of the painter. For the painting “grasps” its viewer through the design it offers, showing us the painter’s way of seeing.80 What Lacan calls “the screen” is “the locus of mediation,”81 where a way of ordering things (his “gaze”) meets the pyramis of the viewer’s look (the perspectival subject).82 Lacan’s intellectual debts here are to a tradition of design and anamorphosis; his remarks in fact develop from an insight afforded by Hans Holbein’s Ambassadors, a painting executed roughly two decades after The Judgment of Paris. Lacan is in other words elaborating a point raised by Evelyn and Fréart,83 for the point Fréart extends throughout his discussion is just this: what is on display (in the end) is not a version of history, or even merely a parable of Paris’s judgment, but Raphael’s way of seeing.84 “An Artist,” Fréart concludes, “paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses.”85 As Jonathan Richardson would later affirm, “Painters always paint themselves.”86 The Judgment of Paris is the judgment of Raphael, for it offers us a moral system and an ethical imperative, the very picture of negotiations between the eye of judgment and the hand of the artist—­borne out on the screen of the world.

Exhibit 6. A Gritty Pebble In a dark room, sectioned off from the rest of the Sedgwick Museum of Natural History at Cambridge, is the geological collection of John Woodward (1665–1728), standing more or less as Woodward designed it. Open the door to Woodward’s curatorially dark study; put on your cotton gloves; open the eighth drawer in the first cabinet on your left; and scan to object number 64. In the drawer custom-­made to receive it, in the walnut cabinet custom-­made to contain the drawers, is object c.226 in Woodward’s catalogue. It is a gritty Peble of a very light brown Colour, an oblong oval Shape, an Inch and ¾ in length, and one Inch in breadth, flattish, and

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6. “A gritty Peble of very light brown Colour.” Specimen c.226 (Mason-­Ogden #A-­8-­64), in the Woodwardian Collection. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

having the two Ends somewhat pointed. There’s a narrow Ridge, of the same breadth in all parts, running directly long-­ways of the Stone, and quite encompassing it. This Ridge consists of a closer and harder sort of Matter than the rest of the Stone. In the middle on one side, the Stone sinks in, and rises out on the opposite, as if it had been soft and press’d in that Part.87 Looking back at you is a stone that looks like nothing so much as a large, heavily lidded human eye. You see it, but it does not see you. This, however, has not stopped at least one person from trying to imagine himself into its place. Viewing it as an enlightened witness to geological time, a silent and opaque relic of momentous events, Woodward more than once mused upon what sights it might have seen, were its eye open one fateful day roughly six thousand years before. John Woodward was a physician, minor poet, antiquarian, and rock hound. He was a collector of statues, vases, inscriptions, and amulets. But his “great and lasting preoccupation” was his collection of stones.88 At the height of his reputation, he was the professor of physic at Gresham College in London, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the foremost figures in the development of geology. Apart from a few published treatises, a handful of vitriolic pamphlet-­satires, and a few portrait engravings, what remains of him is now precisely this cabinet—­kept in its original order by the terms of

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his bequest. The cabinet captures nothing less than a design and way of ordering the world; it takes the stuff of the landscape and puts it in a more perfect order—­an arrangement according to an idea. And he was, of course, the man who collected and attempted to make sense of this “gritty Peble,” a compact object which nevertheless, for Woodward at least, articulated a vast design. The cabinet and this pebble represent an asymmetrical dialectic now frozen in time, a record of Woodward’s efforts to arrange an explanatory and complete system of the world. The last work of Woodward’s life was his Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England (1728), a half-­finished catalogue of his mineralogical collection. Containing, by one count, 9,400 specimens, the collection is a study in variety. Each of its items, Woodward writes, “so much differ[s] from the other, that in the whole there are scarcely any two alike.”89 Nevertheless, among this chaos of objects, the Attempt offers an organizing scheme, and it is here that the collaboration between nature and design emerges. Recognizing that “there are Those who would have the Study of Nature restrain’d wholly to Observations, without ever proceeding further,” Woodward offers this reply: Assuredly, that Man who should spend his whole Life in amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building, without ever aiming at the making an Use, or raising any Fabrick out of them, might well be reputed very fantastic and extravagant. And a like Censure would be his Due, who should be perpetually heaping up of Natural Collections, without Design of building a Structure of Philosophy out of them, or advancing some Propositions that might turn to the Benefit and Advantage of the World. This is in reality the true and only proper End of Collections, of Observations, and Natural History.90 As Woodward understands it, a collection without an organizing “End” threatens to lapse into a mere “heap,” a sort of “extravagance” (a “detour” or “going out of the way,” see Exhibits 10–14). The alternative is to organize a collection around some “Design,” which he calls, after the example of the “Fabrick,” an intentional “Structure of Philosophy,” a connected system of observations and remarks constructed out of the objects he has accrued. Such an ideal structure, a pattern composed in the mind during a life of “amassing,” is at once a “design” itself and what the collector “designs” to build out of the materials of thinking.

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Woodward’s architectural figure, however, barely qualifies as a figure; in summoning up a hypothetical “Man” who “spends his whole Life amassing together Stone, Timber, and other Materials for Building,” Woodward could be speaking of his own life, and his own stones, housed in four fall-­front walnut cabinets, custom-­built for the purpose. Lumber and stone: we might at first say that this is an ecology without nature: the pieces are all there—­rocks and stones and trees—­but this is clearly a moment in English history where natural resources are the stuff of building.91 Nature, in this instance, emerges as a structural effect; nature is after all the “End” of “natural history,” both purpose and final product. This, too, begins to imply the particularly material imagination Woodward possessed, that of a man whose “Judgment” is founded entirely “upon the . . . Nature and Properties” of the objects in his collection.92 It was not that he was simply unimaginative, that he could not think of a better metaphor; he was involved in a ruinous pamphlet war with his rival Richard Mead—­and his richly vituperative prose signals a mind capable of extraordinary invention. It is, on the contrary, that Woodward thought his way through the materials with which he surrounded himself; he was invested in his cabinet. And so, when one satirical pamphlet suggests that Woodward’s geological treatises had “stood [their] Ground” supported not by “Observations and Reason” but by “Shelves and Brackets,” it happens upon the justifying logic of the book itself.93 Woodward, at least when he is speaking as a geologist, thinks through the materials of his concern; collecting stones ends up not just modeling but performing a set of recognizable cognitive activities. His design was all along a matter of geological practice. It is, therefore, worth dwelling on Woodward’s description of his collection, especially as his cabinet puts it on display. It is organized by class, beginning with “Earths and Earthy substances,” followed by stones, pebbles, and flint, crystals, salts, metal ores, and finally other minerals mined more deeply from the earth.94 Woodward recorded, wherever possible, the locations and depths of the objects he collected; he requested his donors and correspondents, which he at one time estimated to number around five hundred, to do the same. His instructions to collectors show no particular interest in the time of collection; as far as Woodward was concerned, all these objects were collected almost simultaneously in the geological scheme, anyway. But the emphasis on place and depth was crucial to how he understood geology, and understanding it, went out into the field to witness it. This emphasis is reproduced in the general index to the collection, a synopsis, which, allowing for exceptions, inclusions, and things like marine fossils, is organized according to specific weight,

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from least to most dense. The same scheme governs the arrangement of stones in his cabinets. Indeed, it organizes the cabinets themselves. His collection of English stones, confined to cabinets A and B, were made to reproduce the cataloguing scheme of stones from earths to ores. Looking at Woodward’s cabinets is like looking at two leaves of a book, recto and verso, repeating from top to bottom, then top to bottom again, Woodward’s geological system. The cabinets manifest, as an organizational scheme, a visual synopsis of nature that is repeated in the index to his Attempt; this is what has been called Woodward’s “synoptic method.” There is a selecting eye at work here, coordinating with the designer’s hand. Woodward sorts from the mass of dirt and stone the stones that make possible a rigorous set of lines and demarcations, cleaning up the mess of strata that he might have seen in the field. From the beginning, a design is operating, yoked sometimes violently to what Woodward called “nature.” Woodward remarks, for instance, that to make such a “Collection” as his, “requires . . . an exquisite Judgment, not one in ten [specimens] of the Bodies collected having been admitted,” the rest being “rejected for being defective in something requisite to render them fine Exemplars.” Judgment has a way of anticipating the data upon which it seems to work, altering the ideas received from sensation “without our taking any notice of it.”95 It is a question of repetition. Set before your eyes, Locke suggests, “a round globe of any uniform color”—­gold, for instance, or alabaster or jet—­and the “idea imprinted on our mind is of a flat circle.” Locke is thinking of course of the model of perception passing through Willis and Hooke; the idea falls upon a flat surface. If it is reconverted into the sphere from which it appears to have come, this is a question of custom—­for we, “having, by use, been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us,” reconvert the flat disk into a sphere. “It is evident,” Locke remarks, “in painting” that this is the general way of perception, rather than its exception; what strikes the eye is only a “plane variously coloured,” but what we experience are “the sensible figures of bodies.”96 In this way, the work of judgment, through repeated use, structures the field of view; the judgment, Locke concludes, “by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes.”97 So, when Woodward’s publisher notes that Woodward’s sorting work is meant to look like no work at all, for it descends from a “thorough Insight into  .  .  . Nature,” “reducing [it] into a Science,” Locke might remind us that here is habit producing naturalness, a way of seeing concreting itself in a vision.98 The end of natural history is to produce nature as its cause. At work is the hand of the designer; Woodward’s cabinet

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observably pares back the geological world just as though in a camera obscura, drawing out the lines of its design. What emerges there—­what Woodward experiences as emerging—­is not Woodward himself but the world’s order and elegance. This is what Woodward calls “nature”; “nature” emerges as the design that may be elicited from an organization of objects as though that design were there already. Woodward offers his stones as examples of nature—­but this is nature cultivated over a long career of seeing the world in a certain way. Woodward’s prose suggests that they are merely examples of the species they may be made to represent, but, all along, the Judgment of Woodward has been lurking there: Woodward’s eye the visive point, silently designing. Woodward was best known not for his collection, exactly, but for a paper he composed shortly after being admitted to the Royal Society, his Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth (1695). The problem taken up by Woodward’s Essay is how to account for layers of rock, when prior theories insist that the Earth and all its inhabitants were created whole in six days of divine labor. Why would the earth not be homogeneous, one perfect sphere as uniform as the word of God? Why would the eye, in gazing at the globe, not be met with a perfect disk, rather than mixed textures and shades, various varieties of landscape? What Woodward proposed was a theory of the biblical Deluge, indeed, a physicalist explanation of the Deluge as a temporary suspension of natural law. Set with the problem of reorganizing a world gone astray, the Creator (Woodward suggests) implemented the simplest and mathematically most elegant solution. He simply suspended gravity for a few days, allowing land and ocean to mix in an unvarying slurry of earth and mud. When gravity was restored, and the excess water drawn off, heaps of rock and earth precipitated out according to their densities.99 The seduction of this theory is that it accounts for strata visible in exposed rock faces. It also explains animal and vegetable inclusions within layers of solid rock. And, finally, it makes intelligible geological wear, which resulted from the “Hurry, Precipitation, and rapid Motion” of the excess water being drawn off.100 As all rivers lead to the sea, so Woodward’s cabinets all tend to this same unfathomable theory of things. The entire visible geological world, according to Woodward’s theory, could thereby be explained by the rapid and violent actions of a few days or even hours, thus coordinating visible geological phenomena with inherited strains of scriptural cosmic history. This is the best that can be said for Woodward’s system, which was immediately attacked from numerous quarters. John Arbuthnot, among others,

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took Woodward’s postulate seriously, launching an extended, forcefully reasoned counterargument. But detractors in general preferred the low road of satire; though few offered superior systems, and though Woodward’s system would prove to be an important step toward later understandings of geological strata,101 critics in and out of the Royal Society called Woodward’s theory the “hasty pudding” model of the Deluge, a kitchen metaphor that sinks Woodward’s sublime vision of the liquefied terraqueous globe to a low image of flour, eggs, and suet.102 The Great Deluge was, as one contemporary remarked, “his great beloved catastrophe,”103 just as it was the organizing idea of his collection, the object of imagination that he distributed throughout his cabinet. Woodward’s first scholarly concern was also his last; his system of nature provides what Woodward more than once calls the “Design” of each of his geological essays—­what he intends for them to prove. His collection was likewise the opportunity for a repetitive return to the same ideal image of a world he could never have seen. As Woodward elsewhere notes, evidently without irony, “’tis not easie, when once a man suffers himself to grow fond of a subject, not to be at once far transported.”104 The design is, in this sense, the sketch or convenience that allows a collector like himself “to draw a considerable number of Materials into so narrow a Compass” that they might be contained in a single cabinet or volume.105 It is with this backdrop, the sublime backdrop of the Great Deluge, that Woodward’s pebble swims into significance. Woodward’s collection contains a number of extraordinary objects, but they all point toward the same desideratum—­the event of the Great Deluge that organizes the stones in his collection. Among these objects is the pebble (specimen no. 226) that Woodward found in a gravel pit near the “New Buildings by Dover Street, St. James,” the geologically generic “gritty Peble of a very light brown colour.”106 Woodward’s description of the pebble stretches over two paragraphs—­the object itself could in fact be wrapped up three or four times in the amount of paper it takes to describe it—­but what becomes apparent is that this “ridge” is its most interesting feature. The ridge, Woodward surmises, comes from the relative densities of the different layers of sediment that the stone contains. It is by the concretion of these different materials that a single pebble like this can be made to prove the truth of his theory about sedimentation—­different layers exhibited in one stone. Moreover, the pebble proves the second part of his theory, the withdrawal of water that shaped the globe as it now is. Such stones, he notes, “have had their Surfaces ground, and worn”; the ridge is raised because it is harder than the surrounding material, and therefore became less worn in

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the hurry and precipitation of the recession of the waters.107 Woodward’s most characteristic descriptions follow this pattern—­a lengthy description of the object itself followed by a return to the Deluge; geology is a reading of patina, his stones, in the common phrase, being the medals of creation. Specimen no. 226 is therefore symbolic, greater than itself, condensing a much larger “Structure of Philosophy” into something that can be arranged into a system. Woodward’s fantasy, which colors all his work, is that the sublime object of the deluge can be contemplated in the compass of a pebble; his stones materialized an imagination. All objects in the collection work this way, but this little stone is additionally resonant—­is in fact biographically special—­because, Woodward records, “’twas the first stone I ever took notice of, or gather’d.”108 It was the first object that caught Woodward’s eye, and it anticipates the arrangement of his whole system. This raises a final, suggestive point. Woodward’s discovery of what would become specimen c.226, the object that sparked his passion, the “first stone [he] ever took notice of,” precedes his first remarks on the geological importance of the Deluge by more than a dozen years. Is it possible that the stone, which looks for all the world like a lidded human eye, noticed Woodward, rather than the other way around? Did the stone call out to Woodward, providing the nugget that crystallized a world? Or, could Woodward ever have wondered what the stone might itself have seen, on that precipitous day, if only its eye were open? Could the stone, in other words, have been the oculus to Woodward’s cabinet, looking out on the vanished vista of the forty days’ flood? Viewed this way, the mute and material pebble, fantasmagoric, provided Woodward with his design, rather than the other way around, itself catching Woodward’s eye and providing a pattern for rejection and exclusion of the “exemplars” of his collection. As Jonathan Richardson reminds us, nothing, properly speaking, is invention; what appears to be invention, even Woodward’s astounding theory, is only an idea once gathered, which turns up again as a pattern.109 The stone forgets itself into an organizational principle. The single element, a principle masquerading as an emblem, condenses a synoptic view—­indeed, presents the view as a feature of the arrangement. This marks Woodward’s stone, a serendipitous find if ever there was one, as a special object, the material origin of a world-­making idea (see Exhibit 9).

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Exhibit 7. An Oval Portrait of John Woodward The single-­mindedness of Woodward’s arrangement means that his judgment is everywhere on display. As Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach noted, while being shown Woodward’s collection, one “must listen to his opinion de diluvio et generatione antediluvian et lapidum postdiluvia, till you are sick of it.” He complained of having to listen “ad nauseam” to Woodward’s theories, noting that he “recites whole pages of his writings.” But this is not nearly “the maddest thing of all.” Woodward, this visitor notes, had “many mirrors hanging in every room, in which he constantly contemplates himself.”110 This same visitor was made to wait while Woodward conspicuously “called to his lad” for a dish of hot water and shaved in his presence. This was evidently a repeated ritual, for “more than four foreigners” had previously been likewise “favored with the privilege of looking on” while Woodward performed his toilet in the midst of his collection.111 This ritual posturing strikingly realizes the function of the cabinet, clustered around the idealized and carefully organized projection of Woodward’s own public image; in composing his cabinet, Woodward composes himself, framing an ideological version of himself in a mineralogical history: Woodward’s judicious eye the end and center of his geological design.112 In this sense, Woodward was not eccentric at all. He was, on the contrary, characteristic of his age; this was a culture, Peter de Bolla writes, “suffused with the desire to see oneself and to exchange self-­images as a form of social practice.” Much as (in Fréart’s words) “an Artist . . . paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses,” Woodward’s collection is ultimately, only more obviously than other cabinets, an extended experiment in self-­fashioning. Any arrangement contains in this sense an element of self-­ portraiture.113 Or, put differently, Woodward intended his cabinet as a portrait of nature, but it captures, as though a fossil in strata, Woodward himself. As Sir John Clerk, the Scottish antiquary, said of Woodward, “some of his fossils were very curious, though indeed he himself was the greatest curiosity of the whole collection.”114 While Woodward was alive, the cabinet was a living ecology; he arranged nature according to his design. And, in the way of private collections, the cabinet’s function as a sort of Woodward machine extends after his death. It fossilizes him, as it were. Woodward left his cabinet to Cambridge, along with enough money to provide the first endowed professorship in the physical

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7. John Woodward, F.R.S., by an Unknown Hand. CAMSM.P.111. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.

sciences in Great Britain (and, one scholar notes, perhaps the world).115 Woodward expected its occupant to curate and to expand his collection, to be physically present in it for the purposes of tours at least three days per week, and to give at least four lectures per year on “some one or other of the subjects treated of in my Natural History of the Earth.”116 Take this chair, Woodward commands; lecture on what I lectured on; inherit my ideas as you inherit my stones: this is the thrust of the terms of Woodward’s Will. The “Chair of Woodwardian Studies” has a number of peculiar requirements, which, taken together, suggest that Woodward himself recognized the autogenetic function of his cabinet: the cabinet as a mirror reflecting himself.

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The Woodwardian Fellow was required not to marry, lest “the care of wife and children should take the Lecturer too much from Study.” This is remarkable for a couple of reasons; the first is that it tacitly assumes that all of the Woodwardian Fellows will be men—­which a survey of the historical occupants of his chair confirms.117 And, of course, it insists that the person seated in the chair will prefer study to the many pleasures of family.118 These restrictions are, however, additionally remarkable in light of Woodward’s own lifelong bachelorhood, not least because Woodward himself seems to have preferred men.119 In part because he was generally irascible, he was the subject of numerous public satires. He was attacked in print for his controversial positions in natural philosophy and medicine, and for his unusually high-­pitched voice.120 The Scriblerian play Three Days after Marriage is commonly supposed to have taken Woodward as its major satirical object, mocking him for his eccentric philosophical pursuits.121 But he was repeatedly, publicly, coarsely slandered for sexual preferences that became well known over his lifetime. Uffenbach is one of many who records that Woodward was criminis non facile nominandi suspectus; he was widely suspected, in other words, of the love that has no name.122 He was repeatedly accused of affairs with choirboys and attractive young protégés.123 One particularly abusive pamphlet, accusing him simultaneously of bad Latin and an inappropriate “love . . . of boys,” caricatured him as “not being able to decline Anus.”124 The point here is that Woodward’s collection seems by him designed to guarantee a legacy, in the absence of any heirs; it seems even, if it may be put this way, have been designed by Woodward autogenetically to reproduce himself in a series of mirror images. The making of cabinets: it is a repeated pattern. Locke has custom crates built for his library (Exhibit 1); Pepys has custom book presses built for his books, and a very special little case built for a more personal specimen (Exhibit 15); Walpole builds a cabinet for a single book, putting that cabinet in a room custom-­built to contain it (Exhibit 17); and so on. A pattern emerges: the building of cabinets happens late in life; it signals the beginning of the end of a living ecology. Make no mistake: Woodward’s cabinet long ago ceased to be a working collection of geology. No one visits it to learn about soil constitution or fossilized inclusions. It is visited, when it is visited at all, because it is the earliest intact geological collection, the largest such collection composed in the eighteenth century and maintained more-­or-­less in situ. It is visited because it captures a way of judging, a highly particular vision of nature. This hardening up, the conversion of a working ecology into a single-­minded machine, is most strikingly figured by the oval portrait of Woodward, the only

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mature portrait of him in existence, which hangs amid his collection.125 The room housing the collection, as specified by his Will, is sectioned off in its own special space; it is in the Oak Wing of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, but it is not a part of it. Kept here are the four fall-­front cabinets, still with their original collection of stones; also here is arranged a desk, open books, and writing implements set up, as though the first Woodwardian Fellow had just left, or as though the chair were left warm for the next occupant to take his place in his turn. What you will not find here, however, are any mirrors; what would they reflect that belonged there? In their place is this portrait in an oval frame, which, like the collection itself, disdains the shifting image of the various occupants of the chair. It offers instead the same, timeless image of Woodward, gazing over his custom cabinets. His eye, enlarged by the natural magnification of the living man into a timeless image of himself, droops under a heavy lid; it sees the same nature coming into being, strata endlessly created out of disorder, that might have been seen by specimen no. c.226—­which is in fact there, also trapped in witnessing the same frozen coming-­into-­being. Woodward’s cabinet, this dark room in Cambridge, is dark room as cabinet obscura. At one end of the contraption is a gritty brown pebble, the oculus to nature at its geologically critical moment. At the other is Woodward, his large eye surveying the work of his life. Caught between them, like a screen upon which are tangled the imperatives of the Enlightenment, are Woodward’s cabinets. Epitome of the world and summary of his understanding, engraved here are the outlines of Woodward’s design, a synopsis of the Judgment of Woodward.

Exhibit 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria Just as Woodward was drafting the codicil that offered his mixed gift to posterity, Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was dreaming up a natural history museum of his own. Viewed superficially, Pope and Woodward had little in common. Pope, among the leading poets of his age, was one of Woodward’s most biting satirists; Woodward turns up in Pope’s work—­once in his early prose satire The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, and again in his multiply revised mock-­epic The Dunciad—­each of which offers a more explicit send-­up of the Gresham College geologist than the last. But there is also a way in which satire gives way to something like sympathy. “The starving chemist in his golden views,” Pope remarked in 1734, is “Supremely blest,” just like “the poet in his muse.”126 A

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8. A fragment of marble, now in Twickenham, fastened in a grotto with “invisible clamps.” Image used with kind permission of Radnor House School.

chemist gathers up the mineralogical world with the hope of unlocking the settled laws that organize it; this is what is implied in his “golden views.” What strikes his eye are rocks, sand, various liquids, and salts; what he has become habituated to see is their nature or secret quiddity. A poet collects visual objects as part of a project guided by his muse; this project, too, is oriented by the design he has trained himself to see. “Muse” here meets “golden views,” a chemist’s arrangement of stones answering a poet’s arrangement of object lessons. And Pope, perhaps more than any other of his contemporaries, was expert at what he called “design,” the arrangement of parts to satisfy an argument. This is more than an accidental binding between poet and geologist; Pope’s poetics were all along the poetics of a curator, even more so than among his contemporaries. As Pat Rogers puts it, “Pope indeed could have been an antiquarian, as Swift or Gay could not.”127 But this does not go far enough. Pope was a collector, of many of the same sorts of things as Woodward. He was, for instance, interested in old coins, a habit he picked up when he inherited a small collection of miniatures and ancient medals from his maternal aunt.128 And Pope, like Woodward, collected geological specimens; his collection, considered in sheer numbers of stones

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and weight of rock, outweighs even Woodward’s at the Sedgwick Museum. Likewise, Pope crafted for himself a cabinet—­which, again like Woodward’s, survives mostly as Pope designed it. Pope’s five acres of Twickenham land, leased in 1719 with profits from his wildly successful translation of the Iliad, were marred by a curious circumstance; they were bisected by the London highway, which separated his neo-­Palladian villa from his small plot of plantable ground. A tunnel solved this problem. At one end of the tunnel, which runs completely under highway and house alike, is Pope’s garden; at the other, fronting the house, is a short lawn sloping down toward a bend in the Thames. This tunnel was destined to become a site of use.129 Contemporary sketches, including a rough sketch by William Kent, the architect responsible for at least some of the house and grounds, suggest that the tunnel was fitted with a desk and enough furniture that it could function as a place of retreat and poetic composition. Built over the last twenty years of his life, Pope’s tunnel realized (in Samuel Johnson’s words) “ornament from inconvenience,” offering a retreat from civilization, a site of intellectual labor, and a meeting place for Pope and his friends in the Tory opposition.130 Finally, it came to house Pope’s mineralogical collection, which remains today where it was originally placed. Pope named this tunnel his “grotto,” and its design multiply registers Pope’s understanding of the relationship between ideas and the senses—­ enough so that it makes sense to trace out its genesis in some detail. To begin with, Pope’s grotto represents a paradigmatic example of what Diana Balmori calls an “intermediate structure.” These structures historically included things like grottoes, hermitages, artificial ruins; they stand halfway between “architecture and landscape,” thereby “articulat[ing] the relationship between art and nature.” 131 The grotto after all links neo-­Palladian house to semi-­informal garden, art put manifestly on display alongside a delicately sculpted natural scene. These are the sort of tensions with which Pope was at home; passing from a pastoral landscape to the house’s formal symmetry, Pope’s grotto displays manifold resemblances with his poetic craft, which delights in staging nature in the rigorous symmetry of the heroic couplet. He was a figure of paradox, who waded into public life by retreating from public centers. Set free from the demands of the marketplace, Pope, like the Roman poet Horace, took up a site outside the immediate orbit of City politics—­a place from which he could launch his satires, free of the demands of piece-­work production.132 But if the grotto has helped us develop a general understanding of the public figure he established for himself, this is in part because Pope built it as a

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site of work for his particularly poetic intellect. Indeed, he designed it to stage and to mirror the intellect at work there. The grotto was, as Frederick Bracher put it in 1949, a “Maze of Fancy.”133 During the winter months, Pope composed from the warmest rooms in the house—­indeed, like Milton, composing at times from bed. But during the warmer seasons, he composed in the grotto, which was, among other things, the house’s coolest space. And as he became used to composing there, he turned the space itself into a reflection of the poetic process as he understood it. In time, this mental cabinet and space of labor was destined to become, in Helen Deutsch’s memorable phrase, “Pope’s most representative and elusive self-­portrait.”134 The grotto has, in other words, all the signs of an active cognitive ecology, a space of thinking that captured something about how Pope saw his place in the world. This was true right from the beginning, in the grotto’s first state. The best-­known description of the grotto appears in a 1725 letter penned to Edward Blount; Pope invites us to stand at the back of the grotto, looking down its long tunnel toward the Thames. Pausing at its back entrance, and looking along its length, Pope insists, “you [will] see the Sails on the River passing suddenly and vanishing, as thro’ a Perspective Glass.” Indeed, Pope’s gardener, in a pamphlet written upon Pope’s death, invites us to witness precisely this view. What he calls a “Perspective View of the Grotto”135 ends up offering a tantalizing view through the grotto, “as thro’ a Perspective Glass,” with a small sail just passing silently by. Even here, the language is language that would not have been out of place in a description of a camera obscura; Joseph Addison and Samuel von Hoogstraten developed strikingly similar descriptions of camera obscuras they separately saw in Greenwich and London.136 But this similarity is perhaps because Pope was himself thinking of the grotto’s other trick. “When you shut the Doors of the Grotto,” Pope continues, “it becomes on the instant, from a luminous Room, a Camera obscura; on the Walls of which the Objects of the River, Hills, Woods, and Boats, are forming a moving Picture in their visible Radiations.”137 Deutsch calls the grotto, described in this way, Pope’s “personal embodiment of the human mind,” for it stages a streamlined account of intellection for the reflexive consumption of the eye.138 It was not enough simply to throw the doors of the grotto open to the scene they frame; this would simply be to take advantage of the view Pope’s villa commanded. The grotto is also made to internalize an epitome of the same scene when the doors are closed, putting the process on review. This is the basic work of the camera obscura. “The prettiest Landskip I ever saw,” Addison remarked in his 1712 essay

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9. “A Perspective View of the Grotto,” in John Searle, A Plan of Mr. Pope’s Garden (London, 1745). Courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

“The Pleasures of the Imagination” (see Exhibits 13–14), “was one drawn on the Walls of a dark Room, which stood opposite on one side to a navigable River, and on the other to a Park.”139 This dark room, which Addison witnessed on a tour to the Astronomer Royal’s Greenwich observatory, is formally identical to Pope’s in Twickenham; like Pope’s, it stands in the transitional space between park and river, sculpted space and wildness.140 For Addison, the camera obscura offers an aesthetic principle by restaging a visual field as “a landskip”—­much in the same way that the engraving of Hooke’s portable device sees nature as a pared-­down system of artist’s conventions. But in addition it articulated a version of what he would come to call the “double principle” (see Exhibit 14), with which Addison accounted for his almost universal preference for representations over originals.141 The advantage of the representation, Addison remarked, is that it at once allowed enjoyment of the scene on display, while also allowing reflection on the object as a production; a superadded pleasure arises from the proof the representation offers of the mind that observes it. The tunnel, like a telescope, satisfies a taste for prospect, but the camera obscura articulates something quite different;142 it offers a perfected version of the rational intellect and disembodied mind, the ecology of the dualist epistemology.143 Cool and dark, quiet, miniaturized, and detached; the

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dark room with its fleeting images was continually recruited as a metaphor for thinking as the contemplation of images. In the camera obscura, writes David Marshall, “epistemology and aesthetics become superimposed”; expressions of pleasure double as the affirmation of a model of the intellect.144 Pope’s grotto, however, underwent a series of transformations; this is one of the things that marks it as a cognitive ecology, a space which changed as Pope’s design sense matured.145 Sometime in the late 1730s, Pope thoroughly refashioned it, doing away with the gadget that offered the most obvious model for the free and rational mind. This second wave of remodeling followed his visit to the Bristol Hot Wells, where he was forcibly struck by the landscape of the Avon River Gorge. Most of his sense of the place, which he described in a two-­part letter to Martha Blount, responds to the “oddness” and “surprising” accidents of what he saw there; confusion rather than regularity reigns, and in Pope’s long descriptive letter there are few of the sort of linguistic shortcuts that might appear if there were regular causal patterns to be observed. “Passing along the river,” Pope remarks, “you come to a Rocky way on one Side, overlooking green Hills on the other; On that rocky way rise several white Houses, and over them red rocks, and as you go further, more Rocks above rocks, mixd with green bushes, and of different colourd stone.”146 His description goes on like this, for page after page—­scenes are repeated, vistas confused, ships found in the middle of streets and doors seen in cliff faces. What Pope has recorded, in the rush of sensation, is the cognitive confusion of seeing something without order, a field of view uninflected by judgment. He does not, in other words, see the neatness of a landscape. To recall Locke’s words, Pope sees, directly, “that which is truly variety of shadow or colour.” His letter, just as though it were painted, describes something that “is only a plane variously coloured.”147 Pope himself concludes without concluding; he instead insists that even four crabbed pages of description must inevitably fall short of capturing the richness of the unmediated sensation. “Nothing can do it,” he finally declares, “but a picture.”148 Among all the disorder of his description, Pope however identifies a single site that seems to provide the possibility of a unified prospect. It is an element of the landscape itself that does the trick—­a spot rather than a viewer. “Particularly,” Pope notes, “there is a Tower, that stands close at the Edge of the highest Rock, & sees the Stream turn quite round it.”149 Confronted with the disorder of the Bristol Gorge, a deep canyon carved by water and time, Pope’s eye finds the single perspective point that causes the world to fall into a regular conspectus. With a shock of recognition, he sees the landscape looking

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back at him. Nor is Pope the only person to have found this spot conspicuous. This precise spot, a tower on the Bluffs overlooking the Avon Gorge, would later become the home of Romantic-­era painter William West (1801–1861), who took up residence in the same tower after it had been abandoned and rebuilt. West found the Bristol landscape attractive for all the reasons that Pope found it impossible to describe—­less for its wildness, picturesque sublimity, and unadorned nature, than for its ability to be organized, by the painter’s eye, into an affecting conspectus.150 West’s 1834 Academy submission, The Avon Gorge from the Summit of the Observatory, is one example of his aesthetic, and it was painted precisely from this tower.151 In fact, it was painted from an observatory installed on the top floor of the tower, containing a perspective glass and a camera obscura. Even more suggestively, West also ordered a tunnel to be built, descending from his studio to St. Vincent’s Cave, a sort of natural grotto which opens from the cliff face just below. The telescope is gone, but the tunnel and cave remain popular tourist attractions, and the camera obscura, which may be turned by hand to change the direction of view while the viewer of course stands quite still, is the oldest surviving example of such a machine.152 Grotto, telescope, camera obscura, and so on: the very fact of the tower highlights and concretizes looking as a thing locatable in the landscape—­first for Pope, and again for West, and now for everyone who pays the five-­pound admission fee to the Clifton Observatory. Its organizing power is its attraction; the observatory, as the figure of a vantage point, as its oculus or eye, introduces nature into the wilderness. Upon his return to Twickenham, Pope reimagined his foot-­tunnel-­turned-­ cabinet, setting out to reface its interior and removing at least some of the technical gadgets it formerly contained.153 It was to offer, Pope notes, a collection of “all Nature’s works under ground,” a task requiring the massing of a great deal of timber and stone. A plan-­view design of the reimagined grotto begins with a series of questions: “Quare,” Pope writes: “what proper for a Natural Roof? / What for a Natural Pavement?”154 From query to quarry, he set about acquiring a material answer—­basket after basket of stone arriving by horse cart and river barge. Some of the new geological material came from his private collection of curiosities. From William Borlase, a geologist of Cornwall, he received local ores, along with instructions on how to affix these stones so as to mimic a cave. Much of the rest came from Richard Allen, the Bristol-­and Bath-­area rock merchant, who provided shipment after shipment of stone, sent by water, to fill in the vast empty areas—­such that it was in large part stone from Bristol that ended up reorganized in Twickenham.155 From first ideal vision of a “natural

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10. Oculus of the camera obscura at the Clifton Observatory. Image used with kind permission of the Society of Merchant Venturers, Bristol.

roof” and “natural pavement” to a tunnel painstakingly organized with hidden metal clamps and invisible masonry, “nature” became the grotto’s new organizing aesthetic.156 A tunnel dug from the earth, faced with brick, and recovered with imported stones: it took a lot of labor to reach this point, but “in its present condition,” Pope concludes, “it is quite natural.”157 This paradoxical aesthetic—­nature as an elaborate effect—­extends the tangled impulses of the camera obscura. But it also recalls Pope’s more famous, and just as paradoxical, formulation of the relation between art and nature in the Essay on Criticism. Here, too, in a poem that preceded the grotto by more than a decade, Pope rehearses the mixture of nature with design on the screen of the mind’s eye.

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True Wit is Nature to Advantage dress’d; What oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d; Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find, That gives us back the image of our mind.158 As Laura Brown observes, “Necessary ornamentation . . . and unadorned nature are systematically confounded”;159 “All Nature,” Pope elsewhere opines, “is but art, unknown to thee.”160 Pope’s tangled aesthetic code, Brown continues, would receive its stamp of approval in the grotto, for the grotto dresses up nature even while it puts Pope’s own judgment on display. Pope’s grotto, far from appearing “natural” in an anachronistic photographic sense, assembles his stone into striking lines and veins of difference; it cleans up the mess of stones that must have arrived on his porch, fixing them with invisible mechanisms, mortar and clamps, into clean lines and demarcations. It organizes them, roughly speaking, in the way that one might see things on the screen of the camera obscura—­masses of stone arranged into more perfect bands of light and shadow. It liberates a mass of material into a design. The relationship between art and nature is more pointedly examined in Pope’s “Verses on a Grotto by the River Thames,” a multiply rewritten poem composed roughly during the years Pope was most invested in the second round of grottifying.161 In the manuscript version sent to Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke (the poem’s “St. John”), Pope calls his Twickenham cabinet “Numa’s Grot,” but in the published version, which was republished in John Serle’s Plan, he clarifies the attribution. This is “th’Ægerian Grott”: Thou who shalt stop, where Thames’ translucent Wave Shines a broad Mirrour thro’ the shadowy Cave; Where lingering Drops from mineral Roofs distill, And pointed Crystals break the sparkling Rill, Unpolish’d Gemms no Ray on Pride bestow, And latent Metals innocently glow: Approach. Great nature studiously behold! And eye the Mine without a Wish for Gold. Approach: But aweful! Lo th’Ægerian Grott, Where, nobly-­pensive, st. john sate and thought; Where British Sighs from dying wyndham stole, And the bright Flame was shot thro’ marchmont’s Soul.

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Let such, such only, tread this sacred Floor, Who dare to love their Country, and be poor.162 Pope is known to have used the grotto as an assembly place for occasional meetings of his Tory friends, and the poem arranges just such a gathering as a pantheon of frustrated ambition: Bolingbroke in the long decline of his career of opposition politics, Sir William Wyndham, once tried for plotting a Tory uprising and by 1740 a committed Jacobite, and the young Hugh Hume, Earl of Marchmont, one of the Whig “Patriots” who had recently joined the opposition to First Minister Robert Walpole. The poem, like the place, asks us to adopt a view without designs of our own; we are asked to gaze with an intellectual rather than a carnal eye, to admire a principle of conservative politics rather than activate a wish for wealth or power. In small, then, the arrangement of figures insists on a certain mode of judgment, staging a nascent nationalism disaggregated from the Whig administration currently in power. And, similar to how Raphael arranges a triad of emblematic goddesses around the momentous figure of Paris, Pope summons a particular nymph out of the recesses of classical myth as a way of condensing his design. This is Egeria, who, along with “nature” (whose emblem she is), centers and organizes the poem. Numa was Rome’s legendary second king, who in the myth of the State rescued Rome from the strife of warlike Romulus. He was in this tradition the first philosopher-­king, whose reign inaugurated a brief period of peace similar to the subsequent Golden Age. Numa was elected to the kingship while he, himself, was in retirement in a town outside Rome. He was elected precisely because he was remarked for his learning and clemency. In this sense, he offers an obvious parallel to Pope’s circle of Tory statesmen. But Numa was also, more to the point, the first keeper of a grotto. Plutarch tells us that Numa “spake of a certain goddess or mountain-­nymph that was in love with him, and met him in secret, . . . and professed that he entertained familiar conversation with the Muses, to whose teaching he ascribed the greatest part of his revelations.”163 This “goddess” or “mountain-­nymph” or “Muse” was Egeria, and he met her in a grotto; it was from Egeria that Numa received the first Roman civic humanist education. This is the constellation of meanings that Pope intends the name of Egeria to capture. The gesture to Egeria’s grotto relies upon a fully material typology, for Egeria’s grotto is not only an abstraction. Like Pope’s latter-­day instance, the first “Ægerian Grott” still exists, an amphitheatrical hollow just south of the Porta Capena of Rome.164 Maynard Mack situates Pope within a tradition of

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Horatian satire; Horace was the one who, freed from patronage by a sudden gift, retired to the countryside to launch his satires upon pomp and excess. But when it comes to the grotto, it is Juvenal’s third satire that is most important for Pope’s understanding. The third satire begins when the poet pauses precisely before Egeria’s amphitheatrical cave, and deplores the state of idolatrous Rome. It is an extended meditation on how much “closer” the grotto would be to the values of Egeria if it were “fringed by a green border of grass” rather than being built up with stones “so unlike to nature.”165 Juvenal’s objection refers us back to the origin myth; Numa, Plutarch tells us, “forbade the Romans to represent the deity in the form either of man or of beast.” This included the “goddess or mountain-­nymph” whom Numa consulted. And so, Plutarch records, “during the first one hundred and seventy years they built temples, indeed, and other sacred domes, but placed in them no figure of any kind; persuaded that it is impious to represent things Divine by what is perishable, and that we can have no conception of God but by the understanding.”166 Juvenal’s satire is in this sense the inaugural example of what Isaac Kramnick calls a “politics of nostalgia,” a way of looking at history and the present moment that bound Pope and his followers in a shared political aesthetic.167 Pope’s grotto joins a number of imitations of or answers to Juvenal—­Samuel Johnson’s “London” among them—­in imagining an alternative to London politics, a kind of stripping back of modern luxury.168 The “nature” of the grotto, its unadornment, registers at every point a historical understanding of modern London—­a politics of nostalgia, or “noble-­pensiveness,” and a “nature” which is more rather than less classical, a way of recovering an otherwise lost form of seeing. There are a number of absences that signal Pope’s debt to the Egerian ethical aesthetic. For one thing, quite early in the design of the grotto, Pope longed for a statue of a certain nymph, but despite the fact that statues of the nymph were readily available, none ever appeared there. This absence, of course, suggests that Pope was already thinking of the grotto as a paean to “nature” in the sense elaborated by Juvenal after Egeria. But that Pope recognized a debt to Egeria’s grotto is additionally signaled by a presence—­by one of the objects in the grotto’s central chamber. Almost precisely in its center, fixed to the ceiling by Pope’s semi-­invisible clamps, is what Pope’s gardener called “a fine Piece of Marble from the Grotto of Egeria near Rome.”169 This “Piece of Marble” was a gift from “from the Reverend Mr. Spence” (a writer of anecdotes and a collector of things about Pope), and it represented the translation, that is to say, the carrying across, of a relic of the classical civic virtues, a material synecdoche for the values that the grotto of Egeria could be made to represent.170 Pope

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seems to have asked Spence to acquire it sometime before his second round of remodeling,171 whereupon Spence, visiting the Egerian grotto, knocked free a piece of stone roughly the size of a human head and packed it up in his luggage. Treasured up in his Twickenham grotto, indeed centralized among all the natural order the grotto was made to display, the stone offered Pope a conduit to the classic ground that he would never be able to visit; it summarized to Pope a sedimented vista of the classical humanist past that he, himself, would never have been able to make the journey to see.172 And in this sense, it provides order to the space in which it stands, providing a principle and a center of ideological mass to the imagination space Pope has designed. What could look more like a callous body, a white wall variously inflected with figures, an interface between the world seen and the principle that sees? And the things this stone has seen—­from Egeria’s secret meetings with Numa to Juvenal’s complaints on the luxury of Rome. The stone was all along part of the object of pilgrimage to anyone wishing to revisit the source of civic learning, the origin of Roman humanism. What could be more, for Pope, like a seat of the soul, sitting in a chamber fitted with its dioptric glasses? Indeed, at some point in the last version of the grotto, Pope installed a pair of looking glasses, flanking the central tunnel but facing its opening, placed just behind and to either side of the stone smuggled out of Italy. Look in the grotto, and it looks back at you. And perched just there, between the glasses and atop the grotto, is this little fragment of Egerian order; it is the principle of its design. We often behave, Pope remarks, “as if we really believed” in the metaphors that govern our understanding of the mind; we write as if we were really inspired by muses, or as if the work of the mind were identical to the keeping of a rhetorical repository. We behave as if we really believed the mind were a grotto or the judgment a camera obscura.173 Pope himself often writes “as if ” he believed in the muses as “Aeriall ladies,” or poetry as “inspiration.” He after all employs what Blakey Vermeule calls a “building block” theory of language, even if (in the end) he finds more in the building-­block theory to satirize than to approve.174 It is a question, for Pope, of how we are to live with these metaphors. Clearly, they are necessary; how else is one to talk about mental and poetic processes?175 But, be careful: they are not to be taken too far. Indeed, the objects of Pope’s satire are often those who take their metaphors too strictly. Woodward is one of these, repeatedly caught behaving “as if ” he really believed that the mind’s arrangement of figures was really reducible to activities just like being inspired, or like sorting and resorting objects in a cabinet. At the business end of Pope’s pointed satire is anyone who uses the

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11. Alexander Pope’s grotto, now in the basement of the Radnor House School, Twickenham. Image used with kind permission of Radnor House School.

workmanlike stocking of a cabinet as a set of guidelines for the workmanlike composition of verse. Pope, for instance, in the satirical guise of Martinus Scriblerus, mock-­seriously proposes a “rhetorical chest of drawers,” meant to automate the production of verse and other forms of public writing. Such a “repository,” Scriblerus insists, should be divided into “loci, or places,” fitted with little “cells, resembling those of cabinets for rarities.”176 The metaphor proves surprisingly apt; Pope extends it over three chapters, among which we discover that composition of the poetical sort is just like that of the alchemical. Morals may be “strained,” lessons “extracted,” descriptions “mixed,” and so forth; the metaphor between poetics and alchemy can be sustained for a full chapter because there is already a building-­block theory of composition at work in poetic production generally. The humor works because we recognize processes already experienced to be occurring. But it is funny because it is clear that what is intended as a working model has taken on a life of its own; the model is writing the poet, rather than the other way around. While the overall tenor of the letters published under the name of Martinus Scriblerus—­many of which point their satire at John Woodward—­is

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clearly satirical, the language of poetic composition employed in day-­to-­day work leans nevertheless against material figures that are to be taken straight. We summon up the metaphor to explain what is happening, we even, in Michael Kearns’s words, “behave, verbally, as if most [metaphorical] representations of mental activity are literally true”—­just as Pope insists we do anyway.177 This is how a design works, how a collection of things emerges into an idea. The trick is not to let the things take over; it is, as Pope exemplifies in the grotto, to control the arrangement of things through the design, rather than the other way around. And so Pope sees no problem with talking about composition as the arrangement of ideal objects, even while satirizing those who think that those compositional practices can be routinized, or that objects are actually to be found in the mind.178 He can notice that “imitation of the ancients” is the hallmark of good taste, and, indeed, that all of what is called “learning,” is merely “the knowledge of the sense of our predecessors,” even while defending originality, especially the originality of a fresh design.179 It can be difficult to tell if the mental or the physical comes first, whether the mind chooses its models, which then shape it, or whether mind inherits a world that molds it in certain ways. What is clear is that Pope inherited a way of thinking about mental operations a few years before he owned a foot tunnel, which became a living ecology of work even while it offered various reflections of how he understood that work to be produced. From the relatively crude production of a sovereign mind through the camera obscura, to the more delicate and entangled appeal to Egeria as a principle of order, the grotto developed, dialectically, a theory of nature as Pope himself came to understand it, and to experience it, in the ecologies he inhabited.

Exhibit 9. Venus at Her Toilet The camera obscura has recently swum back into view as an object of historical and epistemological interest, largely through a hot debate over its possible use among artists of still life and trompe l’oeil. This argument includes such well-­known public figures as David Hockney, who goes so far as to suggest that painters of the Dutch Golden Age, long admired for their dazzling precision, relied on the optical camera obscura for some of their most characteristic effects.180 Their claim is bolstered by evidence that the camera obscura was employed by eighteenth-­century physician William Cheselden, whose influential Anatomy of the Human Body may have relied on its technical assistance.181

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12. Jan van Kessel the Elder, Kunstkammer with Venus at Her Toilette. AN 2797 © Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe.

Moreover, we know for a fact that such eighteenth-­century painters as Benjamin West and Joshua Reynolds dabbled with camera obscuras—­though for what purposes remains unclear. Horace Walpole, who owned one himself, noted as late as 1777 that Reynolds and West were “gone mad” with William Storer’s version of the device, what he marketed as the “Delineator.”182 Reynolds’s box, which survives in the Science Museum in London, incorporates an additional twist of the trompe l’oeil; it is fashioned so that, when shut, it looks like any book, and can be stored on a shelf. An object meant to condense the world in epitome, it may be stowed alongside other such compendia, like encyclopedias, commonplaces, and so on.183 All this attention to the camera obscura as a technical gadget has, however, distracted us from its fundamental role as a conceptual metaphor, a figure for the separation of ideas from things, mind from matter, and so on. Works like Johannes Vermeer’s The Astronomer (ca. 1668) aspire to an aesthetic of virtual realism; they offer things to the eye as though they were the things themselves. In this sense, Vermeer might have relied occasionally on a camera obscura to

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help with delineation. But the work of the camera obscura is not in capturing details; it is in the design. These sorts of images repetitively stage spaces that are microcosmic reductions of the world at large—­in this way very like the eye and mind that the camera obscura formalizes. The astronomer consults a complete and adequate representation of the world cast on a two-­dimensional surface, even while the light streaming in through the window might provide, if viewed directly, a version of the same thing. The subject of the painting does not look at the thing itself. He looks instead at a miniaturized representation or conceptual model. Even if painters of the descriptive turn declined to use the camera obscura, in other words, they nevertheless staged thinking as an activity occurring in the dark room of the mind.184 The camera obscura was turning up in a different way, not as technique, but as arrangement or design. A similar formal arrangement is visible in The Toilet of Venus, one of a surprisingly large number of paintings produced in the studio of Jan van Kessel (1626–1679).185 On the one hand, it clearly aspires to a realist aesthetic; the tumble of objects precisely picked out, substantial things behind their hard edges and glossy surfaces, means to trick the eye.186 In actuality, a community of painters has at different times assembled objects from various places, painting them into a collection as though it were a real space full of particulars. These things were never gathered together themselves, except as representations; themselves collectors, tumbling together images borrowed from art and nature, these painters stage a collection.187 But this image also stages a space that is formally like Locke’s dark room: a single observer (here accompanied by a cupid) turns away from the source of light, consulting instead the memories of things stored as images of themselves. Krzysztof Pomian’s Collectors and Curiosities, which remains among the most influential works on historical practices of collecting, identifies this image as exemplary of the impulses organizing early modern collections. Pomian describes it this way: “Venus, half-­naked, is accompanied by a Cupid and stands amid shells, minerals, scientific instruments and pictures, with a backdrop of shelves bearing busts and statues.”188 For Pomian, the meaning is instantly clear; Venus is “the only way that the desire responsible for bringing together rare objects . . . can be represented allegorically.”189 Desire and arrangement; this is of course a design. The collecting impulse, the drive that populates the cabinet of the imagination, is according to this reading localized by Venus as a metaphor that, extended, becomes the allegory of the cabinet collection generally. Van Kessel’s innovation, at least in Pomian’s reading, is only to make visible the invisible operations of the ordering intellect, inviting allegory’s “univocal and consistent meaning.”190

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And so (again, according to this reading) Van Kessel’s Toilet of Venus is only allegorizing the work of all collections by introducing an aestheticized object of the imagination as the goal or center of gravity of the collecting apparatus. Readings of this image, and a large number of copies, have, however, historically fallen into the same trap as Paris, choosing for their subject the goddess of love. This is despite the fact that many of these pictures, turned out factory-­style from the studios of Breughel the Elder, Van Kessel, and others of Antwerp, contain a miniature version of the Judgment of Paris among the paintings arranged on their miniature walls.191 It is also despite the fact that viewing with the animal eye is satirized by Van Kessel’s monkey in the left foreground, who is caught looking quizically through a primitive pair of glasses at a hypnotically real seascape. To read this as a toilet of Venus is to misread the allegory of the piece, for this is Juno, here made to personify optics.192 Van Kessel, working in a tradition of allegory paintings, offers us an allegory of sight; framed here is a highly organized allegory of sight misrecognized as an allegory of a desire to accumulate. This sheds light on an additional detail common in the genre—­the windows that open out onto a view of a bright seaport, with busy boats plying their trade. These windows are clearly an essential feature of the form, present in all its examples; they are what remind us that the space within is formally like the space without. The bustling seascape in Van Kessel’s arrangement recalls the global origins of the things in the chamber; it reminds us at once that vision is the sense that can cross and organize space, as well as of the importance of optical instruments in the conduct of navigation. Contained in the room, for Juno’s consideration, are the sort of two-­dimensional prints that can cross space in ways that native flora and fauna can’t.193 Arranged in the dark room are not only the instruments that extend the eye’s work; also here are instruments that make sense of the eye itself, and of the mind as its internal duplicate. The windows are the painting’s dioptric glasses, dividing the world of business and commerce from its internal representation. Outside, maritime traffic negotiates wind and tide and right of way; inside, the world is reflected in miniature back to Juno, who stands, like Woodward, before a mirror, gazing at herself as the central eye and most important lesson of her own arrangement of things. Taken together, this mix of meanings and influences, distributed in the arrangement of the image and its details, dividing the world into inside and outside, is how Juno at once personifies sight, and represents sight as the master sense of judgment. Among the works of the British eighteenth century, the poem most formally like a cabinet portrait is Pope’s Rape of the Lock.194 The poem establishes

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a formal complicity between chamber and mind, dark room of the dressing chamber and dark rooms of the human psyche. It is in part for this reason that among the only substantive words that appear in the poem more often than those having to do with the lock of the title are “eye” and “eyes,” both as organs and objects of sight. This is a poem about visual things, in all their cognitive richness. The poem, like van Kessel’s Allegory of Sight, opens when “Sol thro’ white Curtains [shoots] a tim’rous Ray”; the “Ray” is instantly answered by the eyes of the heroine, for it “oped those Eyes that must eclipse the Day.” Thus begun, the poem operates under the regime of the eye—­commanding the commerce between object and idea, coordinating a visual epistemology and cognitive ecology. It continually maintains the isomorphism between chambers and minds. This is in part a matter of poetic convenience: how else to capture what is invisible but through what is visible, or, in other words, how else is one to imagine facts of character, for instance, except through objects of dress and fashion, looks of the eye and dispositions of the body? But the technique depends upon a trick learned from the camera obscura. The things “out there” are for Belinda also what is profoundly “in here.” This continual isomorphism helps account for many of the poem’s best-­known moments, including Pope’s striking description of the “moving toyshop” of Belinda’s heart, which is populated by the same kinds of things that might appear in a dressing room: wigs, ribbons, love letters, and all the stuff of the beau monde. Pope offers two versions of Belinda’s proper ecology. The first is her dressing table, every bit as global a collection as Pope’s grotto or Woodward’s study. This passage is well known, but it deserves quoting in full. And now, unveil’d the toilet stands display’d, Each silver vase in mystic order laid. First, robed in white, the nymph intent adores, With head uncover’d, the cosmetic powers. A heav’nly image in the glass appears, To that she bends, to that her eye she rears; Th’ inferior priestess, at her altar’s side, Trembling, begins the sacred rites of pride. Unnumber’d treasures ope at once, and here The various offerings of the world appear; From each she nicely culls with curious toil And decks the goddess with the glitt’ring spoil. This casket India’s glowing gems unlocks,

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And all Arabia breathes from yonder box. The tortoise here and elephant unite, Transform’d to combs, the speckled and the white. Here files of pins extend their shining rows, Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billets-­doux. Now awful beauty puts on all its arms; The fair each moment rises in her charms, Repairs her smiles, awakens every grace, And calls forth all the wonders of her face; Sees by degrees a purer blush arise, And keener lightnings quicken in her eyes. The busy sylphs surround their darling care, These set the head, and those divide the hair, Some fold the sleeve, while others plait the gown; And Betty’s praised for labours not her own.195 Pope offers us a vision formally like Van Kessel’s of the optical Juno. We see here a little microcosmic ecology; it is an epitome and a way of seeing the world, though flipped upside down by the gentle satire of the mock-­epic. Belinda, as a figure, is an icon of the collecting sort exactly to the extent that she summarizes a world of visual goods. Her work is “cosmetic” in the full richness of the word. Her cosmetics are, the word itself reminds us, “kosmoi,” small moments in the visible world that point, talisman-­like, to an order or arrangement much larger than themselves. Derived from the type of “poetic language” that becomes, in Latin rhetoric, ornatus and decoratio, “kosmos” was Aristotle’s word for any token that could be arrayed as part of a global or universal image. The “classic example of a kosmos,” Angus Fletcher remarks, “is the jewelry worn by a lady,” because it integrates the individual wearer into a cosmic system. Such an icon has a dual purpose, denoting both a large-­scale order (macrocosmos) and the small-­scale sign of that order (microcosmos); this is of course Hooke’s language, too: the mind, like the eye, offers a “microcosm” of the world. The “kosmos” refers to any “decoration or ornament of dress, any embellishment, any costume”; it refers to any deliberate detail, because any ornament, no matter how fashionable (indeed, especially if part of a system of fashion), resonates with the large-­scale order of which it is a reflection: the world arranged, like a still life, on a baroque toilet table.196 This is a cognitive ecology, a compact representation of the universe and its microcosmic epitome, of which Belinda is the center and in which she finds her mirror image.

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Belinda’s dressing chamber is a conceptual metaphor, coordinating macrocosm with microcosm. The toilet table is every bit a microcosm of the world that a globe or chart might be; the space of the table is where “all Arabia” may be made to “breathe… from yonder box,” where India’s rubies may be ranged alongside tortoises or elephants of Africa. Like the poem, the table represents the world in a global batch of toys. The five-­canto edition of the poem, revised and published more than a year after the first, expands this aspect of the poem, extending metaphor into allegory. Pope introduces what he calls a “Rosicrucian” machinery: an invisible world that, in the Rosicrucian mode, perfectly mirrors the visible one. This machinery is his system of invisible spirits, sylphs hovering around Belinda and lending her their aid. They work in the frame of the poem by offering allegorical reflections of the social and political system that places Belinda at its center, for they pick out and guard particular items of Belinda’s object world: Zephyretta guards the “flutt’ring fan” (2.112), Brillante the diamond “brilliants” (2.113), “Momentilla” the pocket watch. Their very names imply their allegorical roles, hovering, as they do, over the objects of Belinda’s toilet table: fan, gemstones, and pocket watch, are all mirrored in this invisible world, but so too are perfumes, ivory, tortoiseshell, whalebone, and in the end everything else littering her dressing chamber. When these same sylphs later line themselves up for battle, settling over Belinda’s cards, ranged like an army over the “velvet plain” of the card-­table, they clinch what already appeared to be true; troops arranged for battle, Fletcher remarks, are the very type and figure of the “kosmos,” for the general is the one who imagines an army lined up “by rank,” and then makes it so through bodies in the world. This is what Belinda has done; her designing eye has arranged a kosmos around herself, ordering the world according to her desire. The dressing scene closes with “Betty.” She is Belinda’s maidservant, who folds pleats, pins hair, sets curls, and so on; she is, Pope concludes, “praised for labours not her own.” Pope means literally to suggest the work of the sylphs, who straighten ribbons and correct the fall of ruffles. She is in other words praised for executing work that was actually designed in the mind. But forgetting hovers over the whole passage, condensing complex networks of harvesting, manufacture, transport, and retail into a series of two-­dimensional screens: the toilet table, the face that bears the blush, the heavenly image that reflects the face. Cosmetics only work as cosmetics by forgetting the global empire to which they are attached; they are transformed into iridescent surfaces or liquefied into economic value, a single metric as an expression of how difficult they were to get. This is indeed what makes Belinda a “goddess” and the

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application of paint a series of “sacred rites”; the forces that produced all these things and gathered them together are forgotten into a mystical relationship. And it is also what has to happen for still life possibly to be about surfaces; the embodied engagement of people with things is filtered out in order to concentrate on how things strike the eye.197 When Belinda “Sees by Degrees a purer Blush arise, / And keener Lightnings quicken in her eyes” (1.141–44), she is watching the effects of kosmoi, as they deposit their global, systemic power on an individual. Belinda’s blush (as more than one commentator has noted) is “purer” because it is generated entirely as a matter of surfaces—­and neither of a global process nor of an embodied interiority at all. Belinda (like Milton’s Eve before her) has woken from a mildly erotic dream;198 she applies a purer surface of Spanish red, her double blush a double bluff, hiding the signs of excitement through the same signs applied artificially. She has made of herself a convex retina, the microcosmic surface where falls the full gaze of the world; it is a scene of painting, of producing an ideal self-­portrait. She is the trompe-­ l’oeil of the globe, of which she is the epitome. Taken together, portrait and collection constitutes a self-­contained system on the order of Venus at her toilet or Woodward’s portrait gazing with frozen stillness at his cabinet.199 Belinda’s dressing room is governed by the rhetoric of surfaces; the camera obscura is at its subtle but invidious work. And it would seem in a straightforward way, therefore, to provide a portrait of the heroine’s mind, or what Richard Rorty, leaning on a poetic turn borrowed from Shakespeare, calls the mind’s “Glassy Essence.”200 Mind is the pure, fine-­grained stuff that might be imagined to be shared with angels; it is, after all, Belinda’s “heav’nly image” that is reflected in her glass. This is the world of cosmetics; it is also the one where objects may signify metaphorically—­things standing in for ideas and for language. But The Rape of the Lock doesn’t stop here. And its next step can help us see a way forward, which is actually a way inward. It looks forward to the remaining exhibits in this book. Though the poem labors to distract us with its surfaces, though Belinda herself labors to distract us, the production of the purer self labors to forget the embodied presence upon which it metaphorically rests. Pope, however, hasn’t forgotten. The poet provides a second portrait, not of Belinda in her proper microcosm, but of a yet smaller space behind Belinda’s eye—­and it is no clean well-­lighted place at all.201 This is the Cave of Spleen, and the journey into its psychic underworld activates a vector of inwardness, reattaching perception to the body of the perceiver. The “spleen” was a categorical waste ground for aspects of experience that could

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not be captured in a container model of the intellect; it was a relic of Renaissance, humoral medicine smuggled into Enlightenment science, responsible at different times and in different cases for everything from autotelic mood shifts to madness to the imagination in its most generative and uncontrollable forms.202 And despite the importance given to the intellectual eye, to the mind in its rarefied form, the spleen expanded over the medical history of the early eighteenth century, made to “account,” as Rorty puts it, “for the bulk of our behavior.”203 This hypertrophic spleen would ultimately become, in the words of one scholar, its own “microcosm” of shadow organs, its vascular network spiraling up the spinal cord, wrapping around the stomach, insinuating itself so powerfully into the gut and organ cavity that it came to mimic the whole person it inhabited.204 The spleen is in other words a name for the mind’s embodiment. And if the camera obscura offered a system of “fixed or static” oppositions, the satisfaction of a mocked-­up dualism, the spleen offered a realm of “fluid and metaphoric” dynamics, a complex and sometimes unsettling system of dark affinities.205 A constant Vapour o’er the Palace flies; Strange Phantoms rising as the Mists arise; Dreadful, as Hermit’s Dreams in haunted Shades, Or bright as Visions of expiring Maids. Now glaring Fiends, and Snakes on rolling Spires, Pale Spectres, gaping Tombs, and Purple Fires: Now Lakes of liquid Gold, Elysian Scenes, And Crystal Domes, and Angels in Machines. Unnumber’d Throngs on ev’ry side are seen Of Bodies chang’d to various Forms by Spleen. Here living Teapots stand, one Arm held out, One bent; the Handle this, and that the Spout: A Pipkin there like Homer’s Tripod walks; Here sighs a Jar, and there a Goose Pie talks; Men prove with Child, as pow’rful Fancy works, And Maids turn’d Bottels, call aloud for Corks.206 The poem’s descent into the psychic underworld, which cuts across the dualist account of cognition, draws from a set of poetic resources distinct from the camera-­obscura world of the dressing room. The poem is still working in the realm of the mock-­epic—­but now it mocks an epic of a different sort. The

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toyshop of Belinda’s heart has reminded more than one scholar of the “formulaic alterations and repetitions” of the martial epic;207 when, in Belinda’s heart, “Wigs with Wigs, with Sword-­knots Sword-­knots strive, / Beaus banish Beaus, and Coaches Coaches drive,” Pope is clearly thinking of the text he was just beginning to translate, in which “shield with shield, with helmet helmet closed, / To armour armour, lance to lance opposed.” This is of course the Iliad. So, too, when Belinda and the Baron sit across the card table’s “velvet plain,” they array their cards like armies with insignia of rank—­just as they have already decked themselves. The Iliad is art of the form one might find in the camera obscura, a microcosm of art and nature. Just as the camera obscura reduces the world to an internalized representation, so, as John Cuff’s poet-­ for-­hire has it, As in a nutshell, curious to behold; Great homer’s iliad was inscrib’d of old; So the wide World’s vast Volume, here, we see To Miniature reduc’d, and just Epitome.208 In the martial epic, everything is available to the eye, the very type and figure of the kosmos. The kosmos, Fletcher concludes, “looks very like a synecdochic relationship, pure and simple—­a matter of solely cognitive thought.”209 Belinda at the card table, or her heart as miniaturized toyshop, is an Iliad in a nutshell; like the Iliad, the Rape of the Lock in these scenes is the poem of the straight way of knowledge, in which the end is known before it begins. It is an epic of statecraft, of the ordering of men in battle and in the assembly: the poem of kosmoi. In turning aside from the order of the eye, Pope’s descent into the Cave of Spleen abandons martial epic to indulge itself in an epic journey, thereby finding its way out of the kingdom of design and into a different organizing principle altogether. The epic journey is the form of Aeneas’s passage into the underworld; it is the genre governing the Odyssey’s “restless” universe of enforced wandering, the striving of “ingenious” Odysseus, polutropos, “the man of many turns.”210 And if the martial epic is structured by “synecdoche,” the epic of wandering is structured by “the syntagmatic relations” that “link . . . the signifying chain.”211 This form of epic is underwritten by what Peter Brooks calls “intention which is irritation,” organization as a series of “detours” (Freud’s Umweg) or disruptions in the straight way of things.212 Speaking specifically of the Odyssey, Joseph Addison suggests that Homer “perplex[es] that fable

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with . . . plots and intricacies . . . by the various concealments and discoveries.”213 This is the cue that Pope has taken; he organizes the fourth canto of The Rape of the Lock according to the discordant meander of the epic journey. When Odysseus descends into the underworld, he finds there many of the same people and things that he met on the plains of Troy; Achilles is there, as are Patroclus and Ajax, and what is more, since there is a commerce between the living and the dead, many of the same sorts of objects end up in the afterlife, like weapons and the machines of war. But, whereas an ordering eye ranges over and governs the martial epic, in the underworld, no such order exists; everything is promiscuously mixed, as disarranged as fragments of the aftermath of ten years’ siege. Pope’s Cave of Spleen indeed contains many of the sorts of things that would have been found on Belinda’s dressing table—­files of pins arranged in rows, bottles, boxes, and vials; it contains many of the same things that might have been gathered in the wide palace of the senses. But it operates under a metaphorical regime of its own, a pandemonium crossed by a deep dream logic.214 Seen in serial review are “living tea-­pots,” jars that “sigh,” a talking goose pie, a walking pipkin. Design has been abandoned in favor of motion; the single vision organized by purpose, the synoptic view of an orderly arrangement, is thrown over in favor of an uncertain journey. Everything here is embedded in and half resolved into “vapors.” Released from the spleen’s dark materials, rising from its laboratory, are the body’s rarified spirits, which in their turn produce a host of unpredictable effects: Belinda’s paleness, her disordered hair, her flashing eyes, and, by extension, the blush she hides with blush. Not cosmetics but narcotics are at work, chemicals ingested rather than applied: Pope’s complex pharmacopeia, including tea, chocolate, tobacco, and coffee.215 In a sudden shift, which winds up the tour of the spleen’s contents, Pope provides a pair of images that turn men and maids alike into pure interiority. “Men prove with Child, as pow’rful Fancy works,” the poet remarks, “And Maids turn’d Bottels, call aloud for Corks.” Encountered here is a compact figure for conception—­the origin of ideas and motives as a question of a bodily process (see Exhibit 20). Where Belinda, in her dressing room, may contemplate herself in the purity of her blush, creating a profound split between mind and body, in the spleen we confront a mixture of carnal motives. The spleen is in this sense the engine of a more profound monism. This, I take it, is why the spleen is shrouded in spirits, and why the scene ends with Belinda venting her anger—­in other words, giving expression; in the place of an austere dualism rises up a profound monism, every bit as integrated as the system so patiently breathed by Raphael (see Exhibit 3).

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Digression, Inwardness, and Conception: the attention to spleen activates a sudden swerve from the eye at rest to the body in motion, from the synoptic view to the inward journey, from the structural effects of a device like a metaphor to the varied sensations of a poet on the move, from the balance of judgment to the vagaries of conception. Pope’s Cave of Spleen announces a transformation from the aesthetics of the just arrangement of things to an investment in the serial sensations of a journey, from the glassy essence of the mind to splenetic embodiment. In fact, it announces the precariousness of the camera obscura metaphor generally, which perches upon a complex set of debts and reciprocal dependencies. As Peter Stallybrass and Allon White put it, while the “individual appeared to be contentless, a point of judgment and rational evaluation which was purely formal and perspectival, in fact it was constituted through and through by . . . a heterogeneous diversity of specific contents, upon which it is, nonetheless, completely dependent.”216 The way out of the camera obscura appears, therefore, to be inward, into the very contexts and environments that made it possible. Thinking ecologically means tracing the way that the mind moves in its body—­indeed, the way that it is intimately engaged with the particular affordances of personal embodiment. Belinda points the way forward—­which is to say, inward; it is to these disordered zones, figured by Belinda’s profound embodiment, that the remainder of this book attends.

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Dig r essi o n 10. The Iliad in a Nutshell — 11. A Full Stop 12. A Conical Roman Tumulus — 13. The Reception of Claudius 14. Addison’s Walk

Exhibit 10. The Iliad in a Nutshell The glory of the arts in eighteenth-­century Britain was the effective execution of design. A strong and elegant design, Jonathan Richardson argues, “composes” figures according to a single “conception,” organizing the mangle of things under the triumph of an idea.1 Like Belinda’s cosmetic system in The Rape of the Lock (Exhibit 9), design puts matter in its place. But what about those times when matter is clearly what matters, when, in other words, it is clearly accidents rather than designs that are shaping the way of things? In the Aristotelian tradition, accidents are precisely what have no philosophy; as aberrations and departures from nature, accidents admit of no cause or effect, no systematic explanation, and are (in this sense) precisely what cannot be thought.2 What then do we say about the work of particulars, bubbling up out of the mess of things and imposing ideas of their own? Woodward is crossing a quarry, and he takes notice of a stone; Pope is in the Avon Gorge, and he catches sight of a tower. John Evelyn mentions crossing a field, and turning up a coin;3 Horace Walpole is looking for a design for a picture frame when he stumbles across a portentous coat of arms;4 Robinson Crusoe is looking for a way off his island but finds a footprint in the sand.5 An object, something as mute as stone, leads each of them off the path they thought they were on. In retrospect, at least to the person making their way through things, the path may appear to have been straight; but in the moment, and indeed to the rest of the world, the journey looks like a picaresque of detours, deflections, and

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sudden changes of direction. Woodward’s stone, Pope’s tower, Evelyn’s coin, Walpole’s coat of arms, Crusoe’s footprint: each was an invitation to see the world differently, and each points to a way in which the world, in the end, is doing at least half of the seeing. Call it, as Ross Chambers does, an “epistemology of the unsystematic”; thinking ecologically means being open to the environment thinking back.6 In one particularly telling moment in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while discussing the “modes of thinking,” Locke indulges himself in a “not . . . unpardonable digression.” “Sometimes,” he remarks, “the mind fixes itself with so much earnestness on the contemplation of some objects, that it turns their ideas on all sides; marks their relations and circumstances; and views every part so nicely and with such intention, that it shuts out all other thoughts.”7 This is what Locke calls “attention”; he may even be exploring an inappropriate form of attention, lapsing into what Natalie Phillips calls “hyperfocus,” for what he means to describe is a mental state at the far end of a spectrum.8 Attention is the mind acting upon something (very much like apprehending or “grasping” it), but between earnest attention on one end and “sound sleep” on the other lie a “great variety of degrees” of thinking, different modes of thought, which Locke, in his characteristic manner, turns into ideas. As he pauses to attend to attention, his prose attenuates itself also; “modes of thinking” is his topic, and he is led from one mode to another by their near connection. Considering such various modes of thinking as study, attention, daydreaming, dozing, dreaming, and deep sleep, touring them in their turn, “leads” him (as he puts it) to a conclusion: that “thinking is the action and not the essence of the soul.”9 “Activity” is in this account the critical thing.10 The subject of the digression has been the mind’s emergence as an activity of the soul; thought is what happens when the soul acts. Its essence appears to be movement, and as long as the mind is on the ramble, we call it “thinking.” “But this,” Locke concludes, is “by the by.” So, what kind of activity is this? “Leads” is Locke’s language (he is “led” from thought to thought), and it has something to teach us about the forms that Locke’s active thinking tends to take. As a prose form, Locke’s name for being led in a train of thought is “digression.” Digression, etymologically “turning aside” or “going out of the way,” mobilizes a loose set of haptic metaphors, carving out space from the fixed arrangement of design; it puts its own spatial logic to work, turning aside from the direct path of reason into byways of local interest. We may oppose it to “method,” which after all means a path towards something or a route towards a clear goal. By marking

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“relations and circumstances,” digression emerges as a strategy complementary with but perpendicular to the straight way of intentional arrangement. It begins when Locke is momentarily distracted by something in his argument—­a detail about the “state of the mind” suggested by a list of different modes of thought. The thinker, in pausing his argument to attend to what might at first appear to be a quibble, discovers new internal geometries, new “sides” to an object, which swim into view as he changes his viewpoint. And he does this upon the ramble. The shape of Locke’s digression is governed by the resources of travel: we are “led” by our own observations; we are asked to “trace [the series] a little further”; we arrive “last of all” at the end of a process; and we may “further” conclude. Having made this detour, having viewed his object from all sides, and even gone out of his way to report upon associated examples, Locke returns us to “our present design,” now newly enriched with a new way of looking at things—­or, as Locke would put it, having traced new connections between ideas. From design, that is, we pass to digression—­and back again. Locke’s apology (that this is merely “by the by” or “by the way”) characteristically signals the end of the journey; it is the standard way of signaling that we are back on the straight road of argument. Locke offers, in other words, a formal detour upon attention, dreaming, and everything else that can be introduced in a circuit between them. The seventh chapter of Swift’s archly ironic Tale of a Tub, composed in the decade following publication of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, could almost be picking up where Locke leaves off, for it includes an extensive “Digression in Praise of Digressions.” Swift’s interlocutor, who is also Swift’s object of satire, begins this way: I have sometimes heard of an Iliad in a nut-­shell, but it has been my fortune to have much oftener seen a nut-­shell in an Iliad. There is no doubt that human life has received most wonderful advantages from both; but to which of the two the world is chiefly indebted I shall leave among the curious, as a problem worthy of their utmost inquiry. For the invention of the latter, I think the commonwealth of learning is chiefly obliged to the great modern improvement of digressions.11 The Iliad in the nutshell is clearly a figure of containment; it turned up across the period as a type for the epitomization of things. Swift probably means us to think of Pliny’s Natural History; naming Cicero as his authority, Pliny

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describes an Iliad copied so small that the whole could lie in the shell of a nut.12 But there were a surprising number of micrographic experiments in the century preceding the Tale of a Tub, as well. Some of these were quite literal, turning up as half-­material, half-­metaphorical objects in collections across England and Western Europe.13 Peter Bales, who not coincidentally invented a marvelously compact shorthand, was widely reported to have perfected the techniques of inscribing a text like the Iliad sufficiently small that the whole could be stowed in the shell of a walnut—­of, it was reported, “native English growth.”14 Almost surely because of their delicateness and size, none of these has survived. (The advantage of the walnut for shelling an Iliad, by the way, is not just that it is larger than, say, a hazel, or smaller than a coconut; it is also that it is multiply associated with the shape and constitution of the human brain.)15 By far the greatest portion of such compact Iliads were, however, figurative—­and many of these have come down to us whole. As two examples that must stand for many more, it was said of the massive collection of antiquities compiled by the John Tradescants that it was “a world of wonders in one closet shut . . . (as Homer’s Iliad in a nut).”16 And, finally, echoes should sound, here, of language that has already turned up in this catalogue; the miracle of the camera obscura is to provide the universe in miniature, “As in a nutshell, curious to behold; / Great homer’s iliad was inscrib’d of old” (see Exhibit 9).17 By the time Swift put pen to paper, the nutshelled Iliad was already a warmed-­over chestnut, a well-­known and oft-­repeated figure for the compression implied in a storage model of intellection, microcosm offering epitome of macrocosm. This, then, is an ambitious object—­an object trembling on the edge of becoming an explanatory principle for the whole of the natural historical project. Swift’s interlocutor has heard of these nut-­shelled Iliads; they stand as figures of design, the whole world reproduced in small. But he has oftener seen the reverse: the nutshell in the Iliad. Here “nutshell” signifies in a mostly obsolete sense, a “type of something of little value.” The world is loaded with nutshells; they are everywhere underfoot. For Swift, these are things that are meant to be disregarded; they are accidents. But for his interlocutor, the nutshell in the Iliad activates a historically particular fantasy of decompression, a generalized figure that traces the connection between the things of the world and ideal systems or patterns that they may, in the right conditions, offer up. Something catches the eye—­a stone; a tower; a coat of arms; a coin; a footprint—­and it sets the mind running, opening new worlds of exploration. The physiological mechanism of this opening is association, but

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its metaphorical foundation is largely the body in motion. This, Swift tells us, is the very stuff of digression; digression is that genre that puts philosophy on the move. Swift means this satirically, of course—­but the satire only bites because it can be read straight, because it rests on habits we all already know. For digression offers a particularly fertile metaphor for the coordination of cognitive activity and bodily experience; it turns a special way of focusing on particulars into a particular way of talking about them. It articulates a kind of geometry, in which the mind, seemingly at rest, discovers new dimensions of the object in view. And Swift’s satire, like so much of his writing, rests precisely upon the body at work; it is the implication of the body in the acts of the mind that earns all his scorn and his lavish care.18 Just as the designing mind implies a neurophysiology, an orderly arrangement of cavities, cells, and storage mechanisms (see Exhibit 4), so too the mind digressing leans on its own theories of brainwork. The digression is not the genre of a mind as a clean, well-­lighted place—­the “ahistorical, disembodied, isolated” entity perched in its dark room and attending to the ideas that appear or have appeared there.19 It is the genre of the mind as the emergent experience of the brain in its physiological complexity, the mess of fat and nerves operating according to its own inscrutable laws. And as the mind moves along the grooves of associated ideas, so, too, physiologies of brain work take up metaphorically isomorphic resources of matter in motion. So, for instance, when Locke says of “Custom” that it “settles habits of Thinking in the Understanding, as well as of Determining in the Will, and of Motions in the Body,” it is because custom is the mechanical outgrowth of “Trains of Motions in the Animal Spirits.” The metaphor collapses; these “Motions” are as bodily as the body they govern. “Once set a-­going,” Locke concludes, these “animal spirits . . . continue on in the same steps they have been used to, which by often treading are worn into a smooth path, and the Motion in it becomes easy and as it were Natural.”20 This is a neurological theory for mind wandering, drawing on the major metaphorical resource of the body wandering along its habitual paths. “As far as we can comprehend thinking,” Locke concludes, “thus ideas seem to be produced in our mind”; they are linked together in mental space much in the same way as “motions in the body” are linked together in the physical. And while Locke quickly retracts his full endorsement of the system of spirits, partly because he had learned to be careful of the theological implications of a fully mechanistic theory of mentation,21 he nevertheless insists that this system of steps and smooth paths, the mind adopting customs in much the same way as the body develops habits, is heuristically useful. This

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then is a generative metaphor,22 what Locke later calls an “analogy.” Analogy steps in to provide a “help” and a way of speaking.23 The bodily economy is preserved on its new level; thoughts stand still, proceed, travel along well-­ worn paths, and so on. What Swift’s interlocutor puts in motion is therefore the relationship between mental activity and movement, between, in other words, objects of interest and the pursuit of an idea, formalized as part of the modern’s epistemology. We are on the trail of the digression, putting the curator’s body in motion.

Exhibit 11. A Full Stop Let’s start by stopping. Let’s begin with the smallest of things, the shortest text offered in Restoration prose. Among the opening examples of Micrographia, Robert Hooke’s 1665 study that took Restoration London by storm, is a certain “full stop,” an object so vanishingly small that its very purpose, any way you look at it, is to retreat into nothingness. It is a period—­not primarily in the contemporary sense of a locutionary phrase or of a stretch of time (though it is these too) but in sense of the thing intended to end a sentence, such as this one here. Hooke’s period is a special object. Micrographia is loaded with objects shown at high magnification; a louse, a bee sting, the eye of an insect are all painstakingly engraved at enormous magnification, shown as they appeared through Hooke’s microscope.24 Among this whole kit of objects, Hooke’s full stop is the only one to appear twice, one image above the other. It appears once at normal magnification, as it might appear to the naked eye. But it is also presented again, in the same plate, after the microscope has performed its technical magic. In the first instance, it is a “mark of a full stop, or period,” ringed by a circle that mimics the eyepiece of the microscope. It is so ordinary and elemental that it has to be circled, so as to sequester it from the other scattered marks on the page; it would otherwise be as insignificant as any nutshell. In the second, it reappears as a largish, rough shape, “like [a] smutty daubing” made “with a blunt extinguish brand or stick’s end.” Here, it has hypertrophied into something extraordinary, a dark sun haloed with solar flares. It is indeed so extraordinary that Hooke insists twice that the shape he offers us is not only a period, magnified, but the most regular one he could find among the “multitudes” he tried out through the microscope’s glassy eye. Hooke was at home among gadgets. Over the course of a busy and controversial career, Hooke would become a celebrated maker and inventor of

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13. The “mark of a full stop, or period,” presented twice, at different magnifications. Robert Hooke, Micrographia (London, 1665). Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.

precision tools, important in the history of navigation, surveying, and cartography. He would, in the years following his employment by Boyle, become the surveyor most responsible for the layout of the City of London after it was largely demolished in the Great Fire of 1666. He was the inventor of the portable ocular camera obscura (Exhibit 4); as will be seen, he inhabited a mind space that was governed by the dualisms familiar to common accounts of empiricist theories of mind, which the camera obscura helped to model. But when Hooke got his start in London, it was as a limb and component of a project much larger than he; Hooke was the first curator of the first museum with modern ambitions, the so-­called “keeper” of Repository of the Royal Society, the place where Robert Boyle’s celebrated air-­pump was stored when it was not in use.25 It was Hooke’s task to sort, to shelve, and (later) to recall the diverse holdings of a collection universal in its ambitions.26 Sometimes, this was a mostly bibliographic project; Hooke had begun a catalogue, designed in part as a first effort toward a totalizing encyclopedia.27 At other times, his curatorial duties involved physical and bodily application. As the Royal Society’s primary “Curator of Experiments,” Hooke was responsible for staging public demonstrations of the society’s latest findings, tuning up and putting to work instruments and objects held in the Repository.28 He was asked regularly to

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stage experiments in air pressure and magnetism, anatomical demonstrations, and lectures on geology, mineralogy, optics, chemistry, and so forth. The Royal Society’s Repository marked an important turn in the new empirical project, which was as much a revolution in habits of thought as it was in the re-­ordering of schemes of knowledge. The Repository had been assembled as the critical resource for the renewal of natural philosophy sketched out by Francis Bacon; just as, Bacon argued, human judgment works on and through arrangements of discrete ideas, so, too, the corporate project of natural philosophy was to proceed through the acquisition of vast natural histories. As Bacon understood it, reason was a discrete faculty, floating free of its surroundings, operating on little nuggets of information detached and isolated from the world.29 So, too, the Repository was to provide a field of facts for the investigation of natural historical questions; semi-­professional, clean-­ handed “investigators” were to do the bulk of their work comparing examples assembled for them by others.30 Boyle was one of these investigators. Hooke was among the “others.” He was not merely assigned to the Repository’s care; he was also tasked with producing experiments on demand as investigators required them. Viewed this way, Robert Boyle’s celebrated air pump was in fact Robert Hooke’s,31 for it was Hooke, not Boyle, who seems first to have coaxed a useful vacuum from nothing more than blown glass, vegetable gums, and machined brass. If the companionable Boyle was the man writing the pamphlets and assembling the groups of witnesses, it was irascible Robert Hooke, more at home with machines than with men, who was toiling at the air pump’s controls, laboriously tinkering to get it to produce.32 Bacon was therefore partially wrong about the relationship between the work of intellection and the work of collection—­for many of the most powerful thinkers in the new empiricist project were the curators, keepers, and technicians who were most closely connected, on a day-­to-­day basis, with the stuff of the museum. Hooke was the paragon of these. As Steven Shapin notes, he “worked where he lived,” the Repository emerging as part of the texture of Hooke’s everyday material and therefore intellectual experience.33 So strongly did Hooke identify with the Repository—­so strongly did he internalize it—­that pressed to offer a model of the intellect, what he proposed is clearly based, for its vocabulary and structure, on his workshop and laboratory. Hooke’s mind, like his workplace and home, was in his words a “repository,” complete with a workshop, instruments, and little specimens called “ideas.”34 Hooke in fact offered this model of intellection twice, once in an early “philosophical scribble,”35 and again in a late set of lectures on light and

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the nature of time. Hooke begins by conceiving “Memory . . . to be nothing else but a Repository of Ideas formed partly by the Senses, but chiefly by the Soul it self: I say, partly by the Senses, because they are as it were the Collectors or Carriers of the Impressions made by Objects from without, delivering them to the Repository or Storehouse where they are to be used.”36 The mechanist psychology Hooke develops in consultation with his place of work is sustained by a mind full of little waxlike similitudes, each stamped in infinitesimally small spaces of the human brain.37 These similitudes, which Hooke simply calls “Ideas,” are linked by contiguity in time and coiled down in the brain’s “Repository,” which Hooke pauses no less than three times to remind his auditors is a “real, material” place full of real, material ideas. Attention is the soul’s bright eye, which focuses on one or another of the repository’s objects, plucking them out of the mass of things to bring them into its “supellex” or “workshop.” Here, they are worked upon: compared, modified, employed, and returned to the repository so they can be found again. The simple idea, originally impressed only with the inaugural markings it received from the senses, receives additional inscriptions, like marginalia, when the mind consults it. “The Body of one Idea,” Hooke remarks, may through this process come to have “many and various Impressions and Motions annexed to it, possibly of 100, nay of 1000 Moments, whence that Idea may be supposed to be more compleat and perfect.”38 As becomes clear in the course of his lectures, Hooke has modeled the mind and its work upon the Repository that had been among the chief cares of the most productive years of his life. Hooke in the Repository was like Locke in his library, Milton in his bed, a fish in water, a bird in air, or whatever you please; this was his ecology.39 Hooke perhaps adapted his version of a material neurophysiology from Thomas Willis’s remarks on the anatomy of the brain (see Exhibit 4); in Hooke’s system, the soul is located in the same place—­“somewhere near the Place where the Nerves from the other Senses concur and meet”—­and inhabits a similarly open floor plan. The critical difference is that Hooke had access to the kind of collection that might meaningfully be compared to a microcosm of the world. For this was the ambition of the Repository—­to provide, in an epitome, examples of everything. Just as habits of collection, historically speaking, caught up to a metaphor that preceded them, so too did Hooke’s Repository fill a mental hunch that he had developed far earlier in life; in a much more rudimentary treatise, Hooke had already suggested that memory was a container of wax-­like “impressions and stamps,” but it was the Repository that could give that metaphor body and shape.40 Moreover, it is

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no accident that Hooke rediscovers the institutional repository at the level of the individual empirical subject, for both theories come from the same place. This had after all been the basic purpose of the Royal Society from the start, for the society’s institutional project of knowledge was based on the Baconian model of the intellect, of a faculty of reason presiding over a memory stocked with sense perceptions.41 We might therefore share Hooke’s confusion when he begins referring to “Memory” as the “Repository,” for the objects of his associative digression are identical to the objects of the Royal Society’s museum. This is what marks it as a living cognitive ecology.42 Hooke initially describes a mind filled with stable objects of intellection, the materials of reason. But then his remarks take a sudden swerve—­in order to account for the mind’s autotelic associative work. Sensory impressions, Hooke suggests, are produced when the retina is “struck” by motions originating in the outside world. These impressions, transferred to little wax-­like tablets, do not simply lie still, coiled down and waiting for later retrieval. They also “retain” and continually “radiate a Motion of [their] own.” So that while “there is a continual Radiation of the Soul into the whole Repository of Ideas” (this is what Hooke, in a proleptic echo of Locke, calls “attention”),43 so “likewise” do these quietly vibrating Ideas “also act upon the Soul.”44 In its simplest form, this is just what happens when any idea currently under attention renders similar Ideas “more notable.” The current idea calls out to other ideas with similar amplitudes, producing the same sort of harmonic amplification that can be seen among sympathetic strings, or possibly even in the harmony of the spheres.45 This affinity “excite[s] the Soul to Attention or Radiation that way also,” the objects themselves prompting the active work of thinking. We have crossed, here, into a world ruled by its own invisible logic, the very rudiments of association given over to the laws and motive force of quivering similitudes.46 For Hooke, then, the Repository itself does something on the order of half of the thinking of the natural philosopher. Not only is all knowledge derived from natural histories; in Hooke’s world, the objects of the natural history themselves participate in thought—­for axioms merely emerge from the harmonies of the Repository objects that the mind coordinates. His theory of mind depends on a lived relationship with the Repository as a site of intellectual materials, and microscopic transcription as the ordinary activity of the acquisition of knowledge.47 This is where a return to Hooke’s Micrographia can help. Hooke’s Micrographia records a series of experiments, using a particularly powerful microscope contained in the Royal Society’s Repository to examine other objects of the Repository under high magnification.

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Its basic premise is Hooke’s brand of technological optimism, his hope that advances in ocular technology will perfect techniques of unspooling even the most insignificant things into the secret springs and networks of the natural world.48 While “the antient Peripateticks,” Hooke writes, were “content” to comprehend the world as a function of “Matter and Form,” it is on the contrary his project “to discern all the secret workings of Nature, almost in the same manner as we do those that are the productions of Art, and are manag’d by Wheels, and Engines, and Springs.”49 This is an analogy, as Locke would come to understand it—­except that Hooke hoped to trace analogy to its material rudiments. Hooke hoped, in other words, to extend mechanical insights made on large scale—­the world as mass and motion—­to a set of rules governing the small-­scale workings of nature. As Katherine Wilson puts it, the microscope, itself “a subtlety of manufacture,” revealed further “subtleties of nature” as the “means by which a Baconian theory of the interpretation of nature was enabled to take hold and drive out its rivals.”50 And we may press this further. Wilson establishes that the microscope reveals invisible worlds, but it only operated by becoming itself invisible—­falling away, like all instruments of persuasion, into a genre. Hooke was remaking the universe from the smallest things to the largest, and it is therefore no coincidence that the Micrographia kicks off with the smallest, least prepossessing of things. These are what Hooke calls “simple shapes,” the material conditions that come closest to geometric ideas: a needle’s “Physical point,” the edge of a razor, an ink dot, and a sheet of fine linen: a point, a line, a point again, and a plane. This is quite explicit; the razor’s edge and ink dot, Hooke notes, have the same “affinity . . . in Physicks, as a line hath to a point in Mathematicks.”51 Just as physics hopes to apply mathematics to the observable workings of the arts—­the parabolic flight of a cannonball, for instance—­so Hooke would seem to be beginning his examination by resolving the world into mathematically legible concepts, beginning with the most axiomatic geometric idea of all: the point.52 Hooke, however, immediately complicates the principles of his beginning, resolving what appears to be the uniformly serene operations of nature on a large scale into a complex swarm of matter and motion. Subjected to the microscope, Hooke’s exemplary period rejoins the mess of inky splatters from which the circle sequesters it in the first place. It reemerges as a relic of technical media, the business end of a world of commerce, trade, and the arts. The “Irregularities of it,” Hooke remarks, remember the accidents of the object’s origins; they are part of the world of “cause” in its material aspect: the “uneven surface of the paper . . . the

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irregularity of the Type or Ingraving . . . and the rough Daubing of the Printing-­ Ink.”53 Viewed through the microscope, the dot offers up the hand of the type founder, the labor of the printer, the paper-­maker’s press, the chemical work of the ink maker, not to mention the occult processes of the oak tree’s gall, the wear of the printer’s type over time, and so on. Hooke has, in other words, discovered in this smallest of things something like the communication circuit famously charted by Robert Darnton, and then expanded that world out into the mesh of an extended ecology.54 As much can presumably be uncovered in anything that one has the technical media to unpack; o­ r, as Hooke insists, the “most useful Informations do arise from common things, and from diversifying their most ordinary operations upon them.”55 As the object is enlarged through the microscope, so, too, is the linguistic effort necessary to do justice to what appears there. In its ordinary form, the period is the simplest article of language—­the merest sign that a thought has come to a natural end. Made the object of a linguistic exercise, however, it opens the opportunity for digression; this is what it means to suggest that the microscope falls away into a genre. In between Hooke’s description of the period, and a discussion of the trades that are involved in its production, Hooke indulges himself in a loose discussion, hinting at a set of parallel researches that he was never, at least in print, to share with the public. Nested in an imperfect parenthesis, this discussion appears formally different from what precedes and follows it. From a description of the “smutty daubings” of copper type, and the “much more rugged and deformed” points made with a pen, he turns to a set of remarks on the possibilities of microscopic inscription. “Nay,” he writes, quite suddenly, having view’d certain pieces of exceeding curious writing of the kind (one of which in the bredth of a two-­pence compris’d the Lords prayer, the Apostles Creed, the ten Commandments, and about half a dozen verses besides of the Bible, whose lines were so small and near together, that I was unable to number them with my naked eye, a very ordinary Microscope, I had then about me, inabled me to see that what the Writer of it had asserted was true, but withal discover’d of what pitifull bungling scribbles and scrawls it was compos’d, Arabian and China characters being almost as well shap’d; yet thus much I must say for the Man, that it was for the most part legible enough, though in some places there wanted a good fantsy well preposest to help one through. If this manner of small writing were made easie

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and practicable (and I think I know such a one, but have never yet made trial of it, whereby one might be inabled to write a great deale with much ease, and accurately enough in a very little roome) it might be of very good use to convey secret Intelligence without any danger of Discovery or mistrusting.56 Hooke closes this passage by indulging in a rare pun: “But to come again to the point,” he writes—­after which, he does, returning to a mechanical account of the point as it appears in the eyepiece of the microscope. The play on words draws our attention to the form at work: the point on the page becomes the opportunity to introduce something only loosely or analogically related—­ what comes to the point through processes of manufacture puts a period to a more general and associative discussion of related episodes. Inhabiting the space of the period Hooke reveals a history of thinking about the possibilities of small writing and small reading. The shape of the dot reminds him of a “piece” of writing the size, and perhaps the shape, of a twopence that, upon closer examination, dilates into the key passages of Christian religion.57 This in turn reminds him of the thinking he has done of a way of perfecting this sort of writing—­and indeed a device he claims to know of.58 He ends with a few remarks on the possibilities of this technology for the secret transmission of information, secret messages contained in seemingly ordinary dots, installed there by art instead of nature. We know what these would become; these are microdots, anticipated by Hooke by nearly three centuries. Hooke looks at the dot, provides in fact a dot for us to look at, but takes us on an outing that the period itself could hardly have foreseen. Here the title of the book meets its object of interest: Micrographia meets micrographia; writing about the tiny meets “tiny writing.” Here, in the end, is a set of material experiments that justifies Hooke’s understanding of the brain as the soul’s workshop. In an important sense, Hooke’s prose never really recovers from digressions like this one. The straight line of argument, the mathematical, logical way, is the one that moves from point to line to plane. This logic is clearly, hopelessly interrupted by Hooke’s microscopic attention, which reveals things like points as fictions or mere conveniences of thinking. Through a suggestive twist, the parenthesis that precedes “one of which” is never answered by a partner. “Parenthesis” does not, of course, only name a grammatical mark; descending from the Greek, and meaning something like “to place beside,” it names a rhetorical technique, the cervicorn path of technical explanation or associated thinking.59 Hooke’s parenthesis is opened, but it is never closed;

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whether due to an oversight on Hooke’s part, or, more suggestively, a printer’s error, the round bracket that should probably follow “naked eye” is simply not there. We may perhaps partly blame Hooke’s difficult, stop-­start, circuitous prose; perhaps the poor printer’s devil responsible for arranging type became disoriented in Hooke’s labyrinthine language, his circumlocutions. But the accident is suggestive in another way, for this passage is itself about what happens when expression attends to its materiality, about the muddling of thought once it encounters inscription. One might be tempted to say that the Micrographia, after this point, never gets back on track. Though it starts as though it will have a clear, mathematical order (from point to line, then plane, cylinder, sphere, and so on), it winds up becoming a daringly capacious catchall of disaggregated studies: colors observed in glass, figures witnessed in sand, the appearance of gravel in urine, the jaggedness of sparks cracked from flint. After the point, that is, the rest of Hooke’s Micrographia is a concatenation of digressions, a series of studies none of which quite deliver line, plane, cylinder, or sphere. And, so, while the dropped parenthesis might at first look like an error, an effect of random chance, it points nevertheless to the ambition of Hooke’s project. When the world is seen at its smallest scale, there is only the Brownian motion of things, the restless movement of particles like dust in sunlight, buffeted by causes that appear inscrutable to the unaided eye.60 When opened to its largest magnification, there appear unanticipated causes and unforeseen figures, the secret springs of the visible world. Hooke’s most general word for this sort of looping, labyrinthine way of thinking is “excogitation.”61 The surest way, Hooke remarks, “to inform the Intellect with a Notion of [a] thing,” and “by degrees to find out its Nature,” is what he calls “a comparative Act of the Understanding from all the various Informations ’tis capable of receiving.” These include what he calls those impressions received “more immediately by any of the Senses” and those received “more mediately by various other Observations or Experiments.” This is not merely the simple development of a tool for a physical task; it is the codevelopment of an instrument to answer a question or set of questions, and the corresponding adaptation of the mind to the instruments it puts to use. Correct thought, in this model, is what emerges from an “exercise” that “begins with the Hands and Eyes,” is “continued by the Reason,” and “comes about to the Hands and Eyes again.” This “continual passage round from one Faculty to another” poses the work of the mechanic as the extended work of the understanding, “adding  .  .  . as it were  .  .  . artificial Organs to the natural.”62 It pairs the “Faculty” of reason with the “Faculty” of mechanical

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know-­how, and it begins to point to the importance of the combination of efforts among people—­as the development of such “artificial Organs” is the accretive, progressive work of many techniques and technicians, inventors and inventions. And when this looping, stop-­start method of many turns is captured in prose—­where it is also called an “excogitation”—­this continual passage provides the basic formal mode of the Micrographia. As Joanna Picciotto notes, “It is as if, in order to bring the implicit knowledge of the artisan into view,” the excogitator “avails himself of the microscope”;63 instrument and expression, process and form, microscope and excogitation become in Hooke’s prose technically complicit and formally parallel. In Hooke’s case, the detour is a technical medium special to the microscope, and “micrographia” becomes the kind of writing that a microscope implies.64 Hooke’s work is to identify a genre or excogitative form that accepts contact with particulars and circumstances as its sustaining energy; this form is of course the digression, the continual thrusting of the knowledge seeker out of the straight path of philosophy and into the twists and turns of technical media. “The footsteps of Nature are to be trac’d,” Hooke insists, “not only in her ordinary course,” not only on the straight path of operation according to regular laws already known. Nature must also be “put to her shifts,” and traced in “many doublings and turnings.”65 Put differently, Hooke’s construction of experiments as the tracing of nature discovers the digression as a technical process, one that proceeds from idea to experiment to idea again, with many more excogitative doublings and turnings. He begins by marking the point, and ends by returning to it.66 In the middle, however, he engages in a set of observations chained one to another by Hooke’s particular brand of technical facility. His is the mind-work of the curator embedded in his cognitive niche, or, put differently, the natural philosopher surrounded by the tools of his manual trade, fully embedded in a world that has its own tricks up its sleeve.67 The digression is the special form that organizes the potentially limitless, relatively undifferentiated world according to the objective piece of the microscope.68 It is worth mentioning, in this regard, that the digression doesn’t interrupt Hooke’s design, so much as it is design’s opportunity. In his editor’s notes on Hooke’s “Lectures of Light,” in an apology for the scandalously materialist philosophy Hooke advanced, Richard Waller suggests that Hooke’s whole neurophysiology is an instance of a collector becoming seduced by his collection. “Instead of proceeding farther in the Method he had proposed to himself,” instead of treating “several Subjects” on light he had “design’d to treat of,” he was “diverted by other intervening Subjects, which

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carried his Thoughts other ways.” Rather than developing his system of optics, Waller tells us, he instead digressed on the advantages of the Repository as a figure for mentation.69 “I have known some Authors,” Swift’s interlocutor writes in Tale of a Tub, to “inclose Digressions in one another, like a Nest of Boxes.”70 Hooke’s remarks on a period—­his digression prompted by “a full stop”—­moves from the dot on the page to something like a limited look at the network of its production, manufacture, and use: the whole world as it could be deduced, or associated, with the dot. Not surprisingly, therefore, Hooke also momentarily (but only momentarily) indulges the fantasy of the potentially infinite dilation of even the most ordinary things. “Could a Mechanical contrivance,” he remarks, “successfully answer our Theory, we might see the least spot as big as the Earth it self; and Discover, as Des Cartes also conjectures, as great a variety of bodies in the Moon, or Planets, as in the Earth”:71 the whole world in a period. “A World,” writes Margaret Cavendish, “may be no bigger than a Two-­ pence.”72 The fantasy runs both directions, the “earth itself . . . by an Analogie” may be “call’d a Physical Point.”73 From the simplest comparisons (the blot like the daubings of the end of a brand, like the color of London mud), to the most fanciful (the dot like the earth, like the sun, like the planets), Hooke’s mind creates ideas as a sort of curatorial work. This sort of theoretically limitless, but formally limited tour, is the infinitely wonderful and endlessly repetitive work of the digression.

Exhibit 12. A Conical Roman Tumulus Robert Plot (1640–1696) was the secretary of the Royal Society immediately after Hooke’s brief tenure, taking over a mess of books and records just a few months after Hooke delivered his controversial mechanist-­vitalist theory of the mind. Plot was different in many ways from the mechanically minded Hooke; he was, however, like Hooke, predisposed to think of intellection as a curatorial activity. He had been employed in various capacities at Oxford, maintaining positions that gave him plenty of time to launch his own philosophical investigations; he had developed a recognized expertise in antiquities, qualifications that would cause him to be appointed the inaugural Keeper of the Ashmolean collection—­the resting place of the Tradescants’ “Iliad in a Nut” (see Exhibit 10). Plot’s Natural History of Oxford-­Shire (1677), which he composed during these years, was his major book-­length project. Its ambition

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14. A Prospect of Ad Pontem, with a tumulus upon the Fosse. William Stukeley, Itinerarium Curiosum (London, 1724). Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.

was to exhaust the region’s natural and artificial features, cataloguing its soils, fauna and flora, waterways, and so on.74 It is loosely organized from the celestial to the human, passing on the way through the many forms of creation: it begins with questions of sky and atmosphere, then describes earths, various bodies of water, animals, plants, people, and their arts. Looked at as a question of design, Plot’s project was very much part of an older episteme. It articulates a worldview that was most strongly associated with the Renaissance great chain of being, ranking the plenum of species in God’s creation from angels to inanimate matter.75 Plot’s organizational gambit was by no means unprecedented; the great chain of being was a common way of organizing cabinets.76 And for Plot, it becomes a question of design, an intention carried out in the brute material of Oxfordshire. The book is clearly ordered as the microcosmic reflection of this Renaissance cosmology, delineating the things of the world according to its sublime logic of nature. The last chapter in the book, however, would seem to be part of a different formal project. “Having finish’d the Natural History of Oxfordshire,” Plot writes, “I had accordingly here put a period to my Essay, but meeting in my Travels with many considerable Antiquities . . . I have been perswaded to add

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(because perhaps a digression that may be acceptable to some) what I have met with in this kind.”77 Plot’s digression, nested in a parenthesis, begins with a period; but it swells to become chapter-­long, fully shot through by digressions in their turn. Rather than concerning itself with the laws of nature as they become visible in Oxfordshire, Plot instead concerns himself with what may be learned by close examination of its antiquities—­a project that shares striking affinities of subject and genre with Hooke’s Micrographia. What is more, while the bulk of the book is clearly organized according to the single view that might be had by a curator arranging his objects according to a design, indeed according to the inherited design of the great chain of being, the work of the antiquarian retains the equally demanding but seemingly accidental order of the scholar on the ramble. In other words, for the still eye ranging over its objects and finding there the reconfirmation of a single design Plot substitutes the moving eye passing through fields and pausing at moments of particular antiquarian interest. This is, at last, an ecology out of doors. Take for example Plot’s remarks on Roman tumuli, the hillocks or mounds of earth that are, Plot insists, “the Sepulchres of their Generals.” Located by the roadside, “nigh to the raised ways” that themselves serve as mute markers of the vanished Roman occupation, the burial mounds are intended as epitaphs and reminders. They insist on a certain kind of cognitive work, which is exactly equivalent to a kind of diversion; they materialize, Plot remarks, the “formula still used on Tombs, Siste Viator,” that is, “Pause, Traveler”: pause, and consider the man who lies here.78 And just as John Locke, when he attends to attention, finds his prose attenuating itself—­finds himself launched on a digression—­so Robert Plot, driven by the epitaphic logic that he himself has just conjured up, proceeds himself to pause—­stopping his description of the antiquities of Oxfordshire in order to launch a different discursus, very much by the way. Pausing over the burial mound, he recalls classical burial rituals. He imagines travelers pausing here to throw dust over the fallen body of a compatriot. He suggests a specific practice, recalling a moment in Horace—­Ode 1.28—­when the scholar and mathematician Archytas, drowned in a shipwreck, speaks from beyond the grave to a traveling mariner. Archytas was best known for a lost treatise interested in geometry, space, and the relativity of place—­which lives on in the voices of others, though he himself is confined to a shallow depression in the sand.79 Like Plot by the tumulus, the mariner is stopped by Archytas near his unburied body, requesting that he throw “three handfuls of dust” on his beached corpse.80 Built into the tumulus, in other words, as an aside to the idea that it represents, Plot has discovered new relations and contiguities;

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he has detoured from the straight road of the Roman highway and found himself in the clear light of the Mediterranean—­a place, it is worth mentioning, he never saw but by way of precisely such digressions as these. Thus does the digression reveal its own inner dimensions, its own space-­time logic, which borrows the rhetorics of embodied movement, though it far exceeds the body’s small scope. Though the turn to Horace announces that Plot’s discussion of Oxfordshire is undoubtedly paused, his loose set of remarks nevertheless continue. The gesture to Horace, who is in turn making a drowned Greek mathematician speak, reminds Plot of the “Conical hillocks” traditionally raised in ancient Greece, including the pile raised over Patroclus that served “for a Sea-­mark to those that should sail the Hellespont.”81 These so-­called “Heroic Tumuli,” the massive burial mound said to be that of Achilles brooding over the smaller one of Patroclus, would be excavated roughly a century and a half later; they would become critical object lessons in the development of modern archaeology.82 But Plot is not interested in the real tumuli; he is not even interested in whether the real tumuli enclose the bones of Patroclus or Achilles. Instead, he is interested in the legendary tumuli as resting places in a literary journey, tumuli as objects in the mind’s eye, or, put differently, tumuli as the seamarks of a cognitive geography. The literary mound of Patroclus reminds him of the burial mound raised over Hector, the man after all responsible for the death of Patroclus in the first place. This in turn launches Plot on the Mediterranean return journey; he is, in the course of his associative wanderings, led naturally to the Aeneid, in which are noted the burial practices both of princes and of “meaner persons.” Interruption, asyndeton, parenthesis, footnote: these are the very stuff, Ross Chambers observes, of digression.83 Plot discusses the burning of bodies before their burial—­recorded in Homer, Wormius, and Camden—­before finally returning to the different practices of “the Romans here in Britain.” He comes again, that is, to the point. Horace’s ode, which begins the digression, perhaps provides the secret pattern for Plot’s discursive journey: though Archytas himself is “lying now in a small mound of dust,” the space of the poem opens up vistas of a banquet at Olympos, “hundreds of shields” gathered at Troy, “the heavenly houses of the gods,” and so forth. Like Archytas, the geometer and Pythagorean, Plot too “measures the earth and sea and the countless sands.”84 Plot’s chorography experiments with a form of historically marked experience called by Ruth Mack “historical transport,” that present experience of being carried, “by a statue, or perhaps a book”—­or, really, anything

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at all—­into distant places and distant pasts.85 As historian and chorologist Thomas Codrington remarks in his notes on the Roman roads in Britain, the “general straightness” of these roads was often apt for producing just such an experience, especially “where a barrow or tumulus was the landmark, the road passing round it.”86 Plot’s typical tumulus is not unlike the mound in William Stukeley’s 1722 description of a burial mound near the old Roman town of Ad Pontam—­a mile south on the straightest of straight Roman roads, the Fosse Way, which still cuts an arrow-­straight slash across England from Lincoln to Exeter. Through a trick in his engraving of the prospect, Stukeley arranges “a tumulus” so that it appears to block passage, forcing a rest in his Itinerarium Curiosum. From the merest thing—­a mound of earth—­Stukeley (like Plot) summons up journeys of inner time and space, ideas constrained by an associative logic grounded in the acquired practice of walking. This is a particularly somatic form of antiquarianism, walking the old roads; in the words of Katharina Boehm, Stukeley frames “the mobility of the traveller as an epistemological practice that produces historical knowledge by emplacing the past.”87 Remarks like these, whether on barrows in Oxfordshire or tumuli near Bingham—­or indeed coins or statues or any antiquity—­tell a history organized not by chronology but by chorography; it is a series of advances and halts: a walk interrupted by the objects one “meet[s] with . . . in [one’s] Travels.” So, when Swift describes the digression as “a numerous Army, encamped in a fruitful Country,” when he notes that that army, pausing on the straight way of instruction, it “send[s] to forage many a Mile,” he is only revealing, with his characteristic rigor, the special logic of the digression.88 In a digression of his own, Bruno Latour asks us to think of such objects—­ coins, nutshells, or whatever—­as “detours,” as a sedimented fund of labor both physical and intellectual, as, in other words, “investments” of ideal content. He takes, as his exemplary object, not a burial mound but something uncannily similar: a speed bump. “Consider the very notion of investment,” he writes. A driver comes across a speed bump; his regular course is interrupted, and he changes his activity—­slows down, speeds up, turns aside. He makes, in a word, a “detour.”89 Looked at systematically, when confronted by a speed bump a driver is not only paused or interrupted in his journey; he swerves into a parallel discursive universe, a set of values and ideologies expressed through concrete. Someone wants him to slow down, but the design is articulated in brute material. This investment is not the designer’s investment alone; it further, differently incorporates the programs and intentions of a traffic planner, a range of artisans, bureaucrats, and activists, indeed everyone involved in its

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craft and implementation, not to mention the tools and techniques developed over ages that make something like a speed bump possible in the first place. Looked at in this way, a speed bump is an unimaginably precarious spot in the mesh of time; there is no original quarry in which to find the original stone, no original toolmaker heroically struggling to crack a sharp edge from a recalcitrant bit of flint. Latour’s point, in the end, is that every object in space, word in discourse, idea, act, mood, habit, or person is as it were a dialogue with orders of actants long absent and far distant. If we are true to experience, if we make it primary, we notice how the topographies of time and space are crumpled up in the dispositions of things, bringing into contact moments and places that look far removed in history and geography.90 The point of the speed bump is to make sense of a world unthinkable in its complexity, indeed to make its sense sensible, deposited in an embodied engagement with brute material. It does this in practice; it also does this in text. Latour meets a speed bump, and he digresses. He liberates a lump into prose. What, then, could be more like a speed bump than a burial mound? What could be more like a detour than a digression? What could be more like “a full stop” than a tumulus?

Exhibit 13. The Reception of Claudius When Joseph Addison, writing a few years after Plot’s death, said that a collection of medals is “a sort of poetical cash,” not “a treasury of money, but of knowledge,” he was working in a long and complicated tradition of the forming of minds like collections, and vice versa.91 In general, when we think of Addison, we think of him as the author of the Spectator, the architect of an aesthetics of distance made popular by his most popular eidolon. The Spectator sees but is not seen; he hears without hearing; he assures us that he has “acted in all the parts of [his] Life as a Looker-­on.”92 We associate him with the production of polite discourse, the power of the passive self.93 As a spectator, Jean-­ Christophe Agnew argues, we imagine him as “conform[ing] to the general neoclassical bent of Augustan letters, particularly to its Stoic ideal of detached and dispassionate contemplation of the world’s follies.”94 Addison’s prose presents, as it were, a screen to the world—­the true mimetic thing itself, the screen of the camera obscura. Addison had indeed visited a camera obscura, admiring it as the acme of mimetic art (see Exhibit 9). It will not surprise us to learn that Addison was a coin collector and a gardener—­two practices that, it will turn out, were in his mind related. Through these practices, each of which is

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15. A Roman Aurius, ca. 44–45. Claudius, bare-­headed and togate, clasps hands with a Roman soldier, draped in a lion’s skin. AN R.6485 © Trustees of the British Museum.

differently about design, arrangement, and display, he duly articulates a dualism arising from the kinds of activities coin collecting and gardening make possible; this dualism makes its way into the aesthetic of the Spectator, among other places. He nevertheless, through the same activities, arrives at a more profound material psychology, adopting the digression as a constitutive form. Design and digression would appear to cross purposes with one another. The one is governed by Cartesian geometry even as it constructs a Cartesian self; the other relies on the abstracted logics of bodily movement to govern strange topographies of time and space. How Addison managed to make them dovetail is the subject of this exhibit. With Plot, we were out of doors, on the move, rambling through the classical Mediterranean. With Addison, we are back in the cabinet—­at least for the time being. Indeed, deeper: we are in the cabinet of the mind. Among the advantages of collecting medals, remarks the most Addisonian of the interlocutors in Addison’s Dialogues on the Usefulness of Ancient Medals, is the great aid to memory that they provide. In part, this is because medals represent a material resource that of itself remembers history—­medals as remembering what people and textual history forget; this is memory in the sense we sometimes use it today: memory as cultural memory. Medals are wonderfully compact—­what Addison calls “the best epitomes in the world,” which “let you see with one cast of an eye the substance of above a hundred pages.”95 In this sense, each one is like the Iliad, Belinda’s dressing table, or the camera

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obscura (see Exhibits 4 and 9). Addison imagines a collection of coins, compiled as a public resource, existing as “a magazine for all sorts of antiquities, that would show a man in an afternoon more than he could learn out of books in a twelve-­month.”96 This is of course a vision of a working museum of history, and it satisfies a fantasy posed by John Locke. Locke had expressed a wish for a dictionary of draughts, with small images of the things signified by words “as they were used by the ancients,” to present the “true ideas” of “toga, tunica, pallium.”97 Locke supposed such a book would be time-­consuming to compose, but Addison knew better; the dictionary already existed, in the cabinets of medalists. This is the first, and most obvious way that a medal collection performs a cognitive function, standing in as a memory archive.98 Addison’s interlocutor, however, continues: the great advantage of collecting is the discipline it imposes, the “help to memory one finds.” This is not because a virtuoso, armed with a complete series of emperors, has a material reference available in the next room. Rather, “your Medallists upon the first naming of an Emperor will immediately . . . consider in what part of the cabinet he lies; and by running over in their thoughts such a particular drawer, give you an account of all the remarkable parts of his reign.”99 This is the museum as a discipline—­habits of body in space recreated in mental architecture; the image was striking enough that it turns up in a number of later treatises on memory, where, we are told, “Memory” is resolvable into “Locality and Association.”100 A certain change in Cynthio, the most skeptical interlocutor in Addison’s Dialogues, registers the kind of success Addison would like his treatise to have. Following a day of ranging over and through Philander’s medals, Cynthio complains that “[I have] so filled my head  .  .  . with old Coins, that I have had nothing but figures and inscriptions before my eyes. If I chanced to fall into a little slumber, it was immediately interrupted with the vision of a Caduceus or a Cornu-­copiæ.”101 Waking or dreaming, walking or resting, Cynthio’s mind has become a museum space organized by the logic and vocabulary of the medalist. Indeed, his very dreams are populated by the cabinet. Not merely memory aids, not merely artificial memory as a prompt or scaffold for natural memory, the cabinet of medals is the ecology that changes the minds of the people who work there. The mind, in this sense, emerges as the vade mecum to a weight of monuments secreted in the study. This is of course a cabinet model of the mind: the observer is alone in the darkness with his memories, treasured up like medals, ranked neatly in their drawers. It is self-­contained; as curator is to collection, so understanding is to ideas. The Dialogues are, however, framed as a series of chats, a polite

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conversation between three friends. They proceed, as Philander puts it, in “the language of a Medallist,” for whom “the intrinsic value of an old coin does not consist in its metal but its erudition”; they proceed in a series digressions, each of which unpacks the fund of knowledge from the medals they take under their attention.102 It is argument not by syllogism or even by example but by praxis and oblique reference, by performing the material pleasures of the objects at hand. Coins, that is, are offered as an infinite fund of talk; this is both the method of Addison’s argument and its proof. Take the reverse of the coin called The Reception of Claudius, the object of this exhibit. The history is this: the Praetorian Guard had just slain the tyrant Caligula; this was the culminating act in a conspiracy that elevated Claudius to the emperorship of Rome. What makes this moment compelling is not merely that Claudius was an unlikely ruler; when he was tabbed as emperor, he was literally the last member of his family, and the only plausible candidate left. Nor is it only that it represents a clear turning point in the history of Rome, launching a long and ambitious series of campaigns to expand Roman territory and to remake the imperial infrastructure. It is arresting also because the outcome of the moment was clear to no one. Claudius had been kept in the dark, and so this moment, sealed by a handshake, might have seen history swerve in a number of different directions.103 Particularly compelling about the Reception of Claudius, and what possibly drew Addison to the medal in the first place, is that the event itself captures and promulgates the negotiation of a fresh hybrid, for the handshake records the production of a newly hybridized set of goals and desires, every bit as important as Paris handing the apple of Discord to Aphrodite (see Exhibit 5). The handshake, that is, condenses at least two political worlds—­Claudius as future emperor and Praetorian Guardsman as liberated subject.104 Indeed, the coin itself was part of Claudius’s campaign to cement his power, to relay a version of history, such that the fragment of gold the three friends pass from palm to palm is a true piece of history coming into being. Addison’s three discoursing companions, however, only touch on these political issues in passing. They are struck instead by something accidental to the propaganda the coin means to promulgate. They are arrested by the lion’s skin the soldier wears as a headdress. This is a kind of nutshell. It is clearly not the purpose of the coin; it is something caught up, as if by accident, in the image the coin conveys. And it sparks a long philosophical ramble. Their interest in this curious headgear launches a discussion of lions in the classical Mediterranean region—­where found, how slain, why significant—­then of lion’s skins generally, of Hercules’s costume as it is described historically,

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and of the dress of soldiers considered transhistorically. The discussion does not end there; without having exhausted the topic of unusual clothing, Cynthio, one of Addison’s speakers, “cannot forbear remarking” on the “usual Roman habit.” A similarity between the soldier’s bare arms and the bare arms of Claudius initiates a further rhetorical turn, a discussion on the history of the toga. To “explicate,” it bears mentioning, only means “to unpleat”: and Addison is unfolding Claudius’s small commemorative medal into six pages of discourse, unfolding or unwrapping a small portion of the vast intellectual investment (itself a sartorial metaphor) pleated in a “Roman habit.” The three companions find themselves reciting a moment in the Aeneid, in which Juno demands that the Romans, in memory of the fall of Troy, must forever after “wear the same habits” as their Trojan ancestors. The passage from the Aeneid becomes the excuse to introduce a new coin—­linked evidently only by association with Virgil—­thus signaling the end of one digression and the immediate beginning of the next. In this way, the coin becomes what Addison calls “poetical cash,” an endless fund of quotations, a well-­stocked library of “Latin and Greek verse.”105 If this feels out of control, it is because, in an important sense, it is. The coin is clearly a relic of a design, in the double sense of a scheming emperor who has a vision for a new systematic empire. But, when it turns up in eighteenth-­century London, it is the invitation to digress, like any tumulus or microdot. Itself a detour, capturing a historical clinamen, it stands now as the possibility of further detours—­the unpacking not just of the gesture it foregrounds but of the cultural forces it distills: a digression, in other words, on digressions. To be clear, Addison is not interested, in the Dialogues, in the life history of single coins. He does not take up the biography of the commodity as explored in the oft-­cited work of Igor Kopytoff, who notices the overlappings between the commodity form and what might be called an object’s life story.106 The subject of the single coin in the single drawer is a subject Addison takes up elsewhere—­in his well-­known Tatler essay no. 249, for instance, which relates the biography of a shilling from its birth on a mountainside of Peru to its repose on Addison’s table (see Exhibit 23).107 In the Dialogues, however, Addison is after something fundamentally different. He is interested in the coin not as a material slug bearing the traces of the many hands it has passed through but as the material remnant of the ideal coin that congeals a whole culture. As Pope puts it, in a panegyric on Addison’s Dialogues, the medal is “faithful to its charge of fame, / Thro’ climes and ages bears each form and name.”108 Such a coin is collected, stilled down in a display, in order to prompt a different order of circulation, often at crossed purposes

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with the design of the coin itself. These detours or digressions put Addison in dialogue with orders of actants whose existence otherwise exists only in traces in the coin’s design, its ideal content. The coin collector’s touch can convert a penny from circulating specie to the repository of a culture, the possibility for a digression upon the culture that it, seemingly of itself, summons up. The coin is no longer identical to itself, or the memories it might bear; it is instead accepted as a more-­or-­less representative feature of the culture that first imagined it, and imagining it, brought it into being. This is not the social life of things109 but what John Sutton calls “the cognitive life of things,” for the object is recognized as functionally isomorphic to a brain trace.110 It is not so much that the coin is made to condense its own fund of talk—­though this too is true; rather, it activates a register of historiographic discourse in the same way that a memory might. Memory is not only engrammatically coded, not only stored in the brain as a trace of an event that occurred there, but exogrammatically coded as well.111 If, Merlin Donald remarks, “engrams” represent the residual trace of an adaptation made by an organism in response to stimuli (that is, a “memory” in the sense we usually use the word), “exograms” are equivalent external traces, which stand as prompts or links to a context of remembering. Such exograms must have two important properties. Though they are instantiated in media, they operate without regard to the media in which they find themselves. It is the definitive quality of an exogram that it is the same exogram whether it is, for example, imprinted in bronze or wood, or appears in manuscript or print; it is not that exograms take many forms, but that exogrammatic forms take many materials. And they must be able to activate, in the mind of the beholder, a set of ideas, calling up a distinct associated context, though this context will depend upon the mind that beholds it. In this limited way, exograms operate like brain traces, as the prompts of association or the learned responses of a brain to stimuli. Likewise, it is in the sense of objects as exograms that we may meaningfully speak of a collection as a memory store—­for its objects are deployed in exogrammatic networks of meaning. Addison has a word for the exogram; it is “hint.” Among Addison’s Spectator papers is a series of papers on what Addison and numerous inheritors—­ Mark Akenside among them (see Exhibit 3)—­called “the pleasures of the imagination.” These papers compose what more than one reader has called a “wholly new” theory of taste, accounting for the feelings of pleasure that accompany imagination work.112 The imagination (or fancy, which is for Addison the same thing) is that faculty wholly concerned with gathering, storing,

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and staging images, whether they are the objects of active perception or are called up to the mind from the memory. This is clearly a container model of the mind. In the style of the tradition Addison develops, his work is new because it borrows; Addison himself returns us to “Mr. Lock’s Essay” for his epistemological framework.113 Addison’s innovation was to describe the pleasures that organize the mind’s labors. Like the work of the imagination itself, which either stages images from the senses or recalls images from the memory, these pleasures are double. Images may be enjoyed in the very same way that they are first gathered; these so-­called primary pleasures of the imagination are produced by the simple perception of things themselves. “With very little Attention of Thought or Application of Mind,” Addison writes, we are “struck,” through inbuilt affinities, and “immediately assent to the Beauty of an Object, without enquiring into the particular Causes and occasions of it.”114 Much as Locke in the end has no explanation for how things cross from impressions on the retina to impressions in the mind, Addison too leans against the facts, as he witnesses them, of experience: “Causa latet,” reads the Ovidian epigraph to the third paper in Addison’s series, “vis est notissima”: the cause is secret, but the effect is known. What Addison calls “secondary” pleasures are naturally more complex, and they have to do with the representativeness of art. These are the pleasures generated when an object itself is not present, when it is summoned up either through a representation, or by the imagination’s own work. In its simplest sense, the secondary pleasures arise when a statue prompts an image of the original. We receive the “primary” pleasure of perceiving a statue, and a superadded “secondary” pleasure derived from our comparison between the statue and what it represents. This helps explain, Addison elsewhere claims, why the Roman poets “take hold of all opportunities to describe the picture of any place or action, which they generally do better than they could the place of action itself.”115 What the ekphrastic representation enables, which the place or event does not, is an association between two implied things; the description implies an original, which may be already lurking in the reader’s mind. This is what Jonathan Lamb identifies as Addison’s “double principle.”116 And for this reason, it seems, Addison almost always prefers the representation to the original, landscapes to land, coins to prospects, and ekphrastic text to painting, for they evince the superadded beauty of reference. As Horace Walpole astutely notes, speaking of Addison’s Travels in Italy, “Mr. Addison travelled through the poets, and not through Italy; for all his ideas are borrowed from [the poets’] descriptions.”117

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There is, however, a more complex way in which the secondary pleasures operate. Here the secondary pleasures are composed in the associations obtaining between two or more images in the mind. The imagination has the “power  .  .  . when it is once stocked with particular ideas,” writes Addison, “to enlarge, compound, and vary them at her own pleasure.” The imagination’s “own pleasure,” apart from the pleasure of the thing itself, emerges as an autotelic principle, becoming the motive force of the mind’s internal operations. This is, in other words, a pleasure embedded not in the images of things but in the basic, associative work of the mind. “We may observe,” Addison begins, that any single circumstance of what we have formerly seen often raises up a whole scene of imagery, and awakens numberless ideas that before slept in the imagination; such a particular smell or colour is able to fill the mind, on a sudden, with the picture of the fields or gardens where we first met with it, and to bring up into view all the variety of images that once attended it. Our imagination takes the hint, and leads us unexpectedly into cities or theatres, plains or meadows. We may further observe, when the fancy thus reflects on the scenes that have passed in it formerly, those which were at first pleasant to behold appear more so upon reflection, and that the memory heightens the delightfulness of the original.118 Addison is here describing what elsewhere would be description, ekphrasis, parenthesis, or digression; the mind is led by the “hint,” or single object, into a whole narrative world, a walk into a city or theater, plain or meadow, field or garden. And the mind itself performs this sort of activity all the time: accepting a single idea, it allows itself to summon up a whole set of associated ideas. This process activates the imagination at its fullest; from the single idea, a “whole scene” is awoken. It is for this reason that Addison finds exhaustive reading in the classical poets to be a prerequisite for travel—­or, indeed, for collecting and consulting classical coins, inscriptions, and statuary. The more “forward he is in this reading,” insists one handbook Addison is known to have consulted, the more the traveler has stocked his memory with “a thousand petty Circumstances,” the greater “Ease and Pleasure will he find” in the contemplation of medals.119 This is an empiricist epistemological model adapted to an aesthetics. What can be known is dependent on the “ideas” and “images” that sleep already in

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the mind; a “particular” impinging on the senses activates a network of associated ideas, filling out a scene with such richness that it evades expectation even of the understanding. But Addison is also working within a related mechanist tradition, in which the curatorial work of the mind may be thought to have a material basis. In a little read but multiply rewritten passage, Addison offers a slightly unexpected “Cartesian” account of the superadded joys of association, thereby providing a physiological explanation for the secondary pleasures that he could not provide for the primary.120 Descartes is normally remembered as the rationalist author of the Meditations, who insisted on the absolute difference between the substance of the soul and the substance of the body. But an eighteenth-­century reader would have been more likely to remember Descartes as the author of L’Homme, a pioneering study in the corpuscular structure of the brain, and therefore one of the inaugural gestures in the mechanist tradition.121 Early versions of Decartes’s model begin by “taking Aristotle’s metaphor to be the literal truth”:122 ideas are stored in the mind through “the real modification of the external configuration of the sensing body,” which “should be pictured in exactly the same way as the modification, by a seal, of the superficial configuration of wax.”123 Sensory impressions are received by the senses, recorded on the wax-­like imagination, which is a “real part of the body . . . large enough so that its various regions can be covered with many figures.”124 Consequently, as John Sutton notes, “Imagination here is the work of memory rather than a separate capacity.”125 It is at least in part for this reason that Addison, who uses imagination in the “traditional sense” of the Scholastic legacy, found a version of the Cartesian model amenable.126 Addison means “Cartesian” in this loose, historical sense, as the school of philosophy that provides a physical, mechanist explanation for the reception of sensory impressions and the workings of the imagination.127 In fact, it is likely that the Cartesian Addison is thinking of is the same “Cartesian” who so strongly impressed John Locke and Robert Hooke: the pioneering neurologist and founding fellow of the Royal Society, Thomas Willis. Willis finds no contradiction between the undulations of the animal spirits in the brain and the stable storage of “species” in “Cells “ or “Store-­houses severally placed”; his is an anatomically based neurology nevertheless perfectly compatible with the major themes of the curatorial mind. Sensory impressions “strike” the imagination—­the chamber with its dioptric glasses (see Exhibit 4)—­where they produce waves of animal spirits. If they strike forcefully enough, they pass thence into the brain’s storage chambers. While Descartes would come to advance a distributed theory of memory, in which memories share real estate

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with one another in mutually entangled networks ready to be reactivated, Willis, like Addison, retains the sense that memories are discrete objects that merely “border” (Addison’s word) one another. It is in this sense that an idea (in Addison’s terms) can “sleep . . . in the imagination”—­where the imagination is understood to be the mobilization of animal spirits stowed away in the brain’s “crankling . . . folds.”128 “When any . . . Idea arises in the Imagination,” Addison proposes, it “dispatches a flow of Animal Spirits to its proper Trace.” An idea thus reactivated wakes in turn other memories around it, thereby returning a “new dispatch of spirits” along the paths of associated ideas. This new dispatch “open[s] up other neighbouring traces, till at last the whole set of them is blown up.”129 Thus, by repeated activity, shaped entirely by the mechanical structure of the brain’s memory works, a “whole prospect or garden flourishes in the imagination.” It is difficult from Addison’s account to tell how commensurate a memory trace (Willis’s “species”) is with the image that it represents. Like Willis, Addison is comfortable speaking at one time of “impressions,” “imprints,” and “sets” of ideas, and at others of the imagination “expanding,” “contracting,” being “enlarged,” and so on. What is clear, however, is that memory is a path network of neighboring affinities, infrastructure as structure. Part of this operation, in the Lockean tradition of “custom,” is dependent upon training. It is “by the prejudice of education,” Addison had earlier noted, that “one idea often introduces into the mind a whole set that bear no resemblance to one another in the nature of things.”130 But the brain also develops its own habits, organizing ideas by the single rule of pleasure. This is the neurological core of Addison’s understanding of aesthetics, where the imagination’s pleasures rise to a general physiological rule. Pleasure was Addison’s contribution to the discourse passing through Locke—­for whom pleasure had no particular neurological priority over any other sensation. “Because,” Addison suggests, “the pleasure we receive” from some “places far surmounted, and overcame the disagreeableness we found in them, . . . there was at first a wider passage worn in the pleasure traces, and on the contrary, so narrow a one in those which belonged to the disagreeable ideas, that they were quickly stopt up, and rendered incapable of receiving any animal spirits, and consequently of exciting any unpleasant ideas in the memory.”131 For Addison, there is nothing beyond the pleasure principle; the mind builds in its own involuntary psychic shield, deflecting the imagination inevitably into the roads of pleasure. A certain feedback loop emerges between pleasure and repetition: repetitive experience wears wider passages

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in the pleasure traces, which in turn drives the repetitive experience of the sorts of hints that activate those sets or networks. This is unidirectional; as the pleasure traces widen, so the disagreeable traces become constricted, simply as a function of repeated use. Roy Porter remarks that the “Enlightenment’s great historical watershed . . . lay in the validation of pleasure”; in Addison’s case, pleasure was the structuring principle not only of his aesthetics but also of the anatomy of the brain. Here, then, is a physiological basis, however rudimentary, for tea-­table conversation, the reading of poetry, the pleasures of the playhouse, and so on. Addison has offered a neurophysiological validation of polite culture.132 In an essay published a few weeks after the last number in “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” Addison expands repetitive experience, linked to a neurophysiological explanation of behavior, into a moral or ethical duty. “The mind,” Addison remarks, “grows fond of those Actions she is accustomed to, and is drawn with Reluctancy from those Paths in which she has been used to walk.” Paths, walks, and actions; this language shares more than accidental similarities with his discussion of the pleasures of the imagination published a few weeks earlier—­not to mention with the strikingly similar passages in Locke’s Essay.133 The mind as a whole develops channels or associative “paths” according to the single calculus of pleasure, just as it experiences pleasure in the linkages that emerge through repetition.134 Addison cites the example of Francis Atterbury, who, “being obliged to search into several Rolls and Records, and notwithstanding such an Employment was at first very dry and irksome to him, he at last took an incredible Pleasure in it.” The pleasure developing organically from repetition, Addison concludes, accounts for the intellectual development of “one of the greatest Genius’s this Age has produced,” for his “training in all the Polite Studies of Antiquity” can be traced to a love of antiquarian documents acquired through brute repetition.135 But, speaking generally, Addison himself notes that what he has developed is a physiological explanation for addiction. We “develop a relish,” which we “retain for life,” for such things which initially “create a Disgust,” such as “Claret, Coffee, and other Liquors.” Someone “addicted to Play or Gaming” will “give himself up . . . entirely to it,” Addison notes, caught in the feedback loop of pleasure. Finally, in a gesture to the theory of brain work underwriting his account, Addison cites the example of an “ideot” who, accustomed to chiming along with the church tower, continued to chime for weeks after the bell tower had ceased to function.136 This is a mechanist neurophysiology made manifest at the level of the organism: clockwork man mimicking clockwork tower.

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The work of the poet, according to this system, is not fully to describe what he sees but to create an image in such a way that it prompts a rich chain of pleasurable associations in the mind of his anticipated reader. As Joseph Warton would later insist (discussing Pope’s “Windsor Forest”) the selection of “lively pictures . . . chiefly constitutes true poetry.”137 This, too, seems to be the work of the well-­designed medal, the tasteful painting, or, for that matter, the well-­planned garden. Each is designed to prompt a chain or “set” of associated ideas, prompting the imagination “to conceive a connected train of thought in unison with that which was first suggested by the particular forms.”138 To be quite clear, these prompts are what Addison calls “hints”; they are exograms in the media of the sister arts. The aspiring poet, according to Addison, is therefore to “take as much pains in forming his imagination as a philosopher in cultivating his understanding.” A poet must be “conversant in the various scenery of a country life,” acquainted with “the pomp and magnificence of courts,” and well versed in “everything that is noble and stately in the productions of art,” including painting, statuary, and architecture either in its “present glory” or in “the ruins of those which flourished in former ages.”139 Such advantages as these “help to open a man’s thoughts, and to enlarge his imagination”—­a mandate that hears the physiological opening and enlarging of the brain’s passages. It is therefore only by assembling a coordinated, networked set of images himself that the poet can know in advance which images or “hints” might best set off a brain’s network of pleasurable associations. Thus the poet’s whole work is to prompt associative work in a foreign neural network. As Alexander Gerard would put it in 1764, “Beauty is, at least in part, resolvable into association.”140

Exhibit 14. Addison’s Walk Inside is programmatically confounded with outside: paths of walking with paths of the brain, medals of the cabinet with hints in the mind. This confusion between inside and outside is categorically true for Addison, who, finding himself on the “classic ground” of Italy, treats his readers to a series of discussions about coins, Latin poetry, and the classical inhabitants who lived there. Standing before the dazzling prospect of Trajan’s Arch at Ancona, Addison describes for us the reverse of a coin minted to commemorate its dedication.141 When we are outside, with Addison gazing at a landscape, we find ourselves inside, leafing through books in a library. The reverse is however true as well.

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16. Bilton Hall, from a nineteenth-­century pencil sketch (now lost). D. G. Kingsbury, Bilton Hall (London: Mitre Press, 1957).

When we find ourselves inside, lost in the fund of knowledge the poet carries around in his head, we discover that we are on the ramble; the digression, the looping journey from prospect to coin and back to prospect again, clearly leans against the experience of walking. Addison’s brain displays no particular preference between what is within and without the skull—­at least when it comes to prompting the greater pleasures of the secondary sort. Nor does he experience much of a difference whether he ponders a garden, poem, or painting—­any of the sister arts. Though instantiated in media, exograms, Addison’s “hints,” operate without regard to the media in which they find themselves. The point is to set the brain afoot. The Dialogues on the Usefulness of Ancient Medals end indoors—­at least literally speaking; the three friends wind up in Philander’s cabinet. But they begin in a very out-­of-­doors way. The first of the Dialogues begins with Philander, Cynthio, and Eugenius taking a walk; at the beginning of the last of the dialogues, which starts from the same spot as the first, Eugenius makes clear the shape that this walk takes. It begins with a stroll; “Philander,” he writes, “used every morning to take a walk in a neighbouring wood.” It was, Addison continues, “cut through by abundance of beautiful allies, which, terminating

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on the water, looked like so many painted views in perspective.”142 This is nature, but nature crafted according to design, “nature” like the nature framed by Hooke’s portable camera obscura (Exhibit 4). Addison’s walk turns a passage or straight way into a series of framed views; it turns a “method”—­that is, a route or way—­into a series of asides, the world made to look like a staged sequence of landscape paintings. The scene with the three walkers therefore anticipates, in a relatively straightforward way, the staged sequence of views that is to follow in the Dialogues: Philander and his companions discuss coins just as they would take a walk in the wood, pausing medal to medal as if each were a discrete, compact vista. This is the familiar double movement that signals the presence of a living ecology, mind taking its rise and its cues from the environment, which is shaped in turn by the mental activities happening there. Walking is the mixed metaphor that pins method to digression, intention to the pleasures of the unexpected vista. This section ends with a look at a number of walks, where nature meets design meets nature again. Each of these several paths is called “Addison’s Walk,” and each of them captures something particular about how Addison imagined aesthetic experience, for walking, especially in a garden, is among the most important organizing tropes for Addison’s sense of literary production. “Among my Daily-­Papers which I bestow on the Public,” Addison’s Spectator claims, “there are some which are written with Regularity and Method, and others that run out into the Wildness of those Compositions which go by the Names of Essays.”143 When the Spectator reads (or prepares to write) a paper of the first sort, he imagines himself “in a regular Plantation” and “can place [him]self in its several Centers, so as to take a view of all the Lines and Walks that are struck from them.” In such “a methodical Discourse,” Addison writes, “your Eye commands the whole Prospect, and gives you such an Idea of it, as is not easily worn out of the Memory.” “He comprehends every thing easily,” Addison continues, “takes it in with pleasure, and retains it long.” When, however, the Spectator is preparing a paper of the second variety, he “fanc[ies]” himself “in a Wood that abounds with a great many noble Objects, rising among one another in the greatest Confusion and Disorder.”144 In such an essay-­wood, you may “ramble . . . a whole Day together, and every Moment discover something or other that is new to you,” but “when you have done, you will have but a confused imperfect Notion of the Place.” The first is clearly an essay organized according to its design; Method is here linked with design (Case 2), the straight way of argument with the organized prospect. Think of Raphael’s tableau, Woodward’s cabinet, or Pope’s grotto (Exhibits 5, 6, and 8).

Digression 143

Think of an Iliad in a nutshell (Exhibit 10). The second, however, is clearly organized like a chain of digressions; think here of Plot’s chorography (Exhibit 12) or Addison’s dialogues (Exhibit 13). Think of an Iliad full of nutshells. Addison leans on the distinction between the overview and the ramble often enough that it rises to the status of an organizing trope. Among the two most famous moments where he makes the distinction are pair of early essays: a “vision” or dream-­essay distributed over two Tatler numbers (120, 123), and a walk reported on Good Friday, 1711, recorded in Spectator 26 (revisited in Spectator 329). The first is an allegorical dream of the passions, representing “all mankind,” who initially appear “lost and bewildered.” It is set in a forest of “prodigious extent,” which is “cut” into a “variety of walks and alleys.” At the center it “opens into a wide plain,” where Addison’s interlocutor “discover[s] three great roads, very wide and long, that led into three different parts of the forest.”145 These three different parts, which divide people into groups according to their ages, are organized into allegorical landscapes of lust and virtuous love, ambition and true honor, and avarice and the care of posterity. Addison thereby forms, under one conspective or comprehensive design, a fully explanatory parable, a totalizing metaphor. It is allegorical in this way—­allegorical because offering a completely exhaustive explanation.146 This dream, allegorically austere, is every bit the curatorial dream that would be dreamt by someone like Mark Akenside; it sustains a metaphor until it renders up an allegory. The second essay quite differently describes a walk in the grounds of Westminster Abbey, which, though it almost certainly condenses experiences from different places and moments into a single narrative, describes a plausibly walkable path. Though everything is still organized by an embracing message (Horace’s Ode 1.4 on Death as the great leveler), the Spectator spends far more time meandering through particulars. The walk coordinates a series of set-­piece digressions on epitaphs, on a sexton digging a grave, on funeral monuments generally, on a line from Aeneas’s voyage through the underworld,147 and, in a sudden metanarrative twist (a digression on the pleasures of digression), on the strange joy that accompanies melancholy reflections. Movement, stillness, then movement again: each of these moments presents a sort of false ending, a resting place and potential summation of the meaning of the piece before the engine of narrative lurches into motion again.148 Here, then, are reencountered the two elements or tendencies of composition—­the plantation admired for its regularity and the wilderness filled with noble objects, the straight way intersected with observations by the by. And while we might be tempted to say that these are altogether different kinds of organizational

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strategies, it becomes on the contrary clear that they represent two tendencies or directions that composition can go: toward, on the one hand, the celebration of design, or toward, on the other, the elaboration of particulars. So, while the second ends with a totalizing reflection—­the eye cast back over the route it has traversed—­the first ends with Addison descending into the walks to confront the people he sees there, taking, as it were, the hint. Ross Chambers puts it this way: “Digression is the equivalent in the order of discourse to the category of nature in the order of culture.”149 Digression is in this sense allowable, even desirable, in polite discourse, for it is what makes way for the interpenetration of particulars into the frozen stillness of ideas. As we have seen, Addison was a coin collector, and his cabinet was clearly an important model for mental processes (see Exhibit 13); but he was also a gardener, taking, as it were, his mental cabinet for a stroll.150 Addison’s contribution to garden design is traditionally understood as a forerunner of the Romantic taste for wildness;151 in the Spectator numbers that together have come to be called “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” Addison seems to evince a preference for unsculpted landscapes. But a closer look at his own practice suggests a different story. While publishing the bulk of his remarks on gardening, Addison was himself engaged in a plantation of his own. He purchased Bilton Hall in February 1712, and by 1713 he was reordering the grounds and breaking up its open vista with, by his own account, more than a thousand trees.152 The dates are important because purchase and planting bracket the publication dates of the Spectator numbers containing Addison’s remarks on method, as well as his most focused remarks on gardens.153 Though much of his time was spent at his Kensington address, under pressure alongside Richard Steele to produce nearly daily numbers for the Spectator, he nevertheless reported to Alexander Pope that between-­times he was “wholly immersed in country business, and [began] to take delight in it.”154 This immersion is the point, for it was during the years that Addison was most thoroughly engaged in the pleasures of planting that he presented to the public his most formal aesthetic remarks; indeed, it seems likely that Addison revised his “Pleasures of the Imagination” in the very space that provided the conspective center of his plantation—­for it was in the library of Bilton Hall, years later, that was found the manuscript notebook containing Addison’s aesthetic essay.155 The “most impressive rooms of the five-­bedroomed hall,” writes Judith Court, were “the ground-­floor reception room and, directly above, the first-­ floor drawing room,” each of which contains, like a lidded eye, a deep window bay projecting its gaze over the back garden.156 These glazed, semishuttered

Digression 145

oculi are captured in the only surviving representation of the grounds, a late eighteenth-­century pencil sketch showing two stands of overgrown trees and, nearer the stacked windows, two parallel lines of cropped yews. Though much has changed, what remains clear is the formal style of Addison’s plantation, an English garden borrowing from traditional styles patterned after French and Italian designs. The artist has set her easel looking back down the central spoke of what turns out to be a radially aligned garden. Addison’s plantation, in other words, distributes itself evenly behind the house, coordinated, writes David Leatherbarrow, by “a central perspective axis” projected from the reception and drawing-­room windows.157 This walk, that would come to be called “Addison’s Walk,” was not the only one of its kind.158 Possibly designed to suggest the river walk looping out from Addison’s Magdalen College, this walk now bears the name of its most famous walker; it, too, is called “Addison’s Walk.” So, too, is a walk planted by Addison’s botanist friend and executor Thomas Tickell, now on the grounds of the National Botanical Garden of Ireland. Three walks, then, each of which shares a name; each also shares certain formal features. For one thing, they delight in straight lines. Here we may see the triumph of design, the articulation of method. This is immediately on display in the anonymous sketch of Bilton Hall; it is still vaguely visible in the footprint of the house and garden as it stands today.159 But these trees themselves seem to have been planted such that they frame perspective views. This is nowhere more apparent than in the Magdalen College river walk. More than one of Addison’s biographers has commented on his taste for strolls in “nature,” especially along the Isis, the Thames, or the banks of the Cherwell in the meadow of Magdalen College—­the “walks” that now bear his name. Like the Bilton Hall grounds, the walks of Magdalen are double rows of trees, defining long, straight paths on the margin of the Cherwell; these trees themselves, however, frame a series of views, each of which is itself an artificially produced landscape. The imagination, Addison insists, prefers “a Prospect which is well laid out,” and it is in part the work of trees as framing devices, and the river as a bar, to create a series of such prospects.160 As William Howitt would note, more than a century after Addison’s death, the walk is bordered by trees “presenting a scene worthy of making a part of a picture of Claude Lorraine.”161 Captured here is a forerunner of the picturesque, which, Dabney Townsend reminds us, is structurally about distance,162 for the straight walk of the footpath offers a series of framed perspectives, one arranged after another. The very purpose of the walk is the serial presentation of perspective views, of aesthetic hints distributed in narrative form. As Horace

17. “Addison’s Walk at Oxford,” in John Cassell’s Illustrated History (London, 1856).

Digression 147

Walpole would later opine, the well-­laid-­out garden should present a sequence of views—­a development which he traces to Milton, and which he locates in Paradise Lost.163 Gardens, like poems, are to be read.164 It isn’t enough, however, that these views merely create a pleasant sight. Even when evincing “the rough careless Strokes of Nature,” they universally activate Addison’s classical debts. This is, after all, how they most fully exercise the pathways of the imagination, linking and bringing into view the thousands of allusions, details, and associations that have been treasured there. The most common way that a landscape can set Addison a pleasant associative task is by reminding him of Virgil’s Georgics; Mavis Batey, the onetime code breaker who became a reader of historical gardens, goes so far as to suggest that Addison “read the Georgics” during his regular morning walks, and though this is surely a guess smuggled in as a fact, it isolates something about how Addison moved through space.165 Addison, who would acquire the epithet “England’s Virgil,” was continually reminded of the Georgics while afoot, often at those moments when he is most directly prompted by what he recognizes as “Nature . . . left to her-­self.”166 In the manuscript recovered from the Bilton Hall library, for instance, Addison remarks that “the wide fields of the Creation” remind him instantly of Virgil’s celebration of country life; in an inserted passage, evidently made while rereading or reflecting on his own description, Addison quotes the Georgics: The calm of broad fields, Grottoes, living lakes, and cool valleys, The lowing of cattle and gentle sleep beneath trees.167 For Addison, an unmediated “nature” would be literally unimaginable;168 what Addison sees is never nature left to herself but is, on the contrary, instantly intermixed with the materials he brings with him. And, after all, what pleasures could be as rich as the secondary pleasures only a well-­stocked mind can experience? We may see here the “double principle” at work: for “the works of Nature,” the Bilton manuscript proposes, are “still more pleasant, as they more resemble those of Art; for in that case our pleasure arises from a double principle, from the agreeableness of the objects to the eye and from the Similitude to other objects,” as either “Copies or Originals.” Consequently, what might seem even to be the most intimate and personal response to place—­his encounter, for example, with the wide fields of creation—­evinces for Addison the formal shape of criticism, what he calls “compar[ing] the

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Natural Face of the Country with the Landskips that the Poets have given us of it.” So pervasive is this associative habit that it turns thought into a horticultural genre. In describing a walk in the country, what we get is a docent’s stroll through the paths laid out in his own mind. Walking from vista to vista is a form of cognitive activity; to see Addison walking is to visit Addison thinking. Addison has a name for this sort of ecological embeddedness; he calls it, risking a turn of phrase, “paradisical thinking.” Paradise Lost was the era’s great ecological poem, Milton’s monism articulated in the period’s most celebrated description of Eden. Addison, whose aesthetic theory often frames itself through the language of gardening, therefore found Paradise Lost apt ground for his remarks—­dedicating to it a total of eighteen Spectator essays. And his remarks rehearse the general layout of the garden: a conspective view that gives way, via a stroll, to the embeddedness of the intellect in its surroundings. Addison begins his reading of the poem with a formal plan of his own, to remark in four papers on each of the four categories recommended by “Aristotle’s Method”: its Fable (or plot), Characters, Sentiments, and Language. These revolve around the neo-­Aristotelian rubric of formal perfection, that the “Action” in an epic poem should be one, complete, and great. Addison begins, in other words, by treating Paradise Lost according to criteria appropriate to the Iliad. He quickly passes, however, into an open-­ended ramble among “particular Instances,” “Beauties and Imperfections,” and “such other Particulars as may not properly fall under” the four heads of neoclassical design. What Addison found to admire most about Milton’s verse was precisely its compact suggestiveness, the individual “beauties” or “hints” that evade the strictness of poetic rules. These “hints” do not produce the “beauty” of the poem; “beauty” is reserved for the regularity of a conspectus.169 Rather, they are identical with the poem’s many “beauties,” its profusion of dense poetic moments. “Milton,” Addison writes, “is every where full of Hints.”170 Addison is reading Paradise Lost in the same way that one might read a garden, passing from design to particulars, conspectus to hint. These “hints” are the opportunity, as the etymology of the words suggests, for the reader to be “seized” by a moment; they activate the imagination’s secondary pleasures, those pleasures that occur when “the imagination takes [a] hint”—­or, we might suspect, is taken by one—­“and leads us unexpectedly into cities or theatres, plains or meadows.” The scene of Eden, Addison finds, is filled with “florid” and “elaborate Descriptions,” and while this could be a flaw in an epic poem, here it is appropriate. This is because the “Reader,” like his first parents,

Digression 149

“during their whole Course of Action, always finds himself in the Walks of Paradise.” Adam and Eve, at least, “never lose Sight of their happy Station in any Thing they speak or do.” Even while conversing, or revolving ideas in their head, garden dwellers always “take a Tincture from the Woods, Fields, and Rivers.”171 In such a setting, Addison remarks that “the Reader cannot but be pleased to find the Depths of Philosophy enlivened with all the Charms of Poetry, and to see so great a Strength of Reason amid so beautiful a Redundancy of the Imagination.”172 Pleasure, philosophy, and beauties; Imagination redounding to Reason: this is a celebration of a living ecology, Milton’s monism experienced as the handing back and forth of sensation and ideas (see Exhibit 3). Each of the “beauties” of such a setting points immediately to the philosophical system organizing it; the paradisical thought moves in a frictionless hermeneutic circle between particular “beauties” and the sublime “beauty” of their design. Partly, Addison is responding to Milton’s deep reading, and the structure of the sort of garden arranged as a sequence of views, each of which condenses a poetic tradition; it is for this reason that Addison notes, in his manuscript draft of “The Pleasures of the Imagination,” that Milton could not have written Paradise Lost without having seen Italian gardens.173 But Milton’s brilliance was also to bind these local beauties to an overarching design; “the author,” Addison concludes, “has shewn us that Design in all the Works of Nature, which necessarily leads us to the Knowledge of its first Cause.”174 The garden is that special spot, and paradise that special way of thinking, that puts on display the intersection between digression and design, bodily movement and ideal system. We generally think of Romanticism as inaugurating a reattachment to the environment. When Wordsworth insists that we “quit our books,” or surely we will “grow double,” he means to stitch back together the profound dualism introduced by an Enlightenment way of thinking. We are meant to return to “the vernal wood,” to receive the “sweet . . . lore which nature brings.”175 This is a familiar account, meaning to reattach the creative impulses of mind to the natural environment. And inasmuch as we are quite clearly poisoning the world we have inherited, a reattachment to linnets and throstles is a laudable ambition. But the lesson of Addison suggests that there is a countertendency here, that the Romantic movement may have emptied out a certain kind of emplaced experience. That is, the legacy of the eighteenth century, precisely because of its investment in books, is profoundly attentive to place, especially to the way that place is before all things; it is attentive to place as an interbraiding of history and discourse. From Robert Plot to Joseph Addison, cognitive

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activity leans against emplaced engagement with the world; book learning is engaged with and routed through the customs established by moving in space, particular learning attached to particular place. In this sense, thinking the ecological thought means reattaching learning to the affordances of the environment, a routing of the library back through the spaces of thinking. This thread will be taken up in the next case.

Case 4

I n wa r d n ess 15. William Hay’s Stone 16. Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a Small Showcase 17. An Ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket 18. A Blue-­Bound Copy of The Mysterious Mother

Exhibit 15. William Hay’s Stone Among the specimens of Hans Sloane’s (1660–1764) vast and wide-­ranging collection of objects was a certain stone, set “in a gold mounted shagreen case” and wrapped with a “manuscript on vellum.”1 The stone is in the case; the case is wrapped in vellum, like a second skin; upon the vellum is inscribed the outlines of a narrative. The stone, the vellum announces, had once belonged to William Hay, who relinquished it only upon his death. Hay (1695–1755) was a Whig M.P. responsible for authoring a number of laws beneficial to the poor;2 he also dabbled in print literature, penning a handful of poems, a small series of translations,3 and his most lasting work, “Deformity: An Essay,” an autobiographical account that some call the first entry in the field of disability studies.4 Hay’s body had always been an object of curiosity—­only some of which was medical; Hay was by his own account a hunchback, reaching “scarce five Feet,” and was regularly an object of vulgar comment and harsh handling in the rough streets of London. As politician and as physical spectacle, Hay had been on display his whole life, and he was used to airing private matters in public. His essay on deformity addresses these issues directly, engaging in a long, deftly ironic dissertation upon the wages of debility. It ends, however, with an account in which private and public are even more stridently crossed; this is his essay on the present state of his ill health, a statement of what he calls “My case.”5 The block capitals are his: visually, they suggest what might

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18. A small flat oval calculus taken after death from the bladder of William Hay, Esq. Specimen A184 © Wellcome Library, London.

be engraved in stone rather than printed on paper; aurally, they anticipate the gold-­mounted shagreen “case” that would later contain the material proof of the account.6 Hay had numerous reasons to complain, but the one fact of his being that organized his experience of himself, marking the passage of the day more reliably than meals, was the bladder stone which he knew himself to be carrying, and which he habitually dosed, three ounces a day, with “Mrs. Stephens’s Medicine.”7 This bladder stone is the substance of his “case.” On display in Hay’s stone are the vexed crossings between public and private that indicate a process of thinking at work. Hay had headed a parliamentary committee that paid the princely sum of £5,000 for the recipe of Mrs. Stephens’s nostrum—­and his account of himself in the last pages of his “Deformity: An Essay” is partly a story of the virtues of the medicine. But he at the same time turns the stone into an organizational principle for his own sense of himself. The stone organizes his life into epochs; it organizes his body, dividing up its invisible interior into objects with functions—­kidneys, bladder, ureter, and so on. As he describes it, it sets the rhythm of his day, demanding its o.d. dose of soap and limewater. What is more, the stone, like the body that bore it, ended as a medical specimen and spectacle. Hay allowed

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for his body to be autopsied by the clerk of the closet to the Princess of Wales;8 the stone, now for the first and last time parted from his flesh, made its way through the hands of Hans Sloane then to the collection of the Hunter brothers at the Royal College of Surgeons (see Exhibit 16). Though “lying Marble will decay,” Kathleen James-­Cavan notes, Hay literally provides himself “a Monument,” a “fragment of a body,” which would “remain  .  .  . to benefit human kind.” It “commemorates Hay,” James-­Cavan continues, “among the beauties of the . . . British Museum”9—­or, at least it did, until it was blasted back into dust during the Blitz.10 Weighing three drachms, two scruples, and eight grains, the color of chestnut and oily to the touch, this intimately private sphere was in the end aired in the emerging public one—­in print accounts of Hay’s life, in the institutional museum, and in the health sciences; in this object the irreducible qualia of pain crossed with initiatives as public as the steering of medical research. In “Deformity,” the graininess of experience flashes into view; the conceptual metaphors that make possible the frank exchange of ideas run aground upon the differences of haptic presence. The very promise of the empiricist epistemological system is that, through standardized linking of objects to ideas and ideas to words, everyone might have command of the same words referring to the same objects.11 This is not simply to make, in Bacon’s influential formulation, “the intellect . . . a true pattern of the world as we actually find it”;12 it is additionally to create the possibility for rational exchange, especially in the emerging sites of republican political discourse. Since communication (Locke insists) is mainly about “upholding common conversation and commerce” in “the ordinary affairs and conveniences of civil life,” no doubt the regularization of language would enable a new golden age of civic involvement.13 Models of the public sphere have been founded upon just such theories of communicative action, on the possibilities of rational deliberation emerging out of a background of shared ideas.14 This helps account in part for the immense amount of energy expended on fantasies of artificial languages, then and since: Locke’s digression, for instance, upon his notion of a dictionary with images of the things words are meant to represent15 and John Wilkins’s attempt to remodel language on patterns emerging through the exhaustive collections of things,16 but also, more recently, lexical experiments and phonetic systems like those of Thomas Spence,17 grammar-­books repeatedly turning up at the spearpoint of empire,18 Esperanto, and so forth. There are, however, a pair of additional problem that schemes like these are not equipped to address. The first of these problems, what we might call the

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outward problem of perception, emerges for Locke when he reflects that even the simplest substances in nature appear to the observer to be combinations of as many simple ideas as there are operations that can be performed upon them. Although Locke clings to the notion that simple substances have certain primal properties, he nevertheless notes that our idea of one will be composed of as many properties as “the ways of inquiry which our faculties are capable of.”19 Take, Locke suggests, the example of gold: one person figures out how it can be melted, while another experiments with how it can be spent. Gold means something different to the chemist than to the consumer. Or take the example of Hay’s stone; one person is interested in how it intersects with his biography, and so encounters it in its textual traces; another is interested in connections between the stone and the rise of the museum, and so traces its position within archives of pathological human calculi; yet another is interested in the stone’s crossings with the history of medicine, and so slices it in half, dissolves it in acid, or grinds it to powder. Hay’s stone is as many stones as there are viewpoints. This begins to capture the contours of the outward problem of perception, the disalignment of ideas one from another based on the different desires people bring into their commerce with the world, their different “points of view.” What we might call the inward problem of perception introduces a more fundamentally inexpressible difference. It is part of perceptual experience, Michael Polanyi notes, that the processes involved in perception are not part of the awareness they enable;20 when the eye erupts in the field of view, it is not to see but to put seeing on display (see Exhibits 4–8). We do not notice the eye when it sees, the neuron when it fires, the arm when it reaches—­or the spleen when it evaporates into a mood (see Exhibit 8). Neither do we notice the telescope through which we look or the stick with which we reach. We only notice the things upon which we are focused. This is a normal part of how perception works,21 but it poses a problem when it tacitly normalizes certain forms of bodily experience in preference to others. This is a charge more than once leveled at the key metaphor theories of language, from the early positivism of Locke to the embodied cognitivism of Lakoff and Johnson (see this point in Exhibit 1).22 Locke goes so far as to note that there might be ideas which are “not intelligible at all,” if one “has not organs or faculties to attain” them; he names “colours to a blind man” as an example.23 But he declines to address the differences to ideas that differences in embodiment might make, especially when it comes to ideas like “imagine, apprehend, comprehend, conceive,” and so on. To “apprehend” an idea is to hold it, but the holding is not part of the

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experience of apprehension; this, indeed, is why the metaphor can be made to work: we can “grasp” (Polanyi’s word) an idea with the mind, but also an object with the hand, or even a skill with repeated practice (see Exhibit 1), but the things we use to grasp them fall away from perception.24 Grasping is the name for a certain “from-­to” mode of embodied action, pressing out into the world; it nevertheless leans explicitly on haptic experience of a normalized type, assuming the hand that does the work. In our regular verbal commerce, in our ordinary habits of thought, it is as though grasping could itself be safely disregarded, because everybody grasps in the same way.25 Embodiment, contrariwise, makes manifest the primary irreducibility of the metaphors we live by, not the least of which are inside/outside, natural/unnatural, and variations upon distinctions like straight/crooked.26 It reminds us that things like “grasping” are different for everyone. This is the inward problem of perception, and it is where Hay’s essay can help. Hay’s crippled body emerges as something like a coordinating condition in its own right, which is another way of saying that it turns up as form, in the linguistic sense of the word. Deformity surfaces in a series of dazzling misdirections, a prose of deft irony and rhetorical sleights of hand, troubling precisely the things we take for granted in our thoughts about thinking. Take, for instance, Hay’s reading of William Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty. Hogarth offers to prove that beauty “consists in Curve Lines,” arguing that aesthetic pleasure is a simple matter of the eye locating “serpentine curves”; drawing his examples equally from classical sculpture and everyday design, Hogarth proposes that the eye universally responds to what he calls the “line of beauty,” a sinusoidal wave form. Hay seems to accept the premise of Hogarth’s treatise—­but then he presses it to its conclusion; he observes that crooked bodies and hunched backs must therefore be the most pleasing to the eye. Put differently, Hay offers himself, in his thoughts on deformity, as the paragon of the human form. How are we to read this? It is difficult to grasp, as it were, Hay’s meaning in all its richness. Are we meant to read this straight? Is Hay making a serious pitch for curvature of the spine as a condition for a universal aesthetics? Or are we meant to read it with a twist? Is Hay’s essay a more general attack on an aesthetics obsessed with outlines, even if it means calling into question the premise of the book, the possibility of form and deformity at all? Are we meant to look at it head­on, or with a craned neck? Surely the solution to the problem is to attempt to put ourselves in Hay’s position—­to see the world from his own embodied point of view. Hay’s prose works this way; it reminds us of his own embodied experience. In the process,

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the essay on “Deformity” works continually at the knot where material lessons are gathered together into their meanings; he picks constantly at the site of metaphor as what produces (in order to stitch up) the slash between body and mind. He reminds us that experience is not a matter of universal metaphorics; it is a matter of individual embodiment, which is as different as individual bodies. It certainly calls into question the possibility of anything like a universal aesthetics, especially in the sense introduced by Hogarth.27 Likewise, it calls into question the fantasy of a universal language based on universal experience. On the contrary, Hay’s essay willingly offers up Hay’s own embodied experience as the disproof of the propositions it would seem to confirm. We are asked to read, as it were, with a hunchback, as a hunchback. We are asked to read aesthetically, which is to say, through the mediation of embodiment. The essay, in other words, upsets any possible confidence in the bottoming-­out of linguistic expression in universal haptic experience. It is not merely that all writing is autobiographical in the same way (as Jonathan Richardson puts it) that all painters only ever paint themselves;28 inward writing, Hay astutely notes, is “self-­anatomy,” continually probing the embodiment underwriting it. The point, Donna Haraway writes, is “to learn to remember that we might have been otherwise, and might yet be, as a matter of embodied fact.”29 There is “the body”; everyone knows about this. The body, as Katherine Hayles puts it,30 is the subject of medical discourse, biopolitics, museums, institutions managing medical specimens living and dead.31 Despite what we might at first think, “the body” is a semantic construction; it is discursive. It is the stuff of policy and gossip, diet plans and refugee camps. It is the body, universalized by common consent, which appears to underwrite Locke’s sense of the mind’s metaphors, and his dream that the right language could make possible the rational exchange of ideas. But then, skimming just under history’s level gaze, there is embodiment. Curiously less available than the body (because, in the whole, unspeakable), embodiment is the texture and medium of lived conceptual articulation, the mangled mess from which conceptual systems draw their energy and the field of action to which they return. Just as the discourse of the body lies in wait for individuals to inhabit it—­in Drew Leder’s words, “inscribes” or writes itself upon individual experience—­so embodiment returns to the conceptual system it supports through complex “reciprocal exchanges.”32 We continually wager our specific embodiments against the discursive system that expects them, making do or making fit as the case may be. We, in other words, “enact” the networks in which we dwell, and we do it through flesh and bone that is irreducibly our own.33 So, for instance,

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Hay comes into contact with beauty from his own point of view, which is a point slightly less than five feet above the earth; likewise, he enacts medical discourse through his own impacted stones, returning by custom, habit, or conviction to Mrs. Stephens’s medicine from his own experience of deformity. These “instantiated enactments,” Hayles concludes, create “feedback loops between materiality and discourse,” precisely the sort of dialectical to-­ and-­fro that means a cognitive ecology is humming away.34 Points of contact between the body and embodiment represent special sites of metaphorics—­ for embodiment is the intimate terrain where metaphor theories of language construct themselves, and where discourse returns forcefully on its instruments. Put differently, there are two directions of metaphor to match the two directions that mental activity may turn. There are metaphors constructed outward, from body to idea, just as the mind gathers ideas. This, writes Polanyi, is the direction the senses normally go: the eyes open outward to see, the arms extend to grasp, and so on. In shifting action to concept, we are made to forget the particularity of experience. In grasping something, we don’t generally regard the tension of muscles in the hand, or the flow of blood through the veins, or the pulsing of animal spirits in the nerves. So, too, when we “apprehend” in the word’s ideal sense, the embodied work that got us there falls away to reveal the essence of the act: we grasp an idea. But metaphors, we are told, “come from and extend into the body.”35 This reverse flow is what is meant by inwardness—­the returning of conceptual systems on the haptic contraptions that make them possible. Making sense of embodiment asks us to attune our outward-­oriented senses inward; it asks us to remember the forgotten work of embodied activity even after that embodiment is made to be forgotten. It requires a set of models and metaphors that are just as impressive and monolithic as the paths, chambers, and gardens of the mind. Inwardness is a negotiation between persons and places, bodies and machines. The establishment of inwardness, the probing at models of the inward problems of perception even within the regime of the container-­like mind, is the subject of the following three exhibits.

Exhibit 16. Two Calculi Cut and Mounted in a Small Showcase Consider the problem of time. How does one experience a pure sensation of time, if experience, according to the dominant view, is only a collection of simple ideas? Robert Hooke’s remarks on the mind’s repository were in fact

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19. Uric Acid Calculi. Specimen 53.55 in its case. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 2014.

mooted as a possible solution to precisely this problem; time, Hooke proposed, was simply the sensation of the number of links counted out in chains of ideas coiled down in the repository of memory (see Exhibit 10). This, indeed, is one of the reasons that a “full stop,” an idea like a dot which is also the minimal pause in discourse, could be such a powerful notion in Hooke’s system; stopping in its normal enchaining of ideas one to the next, the mind creates new connections, looping novel topographies within the mind’s orderly repository.36 Locke, possibly inspired by Hooke, offered a similar solution. For Locke, time is the sensation of ideas passing in their “train”; the mind observes its succession of ideas in the same way that a stationary observer might witness the passage of the elements of a parade, or the sequence of artillery and equipment on the march.37 In this sense, time as a direction or tendency—­time as “passage”—­is hardened up into an arrangement of former thoughts; a batch of little nugget-­like moments is relinked into a sequence available to the eye. Through a metaphorical trick, Hooke’s figure additionally liquidates time into a single number, the measurement of the chain separating now from then. And time could, for someone like Hooke, be mathematically simple, for Hooke was among the first people to explore the pendulum clock as a way of converting time into a regular sequence of ticks.38 Looked at more broadly, however, Hooke provides a particular example of a more

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general phenomenon.39 “Everyday language,” notes one team of researchers, “is replete with both literal and metaphorical language that follows this broad pattern”; “motion language” is substituted for the literally imperceptible function of time, or, put differently, time is summoned up as part of a meditation on the passages of bodies and things. This is one signal example, they note, of the more general tendency to handle “abstract notions” by referring them to “more experience-­based domains”: thinking about time is inevitably a form of thinking through the body. Even as a concept, time is “intimately dependent” on sensorimotor experience.40 Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), diarist and Chief Secretary to the Admiralty, bibliophile and collector of ballads, was continually faced with the question of time. This is what it means to keep a diary, of course, which is tied to the passage of days. But time, for Pepys, comes in many forms—­among which are the highly public ways that he positioned himself in the world. Among the most relentless metronomes of Pepys’s diary (in the general absence of actual pendulum timepieces)41 is his tallying of his belongings: of his cash value, the number of his servants, the chief of his possessions, his house, his wife. Pepys casts his accounts regularly (annually on the new year, and frequently as often as monthly) as a way of gauging how well he was making his way in the world. This is time as progress—­and it governs how Pepys thinks of himself, even in times of crisis. London is burning, and Pepys is of course concerned for his friends—­but he is also wondering about what this will mean for his standing (will he continue to be able to keep a maid of quality?) and in a quiet hour he steals off with Sir William Penn to bury their wine and a large Parmesan cheese. Pepys, that is, was comfortable thinking about himself primarily against the backdrop of the things he socked away. Indeed, among the most elaborated items in his will were the directions for the disposition of his library, including its “completion . . . according to the Scheme delivered to him for that purpose”—­thus strikingly realizing Jean Baudrillard’s claim that the completion of the collection would “basically signal the death of the subject.”42 Codicils to Pepys’s will expressed his earnest, elaborated “will and desire” that that the library be “preserve[d] . . . intire in one body,” and in its fully elaborated, precisely ordered final shape.43 This is one way that time is signaled outwardly; the things Pepys has collected offer a chain of moments to the eye, or, an “intire . . . body” of regular accumulation. The library, like the rest of his possessions, offers a regular accumulation, signaling the regular progress and fit closure of a full and active life. Pepys, however, also recognized inward vectors to time, private

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anniversaries ritually performed and reperformed, and which had to do with the preservation of a different body altogether, and not altogether “intire.” Pepys’s diary, begun in 1660, reverts to an operation. On March 26, 1658, Pepys underwent a rudimentary lithotomy to remove a urinary calculus from his bladder.44 His diary begins with a return to this moment, a return strong enough that it suggests the ghost of a trauma, first blessing God that he was “in very good health, without any sense of my old pain but upon taking of cold.”45 It is only then that Pepys remarks on the state of things as they are, indicating his own relationship in space and his relationships to other people: his address (Axe yard) and the state of his small family (his wife and his “servant Jane”). Stuart Sherman, in his brilliant reading of the vectors of time in the diary, notes that Pepys starts by linking chronos to kairos, homogenous clock time to an experience of time as a series of moments charged with irreducible significance. These two models of time, which find an important parallel in the phenomenological distinction between space and place (see Exhibit 15), compete over the flow of experience. The diary proper, after Pepys’s paragraph-­long prolegomena, begins “kairotically overdetermined”: January 1, 1659/60, Pepys notes, is “Lord’s Day,” thereby linking the regular rolling of days and years with a Messianic moment.46 Pride of place, however, goes not to the communal but to the personal ordinates of time, to the memory of the cutting of the stone—­the “old pain,” which is now void. The general absence of pain is in this sense the occasion for beginning the journal, and is its conceptual frame; this absence is the object around which his calendar of years gravitates and collects. And it links, therefore, even the condition of outward experience, that is, experience of time of an objective sort, to a general absence of difference, to being “without any sense of my old pain.” Put differently, the excuse for the regular rolling of the days of the diary is the absence of an overriding embodiment.47 Time pools around the operation; in the way that trauma is signaled by repetition, March 26 would become for Pepys a regularly marked anniversary. While days like January 30, commemorating the regicide, and May 29, remembering the king’s birthday and the anniversary of the Restoration, were rapidly becoming memorialized as part of a state apparatus, March 26 was Pepys’s annual celebration of his own personal delivery.48 It became an opportunity to mark his “deliverance,” which he “did resolve . . . to keep . . . a festival.”49 As conditions allowed, Pepys organized reenactments of the conditions of his surgery, inviting the principal actors in the event to an annual feast. It is unclear how far Pepys went in his reconstructions; certainly he did not go

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so far as to act out his surgery, trussed up and waiting for the knife, but he probably did proceed so far as to remember the event and relive it in anecdotes and narratives. We know in any case that Pepys’s commemorative feasts were not unique; at least one other lithotomy survivor is known to have organized similar commemorative celebrations.50 The central exhibit of Pepys’s celebration was his stone. Pepys kept it as a visible souvenir of a series of intimately experienced events that, prior to his being cut, had no visible content. On August 27, 1664, six years after the operation, he visited a case maker in St. Paul’s Square to commission a small, custom-­fit box or chest. What he came to call his “Stone-­case” cost twenty-­ four shillings, “a great deal of money.” It was, however, worth the expense, Pepys notes, to “have it to my mind”—­“it is well done, and pleases me.”51 Claire Tomalin, Pepys’s most recent biographer, sees episodes such Pepys’s interest in his stone as evidence of the “classifying” mind of an orderly and curious fellow of the Royal Society.52 (She expresses roughly the same opinion about his library.) She sees Pepys’s interest in human anatomy—­especially his own—­as part of broader shifts in medical research, including the anatomical dissections and demonstrations carried out under the auspices of the Royal Society and the College of Surgeons. The stone is in this sense part of a medical discourse, which is to say, “the body,” and Pepys understands it this way; he went to at least one anatomical lecture on the urinary system, prompted by a curiosity about the structure of his own interior. On February 27, 1662, as the date of his stone feast was approaching, Pepys attended the lecture of Christopher Tearne on the structure of the “Kidnys, Ureters, and yard.” Addressing the company in the Theatre of Chyrurgeons Hall, “being all invited thither and promised to dine there,” Tearne was flanked by the “Maister and Company, in a very handsome manner,” which, Pepys laconically notes, “was very fine.” This is the sort of lecture any fellow of the Royal Society might be invited to join, and belongs possibly therefore in a category with Pepys’s intense interest in Hooke’s Micrographia and Boyle’s pneumatic experiments.53 It articulates an interest in the body as a medical specimen—­a universal thing, discussed and even constructed in public. But Pepys did not stop there. Evidently unsatisfied by the public version of things, Pepys returned later in the evening with the friends of Dr. Charles Scarburgh, who led them into “a private room,” where “there was the Kidneys, Ureters, yard, stones and seminary vessels.” Here was a performance of a very different sort, though over the same medical specimens. Here there seems to have been an opportunity of interaction, with both the objects on display and

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the expert curator. Not only was Pepys able to touch the body, “Dr. Scarborough upon my desire and the company’s, did show very clearly the manner of the disease of the stone and the cutting and all other Questions that I could think of.”54 The whole structure of the experience rediscovers a kind of interior journey: from public “theater” to “private room,” from prepared lecture to individual questions and answers. And it is clearly driven by Pepys’s desire to learn something about his own dark interior, his intention turned inward. On the pivot point of the stone, Pepys could look into the excavated abdominal cavity of another man and see his own progress from pain to health, the private journey to wholeness that precedes and structures the diary. Hall, theater, room, body, stone: interiority is put on display for the consumption of the eye—­as the relations understood to exist “out there” are discovered or invented to be isomorphic with sensations experienced “in here.”55 And it is of course because of episodes like these—­of his candid curiosity about his own body—­that Pepys is commonly remarked as being among “the first professional men we can know intimately.”56 The progress from kidney to ureter to bladder turns up again in the personal progress that Pepys records in his “Present Ill State of My Health,” written some fifteen years later. Pepys describes epochs of his life in this way: I remember not my life without the pain of the stone in the kidneys (even of the making of bloody water upon any extraordinary motion) till I was about 20 years of age, when upon drinking an extraordinary quantity of conduit water out of Aristotle’s well near Cambridge (where some scholars of us were for refreshment in a hot summer’s day walked), the weight of the said water carried after some days’ pain the stone out of the kidneys more sensibly through the urater into the my [sic] bladder, from which moment I lived under a constant succession of fits of stone in the bladder till I was about 26 years of age when the pain growing insupportable I was delivered both of it and the stone by cutting and continued free from both (by God’s blessing) to this day, more than what may be imputed to it of the aptness which I still retain to cold and wind and the pain attending the same in those parts.57 This is a self-­anatomy every bit on the order of Hay’s description of his “case” (Exhibit 15). In “surveying” “the present Ill State of [his] Health,” Pepys records, in a single, heavily weighted sentence, the coordinates of pain and

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memory that find their material counterweight in the mineral object cut from his body. His account organizes pure and irreducible feels of pain into three successive epochs of a stone: an epoch of the stone in the kidneys, an epoch of the stone in the bladder, and a final epoch of the stone having been evacuated from the body altogether. And just as time in general is marked through metaphors of movement—­time passes us or we move in time—­so too Pepys liquidates a physical journey into a metaphorical one. He begins with his own journey to Aristotle’s well, and the primally active “making . . . of water,” but his account quickly turns to a series of passive constructions, the autotelic journey of the stone, “carried” by the “weight” of water from the well. From an outward-­ directed bodily journey, the account develops toward an “aptness,” the particularity of embodiment to produce sensations of one sort rather than another. Pepys has first produced the possibility of a series of metaphors, including the metaphor of time as a journey, in order to map it back on his own embodied experience, giving it discursive shape. The stone, falling like the weight of a primitive clock, produces embodied time out of the telling of years. Pepys is caught in a classic bind. “Acts of consciousness are not only conscious of something,” Polanyi notes; they are “conscious from certain things which include our body.” Leave those things alone, and they facilitate awareness—­which is, in its very nature, embodied, though embodiment plays no explicitly reportable part of the conscious experience itself. Remove those same things and the spell of indwelling is broken; “switching attention to the parts,” Polanyi concludes, “turn[s] the parts into external objects without functional meaning.”58 Pepys’s task is to learn to dwell in his own body—­a body marked by a particular kind of pain—­in a way that can be communicated to others and to himself. This task can be felt in a small way in the swiveling of Pepys’s syntax from an outward account of implicitly embodied activity to an inward account of the body’s parts in relation to one another. His hesitation about the possession of his own invisible organs—­“the my bladder”—­in part signifies the embattled ownership of those parts of his body that fall equally under his own subjective memory of pain and the “objective” journey of the stone: body and embodiment. Pepys’s hesitation—­ the stone/my stone—­ compactly voices the reciprocal jostlings of embodied experience with medical body, unspeakable difference with discourse. Put differently, Pepys has made his own experience external in order to learn to dwell in it with a difference; the stone is what makes it possible to dwell in the digestive tract of the cadaver he witnesses on the table. He puts a fragment of his own body into a case; he wraps the stone in text; he encases it.

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It is barely possible that Pepys’s stone ended up in a collection of calculi owned at one time by John Hunter, but it was his brother William who was more interested in body stones. At the time of his death in 1783, William Hunter had one of the most extensive collections of bladder and kidney calculi in England. The Scottish physician was best known for his pioneering obstetric research, a “pioneer,” writes Michael McKeon, in the “implacable exploration of the female interior: the lying-­in chamber, the womb, the secret privacy of mind and body.”59 But even when Hunter published his magnum opus, the Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (see Exhibit 18), he had been collecting pathological human calculi of all sorts for at least fifteen years.60 He left at his death something on the order of a hundred urinary calculi alone, arranged in strata according to their chemical composition.61 Among these is specimen 53.55, a single specimen composed of two stones, described by a young archivist later tasked with making sense of Hunter’s collection. 53.55. Uric Acid Calculi. Two in One Bladder Two calculi, cut; probably from the same case. Mounted together in a small show case. The one is a flattened oval stone about the size of a pigeon’s egg; the other is about the size of a goose’s egg, in shape somewhat flattened, and in profile of the broadest surface oval, with a deep bay in either side, which corresponds in size with the small stone. Probably the small stone lay sometimes on the one side of the large, sometimes on the other. They are of the same composition—­uric acid with a trace of calcium oxalate.62 Taken as a genre, the catalogue does the basic work of the empiricist’s museum (see Exhibits 6–7) or Locke’s indices (Exhibit 1). Each of the specimens in Hunter’s collection is unique, like a snowflake; the description presents the typical struggle of the specimen text: at once to capture what makes specimen 53.55 representative (its composition of uric acid, its sizes), while retaining enough particularities to set it apart from others (its doubleness, the shapes). But this is an especially difficult proposition in this case—­in the case of these two unique stones, which seem to call out for a narrative explanation. The description indulges itself in a bare supposition: they are “probably” from the same patient, the small one “probably” lay sometimes on one side of the large, sometimes on the other. But this interest, in the end, will ultimately be subsumed under an accurate description of the object’s details. The pain implied in this obscure spooning must have been unbearable—­but it is in any case

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unspeakable; the catalogue merely records them as specimens in an attempt toward a system of the nature of pathological human calculi. Speaking specifically of the problem of the uneasy relationship between cadavers and history, Lorna Clymer proposes that “the material nature of human remains extinguishes a body’s meaning unless narrative encases a corpse.”63 Encasement is the critical thing; in order to emerge into meaning, the kind of meaning that can be pieced into a conceptual understanding of the world, the stone must be wrapped in successive layers of text, “encased” in “narrative.” Hunter hoped that these stones would someday form the material foundation for a system of pathological concretions. This is one kind of narrative, but it is also clear that they lend themselves to a different vector of narrative altogether: the site of a ritual inwardness. These can be heard in the two halves of the first, complex sentence of the catalogue’s description: “Two calculi, cut; probably from the same case. Mounted together in a small show case.” Meeting around these stones are two etymological strands, two different metaphorical valences of “case,” one of which points to the developing discourse of the body, the other clinging to an effort to reproduce embodiment. “Case” as a “showcase” descends from “capere,” to grasp or to take hold (Latin “capsa”—­a container). This is a “case” in the sense of enwrapping something with the hand, grasping or apprehending it, with the special sense of a reliquary. This is the primary meaning of Pepys “stone case” costing twenty-­four shillings, or the custom cases for his books, and so on. “Case” as a “medical case” has, however, a completely different etymology; it descends from the Latin for “an occurrence or happening”; “case” in this sense is just how things fall out, as in “the world is all that is the case.” This is what Hay means when he refers to his stone as a condition, as “My case.” The stones in Hunter’s collection have, in other words, passed from one case to another and back again, from a crafted box designed to recover the special inward significance of the object in its embodiment, to a body of medical discourse, differently enwrapping it as part of a case history, to a medical display, and so forth. The showcase that contains these stones is therefore not simply a medical technology designed to teach us something about stones when placed together but the echo of the body that at one time cradled them. From body to box, case to case, Pepys’s stone has likewise undertaken a translation from blind embayment in the body to surrogate embayment in a container. What the box opens up is the possibility that the diary itself, the book making its own pilgrimage regularly to the stone, emerges as a property of that continual inwardness, as, in David Miller’s words, a “property,” or one of its “effects.”64 From the stone’s voyage to his own, he has created a

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little machine of interiority; by introducing the stone into the diary, he has produced a gadget for reflecting on his own inwardness. For Pepys’s interiority, in the end, does not emerge from the squat, horrible little thing cut from his body. How could it? Rather, it emerges in the intersection between medical discourse and embodied excess: discursive knowledge about his interior enwrapping the primally personal experience of the stone’s blind journey. The “danger” of a lithotomy, John Evelyn in his own diary remarks, is of the “Wounds never closing,”65 but Pepys’s story tells us that this is its promise. The stone centers a private vector of time, anchoring the rituals and narratives of inwardness that surround it, not the least of which was Pepys’s wonderfully intimate diary: a “leather-­bound volume (itself usually concealed within a desk drawer) containing the self-­sequestering orthography of shorthand.”66 It is finally worth mentioning that Pepys only thought he was a lithotomy survivor; his death almost certainly resulted from surgical complications, though forty-­five years intervened.67 At least one twentieth-­century physician speculates that Pepys was sterilized by the operation, so he may have had less for which to be grateful than he believed.68 What is more, while Pepys “blessed . . . God” every year for “continu[ing] free” of the stone, he was in fact carrying seven additional stones in his left kidney when he died. Pepys’s “body,” the physician notes at the autopsy, “was very much emaciated”; “the right kidney was of a larger size than ordinary, very sound and well colourd.” But “the left, which had scarce the form of a kidney, adhaered so firmly to the hypochondrion and psoas muscle . . . that it could not be separated without the knife. Upon opening it . . . a large stone weighing an ounce and a half was found in the pelvis, and several others, viz., vi, weighing about three ounces, were so firmly fastend to the kidney that most of the glandulous substance seemd to be petrified.”69 The report is signed by the physician who led the autopsy; this was Hans Sloane, the future founder of the British Museum, who would, roughly half a century later, receive Hay’s bladder stone into his collection. A physician and virtuoso like Hunter, and a leading member of the Royal Society (like Pepys), he too composed a collection of human calculi, possibly for the purposes of publishing a study.70 What did he think when he gazed upon Pepys’s impacted kidney? The autopsy itself signals that Sloane knew of Pepys’s lithotomy. Had he also seen Pepys’s stone, nestled in its little custom case? What were his thoughts when he removed its companions from Pepys’s body—­and counted, weighed, and catalogued them? Perhaps there was a moment when Sloane, after separating the stones from Pepys’s kidneys, thought of keeping them. Were they interred with Pepys, somewhere nebulously beneath the stones of St. Olave Hart Street? Or might they have been removed

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into a medical collection? Had Sloane kept them, would he have labeled them as stones taken from the secretary of the Admiralty or as unusually impacted kidney stones? Would they have been wrapped in an embodied or a medical narrative?71

Exhibit 17. An Ampulla of the Blood of Thomas Becket John Evelyn (1620–1706) is the contemporary diarist with whom Samuel Pepys is most often compared, and while Evelyn and Pepys had already shared a number of letters on official matters (including a long letter from Evelyn about library design), Evelyn’s first mention of Pepys in his diary is through the mediation of Pepys’s stone. On June 10, 1669, tantalizingly close to Pepys’s last entry,72 Evelyn records “carry[ing] Mr. Pepys to my Bro: (now exceedingly afflicted with the Stone in the bladder) who himselfe had been successfully cut; & carried the Stone (which was as big as a tenis-­ball) to shew him, and encourage his resolution to go thro the operation.”73 Evelyn knew about lithotomies as a medical matter; curious about medical practices, he went out of his way to see them while on tour on the Continent. While in Paris, between excursions to a statue garden and the collection of an Italian sculptor, Evelyn visited the surgical theater at the “Hospital of the Charitie.”74 He witnessed no fewer than five operations, recording among other things the “extraordinary patience” and “greate joy” of a “little Child” of “8 or 9 yeares age” upon being successfully cut and closed. He marked the “attendant Frier” taking note of the “shape, weight &c of the stone” and entering it “in a booke.” Like Pepys, then, Evelyn knew about stones, was even, like Pepys, present at a lithotomy. But because Evelyn was merely a spectator, rather than the subject of the surgical procedure, he clearly knows the stone differently. He knows it on the order of a medical procedure, the voyage inward into another body, rather than his own; he knows it (in other words) as a question of anatomy rather than self-­anatomy. Indeed, Evelyn would later apply to Pepys’s stone something like the record-­keeping practices that he observed in Paris. As the friar encased the mute object in text, recording its size and weight, so too does Evelyn. What we have in Evelyn’s diary is a little, fragmented version of the kind of remarks that wound up in the register of the Hôpital de la Charité: Pepys’s stone was “as big as a tenis-­ball.” Evelyn, like many of his compatriots, brought back more from the Grand Tour of Europe than a way of recording medical cases. He also returned with a reverence for antiquities and curiosities, and a set of strategies for their

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20. A twelfth-­century ampulla from Canterbury, inscribed on the reverse “optim egror medic fit toma bonor” (Thomas is the best doctor for the worthy sick). R.6485 © Trustees of the British Museum.

organization and display. One historically important mode of display, which rises in this case to a kind of mysticism, concerns Evelyn’s relationship to Pepys’s stone. Evelyn records “carry[ing]” Pepys, who “carried” his stone, to visit his brother. This is not merely to show his brother a visual example of what he carries within him. He carries Pepys with the stone to display an example of wholeness, someone restored by the miracle of the modern lithotomy. It is the sign of Evelyn’s great expectations for the efficacy of this combination, the stone paired with the person it saved, that Evelyn expects carrying it to his brother to prompt the sort of healing work that might have been expected from the fragment of a saint. In this sense, Evelyn’s diary entry

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echoes a much older politics of display, for by “carrying” Pepys (who “carries” his stone) “across” to see his brother, Evelyn effects a certain kind of translation, in the technical sense of the “carrying across” of a relic from one See to another.75 The metaphor is here put to active work; not just the stone, but something else is meant to be carried across, and not only across the Thames but across ineffable realms of real and ideal. Translation, like metaphor, is a link between body and idea and back again, a form of magic. For the fragment stands in a semimystical, synecdotal relationship with the memory it records, with, in Samuel Pepys’s instance, the body in pain it recalls, and the deliverance it witnesses. And it is worth pausing here to notice something else. We know from this episode that Pepys continued to own his stone, and to make the private episode of his own lithotomy publicly known, even to a relatively new friend like John Evelyn. The techniques of public display, especially public display of objects with personal resonance, were not developed whole by men like Evelyn and Pepys. They are partly borrowed from the storage and display practices of Renaissance and early modern England, especially in the display of relics. Discussing affinities between the reliquary at Canterbury and the collection belonging to the seventeenth-­century scholar John Bargrave, Stephen Bann notes that the “convention of display . . . creates a dynamic link between two very different phenomena: religious iconography and the  .  .  . cabinet of curiosities.”76 As Bann has it, “religion constitutes the return of the repressed for the regime of ‘curiosity’” (just as “curiosity,” he continues, is the repressed impulse for the “regime of science”); what we might recognize as structures of religious experience turn up quite naturally among the collections of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, because those collections lean against earlier patterns in the arrangements of things pioneered in religious institutions. In this sense, as Bann argues, the cabinet of curiosities took the place of church collections of relics and other treasures. Private collectors adapted techniques learned from the display of relics to their own collections, introducing practices developed around relics into their own cabinets.77 From mystical body to medical body: techniques of arrangement continually lean against conventions inherited from an older episteme, especially in such instances in which objects resonant in a prior regime (a fragment of human remains, for example) are perforce shifted to modern cases, or new objects are restaged in old ones. This restaging is quite literally true in Bargrave’s case. Bargrave, the canon of Canterbury, kept his cabinet of curiosities, lodged (suggestively) in an old “organ case,” in his study at the cathedral.78 More than one virtuoso made the

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journey to Canterbury to see Bargrave’s collection; Evelyn was among them. He records in his diary a tantalizingly short entry: “To Canterbury,” it reads; “visited Dr. Bargrave my old fellow Travelor in Italy & greate Virtuoso.”79 Evelyn wasn’t making a pilgrimage—­not exactly. He was passing from Chatham to Dover, which was already a longish journey, and Canterbury was on the way. But he seems to have spent a day in the company of his “fellow Travelor,” becoming acquainted with his collection. Bargrave, Bann ventures, “must have conducted himself as a virtuoso,” which is to say, “done the honors of his collection to his distinguished visitor”; this would mean conducting Evelyn to the cabinet and handling its contents, considering them and telling their stories each in their turn. Individually, all Bargrave’s objects are ordinary, even slightly abject debris: a heart-­shaped stone from an Arundel obelisk, a rock crystal from the Alps, a Frenchman’s finger, a dried chameleon. None of them signifies on its own; they are “signs . . . to indicate where [he] had been,” objects that “are supplemented by a narrative discourse.”80 Bargrave was, Bann argues, therefore participating in a more general impulse toward restoration, storing up of relics of himself—­and the events, prospects, and sites he visited (among which were not a few cathedrals with their tours of relics) in a general project of reconstruction and retrospective wholeness.81 The style was digressive—­the special form of the virtuoso, reminiscent of Addison in his cabinet of medals, or, what is more to the point, of his essay-­stroll through Westminster Abbey (see Exhibits 13 and 14). But if Evelyn didn’t think of his visit to Canterbury as a pilgrimage, exactly, many other visitors did. Canterbury was of course the site of the shrine of Thomas Becket, which once contained his bones, and while the shrine itself had been destroyed in an act of iconoclastic enthusiasm, other rituals stood in its place. The power of the relic, at least as far as English voyagers to the Continent were concerned, had little to do with the object itself; Pepys, Bargrave, and Evelyn were relatively uninterested in religious mysticism, except as part of an emerging project of comparative mythology. Evelyn himself saw what he believed was Becket’s head in the crypt of St. Peter’s Basilica, and while he considered the event remarkable enough to bother jotting it down, he spent little time reflecting on it, far less expecting the head to work miracles.82 On the contrary, for virtuoso visitors to the rituals of mainland Catholicism, the interest in relics was attached to the techniques of display they centered. These techniques could moreover be witnessed in Canterbury Cathedral itself. The cathedral had been altered over the years, altered to handle crowds of pilgrims and to organize their visits into a series of framed prospects and devotional views.83 A pilgrim,

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visiting Becket’s shrine, would be isolated from the institutional work of the church;84 visitors were steered, instead, along a carefully paced tour. Walls had been thrown up and columns taken down to make visible the site where Becket “made his stand”; chapels were emptied out to make room for Becket’s shirt and drawers of haircloth; cabinets were built in to display fragments of his skull encased in silver, his handkerchief clotted with blood.85 The cathedral had, in other words, been converted into a museum, all with the single purpose of memorializing the martyred saint who had lived and died there. This was, however, a museum of a special kind, arranged towards a significant end. The most striking thing, what “seems to have impressed every pilgrim,” was the “long succession of ascents,” by which “‘the church seemed,’ as they said, ‘to be piled on church,’ and ‘a new temple entered as soon as the first was ended.’”86 The ritual tour, accompanied by a running narrative, led ultimately to the shrine itself—­the worn paving marking the precise point of the tour’s greatest energy. This spot framed the tour’s central display. “Before them,” writes Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, rose the Shrine, secure with its strong iron rails. . . . The lower part of the Shrine was of stone, supported on arches and between these arches the sick and lame pilgrims were allowed to ensconce themselves, rubbing their rheumatic backs or diseased legs and arms against the marble which brought them into the nearest contact with the wonderworking body within. The Shrine, properly so called, rested on these arches, and was at first invisible. It was concealed by a wooden canopy, . . . painted outside with sacred pictures, suspended from the roof; at a given signal this canopy was drawn up by ropes, and the Shrine then appeared blazing with gold and jewels; the wooden sides were plated with gold and damasked with gold wire; cramped together on this gold ground were innumerable jewels, pearls, sapphires, balassas, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, and also, “in the midst of the gold,” rings, or cameos, of sculptured agates, cornelians, and onyx stones.87 “The body of the Saint,” Stanley continues, was, however, “not to be seen.” Denied sight of the relics themselves, the pilgrim would instead hear a narration of the precious objects encrusting the shrine, many of which were gifts, and some of which had their own miraculous histories or properties.88 All of this machinery—­blocking, props, scenery—­is part of what Sarah Blick has

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compellingly called “stage managing the cult,” a series of blinds, layers, gestures, performances, and framed presentations meant at once “to protect and enhance the moment of viewing the actual shrine.”89 Once the reliquary was removed from view, the visitor’s denouement was swift. Pilgrims were ushered quickly down a different, short flight of stairs, which let out into Mercery Lane. Here were offered for sale ampules of the martyr’s blood, badges, various souvenirs and “objects of ornament or devotion” meant to commemorate the visit. Thus would pilgrims exit through the gift shop. This crossing of private experience with public space, cathexis with cathedral, hinges upon the exchange of relics and votives. From the beginning, argues Kim Bowes, relics were the hot points where public ritual and private virtue crossed, where closet devotions overlapped with staged beliefs.90 Relics condensed public sentiments, discourses as diverse as those on piety, medicine, law, and property. Some of these aspects of the relic’s social function are visible in the ampullae of blood that were purchased on the way out of Canterbury Cathedral; these ampullae, which came in many forms, commonly present an image of the saint whose blood they contain, stamped with the regalia of his authority, sometimes with angels descending, or flanked by figures of the knights who perpetrated his martyrdom. This was however only half of the exchange of objects that the shrine afforded. Visitors purchased fragments of the saint to take away, ampullae of his blood (diluted to a virtually homeopathic tincture); but they left gifts of their own, placing them on or near the shrine itself. The range of votives included objects of immense pecuniary value, some of which were affixed permanently to the shrine or its cover. But by far the largest portion of votives were minor curiosities worthless in any other context, gifts with a more personal vector—­worms extracted from the body, cherry stones, fish bones, bodily excrescences, crutches, shackles, and thousands of wax images of diseased limbs and organs. In her study of votives at Canterbury and elsewhere, Sarah Blick calls this exchange “communication,” noting that it is sometimes communication of the most irreducibly personal sort—­“vivid, tactile experiences” linking embodied awareness with divinity. Pilgrims “ensconced themselves” within and under the shrine, in openings and niches, winding themselves into the architecture they came to witness.91 And they made their sufferings material. Gifts even of the most generic sort, many of which could be purchased just outside the cathedral, were charged with personal significance; they were saturated with the idiolocal, personally inward and embodied experiences of deformity, or of suffering and wholeness. To be quite clear, not every gift

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was related to sickness, but Canterbury was especially overrepresented by pilgrims with medical ailments; as the ampullae of Becket’s blood announce, St. Thomas was the “best doctor for the worthy sick,” and it was for illness that people especially sought him out.92 It is worth remembering, at this point, how the metaphor of the mind as collection made its way into Restoration and eighteenth-­century Britain. Thomas Aquinas was comfortable comparing the mind to an architectural space not unlike a church; memory was its “treasury,” that is, the space where relics might be kept.93 This is an ultimately Aristotelean figure that made itself at home among the schoolmen, and from thence into Restoration and eighteenth-­century minds like Evelyn’s and Bargrave’s.94 Evelyn was amenable to the general model of thinking about mentation through architectural figures; he produced a translation of The Golden Book of St. Chrysostom, for instance, which includes a lengthy allegory of the mind as a city.95 But the general upshifting of a generic place, like a “treasury” or a “cathedral” as an image for a depopulated mind-­space, is not quite what is going on in the case of Canterbury Cathedral. Canterbury Cathedral is clearly a public space, and, as a space, it “lends itself to predefined predications, uses, and interpretations”—­ including the rigorous stage management of Becket’s martyrdom. It is moreover a site of religious learning, church government, pilgrimage, and so on, and is in this sense more or less generic. But the experiences of pilgrims to the cathedral clearly encounter it along a personal vector, experiencing it as a profound reflection of their own ailments, thoughts, and concerns. In this sense, the cathedral is continually a “place,” differently noted and experienced by each of its visitors. One always, Edward Casey argues, relies on one’s own body “as the primary agent” in a place; we approach places “from the body out.”96 The “peculiarity” of any place, Casey continues, “calls . . . for the imaginative constitution of terms respecting its idiolocality”: that is, for the particular rearrangement of parts based on personal experience.97 Place “is more an event than a thing”; it is the pooling of time and space according to the peculiarities of one’s own embodied experience. For each of its pilgrims, then, Canterbury stands less as a metaphor of mind than as the structural condition of certain kinds of awareness; it affords an event of inwardness, different for each of its visitors, though similar in its overall contours. Thus could Canterbury Cathedral, by a strategic layout of walls, walks, vistas, and objects, condense place and time into something registered as personal by each of its visitors, pilgrim and virtuoso alike. It was a machine for generating effects of inwardness. It is at the shrine, at the heart of Canterbury’s many machinations, after

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the relentless tour inward, that pilgrims confronted and made explicit their own deformities, airing out the inward qualia of pain. As the souvenir effects a “transformation of exterior into interior,” moving history into private time, so each votive makes material the inward sensations of disease or deformity, shifting private experience into public space.98 The overall contours of this reciprocity should, I hope, appear familiar by now; they are suggestive, for instance, of Pepys’s experience at the Royal College of Surgeons (see Exhibit 16). Pepys was of course suffered to examine the opened body of a corpse, whereas pilgrims to Canterbury were denied viewing the body itself. But the architectural structure of the experience is similar; a positive sensation of inwardness is an effect of an arrangement in space. So, too, Bargrave’s collection contains many of the same kinds of objects that would not have been out of place in a shrine or reliquary—­gemstones, precious metals, and even an assortment of body parts. But it also reproduces something of the private voyage that the shrine had previously institutionalized.99 Not only the objects, but the context seems crucial. Bargrave’s collection was kept in his office, in a large case; in this space lies a series of further enclosures, including some objects that are themselves containers: a “nun’s work purse,” a leather bag, some knitted sacculi, and so on, all rarities packed within curiosities collected on Bargrave’s interregnum tour through Italy and the southern European continent. Finally, Pepys’s stone case (like Bargrave’s cabinet) stands in direct, nearly point-­for-­point equivalence with Becket’s reliquary and shrine. Pepys’s case was (probably) not gold—­though William Hay’s was—­but it was a little shrine, secreted away and only shown as part of a performance. Pepys, like the prior at Canterbury, is careful to indicate the shrine’s precise, exorbitant value. The carefully crafted, elegant little case is meant to be a “vehicle and vector of the power of [the] object,” the center of a ritual of inwardness that can be shared with others.100 Like Becket’s shrine, Pepys’s case affects a gathering of a community of sufferers around the central ritual of revelation it reveals. It is not therefore that Evelyn had hoped that Pepys’s stone might, relic-­like, heal his brother. But this particular object is nevertheless as it were a relic of Pepys’s delivery; it supports a way of speaking about things and imagining embodied space and time. It offers the ability to reflect on inwardness, to make its dimensions public, and vice versa. The power of this object, condensing a medical discourse on “the body,” appearing at the center of a massive industry of life and death, activates a form of condensation similar to the charged effect of the shrine. The stone remembers Pepys’s personal delivery, the weight of natural science

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displayed in and through his particular case; Evelyn hoped to translate the trick to his brother as well. Though seventeenth-­and eighteenth-­ century England countenanced few official relics, numerous other charged objects centered similar ritual processes. Underneath Westminster Abbey were the effigies of the monarchs of England, visits to which formed a ritual halfway between private entertainment and nationalist devotion. The clothes and insignia of Charles I—­the so-­called martyr-­king—­were especially charged objects, rising to the status of relics among his followers. The king himself provided the pattern, argues Patricia Fumerton, for the taking up of relics as objects of personal concern; his execution witnessed the distribution of his blood and hair as treasured remnants, which turn up in different ways in an enameled locket, a blood-­dyed book cover, and numerous miniatures worked in needlepoint from his hair.101 Each piece of the king, or each fragment of any other commemorated figure, “held for its possessor a whole story,” a story that crossed a public event with a private experience.102 So, as it is said, England countenanced few official relics, but then there is Milton’s deathbed (Exhibit 2)—­or his hair and fragments of his bone103—­Clarissa’s heart,104 the corpse of Martin van Butchell’s wife (see Exhibit 20), copies of Yorick’s snuffbox,105 murderabilia (see Exhibit 28), virtually anything from Charles I including medals of his disastrous war,106 bladder stones (from William Hay to Samuel Pepys, Exhibits 15 and 16), locks of hair (Exhibit 26),107 nail clippings, teeth and bones, portrait busts, not to mention miniature portraits,108 jewels, stacks of letters, charms, ribbons, garters, pet dogs: the British Enlightenment shuffled the superstitions of relic culture into the dustbin of the past, only to rediscover them elsewhere, vast realms of public concern condensed into hypercharged objects of personal devotion.

Exhibit 18. A Blue-­Bound Copy of The Mysterious Mother “Canterbury I know by heart,” Horace Walpole (1717–1797) once opined.109 The cathedral had provided a wealth of hints for the architectural ornaments of Strawberry Hill, which moreover borrowed a trick or two from Canterbury’s ritual staging of serial views. He had internalized it, such that his own house, which was, by some accounts, the first residence custom-­built to house a collection of antiquities,110 came to exhibit many of the same techniques as Canterbury Cathedral, and to produce many of the same feelings. And why wouldn’t he have, when he was so fond of relics? During the eighteenth

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21. Walpole’s personal copy of his own scarce play. A note on the front flyleaf reads “This copy is to be kept in the Beauclerc-­closet to explain Lady Di Beauclerc’s Drawings. HW.” Courtesy the Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

century, Ruth Mack notes, the word “relic” signified in two related ways. In the first, more technical sense, “relic” meant a religious object, like Becket’s bones or his diluted blood. But in the second, more popular sense, “relic” meant “an object invested with interest by reason of its antiquity or associations with the past.”111 The second sense clearly leans upon the first, not least in the techniques of display each implies; display practices for objects of curiosity clearly borrowed from the practices put in place in the arrangement and display of relice (see Exhibit 17). But in cases like Walpole’s, the distinctions between senses of the word become blurred, for Walpole was among the period’s most dedicated collectors of, in his own words, “bits of famous people,” which Strawberry Hill was designed in part to display.112 What is more, like

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Canterbury Cathedral, which was one of the first English sites of pilgrimage, Strawberry Hill became a site of considerable public interest and a popular tourist attraction. The house was arranged for touring, beginning in the large public sections, decked with art and Gothic artifacts, and proceeding through the more private areas towards a back exit into the garden. The whole affair follows the sort of trajectory that we might expect from any tour of a museum; it follows, in other words, the kind of trajectory that Canterbury Cathedral had been modified to enforce. Horace Walpole was the son of the first First Minister of Britain, a public figure from the moment of his entrance into the world. Over the course of his long and productive life, he established himself as a widely read historian of art and antiquity and a writer of backstairs memoirs; he was the author of an imposing body of personal letters and of the sensational Castle of Otranto, still widely regarded as the first Gothic novel. But in his own day, he was best known for his enormous collection of medieval antiquity, from which he wrote a number of histories, including an apology for King Richard III. At the same time that he was engaged in these various projects, he built and rebuilt his rambling, neo-­ Gothic villa in the London suburb of Twickenham; it was an ornament book for Gothic architecture and a display case for his Gothic collection. If selfhood is what is owned to oneself, it was modeled in spaces like Strawberry Hill. Constructed through public displays of removal, visible rituals of absenting from public, the mind found its proof and best models in increasingly labyrinthine, increasingly visible architectural and institutional finesses, among which the private spaces of the house (think of Locke’s cabinet or Pope’s grotto) and the published narrative were two of the most important.113 Inwardness is a “metaphor,” notes Mary Thomas Crane, “that likens the relationship between self and body to the enclosure of the body within a private . . . space”;114 interior and exterior offer concretions of the directions of awareness, perception hardened up into structure, what in the lingo of cognitive philosophy is sometimes called “cognitive architecture.”115 While the “public” would therefore seem in a naïve way to be “what remains once the element of personal embodiment has been abstracted away,” and the private self the product of the turn into inward spaces and inward reflections (whether in the closet or forms of art like the novel), what scholars like Michael McKeon continually discover is that the public provides the only meaningful stage for the continual construction of privacy in all its forms. As such, the publicity of display “both dispelled and nurtured privacy”;116 the inward turn of the public individual was staged, perforce, in public.

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Interiority is clearly a metaphor, which, because it organizes the felt site of cognition generally, oversees a host of subordinate metaphors; it is a figure for awareness of the metaphorical conditions of expression, the moment where the outward tendency of sensory experience is turned back upon its machinery.117 This paradox, the public staging of privacy, is the subject of this last exhibit. In light of the public interest in his private residence, Walpole printed at his private press a widely circulating set of instructions for visitors. This is The Description of Mr. Walpole’s Villa, which contains a list of the antiquities the house contains, along with a series of engravings capturing the house’s most important views and spectacles. The Description is arranged so that it follows the trajectory of the tour; readers would experience, in advance of their visits, the entrance, leading into the main staircase, the main stairwell, the gallery, the Tribune, and so on. All this is what is available without ever visiting the house—­just from reading the book. But just as Canterbury Cathedral reserved its most important sight, offering a blank where an object might be, so, too, Strawberry Hill’s sequence of staged views led inexorably towards an important absence. Among the multitude of images available to the public, from stairwell and gallery to bedrooms and private chambers, is one space of which no image exists. This is the so-­called Beauclerc Closet, tucked away in a Flemish tower called the Beauclerc Tower, near the virtually inaccessible northwest corner of the house.118 Moreover, in that tower was a copy of a certain blue-­bound volume; this book lay in a closed drawer in a closed desk in Walpole’s semisecret closet, which Walpole kept, in his words, “sacred,” for it was “not to be shown to the profane.”119 So, while Walpole’s Description of house and grounds provides images of the major rooms of the house and tour, while Walpole even describes the contents of the closet, no public image of that closet exists. The written description continues, but the series of engravings stops just before it reaches the Beauclerc Closet, and picks up again once it exits the house. Like Hay’s stone, which was embayed in a case, then wrapped in vellum, so too the tower was built to enclose a particular object, a scarce copy of Walpole’s only attempt at writing for the stage. The tower and the closet it contains alike take their names from the author of seven soot-­water drawings: Lady Diana Beauclerc, née Waldegrave, the on-­again, off-­again wife of Topham Beauclerc. These seven drawings are of scenes in Walpole’s Gothic drama The Mysterious Mother: A Tragedy, and they were at one time displayed in the tower. Though posterity has not been kind to it, Byron was among the play’s Romantic-­era admirers, calling it “the last tragedy in our language,”

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an encomium that matched his epithet for The Castle of Otranto: “the first romance” in English.120 Although each work is commonly recognized as “Gothic,” they were in other respects very different. The novel was the best-­ known product of Walpole’s pen, and the only one of his works to remain more or less in print over the course of his lifetime. It circulated openly and helped create and sustain a significant taste for Gothic architecture and fiction. It is about wonder—­supernatural events, ancient portraits coming to life, skeletons, and animated suits of armor—­“a nightmare juxtaposition of unrelated objects.”121 It is concerned with relations of patrilineal primogeniture; it turns on the identity of Theodore, a long-­lost heir to the throne. What is more, it is well known and often remarked to be associated with the house; the action of the novel could almost be set in Strawberry Hill, especially in its more public sections, like the gallery, and the stairwell.122 The Gothic tragedy, on the other hand, circulated privately, a kind of backstairs closet drama, read among circles of friends.123 It produced “curiosity”124—­mysteries sustained and forestalled—­but not wonder. It is concerned with female desire and the problems of short-­circuited matrilineal inheritance, the legacy of a countess who has exiled her son and heir. And, while Walpole’s Gothic novel organized the public spaces of Strawberry Hill, the back section of the house, proceeding from brightly lit to dimly lit, spacious to snug, enacts a narrative of a different sort.125 “Architecture, indeed,” Walpole elsewhere noted, “has in a manner two sexes: its masculine dignity can only exert its muscles in public works and at public expence; its softer beauties come better within the compass of private residence and enjoyment.”126 While the front portion of the house publicly and even bombastically puts Walpole’s Gothic historiography on display, the back part of the house organizes a procession of inwardness, toward the object of inwardness at its end. The mystery of The Mysterious Mother was heightened by the circumstances of its limited circulation. A curious eighteenth-­century reader could not simply pick up a copy of the play to see what it was about. It had been printed in 1768 in a small edition of fifty copies at Walpole’s private press. These were circulated strictly among close friends—­Lady Diana Beauclerc among them—­with a request for suggestions and advice, anticipating a corrected edition to be forthcoming. This corrected edition, however, never appeared. Following mixed reviews of the first draft, Walpole suppressed the play’s publication and worked to reacquire what copies he could.127 And so, following the tepid reviews of his friends, Walpole reimagined the kind of performance that The Mysterious Mother could produce. If it could not be

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staged, it could still be a closet drama—­the kind of drama that could be consulted in private, rather than performed onstage. Walpole therefore placed The Mysterious Mother in a desk drawer, and built a tower and closet specifically to contain it. It became, that is, a closet drama of the most perfect sort—­a play routed not just into the closet generally but into a specific closet, publicly withheld from the public stage. The critical thing is just this: people reported knowing about the play. It was advertised; it appeared in the description of his house; the difficulty of finding a print copy is attested in part by the multiple manuscript copies of the play still surviving.128 Finding a copy to satisfy their interest, however, was exceptionally difficult. Among the only known copies was the most famous of them—­the one Walpole advertised in his closet. The Mysterious Mother itself provides clues to the elaborate strategy of nonpublication Walpole ended up designing for it, for the play stretches its central riddle into an embodied relationship with space. As the play begins, the Countess of Narbonne (the mysterious mother of the title) has been publicly grieving for the past sixteen years; she confines herself mostly indoors, appearing only occasionally to do public penance through various ritual humiliations. Nobody, however—­not the clergy nor her closest advisers—­knows what she is doing penance for. This is the mystery. Her husband, it is true, died sixteen years earlier; also sixteen years ago, she exiled her son, ostensibly for an indiscretion with a chambermaid. But the connection between these events, if there is any connection, is unclear, and her penitence seems out of proportion with what might have been her grief. The question is particularly pressing because, as we might expect in a tragedy, the fate of the community hinges on discovering the “guilt” and “mysterious crime” to which she continually alludes but which she will not reveal. Something is rotten in Norbonne, a publicly secret guilt that the play promises to expose. The action of the play is therefore largely negotiated in the public commerce of the Countess’s private guilt; an intimate question of psychic interiority is aired out as the continual topic of conversation in the agora. The play produces, as its central effect, the stalled sensation of inwardness. The question, continually turning up in the marketplace, concerns what lies, in the play’s words, “within,” “behind,” “in,” or “beneath” the expressions of guilt and contrition that the Countess continually and oracularly voices; psychic trauma becomes a prepositional relationship.129 Likewise, while discussing the Aristotelean dramatic unities, Walpole notes that his play “observes unity of place,” which is “but once shifted, and that merely from the platform without the castle to the garden within it, so that a single wall is the

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sole infringement of the second law.”130 This is not quite true, but the trajectory Walpole sketches out is perfectly accurate; the scene of action progress relentlessly “inward.” Interiority, as the play imagines it, is a syntax, which is rediscovered in the setting of the drama, moving inexorably from courtyard to closet. The sense is that if you could just get into the recesses of the Countess’s castle, you would be able to know the secret that she seems to be harboring in the recesses of her mind.131 It is because of this doubleness—­the house as inhabitable space and as pattern for psychic interiority—­that when the Mysterious Mother gives voice to her secret guilt, she does it in what she calls her “closet devotions.” The most general sensation of inwardness is generally called “tension”; tension is the sensation of the body meeting some unlocalized resistance, providing one of the chief embodied experiences that may be shifted up into conceptual metaphor.132 The important thing to notice is that what is generally understood as a dualism—­inside/outside, which becomes naturally coupled with the dualisms of private/public, subject/object, mind/body—­is instead experienced as a problem.133 Walpole seems generally to have subscribed to the doctrine of the simplicity of ideas—­and therefore to the consequences that follow, such as thinking of the mind as a container and wit as the unexpected combination of ideas.134 The mind, Walpole once opined, is “like a cabinet,” its drawers stuffed with papers and scribbled notes.135 “A man of  .  .  . wit,” Walpole noted late in life, “treasures up ideas & reflections; he compares them with new occurrencies, and strikes out new lights from the Collision.”136 As with everything else in Walpole’s private correspondence, however, he means this with an irreducible slant: his thoughts on the cabinet of memory are posed in light of his own memory’s decay; his thoughts on wit are offered in light of his own mental development, his failure to find, in himself, wit as an inborn faculty. It is the tension between a clear plan and an experience of absence, or, put differently, between a transparent model and its tension with Walpole’s actual experience, that provides a working program for his own dwelling, a space of thinking where Walpole was able to find and to confirm his public, and his publicly private, self. “Never was a place so associated with the memory of one man,” said the auctioneer on the day it was being dismantled, “as Strawberry Hill is with Horace Walpole.”137 This is partly because the house stages a collection in the same way that it might stage a mind, in the same way, for instance, as Pope’s grotto (which was just down the street—­see Exhibit 8). But it is also because the house put on display Walpole in all his paradoxical reserve, in fact made him famous in part for what he withheld.

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The mysterious mother’s mysterious secret is of the kind that is particularly apt for sustaining paradox. It is what David Miller, in his study of boxes within boxes within David Copperfield, calls “a commonplace complex”;138 like the plays Walpole elsewhere names as his models (Oedipus Rex, Hamlet) the tragic secret is incest.139 Following the death of her husband in a hunting accident, the inconsolable Countess disguised herself as a chambermaid and turned to her son’s bed for comfort. This forms the inaugural trauma of the play; a moment sixteen years before the play’s action is the moment to which she, in her private prayers, continually returns in order to expunge. But even as it is about incest, The Mysterious Mother is only about incest in a roundabout sort of way. Consistently refusing to stage (even in the imaginary world of the closet drama) the strangely displaced sexual desires of its most important moments, the play instead routes its tensions into a strikingly involved language. The event that cannot be shown, and the desire (at least this desire) that has no name, turns up instead as a “mystery,” “riddle,” “untold tale,” and so on, a halting idiom of stalled progress. As Paul Baines puts it, speaking of precisely this play, “where sexual activity has become prohibited, sexual energy is displaced into language, and a sexualized potential is repeatedly discovered in diction.”140 We may push Baines’s insight; the particularly knotty form of sexual activity, which tangles the logic of the family tree, becomes rerouted in a particularly opaque language, which frustrates the semantic logic of the utterance. Walpole’s genius is to extend the local puzzle of relations into the formal engine for an affective drama, constructing, in other words, what Isaac Reed calls the drama’s “nervous, simple, pathetic language” as the effect of a mystery whose solution is incest.141 Walpole maintains this misunderstanding—­what would be a comedy of manners if it weren’t for the unmannerly cause—­for nearly five full acts, staging moment after moment of the Countess’s unaccountable behavior. Walpole’s circle of confidants lamented that he chose such a dangerous topic for a play that was (in the words of one early reader) “so interesting, and so exquisitely written.” But the difficulty of the topic also turns out to be its attraction. This same reader cautiously advances the opinion that the subject is necessary to the effect. The twin emotions that “constitute  .  .  . the very nerve of true Tragedy” seem to this reader “naturally [to] arise . . . from the subject.”142 The problem with a play like this is that its dramatic effect depends entirely upon sustaining, without resolving, the tension built into the openness of the secret. Resolution would signal a failure of the entire dramaturgical project. Of course, in the way that the repressed always returns (this return, in

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Walpole’s words, is “necessary”), this is precisely what happens. The Countess’s son comes home from sixteen years of exile and elopes with the fifteen-­year-­old daughter he did not know he had. In fact, the son seems to be attracted to her precisely because she reminds him of himself—­his secret daughter and sister as his own longed-­for self-­object. Inevitably, then, the secret gets out. The secret, in fact, is no longer a secret but becomes just public knowledge; the publicly secret “guilt” that sustains the inaction of the play collapses, and with it the illusion of tortured interiority that the riddles had helped to construct. Put differently, once the secret is made public, rather than being kept publicly secret, the mother is no longer mysterious. She passes from an object of pity and terror to, in the language of the play, a mere “execrable . . . infernal woman.”143 All this happens late in act 5, because, once the riddle is solved, the play can’t end itself quickly enough. A drama that begins as a high tragedy of classical pitch, an “entertainment” and a “pleasure,” becomes retrospectively only the record, throughout, of a taboo infidelity sixteen years earlier in the play’s own prehistory. It is in fact “for this reason,” Walpole writes, “I suppressed the story till the last scene.”144 Withholding the ending—­forestalling the secret—­is the play’s only dramatic resource. What Walpole calls the “necessar[y] denouement” consists of barely one-­and-­a-­half very short scenes.145 It is not the long unknotting of action—­the whole play, in a sense, is such a long unknotting—­ but the quick wrapping-­up of affairs so that everyone can get out of Narbonne and away from the incest with which all have become both implicated and utterly, existentially weary. The experience of reading The Mysterious Mother seems, historically, to have mirrored the experience of the characters of the play themselves: intense curiosity, which is to say, attention inward, followed by swift revulsion. One of the few copies of the play that Walpole was unable to recover was one that made its way into the queen’s private library; it was here that Frances Burney, who had been seeking a copy for some time, found it and organized a reading with a few close friends. The play, as she describes it, at least initially sustains the curiosity that caused her to seek it out in the first place. “The opening of the play,” she writes, “contains a description of superstitious fear, extremely well, and feelingly, and naturally depicted: it begins, too, in an uncommon style, promising of interest and novelty.” After arriving at the last scene, however, she records that she “felt a sort of indignant aversion rise fast and warm in my mind, against the willful author of a story so horrible: all the entertainment and pleasure I had received from Mr. Walpole seemed extinguished by this lecture, which almost made me regard him as the patron of the vices he had been pleased to record.”146 Burney

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makes a characteristic leap here—­from play to playwright, from, in her words, “horrible . . . story” to “willful author.” She makes the transition from public secret to private person that the play itself seems to invite. But she also captures a response to the play that turns up repeatedly in letters and reviews—­a long drawing-­in followed by a very quick turning away. And so withholding the secret ‘til the very last scene would appear to be not quite enough; withholding the play itself was Walpole’s way of perfecting the kind of curiosity, the sustained tension, that the play was designed to produce. The Mysterious Mother, withheld, became Walpole’s mysterious play, continually withdrawn from public view. Take, for example, the advertisement to the 1788 edition of the play: “The tragedy here offered to the Public,” the Advertisement reads, “has long been known in private to a few individuals. The admiration it justly claimed, the continued praises of those who had been fortunate enough to peruse it, naturally excited curiosity.”147 The gap between the “few individuals” and the “Public” to which it is offered produces a “curiosity” analogous to Edmund’s “curiosity” over his own more personal mysterious mother; it promises the play as the object of an exclusive secret.148 One would suspect that the play would follow—­especially since the advertisement explicitly promises a tragedy “offered to the Public.” But in fact this edition, like a number of others, was aborted before it reached the press; it was never offered at all, except as a kind of hint for a play not forthcoming. This is an extreme form of a strategy Walpole used often enough that it becomes a sort of general practice at his own printing house: while a “large edition” that “can be had” might sell barely “a third,” Walpole remarks, “my editions sell for their curiosity,” that is, for the scarceness that makes them desirable.149 The publication history of The Mysterious Mother, for its first two decades at least, is perhaps therefore best described as a nonpublication history—­all advertisement, but no tragedy; all curiosity, but no satisfaction. And this is the essential work that the play came to perform; withholding the play became part of the play’s extended production, a public dramaturgy of curiosity and longing that all who voiced the desire to see the play, but found themselves unable to locate a copy, were performing without knowing it. Such a disappointed public is invited into the Gothic world of suspended animation that was Narbonne before the Countess’s secret is revealed.150 This is the substance of the play Walpole commissioned a desk in a closet in a tower to conceal. The house, therefore, ended up staging the haptic logic of the play. A visitor to Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, bearing her ticket for admission, would be led by Walpole or his housekeeper on roughly the trajectory laid out by the publicly circulated Description of Strawberry Hill; but she

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would also be led on the trajectory described by the privately withheld drama. Beginning in the public sections of Strawberry Hill, decked with large objects of public art—­history paintings, large pieces of sculpture, portraiture of public persons—­a visitor would be shown into the smaller, more dimly lit, more private rooms.151 Privacy was partly marked by a room’s contents: miniatures, sketches, nudes, prints, watercolors, soot-­water drawings, and so on. But more important was the trajectory in which rooms were positioned, which meant that even ostensibly public works of art could find use in private spaces.152 As Patricia Fumerton puts it, speaking of developments in home design generally, “one moved inwards, but inwardness could be reached only after running a gauntlet of public outerness. . . . The overall sense was of privacy exhibited in public, as if one were visiting a museum of the history of private life.”153 Rooms placed in a certain nonreversible order—­from large rooms to small ones, from grand parlors to “petit cabinets”—­end up affording (in their architectural idiom) a narrative of inwardness.154 The tour of the house ends roughly with the play—­or, at least, with Walpole’s shrine to that play, the custom-­built closet, “built on purpose,” Walpole notes, to encase the series of seven soot-­water drawings by Lady Diana Beauclerc.155 Beauclerc was one of the few people to encounter The Mysterious Mother without expressing her disgust for the secret with which it ends; these seven drawings record seven of the play’s principal moments, without ever attempting to provide a solution to the tensions they evince. Walpole’s printed Description describes the images this way: The beauty and grace of the figures and of the children are inimitable; the expression of the passions most masterly, particularly in the devotion of the countess with the porter, of Benedict in the scene with Martin, and the tenderness, despair, and resolution in the countess in the last scene; in which a new stroke of double passion in Edmund, whose right hand is clenched and ready to strike with anger, the left hand relents. In the scene of the children, some are evidently vulgar, the others children of rank; and the first child, that pretends to look down and does leer upwards, is charming. Only two scenes are represented in all the seven, and yet all are varied; and the ground in the first, by a very uncommon effect, evidently descends and rises again. These sublime drawings, the first histories she ever attempted, were all conceived and executed in a fortnight.156

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This is the longest description in Walpole’s catalogue, belying the smallness of the drawings themselves. It celebrates Beauclerc’s drawings partly to heighten the curiosity to see them: they are “inimitable,” “masterly,” “charming,” “uncommon,” and “sublime.” But, in addition, the description reproduces the kind of tension that The Mysterious Mother itself elicits. Each of Walpole’s descriptions draws on a haptic confusion, what in the body would be experienced as tension. Edmund’s “double passions” are pity and terror, the generic passions of tragedy, and these double passions are rediscovered here in a series of opposites verging on the kind of riddles The Mysterious Mother repeatedly imagines. Edmund prepares to strike even while he relents; the Countess is tender, despairing, and resolved; the ground rises while it descends; the child looks down while she leers upward; only two scenes are represented in seven drawings, yet all are varied. Each of these poses a kind of riddle of embodiment, a felt tension offering resolution as a question of the mental condition or aesthetic effect which might coordinate what would seem to be opposites: anger/compassion, down/up, falling/rising, and so on. Each moreover captures what John Locke might have called “disturbance,” that most inward of ideas; its very etymology, which refers us to a pandemonium or tumult, is captured in Walpole’s description of the first of the illustrations: the ground both rises and falls. Edmund, who in his daughter, now his wife, sees the evidence of his own sexual transgression—­the outward turned inward—­expresses it in a striking paralysis: striking and relenting in the same gesture. Expressed here are the confusions of recognition, of the mapping of a misrecognized secret back on his own intimate knowledge of himself. The mother’s secret suffering, now no longer secret at all, was his own all along. One might be inspired by reading this description to want to see the drawings, to answer the riddles the description poses; presumably a look at the drawings would explain the minor riddles or paradoxes of the Description. Quite the opposite, Walpole insists; the contorted bodies he describes in the images are only to be “explained” by an additional supplement—­the core object of the long unspooling of the tour of the house. These little embodied riddles are not completed by the images themselves; they both publicize and obscure instead a deeper principle of explanation, the central semiotic tangle of the tour. And so, also in the room is “A writing-­table of Clay’s ware, highly varnished: it is black, with blue and white ornaments in a gothic pattern, designed by Paul Sandby. In one of the drawers the play of the Mysterious Mother, to explain the drawings, bound in blue leather and gilt.”157 This copy of The Mysterious Mother, which was specially prepared for its suppression, is

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practically the last object a visitor is promised to be able to see. At the end of the house is the tower; in the tower is the closet; in the closet are the pictures that the closet tower was specially built to contain; in this room is a desk with a drawer containing in turn a blue-­bound volume containing The Mysterious Mother. It so happens that almost no one who visited Walpole’s literary shrine was allowed to see the object itself. Although several journals record seeing the drawings, almost no one ever got to consult the play. Frances Burney, while visiting Strawberry Hill, asked Walpole if she could read it; Walpole replied that she might read it only if she visited again.158 That is, even while she was visiting the house, Walpole deferred the event of the play itself. She found herself in exactly the kind of a narrative trap that Walpole developed The Mysterious Mother to produce: a long deferral toward an object that is always missed, disappointed, or misremembered, a kind of infinitely deferred arrival at what is within, behind, or beyond. Walpole himself remembers that “Miss Pope the actress,” after seeing the Beauclerc drawings, “literally shed tears, though she did not know the story.”159 Indeed, she “literally shed tears” because she did not know the story; the drawings enable a public outpouring of private emotion because they extend, without resolving, Walpole’s dramaturgy of interiority. The power of Jane Pope’s response, which is absolutely out of proportion with the small sketches occasioning it, finds instead its proportional object and cause in the architectural journey. She did not know—­or maybe, because she was an actress, she did—­that in not reading the play, she was in fact embodying it.160 As for the drawings themselves—­they have widely been agreed, taken in themselves, to be unremarkable. Writes John Anderton, in a manuscript note on his copy of the catalogue of the 1842 sale of these pictures at public auction, “They are but poor drawings and independently of the circumstances claim no attention.”161 But in context, enriched by the pride of place they hold in the house and in Walpole’s curatorial construction of himself, they are nearly without parallel. Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis, the great collector of Walpole, records a valuable lesson to himself when he ended up paying a princely sum for just one of the prints. The art dealer who had them thought they were insignificant daubs until he saw Lewis’s excitement; Lewis recognized them as the event horizon of Strawberry Hill, the last visible signs of the text marking the reorganization of the interior of the house.162 A given place, Edward Casey remarks, “takes on the qualities of its occupants, reflecting these qualities in its own constitution and description and

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expressing them in its occurrence as an event.”163 But the reverse is clearly true as well. “An embodied view of meaning,” Mark Johnson argues, “looks for the origins and structures of meaning in the organic activities of embodied creatures in interaction with their changing environments”164—­even in cases where embodied creatures are actively changing their environments, and especially where the structure of meaning in question unties the organicism that produces it. Surely this is the case with Strawberry Hill, a cognitive ecology if ever there was one; Walpole’s villa by the Thames has clearly been shaped to meet the taste of its owner, that is, to facilitate a certain kind of self-­awareness. As Walpole remarked, “One is an artificial being: I and my friends and this place compose but one idea in my mind, and it is lopping a limb to touch any of the constituent parts.”165 Seeing the drawings out of context is like seeing an abject limb, but witnessing them in the full richness of the display they choreograph means experiencing them as proof of Walpole’s rhetoric of inwardness.166 The drawings, like the bejeweled casket concealing the shrine of Thomas Becket, or the vellum-­wrapped case of Hay’s stone, conceal in order more explicitly to display; they are where unspeakable difference is rendered up in the public discourse of inwardness.

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C o n c ep t i o n 19. A Blank Sheet of Paper (1) 20. A Folio Sheet with Two Sketches of a Single Conception 21. A Triumph of Galatea — 22. Joshua Reynolds, William Hunter

Exhibit 19. A Blank Sheet of Paper (1) Horace Walpole, upon visiting the Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge, was astounded to find something he thought he had invented.1 “At the entrance of a college which I had entirely forgotten,” Walpole wrote to the Marquise du Deffand, “I found myself precisely in the courtyard of my castle. Towers, doors, chapel, the great hall: each responded with more exactness than the last. Without me knowing it, the idea of this college had remained in my head the whole time, and I had made it serve for the design of my castle without even perceiving it—­so much so that I believed all at once that I had stepped into Otranto.”2 Over the course of his lifetime, Walpole would offer a baffling surplus of origins for his best-­known and most-­studied work. The Castle of Otranto (he at one or another time insisted) was found as a manuscript; it was inspired by a portrait viewed in the moonlight; it was prompted by a dream of a gigantic hand in armor, resting on a balcony in a great stairwell.3 But the explanation offered in this letter, though it appears last, refers us to the earliest event in point of time; remembering more than a decade after the book’s publication, Walpole reverts to a memory gleaned from his youth;4 he casts back to an encounter or a forgotten memory that, he suspects, accounts for the design of the book’s most important scenes. He has, moreover, offered a nearly perfect example of invention, as it was theorized in the eighteenth century. The problem is a fundamental one; it is a question of how anything new might appear in a mental system that contains nothing that was not first

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22. “Paper ready to your hand,” a cognitive ecology of the simplest sort. Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy (1759–1767). Courtesy William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.

in the senses. Is anything like originality, in such a regime, possible? And how might it be modeled for the mind to contemplate? “Perhaps,” suggests Jonathan Richardson, “nothing that is done is Properly, and Strictly Invention, but derived from something already seen.” If this were indeed the case, as he supposes it probably is, “these Images laid up in our Minds are the Patterns by which we Work when we do what is said to be done by Invention.”5 No clearer case could be given of this than Walpole’s final account of the origins of his best-­known work.6 By this account, when he sat down to the blank page, ready to write, what he put on paper was what he misremembered from his youth. Walpole had forgotten an experience into an inspiration. Walpole’s last version of the origin of Otranto, his spontaneous discovery

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at the courtyard of Trinity College, is nevertheless the earliest, in the sense that it points us back to an episode in his youth, decades before the book was dreamed up; it is as though, the further along he gets in his life, the further he has to back up in order to explain its key events. This is exactly the trap woven by Laurence Sterne, whose Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759–1767) is so obsessively about origins that, in Walpole’s words, the novel is “always going backwards.”7 The motivating idea of Sterne’s book is to trace Tristram Shandy’s life as the history of the stock of ideas Shandy picked up. Establishing the original of his opinions, the sum of influence that has molded him as an adult, means to Shandy backing all the way up to a moment before he could possibly be said to have been aware, the precise flash or collision when something new is created out of the sum of things already existing. In order correctly to begin his autobiography, Shandy begins in the same way as the Trojan War: “ab ovo,” he says, that is, from the egg.8 He has backed up all the way to his own primal scene, the moment of his conception. And he initiates a fundamental split, which he attempts to stitch back together for the remainder of the nine-­ volume account. On the one side, there is his biological life, full of problems of health and worries of death; on the other, there is an ideal or intellectual life, composed of the stock of opinions he has acquired. They are linked from the start by a series of metaphors that, in a less philosophical context, would look like double entendre: conversation, conception, gestation, birth, and so on, matters of the bedroom that are differently linked to a life of ideas. Right from the start, then, conception is the object of Tristram Shandy, and one of its principal philosophical concerns. This going backward—­it is a trick that Shandy implies he has learned from reading John Locke. In addressing directly the problem of originals, Tristram Shandy has happened upon the central aporia of the empiricist epistemology; Shandy has stumbled into debates and discussions about ways in which “conceptions” might come into the mind, indeed ways in which anything new might appear there. In the final analysis, Locke himself admits that he has no idea how it is that ideas are formed; how could he, when ideas themselves are the materials of thinking? Though “impressions” on the fingertips or the retina may be understood, and “motions from thence continued to the brain” may be “conceived,” the link happens “in a manner to me incomprehensible.”9 “Impressions” may be “conceived”; but the manner of “how [we] come by them,” indeed “how it is that [we] perceive,” is itself impossible “to conceive.” It is part of the process of knowing rather than the object known. This is the paradox; the production of new ideas, the central mechanism of Locke’s epistemology,

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is a process made to be epistemologically dark. The problem would come to be a pressing one, in part because it bears directly on the question of how we own things; it bears on property, both personal and intellectual. As a legal issue, the problem is how to develop a system of authorship—­of one who “originates or gives existence to anything”—­within the old empiricist ring fence that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses.10 As a more philosophical problem, it involves how to reconcile the experience of newness in the realm of one’s ideas with the faith that “Man’s power” (in Locke’s words) is “much the same” in the little kingdom of his intellect as it is in the material world.11 For “the materials in both being such as he has no power over, either to make or destroy, all that man can do is either to unite them together, or set them by one another, or wholly separate them.” So, then: what is the solution to the problem of beginnings? Where does something new come from?12 Expressed as a problem of art and autobiography, of artists who only ever paint themselves, how does one ever get started? In the end, Shandy would model his theories of the origins of ideas upon the same haptic field that offers a model for other abstract concepts; he returns them to embodiment. One “picks up opinions in the same way that one picks up an apple,” Shandy proposes, returning questions of intellectual property to relations in the world of things. But Sterne, who was himself a literary borrower of dazzling cleverness,13 at the same time silently signals the complex debts of Shandy’s thinking.14 Shandy’s opinion is in fact Locke’s; Shandy’s apple is picked up from Locke’s Two Treatises on Government, in which Locke himself is at considerable trouble to puzzle out how something might be absolutely, unequivocally claimed as one’s own. Speaking of a hypothetical apple gatherer, Locke notes that by the time a basket of apples has been washed, roasted, and consumed, no one “can deny but the nourishment” belongs to the consumer. The question is about the precise, vanishing instant in which the apple is transformed from a common apple to a particular one, from something belonging to everyone to a piece of property. Locke is after a moment in which an “added something” springs into being: when public materials, through an originary act or choice of the will, are transformed into something new. In a series of questions, Locke asks: “When did [the apples] begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up?” Locke’s answer is of course that the act of gathering made them his; grasping the apple and slipping it from the tree “added something to [it] more than Nature . . . and so [the apple] became his private right.”15 And not only apples but also ideas

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might be so claimed; this much is implied in Shandy’s remark.16 In a system (like Locke’s) in which ideas are as compact and as self-­contained as pieces of fruit, in which the mind is as container-­like as a bushel basket, it seems reasonable to speak of intellectual property in the same terms as the ownership of apples; holding something in the hand, savoring it in the mouth, and acting with and through the nourishment it provides might therefore be recruited as the haptic grounds for talking (metaphorically) about the way the mind comes to have ideas. As two of the leading voices in the cognitive theory of metaphor affirm, “Acquiring ideas is eating”; eating is one of a small group of conceptual metaphors that coordinate subordinate metaphors, making it possible to give voice to thought processes.17 Locke has already been quoted as suspecting that his whole conceptual vocabulary, and indeed his whole epistemology, ultimately “depends” upon, that is, “hangs from” ideas first produced by the senses (see Exhibit 1). We “apprehend” an idea (Locke’s word) in the same way that we apprehend an apple, and most of our names for abstract notions lean on the names for obvious sensible ideas.18 Locke’s list of examples makes the parallels clear. All of the mental acts he names—­“imagine, apprehend, comprehend, adhere, conceive, instill, disgust, disturbance, tranquility”—­are linked to embodied experience, either of the gross motor output sort, or of the passive, sensory or proprioceptive variety.19 “Apprehend” means “grasp,” “adhere” means “stick to”; “instill” means “put in by drops”; “disgust” means “averse taste,” and so on. This means, in part, that all our ideas may be run backward to their components, to simple ideas that are embedded in the body’s affordances, either to act or to feel. Locke’s list of concepts—­from “imagine” to “tranquility”—­are drawn from embodied acts. They are, however, embodied acts placed on a spectrum, what Drew Leder calls a “complemental scale,” passing from extero-­to interoception, from outwardly directed action, to inwardly directed sensation.20 The list proceeds from outward or focally oriented actions like “apprehending” (“grasping”) toward descriptions of tacit indwelling like “disturbance” and “tranquility.”21 It proceeds in other words from the things we consciously do, toward the things that describe variations upon the support or background of conscious doing. Speaking precisely, Locke’s list begins in the moment just before grasping, in the microsecond in which an act is “imagined,” but then follows a train of thought along a career of inwardness. Locke’s list therefore has the curious property of following the basic contours of the career of an apple along the alimentary canal—­from grasping to digestion. From the first thought and the grasping that will follow, to the repose of quietness afterward,

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with chemical processes and unease in between, Locke organizes his metaphors in phase with the body’s own logic. In each case, the origin of ideas is made to depend upon, even to anticipate, a journey into obscure interior processes that far outweigh the concepts they support. Locke’s strategy, whether in the epistemology of the Essay or the labor theory of property in his Second Treatise, is to begin with the abstract and back up to the moment when it was incorporated; he begins with the nourishment and backs up to the moment when the apple is claimed; he begins with the abstract idea and reminds us of the experience from which it depends. Among the jokes in Tristram Shandy is the repeated strategy of revealing this reverse motion as a sleight of hand; Shandy shows us what an idea-­apple looks like in forward motion. He shows us the basic trajectory of ownership, beginning in the moment when the apple-­gather “set his heart upon” an apple, but not ending until “he brought it home . . . roasted . . . ate . . . digested,” and, in one of Sterne’s suggestive lacunae, “—­—­?—­—­.”22 This last gap, the lacuna of unspeakability, joins Locke’s “tranquility” as the state of things when we have ceased to have to think about them or make them subjects of desire. Sterne would later be joined by Michel Serres in suspecting that property claims are fundamentally about mixing our waste with the commons, a “stercoraceous or excremental origin of property rights.” Pass the salad at the salad table, Serres suggests; the first person to spit in the salad gets the whole salad for himself—­ though it may be that it is no longer something he wants. The first person to eat the apple gains it; though, by the end, the apple might just become something without any interest to anyone, anyways, what is used up, cast off, or (put euphemistically) returned to the commons.23 The whole embodied economy offers an equivocal model for mentation, for the transformation of objects “out there” to qualities “in here.” This is partly what Tristram Shandy means when he says that Locke offers a history of “what passes in a man’s own mind”;24 for Shandy, Locke’s particular brilliance is the deftness with which he constructs narratives for the origins of mental states, unpacking their embodied investments. “What passes in a man’s own mind,” at least when Shandy gets ahold of it, looks not just a bit like an apple passing into a man’s own body. In a limited sense, the meaninglessness of the process, of possessions as borrowings or what passes through a man’s body, is rescued by a yet more orphic interior. Poised at the navel of Locke’s list is “conceive”; the word ends up offering a new explanatory principle to a process Locke only means it to exemplify. From “conceive” come “concept” and “conception,” words that Locke

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uses exchangeably with “ideas,”25 and which provide therefore the category names for the ideal objects in the list. Locke possibly intended “conceive” to be heard in the sense remembered by its etymology: something like “to take all at once” or “to take in and hold.” This would be to identify a moment when something is owned most completely. Understood in this sense, “conceive” follows “apprehend” and “comprehend”—­each of which has to do with how we “grasp” ideas. But, not least because Locke had been a physician, who worked as an obstetrician, and who returned to generation as a practical, theoretical, and even theological issue, we should also hear the word in its other sense: conception as the moment when life springs into being.26 This is what is normally meant when we say that something is “conceived”; we mean that an “added something” emerges from a combination of parts. By “conceive,” we mean an emergent property that exceeds what was there an instant before. Clearly, for Locke, at least, there can be no primal, embodied experience of conception in this sense; viewed this way, “conception” becomes the very thing that cannot, itself, be conceived.27 “Conceive” therefore has a special status. As a conceptual metaphor, “conception” works because it shifts the problem of how we internalize knowledge to an issue of gender and sexuality. It rephrases an orphic process as something that men like Locke categorically cannot know, at least in the way that Locke claims that we know all things; it turns it into a question of the kind of embodied experience that men of science can observe, though they cannot have it themselves.28 And it occasions a whole family of related metaphors, providing Shandy’s vocabulary for the “first engendering of ideas . . . to their crawling forth,” from the instant they are “engendered in the womb of speculation” to the moment when they are “safely deliver’d,” and so on.29 It is as though Sterne’s strategy, in penning Tristram Shandy, were only to take seriously Locke’s suggestion to “trace [ideas] to their sources”—­especially when it comes to the ideas that help us make sense of originality in the first place.30 The single instant in Tristram Shandy when conception is most scandalously on display is the deliberately blank page Shandy offers us in the sixth volume of his Life and Opinions (Exhibit 19). Shandy is discussing the “concupiscible Widow Wadman,” when he is presented with a new problem of how to begin. He is having difficulty picturing her—­that is, “conceiving” her, or, to put a finer point on it, conceiving the idea of her. “To conceive this right,” Shandy begins, “Call for pen and ink—­here’s paper ready to your hand.—­Sit down, Sir, paint her to your own mind—­as like your mistress as you can—­as unlike your wife as your conscience will let you—­’tis all one to

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me—­please but your own fancy in it.”31 Shandy stages the ground of empiricist epistemology—­that is, the mind as blank paper; but he is of course specifically interested in the problem of the origins of artistic expression, of, in Shandy’s words, “conception.”32 “To conceive this right,” Shandy begins. Artistic production by this model begins with the conception. For Sidney, the “skill of the Artificer” consists of the “fore conceit of the worke”;33 for Jonathan Richardson, the painter “composes” figures according to a single “conception.”34 Shandy however does more than offer us a metaphor; he creates a strikingly realized yet singularly paused cognitive ecology, a whole little scene enacted, whether we want it or not: a body (yours) sitting, a hand poised, a page blank. And it therefore stops the clock on what was already under way, the dimly conceived image of the Widow Wadman half-­imagined, interrupted by the blankness that stares back, elaborately producing in the mind’s eye the absence of creation where before stood the first outlines of a figure of desire.35 It is impossible to conceive under these circumstances. Shandy has, in other words, encountered the classic problem of the artist’s burden—­and palmed it off on the reader. He has done Locke the disservice of taking him literally, substituting, for a one-­page description of the Widow Wadman, the vision of a mind ready to conceive.36 He repeats, in other words, the opening gesture of the book, the effort to catch conception in the act. This case takes up conception as its subject. It isn’t that conception offers a solution to an intractable problem; it is that it offers a program and a design for talking about the problem, even for addressing it as an object of the intellect and the eye. Here are arrangements of objects in space that mean to capture something preceding them all—­capturing ideal origins in arrangements of material things. A manual of obstetric anatomy, a painting of an epiphany, and a portrait of an obstetric anatomist: each of these exhibits reroutes an aporia in the philosophies of men through the bodies of women. Each, that is, restages the problem as a problem involving gender. We are nearing the end, for this case means finally to look toward what follows, to begin sketching out questions of dispossession that rise up when the empiricist epistemology is confronted with the paradoxes of its own invention.

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Exhibit 20. A Folio Sheet with Two Sketches of a Single Conception Where to begin, when the problem is beginnings? Let’s turn to another (nearly) blank page—­this one belonging to William Hunter (1718–1783), the collector, anatomist, and obstetrician whose interests in the secret workings of human interiors was by no means limited to body stones (see Exhibit 14). Among William Hunter’s papers, stuffed amid his notes on the process of human generation, is what could almost be an answer to Sterne’s blank page, his call to “conceive” the Widow Wadman.37 This is a single folio sheet folded in half, forming a book of the simplest type. On the cover of this book (call it 1r) are three pen strokes, forming an imperfect isosceles triangle. Its edges are slightly convex; its vertex, pointing downward, flares open. Open this book, and on the right-­hand page—­2r—­is a crude drawing of an embryo in utero, at perhaps nine weeks; it is almost certainly in Hunter’s hand. This latter drawing is a technical illustration, carefully capturing the distinctions between the lamellae of the amniotic sac: the chorion displayed quite distinct from the amnion, especially where the umbilical cord meets the placenta, which appears in Hunter’s sketch as a maze of hasty scratches. We might offer an initial speculation: 1r seems to hold to 2r the same relation as an initial thought to a more complete drawing, an artist’s conception to a painting. The author of this little flip book was his generation’s leading man-­ midwife, respected enough in his profession to become the regular obstetrician to the queen; he was among other things the man who brought George IV into the world.38 He was, however, also an anatomist who delivered an enormously popular series of lectures at his London-­based anatomy school; promising in his advertisements to lecture only from fresh specimens—­the bodies of executed felons legally acquired or cadavers culled illegally from the black market—­his school quickly established itself among the foremost sites for physicians and surgeons to learn their trade. These interests crossed in the work for which he is best remembered; this is his massive Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, which more than any other single volume was responsible for the modernization of obstetrics.39 This book, composed over the better part of two decades, is life-­sized in more ways than one; presenting life-­sized renditions of the human reproductive system, it also represents Hunter’s most important life’s work. This also means that Hunter stumbled into the same territory as Sterne, his contemporary and in some ways alter ego.

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23. A single folio sheet folded in half, offering a rudimentary illustrated handbook of obstetric anatomy. MS Hunter HF224. Courtesy Special Collections Department, University of Glasgow.

Put differently, his atlas on the anatomy of the human gravid uterus ends up rehearsing the problems of the empiricist project, especially when it addresses the representations of origins. During the third quarter of the eighteenth century, there emerged a concentrated interest in conception as the general name for origins under the empiricist epistemology. In the first place, for good or ill, obstetrics was modernized during precisely this period. Old theories about sympathies between a mother’s imagination and the fetus in the womb were generally overthrown; it was no longer agreed that something the mother desires during pregnancy (or, Tristram Shandy suggests, during conception) turns up in the soft medium of the unborn fetus.40 The lying-­in chamber, a site traditionally closed to men, was opened up to male practitioners on a more regular basis.41 “Childbirth,”

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as one historian notes, had heretofore been “a social occasion for women,” the culmination of a nine-­month process governed by the oral traditions and inherited practices of a community of women midwives.42 Tristram’s mother, Elizabeth Shandy, appeals to this female set of birth rites; she leaves the circle of Shandy men in the drawing room, where they speculate on the mysteries of parturition, while she with a small team of women performs the real labor of childbirth behind closed curtains.43 Posed as a problem of knowledge, the childbirth Elizabeth Shandy is experiencing is what Walter Shandy speculates about; a system of concepts is divided from its haptic ground by a series of blinds, not the least of which is Elizabeth’s desire for privacy. By roughly 1760, however, conception had become an object of empiricist research. Birth had become a national institution under modern medical care, comprehended by such bureaucratic, paper-­driven developments as centralized lying-­in hospitals and colleges of man-­midwifery.44 The whole childbirth process had accordingly been brought into the anatomy theater, fully modernized as part of an imperialist project—­an effort William Hunter helped to advance.45 Partly for the circles in which he moved, partly for his familiarity with the human form, and partly because he was already a collector of things like medals and old coins, Hunter was a natural choice as the inaugural lecturer on anatomy to the Royal Academy. The Royal Academy was established to be the central institution for the development of the visual arts in Britain. We can see from surviving notes and published scraps that Hunter’s lectures, which he delivered quarterly, were generally composed of two movements. His position as professor of anatomy demanded that he defend the importance of mimetic fidelity—­for his expertise was after all in the observable and material realities of the human body itself. As he lectured, so too he practiced; though he was a collector of a wide range of visual and plastic arts, the art that he himself authored and collected is almost all anatomical illustration, including plaster casts, medical preparations in spirits of wine, and mummified and embalmed bodies.46 Hunter mummified more than one human subject, including the wife of the notorious dentist Martin van Butchell, who subsequently set her up in his shop window.47 Still visible at the Royal Academy is the so-­called Smugglerius, a plaster statue cast from the flayed body of an executed felon, frozen in the attitude of the Dying Gaul. Hunter’s uncanny skill with medical preparations was not lost on his contemporaries; among others, Sir Richard Jebb called Hunter a “gorgon,” for he turned his subjects to stone.48 In this aspect of Hunter’s work, art is not so much representative as it is, in its perfect state, simply the thing itself: casts of the objects, or just the objects, prepared

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in such a way that they can be put on display.49 Hunter’s primary preference, as he expressed it to the attendees of the Royal Academy, was therefore for the “simple portrait, in which the object is represented exactly as it [is] seen.” Such images are “finished from a view of one subject,” and are therefore “close representation[s] of nature.”50 “What imitates Nature,” and this is Hunter’s keynote, “is most striking”; “in the fine arts,” he continues, “the more precise the imitation of Nature is . . . the more striking I should suppose the effect will be.”51 There is, however, an important second axis in Hunter’s aesthetic, describing a different register of awareness. Crossing Hunter’s taste for frozen attitudes and striking realism is a preference for art that expresses something in excess of itself. Images developed according to this second axis are “figures of fancy, made up from a variety of studies after nature,” which, as such, “may exhibit in one view, what could only be seen in several objects.” Such figures “admit of a better arrangement, of abridgement, and of greater precision”; they have “commonly the hardness of a geometrical diagram,” because they do not “shew the object” but rather “describe or give an idea of it.”52 Such studies tend to elicit or to render up the skeletal framework of the ideal design, what in a different author would be called the “central form.” And these representations—­and this is the critical point—­are what are “conceived in the imagination”; despite being elicited from numerous particular examples, they are nevertheless the “artist’s conceptions,” generalized versions of particular nature. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison argue that Hunter decidedly favors what he calls “the simple portrait,” and that the second mode marks the failures of representative art.53 But Hunter’s remarks at most lean toward the first form of figuration; in practice, Hunter presses toward the “figure of fancy” with greater regularity as his projects wear on. Indeed, the fanciful mode of figuration may already be absorbed in the mimetic. Preparing the “simple portrait” of a living body with only the surfaces of dead flesh to work with meant developing and employing complex injection, dyeing, and painting routines—­at which Hunter was particularly adept;54 like Alexander Pope’s Belinda at her dressing table (see Exhibit 9), Hunter coordinated a range of pigments and dyes in an effort to capture, rather than disguise, what he took to be living nature.55 Hunter’s most extended aesthetic remarks, however, appear not in the notes of his lectures at the Royal Academy or even in the notes taken by students at his anatomy school.56 It was in the preface to his Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus that Hunter most directly engaged the problems of

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representation. The Anatomy, commonly simply called his “Atlas,” is read as a handbook for students of obstetric anatomy, which, of course, it is; Hunter’s Atlas helped to revolutionize obstetrics. But there is a second purpose at work, which, for formal and affective reasons, is almost universally disregarded. Just as Hunter’s aesthetic loyalties are split between an axis of mimetic realism and a perpendicular axis of ideal abstraction, so, too, the Atlas is composed of two distinct parts. It begins, like Hunter’s remarks, in the mode of a “fidelity to nature.”57 Historically speaking, Hunter’s Atlas began when Hunter received, as part of a cargo for his anatomical lectures, the body of a woman who had died in early labor. It was the winter of 1750, which meant that the cadaver was partially preserved by the cold; Hunter was able to linger for weeks over this single specimen, posting his engraver with his easel precisely in the position where an obstetrician would stand during childbirth. Together, they produced nine plates from this single subject, exhaustively detailing the layers of the childbearing body as its “fat and skin are removed.”58 Precisely because they are so precise, these engravings are difficult to look at; just as more than one of Hunter’s contemporaries noted the difficulty of attending his anatomical lectures, so too later commentators have remarked on the difficulty of gazing dispassionately at the engravings he oversaw.59 This is the paradox of the Atlas, endlessly renewed;60 in attempting to isolate the matter of generation, the system that as a system emerges into life, Hunter can only offer us a rigorously delineated assemblage of organs. Paul Youngquist, for instance, describes the Atlas as seeing a human body “pared away . . . like a rind.” After the body is removed in layers, what is left is “only viscera: extraneous, abject matter.”61 “It is death itself,” insists Lyle Massey, “that seems most present” in this book on the origins of life.62 Hunter possibly learned this style of anatomical engraving, of reducing the body into layers with distinct functions, from the sketchbooks of Leonardo da Vinci;63 Hunter had studied these books at length at Windsor Castle, pronouncing Leonardo “the best Anatomist of his time.”64 Hunter’s mimetic aesthetic adopted Leonardo’s keynote as its own: “This my illustration of the human body shall be demonstrated to you,” writes Leonardo, “not otherwise than if you had the real man before you.”65 This could almost stand as the epigraph to Hunter’s atlas. Taken as a collection, writes Hunter of his Atlas, “the whole of ’em are Nature herself & almost as good as the fresh subject”; such a picture is “almost as infallible as the object itself.”66 But Leonardo was clearly sensitive to a distinction lost to Hunter’s eye. In Leonardo’s sketches a clear division emerges. For Leonardo, the male body was the normative object

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of anatomy, a machine of tendon, muscle, and bone.67 The bodies of men were the starting point for the field of anatomy as an ontological science—­a field depending upon the knife to distribute an undifferentiated mass of physical matter into operative organs. Leonardo’s sketches focus on layers and surfaces, peeling the body back into discrete, identifiable systems, each with its own shape and purpose. The “female figure,” on the contrary, “came . . . to stand for the body’s hidden interior,” possibly, Katherine Park argues, “by association with the uterus.”68 Leonardo’s so-­called situs sketch, produced with an experimental ink-­washing technique, is exemplary; it imagines the woman’s body not as the container of organs to be cut, divided, and categorized but instead as the receptacle of mysteries—­nebulae of organic dark matter arranged, torus-­like, around the womb. Not the clear and distinct surface but the unimaginable site of generation, that great epistemological vanishing point, is its organizing trope. The bodies of women, in Leonardo’s tradition, are carted in to leave obscure the body’s greatest, insoluble mystery: the secret of its origins, of what emerged as the sublime object of Leonardo’s research—­nature’s “vital force.”69 What would appear to be missing from the Atlas is therefore what Hunter, in his aesthetic remarks, speculatively calls the “spirit” of a painting, or, repeatedly, its “life,” that superadded quality, in excess of mere mimetic fidelity. Hunter sees his Atlas as the reproduction of “nature,” but another viewer might see the engravings as decidedly unnatural, missing exactly the emergent property the book was designed to capture in its most plangent moment. This is where the second half of Hunter’s Atlas steps in, articulating the second half of a two-­part visual strategy. Hunter’s engraver was the talented but difficult artist Jan van Rymsdyk,70 and Rymsdyk’s word for their corporate project was “exantlation”—­an aesthetic touchstone tying the mimetic axis of Hunter’s eye to the transverse tendency of the Atlas’s second half. “The whole sum of our Doctrine is this,” Rymsdyk insists: “that the Art of Painting is nothing else, but a true Representation of Nature. But it was not her desire, that men should know every thing, and therefore only suffers herself to be looked at, through dark Crevices, by the most wise and learned Men, nay its impossible to fathom or unravel the Obscure Enigmas of Nature. However, though we cannot be deep, he that comes the nearest is the best Artist. Nature like Truth, doth lie in a Well, and is not recoverable but by Exantlation.”71 Rymsdyk’s remark quotes, almost verbatim, Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646), Browne’s wide-­ranging “enquiries” into “commonly presumed truths” of such subjects as geography, visual art, and animal

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(including gestational) economy.72 “Exantlation” is derived, whether Rymsdyk knew it or not, from Helmontian iatrochemistry;73 it means the “exhaustion” of something, literally the chemical liberation of the “active spirits” of a seed, or the evaporation—­the “breathing out”—­of vapors from a sponge or a moist compound.74 Exantlation therefore formalizes a process for releasing something rarefied from something as weighty as a sample or a specimen; it is the process bridging brute creation with the mystical, unrepresentable something added. It is a leftover, in this sense, from a species of mystical monism, which, in its interest in the release of spirits from matter, resonates with the plenum Raphael breathes into Adam’s ear in Paradise Lost (see Exhibit 2). Browne will ultimately assert that the lesson to be gleaned from repeated exantlation is the majesty and efficiency of God’s handiwork; Hunter and Rymsdyk are after the world’s generative patterns—­nature, rather than divine order. All three, however, insist that accurate representation of the material world is the means, rather than the end, of their projects. Each strives toward a set of essential truths through the painstaking, “difficult,” and exhaustive location of the ordering secrets of the material world. Exantlation captures therefore a double movement: the accurate rendering of detail, and the liberation of an ideal order.75 Jan van Ramsdyk’s obstetric artistry has been called “arresting,” and no doubt it is; commentators are almost universally arrested by the difficult early images of the Atlas. But if the first half of Hunter’s aesthetic remarks touch on what Hunter calls “striking” images and “simple portraits”—­exhaustion as the tiring elaboration of what is seen by the eye—­the second half of his remarks advance the quest after the ineffable leftover, dwelling on images of the sort Hunter calls “a representation of the object under such circumstances as were not actually seen, but conceived in the imagination.”76 Whereas the first half takes one subject, and opens its structure to the eye, the second half assembles multiple subjects, acquired over roughly fifteen years, and assembles them to look as though they were the same subject, viewed at various stages between conception and parturition. Hunter may have learned this technique from his younger brother, the surgeon John, whose multiple preparations (for instance) of the testicles of sparrows in the different months of the year are meant to display the seasonal ebb and flow of sexual desire.77 Like his brother, Hunter stages an imaginative technique routed through the material of a medical collection, forgetting the differences in individuals in the aim of liberating a process, impulse, or idea—­something added.78 But there is a curious detail—­something absolutely unlike what could be

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seen, even if Hunter could have seen a single pregnancy from conception to parturition. Hunter, with his characteristic sangfroid, returns repeatedly to the frustrations of working in a medium in which he has, perforce, always missed the event of his greatest interest. “We can’t,” he remarks in his anatomical lectures, “take Women and open them one at two Days another at 6 Days after they are pregnant to examine. Therefore,” he laconically continues, “we can’t determine from hence absolutely” about the processes of conception—­or (like Shandy) capture it while it is happening.79 His last assistant, William Cruikshank, would finally identify the site, if not the precise, invisible moment, of conception through an appalling destruction of artificially impregnated rabbits, but in general Hunter’s approach to the secret of the origins of life was to construct it as a desideratum.80 In this aim, in the Atlas, he assembles multiple subjects but arranges them in reverse order. Containing between fourteen and thirty subjects in various stages of pregnancy, the second section of his essay offers us an engraving of an opened female subject at nine months of pregnancy, then one at eight and a half, another at eight months, at seven months, six, five full months, and so forth.81 If the first section of the Atlas purports to treat the gestational system as a relation of parts, a single body divided into its components, the second half introduces the long, formal pursuit of what one critic calls “an object of longing”82—­in Hunter’s words, “a figure of fancy.” This object is in Hunter’s Atlas the conception, the single moment toward which the second half of the Atlas tends. Hunter explicitly rejects the late Renaissance position that conceptions in the womb had some actual or analogical relationship to conceptions in the mind. He, for example, repudiates William Harvey’s “vague and wild Doctrine” that “an Animal is produced in the Uterus perhaps something like thought in the Ventricles of the Brain.”83 He rejects the “vulgar” opinion that the “imagination and longing of the mother” could be involved in the fact of a child’s conception, or in the marks or features borne by the embryo. But he is nevertheless ultimately forced, in the problems of assembling a set of physical specimens to isolate an organizing impulse, to lean on a sort of imaginative leap, attempting to conceive, as a geometrical or ideal image, the conception in its very first state. In this sense, he passes from a drawing as a representation of a thing seen to a drawing as the representation of a thought. Hunter’s plate 34, an image of a fetus at five weeks, is a “conception” in the first of two technical senses that Hunter uses the word; it is an imperfectly formed fetus along with the traces of the surrounding “chorion with all its contents.” But it is almost a conception in the vexed sense that haunts Hunter’s aesthetics,

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24. “A Foetus at five weeks.” William Hunter and Jan van Rymsdyk, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata (London, 1774), plate 34.2. Courtesy Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

in the sense Hunter uses of what is “conceived in the imagination.” Indeed, this image of a “conception” is also the first image in the series not presented “exactly as it was seen”; it is “magnified.” At precisely this moment, Hunter’s prosaic account emerges somewhat unexpectedly into poetry; we are to see, through Hunter’s eyes, “a tender jelly, so transparent as to be almost invisible,” an “amnion distended with a liquor as transparent and void of colour as the clearest water.”84 The fineness of Hunter’s language is directed toward the fineness of his objects; it is just at this point that Hunter becomes interested in the vanishingly precise distinctions between

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layers, arranging nearly invisible specimens such that three-­dimensional membranes curve away into two-­dimensional outlines. It is at this moment that the object begins to pass away into a design—­or, more properly, from a topographical contour to a geometric plan.85 To be quite clear, this is the same moment in the Atlas where Hunter begins discussing “conceptions,” in, as I have suggested, the word’s double sense. We are approaching the outline as a technique of representation (an “artist’s conception”), at precisely the same time that we approach conception as a position in a field of knowledge.86 And so the conception emerges as an obstetric category at exactly the same moment when it emerges as an art theoretical or aesthetic one, marking the frontier of gestation that cannot be captured in the “simple portrait.” “We very seldom see,” says Hunter, “conceptions earlier or younger than 6, 7 or 8 weeks”;87 consequently, his last three specimens—­magnified, postage-­ stamp-­sized engravings—­are of what he calls “supposed conceptions,” that is, conceptions of conceptions, or ideas of ideas. His procession, having passed through the subject from nine months to five weeks, ends with six strikingly similar images. He offers a considerably magnified conception at four weeks, the chorion cut and held open by a pair of bristles. This is posed in three views. It is followed, however, by something never seen. It is followed by a conceptual rendering of the same conception at the same age, the amnion represented in all its geometrical hardness, then again at two weeks, and at one week. In the gap between the mimetic representation of the conception held under the microscope and the geometric conception of the same thing, Hunter has made the leap into the realm of the ideal. The image of a conception at one week—­a “representation of the object” as it is “not actually seen, but conceived in the imagination”—­is the last stop before the unthinkable horizon of the arts, the inconceivable moment of conception itself. Thus, Hunter laments, “by accurate observations . . . we may come a little nearer & nearer but to know exactly we never can, because . . . it consists of minutiae beyond our Imagination.”88 We had passed beyond the scope of empirical investigation some time ago—­but from this zone we will pass also beyond what the imagination can categorically handle. It is therefore just after the conceived conception of one week that the Atlas ends. Its final image is a blank page, the representation of the derealized human body. Later in life, Hunter seems to have believed that the embryo in its initial stages was perfectly transparent, that it developed out of the mixing of fluids.89 “Dr. Hunter,” writes one of his students, had come to believe “that conception is brought about by the male and female seed meeting in the cavity of the

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25. Six conceptions of the same conception. Hunter and Rymsdyk, Anatomy, plate 34.4–9. Courtesy Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

Uterus, where they unite and form a jelly, in to which the Uterus throws out an effloresecence [sic], and makes a compound which forms a membrane.”90 In little bags of jelly, what Hunter calls “most wonderful” membranes, viscous fluids and liquors so rare as to be invisible, Hunter’s Atlas approaches, without capturing, what he repeatedly lamented would remain the “unintelligible” secrets of conception. But of course even Hunter’s description is the description of one seeing with the mind—­that is, “conceiving”—­rather than with the eye, which helps explain the importance of outlines and membranes to his account; he is reporting on a sketch, outline, or design. The “conception,” one might say, is less a physiological or obstetric fact than it is a problem of mimetic or representative knowledge, where technical gadgets and the artist’s fancy step in to design the idea that cannot rise directly from sensory experience—­indeed, to provide the somatic ground of what categorically evades sensory experience. The long second half of the Atlas is therefore best read as an attempt, through the things of the world, to display the gestational process retreating toward its

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source, or, recovering a phrase mooted by Locke, to “lead us a little towards the original.” Of the Atlas “conception” is both origin and end, circumference and absent center. It is the single desideratum of Hunter’s thirty-­four plates, and the spark that causes the whole obstetric contraption to lurch into motion. Hunter’s manuscript sketch, the object of this exhibit, is an attempt to sketch exactly this epistemological horizon, the very origins of things. It is a conception of a conception. What seems to have happened is something like this: Hunter first sketched out an idea of a conception in a rudimentary triangle on a folded half sheet. Finding it, however, too small for what he wanted to represent, he folded the sheet back and redrew it much larger. What he captures, therefore, is the barest possible sketch of life just coming into being that is also the rudest figure of an idea just emerging. It is neither quite blankness nor quite conception, the sublime thing itself just passing out of nothingness. Page 2r is a second attempt at the same problem as 1r; it poses the same unrepresentable idea, this time as a structural distinction. The membrane in 2r that Hunter twice sketches out, perfectly parallel in different colors of ink, is precisely the chorion separated from the amnion, the wonderful membranes thrown off at the conceptual moment of the mixing of jellies. So geometrically simple as to approach the thinness of a mathematical line, it is, as Hunter imagines it, the shroud in which life happens, where the first spark of animation begins. It therefore seems that the relationship between the two sketches on Hunter’s minimal pamphlet were more than simply his first try at an image, and his second—­that is, more than simply a conception of a finished drawing, and the drawing itself. This booklet puts into motion the relationship between conception and embryo, capturing the origin of a thought (about the questions of origins) at the same time that it reverses the project of the Atlas. What Hunter offers us is not an incomplete version of something else but a complete version of the artistic process as it looks to an obstetric anatomist.

Exhibit 21. A Triumph of Galatea The Royal Academy, where Hunter delivered his series of quarterly lectures, was in many ways the brainchild of portraitist Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792); it was Reynolds who helped organize the funds to establish it in the first place, and Reynolds who tabbed Hunter as its inaugural lecturer in anatomy. Sometime

26. Raphael Sanzio’s Triumph of Galatea, the conception sponsoring a long series of imitations. Villa Farnesina, Rome © Alinari/Art Resource, N.Y.

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in 1789, Charles Long brought to London from Bologna a small painting of the Triumph of Galatea, which the seller assured him was a genuine Giulio Romano. Perhaps wishing to have its authorship confirmed, Long showed the painting to Reynolds, then in the twilight of his career. Something about the painting must have appealed to Reynolds, for he offered Long a choice among the many “fancy three-­quarter paintings” currently in his gallery. A “fancy” painting is one conceived in the imagination, rather than intended to capture the likeness of a patron or client; Reynolds was offering a product of his own fancy in exchange for what they both understood to be one of Giulio’s. The trade was accepted. What happened to the Reynolds is unknown, but Long’s Giulio remained in Reynolds’s collection until his death. It was sold by Christie’s as “an undoubted picture of this scarce master.”91 But this doesn’t do justice to the full contours of what had occurred. While it was in Reynolds’s possession, in the three or so years between Reynolds’s acquisition of the painting and his death, it underwent a transformation, such that a modern viewer might be tempted to call it a Reynolds. Reynolds, Joseph Farington tells us, “as he frequently did rubbed the picture almost to the outline & then worked upon it several days.”92 The Giulio may indeed have been a worthless daub to some eyes; “the picture never had any real value,” notes Farington, “but Sir Joshua was apt to be struck in this way with pictures of little merit.”93 Reynolds stripped the painting back to its outline before building it back up to a finished image. This image was what was catalogued in his collection and sold at auction. This was not an isolated incident. Reynolds was known for retouching works that came into his possession. His first biographer notes that Reynolds often “sacrificed his paintings to his ambition,” destroying the images that came into his collection in an intensifying quest after “the secret of producing their particular richness and effect.”94 It was a “particular pleasure to [him] when he got into his hands any damaged pictures by [the] Old Masters,” writes James Northcote, “for he would often “work . . . upon them with great advantage.”95 Sometimes Reynolds would alter what a subject was holding, or change the shading in a sky; at times he seems to have been interested in affecting an improvement to the general effect, while, at others, he was after a particular technique or formula employed by one of his predecessors. There was certainly precedent for the manipulation of paintings.96 Giulio Romano himself seems to have retouched a number of paintings of Raphael, including, possibly, the so-­called “La Fornarina,” one of Raphael’s very small number of nudes.97 But if it was Reynolds’s intention to improve the Giulio through judicious retouching, then this was a radical case of improvement. So too was

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his experiment with a Parmigianino some years earlier. Northcote records buying a “fine picture” by Parmigianino at Reynolds’s order; when he brought it back to the studio, Reynolds “rubbed and scoured [it] down to the very panel on which it had been painted, so that at last nothing remained of the picture.”98 Sometimes, that is, it seems that Reynolds was after surface effects—­ attempting to mimic the work of time in his own fresh productions or to capture lost recipes for color; at other times, however, he was after something preceding surface effect, something so radical that the investigation destroyed the image which contained it.99 Opinions on this sort of practice were mixed. Some commentators (like Northcote) admired Reynolds’s pursuit of knowledge. Others responded differently; the nineteenth-­century editor of Reynolds’s papers, who was among Reynolds’s most important nineteenth-­century apologists, simply opines that Reynolds’s “wilful destruction of . . . work[s] of genius is a sort of murder.”100 It is unclear exactly what Charles Long’s painting was—­but it is worth taking an educated guess at what it looked like. The painting is last mentioned in yet another auction catalogue, again at Christie’s, where it fetched nine guineas as a “Triumph of Venus.”101 Either subject is possible; the Triumphs of Galatea and Venus share many of the same emblematic features. Either would display a female nude borne on sea creatures, surrounded by tritons and adoring cherubim. It is also unclear if it was by Giulio Romano himself. Giulio, the sixteenth-­century Mannerist best known today for his religious images, was certainly capable of and inclined toward paintings like a Triumph of Venus or Galatea.102 But he is not known for any Galateas, so the ascription is worth attending to more because of what his name might have represented than as a clue to its provenance. Giulio was the most accomplished painter to have labored and studied at the studio of Raphael, and Raphael was well known for a Triumph of Galatea, was in fact known for being the first painter to paint the subject. The identification of the painting’s subject, and its ascription to Giulio, means therefore that it almost certainly brought to mind Raphael’s celebrated original.103 In cases where there is no question of intellectual property, the painter’s name serves less an indexical function than as the label of a certain style. The painter is recognized as a way of arranging things. For Reynolds and his contemporaries, Giulio Romano came to mean a set of compositional tendencies, or in other words, a repertoire of techniques for ordering things according to certain kinds of ideas. He was a painter associated with Raphael, who was himself particularly noted for the strength and elegance of his designs (see Exhibit 5).

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Reynolds’s apocryphal Triumph of Galatea has not survived, but Raphael’s, the prototype of the subject, has. Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea was executed in 1514 as part of an unfinished series of illustrations of Angelo Poliziano’s “Stanze per la giostra,” a long panegyric poem that briefly mentions Galatea’s story. The important thing, here, is that Poliziano and Raphael after him put an old tale to new use. Historically, the focus of the myth of Galatea is on the elemental human passions. Galatea was the nymph betrothed to Acis but desired by Polyphemus—­the same rough Cyclops later vanquished by Odysseus. Polyphemus, in a fit of rage, slays his rival suitor in a particularly material way: he smashes Acis with a fragment of a mountain. The etiological tale is sealed when Galatea converts his river of blood into the stream that bears his name; this is of course the Acis, which evidently at one time emerged from a spring in a split in a boulder. From nothing, then, something: from death, a spring or fountain.104 But Poliziano and Raphael were both attracted to a different aspect of the tale; Poliziano describes, and Raphael paints, Galatea being borne into her apotheosis. The Triumph of Galatea was not a theme before Poliziano wrote it and Raphael painted it; Ovid mostly demurs, and the apotheosis in later relations generally gets little more than the attention due to a necessary denouement. After Raphael, however, the apotheosis clearly becomes the critical thing; and so paintings of the triumph from the succeeding years and centuries are all clearly based less on a mythic tradition, of which there is none, than on Raphael’s innovative arrangement of figures, Raphael’s invention, or, not to put too fine a point on it, what would later come to be called his “conception.”105 It is not provenance, but what Reynolds would have called “design,” “invention,” or “conception,” that guaranteed author and title. To be completely clear, then, we cannot know precisely what Reynolds’s particular Galatea looked like; but we may know with certainty that it was identified as a Galatea because it alludes to a formal arrangement developed by Raphael in his well-­known fresco at the Villa Farnesina. Even more so than William Hunter, Joshua Reynolds was attuned to the problems of conception as a principle of artistic production. While much of his painting was portraiture, and hence largely limited by its indexical function, Reynolds helped develop what he called the “Grand Style,” what critics and art historians since have recognized as a branch of the academic style in painting. This style, characterized by its allusiveness, works by establishing, in the frame of a single image, a web of recognizable allusions to other classical paintings. It is a question (in Svetlana Alpers’s terms) of “the ways in which painters use the museum and also how they imagine it.”106 In the end,

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imitation, which is the key concept of the academic style,107 had all along been the key concept of Reynolds’s practice. As Reynolds puts it, it is the artist’s task to gather “inventions and thoughts,” from both the moderns and the ancients, moving among picture galleries and accruing ideas from “statues, bas-­reliefs, intaglios, cameos, and coins.” Once he has “diligently collected . . . these materials,” the “fire of the artist’s own genius” may thereafter “go to work.”108 This is of course the hallmark of the Augustan aesthetic, and of the empiricist epistemology; it was also the first point of objection when Reynolds’s work was reviewed in the next century. William Hazlitt, in what was a mostly sympathetic review of Reynolds’s aesthetic lectures, simply dismisses Reynolds’s preference for imitation out of hand, as being one of three related concepts that he finds “wrong in themselves.”109 William Blake, in a series of marginal notes to Reynolds’s lectures, could hardly believe what he was reading; “The following Discourse,” Blake opined, “is particularly Interesting to Blockheads as it endeavours to prove that There is No such thing as Inspiration & that any Man of a plain Understanding may by Thieving from Others become a Mich Angelo.”110 Reynolds, however, is consistent. In his strongest statement of the position, he insists that it is “by imitation only, variety, and even originality of invention, is produced. . . . Even genius,” he continues, “is the child of imitation.”111 Speaking specifically of Raphael, Reynolds insists that he “was always imitating, and hence, always original.”112 Reynolds saw in Raphael a fellow spirit, for whom originality developed through copying. Because of the programmatic debts he pays to his predecessors, Reynolds’s collection of pictures became an important part of his creative practice; it provided a working vocabulary and ready magazine of images, attitudes, and ideas. This is so much the case that when Reynolds says, in his addresses to the Royal Academy, that “a great part of every man’s life must be employed in collecting materials for the exercise of genius,” or when he insists that an artist “must . . . endeavor to collect subjects for expression; to amass a stock of ideas, to be combined and varied as occasion may require,” it can become unclear if he is referring strictly to mind work or to the activities of the connoisseur and art collector.113 The point is borne home by Reynolds’s attachment to his own studio collection, which developed into perhaps the finest collection of visual art in Britain. Composed of prints, drawings, and paintings, it was heavily weighted toward painters of Italy and the Low Countries in the Renaissance and seventeenth century—­the loose category that Reynolds understood as the “Old Masters.” At the time of his death, he owned by one estimate as many as four thousand drawings, and perhaps

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twice as many prints;114 he also owned, at the time of his death, something on the order of a thousand paintings, with many more having passed through his hands while he was alive.115 It was part of his pose as a gentleman;116 it was a sign of what his latest cataloguer calls “sheer acquisitiveness.”117 But it was also the terrain of his intellect, where he did his best thinking. He became “unsettled” when he was kept from his collection, and, notes Northcote, though he accepted invitations to visit the country residences of the nobility, he always “returned home like one who had been kept so long without his natural food.”118 Reynolds’s conservative aesthetic places him on the same contested ground as Joseph Addison, Alexander Pope, Mark Akenside, and others—­for whom borrowing as a form of creativity always threatens to look like no kind of creativity at all (see Exhibits 8, 13–14, and 3). The artist is to “take what materials he pleases” from the work of the ancients or of “modern artist[s] not his contemporary.” In so doing, Reynolds writes, the artist borrows from a “magazine of common property, always open to the publick,” treasuring ideas in the memory, thereby making them “his own property.”119 Reynolds could almost be quoting Addison’s Spectator 411; he is in any case adapting Addison’s remarks, just as elsewhere he adapts remarks from Roland Fréart, Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy, Jonathan Richardson, Pope, John Dryden, and so on. One of the commonly reiterated historical objections to Reynolds’s Discourses is that they tilt on the edge of being a jumble of plagiarized passages, but it is hard to imagine Reynolds’s mind working any other way.120 The painter who built a career on adaptation—­on communing with the ideas of others—­developed a body of critical theory on the same grounds that he built a practice.121 Just as a poet might imagine an internal eye ranging over objects stashed away in memory (think of Akenside’s palace of the imagination—­see Exhibit 3), so Reynolds imagines the painter’s eye ranging among images that have been treasured up over a lifetime. Such a theory does not leave much room for what a later poet, Coleridge for instance, would understand as creativity or poetic genius; the painter’s imagination, in the age of Reynolds, is limited to the precise task of “finding out” suitable images and combining them in aesthetically pleasing arrangements.122 “This process,” Ernest Lee Tuveson observes, “involves nothing transcendent”; true wit, in the curatorial arts, is what oft was thought, but ne’er so well express’d.123 Put differently, “originality” in the modern sense was still a new concept, against which Reynolds was fighting a rearguard action. Under such a regime of invention, notes Simon Stern, “novelty and imitation” were able to “coexist.”124

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Invention understood this way might be seen as being little more than a sort of “systematic prodding of memory,”125 useless in discovering new truths about nature but essential to defending a rhetorical position. This marks what E. H. Gombrich, in a short but crucial essay on Reynolds’s practice, calls Reynolds’s “conservative programme in the true meaning of the word.” (Gombrich, for example, dissects Reynolds’s Three Ladies Dancing at the Term of Hymen into its sources: a Poussin, a Rubens, a Three Graces, an anonymous Rape of Proserpina, and so forth.)126 And it also marks Reynolds as being in dialogue with a long tradition stemming from Francis Bacon, for whom the world of concepts is worked up out of masses of particulars. We know from his notes that Reynolds studied Bacon’s remarks on originality; Bacon’s crucial contribution to theories of invention was to cleave invention into two sorts: “the one of Arts and Sciences, the other of Arguments and Discourse.”127 The latter is the simple summoning up of images or ornaments. The poet or painter conceives an argument or idea; he summons up sensory objects to support it. As Bacon insists in the Advancement of Learning, and as Reynolds copied into his notes, “invention is no other, but out of the knowledge, whereof our mind is already possessd, to draw forth or call before us that which may be pertinent to the purpose which we take into consideration.”128 Bacon is thinking, in this passage, of Cicero and Demosthenes, for whom invention “is readiness and present use of our knowledge and not addition or amplification thereof,” a point Reynolds returns to in his twelfth discourse.129 But the very passage Reynolds copied out is only meant as a foil to Bacon’s real interest; this is his insistence on another sense of invention, a method of discovery that would ultimately provide the basis for his new method.130 This is invention “of the arts and sciences,” which begins with masses of particulars but aspires toward the discovery of “principles.” The striking thing is that this kind of invention is if anything even more passive than that of the rhetorical arts. The mind husbands up instances; it proceeds “by proper rejections and exclusions,” to “come to a conclusion on affirmative instances”; it arrives at the affirmative forms of things that lie behind all particular instances.131 The inductive process associated with Bacon (and “revitalized” after Locke) turns up more broadly as one of the central pillars of Reynolds’s artistic practice, his quest after what he called the “central form.”132 In history paintings in the grand style, invention meant searching for a normal or transhistorical human form, generic and symmetrical, beyond the particularities of any model. The guiding principle for Reynolds, as for Samuel Johnson and others of his circle, was an idea of a “general” or “perfect state of nature, which the Artist calls

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the Ideal Beauty.”133 Not what the eye sees, but this “leading principle,” is the grand object and aesthetic frame of all “works of genius.” Reynolds’s appeal to ideal beauty has led a number of critics to identify a strain of Platonism or Neoplatonism in his aesthetic, as though he were thinking of the primal world of ideal forms that is the critical feature of Plato’s metaphysics. But in light of Reynolds’s debts to Bacon and others, it is surely better to refer to Reynolds’s aesthetic as Platonic or idealistic only in a loose, nontechnical sense.134 For Reynolds’s “central idea” was worked up out of masses of particulars, abstracted from experience, in a mode most strongly associated with Baconian and Lockean empiricism.135 One is not to “patch . . . up a particular work on the narrow plan of imitation,” Reynolds insisted, but rather to “apply to . . . art” the kind of “observations which [Bacon] made on poetry, on life, and on everything about us.”136 In this way, the “study” of past masters “consists in learning to see nature,” learning to abstract form from particulars; this set of acquired predispositions, this leap above particularities and into the world of ideas, Reynolds continues, “may be called the art of using other men’s minds.”137 This expanded idea of invention—­what Bacon calls invention of the arts and sciences, Reynolds more commonly “conception”—­is the leap from particulars to the imperfectly formed idea that, in turn, provides the initial pattern or design of visual display. It is in the conception that the turn of style unique to each sculptor, painter, or poet lies, just as it is here that a string of disconnected gestures are linked into a living form. This “conception” is particularly marked in drafts and sketches; for this reason, Reynolds was particularly interested in the rough sketches and original drawings that preceded finished pictures, such drawings forming “a major part of his collection.” These are valuable “not for high finishing, or a minute attention to particulars,” but because they “give the idea of an whole,” relaying the “idea” or “invention” of the artist.138 The conception is also carried within the finished product; the aesthetic effect of the final work of art lurks in the conception that organizes and arranges the material world around it.139 This then helps pin down a critical distinction, what made it possible for a painter to borrow without being a plagiary. As an artist, Reynolds insists, you are not to “borrow . . . a particular thought, an action, attitude, or figure,” and “transplant it into your own work”; this, he writes, would be unwarrantable plagiarism. Reynolds advises young painters that rather than “copying the touches of [the] great masters,” they should instead “copy only their conceptions”;140 he advises them, that is, to filter out the organizing spark, to isolate it from its mediating material,

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for the conception is that inspiring logic that, if all the shape and color were impossibly pared away, would be lurking behind the finished surfaces of paint. This is Jonathan Richardson’s advice, as well. Richardson, the man Samuel Johnson insisted was responsible for inspiring Reynolds to be a painter in the first place, identifies two painters richer in conception than others: these are Raphael and his most important student, Giulio Romano.141 We are prepared, then, to see what appealed to Reynolds about what he believed to be a painting direct from the hand and eye of Giulio. For one thing, it appealed to him because of its conception—­the conception of a mind praised by Richardson as particularly rich. It was one step removed from a Raphael. But the subject was also important—­for it was one step removed from a particular conception, the Triumph of Galatea at the Villa Farnesina, which is itself about the problems of artistic representation. Raphael’s fresco illustrates an ekphrastic pair of stanzas from Poliziano’s “Stanze per la giostra.” As Poliziano frames the scene, we are in fact not to imagine that we are looking at Galatea, Acis, and Polyphemus; we are instead meant to be looking at a representation of the same events previously painted by Vulcan. Joseph Addison would have loved the play of representation (see Exhibit 13); standing in the cool air of the villa’s five-­bay loggia, what we at first took to be narratio is in fact ekphrasis; what we perceive as a painting of a myth is in fact a painting of a description of a mythical painting of an event. Poliziano’s poem describes a painting by Vulcan himself, and, as Poliziano puts it, Vulcan never esteemed any other of his works so highly, Truth itself has not more truth than this; Whatever the art in itself does not contain, The mind, imagining, clearly understands.142 This is Poliziano’s idea of the philosophical burden the Triumph of Galatea might be made to bear—­and it was Raphael’s task to relay this something extra, what the “mind, imagining, clearly understands,” returning it to a visual medium. Raphael’s solution was an experiment with central form, ideal beauty culled from and poised against particulars; he multiply restages the tension between particulars and their central or motivating idea. This tension first appears, according to E. H. Gombrich’s influential reading, in the disjunction between the painting’s design and its riot of flesh. There is on the one hand a clear geometric pattern, captured in the crossing of arrows and reins at the condensed point of Galatea’s gaze; there is on the other hand a continual,

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writhing movement, in the bodies gathered pell-­mell around Galatea as a generative object of desire. Her face stands quite still, as the rest of the composition turns round her. This disjunction reappears, moreover, in the classic split between Galatea’s body and whatever it is that she sees; figured here is the mind in contradistinction with its body, barely draped human flesh with some ideal object and end.143 Raphael in other words is attempting, in the tension between bodies and geometric design, to suggest something of the difference between what the “art in itself contains,” and the conception that motivates it. The tensions in Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea are characteristic of what has come to be called Mannerism, and the fresco therefore cements a historical turn in Raphael’s style.144 Raphael’s attempt to disentangle Galatea from the tactile field in which she is embedded signals his transition from the quattrocento aesthetic he inherited—­what Gombrich calls “the faithful portrayal of nature”—­and toward an interest in “central form.” In a discussion of the Galatea, Raphael was reported to have insisted that he relied on no particular model; nor did he rely on the trick that Zeuxis is recorded by Pliny to have used: to consult “several beauties,” and “make the selection [of the parts] of the best.” Raphael insists that “there being a dearth of good judges and of beautiful women,” he began instead with “a certain Idea that comes to my mind.”145 More than one commentator has called this Raphael’s Neoplatonism, but it is clear from Reynolds’s remarks that he celebrated Raphael for the facility with which he isolated and relayed a “central form” gathered through long familiarity with numerous particular instances;146 Raphael’s “materials are generally borrowed,” Reynolds insists, “though the noble structure is his own.”147 It is this noble structure, the production and framing of the central form, indeed the invention of the concept of central form generally, that the Galatea puts strikingly on display.148 The “triumph,” Raphael’s innovation, is to capture as the theme of a painting the escape of an idea from flesh. The Triumph of Galatea is therefore the first of a new way of thinking about the conception as the triumph of art, as the laborious something and ineffable product rising out of the mangle of embodied practice. Galatea’s triumph is the same as Raphael’s. This innovation is of course what Reynolds would have called the painting’s “conception”—­indeed, a possible ground for the invention of “conception” as an artist’s practice generally. It is for this phrasing of conception that Raphael’s idea was multiply reproduced, becoming a standard topos of art generally, including in the painting Reynolds acquired from Long. In what he thought was a Giulio, Reynolds had the chance to witness a painter of

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particularly fertile invention handling a theme that is itself about conception: the very birth of the principle of the artistic conception itself. In chasing this conception, the outline under the image, Reynolds therefore adopted the paradoxical methods employed by Hunter before him, scrubbing or paring flesh nearly into blankness. Reynolds’s aim at least partly lets him off the hook for defacing the canvas in the first place, or Christie’s for selling it as a Giulio, for both auctioneer and painter were motivated by the conviction that the material execution of the image was much less important than the something added which it contained, and which could not in any case be marred by the simple manipulation of materials.

Exhibit 22. Joshua Reynolds, William Hunter One of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s oddest portraits currently hangs in the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow, the institution to which Hunter left his estate and museum. It displays William Hunter in a space designed to suggest his study, a few books obscured by masses of red drapery. He is wearing the high-­buttoned black coat that he wore in his lectures, capturing something between the man working in blood and bone and the authority speaking on matters of ideal anatomy. Hunter’s instruments, his pots of ink, and his model are at hand. So too is a fragment of red chalk, of the sort used by Jan van Rymsdyk in preparing the initial sketches for his engravings.149 Hunter stands over a table covered in a figured red cloth. There is a wet-­tissue preparation of a uterus on the table behind him; he has just looked up from consulting its twin, a plaster casting that Hunter himself (or his assistant) painted to indicate its vascular structure. This painting of a painted casting is one sign that the artist (Reynolds) means to capture another artist (Hunter) at his work, but there is a second sign: Hunter is craned over a blank sheet on the cloth before him—­in fact, a folio sheet folded in half, with the fold at his left. The painting, too, is a work of museal reproduction; its rendering of both wet-­tissue preparation and the cast-­plaster copy are striking in their realism—­much more striking, in fact, than the loose masses of paint that suggest Hunter’s face or his pale hands. This is the portrait of an anatomical surgeon that does him the justice of representing him as an artist at his craft; the portrait captures his aesthetic, offering Hunter as the perspectival center of an arrangement of flesh and blood. It is more than a little like Raphael’s Triumph of Galatea; Hunter’s moon-­like and surprisingly serene face gazes out

27. The anatomist William Hunter, at work among his medical preparations. GLAHA 43793. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow, 2014.

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of the mess of flesh with which he is surrounded, gazing toward some conception of his own. Reynolds’s portrait of Hunter was commissioned in 1784, shortly after Hunter’s death, bringing together for the last time two men who had crossed paths on many occasions during their long and productive lives.150 Reynolds arrived in London society as an outsider, a poor painter from Plympton, and established himself as the foremost member of his profession. Half through his technical merits, and half through his social accomplishments, he rose to become the inaugural president of the Royal Academy, and Principal Painter in Ordinary to the King. “Reynolds,” notes Richard Wendorf, “was a carefully constructed character,” who consciously performed and internalized the breeding that was his passkey into polite culture.151 Reynolds was enormously and unashamedly ambitious, remarking that “without the love of fame you can never do any thing excellent”; he adopted habits of personal deportment as part of what it meant to be a successful painter.152 Hunter was similarly driven, arriving in London from a small town in Scotland, building up his anatomical school into the first such institution in England, and developing his reputation as an obstetrician until he was physician to the queen. The similarities between the two men may be gauged by the remarks of James Northcote, Reynolds’s last apprentice and first biographer. Reynolds, Northcote writes, “thinks that had he been breed a Surgeon he should not have been obscure, for as fame was allways his desire he would have study’d physic and at least have attemted if not realy made the greatest physician in the world.”153 Perhaps Reynolds was thinking of Hunter while he was indulged himself in this fancy, for he has accurately described the man who rose from an obscure surgical practice in Glasgow to the highest social strata in London.154 At first glance, Reynolds’s picture of his alter-­ego presents a simple portrait of an anatomist in his practice. Hunter worked promptly with fresh specimens and insisted that painters and engravers in his employ work equally quickly. He would never “paint from memory or imagination, but only from immediate observation.”155 But in fact what Reynolds portrays Hunter doing is beginning (or ending) a sketch or a set of remarks on the human gravid uterus with reference to his many materials and preparations of specimens. Reynolds himself claimed that he painted Hunter “after memorie,” but memory in this sense is meant in the active sense with which he, like Hunter, was accustomed—­the sense of a collector working in a gallery of surviving images. Reynolds customarily began with a “conception” or “central form”—­in the case of a portrait, something to capture the character of the subject—­only

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then consulting things as they look to the eye. The conception is developed in the mind; the image is constructed as a complex dialogue between the artist and his materials. It is evident from the finished product that Reynolds, deprived of the living person himself, consulted instead a handful of reproductions. He was not at all shy, after all, about putting other men’s minds to work in his own compositions.156 The twist of Hunter’s neck in Reynolds’s portrait, for example, answers the imaginary point of view in Johann Zoffany’s conversation piece of Hunter lecturing to the Royal Academy.157 So too does the costume; Reynolds has in other words relayed Hunter at work, abstracting him from Zoffany’s piece and translating him into his study. Not so Hunter’s head, however; Hunter’s head, including its oddly puffy contours and mottled texture, is by common consensus thought to have been copied from his deathmask.158 This means that there are in fact two paintings of castings in Reynolds’s finished portrait, the casting of the gravid uterus on the table, and the casting of the pregnant mind on Hunter’s shoulders. Reynolds, like Hunter, was pursuing a design that itself meant to capture something other than what appears before the eyes, something about what it meant to conceive. The preparation on Hunter’s table, done from the life, represents the anatomical preparation, still at the Anatomy Museum in Glasgow, that formed the subject of plate 26 of Hunter’s Atlas.159 This preparation has a special status in the Atlas. It is among the last fully realized, life-­sized engravings of the womb with its contents, the last image that does not begin to shade into a design, and therefore the last image that might be called “a simple portrait, in which the object is represented exactly as it [is] seen.” Moreover, it is Hunter’s only known preparation to present the transparent membrane of the chorion as a window into another, unknowable world, shaped nevertheless so precisely that it captures, in the “convex surface of the transparent membranes,” the reflection of “a distinct miniature picture, of the window which gave light.”160 The precision of the reflected window—­Hunter’s window captured on the window of the womb—­is what Roberta McGrath calls a “hallmark of truth . . . presenting the object to viewers in black and white ‘exactly as it was seen.’”161 But the musculature surrounding the uterus, cut and peeled back by Hunter’s knife, means to frame a window into something else, the world of tender liquors and invisible jellies, where life is happening in all its mystery. The wet-­tissue preparation, one of the marks of Hunter’s accomplishments as an artist in flesh and blood, provides a window between the conceivable and the inconceivable, the unspeakably material body of the subject cut open to reveal the vanishing world of membranes and lamellae.

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This medical specimen, when organized by Reynolds’s idea, finds an additional echo in the mass of mottled red drapery. This drapery is made to dominate Reynolds’s Hunter, occupying, along with the figured red tablecloth, fully 80 percent of the canvas. Red drapery is peculiar among Reynolds’s work; not only is it particularly uncommon, but drapery with the particularly dappled texture of Hunter’s tablecloth is exceptionally rare. There was an established, slightly scurrilous tradition of curtains standing in for the mysteries of obstetric medicine; take, for instance, the crude woodcut entitled “Dr. William Hunter at a Confinement,”162 which, like Reynolds’s Hunter, is dominated by drapery—­by what is in this case a mass of bed curtains.163 This image positions Hunter, slim and dressed in a practical bob-­wig, with his long fingers just parting the curtains into a vaguely sexualized crevice. Not the blank curtains, but the gap or opening introduced into the curtains alludes to the obstetric stage play that is about to be performed. As the caption to a similar engraving suggests, Hunter is an “occult philosopher searching into the depths of things.”164 This is an example of fetishization in the most elemental sense.165 Something like this is going on in Reynolds’s work generally, where red curtains continually suggest a slightly racy scene; they appear for instance in Reynolds’s pair of group portraits of the Society of the Dilettanti—­that club associated with drunkenness, scurrility, and sexual excess.166 And they turn up here, because bedcurtains are Hunter’s proper emblem and the fetish that calls him up. Reynolds has created an image both of the site of Hunter’s most fervent investigations and, in Reynolds’s words, of the “veil” of Nature, which the “modern artist . . . is obliged to remove.”167 By restaging the scene of conception as Hunter’s proper place, by in fact repeating in the sweep of the drapery the curve of the cuts in the wet-­tissue preparation on Hunter’s desk, Reynolds offers us a parable of conception. Put differently, Reynolds causes Hunter to confront the problem of conception from the inside out. There is, however, a final related way in which this portrait does its peculiar work: the medical preparation finds a final echo in the stack of papers under Hunter’s right hand. The blank page that features in more than one portrait of Hunter168 is a figure of erasure that, like the empty womb in the jar, frames an absence. It is a figure of “conception” in the doubled sense of the word. Put differently, for the natural historian in the tradition exemplified by Hunter, the conception just before it happens is best figured as a blank page, “void of all characters, without any ideas.”169 Hunter, standing over one anatomical figure and turning away from another, is either about to begin, or has just finished, his magnum opus, depending upon how we read that blank

28. Joshua Reynolds, Laurence Sterne. NPG 5019 © National Portrait Gallery.

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page. He may, indeed, be about to sketch, for Reynolds, a figure of a conception, a small open-­ended triangle. In this sense, Reynolds joins Hunter, Sterne, and Locke in adopting blank paper as a site of a certain conceptual vanishing and the ground of knowledge production. He gazes from flesh to idea; we see in Hunter, isolated from the riot of flesh that surrounds him, a certain tension between death and life, matter and form, desire and the cold eye of the obstetrician; Reynolds’s William Hunter was his Triumph of Galatea. It is finally worth noting that Reynolds’s portrait of Hunter echoes another of Reynolds’s rare portraits featuring red drapery. In the spirit of always going backward, we might say that Reynolds’s portrait of Hunter anticipates a portrait executed many years earlier. This is Reynolds’s portrait of Sterne, which, like that of Hunter, captures the major theme of origins with which the first sections of Tristram Shandy are preoccupied. The echoes picked up in the later portrait of Hunter are clear: Reynolds poses Sterne in a site of conception, which is either about to happen or has already occurred. Under Sterne’s arm is a mass of papers; what we see is the half-­blank title page of his best-­known novel. From the first to the last, last to the first: he is either about to begin or has just put the finishing touches on his manuscript; the pen in its inkstand is either just laid down or just about to be taken up. As the enigmatic look on Sterne’s face suggests, it does not in the end matter which interpretation we accept—­when Sterne turns the page, we will be left with the period’s longest literary articulation of the knotty problem of conception. When the page is turned, we will be confronted with the question of the origins of a life and opinions. And, as should by now be apparent, once we accept that the mind is a collection, we are given the tools to pose the question at the same time that we lose the resources to answer it.

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Disp o ssessi o n 23. A Shilling — 24. A Book of Accounts 25. A Blank Sheet of Paper (2) — 26. A Ring Containing a Lock of Hair 27. The Lost Property Office — 28. The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild

Exhibit 23. A Shilling These final six exhibits have a heavy task. They have to help to unthink everything the past twenty-­two have thought. Having sketched out the stakes of mainstream Augustan epistemology as it was remodeled by some of its most important popular champions and practitioners, it remains to characterize, that is, to materialize, the experiential background of the vast majority of British men and women. For mainstream cognitive models depended upon establishing a reliable relationship with a stable storehouse of materials; the metaphors deployed to coordinate those storehouses depended on repeated embodied experiences with materials of thinking—­that is, the sort of cognitive ecology implied by a collection. The paradox, as we have encountered it so far, is just this: the triumph of the disembodied intellect, the success of the model of the mind as a curator consulting his collections, emerged out of the riot of flesh with which it was surrounded, the hodgepodge of haptic embeddedness. And this was in part possible because systems were in place to still things down—­whether these were systems for cataloguing and sorting, or techniques for the preparation of tissue samples, or aesthetics of design and arrangement. But what is to be said about all those people who did not have such a set of experiences, or whose ownership of materials in the literal sense was perpetually insecure? Joseph Addison’s career, for instance, ebbed and flowed with the fortunes of his patrons, but Addison was never troubled by the law, seriously in debt, called before a judge, or dispossessed of his belongings.1 He never made dispossession a programmatic object of his remarks.

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29. A splendid 1701 shilling, uncirculated. Courtesy Royal Mint Museum.

Why would he, if it wasn’t part of his experience? On the contrary, he built a philosophy of possession, composing part of the theoretical and cultural buttressing of what would emerge as liberal subjectivity, the theory of possessive individualism.2 Simply gaze upon the world, as Addison puts it, and it gives you a kind of property in everything you see.3 And this story often stands in as the normative one—­as though the possessive experiences of a few could adequately stand in for the complicated, embodied experiences of the multitude. This, however, is not the only story. In repeating Addison’s confident claim (which echoes Locke’s confident claim) about the mind’s materials, in undertaking an archaeology of mind-­stuff through the collections that those minds took as their models, we are in danger of forgetting, as Addison forgets, that not everyone was a collector, not every mind had a cabinet (or had experienced a cabinet). We are in danger of repeating the long silencing of whole groups of people whose works were differently material and vocal. For Addison’s position that the mind is a collection of materials, while intended as the ideologically neutral elaboration of the claim that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses, is in fact a sorting switch of power. It excludes the vast numbers of people who did not experience themselves primarily as owners of things. If mental work depends upon the possession of ideas, and if that metaphor itself depends in a fundamental way on the experience of collecting to which it refers, then what about all those people who did not have that experience, whose experiences of loss far outweighed those of accrual? I am thinking here of those people who, for one reason or another, may be loosely classed as the “dispossessed,” which includes the poor, the transient,

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and those cast out by the law. It also includes most women, a fact that helps explain Karen O’Brien’s observation that “no woman writer, not even Locke’s friend Damaris Masham [who may have shared Locke’s library], accepted uncritically his epistemology, according to which we derive all knowledge . . . through our experience and reflection upon the material world.”4 It includes, in any case, everyone for whom Patricia Fumerton demands an increased sensitivity to “trivial subjectivities,” selves made out of ephemera, shifting working conditions, dislocation, disease, disempowerment.5 And it should go without saying that this will call for a different, oblique way of approaching the problem, one attuned to loss, circulation, dispossession, publicness, and the law. The subjective experience of life in the marketplace often recaptures the basic model of the empiricist epistemology, with, however, the critical difference that it does not witness the stability of possession as a meaningful ground for personal identity. A previous exhibit (Exhibit 12) touched briefly on Addison’s Tatler essay no. 249; this is Addison’s short essay, one of the first among the emergent genre of the it-­narrative, in which a silver coin, taken from Addison’s pocket and set on his table, rises up of itself and speaks to tell of its picaresque perambulations. Born in Peru, it voyages, by way of Drake’s cruise, from the last monarch of the Tudor dynasty through the interrupted reign of the Stuarts. It witnesses the development of England from a marginal kingdom among others into a nascent mercantile empire. Each of its stops leaves its mark; it bears the image of a queen, is nicked, bent, worn smooth, clipped, and finally remelted to take the profile image of King William III. It would be possible to imagine a tale like this in which the coin tells its story through its scars: this nick remembers the teeth of a tavern keeper testing me for soundness, this scratch remembers when I was cast under a wall, and so forth. It would bear witness in the same way that it bears marks—­at least, if it hadn’t been melted down and recoined.6 Such a story would depend on an instantly understood metaphor; just as a coin can be said to have a life story simply by being witness to a series of adventures, can be made to render them up (Sherlock Holmes–like) through careful deduction from its surface marks, so too people may be said to be the sum total of the ideas or “impressions” that they have accrued over a lifetime of experience; scratches on an object would have an isomorphic relationship with scratches on the brain, exograms with engrams (see Exhibit 13). This fantasy drives a series of puns, which point to a deeper set of resemblances: both money and man may be said to have a “fund of discourse,” to have “value” that increases by “being in motion,” to be able to “give an account” of their adventures, and so on.7 Telling a story

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is metaphorically equivalent to making an inventory of one’s possessions. In the end, Addison’s theory of poetic inspiration turns on this sort of ownership. Objects are inspirations because they have an isomorphic relationships to a brain traces, a coin telling a story of itself in exactly the same way that Addison, holding the coin, is prompted to consult his own impressions—­and therefore to speak of the rise of England’s mercantilist empire, itself based on a brute accumulation theory of value.8 In essence, Addison proposes a coin that can collect experiences and recount them despite being melted down and remade. He proposes a coin that can only accrue; he imagines an account as an inventory, as the irreversible collecting of things, with no expenses and nothing ever lost. Addison’s own evidence, however, speaks against him. Among the adventures the coin remembers to relate is a brief pause in the pocket of John Philips, where it claims to have provided the inspiration of Philips’s mock-­Miltonic burlesque, “The Splendid Shilling.” This is a remarkably literary shilling—­stitching its way between Philips’s celebrated poem and the Tatler essay Addison means to pen; presumably, just as the shilling on Addison’s desk provides inspiration for his essay, so, too, while resting in Philips’s pocket, it provided inspiration for his poem. Addison has, in other words, assumed that a poem about the meaning of a shilling will multiply turn upon the question of ownership, including the ownership of that coin; he has assumed that the poet’s creative process depends upon the stable ownership of things, and has extended that process to Philips. But “The Splendid Shilling” does not record ownership as a meaningful artistic principle; the poem may not be said meaningfully to cross with Addison’s coin at all, for it is a poem, instead, about how the lack of a shilling changes the poet’s relationship with the world he inhabits.9 The poem begins by imagining a man who, “in Silken or Leathern Purse retains / A splendid shilling.” This could almost be Addison; possession penetrates the texture of the possessor’s experience. Such a man, armed with the purchasing power of such a twelve-­penny piece, is imagined as smoking in peace, “laugh[ing] at merry Tale[s],” toasting the health of friends and lovers. This is of course richly embodied. He does not “hear with pain / New Oysters” hawked on the street, nor “sigh for cheerful Ale,” for the simple fact that he has locally unlimited (so long as untapped) powers of acquisition means that he does not experience lack as immanent pain.10 He may experience lack as pleasure—­for it implies the sweetness of satisfying a desire. Philips, on the contrary, owns no such shilling. The poem is about what it means to lack a shilling. He is therefore surrounded with “griping Penury”

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and “Hunger, sure Attendant upon Want”; he is starved, suspicious, circumspect, and cold. He “feed[s] with dismal Thoughts” his “anxious Mind.”11 He is hounded by duns, catchpoles, and other agents of the law—­or anxiously imagines them even when they aren’t there. Pain and anxiety rise, in his case, to the very principle that causes him to be a poet. The lack of a shilling prompts a counterintuitive productiveness, the roving alertness of the dispossessed. The bodily experience of frustrated desire, the experience of being “from Pleasure quite debarr’d,” is the engine or material ground of the Grub Street poet’s mental work. And where Addison’s work is in general marked by certainty, chaining together affirmatives, “The Splendid Shilling” continually offers alternatives, each of which stalls upon not quite coming into being. While the poet “labour[s] with” the contextual experience of “eternal drought, / And . . . parched throat,” “he mournful Verse / Indite[s], and sing[s] of Groves and Myrtle Shades, / Or desperate Lady near a purling stream.”12 In other words, he shifts his longing, his present absence, into the heightened sharpness of alternatives. He is not longing for a particular lady; he by no means desires a particular grove or myrtle shade. These are all stock images, recycled here as alternatives to the general ground of his own want. Put differently, the lack of a shilling provides the immediate inspiration for the production of poetry. Finally, it is worth noting that “The Splendid Shilling” was the title given the poem by men like Addison. When the poem first appeared, it was in unauthorized editions of pirated verse, where it was simply called an “Imitation of Milton.”13 We have entered, in other words, the realm of the dispossessed. This is not a poetics that mirrors the careful tending of things, like a garden or a repository. It is a poetry that rises up as the effect of dispossession, and that, itself, recirculates images it borrows without repaying.

Exhibit 24. A Book of Accounts Speaking of accounts—­personal, financial, and narrative—­let us turn to a book once owned by Laetitia Pilkington. Like most of the objects temporarily owned by the dispossessed, it is now lost; museums and cabinets always favor the telling of a history of possession. To recover a mind space like that of Pilkington, we will have to imagine it instead. It is an account book, possibly folio sized, probably inexpensively bound, which contained, depending on how you look at it, either a register of the pamphlets, prints, and second-­ hand books that passed through her print shop, or the carefully refashioned

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contents of those pamphlets and books themselves.14 In 1743, Pilkington purchased a collection of prints in bulk from a seller under distress, and set herself up in a small storefront in the Strand. It was roughly in the next year or the one following that she was accosted in her shop by a pair of strangers. Two very fine young Gentlemen, whom I did not know, came to buy some Prints, and observing a large Book in Manuscript, open before me, one of them demanded, Was that my Account-­Book? I assured the Gentlemen, my Revenue was easily cast up, and that I was but a bad Arithmetician, though I frequently dealt in Figures and Numbers. This Gentleman, whom I presently after found was an Earl, by his Companion’s calling him by his Title, insisted on seeing the Subject of my Amusement. This was the First Volume of my Work, which when once he had began, he went quite through with, and gave it more Applause than ever an Author’s dear Partiality to their own Offspring could possibly make me believe it deserved.15 Pilkington was a sometime ghostwriter and Grub Street hack writer who composed verse, small plays, farces, and entertainments. She was the librettist for a number of ballad operas—­setting new words to well-­known tunes. She wrote and circulated poetry as instruments for securing patronage; she composed verse for the friends of Samuel Richardson and Colley Cibber to pass off as their own.16 The general ephemerality of the genres in which she worked is marked by the fact that almost none of Pilkington’s librettos, poems, farces, and epistles were ever to appear in print.17 The one sustained effort from which depends most of her literary fame was her three-­volume memoirs; it was the first volume of these memoirs that was mistaken (in the scene above) for a book of accounts. Telling the story of her life from her partial point of view, her memoirs are, in her words, the autobiography of a “lady of adventure,” a sort of picaresque of the trade in low literature; in this sense, they are the “offspring” of her own conceiving, her own life and opinions developed up from their origins.18 They are also, naturally, objects in her own accounts, shaping her life as much as they record it, objects of trade as much as they trade on the lives and objects of others.19 For Pilkington’s embeddedness in the world of literary circulation cuts both ways. She was sought out for the facility of her pen, which is multiply recorded in her memoirs; she was also reviled as a scandal-­sheet writer, for whom memoir was an instrument of blackmail. She

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was multiply imprisoned for debt and pursued for slander and libel—­not least by her estranged husband. The Memoirs are loaded with slightly sordid, embarrassing stories about almost everyone she ran across. It has been suggested that most of the people who subscribed to her memoirs hoped to suppress the inconvenient truths Pilkington threatened to reveal or to invent. We know this, like so much else that we know about Pilkington, because she says so herself in the memoirs’ second volume.20 What kind of world did Pilkington inhabit? What might we call her ecological niche? For one thing, she owned no library; she had at one time owned a slender collection of books compiled through purchase, gifts, borrowing, and exchange, but this had early on been confiscated by her husband and dispersed. We know from her own memoirs that she made use of some of London’s earliest lending libraries;21 we know from the same source that she picked up gossip, news, and the latest verse and drama from coffeehouses and the theater. Since she owned no library she could work anywhere; her habituated haunt was White’s Chocolate House, a hub of “the inferior part of the world,” which Jonathan Swift called “the bane of half the English nobility,” and which Richard Steele named as the proper site for receiving and recording “all accounts of Gallantry, Pleasure, and Entertainment.”22 She was a shopkeeper when she could be, her life being too mobile to have been attached to anything as permanent as a settled habitation. But in renting a storefront and displaying herself and her wares in the window, Pilkington had, in the words of her biographer, “turned her stock into trade”;23 she had purchased a collection of prints by lot, and, adding to them pamphlets, ballads, and possibly second-­ hand books, drove a desultory business in low London literature. And just as a library may be said to provide the model for one kind of poetic production—­ providing both the scene of writing and its materials—­Pilkington’s shop, in addition to being an inventory of movable goods, was the place where she did the greatest part of her reading and writing. She read there; she records, for instance, being “thrown . . . into a hearty fit of Laughter” by her reading when a customer walked into her shop.24 She wrote there as well. When confronted by the two well-­dressed gentlemen, she was interrupted in her own jotting in her “large book of Manuscript.” We may therefore judge, from this episode and others, that memoir for Pilkington was a genre of a peculiar sort; it was a genre to be composed on a sales counter.25 This “large book of Manuscript” is what the client mistakes for an account book—­but was more properly the first volume of her memoirs. The mistake is natural—­what more natural for a shop than a book of accounts? But it

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is also apposite, for the mistake links a web of mutual influences between writing, trust, the public performance of selfhood, and the rise of finance.26 We commonly tell the story of the rise of modern subjectivity through the development of genres of autobiography; the long, prose form of life writing developed, so this account goes, alongside an interest in the growth and development of people as individuals.27 Pilkington’s account is a signal example. Like autobiography, Mary Poovey suggests, double-­entry accounting formed one of the critical test sites for the production of the modern self.28 The account book for which Pilkington’s manuscript was mistaken was a technical medium designed to solve a certain problem. In the absence of other mechanisms for determining trustworthiness in a credit economy, the book of accounts was one of the major technologies—­both a set of formal techniques and an attached set of instruments—­for making a history of semiprivate dealings public. Genre, remarks Michael McKeon, “provide[s] a conceptual framework for the mediation (if not the ‘solution’) of intractable problems, a method for rendering such problems intelligible.”29 Like all such technical instruments, the book of accounts solves the problem of trust by making its solution transparent.30 This is because the accounting system, Poovey explains, refigures social transactions as financial ones, in which all credits are met by obligations, and all debts by corresponding capital.31 Character is merely a question of finding the zero to which the book’s figures must balance. Pilkington mentions her own “bad arithmetic,” so it is unclear exactly what system of accounting she might have been using;32 it may be that her memoir was her only system of accounts.33 But the full system of double-­ entry bookkeeping to which she alludes would only begin with the so-­called memorial; also called the “daybook” or “waste book,” the memorial was the first in a series of books, each of which progressively simplified the records of transactions, altering them step by step until they became a series of numbers expressed in a common money. Pilkington’s daybook would contain merely the jotted notes made in the heat of the transfer, minimal narratives made as something is bought or sold, lost or gained. The “journal,” the second book in the series, would simplify and render the jotted notes of the memorial in a more universal arithmetic, formalizing and reorganizing the accounts of the daybook. The final book—­the “ledger”—­introduces an additional twist; each entry copied from the journal is recorded twice, once as a credit, and once as a debit. Each transaction is split into two entries, one representing what is gained from the transfer, and the other capturing what is owed or lost. Each transfer between books, Poovey notes, “seeks not simply to express the same

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information in different words but to write this information in abbreviated and increasingly rule-­governed form.”34 While the memorial may be a mere scratching of notes on blank paper, the journal must introduce a column of figures, split from narrative by a vertical line and tagged, in a separate column, by numbers or brief memoranda which would provide the terms for an index. And while the journal began the process of splitting narrative from figures, and creating the possibility of indexical reference, the ledger finalized the process of record, embedding a sequestered river of transactions, organized asynchronously, between two columns of numbers. At the end of this process a single number emerges, a final figure representing the balance of credits and debts; in the books of an plain dealer, whatever remains after debts are subtracted from credits will be itself explained with an equivalent number, so that profits, outstanding liabilities, and other exigencies will balance against monetary gain. This is what is meant by balanced books; in the shop of an honest dealer, everything will be explained; loss will be balanced with its compensation, and profit with risk and justifiable labor. The ledger, the book always available to the interested public, is what always adds up to zero, as the transparent sign of a merchant’s integrity. This is a pure example of an extended cognitive system, a set of instruments that disperse a cognitive process across disparate media, and it invites us to consider cognition as practices extended in ecologies, rather than as functions immanent to a single brains. One of the classic statements of the extended cognitive situation asks us to think of a man with his notebook; constitutionally unable to remember things like addresses, he copies them instead into a book, thereby shifting part of his cognitive load to a written document. The idea is that the note taker comes to rely upon the book—­and therefore a description of a thought must include not only a brain state but also a full account of his environment.35 This example makes some intuitive sense—­not least because it leans upon the folk model of memory popularized by people like Locke and Addison: memory is a storage device, like a notebook. This is why we call notes “memoranda”—­that is, things that must be remembered. But it is by no means clear that this is how memory works—­ except in the idealized wish posed by people like Locke.36 And so the memoir, like Pilkington’s waste book, while (again) simplifying and enactive process, offers a more apt model, for it offers an example of a technical medium across which representations pass, are transformed and held for a while, and then lost or retained as chance and circumstance will have it. Loss accompanies gain in this transactional medium; memory is a transactional state, and thinking

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relies on the constant coordination of cross-­referenced media. In the extended cognitive niche, the individual does not arrive to the group with faculties like reason or calculation ready-­made; on the contrary, individuals are the “lightly equipped” coordinators of artifacts that make cognition possible, the sites where techniques and technologies are made to mesh.37 Viewed this way, individuals carry only enough portable knowledge to make possible their intersection with a part of the cognitive processes into which they enter; reason—­that is, conceptual logic—­is what develops within the constraints of representational media, as thoughts cross boundaries between voice, individual minds, the memoir, journal, book of accounts, and so on. Close analysis of such a regimented, combined task asks us to rethink cognition as a media event. Books like Pilkington’s book of accounts turned up with increasing frequency in literature of the middle years of the century. George Lillo’s London Merchant is one among a number of bourgeois dramas that register the importance of accounting to the question of moral character; in such a world, the question of one’s social and ethical being is as transparent as examining one’s books. “The rectitude of the system as a whole,” writes Poovey, was, however, “a matter of formal precision, not referential accuracy.”38 For one thing, because what is bought almost never immediately balances against what is sold, numerous fictional entries had to be invented to make up the gap—­notional sums like “profit,” “money,” “stock,” and “loss.” These fictional quantities, these “personified aspects of business,” haunt the double-­entry system, ensuring its formal precision at the cost of its narrative or autobiographical referentiality. The fantasy is that the number accurately reflects the reality of the transaction that has occurred, that what is lost is mere narrative excess, but the very evidence of the sleight-­of-­hand made to balance the books suggests that a more complex economy is at stake here, one system of fictionalization giving way to another. If the waste book merely accrues transactions in narrative time, if the memorial may be said to be something like the beginning of autobiography, the ledger registers exchange as it looks to a particular economy of character. The habits of self-­writing implied in the simplification of narrative build the arch spanning from memorial to ledger. Memoir, in its effort to refashion diary into a partially retrospective account, makes a similar set of simplifications. This helps justify the series of puns Pilkington indulges herself in: the memorial, like the memoir, is a book of “figures and numbers,” at once of poetry and trade.39 This also helps account for why it is that Pilkington’s Memoirs, one version of the book on her table, are also filled with little memorials, of both monetary and moral variety. Pilkington might, on the one

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hand, record a sum of money owed to her: “Mem. he owes me two shillings”;40 this is the kind of thing that belongs in a waste book. She might also, however, record a moral lesson learned from a failed exchange: “Mem. The Clergyman infinitely more generous than the Peer”;41 this is the kind of thing that belongs in a diary. Here, then, is the way that the double-­entry system can begin to cross into a method of moral accountancy and life writing, for sometimes what is gained from an exchange is merely a lesson in life, or a narrative adventure: the stuff of memoir. It is in this sense that Pilkington’s account of herself was quite literally an account of herself, autobiography as bookkeeping, and vice versa. How about an example? “Having just paid my rent,” Pilkington remarks, and bought some Shop-­Goods, on which I had laid out every Penny I was worth;—­as I had stuck up on my Shop Window, Letters written here on any Subject, except the Law, Price Twelve-­pence; Petitions also drawn at the same Rate. Mem. Ready Money, no Trust. A Man came in, very badly drest, with a greasy Leather Apron before him; he looked over some Prints, when the Postman brought me a large Pacquet, marked Edinburgh; as I had no Money, I was in terrible Confusion, especially as the Fellow cried, “Come, Mistress, don’t keep me waiting;” I said, I must send out for Change: Oh, said he, I never go without it; where’s your Piece? Upon this, the Leather-­apron’d Gentleman, for such he was, drew out a Handful of Gold, and throwing down a Guinea, said, “There, take your Money;” and what was yet more surprizing, he insisted on my taking the Change, for he determined, he said, to have me his Debtor. Upon this I began to have a very different Opinion of my new Customer than what his first Appearance gave me, and therefore civilly entreated his Permission to peruse my Letter, to which he agreeing, I had not read above ten Lines when I burst into Tears, so the Gentleman insisted on my laying it aside while he stayed, telling me, I must so far oblige him as to write a Love-­Letter for him. Upon this I invited him into the Parlour, and told him, he must make me his Confidant.42 Captured here are the basic terms of life in a pamphlet shop. Pilkington records a series of exchanges, crossing between social intercourse, monetary

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transfer, and expressions of indebtedness. Each transaction is characteristically doubled: her money goes for shop goods, the exhaustion of her stock of cash (a debt) balanced by her inventory (“stock”); she receives a letter for a sum of money; this sum of money is part of a much larger sum—­a single coin—­that puts her in debt to yet another party for the moiety; she begins payment of this difference by composing a Love-­Letter, a “Task” governed by the standard rate of exchange already indicated on the shop sign. There are at least five, possibly six different people here, not taking into consideration the authors and makers of the “shop-­goods”; there is the seller of the shop goods, the courier, the person who wrote the epistle (her son), and, of course, Pilkington. The fifth is the man in the apron; he claims to be “Tom Brush,” an unlettered painter, though he will turn out to be (at least as Pilkington relays the episode) one of the leading peers of Ireland on a sort of escapade. While he has produced himself as a housepainter by the mere addition of a bit of costumery, the give-­and-­take of the monetary exchange creates the formal conditions for trust. The sixth person, the “Lady” to whom Pilkington pens her letter, will end up being already present in the room in a more literal way. The housepainter will exchange his “greasy apron” for a suit of “very rich” clothes and return, bearing the original note, “copied out fair,” and addressed now to Pilkington herself. The whole episode ends by eating its own tail, Pilkington recording an episode as a mode of idealized self-­production that records, internal to itself, Pilkington writing a letter to win her own affections. She becomes her own confidant; the love letter written for him is a love letter written for her. Pilkington calls the gentleman’s plot a “very genteel Piece of Gallantry, and quite new.”43 But if it is new, it is new only in the way that everything in a second-­hand book store is new; it is new because it is the recycling of something old. The letter itself, which she “quickly finished,” has been cobbled together out of phrases recalled and half-­remembered from stock either in or having passed through the shop, literally or metaphorically. As a new letter, it is twice the recycling of old things. Even the scenario seems to be borrowed; the episode with “Tom Brush,” Pilkington notes, “put me in mind of an Adventure I had in Ireland, when one of the finest Gentlemen in it came to visit me in a Grazier’s Coat, and told me his Name was Tom Long, the Carrier, though he happened to be an English Baronet.”44 We encounter here what seems to be the central paradox characteristic of trade writing, of Grub Street literature: “imitation” in these cases “provid[es] a strategy of innovation.”45 Through a kind of creative misprision, through a contextual recycling of old stock, memory gives way to wit.46 In fact, the resemblance between

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the episode involving Tom Long and Tom Brush might simply be reversed, the episode in Ireland of an English peer prompting the invention—­if it was invented—­of the episode in London involving an Irish one. If this is the case, then the reuse of the letter as a love letter to herself formally replicates the reuse of the scenario as a scenario involving herself, Pilkington reimagining a borrowed story in order autobiographically to produce herself as she would like to be seen. Catherine Gallagher reminds us that creativity among the dispossessed emerged at the junction of criminal and property law. Gallagher’s argument sketches the development of “invention” as a broad-­ranging criterion seeking to attach a text to an author; invention stood as the metric that separated scandal from novel, theft from originality, and exchangeable commodity from stolen goods, ultimately blossoming into a Romantic-­era defense of original genius.47 But in its early form, “invention” does not imply autogenesis; rather, it implies the “learning and labor” that informs the production of a new text, what marks it as an exchangeable commodity. This is a system based on the circulation of inherited goods, a system that in some ways marks what one recent authority calls the “counterintuitive” elements of modern copyright law, in which a poem may be “copyrightable  .  .  . even though many of its lines are taken from works that are in the public domain.”48 In what is less a defense than a celebration, Pilkington insists that she has “nothing to boast of as a Writer, but a great Memory”; she vaunts that her “three Volumes of Memoirs” were only “compassed” by giving a “Taste of the Wit” of such writers as “Shakespeare, Milton, &c.”49 Indeed, she argues, Pope is just such a poet of memory as wit, for whom the poetic process at once minimally shields the author from criminality and installs him in a chain of such shieldings.50 “Pope has stolen from Milton,” she remarks; “Milton has stolen from Shakespeare; Shakespeare has plundered nature.”51 “All writers,” she says, “are thieves,” but it would be no more possible for a public person—­anyone not living in “Desarts,” or “a Cave”—­to write a memoir without borrowing than it would for a painter “to give a good piece, when he is positively commanded never to draw the Likeness of any thing in Heaven or on Earth.”52 This is not merely the defense of a Grub Street writer against accusations of plagiarism; even her defense against plagiarism is borrowed from such writers as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, Joseph Addison, and Joseph Warton.53 (“Those anticipating Rascals the Ancients,” Pilkington quotes Swift as saying, “have left nothing for us poor Moderns to say” [1.186]; Swift, for his part, was merely paraphrasing Addison, and so it goes.)54 It is therefore not in spite of, but because of,

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her numerous transcriptions and plagiarisms that she enrolls herself in the tradition that flows from Shakespeare, announcing herself as “the Cream of Historians, the Mirror of Poets.”55 Though her opinion on these matters would change over time, memory, according to Pilkington’s earliest accounts, is the special “fountain” of “wit,” not merely a heap of poetic materials, but “Nurse and Guardian” of poetic insight. Pilkington was comfortable talking about her memory loosely as a “storehouse,” as a “sacred Store  .  .  . of Learning,” or as the repository of a “treasure”; she repeatedly refers to her memory as “the book and volume of her brain.”56 Like others among her contemporaries who traced the entanglements between wit and memory—­a theme emerging in the discourse surrounding Robert Hooke and Horace Walpole, among others (see Exhibits 11 and 18)—­Pilkington increasingly used the terms synonymously, such that memory might be said of “Wit” to “lay . . . it up till Season due and fit.”57 We may hear here the classical notion of invention as discovery, a theory of poetic inspiration that unites such otherwise different figures as Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Joshua Reynolds, and Laurence Sterne.58 In the tradition of the classical rhetors, invention is the wide-­ranging capacity to “draw forth readily” the appropriate images and ideas that are “collected and laid up in the mind”; it is the “readiness and present use of our knowledge” (see Exhibit 21).59 Perhaps Pilkington’s most perfect articulation of invention as repetition in this vein is her “Memory: A Poem.” A short panegyric in tetrametric triplets, it is inspired by a conversation with Jonathan Swift about memory as the source of inspiration, taking therefore as its subject its own originlessness in a conversation that itself recycled well-­known positions.60 Beginning with a celebration of memory, Pilkington ends in no uncertain terms championing plagiarism as the proper work of the poetic intellect. The work of memory is to register phrases and episodes to be recycled on demand. Such is Pilkington’s defense of memory as the proper origin of original thought that poetic production and literary theft become nearly identical. The account book—­ daybook and autobiography, memorial and memoir—­provides the metaphorical source domain for Pilkington’s account of cognition and the poetic process. It casts her memory as a working record of instantly available materials and transactions, the “register” or “copy” of what she sees and hears, and intends to put to use. Her head, she insists, is her “only Estate”;61 literature was both the object and the medium of her trade. Her memoirs are in this sense the parallel account of a circulating mass of literature which Pilkington consumed, stole, rewrote, produced, or recycled, and which

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(therefore) far exceeds that account. The pamphlet, engraving, and used-­book shop provides an apt model for this sort of literary production, which is less about literary fame than about the perpetual circulation of goods and ideas, in which the author emerges less as a source of autogenetic production than as what might be called a function of the marketplace. Fumerton remarks that “delivering an ‘account’ or ‘reckoning’ of one’s life—­what we might call ‘autobiography’—­could belong only to the respectably settled”;62 but the crossings of accounting and life writing emerge as a more general sign of the dispossessed, of being unsettled, or being instruments of and in the exchange of goods. It is in this sense that Pilkington’s autobiography may be called an account, a double coincidence that helps explain the penumbra of polysemous wordplay between business and poetry that hovers throughout the memoir.

Exhibit 25. A Blank Sheet of Paper (2) Pilkington advances to its final, self-­consuming position the basic claims of the curatorial aesthetic; creativity is indistinguishable from plagiarism. But a critical difference emerges in how Pilkington experiences cognitive work. Though she is known for her prodigious memory, her memoirs are nevertheless filled with forgetting and the registry of loss. The episode of Tom Brush, the painter turned peer, ends with a series of remarks on how loss gives way to gain and suffering to enjoyment. She has only become a seller of pamphlets because, in her words, she had been abandoned by her husband; but her words are in fact a borrowed cliché: she takes up a “Pen,” she notes, when she is denied “employ[ment] with a Needle.”63 This observation is followed by two sets of lines quoted for the occasion. The second of these offers an embracing theodicy of hardship; it is with some inaccuracies quoted from James Thomson’s Hymn on the Seasons (1730).64 “From seeming evil,” Pilkington “still educes good, / And better still from thence, and better still / To infinite Perfection.”65 The lines are ultimately indebted to Milton—­the last, tragicomic book of Paradise Lost; the divine plan involves an initial evil kicking off a string of vexed, embattled “better” and “better[s].” Evil is balanced by good; good depends on an initial evil. But this theodicy follows an even more precise articulation of double-­entry accounting, pairing learning with suffering. Pilkington’s quotation from Thomson (who has himself quoted Milton) is meant to explain a puzzle posed by what is another much-­borrowed line: “now pleas’d Remembrance builds Delight on Woe.” The original source of

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this line is Pope’s Odyssey,66 where the other half of the couplet is perhaps what caught Pilkington’s eye in the first place: “For he who much has suffer’d, much will know.”67 Here, then, is a compact formula: loss and suffering deliver a compensatory knowledge; memory constructs delight on the foundation of primal woe. Pilkington’s memoirs are loaded with loss—­lost love, lost money, lost parental affection, death, disease, poverty, debt, forgetting, lost honor, missed appointments, dead parents, dead siblings, and dead children, evictions, itinerancy, bad faith and lost sales, missed payments, lost books, stolen clothes, stolen verse, misplaced sentimental objects and lost efforts, stolen ideas, forgotten names, misremembered events, and forgotten promises. The memoirs are sufficiently filled with such episodes, where good fortune is balanced by evil fortune that is in turn balanced by a profitable lesson, that this becomes part of their very texture. In the first fifty pages of the first volume alone Pilkington pens and interpolates a verse epistle in the voice of birds about to be shot, a narrative poem about a prince who has forgotten even the image of his wife, a thing-­poem about an eagle quill in danger of being “robbed” of its “eternal fame,” and another about the destruction of paper in the production of poetry. Each of these poems, that is, begins with the threat or the articulation of loss, even as it lurches into motion. This last is surely partly autobiographical, the writing of an it-­narrative about white paper registering, in what was already a common trope, the fate of the dispossessed (especially female) author.68 O Spotless Paper, fair and white, On whom by Force, constrain’d I write, How cruel am I to destroy, Thy Purity to please a Boy?69 Bernard Tucker suggests one immediate way in which this poem is self-­ referential, remarking that Pilkington “adopts the trope of a blank sheet of paper as a virgin ravished by the writer.”70 In this sense, she is registering the tradition that flows through Locke, Reynolds, Hunter, and Sterne (see Exhibits 19–22); she is identifying with the sheet of blank paper on Hunter’s desk (Exhibit 22). We may, however, say more, that this is a precise moment of reflexivity, where the major trope of Enlightenment epistemology, the paper on which one writes, is through a twist in perspective incorporated into the system that witnesses it. For Pilkington is surely looking at the sheet of paper partly as the medium of her

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trade and partly as its product, partly as the effect of the poet and partly as her mirror. Paper is her “dear Friend,” to whom she “oft imparts / The choicest Secrets of my Heart”;71 it is her confidant, much as Tom Brush was her confidant by being worked up out of the stuff of novels. This is the basic move governing Pilkington’s production of memoir, in which paper becomes the medium for making private secrets public. Like memoir, it records an intimately related trajectory of progressive loss, where making the materials of thought visible is equivalent to giving them up to the world. “This small Comfort I can give” (“the only comfort I have,” she says of losing her shop): “That which destroy’d, shall make thee live.”72 This is a lesson half-­borrowed from a commonplace in Shakespeare’s sonnets: the poem lives on while everything else passes away. But here, the logic is internal to production: something must be lost for something else to be gained. By this double-­entry calculus, writing on paper converts it into its own subject, and the loss of paper is poetry’s only lesson.73 It comes as no surprise that this scrap of manuscript poem, according to the memoir, was itself stolen by a “Lady of Distinction,” who had it published under the name of “Lord Chancellor Talbot’s Daughter.”74 Loss emerges as a principle of the production of poetry generally, of the making public of the private idea. “If we look closely at these authors’ rhetoric of alienation,” writes Catherine Gallagher, “we see that it contradicts the classic Marxist formulation of the capitalist appropriation of surplus value.”75 Here, alienation does not imply the separation from surplus value located in the objects of their production; rather, alienation records a relationship to value in which value is produced through continual exchange. No commodity in lower Parnassus is a terminal commodity; no labor implies production, but only the recirculation, in new forms, of second-­hand material, loss and gain following one another. Grub Street authors, writes Gallagher, do not “portray their authorship as an originary activity of creation.” In fact, this is true of most eighteenth-­century authors. But hack-­work authors are additionally marked by “not present[ing] their texts as places where they have stored themselves.” In fact, they make this a principle of the production of these texts, which are made to circulate on their own. On the contrary, these authors, mirrored in the texts they produce, “themselves are the effects of exchange.” This is what Gallagher calls “dispossession.”76 The balancing of loss with gain, of destruction with production, and theft with ownership embeds itself deeply enough in Pilkington’s understanding of the artist’s trade that this balancing becomes a fundamental aspect of human behavior, a prime neurological principle. Pilkington risks a theory of brain work. “I have known a person,” she remarks,

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who in his Youth was an extraordinary Adept in Music, and performed on several Instruments extreamly well. I saw the same Person some Years after, and lo! His Musical Talent was entirely lost, and he was then a very good Painter. Now I cou’d not help forming a Notion in my own Mind, that as our Ideas depend on the Fibres of the Brain, it was possible we might by the continual Use of some particular one, weaken it so as to make it perish, and at the same time, another might exert from that very Cause itself with double Strength. Thus, I suppose, when this Gentleman’s Musical Fibres perished, his Painting ones shot forth with Vigour. If there be any Truth in this Whim of mine, which I own, I am fond of believing myself, we may easily account for the various dispositions which we meet with, even in the same Person at different Periods of Life.77 This is one of a number of times that Pilkington explicitly registers the parallels between brain work and mentation; it is also where she remarks on the mechanical rudiments of thinking, that is, the brain as what gives rise to the work of the mind. Her earliest theory of brain work offers a relatively straight version of the container model of the mind: “In what Recesses of the Brain,” she inquired, “Does [memory] remain, / By which all Knowledge we attain?”78 But her last theories, including her strikingly realized image of “the Fibres of the Brain,” winds up offering a sort of double-­entry account of brain work; it poses a theory in which losses may be seen to balance gains. Indeed, it registers the equivalence of loss and gain in the very project of use. She is on the terrain of the vegetable aspects of the soul, the lowest, root forms that encompass the category of life. The substance of the brain, its “Fibres,” have a special power they share with plants and animals; not unlike the trimming of one shoot of a plant or hedge, cutting back one section of the brain causes another to grow with renewed strength. Pilkington’s suggestion here is that this basic tendency, which seems at first to lean on observations in horticulture, is linked to simple use; it is not trauma to the brain but simply its exercise that links loss to gain. But the essential logic here is not horticultural at all; one shoot of a plant does not die off from simple use, but, on the contrary, grows stronger. It is instead economic, loss being linked transactionally to gain, and this economic logic is as much at work in the account book as it is in Pilkington’s models of the garden or the fibers of the brain. The displaced articulation of loss begetting gain embeds itself as the material principle of Pilkington’s cognitive theory. It accounts, materially, for

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“the various dispositions which we meet with,” pain and loss producing habit. These things can be deliberately routed, but they are created always by the sacrifice of something else. Pilkington repeatedly refers to her own “scribbling” as a “custom” and, elsewhere, an “itch,” which she was driven to when she was abandoned by her husband. She takes up the pen instead of the needle. This transactional mechanism, embedded in the print shop but developing as a principle of thinking, emerges to perform in the Memoirs the same function that the feedback loop of pleasure performs in Joseph Addison’s digression on his own Cartesianism (see Exhibit 12). Where for Addison ideas are linked by the pleasure that is experienced in their association, for Pilkington ideas arise out of loss, where loss in one place is registered immediately in its compensation somewhere else. Addison’s prime example is Francis Atterbury, who through force of habit caused himself to enjoy his antiquarian toil. Pilkington argues for an inverse relationship between pleasure and habit, for pain as the engine of custom. Pilkington notes, for instance, that her own education was multiply attended by suffering. “My eyes being weak, after the Small-­pox,” she writes, “I was not permitted to look at a Book . . . neither was I allow’d to read: This restraint, as it generally happens, made me but more earnest in the Pursuit of, what I imagin’d, must be so delightful.” As she remembers to tell it, the general discouragement of her education, not limited to the pain of her weak eyes, strengthens an interest in learning as its compensation. As Pilkington knows from Pope, “he who much has suffer’d, much will know.” Seen very broadly, the pattern linking loss and gain resolves itself into an articulation between suffering and knowledge. But it also accounts for the production of new ideas in a simple way, the loss of some “Fibres of the Brain” realized differently in the production of ideas, depending on new fibers. The progressive development of the mind, its acquisition of ideas, is thereby enabled by loss and pain, a principle exemplified by the very episode in which Pilkington shares her theory; witnessing the musician’s loss prompts her own meditations, the new idea or “notion” which she “cou’d not help forming.” Her “whim” emerges through a mechanical process; loss experienced in her environment is registered in a compensatory gain in the brain’s wetware. The reverse logic whereby pain, discouragement, and suffering have positive effects functions at the level of memory itself, and it has done this right from the start. Her education has been accompanied by suffering. “Twenty Times a Day,” Pilkington remarks, she was “corrected, for asking what such and such Letters spelt; my Mother us’d to tell me the Word, accompanying it with a good Box on the Ear, which, I suppose, imprinted it on my Mind.” She “quickly

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arrived” at her “desir’d Happiness being able to read.” This is, however, a particular kind of imprinting—­not merely an “impression” of the sort that Locke might conceive, for, in this case, the physical manner of the thumping alters the texture of the memories themselves. She finds herself “oblig’d to enjoy” the “Pleasure” of reading “by Stealth, with Fear and Trembling.”79 It is in this context that Pilkington offers a particularly telling misreading of Gulliver’s Travels, inserting her own lessons about suffering and memory into an episode differently intended by Swift. Swift mentions the Laputan philosophers, who descend so deep in thought that they employ “flappers” to flap them on their eyes or ears; thus is their attention drawn out of their reveries when there is something important before their eyes, or when there is some critical purpose to be remembered. But as Pilkington remembers the story, it offers a simple lesson about forgetting. When these same Laputans, as Pilkington misremembers it, had “promised any favour, the suppliant was obliged to give him a tweak by the nose, or a kick on the rump, to quicken his memory.”80 This is clearly Pilkington repositioning a literary moment as though it provided a personal lesson—­but it moreover reinterprets a satire on recollection as a parable for remembering. Pilkington, in other words, misremembers a parable about the failures of attention as a lesson about memory techniques, a lesson about the importance of pain in the basic operation of the intellect.81 The elevation of suffering into an intellectual principle helps, in the final analysis, to account for Pilkington’s particularly barbed style; scandalous memoir offers to Pilkington an analogue to what, for Addison, is offered by polite conversation. If the Addisonian essay, whether methodical or digressive, develops through the pleasure of repeated association, and this pleasure is its neurological principle, the give-­and-­take of the scandalous memorial develops as the balancing of books. Blackmail, burlesque, scandal, satire, and the ad hominem attack: Pilkington’s Memoirs convert memories of exploitation and loss into current, vendible accounts. Suffering, especially the pain of loss, runs therefore like a tracer dye through Pilkington’s autobiography, episodes of loss registering the acquisition of the materials of literary expression; the episodes she remembers to publish are those most heavily marked by her dispossession.

Exhibit 26. A Ring Containing a Lock of Hair From the “new subjectivism” of John Locke to the gallery space of Joshua Reynolds, the basic argument would seem to be the same; as Charles Taylor

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30. A love token or a mourning ring, crafted from gold, crystal, diamond, and human hair. AN1418875001 © Trustees of the British Museum.

argues in The Sources of the Self, the mind of the modern sort is put together out of the “building blocks” of ideas produced by experience.82 The very rise of modern forms of individualism, in the line of thought first programmatically observed by C. B. Macpherson, depends upon possession: the ownership of material things enables a kind of metaphorical transference to the ownership of other things, like ideas, rights, or faculties of mind.83 Such a person owns ideas in the same way that she owns property; she owns ideas because she learns to cut things out of the whole cloth of the world—­in other words, to claim them as properties. She owns faculties because she owns ideas, the faculties becoming apparent as the stock of ideas increases. She owns rights because she owns faculties; rights are things to be possessed, fought for, gained, or lost, by any rational person. She owns labor—­which she can sell on the open market just like any pin, snuffbox, or gemstone; labor commands what the market will bear.84 She owns aesthetic responses, such that Addison might form the well-­known remark that a viewer, while “feel[ing] satisfaction in the prospect of fields and meadows,” marks “a kind of property in everything he sees.”85 And, finally, she comes to own other, more intimately mental contents like opinions, virtues, and faculties; when Lord Chesterfield, speaking at the House of Lords, claimed that “Wit . . . is a sort of property: it is the property of those that have it, and too often the only property they have to depend upon,” he is offering, as a self-­evident fact, a highly contentious claim that

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depends upon a long, inherited chain of arguments about ownership.86 Private property, private subjects: the individual would seem by this account to take her rise as an effect of her absolute dominion over the things she owns.87 The private person takes her rise through ownership; ownership, however, takes its rise against the backdrop of discrete owners, presupposing the very thing it produces. This is evident, for instance, in Locke’s account, on the one hand, of the person who emerges as the owner of ideas, and, on the other, of ownership as a function of a personal claim (see Exhibits 1 and 19). Property requires a person—­but the very category of “person” rises out of theories of property ownership. A feedback loop emerges—­or is it a mise en abyme, the inward descent into the groundless abyss of the property-­owning self? Ever since the critical shift, occurring roughly in the eighteenth century, from property as a feudal privilege to property as a personal right, law has always been the critical instrument in “establishing a boundary between the subjective and the social,” in maintaining the fiction of the self against the claims of the commons.88 This struggle has been contested simultaneously on the ground of intellectual and personal property, since each mystically links one who may be said to “own,” and therefore be said to have despotic, exclusive sway over some particular “thing” or “substance” distinct from everything else.89 It is no accident that laws seeking to restrain intellectual piracy, including the pivotal Statute of Anne (1709), were matched by a series of increasingly draconian provisions against theft and property crimes, culminating in the “Black Act” of 1723. While advocates of stringent copyright law, over the past two centuries, have “repeatedly invoked the solitary, self-­made authorial genius,” notes Simon Stern, in order “to justify longer term limits and an ever-­expanding scope for copyright protection,” the Act of Anne itself “says nothing about originality.”90 The law was an instrument, instead, for negotiating the traffic of ideas and opinions as forms of public commerce. Legal arguments surrounding the sequel to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, for instance, or the court cases surrounding the many editions of Pope’s letters, demonstrated that it was far from clear who owned the stuff of one’s mind or the content of one’s character.91 What was private was worked out in the most public places of all; private property, in this formulation—­even something as private as an idea—­was by its very nature the articulation of relationships in the public commonwealth. Dualism has a history—­and it is entangled with the rise of the discourse justifying the modern marketplace. The constellation of theories falling under what Macpherson has called “possessive individualism” represented “a fairly realistic conclusion at the time,” writes Peter Lindsay. Viewed at the very

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coarsest level of magnification, they reflected habits of acquisition and transfer that were part of the texture of everyday life.92 Models of the subject based on possession did not, however, emerge, Lindsay argues, because they are “anthropologically or ontologically true”; they emerged as part of the historical function of the nascent marketplace. These theories gained currency in part because they justified the capitalist relations in which people were embedded, thereby masking not only the inequalities that emerged in London’s early mercantilist system but also aspects of experience that cannot be captured as a simple expression of the desire to accumulate.93 The seemingly simple form of ownership implied by the discourse of capital accumulation by no means exhausts the ways that a thing can be owned; far from it: the relationship between a person and a thing, or, more to the point, between a person and other people, is on the contrary constructed as it goes along. Someone like Jane Lead, an author and printer responsible for a number of controversial Quaker pamphlets, might see herself (in the words of Paula Macdowell) as “a configuration of states of beings” rather than an able curator of ideas. Publishing from a commune, in which all things were held in common, she might likewise see “human interiority as fluid and unfixed”; her social conditions, both the relationships she established in the Society of Friends and the communal relationship she established with her personal God are shifted into “the fluidity of her imagery.”94 There is, in other words, a “mutually constitutive relationship” between “human interiority [and] material social history,” but this is by no means limited to the owning of ideas in the same way that we might own books, utensils, or other tools of thought.95 This is an important insight. For all the studies of the development of philosophical dualisms, there is an almost total absence of studies analyzing their social, material, and political contexts.96 Let us return, then, to a person who has at first glance little in common with Laetitia Pilkington. This is Alexander Pope’s Belinda, the heroine of The Rape of the Lock, whose appearance at the beginning of the eighteenth century is widely considered to witness the rise of modern consumer consciousness.97 It is hard to imagine someone more confidently put together as the function of private property; in a prior exhibit (Exhibit 9) we left her at her dressing table, decked with all that land and sea afford. She is sitting for her cabinet portrait, surrounded the various fruits of empire, the emblem and desideratum of unlimited accumulation. This is what Pope calls a scene of “cosmetic power,” the microcosmic organization of a macrocosmic system. And what Pope calls the “moving toy-­shop of her heart” is revealed to be the mirror of the luxury objects with which she

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surrounds herself—­as the “heavenly image in the glass” of her dressing table makes abundantly clear. The saturated center of desire in Belinda’s private construction of her public self-­image is of course her “lock,” which achieves in part its heightened value in reference to the collection of things assembled around it. (Nor is this the only clutter of things that the lock organizes; it also organizes a striking similar heap of objects involving the Baron.)98 But this is not how the poem ends, for Belinda’s lock will be violently seized as a token of love or conquest; this is the “rape” of the title. First Belinda will “lose” it through force (“lose” is Pope’s word); the Baron will clip the lock from her head. But far from signaling, in a simple way, a new system of ownership, the Baron’s almost trivial act, the meeting of steel at the spearpoint of history, kicks off a flurry of fantasies over the lock’s new disposition. The first of these is delivered by a member of Belinda’s party—­and borrows the major terms of ownership to reimagine the lock displaced into a new, stable sort of possessive enclosure. “Shall this prize,” Thalestris wonders, . . . th’ inestimable prize, Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes, And heighten’d by the diamond’s circling rays, On that rapacious hand for ever blaze?99 This is a vision of a kosmos of the most compact sort; Thalestris is imagining Belinda’s hair, carefully plaited, sandwiched between rock crystal and foil, and surrounded by gold, precious stones, and other markers of England’s preeminence in the global circulation of goods. And the connection is therefore quite clear; the image repeats Belinda at her toilet. Whereas previously she was content to observe herself in her glass, gazing upon her own hair as it was pinned and powdered, here she is caused to confront fragments of her former self now worn in a ring on the hand of another. Precisely because of the rich connotations with which this hair is loaded, as sign of herself as the center of an economy, the ring signifies in two ways. Clearly, for the Baron, it is a token of sexual conquest, metonymically linked in Belinda’s words to “hairs less in sight.”100 It bears in this sense the erotics of a love token. We know, partly from the literary record, that rings were given with this purpose in mind; tokens of this kind turn up roughly a century later in Sense and Sensibility, first in an equivocal exchange between Lucy Steele and Edward Ferrars, and again between Willoughby and Marianne Dashwood. (At least one scholar has

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suggested a deliberate allusion to The Rape of the Lock—­thereby further complicating the ownership of Belinda’s hair.)101 But for Belinda, the ring is clearly a sign of her dispossession, and it signifies therefore as a ring of mourning, of the sort specified in Clarissa’s will in Richardson’s History of a Young Lady.102 In the later case, the metonymic link between hair and the person to whom it was once attached works to construct the ring as a relic (see Exhibits 21 and 22). Rings of this sort, which were coming into fashion at just about this moment, can be made to point either direction—­just as likely to be worn in mourning as in hope. In either case, they exist at a specific junction of modernity, where early forms of consumer culture cross with traditional forms of love and death. As for the thing itself, that dalliable excrement,103 what could be more abject than hair? Life in death and death in life, unfeeling and continually expelled: clearly what matters are the attachments it affords; hair is a matter of how it modifies relationships.104 In life or death, objects like hair rings work as the counterweights to the strands of power and affection stretched between actors. Such jewels are “exhibited secrets,” private things that signify only because they are worn publicly.105 It is tempting to think that every possessor implies someone dispossessed—­ that the trick is as simple as remembering the debtor at the same time as the creditor, and something like a lock of hair therefore serves as the anchor to one end of a vector. But the first scuffle over the fate of the lock, which joins a group in order to divide them, splitting Belinda’s coterie into those who think it is owned and those who think it is stolen, obscures a more complicated arc of indebtedness. Thalestris’s fantasy that the lock must one way or another become property—­that the debate is about who shall exert despotic dominion over it—­is only the first in a more complicated set of reflections upon ownership. Whether the lock ever made it behind glass is unclear—­but even this would only be a resting place, for the lock was destined to become doubly, redundantly lost. It seems to be historical fact that the celebrated episode upon which The Rape of the Lock was based ended with the lock of hair becoming dropped, misplaced, mislaid, or otherwise nowhere to be found. As in history, so too in the poem: and so Pope works out two possible arcs or resting places for the lock, which sketch out two ways of relating to lost property. “Some,” Pope remarks, . . . thought it mounted to the Lunar Sphere, Since all things lost on earth, are treasur’d there. There Heroe’s Wits are kept in pondrous Vases,

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And Beau’s in Snuff-­boxes and Tweezer-­Cases.106 This is an explicit fantasy of a common collection point in the autonomous arcs of lost property, and this fantasy, not the cabinet portrait of the poem’s heroine, provides the frontispiece to the critical five-­canto edition, complete with aerial figures proper to lunar life. Framed in this fantasy (and in the frontispiece) is a proper place for all things gone astray—­literal things and metaphorical things alike; lost wits and hearts may be treasured up alongside lost tomes and butterflies. But it is a place of a final, firm guarantee, the fictional category that balances out dispossession. It is a place coordinating the fantasy of the book of accounts, where what is lost here is treasured there, and it therefore shores up a fantasy of accumulation as the regular course of property. This is what the merchant’s clerk would call “writing off.”107 This is Pope’s first ending. But Pope’s second ending suggests a broader role for loss as a general condition of property, and, in the end, authorship. The second edition of The Rape of the Lock, the one that contains this fantasy of lost property, only ever appeared in public under the sign of a certain kind of paradox—­a paradox common enough in Pope’s publication history that we may call it a trope. Pope insisted that The Rape of the Lock was only ever meant to be a privately circulating manuscript; it was, Pope at least publicly claimed, a pirated copy of a private poem that simply fell into the wrong hands.108 And the linkages between loss and fame—­loss and fame of the variety exercised by Belinda, whose lock was, like Pope’s manuscript, “lost”—­are made perfectly explicit in the closing peroratio: Not all the Tresses that fair Head can boast Shall draw such Envy as the Lock you lost.  . . . This Lock, the Muse shall consecrate to Fame, And mid’st the Stars inscribe Belinda’s Name!109 This paradox governs The Rape of the Lock; it is what drives its gentle satire, right down to the little scissors that cut the lock from Belinda’s head—­which, Pope writes, “meet . . . to dissever” and “join . . . to divide.”110 Property here is based on dispossession, losing with joining, and vice versa. The difference is of course that Belinda’s lock was clearly seized in what now qualifies as a punishable act of sexual assault,111 while Pope’s manuscript was almost certainly deliberately “lost.” Each, however, articulates the paradox of property in the

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case of intellectual property: an idea must be circulated publicly to be owned personally. Loss is in this sense the underwriting condition of ownership, which intellectual property only makes most clear. The formal similarity, what binds Pope forever to Belinda, is that each enjoys a share of celebrity because they both share in the arc of lost property. Loss emerges as an essential part of how something, even something important to one’s public identity, may be said to be owned—­for Belinda, yes, but also for Pope, whose work emerges as a compendium of the property of other people. Pope’s career frequently crossed with the law; by the end of his writing life, he had been embroiled in multiple court cases to defend his intellectual property. But this is ownership based on debt, property on loss, for Pope was of the school of thought that crossed with Pilkington, Swift, and Addison, and that would turn up with Reynolds; like these others, Pope agreed that property was a function of things circulating in the commons. As Pope puts it (in a defense against plagiarism published a few years after his mock-­epic), literary productions are to be commended for the extent of their “imitation”—­especially “of the ancients”; “the highest character for sense and learning,” he continues, “has been obtained by those who have been most indebted.”112 And so, when Pope found himself in court, in an action against George Bickham, to defend his right in his Essay on Man, or when he sued Edmund Curll for publishing private letters in what is now regarded as a ruse on Pope’s part to see those letters into print, we may observe that property, at least as far as Pope’s career is concerned, is all along shot through with deliberate loss.113 Models of selfhood based on possession, in other words, are founded on the shifting sands of dispossession. It is not that every owner implies someone disowned; it is that public dispossession is built into what it means to own something privately. This is not a paradox. It is merely the sign that an ecology is at work.

Exhibit 27. The Lost Property Office If he had only published The Rape of the Lock a year or so later, Pope might possibly have substituted a London address for the “lunar sphere,” for, in the interim, a place had sprung up where “all lost things are treasured.” The poem appeared in its five-­canto version in 1714, the same year that Jonathan Wild opened the first of several storefront operations in the low-­rent districts surrounding the City of London. Wild’s so-­called Lost Property Office, one name for a chain of places, was the first major experiment in a collection composed

31. “Honest Jonathan in His Repository,” in Life and Glorious Actions . . . of Jonathan Wilde (London, 1725). Courtesy Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

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entirely of misplaced, dropped, “lost,” and otherwise alienated property. It was not the first of its kind, but it was by far the most public, successful, and visible, such that Wild threatened for a decade to monopolize the trade. As Daniel Defoe observed, it was “as if ” everything lost “had been deposited with him to be restored.”114 Like Pope’s summary vision in The Rape of the Lock, Wild’s operation was based on the public fantasy of a great well or collection point in the autonomous arcs of objects, a proper place for all lost property. We might therefore say that Wild’s Lost Property Office picks up where The Rape of the Lock leaves off. Whereas Pope made his living translating objects into ethics, Wild drove a brave trade in reconnecting property with its proprietors. And so while Pope’s poem ultimately dismisses the still life he paints in order to examine the poetic afterlife of the lock (the lock which the muse sees “upward rise”), Wild invented himself as the single resource for finding exactly the kind of lost things that Pope’s description heaps up: tweezer cases, snuffboxes, vases, and tomes, not to mention the sort of lockets and rings built to display locks of hair, or just human hair itself.115 Had the lock been lost just a few months later, we could imagine Belinda’s pleasure barge whisking the whole cast of her friends and family up Fleet Ditch to the Little Old Bailey branch of the LPO. Jonathan Wild was perhaps the most public of London’s public persons. At the height of his career, he announced himself as the “Thief-­Taker General of England, Scotland, and Ireland”;116 largely through the force of his own design, Wild became the single most important thief taker in London. He was consulted on official “police” affairs by the ministry and advertised to for the discovery and return of “lost,” “dropt,” “misplaced,” or stolen goods. Indeed, Wild filled an important institutional gap, for until the establishment of the Bow Street Runners in the 1750s, London had no official, citywide police force, but depended instead upon incentives, rewards, and ad hoc measures to enforce law, so that without Wild, and others like him, there was no good way to apprehend criminals at all.117 Wild ran his business out of a number of addresses collectively called his Lost Property Office, which was imagined to contain a collection made up entirely of objects alienated from their proper owners, things that he claimed to have recovered (or could recover) entirely through his network of informers and agents.118 And so, if something was “lost,” your best bet to find it would be at Jonathan Wild’s Office at the Old Bailey. “If anything was lost,” Defoe remarks, “away we went to Jonathan Wild.”119 Wild received forty pounds from the ministry for every criminal he apprehended, and a brokerage fee for every object he returned. And this begins

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to offer a glimpse of the double-­entry logic of Wild’s peculiar enterprise, for this official commerce was only half his business. His self-­invented role as “Thief-­Taker General” masked his labor to organize and coordinate the thieves and highwaymen Wild pretended to catch—­this organization was what he called his “Corporation.” The doubling of official and unofficial employments was at times surprisingly explicit; Wild’s chief assistants, known as “Clerk of the Northern Roads” and “Clerk of the Western Roads,” were supposed publicly to keep those roads clear of highwaymen, though of course secretly they were organizing the very attacks they were assigned to suppress on the very roads they were officially protecting.120 It is partly because of this “incorporation” or bureaucratization of crime—­highwaymen as “clerks”—­and partly because of his business’s indistinguishability from police functions that Wild represented something new, what Defoe called “a perfectly new Scene”;121 he was, in the words of a twentieth-­century biographer, among “the ‘first’ modern gangsters” and “the ‘first’ modern policemen,” and, what is more, among the first “modern” men precisely for this doubling of his illicit business under the disguise of perfectly licit police work (and vice versa).122 Jonathan Wild’s Lost Property Office was therefore a thinly disguised clearinghouse for the very goods his corporation acquired; it was filled with, or imagined to be filled with, a collection of entirely “lost” property. Wild conducted his daily trade through advertisements placed in London’s three major daily newspapers, for his business had all along extended itself into the technical media of the emerging public sphere.123 Wild advertised “found” objects in newspapers and responded to advertisements of “lost” objects placed by victims. Among the first of these advertisements involving Wild is this one: “Lost on Friday Evening 19th March last, out of a Compting House in Derham Court in Great Trinity Lane, near Bread Street, a Wast Book and a Day Book. . . . Whoever will bring them to Mr. Jonathan Wild over-­ against Cripplegate-­Church, shall have a Guinea Reward and no Questions asked.”124 As one contemporary spectator put it, the newspapers, crowded with these notices, were “calling loudly out for all sorts of stray’d Valuables, to be brought into Mr. Jonathan Wild’s in the Old-­Baily, upon Promise of great Rewards, and no questions.”125 When property went missing, it ended up in print, and not only in pamphlets and biographies written after Wild’s death; the same journals that reprinted ballads, popular songs, pirated poetry, reprints of news stories, and other borrowed or half-­stolen content bore the announcements of the latest objects acquired by Wild’s corporation. But there is a twist. A series of legal innovations known as the Receiving Acts made it a

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felony to possess goods that were known to be stolen, even for the purposes of returning them.126 Property law, itself foisted upon a series of fictions, endorses a further, necessary fiction in the comedy of lost property. What here looks at first like an advertisement placed by a victim addressed to a thief was on the contrary almost certainly placed by Wild to attract the victim—­or placed by the victim at Wild’s request in order to make the payment for the return of stolen goods appear legitimate. This is one of the truly remarkable things about eighteenth-­century advertisements for objects that have gone astray; Wild and his victims alike advertise for objects as though they were “lost,” “misplaced,” “dropt,” or “missing,” but never, ever, “stolen.” From the very start, Wild and his victims alike recognized the necessity of preserving the fiction, even when the lie was manifest—­even in the case of something like a register being “lost” from an office or, in more astounding cases, a “lost” carriage, a “dropt” wig.127 Wild’s public presence—­one would meet with his name every day in the daily papers—­inspired more than one attempt to sketch his life and practice. Consider the engraving “Honest Jonathan in His Repository,” the matter of this exhibit, and a cabinet portrait if ever there was one. It presents Jonathan Wild; the anonymous artist has displayed him, seated among the treasury of alienated goods gathered temporarily together at the Lost Property Office. For all its aspirations to realism—­its overcharged scattering of superfluous detail, the seemingly extraneous touches of furniture and wainscot—­“Honest Jonathan in His Repository” is clearly a fiction.128 For one thing, no such place could have existed, at least not in the sense it is represented here. Wild had at least three offices in the decade in which he was in business: one in Cripplegate Parish around the corner from Grub Street, another in St. Giles-­in-­the-­Fields just off Drury Lane, and a third in the Old Bailey just off Fleet Ditch. But, in general, he never seems to have kept anything there—­at least not the stolen goods that the engraver has bundled together in this spot. His Lost Property Offices were on the contrary places to coordinate meetings—­the handing off of information, money, and goods. The one time Wild was caught with stolen goods was also the last time it happened; to be caught holding goods, rather than coordinating their return, was a capital offense. The scattering of paper provides one clue to Wild’s enterprise. Each of Wild’s offices was opened in a low-­rent, undesirable district that was nevertheless crisscrossed daily by foot traffic from more desirable neighborhoods. But it is no accident that these were also the major districts of low-­rent literature, the homes of poets like Pilkington just as much as of ballad sellers, thieves, and vagrants. Nor is it any accident that Wild set up shop just a short walk

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from where Pilkington would later pitch her bookstall, or that when Wild was attacked (nearly fatally), the weapon was a penknife, for Wild’s career had been closely allied with the print industry all along.129 Wild’s biography is curiously complete in the pamphlet record, and his life is peppered with the names of Grub Street authors, partly because Wild’s business got its start and maintained itself integrally through the medium of print.130 Grub Street, which became a metonym for a school of literature, was the site where poetry was principally a vendible object of exchange, and where the poet was indistinguishable from the beggar or thief. Such “writers,” Pat Rogers argues, “deal in the second-­hand; they are thieves; they are literary contortionists”—­and so of course was Wild.131 In this sense, Jonathan Wild’s Lost Property Office was a Grub Street institution, and Wild was a Grub Street writer,132 a fact dramatized by William Hogarth’s virtually contemporaneous engraving of a distressed Grub Street poet; it shares the same array of low objects: the sword, a pipe, a snuffbox, a silver tankard, and, not at all incidentally, the writing desk and the litter of paper. Hogarth’s poet is cobbling together a poem “On Poverty,” but the context suggests that he is borrowing his verses; the print tacked loosely to the wall just above his head alludes to Alexander Pope’s wranglings over copyright with Edmund Curll, while the copy of Bysshe’s Book of Poetry presumably provides his rhymes. Everything surrounding the poet is ironic; his poetry is in quotation marks, but so, too, is the litter of objects in the poet’s room. The sword is one particularly significant trinket, worn less for protection than as the sign of gentility, worn not as a weapon but an accessory, not a sword but a “sword.”133 It is worn ironically—­but it is also owned ironically, owned “as if ” it will be owned all along, when clearly everything in the room is in immanent danger of being repossessed. This is why the poet is scribbling so furiously in the first place; he is borrowing phrases about riches, in order to borrow a few signs of the riches he would like to have. He is a public person who has put himself together out of other people’s things. This is a portrait of the dispossessed, offering a figure of poetic production, much like Philips or Pilkington before him. Wild is like Hogarth’s “distrest poet,” surrounded by trash and trumpery, memoranda, and aborted poems. Their attitudes are the same, and so, in a broad sense, is their work. And, like Hogarth’s satire, the anonymous portrait of Wild draws on an established tradition of cabinet portraits, right down to Wild’s posture and the arrangement of objects on shelves around him. For the engraver presents the imagined ecology of a thoroughly public person—­the mental labor of someone put together entirely out of lost property. Either

32. William Hogarth, “The Distrest Poet” (detail). Courtesy Lewis Walpole Library, Yale University.

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engraving could be a rendering of Locke’s understanding of the mind as a cabinet; each allegorizes the operations of the imagination, which takes in and stores “materials”—­rings, tankards, swords, packets of cloth, and books. It stages the abstraction of things into words, the transformation of objects acquired by the imagination into objects of discourse. This transformation is made explicit by the recording operation that Wild himself has sat down to perform, indeed, which the space seems built to perform. The engraver has labeled these “memoranda,” that is, “what ought to be remembered.” It is, finally, an allegory that, in Locke’s words, “makes visible” the “use of reason,” as Wild gestures reflexively to his latest memorandum, making his own peculiar brand of reason visible to itself. What we are seeing, then, is an allegory of how, to recall Locke’s words, “the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty.”134 We are seeing a space crafted to meet a model of the intellect, just as a working model of thinking is based on such a space; this is what helps explain the “memoranda” in the first place, for memoranda instantiate the dominant, empiricist model of memory as a collection of notes or impressions on blank paper. We are seeing a space of mentation just as fully realized as Locke in his library (Exhibit 1), John Woodward in his cabinet (Exhibits 6 and 7), or Laetitia Pilkington in her print shop (Exhibit 22). That this is a private space (an interior) cobbled together out of public goods marks it as exemplary of what it meant to be public. Put differently, on display is an ironic taking-­up of the trappings and the suits of possessive individualism by one of the dispossessed, a private portrait of a public person. There is one more detail that is worth remarking, a bit of furniture that is not merely furniture, drapery that is not drapery. Just as the mind is fitted, Locke reminds us, with apertures to “let in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet,”135 Wild’s office as we see it here contained an important technological innovation. This barrier between inside and out, Wild and the public, is pierced at a number of critical points; the Lost Property Office contained an important and surprisingly direct technology contrived for exactly that purpose. In the words of Grub Street author D.H., a party visiting Jonathan Wild seeking the return of a stolen object entered a plain, unfurnished room, where, “pushing back a small panel of the Wainscot, a Hand us’d to appear with the [object] in it, and the Parties were to take them out of that Hand, and put the Money into it, without their seeing the Body which belong’d to it; so that they could not say he had ever taken any of their Money or receiv’d the stolen Goods.”136 This panel may be pictured in the

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anonymous engraving of “Honest Jonathan,” appearing centrally above his desk and convenient to his right hand. The panel constitutes a valve for objects and knowledge—­separating interior from exterior, private from public, and thief from owner, but also separating knowledge from ignorance, the flow of objects from the people seeking them. “Honest Jonathan” does not show the “plain room” mentioned by D.H.; the wall that displays this collection of lost objects is the wall that separates lost property from its proper owners. It is an epistemological barrier between the interiorized facts of the matter and the explicitly public “place of business” that fronts it; it is at the same time a formal frontier, separating a world of the shifting fortunes of persons and things from a fictional space governed by a pervasive irony, by the stageplay of property. This has the curious effect of making this fictional space, this cabinet imagined out of what could be gathered from the newspapers, seem more real than the world of human affairs continuing outside. Here, on the side of the wall containing the collection and the account book, Wild is a thief and a fence of stolen goods. In this illicit, corporate space, people are reducible to things in the dismembering logic of the corporation: “hands” that “us’d to appear,” the “bodies” that “belong’d” to them. These are the same hands and bodies that are vulnerable at every moment to Tyburn, the gallows, transportation, the institutionalized bureaucracy of discipline and punishment that offers a glass ceiling to every clerk of alienated property. But it is also on this side of the wall that the cracks in the fiction of property are papered over—­for it is here that the fragmentary experience of ownership, hedged round by the possibility of loss, finds its guarantee. The “self ” is a fiction projected by the reality of loss. What is lost on earth is treasured here.

Exhibit 28. The Skeleton of Jonathan Wild Wild is best known today as the inspiration for John Gay’s best-­known work, The Beggar’s Opera, which begins in Peachum’s “lock”—­a domestic space that is also the back room of an operation clearly modeled on Wild’s Lost Property Office. As the curtains rise, they catch Peachum with his account book, cataloguing and tallying up the people in his employment, ranking them alongside the objects that have come through his hands. He is looking for someone in his corporation who is worth less to him than the forty pounds for which he can “peach” him—­that is, impeach him, or turn him over to the law. The gem of his corporation, the plum of his practice, is “Crook-­finger’d Jack”; here

33. An articulated male skeleton, age forty, believed to be of Jonathan Wild. RCSHM/ Osteo. 336. Courtesy Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, England.

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is what he looks like in Wild’s account book: “A year and a half in the service; let me see how much the stock owes to his industry; one, two, three, four, five gold watches, and seven silver ones. A mighty clean-­handed fellow! Sixteen snuff-­boxes, five of them of true gold. Six dozen of handkerchiefs, four silver-­ hilted swords, half a dozen of shirts, three tye-­perriwigs, and a piece of broad cloth. Considering these are only the fruits of his leisure hours, I don’t know a prettier fellow, for no man alive hath a more engaging presence of mind upon the road.”137 Crook-­finger’d Jack cuts quite a figure. The exchange calculus of bodies and things reduces everything, including Crook-­finger’d Jack, to the metrics of the underground marketplace. It reduces him to a string of numbers, inasmuch as he could be liquidated at any moment if he does not continue to provide entries in the book of accounts. What is more, this is virtually all we will see of him. He will turn up very briefly in the second act to utter one line. He offers a reflection on thieves as “practical philosophers,” for highwaymen like Jack are the ones who return abstracts to particulars, who have an “engaging presence of mind upon the road.” Similarly, we will see these objects nowhere else; the account book is, as it were, a variorum edition of Crook-­ finger’d Jack, for this collection was never gathered together in one place, except in the traces it leaves in an account of a medium of circulating goods. What is this, then, but a modern blazon, a love sonnet penned by the owner of capital to his alienated laborer? Peachum celebrates an enumeration of luxury objects promiscuously with the parts of the body shaped to acquire them; he is equally enamored of Jack’s “clean hands” and “crook fingers,” which in any case are summoned up as an effect of the portable property he has alienated. Jack’s very name suggests his reducibility to such an instrument, for “crook-­ finger’d jack” might be read in the same way as “saw-­jack” or “spit-­jack”; he is an instrument that performs a single function, or, as the OED puts it, “a thing which takes the place of a man.” Wild was rumored to have had a museum of criminological rarities in the vaults beneath his office at what is now 68 Little Old Bailey, possibly directly below the desk in “Honest Jonathan”; here he stashed away weapons from famous crimes, nooses from celebrated executions, and even (so it was rumored) the bodies of well-­known criminals. He may have been the first recorded collector of what has come to be called “murderabilia.” The discovery of just such a strange museum in the 1842 redigging of the footings of the Holborn Viaduct, roughly on the spot of Wild’s Lost Property Office, seemed to some to lend weight to the theory.138 When the building that once housed Wild’s office was torn down, workmen discovered a labyrinth of tunnels, trapdoors,

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passages, and subterranean rooms; the discovery became, for a number of years, a Grub Street sensation in its own right. Reported to have been among the debris were fragments that may have constituted Wild’s private museum: nooses from the Tyburn gallows, weapons labeled as having been used in particularly gruesome murders, the skeletons of Wild’s former colleagues. Wild received a fee for every criminal he apprehended; the secret, perhaps the publicly open secret, was that many of the thieves who were executed on his advice were members of his own organization who had fallen below their quota. Anyone, after all, who became worth less to him than the forty pounds Wild could claim for turning him in was vulnerable to ending up, ultimately, as part of Wild’s collection—­that is, as bodies and hands behind that secret panel. Nor was Wild immune to an accountancy he practiced, but did not invent. Wild himself would become his own most sensational example of the dismembering accountancy synchronized by the interior of his office. He was the subject of numerous pamphlets and ballads, including John Gay’s brief “Newgate’s Garland,” which records another charged intersection of people and things, narrating “how Mr. Jonathan Wild’s Throat was cut, from Ear to Ear, with a Penknife by Mr. Blake.”139 The wound was not fatal, but the scar left by the penknife was later to be recrossed by a different bureaucratic instrument. Having been caught with ten pounds’ worth of stolen linen, Wild was executed by hanging in 1725, and according to the law of the time that gave the bodies of executed felons to the Physician’s Guild, he was anatomized. The skeleton of the man so shriveled during his own lifetime that he was said, already, to have been “shrunken to an anatomy”140 is now in trust to the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons.141 This very skeleton is of course the matter of this exhibit, the marks of the anatomist’s saw visible in the sectioned ribcage. Care has been lavished to piece together Wild’s membra disjecta; his clean hands and crooked fingers have been rearticulated into wholeness. Behind the wall is the account book, containing the still lifes of people anatomized by its logic. Here people are embodied, to the point of being exchangeable for the objects they accrue. But in front of the wall, irony governs a transaction in which, as Defoe puts it, Wild was “like a man of business.” This is his “office,” things here are “lost,” and Wild himself is “a man of business” with “clerks” and “agents” only in the ironic sense. Accordingly, the public front room of the Lost Property Office is like another site governed by irony—­the theater—­a fact not lost on Wild’s contemporaries. On the public side of the wall, Wild was a thief taker and a broker facilitating the return of lost objects; the Lost Property Office, looked at from this side of the wall, is a

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stage that repeatedly rehearses the same tragicomedy of property lost only to be returned. The theft and return of stolen property was in fact at least once imagined explicitly as a play, what Defoe calls a “grimace,”142 in the obsolete sense of a brief play or sham performance, stemming from the etymological sense of the word as a “mask.” The True and Genuine Account recounts Defoe’s own involvement in such a grimace, though, as he sought “only a silver-­hilted sword,” he never recovered his property.143 He relays, however, the “more material case” of an exchange between Wild and “a lady” over a “gold watch with trinkets and some diamonds about the watch.” This “grimace,” the opportunity for an extended stage play elaborated over four pages in the original, includes speech headings, stage directions (“offers him money,” “waits on her to her coach,” and so on) and a series of relatively generic situations that suggest the interchangability of the actors. It consists of a series of “needful” questions that exist only to maintain the fiction that Wild is not organizing the entire event, what Defoe calls questions which are “needful, not for his information, but for your amusement.”144 The proper search and inquiry, the particularizing of the object and Wild’s enumeration of possible thieves, the print advertisements promising “no questions asked,” and even the dialogue itself are all parts of an elaborate play, recognized as a play by the players themselves. Such a script is more than just an imaginative recreation of an event in the past; in the way that all scripts invite participation, it is the opportunity to enter into and to perform—­and perhaps, in a small way, to enjoy—­the exchange that it records. The Beggar’s Opera revels in the fluidity of the urban ecology, showcasing people as collections of other people’s property. Traditional models of what Patricia Fumerton calls “high” early modern subjectivity posit a “unitary or consistent” self as the kernel of the subjective experience; such a model assumes a relatively stable profession and address, a single person engaged in a more-­or-­less unchanging occupation over the course of a lifetime. But a member of the London working poor, if he or she entered the public register at all, might be recorded as having half a dozen professions or more. Fumerton therefore posits a countervailing theory of “low” subjectivity, which, like the people it seeks to address, “is itself vagrant.” Such a model would account for the surprising number of people who inhabited “lower” positions in the London workforce at the same time that it helps make sense for the spatial and professional mobility of those people. That is, this sort of “low” subjectivity could be “experienced . . . by a range of lower-­order subjects” who inhabit variously and as occasion demands “multiple types of selves.”145 In a suggestive

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remark that she declines to develop, Fumerton notices that the early modern London consumer economy depended upon a vagrant workforce, partly for the production of goods like combs, tape, lace, pins, and ballads, but partly also because the very mobility of the London working poor helped distribute these goods. The London economy was, as she puts it, “invested” in a vagrant market to keep the circulation of low things going, just as the London semi-­ employed were “invested” in a rapidly changing marketplace for income.146 As Fumerton puts it, “We might best think of such a subject as ‘performative’”—­ not in the sense of open-­ended role-­playing, but as an enactment of marketplace speculation, an interfacing of the subject with the material conditions of the marketplace.147 The Beggar’s Opera stages a series of similar selves—­people made up out of the portable property of other people: take for instance the pickpocket, Beetle-­ browed Jemmy, who wears a silver sword in order to pass as a gentleman at Tunbridge Wells. This is a stolen sword—­it will be pawned or fenced tomorrow, but today it is part of Beetle-­browed Jemmy’s public image. Suky Straddle wears “a repeating watch,” in order “to make a figure with it to-­night in Drury-­ Lane.” She wears a watch—­perhaps a watch that she herself stole—­in order to pass as a lady (or as a prostitute passing as a lady) at the playhouse. In the account book, Jemmy is a pickpocket (in the eighteenth-­century idiom: a “pincatcher”), but at Tunbridge Wells he is a fashionable young man. For Suky and Jemmy, their capital is also their exchangeable goods; what they use today as the tools of their trade is what they will sell tomorrow; the same object figures in two ways on the two sides of the door to Peachum’s “lock”—­as stage property and stolen property.148 Suky, Jemmy, and the other clerks of Peachum’s corporation are playing roles predicated entirely on the stuff that passes through their hands, selves constructed completely through the alienation of other people’s things. This might be seen as an extension of the kind of stage irony developed by Jonathan Wild, where the things of the Lost Property Office are owned ironically by the very people who alienated them from their owners. And it also provides a way of thinking through the kinds of collection implied by the Lost Property Office itself, in which authors and actors are the aggregates of things they use without owning. The Beggar’s Opera was an unprecedented hit—­a satire claimed by Tory and Whig, foes of opera and fans of opera, high and low alike. It ran for an unprecedented sixty-­two consecutive nights; it made stars out of the production’s two leads and launched its author, John Gay, as a celebrity in his own right. As Gay’s friend and fellow scribbler John Arbuthnot put it, “The inoffensive John

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Gay . . . is now become a public person.”149 Like Wild himself, The Beggar’s Opera was “a perfectly new scene,” an opera cobbled together out of ballads—­ and written by a beggar. But the play is furthermore itself a collection of other people’s property—­an art form that pivots on the pleasure in reclaiming lost things. Gay’s trick was to take well-­known tunes and give them new words. The ballad, as one critic puts it, “promises a total immersion of personality in context that is the antithesis of the literary author’s separation from both the local and the living presence of audience.” And so, as this critic continues, “here was a role for the eighteenth-­century author quite different from that offered by patronage, professionalism, and the parodies of ventriloquism.”150 Nobody owns a ballad—­or just about anyone can own it at any time. It does not work by being original; quite the opposite—­the ballad works because it is familiar, because it belongs to the people who already know it in one form or another, and who, when they sing it, are in fact singing a new version of a song in which they already have intellectual property. This complex of influences, this twist between theft and production, privacy and publicity, makes possible a different sort of authorship, a wholly public authorship without the trappings of an individualized celebrity, which exists entirely to the extent that it is not a kind of authorship at all, only a sort of recycling of the property of other people, a collection of things not properly one’s own. John Gay’s most popular play stages everyday people coming abruptly to realize that, in the Lost Property Office, every person is a public person, and all art is public art. What is more, it invites its audience to participate in a vision of the world in which all owners are thieves, all authors are beggars, and all persons are public persons. The fantasy of a proper place for all lost property is necessary to the fiction of the possessive individual. But it is plagued by a contradiction. On the one hand, Wild’s office, as a public institution, is the guarantee that all lost things will find their way to their owners. This is despite the fact that perhaps one-­third of what came into Wild’s office was melted down or sent overseas.151 So when Defoe remarks that it was “as if ” everything lost “had been deposited with him to be restored,” we must hear the burden of that critical “as if.” “As if ” is the marker of irony; it is the sign that property is owned “as if ” accumulation were the only meaningful way of engaging with something. On the other hand, the person installed there, the manager of the Lost Property Office just like everyone who visits, is clearly cobbled together out of other people’s things. His business is the buying and selling of other people’s property; his memoranda are distributed in notes and newspapers. The space he claims as his cabinet is open, sometimes violently, to the world of exchange. This, in

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the end, is the lesson of lost property: modeling mental activity on possession is already to have given way to a strange, vertiginous dispossession. The same irony sustaining the mind’s metaphors already buoys up the ground upon which it is built, the complex fictions of ownership in civil society. This is one aspect of what Jody Greene calls “the trouble with ownership,” by which she means to register the paradox of intellectual property. The central tension is that, as a social matter, a person may only lay claim to an idea by releasing it to the world.152 Even “genius,” or what Locke finds is a person’s internal inclination to organize materials in one way rather than another, is an uncertain property.153 “What we call a genius,” Alexander Pope remarked, “is hard to be distinguished by a man himself. . . . The only method he has is to make the experiment by writing, and appealing to the judgment of others.”154 For in the end the relational nature of intellectual property articulates in a highly visible way the relational proof of the private self; privacy is a function in the end of a highly negotiated and sometimes toxic set of public relationships.155 In the revised edition of the second book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke voices a noble doubt. This is precisely in the section in which he lays out the most forceful statement of his position that the mind is a container; it is here that he discusses the necessity of memory to the work of the mind, and it is also the section in which he is most dependent on a series of striking metaphors: memory is “a repository,” we “bring [ideas] in sight,” ideas are “objects . . . imprinted” in the mind, and so on. “But,” Locke would in his second edition remark, “this laying up of our ideas in the repository of the memory signifies no more but this,—­that the mind has a power in many cases to revive perceptions which it once had, with this additional perception annexed to them, that it has had them before.”156 This is as close as Locke will come to an enactivist theory of cognition—­that cognition is little more than a vast and messy repertoire of actions, things we have learned to do by doing them, among which is the ability to produce ideas. Under such a regime, we would only “have” ideas in the same way that we “perform” a thought. “To have” is not to hold, nor less to grasp or to apprehend; to “have” in this case would be merely to come into the orbit of an experience or a disposition we have “had” before. Put differently, we would have thoughts much less than thoughts would have us. But Locke takes his doubt no further than this, for to speak of mental activity, as he knows, means to speak in metaphor. “In this sense it is,” he continues, “that our ideas are said to be in our memories, when indeed they are actually nowhere.” We in general read this line with the emphasis

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on “in”—­which is surely to remind us of the critical metaphor of the age: the mind is a collection. But we might also cast the emphasis on “said,” reminding us that models of mentation are in part linguistic tricks, a special mode of utterance. To speak of mental activity in the empiricist mode means to sustain a certain variety of speech; indeed, it means to sustain this timbre of speech just as though it were true, to allow it even to proliferate into a mode of action, in spite of all the evidence that it is false. Speaking of mental activity means to construct vocabularies and even to mold behaviors according to a belief, and to sustain that belief long enough that vocabularies and behaviors stand in as proof. How else could we proceed, if the mind is, as Locke in the end insists, the sum of what it has claimed as property, and property is itself a minor pause in, or way of looking at, a more general pattern of dispossession? How else to speak of intimate convictions, except by airing them in the public agora? And how, finally, to describe something as special and discrete as the mind’s glassy essence, except to phrase it precariously in the stolen words of others?

C o n c l u si o n

Through the six cases and twenty-­eight exhibits in this book, I have been arguing for a model of cognition that moves beyond a naïve dualism, while still preserving space for what most of us experience as true: that we have minds, and that they have features not unlike the tools of thought. I have worked to place the grand metaphor “the mind is a collection” back in the shifting ground of its early historical context, suggesting that it has arisen naturally out of a set of evolving relationships with a series of cognitive environments. I have proposed a middle route—­that the condition of thinking in space, of our active embeddedness in our distinct and evolved ecologies, naturally gives rise to historically true structures of thinking, which in turn have real effects in the world. In order to speak to ourselves and to one another about the mental states we experience ourselves as having, we lean against vocabularies elaborated from physical models. More strongly put, we understand our minds as working in much the same way that we see systems working in the world. And the reverse is true, for this understanding, which we develop in consultation with our environments, shapes how we behave. We develop environments that respond to the mental processes we experience ourselves as having, having already, in one form or another, modeled them there. The very distinctions between mind and matter, observer and observed, are modeled and nurtured in active, participatory modes of dwelling. On the one hand, this means that we think in and through ecologies. On the other, it means that we have always already given ourselves over to a bewildering dispossession. This is the natural condition of thought, for the quasi-­stable mind patched together from shifting object relations continually renews itself through embodied interventions in the world. This is what it means to live as though the mind were a collection—­which, because it is immensely convenient, we will probably mostly continue to do anyway. As this catalogue neared completion, I was asked several times what

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happened to this metaphor—­to “the mind is a collection.” I think I was in general being asked what radical epistemic break, right around the end of the eighteenth century, caused Western civilization to shift its perch from one branch of cognitive convictions to another. Much has of course been written on this question—­from Meyer Abrams’s Mirror and the Lamp to Dror Wahr­ man’s Making of the Modern Self, with many more projects before, after, and in between. Each of these proposes different versions of a radical displacement, an irreversible threshold crossed from (in Wahrman’s terms) ancien régime to the modern. Things clearly changed; people became differently aware of the synthetic work of the mind—­of its work to half-­create what it sees—­and it is the charge of Abrams’s and Wahrman’s studies (and many more) to trace this change. But what would it mean if we rephrased the question, tackling it from the point of view with which this book began? For, in the end, the purpose of the book was not to trace a metaphor; it was to describe cognitive life from an ecological point of view. What, in other words, does “historical epistemology” look like from the world of things?1 The first thing we would have to do is adopt a skepticism about radical historical breaks. The simple, brute fact of things alone implies a certain inertia in the paths of thought. How, then, do cognitive ecologies persist even across moments of great political and cultural change? How does the metaphor “the mind is a collection” continue to operate, slashing embedded cognitive conditions apart into minds and arrangements, only to link them together again? Bruno Latour is on a hike; he pauses in his journey, and lifts a sighting compass to his eye. This is clearly a detour, in the sense that he has turned aside to consult something not in the straight way of his journey (see Exhibit 13); but it is also a small moment of historical transport, for in his gesture, whether he knows it or not, he has articulated a small scrap of thought pioneered by Robert Hooke.2 Ecologies are hardly ever exhausted; they are damaged, mutilated, plowed under or blown up, but in the way that the new always gathers up the remnants of the old, fragments of the past survive in the fabric of the present. This doesn’t just mean that antiquities end up in museums, like Locke’s indices at the Bodleian (Exhibit 1), or Woodward’s pebble in the Sedgwick (Exhibit 6). This is just the stuff, which has its own concrete persistence. Ecologies turn up in habits and gestures, notions and ideas, ways of thinking and modes of being. An ecological theory of thought asks us to adopt an ecological theory of time. If we view mental activity as a function of the mass of neurons in the brain, we notice its pliability and resilience. It is not just that the brain responds to damage by “recruiting” available networks

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of neurons; nor is it only that the brain is loaded with atavistic structures and reflexes, which turn up in ways we might not expect; it is that the brain’s entire principle is the patching together of borrowed resources.3 This, it has recently been suggested, ultimately offers a neurophysiology of metaphor (see Exhibit 1), insofar as neural networks dedicated to motor activity, sensation, and so forth, are recruited for conceptual work (“grasping” ideas, or “picturing” them). A similar principle governs cognition understood in the distributed sense, for, when thinking is understood to be a function elaborated within networks, then we should be looking for patterns of persistence, especially in the lines of force connecting persons and things. When we shake hands, for instance, we might as well be shaking hands with Claudius (Exhibit 13); when we pause on the straight way of a walk, we might as well be pausing alongside William Stukeley or Robert Plot (see Exhibit 12).4 As the network’s crumpled topographies of time afford strange alliances and unexpected contacts, so, too, major conceptual models have made do with borrowed materials, picking up and filling in across shifts in metaphorical regimes.5 The dominant cognitive metaphor in modern-­day Europe and the United States, at least as I grew up experiencing it, developed explicitly from the cognitive model that underwrote the Enlightenment. When Alan Turing reflected on his own mind as a way of modeling the first computers, what he found there was the same core metaphor organizing John Locke’s epistemology. The mind of a child, Turing would later remark, is like “a notebook as one buys it from the stationer’s.” Such a mind is “rather little mechanism, and lots of blank sheets.”6 This is of course the “blank tablet” theory of intellect lying at the material heart of both Aristotle’s epistemology and the Enlightenment systems that borrowed from it; it is Locke’s commonplace ready to receive impressions. The best, most universal computing machine, Turing therefore supposes, would pair a relatively simple, empyrean processor with a store of discrete data, inscribed on a limitless notepad. The critical innovation was a processor that could upload data for short periods of time, in order to incorporate them as instructions; it was in this way able to change its own program. Such a machine pairs a theoretically limitless but perfectly stable store of data (in punch cards, magnetic drums, or other relatively slow media) with a limited but instantly accessible memory medium (in mercury-­delay lines, cathode ray tubes, or other relatively instantaneous media), and organizes both under the view of a central processor.7 It offers a model of cognition that is architecturally isometric with Francis Bacon’s three-­part intellect, or John Locke’s; all that is needed is a large repository, a small workshop, and a caretaker. Turing’s

272 Conclusion

idea for artificial intelligence was simply to set just such a universal machine free in the world—­allowing it to modify its own program as it developed. As Locke might have put it, “In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas and language, the materials about which to exercise its discursive faculty: and the use of reason becomes daily more visible, as these materials, that give it employment” (see Exhibit 1). And so, when various networks of thinkers, at RAND Corporation, at a series of interdisciplinary meetings called the Macy Conferences, and at the Stanford Humanities Institute, among other places, modeled cognition on the computer, they were in fact rediscovering, in a new technical medium, the formal properties of a model of intellect pioneered in the first moments of the empiricist turn.8 It was breakthrough as tautology, effortless because already accomplished. The computer has been modeled on a long-­standing model for the mind as a curator with its objects; that new gadget has been recruited as a model, in turn, for the mind that observes it. This tendency has ramified into different branches: it is roughly as common to find neurological structures defined in the language of a circuit board (neurons as wires) as it is to find psychological theories scaffolded around processes witnessed in a microcomputer (thinking as processing), though both neurologist and cognitive theorist will point out that one does not imply the other. In the event, we can see, witnessed on a very long scale, what was also apparent in the course of the single lives of collectors, authors, artists, and inventors: a set of tools for thinking offers a model for thinking, which suggests in turn new refinements to the tools, which prompt new twists to the model, and so on. This is especially obvious when a microcomputer, or a cognitive model explicitly based on a microcomputer, is compared automatically to a librarian in a library, so much so that we hardly witness it as a metaphor at all.9 It is not that computers may be continually refined until they may come to simulate the working of the human brain; it is that, once we start thinking of mind as something to be modeled by a gadget, all intelligence becomes artificial intelligence anyway. This book has argued that the glory of the eighteenth century, the establishment of the mind as distinct from body, self from other, and so forth, stems from a greater set of entanglements; “the Enlightenment” is the name for the special state of a network in which the network erases itself, renders itself transparent.10 But this accomplishment, and these entanglements, extend not only for the length of a single life; it is not merely that one person and one collection are changed by their lifelong cognitive relationships, but that persons and things are together linked in the dialectical ebb and flow of

Conclusion 273

embedded cognitive activity. The standard cognitive model is about the present moment, interested in how we think right now, not, on the contrary, in how we got this way.11 Historicity is, however, built into cognition understood in its ecological sense; elements of any thinking ecology evolve with reference to other elements in the ecology. This means that cognitive ecologies have a history; the relationships between elements of the system (between us and our objects, objects and their caretakers) bear historical baggage. We become comfortable, before ourselves and others, thinking of our minds as collections of ideas; our environments have likewise become comfortable thinking of us as collectors and curators, have, indeed, come to rely upon us as agents of care. How else could it be? The metaphor runs both ways. We are touched and changed by our interactions; our environments, like sensitive plants, feel the change and adapt in their turn. The question of how we arrived at this point in our cognitive history demands, therefore, an answer respecting the environments in which we find ourselves. The history of cognition is an intellectual history of the tools of thinking, or, put differently, a material history of intellectual work, histories that are, I have been arguing, two sides of the same coin. And case studies in eighteenth-­century thought are in fact studies in twenty-­first-­century thought, at least inasmuch as we continue, for convenience’ sake, to think and act as though the mind is a collection.

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n o t es

introduction 1. See for instance M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), 57–69; Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 86–112. 2. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis et al., 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–83), 33.576–77. 3. Robert Nourse, Discourse upon the Nature and Faculties of Man (London, 1686), 24–25. 4. Joseph Addison, Dialogues Concerning the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (London, 1726), 22. 5. Jonathan Swift, “Preface” to The Battle of the Books in The Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Robert A. Greenberg and William Piper (New York: Norton, 1973), 375. 6. Boswell’s extended analogy for his mind, in Boswell in Search of a Wife, 1766–1769, ed. Frank Brady and Frederick A. Pottle (New York: McGraw-­Hill, 1956), 137–38. 7. Swift, “The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit,” in Writings, 407. 8. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad in Four Books (London, 1744), 2.44. 9. Among others: Edward Reynolds, Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (London, 1656); Nourse, Discourse upon the Nature and Faculties of Man (1686), Alexander Forbes, Essays Moral and Philosophical; Isaac Watts, The Improvement of the Mind: or a Supplement to the Art of Logick . . . (London, 1741). 10. Francis Bacon, for example. See Andrew Hiscock, Reading Memory in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 219–45; Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge, 1966), 356–59; Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 11. Joseph Warton, An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1782), 2.54. 12. Alex Page, “Faculty Psychology and Metaphor in Eighteenth-­Century Criticism,” Modern Philology 66.3 (1969): 237. 13. See Robert D. Hume, “Dryden on Creation: ‘Imagination’ in the Later Criticism,” Review of English Studies 21.83 (1970): 295–314. 14. “A wit’s great work,” writes Dryden, is to edit, to “retrench,” to rearrange, and, in short, “to refuse.” “Eleonora,” The Poetical Works of John Dryden, ed. Richard Hooper, 5 vols. (London: George Bell, 1891), 2.288. See James Jensen’s discussion of “wit” in A Glossary

276 Notes to Pages 2–3 of John Dryden’s Critical Terms (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1969), 121–24. Dryden, “In Memory of Mr. Cartwright,” Poetical Works, 1.121. 15. Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-­ Century England,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (New York: Routledge, 2008), 69. 16. Richard Hurd, “A Discourse Concerning Poetical Imitation,” in Epistola ad Augustum with an English Commentary and Notes (London, 1751), 110. 17. See John Baird, “‘Too Much a Cento’: Imitation as Invention in Pope’s Mock-­ Heroic Poems,” Lumen 26 (2007): 35–48; Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-­Century England.” 18. For a discussion of the prevalence of this model of imagination, see J. M. Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1991). Cocking traces intellectual debts from Aristotle to Avicenna and Averroës, to Renaissance imagination theory. See also Dennis L. Sepper, “Aristotle’s Phantasia: From Animal Sensation to Understanding Forms of Fields,” in Understanding Imagination: The Reason of Images (Dordrecht: Springer, 2013): 185–265. 19. Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 30. On medieval cognitive theory, see Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Mediation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Mind (New York: Routledge, 1993); Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages (Westport: Greenwood, 1996). 20. The “Library of Eumnestes,” Faerie Queene, 2.9. See Jennifer Summit, “Monuments and Ruins: Spenser and the Problem of the English Library,” English Literary History 70.1 (2003): 1–34, and Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 121–32; David Landreth, “At Home with Mammon: Matter, Money, and Memory in Book II of the Faerie Queene,” English Language History 73.1 (2006): 245–74. 21. Kenelm Digby, Loose Fantasies, ed. Vittori Gabrieli (Roma: Edizioni di Storia, 1968), and Two Treatises: In the One of Which, the Nature of Bodies; in the Other, the Nature of Man’s Soule (London, 1644); Paul S. MacDonald, “Introduction,” in Digby, Two Treatises (Leiden: Brill, 2013). On Digby, see Robert Hugh Kargon, Atomism in England from Hariot to Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966), 72–73. On Digby’s neo-­ Aristotelianism, see Michael Foster, “Sir Kenelm Digby as Man of Religion and Thinker,” Downside Review 106 (1988): 35–58, 101–25; Betty Jo Dobbs, “Studies in the Natural Philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby,” Ambix 18 (1971): 1–25 and 20 (1973): 143–63; Bruce R. Smith, The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Renaissance Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 116; John Sutton, “Soul and Body in Seventeenth-­Century British Philosophy,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter Anstey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 292–95. 22. See Cocking, Imagination, and Marco Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism (London: Springer, 2013). These accounts all hinge on what Fabian Dorsch has called a model of “dependency”; “imaginings” in these accounts are all derived in one way or another from “cognitions,” which is to say that all mental activity “depends” from perceptions, sensations, judgments, and so on. The Unity of Imaginings (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2012), 27–37.

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23. Paul F. Cranefield, “On the Origin of the Phrase Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu,” Journal of the History of Medicine 25 (1970): 77–80. See also Abrams, Mirror and the Lamp, 159–62. 24. By Edward Young, in the Conjectures on Original Composition (London, 1759). 25. Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, “Creativity” and “Mimesis,” in A History of Six Ideas: An Essay in Aesthetics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1980), 244–265, 266–309. 26. Dacey, “Concepts of Creativity: A History,” Encyclopedia of Creativity, ed. Mark A. Runco and Steven R. Pritzker, 2 vols. (London: Academic Press, 1999), 1.310. 27. William Duff, An Essay on Original Genius (London, 1767), 6–7. 28. Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 66–67. 29. Duff, Essay on Original Genius, 282. 30. Locke was multiply separated from his library, though he kept a running catalogue and recollection aid. The Essay seems to have been begun (and was inspired) in his “chambers” in London and concluded in his “retirement,” where his catalogue and commonplaces became essential. John Harrison and Peter Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); also see Locke, Drafts for the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch and G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). 31. See Peter Anstey, John Locke and Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), esp. 46–69. 32. In the way catalogued, for instance, by Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 33. There were a handful of collections, some of which went by the name “museum,” before the Civil War, but the flowering of the museum industry occurred after the Restoration. See Ken Arnold, “Museums Arrive in England,” in Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 13–44. 34. The Ark was moved to Oxford and renamed the Ashmolean; some of the man-­ made artifacts from the collection remain there. Numerous accounts of it as it existed survive, including those in the journals of Celia Fiennes and Conrad Zacharias von Uffenbach. Also see Arthur MacGregor’s account, “The Ashmolean as a Museum of Natural History: 1683–1860,” Journal of the History of Collections 13.2 (2001): 125–44. Marjorie Swann discusses the details of its acquisition and translation into his name, into Oxford, and into print by Elias Ashmole in Curiosities and Texts, 27–54, especially 38–54. 35. See, for instance, Swann, Curiosities and Texts, 4–12; Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-­Porter (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Arnold, A Cabinet for the Curious; Simon Chaplin, “The Domestic Oeconomy of Display,” in John Hunter and the “Museum Oeconomy,” 1750–1800 (Ph.D. thesis, King’s College, London, 2009), 157–214. 36. Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 130. 37. See also Richard D. Altick’s discussion in The Shows of London (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). 38. See, for instance, Barbara M. Benedict, “Collecting Trouble: Sir Hans Sloane’s Literary Reputation in Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 36.2 (2012): 111–42; From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections, ed. Michael Hunter, Alison Walker, and Arthur MacGregor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

278 Notes to Pages 6–9 39. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: Zone, 1998), esp. 109–34 and 303–68; John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), esp. 73–83; Lorraine J. Daston, “The Factual Sensibility,” Isis 79.3 (1988): 458. See also Laura Laurenich-­Minelli, “Museography and Ethnographical Collections in Bologna during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth-­and Seventeenth-­Century Europe, ed. Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 19. 40. Susan Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (New York: Routledge, 1995), 124. But see also Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 39. Gunnar Broberg, “The Broken Circle,” in The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Tore Frängsmyr, J. L. Heibron, and Robin E. Rider (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 66. William Eamon, “From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of the Concept of Openness in Science,” Minerva 23 (1985): 321–47. 41. Richard G. Olson, “Tory-­High Church Opposition to Science and Scientism in the Eighteenth Century: The Works of John Arbuthnot, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson,” in The Uses of Science in the Age of Newton, ed. John G. Burke (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 171–204. Margaret Jacob, The Newtonians and the English Revolution: 1689–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976). 42. Joseph Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977). 43. On the history of the field of geology, which Woodward himself helped to invent, see Roy Porter, The Making of Geology: Earth Science in Britain 1660–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 44. For instance, Richard Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, Notebooks and English Virtuosi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); John Bender and Michael Marrinan, The Culture of Diagram (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010) Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Summit, Memory’s Library; Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory; and Zsolt Komáromy, Figures of Memory: From the Muses to Eighteenth-­Century British Aesthetics (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell, 2011); Daniel Selcer, Philosophy and the Book: Early Modern Figures of Material Inscription (London: Continuum, 2010). 45. Summit, Memory’s Library, 1–16. 46. Summit, Memory’s Library, 4. See also Carruthers, The Book of Memory. 47. Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon, 15 vols., ed. Graham Rees and Lisa Jardine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 11.187. 48. See Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Stark, “From Mysticism to Skepticism: Stylistic Reform in Seventeenth-­Century British Philosophy and Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.4 (2001): 328–29. 49. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (3.10.34), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 2.146. 50. John Guillory, “Enlightening Mediation,” in This Is Enlightenment, ed. Clifford

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Siskin and William Warner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 37–63. See also N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 158–63. 51. Boyle, “Considerations Touching Experimental Essays in General,” Certain Physiological Essays, in Works (London, 1772), 1.304. See Maurizio Gotti, Investigating Specialized Discourse (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 171–88. For important counterarguments, see Jayne Lewis, Air’s Appearance: Literary Atmosphere in British Fiction, 1660–1794 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 36–60; Daniel Tiffany, Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 38–62. 52. Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 18; Rorty is paraphrasing the argument of Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). 53. See John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36 (2010): 321–62. Also see Richard Rorty, “The Contingency of Language,” in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, 18. 54. Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 22–79. Alan G. Gross, The Rhetoric of Science (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990); Lawrence J. Prelli, A Rhetoric of Science: Inventing Scientific Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989); Ken Baake, Metaphor and Knowledge: The Challenges of Writing Science (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003). 55. Jean Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 56. John Locke, “On the Conduct of the Understanding,” ed. Paul Schuurman (University of Keele, Ph.D. Dissertation, 2001), 215–16. 57. Locke is discussing the linkages between mind and body, body and mind, in the pursuit of conviction. Locke, Essay (4.3.23), 2.213–14. See Stephen H. Clark, “‘The Whole Internal World His Own’: Locke and Metaphor Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.2 (1998): 241–65. 58. Locke, Essay (3.1.5), 2.4–5. 59. On this point, see Susan Manning, The Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 40–43: “The received view is that eighteenth-­century poets and rhetoricians regarded figurative language as an embellishment rather than a constituent of meaning. . . . A more nuanced version would recognize that metaphor and metonymy in particular presented a problem, and an opportunity, for eighteenth-­century rhetoricians, who worried about how to manage figures of speech, and how to distinguish distracting adornment from a compression that would be functional in communication and comparison” (41). 60. Locke discusses the difficult passage between body and mind, objects and ideas, in chapter 3 of the second book of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding; it is here that he replaces the certainty about empirical matters with the conviction of experience. See especially 2.3.28. 61. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Edinburgh, 1785), 52. 62. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature: Addresses and Lectures (Boston, 1849), chapter 4. 63. Although often mistaken for the London-­based lexicographer of the same name, this Samuel Johnson was an Anglican churchman living mostly in New England and New

280 Notes to Pages 11–15 York, who was among the chief figures responsible for introducing the major thinkers of the new philosophy, including Bacon, Locke, and Berkeley, to Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and what would eventually become Columbia University. 64. Samuel Johnson to George Berkeley, Feb. 5, 1730, in American Philosophy: The Early Schools, ed. I. Woodbridge Riley (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1907), 90. 65. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czemy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), 17. 66. William Croft and Alan Cruse, Cognitive Linguistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 24. 67. Hans Blumenberg, Paradigms for a Metaphorology, trans. Robert Savage (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010), 2n3. 68. Blumenberg, Metaphorology, 3–5. Also see Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Zizek’s discussion in Mythology, Madness, and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum 2009), 50–80. 69. For the revivification of the dead metaphors of language, see Kearns, Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 22–24. Also, Lawrence Hinman’s “Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43.2 (1982): 179–99; and Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lying in a Non-­Moral Sense,” The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139–53. 70. Max Black, “Metaphor,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 55 (1954): 273–94; Black, Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1962). 71. John R. Searle, “Metaphor,” in Expression and Meaning: Studies in the Theory of Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 76–116; Donald Davidson, “What Metaphors Mean,” Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978): 31–47. See also Rorty, “The Contingency of Language,” 3–22. 72. Mark Johnson, “Metaphor and Cognition,” in Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, ed. Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 401–14. 73. See Ellen Spolsky, Gaps in Nature: Literary Interpretation and the Modular Mind (Albany: SUNY Press, 1993). 74. Pope’s satirical characterization of lesser poets, in Peri Bathous: Or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (London, 1727), 74–75; Addison’s straight claim in Dialogues on the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (London, 1719). 75. The term is Mark Johnson’s, developed in an analysis of exactly this recursivity. Johnson, “Conceptual Metaphor and Embodied Structures of Meaning,” Philosophical Psychology 6.4 (1993): 413–22. 76. Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 35. 77. See Daniel N. Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), esp. chapter 11, and Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). 78. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 91. 79. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, 33. See Paul A. Harris, “The Itinerant

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Theorist: Nature and Knowledge/Ecology and Topology in Michel Serres,” SubStance 26.2 (1997): 37–58. 80. The phrase “cognitive ecology” is indebted to Edwin Hutchins, whose formulation is in turn indebted to Gregory Bateson and James J. Gibson. “Cognitive ecology,” Hutchins writes, “is the study of cognitive phenomena in context.” The term may be used to refer to the contextual space, the network of the thought, or the study itself, all of which refer to one another anyways. Edwin Hutchins, “Cognitive Ecology,” Topics in Cognitive Science 2 (2010): 705–15; Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballantine, 1972); Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986). 81. There is a burgeoning literature on this topic, which is too large to catalogue here. A few influential, summary projects include Lambros Malafouris, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2013); Ian Hodder, Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (Chichester: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2012); and Steven Shapin’s extraordinary collection of essays, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 82. For instance, John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 83. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949): 11–24; Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 48–50, 136–48; Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (New York: Penguin, 2002), 5–6. On Descartes and dualism more recently, see Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor, Retrieving Dualism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015). The question of the history of the mind/body dualism is elegantly framed by G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter in their introduction to The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 84. Morton, Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); and The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 85. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 130. 86. Morton’s point in The Ecological Thought. 87. Shapin and Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-­Pump, 39. Case 1. Metaphor 1. Jonathan Richardson, “Life of the Author,” in Explanatory Notes and Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost (London, 1734), cxiv. 2. Daniel Fried notices the same pair of terms in Hobbes’s Leviathan, “Milton and Empiricist Semiotics,” Milton Quarterly (2003): 125–26. 3. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1.2.15), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 1.48–49. 4. John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 125.

282 Notes to Pages 24–26 5. Locke’s remarks are part of a general rerouting of speculative questions through practical systems, with experimental practice increasingly shaping theories of mental processes. See, for instance, James Buickerood, “The Natural History of the Understanding: Locke and the Rise of Facultative Logic in the Eighteenth Century,” History and Philosophy of Logic 6 (1985): 157–90; Peter Anstey, “Experimental Versus Speculative Natural Philosophy,” in The Science of Nature in the Seventeenth Century: Patterns of Change in Early Modern Natural Philosophy, ed. Anstey and John Schuster (Dordrecht: Springer, 2005), 215–42; John Yolton, The Two Intellectual Worlds of John Locke: Man, Person, and Spirits in the “Essay” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 6. “Exemplar Mundi in Intellectu humano fundamus.” Bacon, Novum Organum, in The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 15 vols. (London, 1857–1874), 1.218. Also Mary Domsky, “Observation and Mathematics,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter R. Anstey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 144–68; Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 1–22. 7. Jules Law, Rhetoric of Empiricism: Language and Perception from Locke to I. A. Richards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 59. 8. Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal, “Embodied Empiricism,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Wolfe and Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 2. On Locke’s complicated dualism, see Matthew Stuart, Locke’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 250–63. 9. Anthony Kenny, “The Homunculus Fallacy,” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), 125–36. Raymond W. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 45–50; Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 44–45. 10. Heather Keenleyside’s treatment of Locke’s “first-­person self ” offers a theory of genre responding to Locke’s ecological investments. Keenleyside, “The First-­Person Form of Life: Locke, Sterne and the Autobiographical Animal,” Critical Inquiry 39.1 (2012): 116–41. 11. Locke, Essay (2.12.1), 1.214. See Charles Taylor, “Retrieving Realism,” in Mind, Reason, and Being-­in-­the-­World: The McDowell-­Dreyfus Debate, ed. Joseph K. Schear (New York: Routledge, 2013), 88. 12. My understanding of the dimensions of Locke’s “idea” is indebted to John Yolton’s “Ideas and Knowledge in Seventeenth-­Century Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 13.2 (1975), 145–65. Also see Ian Tipton’s review of this question: “‘Ideas’ and ‘Objects’: Locke on Perceiving ‘Things,’” in The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, ed. Margaret Atherton (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 1–18; Lisa Shapiro, “Instrumental or Immersed Experience: Pleasure, Pain and Object Perception in Locke,” in Embodied Empiricism, ed. Wolfe and Gal, 265–85. 13. Paul de Man, “The Epistemology of Metaphor,” Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978): 16. 14. See Nicolaas T. Oosthuizen Mouton, “Metaphor, Empiricism, and Truth: A Fresh Look at Seventeenth-­Century Theories of Figurative Language,” Tropical Truth(s): The Epistemology of Metaphor, ed. Armin Burkhardt and Brigitte Nerlich (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010), 23–49. 15. William Walker notes that “identifying and interpreting metaphors of mind” in Locke’s Essay has been a “standard practice . . . of mainstream philosophical commentary

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from Leibniz to Rorty.” Walker, Locke, Literary Criticism, and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xiii. These analyses, focusing on Locke’s spurious reliance on the analogy of the mind to tabula rasa, are summarized by Richard Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 139–46. See Philip Vogt, John Locke and the Rhetoric of Modernity (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 61–63, for discussion for the absence of the figure of the tabula rasa in published versions of the Essay. As Nicolaas Oosthuizen Mouton points out, such analyses “are usually concerned with the degree to which Locke’s reliance on figuration was at variance with and compromised his epistemological doctrine.” Mouton, “Metaphor, Empiricism and Truth,” 23–49. Finally, see Annabel Patterson’s discussion of Locke’s metaphors (and what counts as a metaphor) in Early Modern Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 260–73. 16. As Thomas Tyers rhetorically concludes, “We must be chained to the mast, if we are determined to hear the music of the Syrens.” Tyers, “An Historical Essay on Mr. Addison” (London, 1783), 2. On this point, see Gerhard Werner, “Siren Call of Metaphor: Subverting the Proper Task of System Neuroscience,” Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 3.3 (2004): 245–52. 17. See Vogt, “Seascape in Fog: Metaphor in Locke’s Essay,” Journal of the History of Ideas 54.1 (1993), 1–18; Stephen H. Clark, “‘The Whole Internal World His Own’: Locke and Metaphor Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.2 (1998): 241–65; Linda M. G. Zerilli, “‘Philosophy’s Gaudy Dress’: Rhetoric and Fantasy in the Lockean Social Contract,” European Journal of Political Theory 4.2 (2006): 146–63. 18. Locke, Essay (3.1.5), 2.4–5. Italics are Locke’s. Brigitte Nerlich suggests that Locke offers an origin for “fundamentally new research into metaphor and other core figures of speech.” Nerlich, “Polysemy: Past and Present,” in Polysemy: Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language, ed. Nerlich et al. (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 50–57. 19. See John D. Lyons, Before Imagination: Embodied Thought from Montaigne to Rousseau (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), ix–xvi and 1–31. For a more general discussion of the metaphors of thought, see George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic, 1999). 20. Concepts, according to Locke’s argument, exist in the mind twice: first as patterns repeatedly witnessed in the ideas catalogued by the senses, and again as pure relationships abstracted and given names. This is what Locke calls the “dependence,” “transfer,” and “abstraction” of concepts on or from the simple ideas of sensory perception. 21. I rely on Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner for the category “conceptual metaphor,” and the cognitive theory of metaphor generally for the division into “source” and “target” domains. See Fauconnier and Turner, “Rethinking Metaphor,” in Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 53. There is a large literature on conceptual metaphors, beginning with Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), chaps. 1–3. See also Andrew Goatly’s summary of these issues in Washing the Brain: Metaphor and Hidden Ideology (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007), 11–34. 22. For instance, Thomas Leland, A Dissertation of the Principles of Human Eloquence (London, 1764), 9; Henry Home, Lord Kames, Elements of Criticism (London and Edinburgh, 1762); Hugh Blair, Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1783, rpt. London, 1820), 1.116–43; even Thomas Reid, in his attack on materialism, decries mere “illustration” (On the Intellectual Powers, Essay 2, chap. IV).

284 Notes to Page 28 23. See Tim Rohrer, “Image Schemata in the Brain,” in From Perception to Meaning: Image Schemas in Cognitive Linguistics, ed. Beate Hampe and Joe Grady (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005), 165–96; Rohrer and Mark Johnson, “We Are Live Creatures: Embodiment, American Pragmatism and the Cognitive Organism,” in Body, Language and Mind: Embodiment, ed. T. Ziemke, Jordan Zlatev, Roslyn M. Frank (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 17–54; Diane Pecher et al., “Abstract Concepts: Sensory-­Motor Grounding, Metaphors, and Beyond,” in The Psychology of Learning and Motivation 54, ed. Brian Ross (Burlington: Academic Press, 2011): 217–48. 24. George Lakoff, “The Neural Theory of Metaphor,” in The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor, 27. Though the general claim is accepted, the precise nature of the sharing of neural networks is the subject of debate. For an influential recent summary of positions, see Michael L. Anderson, “Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010): 245–313. 25. Lakoff, “Neural Theory,” 27. 26. Mark Johnson, “Philosophy’s Debt to Metaphor,” Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, ed. Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 45. See Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Johnson and Lakoff, Philosophy in the Flesh; The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 27. One overview of a few of these studies is in Johnson, Meaning of the Body, 167–70, but see also relevant notes below. 28. Most studies agree that the neurons involved during perception and visualization include part, but not all, of those activated during overt movement. See Ralph D. Ellis, Questioning Consciousness: The Interplay of Imagery, Consciousness, and Emotion in the Human Brain (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1995); V. S. Ramachandran and William Hristein, “Three Laws of Qualia: What Neurology Tells Us About the Biological Functions of Consciousness,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 4 (1997): 429–57. 29. See Jerome Feldman, From Molecule to Metaphor (Bradford: MIT, 2006), 163–71; Feldman and S. Narayanan, “Embodied Meaning in a Neural Theory of Language,” Brain and Language 89.2 (2004): 385–92; V. Gallese and G. Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts: The Role of the Sensory-­Motor System in Conceptual Knowledge,” Cognitive Neuropsychology 22.3–4 (2005): 455–79. 30. Anderson, “Neural Reuse.” Models include Susan Hurley’s “shared circuits” (“The Shared Circuits Model (SCM): How Control, Mirroring, and Simulation Can Enable Imitation, Deliberation, and Mindreading,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 31.1 [2008]: 1–58) and Vittorio Gallese’s “neural exploitation” (“A Neuroscientific Grasp of Concepts: From Control to Representation,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London, Biological Sciences 358 [2003]:1231–40). Also see Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of Human Invention (New York: Viking, 2009); Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, esp. 124–25. 31. On the revivification of the dead metaphors of language, Michael S. Kearns, Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1987), 22–24. Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lies in a Non-­moral Sense,” in The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Guess and Ronald Speirs (1873; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Sarah Kofman, Nietzsche and Metaphor, trans.

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Duncan Large (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), esp. 23–50; Lawrence Hinman, “Nietzsche, Metaphor, and Truth,” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 43.2 (1982): 179–99. 32. As Allan Paivio remarks, in what could almost be a gloss on Locke’s Essay, “All mental transformations engage motor processes that derive originally from active manipulation of the referent objects.” Allan Paivio, Mental Representations: A Dual-­Coding Approach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 72; Paivio, The Mind and its Evolution: A Dual Coding Theoretical Approach (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013), 142–80; also see Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science; Gallese and Lakoff, “The Brain’s Concepts”; Johnson, The Meaning of the Body. 33. Locke, Essay (2.2.2), 1.145. See Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 265–68. Taylor, “Retrieving Realism,” 88n11. 34. Likewise, treatments of the mind/body split have generally avoided thinking about the sociocultural beds that caused a mind/body split to bubble up in the first place. See G. S. Rousseau, ed., The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 35. Lakoff and Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh, 244–55, 338–40. 36. There is a large recent literature on this question, including Roslyn M. Frank et al., Body, Language and Mind, Volume 2: Sociocultural Situatedness (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), especially Enrique Bernárdez, “Collective Cognition and Individual Activity: Variation, Language and Culture,” 137–66, and Patrizia Violi, “Beyond the Body: Towards a Full Embodied Semiosis,” 53–76; Chris Sinha and Krisitne Jensen de López, “Language, Culture and the Embodiment of Spatial Cognition,” Cognitive Linguistics 11 (2000): 17–41. James Egge, “Theorizing Embodiment: Conceptual Metaphor Theory and the Comparative Study of Religion,” in Figuring Religions: Comparing Ideas, Images, and Activities, ed. Subha Pathak (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2013). 37. As many have all along suspected, such a library is a portrait of a mind exactly to the extent that a mind is modeled upon it. As Isaac D’Israeli notes in his essay “The Bibliomania,” one of the attractions of collecting is that it holds out the continual promise of the acquisition of knowledge through the twist of the metaphor it justifies. He is thinking of Locke and those working in his tradition; collectors, in complex, lived relationships with their books, “imagine that they themselves acquire knowledge when they keep it on their shelves.” Returning Locke’s information-­gathering figure to the practice upon which it depends, he facetiously observes, has its own seductive power; the promises of the collection, he concludes, “are not without a Lock on the Human Understanding.” Isaac D’Israeli’s “Bibliomania,” first published in 1791, was multiply rewritten and republished. I have it from “The Bibliomania” in Curiosities of Literature, ed. Earl of Beaconsfield, 3 vols. (London, 1881), 1.9. 38. See J. R. Milton, “Locke at Oxford,” in Locke’s Philosophy: Content and Context, ed. G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 31–47; also see G. G. Meynell, “John Locke’s Method of Common-­Placing, as Seen in His Drafts and His Medical Notebooks, Bodleian MSS Locke d.9, f.21 and f.23,” Seventeenth Century 8.2 (1993): 245–267. 39. Richard Ashcraft, “John Locke’s Library: Portrait of an Intellectual,” Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 5.1 (1969), 50. 40. J. R. Milton has pointed out that Locke’s library’s relative weakness in French

286 Notes to Pages 30–32 titles meant that Locke encountered little of the mature systems of Continental thought. “The kind of intellectual explorations that Locke began in 1671,” Milton observes, “had no secure location on his own current maps of the intellectual world.” Locke began the study of the intellect, will, and passions as a field falling under “physica,” an inherited category of rhetoric which included natural philosophy, but which was concerned with a certain way of organizing ideas out of masses of particulars. J. R. Milton, “Locke at Oxford,” 46. 41. Locke, Essay (2.1.5, 2.1.23), 1.124–5, 1.141. On the descent of this idea from classical Greece, see Paul F. Cranefield, “The Origin of the Phrase Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu,” Journal of the History of Medicine 25.1 (Jan. 1970): 77–80. J. M. Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1991). 42. Thomas Hyde, Catalogus impressorum Librorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae (Oxford, 1674). Bodleian Library, Locke 1716. 43. See Peter Laslett, “John Locke and His Books,” in John Harrison and Laslett, The Library of John Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). Locke’s collection ultimately achieved 3,641 unique volumes, which had been accrued over four decades of book buying, and each of the books received the same treatment when it was ushered into the library; Locke copied his name in the inside cover along with a record of how he acquired the book, underlined the last two digits of the year of publication on the title page, overlined the numeration on the final page, and entered the price on the lower margin of the eleventh page. Some of these marks seem to have been simple marks of ownership; others would become important—­and may have been added—­in later phases of coordination. Aside from these marks, however, Locke rarely made annotations in the text itself, refraining from underlining and only rarely making forays in the margins; he would make notes in the flyleaves, and regularly constructed indices in books that were of special practical importance to his thinking. 44. See Laslett, “Locke and His Books.” 45. Indeed, because he had custom cases made for the books, crates that could be packed up without disturbing their order, Locke was able to have an arrangement in mind even while he was away from his books—­an important feature of working collections. For a review of these issues, see The Spatial Foundations of Language and Cognition, ed. Kelly S. Mix, Linda B. Smith, and Michael Gasser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. chaps. 1, 2, 8, and 9.5–7. 46. For studies of how the development of the camera obscura affected theories of vision, and of the mimetic gathering of ideas, see Exhibits 4–9. See also Erna Fiorentini, Camera Obscura vs. Camera Lucida: Distinguishing Early Nineteenth Century Modes of Seeing (Berlin: Max Planck Institute, 2006); Michael John Gorman, “Projecting Nature in Early-­Modern Europe,” in Inside the Camera Obscura: Optics and Art Under the Spell of the Projected Image, ed. Wolfgang Lefèvre (Berlin: Max Planck Institute, 2007), 31–51. 47. Locke, Essay (2.19.1–3), 2.298–99. 48. Locke, Essay (2.11.17), 1.211–12. 49. Sorana Corneanu, Regimens of the Mind: Boyle, Locke, and the Early Modern Cultura Animi Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 141–68. 50. Though Locke has been called a minor pioneer in library science, especially for his elaborate means of cataloguing his books, none of this system is radically new; library systems, as the frameworks of cognitive ecologies, had even by Locke’s day already for centuries been caught in the dialectical back-­and-­forth of mind and habit. Jennifer Summit,

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Memory’s Library: Medieval Books in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 51. On this distinction, see Rhodri Lewis, “A Kind of Sagacity: Francis Bacon, the Ars Memoriae and the Pursuit of Natural Knowledge,” Intellectual History Review 19 (2009): 155–75. 52. Locke, Essay (2.10.2–5), 1.193–96. 53. On this point, see Hugh W. Buckingham and Stanley Finger, “David Hartley’s Psychobiological Associationism and the Legacy of Aristotle,” Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 6.1 (1997): 21–37; in Paul Eling, “Memory’s Past,” in Memory: Basic Concepts, Disorders and Treatment, ed. Peter Paul De Deyn et al. (Leuven: Acco, 2003), 15–32; Mary J. Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 54. See Lucia Dacome, “Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth-­Century Britain,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2005): 603–25. 55. See Richard Yeo’s discussion of Locke’s commonplace system in relation to the printed commonplaces of the late seventeenth century, Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 111– 15; also, Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 175–218. Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-­Century Commonplace Book,” New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Society, 1985–1991, ed. Speed Hill (Binghamton: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993). 56. See Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York: Greenwood Press, 1974); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 141–49. 57. Cicero was Locke’s favorite Latin author, and his work relays a psychological tradition inherited from Aristotle. Laslett, “Locke and his Books,” 21. Cicero was the best-­ represented Latin author in Locke’s library, and the author of the most books published before 1600. William Poole, “The Genres of Milton’s Commonplace Book,” in The Oxford Handbook of Milton, ed. Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 367–81. Ruth Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969). 58. See, for instance, Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 111–50. 59. See Lisa Jardine and Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy,” Past and Present, no. 129 (1990): 30–78. 60. Poole, “Genres of Milton’s Commonplace.” 61. See Ann Blair, “Humanist Method in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53.4 (1992): 541–51,” and Richard Yeo, “Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth-­Century England,” History of Science 45 (2007): 1–46. Locke’s predecessors imagined the commonplace as a method of regularizing the memory, primarily for, in other words, better storing and recalling exempla in the mind, and only secondarily as a supplementary source in order to supplant it. “The function of notebooks” for these premodern thinkers, writes Yeo, “seems to be that of prompting the memory to recall what it already should possess” (2). 62. See Walter Ong, “Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare,” in Classical Influences on European Culture 1500–1700, ed. R. R. Bolgar (Cambridge:

288 Notes to Pages 33–36 Cambridge University Press, 1976), 91–126; Francis Goyet, “À propos de ‘ces pastissages de lieux communs,’” Bulletin de la Société des Amis de Montaigne 5–6 (1986): 11–26 and 7–8 (1987): 9–30. 63. See Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-­Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 64. Blair, “Humanist Methods.” 65. Yeo, Encyclopaedic Visions, esp. 112–13. See also Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison,” 133–47. 66. Richard Yeo, “Before Memex: Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Vannevar Bush,” Science in Context 20.1 (2007): 21–47. See also Alan Walker, “Indexing Commonplace Books: John Locke’s Method,” Indexer 22.3 (2001): 114–18; Moss, Printed Commonplace-­ Books, 279. 67. Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia: Or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), entry for “Common-­places.” 68. This is quoted and discussed at more length by David Allen, “‘A sort of register or orderly collection of things’: Locke and the Organization of Wisdom,” in Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 67. 69. Locke, “A New Method of Common-­Placing” (London, 1706), 6. 70. LeClerc, “Preface” to Locke, “New Method,” i–ii. 71. Locke, Essay (1.1.15), 1.48–49. 72. Locke’s notebooks are “to be regarded as ‘histories’ in the sense used by Bacon and by the Royal Society.” G. G.Meynell, “A Database for Locke’s Medical Notebooks and Medical Reading,” Medical History 42 (1997): 476. 73. Locke, Essay (1.1.15), 1.49. On this point, see Dacome, “Noting the Mind.” 74. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 168. 75. Locke, Essay (2.9.8), 1.186–89. 76. Locke finds a proleptic echo of recent work in activist cognitive circles. See for instance Alva Noë’s discussion of the appearance of things like coins in Varieties of Presence (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), esp. 57: “In perception, your relation to the perceived features is sensorimotor.” 77. The understanding, by Locke’s account, is guided by general ideas developed out of experience; it applies them as present occasion requires, sometimes so swiftly that it looks to us as though it were simply sensory perception itself. This helps account for what Locke calls the “probabilistic” work of judgment, where judgment “presumes” that something is so, even in the absence of infallible demonstration. “The constitutive role of memory,” writes Stephen H. Clark, “makes imagery of . . . acquisition, and storage central: the initial reception of sense-­data emphasizes the passivity of perception,” which is to say, the fixity of the repository. “But in a secondary movement,” Clark continues, “the ‘Workmanship of the Understanding’ (3.3.12) labors incessantly to reconstruct a world.” Clark, “‘The Whole Internal World His Own,’” 245. 78. Locke, Essay, 3.3.12–14. Maurice Mandelbaum, “Locke’s Realism,” in Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 1–60; Jan-­ Erik Jones, “Boyle, Classification and the Workmanship of the Understanding Thesis,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.2 (2005): 171–83.

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79. Locke, Essay, (4.15.4), 2.365. 80. See Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550–1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 11–28. 81. This is discussed at more length by Allen, “‘A Sort of Register,’” 61–70. 82. Graham Richards, Mental Machinery: The Origins and Consequences of Psychological Ideas (London: Athlone Press, 1993), 107. 83. Locke’s point in book 3, chapters 10–11, of the Essay. 84. John Locke’s second letter to Edward Stillingfleet, in The Works of John Locke, 9 vols. (London, 1824), 3.139. 85. Ruth Mohl suggests that the commonplace was probably smuggled out of the general destruction of Milton’s papers by Thomas Skinner, a young political aspirant who delivered it as a gift to a Richard Graham, the first Viscount of Preston. Graham is known to have had the book in part because he himself used it for his own rhetorical ends—­a fate the Republican Milton almost certainly would have abhorred, for Graham was a known Jacobite conspirator. See Maurice Kelley, “Daniel Skinner, Lord Preston, and Milton’s Commonplace Book,” in Modern Language Notes 64 (1949): 522–25. 86. Ruth Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969), esp. 12; also see Joan Marie Lechner, Renaissance Concepts of the Commonplaces (New York, 1962). 87. See Harris F. Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961). 88. See Marco Sgarbi, The Aristotelian Tradition and the Rise of British Empiricism: Logic and Epistemology in the British Isles (1570–1589) (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), esp. 35–39. 89. The term “psychology” itself, Katharine Park and Eckhard Kessler note, was “coined  .  .  . to refer to the traditional complex of problems originating from these two works.” Park and Kessler, “Psychology: The Concept of Psychology,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy ed. C. B. Schmidt et al.(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 455–63, at 456. “If physics was the foundation of Aristotelian natural philosophy,” Park and Kessler continue, “psychology was its culmination” (456). 90. See Noel Sugimura, “Matter of Glorious Trial”: Spiritual and Material Substance in “Paradise Lost” (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 91. Milton was conscientious in recording the sources of entries, and in referring each to an index of traditional topics; besides this, however, there is nothing to organize the entries other than clearly indicating where each one ends and the next begins. See Milton’s Commonplace Book, ed. Ruth Mohl, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, vol. 1 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1953), 344–513. Also see Mohl, John Milton and His Commonplace Book (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1969). 92. See Emma Annette Wilson, “How Milton’s Education at Christ’s College, Cambridge Influenced Logical Styles in Paradise Lost,” in New Essays on Milton, ed. Mary C. Fenton and Louis Schwartz (Selinsgrove. Pa.: Susquehanna University Press, 2011), 133–46. 93. Paul F. Cranefield, “On the Origin of the Phrase Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu,” Journal of the History of Medicine 25 (1970): 77–80. As Milton received this line of reasoning, the mind is split into essentially three faculties; the imagination, poised between senses and judgment, organizes and arranges images for the mind’s consideration. Memory is appended to imagination, in some accounts, as a fourth separate faculty. For discussion of aspects of classical faculty psychology in the general tradition

290 Notes to Pages 40–44 inherited by the seventeenth century, see Margaret J. Ostler, “Renaissance Humanism, Lingering Aristotelianism and the New Natural Philosophy: Gassendi on Final Causes,” in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kray and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), 193–208; Anthony Grafton, “The New Science and the Tradition of Humanism,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 205; also relevant is Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, “Instruments and Images: Subjects for the Historiography of Science,” in Instruments and the Imagination, ed. Thomas Hankins and Robert Silverman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 6–10; E. J. Ashworth, “Do Words Signify Ideas or Things? The Scholastic Sources of Locke’s Theory of Language,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 19.3 (1981): 299–326. For a more general discussion of aspects of classical and medieval faculty psychology, see Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Mediation and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Carruthers, The Book of Memory; Lyons, Before Imagination, 1–31; Gerard Watson, Phantasia in Classical Thought (Galway: Galway University Press, 1988); J. M. Cocking, Imagination; Murray Wright Bundy, The Theory of Imagination in Classical and Medieval Thought (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1927); Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 88–96. 94. Bacon, “Valerius Terminus,” in Stephens’s Letters and Remains (London, 1734). While the traditional position on Bacon’s career is that he overthrew centuries of neoAristotelian excess, it is more accurate to say that Bacon’s influence shaped a pattern of borrowings and leavings. See Jardine, Francis Bacon; Brian Vickers, “The Myth of Francis Bacon’s ‘Anti-­Humanism’” in Humanism and Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Jill Kraye and M. W. F. Stone (London: Routledge, 2000), 135–58; Kenneth Wallace, Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969). 95. Johnson, “Milton,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 1.183. 96. On this question, see Sarah Eron, Inspiration in the Age of Enlightenment (Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2014), 1–31, esp. 20–24. 97. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler (London: Longman, 1998), 4.800–809. 98. Milton, Paradise Lost, 1.254. Edward S. Casey links Milton’s Satan to the Aristotelian model of mind as a container of forms. Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-­World (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 16. 99. By the time Milton penned Paradise Lost the system he puts in Adam’s mouth repeats what he took, by then, to be a naïve dualism. Fallon, Milton among the Philosophers: Poetry and Materialism in Seventeenth-­Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), 79–110. 100. For a review of this issue, and the relevant criticism, see Robert Wilcher, “The Greening of Milton Criticism,” Literature Compass 7.11 (2010): 1023–25. 101. Milton, Paradise Lost, 5.472–87. 102. John Milton, The Christian Doctrine, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merrit Yerkes Hughes (Indianapolis: Prentice Hall, 1957), 980. 103. Heinrich F. Plett, Rhetoric and Renaissance Culture (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), 99. Plett cites Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Auerbach, Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, 1959), 11–76.

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104. Phillip J. Donnelly, ‘“Matter’ Versus Body: The Character of Milton’s Monism,” Milton Quarterly 33.3 (1999): 81. 105. Lana Cable, Carnal Rhetoric: Milton’s Iconoclasm and the Poetics of Desire (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 15. The eighteenth century was to inherit from Milton what Noel Sugimura calls a metaphor theory of language. Sugimura, “Matter of Glorious Trial.” 106. For a longer discussion of Akenside’s membership in these institutions, see Robin Dix, The Literary Career of Mark Akenside, Including an Edition of His Non-­Medical Prose (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2006), 201–5. 107. Akenside to Jeremiah Dyson, April 21, 1744, qtd. in Alexander Dyce, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, Edited, with a Life (London, 1835). 108. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century, 9 vols. (London, 1812– 15), 8.523. 109. See Charles Theodore Houpt, Mark Akenside: A Biographical and Critical Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1944), 78. See also letter to Birch qtd. in Dyce, Poetical Works of Akenside, in which they discuss a letter penned by “Lord Bacon,” Nov. 29, 1762. 110. John Aiken, General Biography, or Lives Critical and Historical, 5 vols. (London, 1799), 1.109. Alexander Chalmers writes, “Mr. Dyson allowed him £300 a year. Whether any bond or acknowledgment was taken is uncertain; but it is known that after his death Mr. Dyson possessed his effects, particularly his books and prints, of which he was an assiduous collector” (General Biographical Dictionary (1812–17), 1:270.). Hardinge reports of Akenside’s life-­long relationship with Dyson: “He [Akenside] lived incomparably well; and as I knew of no other source to his income but his constant Friend Mr. Dyson’s munificence to him, I rejoiced in it, for the honour of them both. I never saw any thing like their friendship and their union of sentiments; yet nothing was more dissimilar than were the two men” (Hardinge, in Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 8:523). Further considerations of Akenside’s partnership with Dyson are offered by G. S. Rousseau, Perilous Enlightenment: Pre-­and Post-­Modern Discourses: Sexual, Historical (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), 109–37, and Jon Thomas Rowland, “Swords in Myrtle Dressed”: Toward a Rhetoric of Sodom: Gay Readings of Homosexual Politics and Poetics in the Eighteenth Century (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998). For a deflationary account, see Robin Dix, “The Pleasures of Speculation: Scholarly Methodology in Eighteenth-­Century Literary Studies,” British Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 23 (2000): 85–103. 111. Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, 8.521–25. 112. Recorded in Memoirs of Thomas Hollis, ed. Francis Blackburne, 2 vols. (London, 1780), 1.111–12. Hollis, a Milton scholar, bibliophile, numismatist, member of the Royal Society, and political radical is recorded to have purchased (on June 12, 1760 or 1761) a bed said to have been Milton’s, giving it to Akenside. Milton, Blackburne writes, was Hollis’s “hero”; he was “particularly inquisitive after every thing that related to Milton and his family.” 113. Blackburne, Memoirs, 1.111–12. 114. Robert Dodsley’s The Toy-­Shop (London, 1735) is a series of moral reflections on the objects held by a purveyor of perspective glasses, lapdogs, mirrors, small jewelry, and other “trifles.” It returns an abstraction (an ethical system) to a curatorial practice (the display of toys in a shop). The General Contents of the British Museum (London, 1762).

292 Notes to Pages 48–52 Authors in the Museum include the well-­known collectors Hans Sloane, Richard Mead, Soame Jenyns, and others. 115. James E. Tierney, “The Museum, the ‘Super-­Excellent Magazine,’” Studies in English Literature 13.3 (1973): 503–15. 116. See Lennart C. Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the “Gentleman’s Magazine” (Providence, 1938). 117. Tierney, “The Museum.” 118. Alexander Dyce quotes a number of contemporaries in support of this claim. See his introduction in Poetical Works of Akenside, i–lxxxii. 119. Charles Bucke, On the Life, Writings, and Genius of Akenside (London, 1832), 221–22. 120. Samuel Johnson, “Life of Akenside,” in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 3.417. Thomas Gray, for his part, found Akenside to be mostly a “middling” sort of poet, though he did in fairness admit that he “rises to the best, particularly in Description”; he was at his best, that is, in the poetry of the senses. Thomas Gray, Correspondence of Gray, Walpole, West, and Ashton, ed. Paget Jackson Toynbee, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 1.224. 121. Thomas Campbell, “Dr. Mark Akenside,” Specimens of the British Poets, 7 vols. (London, 1819), 6.129. 122. Alexander Dyce, Poetical Works of Akenside, lxxx–lxxxi. 123. While these metaphorical smugglings propagated a warpage in philosophy that differently became the study of Ryle, Richard Rorty, and others questioning the mind/ body dualism, these metaphors nevertheless provided a basic set of mechanisms for the arts. For the Augustan strain of the arts located its most important techniques by thinking of imagination as the manipulation of images (or, put more precisely, the manipulation of ideas as images). 124. “Of Addison [Akenside] has been accused of being indebted for more than he acknowledged.” Campbell, “Dr. Mark Akenside,” 6.488–89. 125. Aikin, Select Works of the British Poets (London: 1820), 630. 126. Addison, Spectator 253 (20 December, 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 2.483. Addison’s claim exemplifies itself, for he is explicitly paraphrasing a remark in the 1701 preface to Boileau’s works; Nicolas Boileau, “Préfaces,” in Oeuvres Complètes de Boileau, ed. Gidel (Paris, 1870), 1.19: “Un bon mot n’est bon mot qu’en ce qu’il dit une chose que chacun pensait, et qu’il la dit d’une manière vive, fine et nouvelle.” 127. See Kirk M. Fabel, “The Location of the Aesthetic in Akenside’s Pleasures of Imagination,” Philological Quarterly 76 (1997): 48–68. 128. Mark Akenside, The Pleasures of the Imagination, in Poetical Works of Mark Akenside, ed. Robin Dix (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 199, ll.2.50–59. 129. Writing of the poem generally, Thomas Campbell remarked: “We seem to pass in his poem through a gallery of pictured abstractions rather than of pictured things. He reminds us of odours which we enjoy artificially extracted from the flower instead of inhaling them from its natural blossom. It is true that his object was to teach and explain the nature of mind, and that his subject led him necessarily into abstract ideas, but it admitted also of copious scenes, full of solid human interest, to illustrate the philosophy which he taught.” “Dr. Mark Akenside,” 6.489. See n132, below. 130. Akenside’s headnote in The Pleasures of Imagination, 87.

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131. Akenside, The Pleasures of Imagination, 145, ll.3.359–62. 132. The curatorial aesthetic that caused Akenside to be so popular during his own lifetime also helps account for the decline in the esteem for his poetry with ensuing generations. In Akenside’s poetry, Thomas Campbell in 1819 insisted, “we seem to pass through a gallery of pictured abstractions rather than of pictured things.” Campell was after a richness of affective and sensual experience that Akenside’s motivated descriptions could not provide; Akenside’s poetry after all only mobilized images in the pursuit of a quasi-­allegorical design. In a turn that reminds us of the distance of Akenside’s poetry from Raphael’s monism, Campbell concludes that Akenside “reminds us of odours which we enjoy artificially extracted from the flower instead of inhaling them from its natural blossom.” Campbell, “Akenside,” 6.489. While this enjoyment of abstracts describes the height of art according to Akenside’s predecessors (Exhibit 24), for later generations it captured what was mean and derivative about his art. Akenside did not offer images for their ambiguity; he only offered images inasmuch as they could be (in Akenside’s words) “signs universally understood.” 133. Jonathan Richardson, Two Discourses (London, 1719), 151; Locke, Essay (2.10.10), 1.200–201. 134. Campbell, “Dr. Mark Akenside,” 6.130. 135. Akenside, “The Table of Modern Fame,” in The Works of Mark Akenside, M.D., ed. Anna Letitia Barbauld, 2 vols. (London, 1808), 1.151–64. 136. There may be an echo here of the parable of Simonides, whose experience of recalling dinner guests seated around a dinner table became an allegorical figure for the disciplining of memory; the idea was that the natural disorder of memory might be regularized by creating a sort of mental dinner table, a regular space like a palace. See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, 25–26. 137. Robin Dix notes with surprise that Mark Akenside’s “Table of Modern Fame” reserves few seats for modern writers—­counting only Tasso, Pope, and Milton. But this reflects Akenside’s recent reading. Dix, Literary Career of Mark Akenside, 179. See also David Spadafora, The Idea of Progress in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 67–68. 138. Joseph Warton, The Works of Alexander Pope, 9 vols. (London, 1797), 2.83. Chapter 2. Design 1. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.11.17), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 1.211–12. 2. On Locke’s formulation of the “idea,” see Keith Allen, “Locke and the Nature of Ideas,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 92.3 (2010): 236–55. On the container-­like “capacity” of Locke’s philosophy of mind, see the recent summary in Eugenia Zuroski Jenkins, A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 44–49. 3. See, for instance, Locke, “A Letter to the Right Reverend Edward, Lord Bishop of Worcester,” in The Works of John Locke, 9 vols. (London, 1824), 3.14–16. 4. John Locke, On the Conduct of the Understanding, ed. Paul Schuurman (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Keele, 2000), 238–39.

294 Notes to Pages 59–60 5. On June 9, 1670, for instance—­when John Evelyn records seeing such a device. The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. De Beer (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 539. 6. Just as the camera obscura makes (a model of ) the eye available to itself, so too it gives the understanding back to itself as an object. As Locke puts it, “The Understanding, like the Eye, whilst it makes us see, takes no notice of it self: And it requires Art and Pains to set it at a distance, and make it its own Object.” Locke, Essay (1.1.1), 1.25. 7. Numerous histories and technical descriptions of the camera obscura exist. One such recent study is Wolfgang Lefèvre and Norma Wenczel’s “The Optical Camera Obscura,” I and II, in Inside the Camera Obscura—­Optics and Art Under the Spell of the Projected Image, ed. Lefèvre (Berlin: Max Planck Institute, 2007), 5–30. 8. J. Waterhouse, “Notes on the Early History of the Camera Obscura,” Photographic Journal 25 (1901): 270–91; John Harris, “Camera Obscura,” in Lexicon Technicum (London, 1704), np; Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks: Or a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections and Colours of Light (1704; rpt. 1730), 26. 9. Printed in Hooke, Philosophical Experiments and Observations, ed. William Derham (London, 1726), 295. On the importance of the camera obscura to Hooke’s theory of mentation, see Matthew Hunter, “The Theory of the Impression According to Robert Hooke,” in Printed Images in Early Modern England: Essays in Interpretation, ed. Hunter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 167–91. 10. A. E. Shapiro, “The Optical Lectures and the Foundations of the Theory of Optical Imagery,” in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. M. Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105–78. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Description (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 27–33. 11. On Kepler, see Stephen M. Straker, “Kepler’s Optics: A Study in the Development of Seventeenth-­Century Natural Philosophy” (Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1970). Descartes’s discussion appears in La Dioptrique (Leiden, 1637). 12. Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-­Morris, “Empiricism Without the Senses: How the Instrument Replaced the Eye,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Science, ed. Ofer Gal and Charles Wolfe (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 121–47. 13. Robert Hooke, “Lectures on Light,” in The Posthumous Works of the Late Eminent Dr. Robert Hooke, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705), 121. 14. John Locke, An Examination of Malebranche’s Opinion, in Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke (London, 1706), 149. On Locke’s theory of vision, see Benjamin Hill, “The Reverse Achilles in Locke,” The Achilles of Rationalist Psychology, ed. Thomas M. Lennon and Robert Stainton (Amsterdam: Springer, 2008), 132–38; Thomas M. Lennon, the Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 255–73. 15. Nicholas J. Wade and Stanley Finger, “The Eye as an Optical Instrument: From Camera Obscura to Helmholtz’s Perspective,” Perspective 30.10 (2001): 1157–77; Alan E. Shapiro, “The Optical Lectures and the Foundations of the Theory of Optical Imagery,” in Before Newton: The Life and Times of Isaac Barrow, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 105–78. Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Description (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 27–33; Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman, Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 37–71. 16. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 32–43. This was an old model, brought up

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to date by a new technical object. As Alpers puts it, “The concept of the mind as a place for storing visual images was of course a common one at the time. But it was in the north of Europe that artists pictured such a state of mind. For better or for worse, depending on one’s view, the general lack of what we might call an ideal or elevated style and the tendency toward a descriptive approach to the representation of even elevated subject matter are due to this representational practice” (Art of Description, 41). For a canvassing of related models predating (and surviving) the camera obscura, see Lee W. Bailey, “The Skull’s Darkroom: The Camera Obscrua and Subjectivity,” in Philosophy of Technology: Practical, Historical, and Other Dimensions, ed. Paul T. Durbin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), 53–79. 17. John Locke, “An Examination of P. Malebranche,” in Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke, ed. Peter King and Anthony Collins (London, 1706). 18. Locke, Essay (2.1.1), 1.37–38. 19. Hooke, “Lectures on Light,” 144. 20. Jonathan Crary, “Techniques of the Observer,” October 45 (1988): 3. 21. On Hooke, see Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); on Locke, see Robert G. Frank, “Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-­ Century Medicine,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 107–46; Bradley Lega, “How the Cerebri Anatome of Thomas Willis Influenced John Locke,” Neurosurgery 58.3 (2006): 567–76. Also see M. A. Sanchez-­Gonzalez, “Medicine in John Locke’s Philosophy,” Journal of Medical Philosophy 15.6 (1990): 675–95; Carl Zimmer, The Soul Made Flesh (New York: Free Press, 2004), 247–56. G. S. Rousseau, “Nerves, Spirits, and Fibres: Towards Defining the Origins of Sensibility,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 3 (1976): 137–57. 22. See Alison Muri, The Enlightenment Cyborg: A History of Communications and Control in the Human Machine 1660–1830 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 117–64. 23. Willis owes evident but unpaid debts to René Descartes. See for instance Desmond M. Clark, Descartes Theory of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), esp. 93–104; Clark cites Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 13 vols. (Paris: Vrin, 1964–1974), 6.129–30, 9.176–81. 24. Willis, Two Discourses Concerning the Souls of Brutes, trans. Samuel Pordage (1683; Gainesville: Scholars’ Facsimiles, 1971), 24–25. See Adrian Johns, The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144–53; Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 180–89; Robert G. Frank, Jr., “Thomas Willis and His Circle: Brain and Mind in Seventeenth-­Century Medicine,” in The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. G. S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 107–46. 25. The modeling of psychology on perspective has been canvassed by Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); M. H. Pirenne, Optics, Painting and Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). 26. On Descartes, see John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 50–113. 27. Hooke, “Lectures on Light,” 121. See Yolton, Perceptual Acquaintance, 125–27. 28. See Roman Frigg, “Models and Fiction,” Synthese 172 (2010): 251–68; Frigg,

296 Notes to Pages 62–65 Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization (London: Routledge, 2008); Catherine Z. Elgin, “Exemplification, Idealization, and Understanding,” in Fictions in Science: Philosophical Essays on Modeling and Idealization, ed. Mauricio Suárez (London: Routledge, 2009), 77–90. 29. See Tarja Knuuttila, “Modeling and Representing: An Artefactual Approach to Model-­Based Representation,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42.2 (2011): 262–71; Marion Vorms, “Representing with Imaginary Models: Formats Matter,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 42.2 (2011): 287–95. 30. Locke’s “Second Reply” to Edward Stillingfleet in The Works of John Locke, 9 vols. (London, 1824), 3.390. See John Yolton, Locke and the Compass of Human Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 118–37, esp. 128; Matthew Stuart, Locke’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 88–104. 31. Locke, Essay (2.10.2), 1.193–94. 32. Willis, Cerebri Anatome, trans. Samuel Pordage (London: 1681), 59–60; See Hunter, Wicked Intelligence. 181–90. 33. Hooke, “A General Scheme, or Idea of the Present State of Natural Philosophy,” in Posthumous Works, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705), 20. Hooke’s point is similar to Locke’s point about the difficulty of understanding the understanding (see note 6 above). Drawing has come to be one of the paradigmatic examples in the case for embedded cognition generally. For instance, Cees van Leeuwen, Ilse Verstijnen, and Paul Hekkert, “Common Unconscious Dynamics Underlie Uncommon Conscious Effects: A Case Study in the Interaction of Perception and Creation” in Modeling Consciousness across the Disciplines, ed. J. Scott Jordan (Lanham: University Press of America, 1999): 179–218; studies in Situated Aesthetics: Art Beyond the Skin, ed. Riccardo Manzotti (London: Andrews, 2012); and Aesthetics and the Embodied Mind: Beyond Art Theory and the Cartesian Mind-­Body Dichotomy, ed. Alfonsina Scarinzi (Dordrecht: Springer, 2015). On Hooke’s externalism, see Sean Silver, “Hooke, Latour, and the Thesis of Extended Cognition,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (forthcoming, 2015) 34. “The visible is what is seized upon with the eyes, the sensible is what is seized on by the senses.” Maurice Merleau-­Ponty: Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge, 1962), 7. Current research on the thesis of active perception has been usefully summarized by Daniel D. Hutto and Erik Myin, Radicalizing Enactivism: Basic Minds without Content (Boston: MIT Press, 2012); Tom Froese, “From Adaptive Behavior to Human Cognition: A Review of Enaction,” Adaptive Behavior 20.3 (2011): 209–21. 35. Mayer and Myers, American Painters on Technique: The Colonial Period to 1860 (Los Angeles: Getty Museum, 2011), 14. 36. Phil Macnaughten and John Urry, Contested Natures (London: Sage, 1998), 119. See also David Marshall, “The Problem of the Picturesque,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 35.3 (2002), 413–37. For a review of what the English eye saw in the countryside, see Erin Drew and John Sitter, “Ecocriticism and Eighteenth-­Century English Studies,” Literature Compass 8.5 (2011): 227–39. 37. John Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 38. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-­World (Urbana: Indiana University Press, 2009), 24. 39. “Aesthetic effect,” writes Nicos Hadjinicolaou, “is none other than the pleasure felt by the observer when he recognizes himself in a picture’s ideology.” Hadjinicolaou,

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Art History and Class Struggle, trans Louise Asmal (London: Pluto Press, 1978), np, cited in John Berger, “The Work of Art,” in Sense of Sight (New York: Vintage, 1993), 199. 40. Hooke, “Lectures on Light,” 132. 41. On links between theories of vision and painting—­via gadgets like the camera obscura—­see Alpers, Art of Description, 27–49. 42. Samuel von Hoogstraten witnessed one of the devices in London in the 1660’s. See Inleyding Tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst [Introduction to the Whole World of Painting] (Rotterdam, 1678), 263. Translation is by Celeste Brusati, quoted in Brusati, Artifice and Illusion: The Art and Writing of Samuel von Hoogstraten (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 70–74. 43. Anonymous, “Verses Occasion’d by the Sight of a Chamera Obscura” (London, 1747), 3. There is a large tradition folded into this claim; the very language of “mimicking,” borrowed originally from stagecraft, makes its way into aesthetic treatises by way of Milton, James Thomson, and Mark Akenside. On this point, see Robin Dix, The Poetical Works of Mark Akenside (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 443n140. 44. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s definition of a design in Philosophical Investigations (#193– 94), 77e–78e. See Henry Staten, Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 18. 45. Locke, Essay (2.13.9), 1.223–24. 46. Conceptually speaking, the idea of “place” is a “modification of distance” in order that people might “be able to design the particular position of things, where they had occasion for such designation.” Locke, Essay (2.13.9–10), 1.223–25. 47. The midcentury blossoming of a consumer culture was attended by a new distribution of taste, articulated especially in the sense that lurking behind and within the objects for sale was something in excess of the thing itself. This something was design. At the same time, there was “a dramatic increase in the use of two-­dimensional paper plans” in the production of “three-­dimensional execution,” of designs as “sources of visual ideas” and “instructions for the execution of the work.” Charles Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth-­Century Decoration: Design and the Domestic Interior in England (London: Harry Abrams, 1993). John Styles, “Manufacturing, Consumption and Design,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 527–54. 48. Matthew Craske, “Plan and Control: Design and the Competitive Spirit in Early and Mid-­Eighteenth-­Century England,” Journal of Design History 12.3 (1999): 189. 49. Shaftesbury, A Notion of the Historical Draught or Tablature of the Judgment of Hercules (1713); see also Richard Glauser and Anthony Savile, “Aesthetic Experience in Shaftesbury,” Aristotelian Society 76.1 (2002): 25–54. On the choice of Hercules, which was often compared with Raphael’s Judgment of Paris (Exhibit 5), see Erwin Panofsky, Herkules am Scheidewege [Hercules at the Crossroads] (Berlin: Mann Verlag, 1997), 37–68. 50. See Richard Checketts, “Pleasure’s Objects: Commodity, Manufacture, and the Art Theories of Shaftesbury and Hogarth,” Anglia 120 (2007): 339–71. 51. William Eamon, “Science and the Secrets of Nature’: “Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 282; Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 174. I am indebted to Ruth Mack’s “Customary Forms: Hogarth and d’Hancarville on Design and the Everyday Object,” a conference paper presented at Traveling Objects, Rutgers University, 2013.

298 Notes to Pages 67–70 52. See M. A. R. Cooper, “Robert Hooke (1635–1703): Photogrammetrist,” Photogrammetric Record 15.87 (1996): 409; see also note 5, above. 53. Evelyn’s translator’s note to Roland Fréart, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, trans. Evelyn (London, 1668), np. Evelyn had been approached by members of the circle that would become the Royal Society to produce a “History of Trades”; this history was to be one of the jewels of the early academy. Evelyn’s task was to organize, in one encyclopedic resource, all the secrets of the manual arts. The endeavor was attended by numerous problems—­not least, as Evelyn himself notes, that workmen acquired trade secrets through long and laborious apprenticeships, and were therefore understandably loath to reveal them, even if for the public good. Of the original design of Evelyn’s “History,” what survives is a manuscript volume of mostly empty pages—­headers of twenty-­four crafts magisterially untroubled by the empirically gathered data that might have realized them in a material way. See Joanna Piccioto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 178–87; Walter E. Houghton, “The History of Trades: Its Relation to Seventeenth-­Century Thought as Seen in Bacon, Petty, Evelyn, and Boyle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2.1 (1941): 33–60; Kathleen H. Ochs, “The Royal Society of London’s History of Trades Programme: An Early Episode in Applied Science,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 39.2 (1985): 129–58; Michael Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 87–112; Natasha Glaisyer, The Culture of Commerce in England: 1660–1720 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2006): 126–27; Ursula Klein and Wolfgang Lefèvre, Materials in Eighteenth-­ Century Science: A Historical Ontology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 21–30; Marc Gotlieb, “The Painter’s Secret: Invention and Rivalry from Vasari to Balzac,” Art Bulletin 84.3 (2002): 469–90. 54. Luigi Salerno discusses the intellectual heritage of this definition, and of the distinction between design and drawing, in “Seventeenth-­Century English Literature on Painting,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 247. 55. John Evelyn, Sculptura: Or, the History and Art of Chalcography and Engraving on Copper (London, 1662), 96. 56. Evelyn, Sculptura, 112. 57. Evelyn, Sculptura, 105. See also Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London: 1715), 139–41. 58. On Marcantonio and Raphael, see Lisa Pon, Raphael, Durer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), 59. See Hubert Damisch, The Judgment of Paris, trans. John Goodman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 72. 60. Fréart, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, 24–41. 61. First mentioned in the Iliad (24.25–30), the fable of Paris provides one supernatural version of the causes of the Trojan War. The Judgment of Paris is a common theme in painting and literature, and it forms the subject of studies by Hubert Damisch and Sigmund Freud. See Damisch, The Judgment of Paris; Freud, “The Theme of the Three Caskets,” The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1913), 12.299. 62. Hubert Damisch has compiled an extensive list in The Judgment of Paris. 63. Helmut Nickel, “The Judgment of Paris by Lucas Cranach the Elder: Nature, Allegory, and Alchemy,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 16 (1981): 117–29.

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64. See Margaret Ehrhart, The Judgment of the Trojan Prince Paris in Medieval Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987), 1–46. 65. Ross, Mystagogus Poeticus, or the Muses Interpreter (London, 1647), 409. See also George Sandys, Ovid’s Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologized, and Represented in Figures (London, 1632), 557. 66. The first person I know explicitly to observe that Paris is a poor reader of allegory is Charles H. Farnsworth, “The Judgment of Paris, or the Worth of Beauty,” Musical Quarterly 1.2 (1915): 162–68. 67. See Phyllis P. Bober and Ruth O. Rubinstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A Handbook of Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 149. 68. On Renaissance perspective, see Samuel Edgerton, The Heritage of Giotto’s Geometry (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 5, 7; Maurice H. Pirenne, Optics, Painting and Photography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Michael Kubovy, The Psychology of Perspective and Renaissance Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). 69. Fréart, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, 37. 70. Hooke, “Lectures on Light,” 132. 71. Joseph Leo Koerner discusses a similar scenario regarding the choice of Hercules, in The Moment of Self-­Portraiture in German Renaissance Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 317–62. 72. Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 46. 73. See Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 1–44 and passim. “The modern concept of perspective,” Elkins argues, “is properly an Enlightenment invention” (18). 74. Fréart, Perfection of Painting, 10. 75. Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 8. 76. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie,” in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 3.8. See Michael Mack, in Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 194. 77. Anamorphosis is the deliberate orientation of a visual field to a particular vantage point; it deposits the burden of a way of seeing, of an entire visual field, upon one unsuspecting viewer. The phenomenon has received a great deal of recent attention. For a general account, see Ernest B. Gilman, The Curious Perspective: Literary and Pictorial Wit in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). See also Lyle Massey, Picturing Space, Displacing Bodies: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Theories of Perspective (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007); Daniel L. Collins, Anamorphosis and the Eccentric Observer (Berkley: Leonardo, 1992); Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective, trans. John Goodman (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995). 78. Lacan’s argument rests on a set of observations by Jurgis Baltrušaitis, whose study of anamorphosis traces its origins to the culture in which Fréart and Evelyn were composing. Jurgis Baltrušaitis, Anamorphic Art, trans. V.J. Strachan (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997). 79. “What is painting?” asks Lacan. It is “to be distinguished” from all other arts “in that, in the work, it is as subject, as gaze, that the artist intends to impose himself on us.”

300 Notes to Pages 73–76 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1998), 101. 80. “It is clear,” writes Lyle Massey, “that it is the peculiar geometric properties of anamorphic perspective that ultimately reveal what [Lacan] wants to say about the Cartesian concept of ‘I see myself seeing myself.’” Massey, Picturing Space, 126. 81. Lacan, Seminar XI, 107. 82. See Kaja Silverman, “Fassbinder and Lacan: A Reconsideration of Gaze, Look and Image,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover: Wesleyan, 1994), 272–301. 83. I have elsewhere argued for Lacan’s more general debts to developments in Augustan culture, especially in the treatment of anecdotes. Sean Silver, “Pale Fire and Johnson’s Cat: The Anecdote in Polite Conversation,” Criticism 53.2 (2011), 241–64. 84. For Lacan as elaborating Maurice Merleau-­Ponty, see Antonio Quinet, “The Gaze as an Object,” in Reading Seminar XI: Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard Feldstein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 139–47. 85. Fréart, An Idea of the Perfection of Painting, 14. Mikhail Bakhtin offers a related discussion of authorship in “The Problem of the Text,” Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 109–16. 86. Richardson, The Theory of Painting, 206. 87. John Woodward, An Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England, 2 vols. (London: 1728–29), 1.ix. 88. See, for instance, David Price’s discussion, “John Woodward and a Surviving British Geological Collection from the Early Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Collections 1.1 (1989): 79–95. 89. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.ix. 90. John Woodward, “Preface” to An Attempt, 1.xiii–xiv. The end of Woodward’s philosophy meets the beginning, here. In his Natural History of the Earth, Woodward insists that “Observations are the only sure Grounds whereon to build a lasting and substantial Philosophy.” Woodward, Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth and Terrestrial Bodies, Especially Minerals (London, 1695), 2. 91. Compare to Todd A. Borlik, Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2011), 75–104; Tara Ghoshal Wallace, Imperial Characters: Home and Periphery in Eighteenth-­Century Literature (Cranbury: Rosemont, 2010), 35–46; Vin Nardizzi, Wooden Os: Shakespeare’s Theatres and England’s Trees (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013). 92. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.x. “Nature and Properties” pull in two directions. When Woodward addresses the “properties” of things, he engages in a series of technical digressions; he offers tricks and tips for distinguishing one type of earth from another, identifies uses of certain kinds of salts but not others, and relays techniques for one category of mineral but useless anywhere else. Some earths, for instance, will “adhere to the tongue,” and this is useful for organizing earths into classes, but no one would think of trying the same trick with stone. With stone, it is better to test how it might break, or to gauge its hardness relative to other materials. When he is discussing nature, however, these tricks of the hand are useless; this is where Woodward’s “structure of philosophy” comes in, what he calls in his Attempt the “synoptic method of all” (1.1). Nature is part of the orderly regime of the eye, relying on organizing methods that align everything in one view together.

Notes to Pages 76–79

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93. Momophilus Carthusiensis (John Freind?), A Serious Conference between Scaramouche and Harlequin (London, 1719), 17. 94. Unlike his theories of fossil formation, Woodward’s techniques still inform modern geological observation. Woodward, Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of the World (London, 1696). Woodward’s Brief Instructions has been called, by Roy Porter, “quite a landmark, for it requires collecting in a scientific spirit—­thus Woodward insists that fossils be sent carefully packed and labeled, in their matrix, and with clear directions as to the adjacent strata and location of the find” (338). It also contains, Porter observes, the first known mention of a geological hammer. Roy Porter, “John Woodward: ‘A Droll Sort of Philosopher,’” Geological Magazine 116.5 (1979): 335–417. Peter Anstey suggests that Woodward may have been thinking of Boyle’s “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey” (1692). Anstey, John Locke and Natural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 62. 95. “The Publisher to the Reader,” in Woodward, An Attempt, 1.iv. 96. There is a rich recent tradition of thought addressing a similar problem, which is summarized by Alva Noë as the problem of the appearance of a tilted coin—­whether it is experienced as round or elliptical. See Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); A. D. Smith, The Problem of Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Alfred J. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (London: Macmillan, 1955); and Alva Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 47–55. 97. Locke, Essay, 3.3.12–14. Maurice Mandelbaum, “Locke’s Realism,” in Philosophy, Science and Sense Perception (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), 1–60; Jan-­ Erik Jones, “Boyle, Classification and the Workmanship of the Understanding Thesis,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 43.2 (2005): 171–83. Stephen H. Clark, “‘The Whole Internal World His Own’: Locke and Metaphor Reconsidered,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59.2 (1998), 245. See also Exhibit 1. 98. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.v–vi. 99. Woodward, Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth. Perhaps the best account of Woodward’s theory, which positions it as one of the first modern theories of geological development is Frederick J. North’s “From Giraldus Cambrensis to the Geological Map,” Transactions of the Cardiff Nature Society 64 (1933): 59–64. Woodward’s theory was only one of the most radical in a minor tradition of deluge theories, which includes Thomas Burnet’s Telluris Theoria Sacra (1681–1689), John Ray’s Three Physico-­Theological Discourses (1692), and William Whiston’s A New Theory of the Earth (1696), the last of which proposes a prior visit of the great comet of 1680 as the source of the forty days’ worth of rain. 100. Woodward, Natural History of the Earth, 46. 101. Despite his idiosyncrasies, Woodward is now recognized as inaugurating the modern school of scientific geology. Roy Porter, “John Woodward,” 335–417. 102. Joseph M. Levine cites the journal of William Nicolson for this epithet (Nov. 21, 1704), and a letter to Edward Lhwyd for a related phrase (“Bagg-­Pudding,” Mar. 18, 1697); see Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield: History, Science, and Satire in Augustan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 121, 308n90. See also the anonymous pamphlet Tauronamachia (London, 1719), and Lester Middleswarth Beattie, John Arbuthnot, Mathematician and Satirist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Studies in English, 1935), 190–262, for a longer consideration of the pudding metaphor in satires of Woodward. 103. John Ward, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (London, 1740), 1672.

302 Notes to Pages 79–83 104. Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach’s diary, in Cambridge Under Queen Anne, ed. and trans. J. E. B. Mayer (Cambridge: Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1911), 405. As Uffenbach noted, while being shown Woodward’s collection, one “must listen to his opinion de diluvio et generatione antediluvian et lapidum postdiluvia, till you are sick of it.” 105. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.vii; “Preface” to the Essay, n.p. 106. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.45. 107. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.46. 108. Woodward, An Attempt, 1.46. 109. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism, in Two Discourses (London, 1719), 151. 110. Uffenbach, diary, 405. 111. Uffenbach, diary, 403. 112. See Siegfried Giedion: “History is a magical mirror. Who peers into it sees his own image in the shape of events and developments.” Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History (New York: Norton, 1969), 2. Discussed in Helene Furján, “The Specular Spectacle of the House of the Collector,” Assemblage 34 (1998): 60. 113. “Self-­presentation,” de Bolla continues, happening upon a geological metaphor appropriate to Woodward’s geological collection, “is the bedrock of polite behavior.” De Bolla, Education of the Eye, 36. 114. J. M. Gray, Memoirs of the Life of Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (Edinburgh: Scottish Historical Society, 1892). 115. See V. A. Eyles, “John Woodward, 1665–1728, Physician & Geologist,” Nature 206 (1965): 868. Eyles, and several other scholars after him, insist that the Woodwardian Chair (1728) was the first endowed chair of any sort, though it was evidently preceded by a small number of institutions—­the Lucasian Chair in Mathematics at Cambridge, for instance. 116. Quoted in John Willis Clark and Thomas McKenny Hughes, Life and Letters of Adam Sedgwick, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1890), 1.181–87, 1.183. The Will specifies three works (his Essay, his Defense of it against Doctor Camerarius, and his Discourse of Vegetation) that were all part of his theory of the Deluge, but also his State of Physick, which offers the key statement of his theory of stomach salts. 117. The Woodwardian Chair has been singularly influential in creating and maintaining the prevailing model of the career scientist. Roy Porter, “Gentlemen and Geology: The Emergence of a Scientific Career, 1660–1920,” Historical Journal 21.4 (1978): 809–36. 118. See Charles Babbage, Reflection on the Decline of Science in England (London: 1830), 38. 119. Richard Morton and William M. Peterson are evidently mistaken when they claim that Woodward was “wedded respectably to a virtuous lady,” a claim for which no evidence is provided. Morton and Peterson, “Introduction” to Gay, Pope, and Arbuthnot, Three Hours After Marriage (Painesville: Lake Erie College Studies, 1961), iv. See Porter, “John Woodward,” 340. Woodward’s only confirmed companion was Anthony Taylor, another confirmed bachelor. Because Woodward’s executors burned the bulk of his private letters, little more is known. See Ward, Lives of the Professors of Gresham College, 298. 120. See “Dr. Technicum,” An Account of the Sickness and Death of Dr. W—­dw—­rd (London, 1719), 8. Anon., “An Epistle to the most Learned Doctor W—­d—­d: from a Prude” (London, 1723); Anon., The Grand Mystery: Or, Art of Meditating over an House of Office, dedicated to the Profound Dr. W—­—­d (London, 1726).

Notes to Pages 83–86

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121. John Gay, Alexander Pope et al., Three Days after Marriage (London: 1717). The connection is made explicit in the published Key, but there are too many affinities for there ever to have been any doubt that Fossile was meant partly to reflect on Woodward: “Fossile,—­Gay gives out, to be Dr. W—­d—­d.” Key to the Farce Call’d Three Hours after Marriage (London: 1717), reprinted with Three Hours after Marriage, ed. Richard Morton and William M. Peterson (Painesville: Lake Erie College Studies, 1961), 72. Woodward may also have been the model for Mummius. See Marjorie Nicolson and G. S. Rousseau’s “This long disease, my Life: Alexander Pope and the Sciences (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1968), 123–29, and Pat Rogers, “Pope and the Antiquarians,” in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 241–43 and 247–53. 122. See, for example, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws and Constitution of England (London, 1769), 215, where it is “a crime not fit to be named.” Like Uffenbach, Blackstone slips into Latin: “peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nomine.” 123. See Craig Ashley Hanson, The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 135–40; Joseph M. Levine, Dr. Woodward’s Shield, 80–92. Roy Porter, Bodies Politic: Disease, Death, and Doctors in Britain, 1650–1900 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 134–35. Among the many pamphlets authored by or directed towards Woodward, see John Freind, A Letter to the Learned Dr. Woodward (London, 1718); Andrew Tripe, A Letter to the Profound Greshamite (London, 1719); Anon., Tauronomachia: Or a Description of a Fight between Two Champions, Taurus and Onos at Gresham College (London, 1719); A Serious Conference Between Scaramouch & Harlequin (see note 95); The Life and Adventures of Don Bilioso de L’Estomac (London, 1719). Also see John Harris, A Letter to the Fatal Triumvirate (London, 1718); John Harris (?), The Two Sosias; Or, the True Dr. Byfield (London, 1719); and Woodward (?), An Account of a Strange and Wonderful Dream (London, 1719). Finally, see Harlequin Hydaspes: Or the Greshamite, staged for a single performance at Lincoln’s Inn Fields (May 27, 1719). William J. Burling, Summer Theatre in London: 1661–1820 and the Rise of the Haymarket Theatre (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 62–66. 124. Freind (?), A Serious Conference, 15. 125. There is also a 1774 engraving by William Humphreys (now at the National Portrait Gallery NPG D4911), after a portrait by an unknown artist; it depicts a very young Woodward. Humphreys was a seller of fossils, shells, and other popular collectibles before turning to engraving; Woodward was among the first engravings he executed. 126. Alexander Pope, “Essay on Man,” The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson et al., 11 vols. (London: Methuen, 1951), 3.1.87. See Roald Hoffmann, “On Poetry and the Language of Science,” Daedalus 137–140 (2002): 137–41. 127. As Pat Rogers points out, “much of Scriblerian satire deal[s] directly with antiquarian currency,” not least because several of the friends of the Scriblerian circle were themselves antiquarians, collectors, and virtuosi. Pat Rogers, “Pope and the Antiquarians,” in Essays on Pope (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 259, 258. 128. See Maynard Mack, Pope: A Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 19. 129. Beginning with R. W. Babcock’s “pilgrimage” to Twickenham in 1940, scholarship on Pope’s grotto underwent a significant change. Babcock, “Pope’s Grotto Today,” South Atlantic Quarterly 42.3 (1943): 289. Helen Sard Hughes’s “Mr. Pope on His Grotto,” (Modern Philology 28.1 [1930]: 100–104), which predates Babcock’s visit, is a case in point; for Hughes, the grotto is a textual artifact, which she examines by collating manuscript verses.

304 Notes to Pages 86–88 But subsequent works generally orient their discussions around the fact of the grotto itself. As A. J. Sambrook puts it, the “fact” of Pope’s grotto “may still be confirmed by anyone who cares to visit Twickenham.” Sambrook, “The Shape and Size of Pope’s Garden,” Eighteenth-­ Century Studies 5.3 (1972): 450–55, quote on 451. See Frederick Bracher’s “Pope’s Grotto: The Maze of Fancy,” Huntington Library Quarterly 12.2 (1949): 141–62; Maynard Mack’s “The Shadowy Cave,” in The Garden and the City (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1969), 41–76; and Helen Deutsch’s “Twickenham and the Landscape of True Character,” in Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 83–135. Three projects by the Honorable Archivist of St. Mary’s Church, Twickenham historian Anthony Beckles Willson, also extend this project: Mastiffs and Minerals in the Life of Alexander Pope (Twickenham: Twickenham Museum, 2005), Alexander Pope’s Grotto in Twickenham (Twickenham: Twickenham Museum, 1998), and his concise but exhaustive “Alexander Pope’s Grotto in Twickenham,” Garden History 26.1 (1998): 31–59, which constructs a precise chronology of the two decades of Pope’s “grottofying.” Maynard Mack’s The Garden and the City is the most elaborate treatment; Mack sketches out the resources of Pope’s Twickenham home as a major component of Pope’s reinvention of himself as a satirist in the mostly Horatian strain. Claudia Thomas Kairoff, in an extended discussion of Pope as a “suburban” poet, similarly develops an understanding of Pope’s self-­fashioning in the space between what she calls the “rural ideal” and the “realities” of urban living; she examines the grotto as part of Pope’s semipublic image of himself poised somewhere between the classical ideal of poetic independence and a new class of commuting professionals. Kairoff, “Living on the Margin: Alexander Pope and the Rural Ideal,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 38.1 (2005): 15–38. 130. Samuel Johnson, “Alexander Pope,” in Lives of the Poets, ed. G. B. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 3.135. 131. Diana Balmori, “Architecture, Landscape, and the Intermediate Structure: Eighteenth-­Century Experiments in Mediation,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 50.1 (1991): 38–56. 132. See Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 39. 133. Bracher, “Pope’s Grotto,” 141. 134. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 111–17, quote on 116. 135. John Serle, Plan of Mr. Pope’s Garden (1745), np. 136. Samuel von Hoogstraten, Inleyding, 263 (see Exhibit 4); Addison, Spectator,414, in Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald Frederick Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3.550–51. 137. Pope, The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 2.296–97. 138. Deutsch, Resemblance and Disgrace, 116. 139. Addison, Spectator 414, 3.550–51. See Alexandra Wettlaufer, In the Mind’s Eye: The Visual Impulse in Diderot, Baudelaire and Ruskin (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1994), 52–55. 140. Pip Brennan, The Camera Obscura and Greenwich (Greenwich: National Maritime Museum, 1994). 141. See Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 122–25. 142. See Zoë Kinsley, Women Writing the Home Tour, 1682–1812 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 96–98.

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143. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 32–43. 144. David Marshall, The Frame of Art: Fictions of Aesthetic Experience, 1750–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 25. 145. “The slow changes it underwent,” Frederick Bracher argues, are therefore “significant of a strong and continuing interest.” Bracher, “Pope’s Grotto,” 141. 146. Pope to Martha Blount (Nov. 19 and 24, 1739), Correspondence, 4.200–202, 4.204–5. 147. Locke, Essay (2.9.8), 1.186–89 (See Exhibit 1). 148. Pope to Blount (Nov. 19, 1739), Correspondence, 4.201. 149. Pope to Blount (Nov. 24, 1739), Correspondence, 4.204. 150. Bristol Record Office document: SMV/10/6/1/4, “Minutes Relating to Clifton Observatory 1766–1960, Part of the Records of the Society of Merchant Venturers.” See also Notices in the Bristol Mercury, June 16, 1829, and June 15, 1830, in which West announces the opening of his observatory and camera obscura for public viewing. 151. On West’s Academy submission, see Francis Greenacre, From Bristol to the Sea: Artists, the Avon Gorge and Bristol Harbour (Bristol: Redcliffe, 2005), 96–97. 152. For the history of camera obscuras, see General J. Waterhouse, “Notes on the Early History of the Camera Obscura,” Photographic Journal, 25 (1901): 270–90. John H. Hammond, The Camera Obscura: A Chronicle (Bristol: Adam Hilger, 1981). John Harris, Lexicon Tehnicum (London, 1704); Harris describes a camera obscura containing a scioptric ball in a wood mount, which affords a panoramic view. Willem Jakob Van Gravensande, An Essay on Perspective (The Hague, 1711), details a device for the use of painters in painting panoramas. Robert Smith, “Optical Machines for Making Pictures of Objects, and their Uses in Drawing” (London, 1738); Smith was a mathematician and instrument maker. 153. On Pope’s decision to remodel his grotto, see Anthony Beckles Wilson, “Alexander Pope’s Grotto in Twickenham,” Garden History 26.1 (1998): 31–59. 154. Or, as Pope’s description of his grotto makes explicit, the grotto is decorated with an “ornamentation” that is made to look like unadornment. See, for example, Pope to Berlase, “The little well is very light, ornamented with Stalactites above, and Spars and Cornish Diamonds on the Edges.” Pope, Correspondence, 4.246. 155. See Benjamin Boyce, “Mr. Pope, in Bath, Improves the Design of His Grotto,” in Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan Dugald McKillop, ed. C. Camden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963). 156. On the importance of “nature” to the grotto, see Mack, The Garden and the City, 51–60; Morris R. Brownell, “Introduction” to John Serle, A Plan of Mr. Pope’s Garden, ed. Brownell (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1995), viii. 157. Pope had a number of at least notional Continental precedents. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park discuss Bernard Palissy’s design for a royal grotto, which “mimicked nature’s own workings”; “in Pallisy’s projected grotto, art aimed at a perfect imitation of nature.” Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 286. 158. Pope, “Essay on Criticism” (ll. 297–300), in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), 1.272–73, ll. 297–300. 159. Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-­Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 107.

306 Notes to Pages 92–95 160. Pope, “Essay on Man” (ll. 1.289), in Poems, 3.50. 161. Pat Rogers, The Alexander Pope Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood, 2004), 312. 162. Pope, “Verses on the Grotto,” printed in Serle, Pope’s Garden, 12. 163. Plutarch, “Numa,” in Plutarch’s Lives, trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), 1.365. 164. Egeria’s grotto is the subject of a poem by William Sotheby entitled “The Grotto of Egeria,” which is remarkable in part because he could almost be quoting Pope’s “Verses on a Grotto,” though there is no evidence that he knew it. See Sotheby, Poems (London, 1825), 101–3. 165. Juvenal, Satires, trans. G. G. Ramsey (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 33, ll. 10–20. 166. Plutarch, “Numa,” 1.365. 167. Isaac Kramnick’s suggestive phrase, developed at large in Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). This is nostalgia in Raymond Williams’s sense of the effort to recover a lost ecology (see Exhibit 2). 168. Bolingbroke names Queen Elizabeth as a domestic example of just the sort of purified civic humanist leader that Numa represented in the classics; like Numa for Juvenal, Queen Elizabeth was the “Patriot King” that Britain once produced but had now lost. Bolingbroke viewed the English mind as “so enervated by luxury” that it was “incapable of great and generous sentiments inspired by virtue”; Pope and Bolingbroke alike shared the sentiment that London in the Augustan age was characterized by “modern dullness and stupidity.” Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle, 74. 169. Serle, Pope’s Garden, 7. 170. Serle, Pope’s Garden, 7. Pope was, as Jonathan Pritchard puts it, a strenuous traveler—­though only in his mind; Pope’s best attempt at a Grand Tour was an imaginary voyage in eight couplets in an epistolary review of Dryden’s translation of Charles Alphonse Du Fresnoy’s “Art of Painting.” Pritchard, “Pope’s ‘Figur’d Worlds,’” Review of English Studies 55 (2004): 233–62. 171. Spence was a gardener in the style of Pope, who made two trips to Italy: the first from 1730 to 1733, and the second from 1737 to 1741. James Sambrook, “Spence, Joseph (1699–1768),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 172. There is a sense in which Egeria replaces Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after Pope’s rumored but widely accepted fallout with her. Consider, for instance, these verses penned by Pope in about 1720 and addressed to John Gay: “Ah friend! ‘tis true—­this truth you lovers know—­/ In vain my structures rise, my gardens grow, / In vain fair Thames reflects the double scenes, / Of hanging mountains, and of sloping greens:/ Joy lives not here,—­to happier seats it flies, / And only dwells where wortley casts her eyes.” See Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. Samuel Weller Singer (London: Centaur, 1964), 147n. 173. A note in Pope’s hand in the manuscript of the “Preface” to the poems of 1717. See The Works of Alexander Pope, ed. Whitwell Elwin (London, 1871). See “Preface,” Poems (1717), 4n1. 174. Blakey Vermeule, “Abstraction, Reference, and the Dualism of Pope’s ‘Dunciad,’” Modern Philology 96.1 (1998): 19.

Notes to Pages 95–100

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175. See Michael Kearns, Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), 42. 176. Peri Bathous: Or, the Art of Sinking in Poetry (London, 1727), 74–75. 177. Kearns, Metaphors of Mind, 18. Pope’s insistence is in his marginal note in the “Preface” to the Poems of 1717 (see note 175 above). 178. Locke sees no problem speaking about what is “in” his mind, even while he chides Stillingfleet for suggesting that Worcester cathedral church might actually be found there (see note 30). 179. Pope, “The Preface of 1717,” in Poems, 1.7. 180. David Hockney and Falco, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters (2001). 181. Allister Neher, “The Truth About Our Bones: William Cheselden’s Osteographia,” Medical History 54.4 (2010): 517–28. 182. Horace Walople, Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis et al., 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 28.328–29. “This instrument,” Walpole remarked, “will enable engravers to copy pictures with the utmost precision: and with it you may take a vase or the pattern of a china jar in a moment.” On the fate of Walpole’s camera, see Correspondence, 28.329n4. On West, see Jenny Carson and Ann Shafer, “West, Copley, and the Camera Obscura,” American Art 22.2 (2008): 24–41. Reynolds’s camera obscura is especially interesting—­for it is itself trompe l’oeil, designed to fold up in to the shape and appearance of an encyclopedia. 183. Reynolds’s camera obscura is object number 1875–28, Science Museum, London. 184. Crary, Techniques of the Observer, 43–47. 185. Robert Watson links, as “masterpieces of epistemological play,” Vermeer’s work with Breughel’s Allegory of Sight and Smell—­the widely attested prototype of paintings in the tradition exemplified by Van Kessel’s cabinet paintings. Watson, Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in Late Renaissance (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 250. 186. See Nadia Sera Baadj, “A World of Materials in a Cabinet Without Drawers: Re-­framing Jan van Kessel’s The Four Parts of the World,” in Meaning in Materials: Netherlandish Art 1400–1800, ed. H. Perry Chapman et al., Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art/ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 62 (Leiden: Brill, 2013): 202–37. 187. On Van Kessel and his debts, see Nadia Sera Baadj’s doctoral dissertation, “‘Monstrous Creatures and Diverse Strange Things’: The Curious Art of Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626–1679)” (University of Michigan, 2012), 126–81. 188. Krzyzstof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-­Portier (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), 53. 189. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities, 53. Pomian’s reading depends upon comparison with a pair of paintings that seem more obviously to be about heterosexual desire: Willem van Haecht’s Appelles’ Atelier and Frans Francken’s Ulysses Recognizes Achilles Amongst the Daughters of Lycomedes. 190. Thomas E. Maresca, “Personification vs. Allegory,” in Kevin L. Cope, Enlightening Allegory: Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (New York: AMS Press, 1993), 25. 191. The Allegory of Sight and Smell at the Prado, which contains a compact Judgment of Paris, is the possible prototype for the other surviving compositions.

308 Notes to Pages 100–106 192. See Zirka Z. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550–1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 71. 193. Bruno Latour calls these “immutable mobiles,” representations that can cross space and be compared with other such representations. A history of the term is in Silver, “Hooke, Latour, and the Thesis of Extended Cognition.” 194. This is Jonathan Lamb’s argument in “The Rape of the Lock as Still Life,” in The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-­Narratives in Eighteenth-­Century England, ed. Mark Blackwell (Cranbury: Associated University Presses, 2007), 43–62. 195. Pope, The Rape of the Lock (1.121–48), in Poems, 2.155–58. 196. Angus Fletcher, Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 110, 112. 197. As Lamb’s “The Rape of the Lock as Still Life” puts it, “The whole point of the display of fashions is the capture of the spectator’s eye” (52). Also see Clarence Tracy, ed., The Rape Observ’d: An Edition of . . . The Rape of the Lock Illustrated (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974), 14; David Fairer, Pope’s Imagination (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 65; James H. Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” New Literary History 11.2 (1980): 308. 198. For instance, Ronald Paulson, “The Rape of the Lock: A Jacobite Aesthetics?” in Acts of Narrative, ed. Carol Jacobs and Henry Sussman (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 133; Sophie Gee, “Heroic Couplets and Eighteenth-­Century Heroism: Pope’s Complicated Heroism” in Eighteenth-­Century Poetry and the Rise of the Novel Reconsidered, ed. Kate Parker and Courtney Weiss Smith (Plymouth: Bucknell University Press, 2013), 16. John Sitter, “Pope’s Versification and Voice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Alexander Pope, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 43–44. 199. See Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985). 200. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 42–43. Rorty has the phrase from Charles Sanders Peirce, who borrows it in turn from Shakespeare. 201. See Ruth Salvaggio, Enlightened Absence: Neoclassical Configurations of the Feminine (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 31–51. 202. On the spleen, see Richard Barney, “The Splenetic Sublime: Anne Finch, Melancholic Physiology, and Post/Modernity,” Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture 39 (2010): 1–34; “‘Anxious Cares’: From Pope’s Spleen to Coleridge’s Dejection,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 44.1 (2011): 99–118. 203. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 43. 204. See, for instance, William Stukeley, Of the Spleen (1723); David Boyd Hancock, William Stukeley: Science, Religion, and Archaeology in Eighteenth-­Century England (Woodbridge: Boydell University Press, 2002), 54–74. 205. See Richard Kroll, “Pope and Drugs: The Pharmacology of the Rape of the Lock,” English Language History 67.1 (2000): 99–141. 206. Pope, Rape of the Lock (4.39–54), in Poems, 2.186–88. 207. Though much of the literature on the Odyssey strives to rescue it as a complexly structured work of the same form as the Iliad, Michael Silk argues for their fundamental difference. See “The Odyssey and Its Explorations,” The Cambridge Companion to Homer, ed. Robert Fowler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 31–44.

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208. Anonymous, “Verses Occasion’d by the Sight of a Chamera Obscura” (London, 1747), 2. 209. Fletcher, Allegory, 113. 210. It is worth remembering that the Odyssey contains the Iliad in a nutshell: Nestor recollects the battlefields of Troy in two and a half lines in book 3. 211. Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” Yale French Studies 55–56 (1977): 281–82. Metonymy, as a “figure of movement,” is “the very motor of narrative, its dynamic principle.” Brooks refers to Lacan’s remarks, “equat[ing] metonymy and desire.” 212. Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot,” 281–82. Brooks points out the connection to Freud’s Umweg, that had already been observed by Angus Fletcher. As Fletcher puts it, “While Freud and his followers may have failed to construct an adequate behavioral theory that can be empirically tested, and have failed to meet epistemological criticism from philosophy, they have not failed in their description of symbolic action.” Fletcher, Allegory, 280. 213. Addison, Spectator 274, 2.564; Addison compares Homer’s Odysseus to Milton’s Satan. 214. On parallels between Milton’s Pandemonium and the Cave of Spleen, see Kent Bayette, “Milton and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock,” Studies in English Literature: 1500–1600 16.3 (1976): 421–36. 215. See Kroll, “Pope and Drugs.” 216. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 199. Case 3. Digression 1. Jonathan Richardson, Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as It Relates to Painting, in Two Discourses (London, 1725), 139. Shaftesbury contends that a good painting produces a “certain Easiness of Sight; a simple, clear, and united View.” “An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour,” in Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 3 vols. (London, 1723), 1.142–43. 2. See Michael Witmore, Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 9. 3. See John Evelyn, Numismata (London, 1697), 110. 4. Walpole’s unexpected discovery was the first serendipitous moment so-­called. See Sean Silver, “The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole and Merton,” Isis 106.3 (forthcoming, 2015). 5. See Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. Michael Shinagel (New York: Norton, 1975), 112. 6. Ross Chambers, Loiterature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 11. 7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.19.1), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 1.298–99. 8. Natalie Phillips, “Distraction as Liveliness of Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Characterization in Jane Austen,” Theory of Mind and Literature, ed. Paula Leverage et al. (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2011), 110. Before the late seventeenth century, Phillips suggests, order finds a series of “basic metaphors,” which include the “straight line.” 9. Locke, Essay (2.19.4), 1.300–301.

310 Notes to Pages 110–114 10. See Wolfram Schmidgen, “The Politics and Philosophy of Mixture: John Locke Recomposed,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 48.3 (2007): 205–23, esp. 208–13. 11. Swift, A Tale of a Tub, in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift¸ ed. Herbert Davis et al., 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 1.90. 12. See Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 7.21. 13. See Isaac D’Israeli, Curiosities of Literature, ed. Earl of Beaconsfield, 3 vols. (London, 1881), 1.276. D’Israeli discusses Bales in connection with Pliny and Pierre-­Daniel Huet. See also Colin H. Roberts and T. C. Skeat, The Birth of the Codex (London: Oxford University Press, 1987), 14; Henry Sanders, The Codex (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1938), 103–4; Richard R. Johnson, The Role of Parchment in Greco-­Roman Antiquity (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), 66–68. Roberts mentions a contemporary eyewitness account in Harley MS 530, f. 14b. 14. In the preface to Cave Beck’s Universal Character, Joseph Waites lyrically opined that such a condensed, quasi-­ideographic language would make possible “Illiads in a Nut-­ Shell”—­a “Galaxie of Languages; where pack / A thousand lights of words all in one track”; it would offer, he insists, an “Index of the mind.” Stephen Gosson compares a small, poisonously invective pamphlet of his own authorship first to “Homers Iliades in a nutte shell,” then “a kings picture in a pennye: little chestes . . . hold[ing] greate treasure; a few cyphers contain[ing] the substance of a riche merchant,” and in a sudden lapsing into the literal, “the shortest pamphlette” which “shrowde[s] matter.” Joseph Waites, verses in Cave Beck, The Universal Character (London, 1657), np; Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse: A Pleasant Invective Against Poets, Pipers, Players, Jesters, &c. (London, 1579), 3–4. Also in this category is Samuel Wesley’s satire “The Iliad in a Nutshell; or, Homer’s Battle of the Frogs and Mice” (London, 1726). Finally, on miniaturization and the epic, especially in the classical world, see Michael Squire, The Iliad in a Nutshell: Visualizing Epic on the Tabulae Iliacae (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 15. See, for instance, William Coles, Adam in Eden (London, 1657), n.p. 16. The Tradescants’ epitaph, still visible at the London Garden Museum. See Arthur MacGregor, “The Tradescants: Gardeners and Botanists,” in Tradescant’s Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, ed. Macgregor (Oxford: Ashmolean, 1983), 15. 17. Anonymous, “Verses Occasion’d by the Sight of a Chamera Obscura” (London, 1747), 2. 18. For a recent treatment of this well-­known point, see Elisabeth R. Napier, Falling into Matter: Problems of Embodiment in English Fiction from Defoe to Shelley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 27–61. 19. See John Sutton, “Carelessness and Inattention: Mind-­Wandering and the Physiology of Fantasy from Locke to Hume,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge: Embodied Empiricism in Early Modern Thought, ed. Charles T. Wolfe and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 248–49. 20. Locke, Essay (2.33.6), 1.529–30. 21. See John Yolton, Thinking Matter: Materialism in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 14–48. 22. Such analogies, in the words of Richard Boyd, “provide a way to introduce terminology for features of the world whose existence seems probable, but many of whose fundamental properties have yet to be discovered.” Boyd, “Metaphor and Theory Change: What

Notes to Pages 114–116

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Is ‘Metaphor’ a Metaphor For?” in Metaphor and Thought, ed. Andrew Ortony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 364. Boyd’s theory is discussed by Michael Kearns, Metaphors of Mind in Fiction and Psychology (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1987), 21–44. 23. Locke, Essay (4.16.12), 2.379–82. In “things which sense cannot discover,” Locke remarks, “analogy is the great rule of probability,” and “the only help we have.” On the general work of analogy in the sciences, see Devin S. Griffiths, “The Intuitions of Analogy in Erasmus Darwin’s Poetics,” SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 51.3 (2011): 651–55. There is nothing more invisible than neurological functioning, which cannot be witnessed while it is happening, as it is happening. On the absorption of neural circuitry into the perceptual process, see Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being, ed. Marjorie Greene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 220; Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 103–25. 24. I can attest from experience with an eighteenth-­century microscope that Hooke actually did a great deal of work to clean up what he saw. For one thing, the magnification is so intense that the image produced by the microscope is a dim, muddy thing; Hooke’s engravings are startling in their clarity. See Francisc Szekely, “Unreliable Observers, Flawed Instruments, ‘Disciplined Viewings’: Handling Specimens in Early Modern Microscopy,” Parergon 28.1 (2011): 154–76; Janice Neri, The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 105–38; also Al Coppola, “The Anthropocentric Spectacle of Nehemiah Grew’s Botany,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 54.2 (2013): 263–77; John T. Harwood, “Rhetoric and Graphics in Micrographia, in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Michael Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Suffolk, 1989): 119–47; Michael Aaron Dennis, “Graphic Understanding: Instruments and Interpretation in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia,” Science in Context 3 (1989): 309–64. Thanks to Pablo Alvarez at the Department of Special Collections at the University of Michigan. 25. See Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, for Improving of Natural Knowledge from Its First Rise, 4 vols. (London, 1756–1757), 1.324. 26. See Rob Iliffe, “‘In the Warehouse’: Privacy, Property, and Priority in the Early Royal Society,” History of Science 30 (1992): 29–68. 27. This project was completed by Nehemiah Grew under the title Musæum Regalis Societatis, or a Catalogue & Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society (London, 1681). See Michael Hunter, John Aubrey and the Realm of Learning (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1975), 45. 28. The best compact discussions of Hooke’s career as Curator of Experiments, Gresham College professor of geometry, and inaugural Cutlerian Lecturer are Michael Cooper’s “Hooke’s Career,” in London’s Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke, ed. Jim Bennett et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 8–28; and Michael Hunter, Establishing the New Science, 279–337. See also Margaret Épinasse, Robert Hooke (London: Heinemann, 1956; rpt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962); Lisa Jardine’s The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London (New York: Harper Collins, 2004). 29. Karl R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man (Urbana, 1968); Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge, 1974). 30. Henceforth, note Shapin and Schaffer, “if one wanted to produce authenticated experimental knowledge . . . one had to come to this space and to work in it with others.”

312 Notes to Pages 116–118 Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 39. 31. The best accounts of the Repository remain Michael Hunter’s “Between Cabinet of Curiosities and Research Collections: The History of the Royal Society’s ‘Repository,’” in Establishing the New Science (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1989), 123–55; Hunter, “The Cabinet Institutionalized: The Royal Society’s ‘Repository’ and its Background,” in Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Europe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 159–68; see also Eileen Hooper-­Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London: Routledge, 1992), 145–66; Hunter, Establishing the New Science, 123–55, and Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: the Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 84–90. 32. “The merit of constructing [the air-­pump],” writes George Wilson, “should seem to be almost entirely Hooke’s.” George Wilson, On the Early History of the Air-­Pump in England (Edinburgh, 1849), 6. See Terje Brundtland, “After Boyle and the Leviathan: the Second Generation of British Air Pumps,” Annals of Science 68.1 (2011): 93–124. 33. Shapin, “Who Was Robert Hooke?” in Robert Hooke: New Studies, ed. Hunter and Simon Schaffer (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1989), 254–62. 34. Hooke (writes Douwe Draaisma) “portrayed himself in his metaphors as a mechanistic thinker, an experimenter and an expert microscopist.” Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas about the Mind, trans. Paul Vincent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 56–58; Matthew C. Hunter, Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (Chicago, 2013), 178–86; Susan Pearce and Kenneth Arnold, The Collector’s Voice (Farnham: Ashgate, 2000), 2.87–93. 35. David Oldroyd, “Some ‘Philosophicall Scribbles’ Atributed to Robert Hooke,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 35.1 (1980): 17–32. 36. Hooke, “Lectures of Light,” in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705), 140. 37. See Matthew C. Hunter, “Theory of the Impression According to Robert Hooke,” Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, ed. Hunter (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 167–92. 38. Such an idea, “when it again comes to be acted upon by the Radiation of the Soul, all the Impressions or Qualifications thereof become of Power to affect the Soul with those Impressions which it had formerly received.” Hooke, “Lectures of Light,” 145. 39. For a brilliant discussion of these issues, see J. A. Bennett, “Robert Hooke as Mechanic and Natural Philosopher,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 35.1 (1980): 33–48. 40. David Oldroyd, “Some ‘Philosophicall Scribbles’ Attributed to Robert Hooke,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 35.1 (1980): 17–32. 41. But see also Hunter, Wicked Intelligence, 179–87. 42. On Hooke’s relationship to his repository, see Richard Yeo, “Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth-­Century England,” History of Science 45 (2007): 1–46; Rhodri Lewis, “Hooke’s Two Buckets: Memory, Mnemotechnique and Knowledge in the Early Royal Society,” in Ars Reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture, ed. Donald Beecher and Grant Williams (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2009), 339–63; Brian R. Singer, “Robert Hooke on Memory, Association, and Time Perception,” Notes and Records 31 (1976): 115–31; Lotte Mulligan, “Robert Hooke’s ‘Memoranda’: Memory and Natural History,” Annals of Science 49 (1992): 47–61.

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43. Hooke’s lecture hears proleptic echoes of Locke’s Essay, which it might have influenced. “Ideas . . . in the Memory,” John Locke would later write, “start up in our Minds of their own accord, and offer themselves to the understanding.” Locke, Essay (2.10.7), 1.197–98. 44. Hooke, “Lectures of Light,” 144. 45. See Jamie Kassler, Inner Music: Hobbes, Hooke and North on Internal Character (London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), chap. 3; Matthew C. Hunter, “Experiment, Theory, Representation: Robert Hooke’s Material Models,” in Beyond Mimesis and Convention, ed. Roman Frigg and Matthew Hunter (Boston: Springer, 2010), 193–219. 46. This is the same logic at work in Hooke’s working museum; machines are machines of thinking, and it is necessary, Hooke insists, to know plenty of such machines in order to be able to anticipate operations that might be performed. The machines, as it were, call out to him, directing or exciting his attention. Robert Hooke, “Method of Improving Natural Philosophy,” in The Posthumous Works of Robert Hooke, ed. Richard Waller (London, 1705), 22–48. 47. See Douglas L. Hintzman, “Robert Hooke’s Model of Memory,” Psychonomic Bulletin and Review 10.1 (2003): 3–14. Hintzman compares Hooke’s mental model to a late nineteenth-­century model by Richard Semon. 48. For the uses of the microscope in the production of knowledge, see Catherine Wilson, “Visual Surface and Visual Symbol: The Microscope and the Occult in Early Modern Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas 49 (1988): 85–108, esp. 103. Thomas L. Hankins and Robert J. Silverman however suggest a different attitude toward instruments: “Locke finally concluded that the microscope, while not exactly a cheat, would be of little use in studying nature.” Hankins and Silverman, “Instruments and Images: Subjects for the Historiography of Science,” Instruments and the Imagination (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 9. On this point, see also Szekely, “Unreliable Observers,” and Coppola, “The Anthropocentric Spectacle.” 49. Hooke, “Preface,” to Micrographia: Or Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies (London, 1665), n.p. 50. Katherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 41. 51. Hooke, Micrographia, 4 52. See Steven Shapin and Simon Shaffer, Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Mary B. Hesse, “Hooke’s Philosophical Algebra,” Isis 57.1 (1966): 67–83; Lotte Mulligan, “Robert Hooke and Certain Knowledge,” Seventeenth Century 7 (1992): 151–69. 53. Hooke, Micrographia, 3. 54. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. 55. Hooke, “Preface,” n.p. 56. Hooke, Micrographia, 3. A second parenthesis, the partner to the orphaned one preceding “one of which in the bredth,” probably belongs after “Bible.” 57. This example of micrographia might possibly have been produced by the same Peter Bales who copied the Bible into a walnut shell. Holinshed mentions that in 1575 he “contriued and writ within the compasse of a penie in Latine, the Lords praier; the creed, the ten commandements, a praier to God, a praier for the queene, his posie, his name, the daie of the moneth, the yeare of our Lord, and the reigne of the queene.” Raphael

314 Notes to Pages 121–125 Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (London, 1587): 6.1262. See also “Bales (Peter),” in William Tooke’s A New and General Biographical Dictionary, 15 vols. (London, 1798), 2.48. Doris V. Welsh reports that John Parker of Derbyshire, a nineteenth-­century writer of small books, wrote the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments in the space of an English penny. Welsh, The History of Miniature Books (Albany: Fort Orange Press, 1987), 14. 58. This was possibly a pantograph invented roughly forty years earlier by the Jesuit mathematician Christoph Scheiner Scheiner, Pantographice seu ars Delineandi (Rome, 1631). 59. Parenthesis is one of the classical rhetorical forms associated with digression. See Chambers, Loiterature, 85–86. 60. The apparently random motion of dust, later to be named “Brownian,” was observed by Lucretius in De Rerum Natura. The relevant passage is to be found in On the Nature of Things, trans. Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910), 69. On the importance of restless motion to the world as Hooke witnessed it, see Allan Chapman, “Robert Hooke: The Man and His Ideas,” in Robert Hooke and the English Renaissance, ed. Paul Kent and Allan Chapman (Hertfordshire: Antony Rowe, 2005), 16–17. 61. Hooke developed an early version of the thesis of extended cognition. See Sean Silver, “Hooke, Latour, and the Thesis of Extended Cognition,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (forthcoming, 2015). 62. Hooke, “Preface,” n.p. 63. Picciotto is speaking of an “excogitation” by William Petty. Joanna Picciotto, Labors of Innocence in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 182. 64. See also Tita Chico, “Minute Particulars: Microscopy and Eighteenth-­Century Narrative,” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 39.2 (2006): 143–61. 65. Hooke, Micrographia, 2. 66. There might be the hint of a recognition of the etymological sense of “period”: a “way around.” This is what the syntactical mark is intended to indicate: that a grammatical journey has been completed. 67. On the importance of unforeseen details and serendipitous discoveries to Hooke’s philosophy of research, see Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber, The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 160–62. 68. See Robert Markley on Boyle’s “Narratives,” in Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 222–40. 69. Richard Waller’s headnote, in Hooke, “Lectures of Light,” 138. 70. Swift, Tale of a Tub, 1.82. 71. Hooke, Micrographia, 3. 72. Cavendish, “Of Many Worlds in This World,” Poems and Fancies (1653), 54. On Cavendish’s materialist imagination, see Gabrielle G. Starr, “Cavendish, Aesthetics, and the Anti-­Platonic Line,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 39.3 (2006): 295–308. 73. Hooke, Micrographia, 3. Hooke’s remarks participate in a tradition elaborated by Bernard le Bouvier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686), translated by John Glanville (as A Plurality of Worlds) in 1687 and by Aphra Behn (as A Discovery of New Worlds) in 1688. See Anne Bratach, “Following the Intrigue: Aphra Behn, Genre, and Restoration Science,” Journal of Narrative Technique 26.3 (1996): 209. 74. In this sense, Plot understood himself to be doing the fundamental work of

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Baconian idea production, the compiling of natural histories. Central to the Royal Society project, Plot therefore joins such figures as Robert Boyle and John Locke, for whom ideas are in the end to be worked up out of catalogues of things. See Daniel Carey, “Locke, Travel Literature and the Natural History of Man,” Seventeenth Century 11 (1996): 259–80; Peter R. Anstey, “Natural History,” in John Locke and Natural Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 46–69. 75. The classic study of the great chain of being is Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936). Among the thousands of studies addressing Lovejoy’s work is a recent strain attempting to tie its “vertical dimension of morality” to somatic experience. See for instance Mark J. Brandt and Christine Reyna, “The Chain of Being: A Hierarchy of Morality,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 6.5 (2011): 428–46. 76. As a way of arranging a natural history, Plot’s gambit was by no means unprecedented; the great chain of being provided the organizational patterns for numerous Continental collections, “spatializing material knowledge according to cosmological structures.” Hooper-­Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 90. Hooper-­Greenhill’s argument is indebted to Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1973). See also the introduction to Impey and MacGregor, The Origins of Museums. 77. Robert Plot, The Natural History of Oxford-­shire (London, 1704), 308. 78. Plot, Oxford-­shire, 322. 79. Plot, Oxford-­shire, 322. On Archytas, see Carl A. Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Also see Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place (Urbana: Indiana University Press, 1993), 13–17, 34–37. 80. Horace’s “munera pulveris,” literally “gifts of dust.” For discussions of this ode and the location of the “Matine shore,” see Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum, 19–24. David West, Horace: Odes I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 132; Bernard Frischer, “Horace and the Monuments: A New Interpretation of the Archytas Ode (C.1.28),” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 88 (1984): 71–102. 81. Plot, Oxford-­shire, 323. The “Conical hillocks” are described in book 24 of the Odyssey. 82. These initial excavations are described in the classic text by German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, Troja: Results of the Latest Researches and Discoveries on the Site of Homer’s Troy (London: John Murray, 1884), 242–63. Schliemann is a controversial figure. See Michael Wood, In Search of the Trojan War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 57–100; David A. Traill, Schliemann of Troy: Treasure and Deceit (London: John Murray, 1995). 83. Chambers, Loiterature, 31–32, 85–89. 84. Horace, Epodes and Odes, trans. Daniel Garrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 58. 85. Ruth Mack, Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 16, 17. 86. Thomas Codrington, Roman Roads in Britain (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1903), 33–34. 87. Katharina Boehm, “Placing the Past: Antiquarianism, Travel Literature and the

316 Notes to Pages 128–133 Geographical Scales of Historical Thought in the Early Eighteenth Century,” essay presented at “Travelling Objects,” Rutgers University, 2013. 88. Swift, Tale of a Tub, 1.92. 89. Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), 186–90; also see Latour, “Where Are the Missing Masses? The Sociology of a Few Mundane Artifacts,” in Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), 225–58. 90. Latour owes silent debts to Michel Serres. Serres and Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 43–70. 91. Joseph Addison, Dialogues on the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (London, 1725), 272, 13. 92. Joseph Addison, The Spectator 1, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1.5. 93. See Scott Paul Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 94. Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-­American Thought, 1550–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 162. 95. Addison, Dialogues, 20. 96. Addison, Dialogues, 12. 97. Locke, Essay (3.11.25), 2.162–64. 98. The fact that we may speak so easily of a collection of coins as a sort of memory speaks to the prior modeling of memory on things like collections of coins. 99. Addison, Dialogues, 22. 100. J. R. Murden, The Art of Memory: Reduced to a Systematic Arrangement (New York: 1818), x. See also Richard Gray, Memoria Technica: or, A New Method of Artificial Memory (London, 1756), iv. 101. Addison, Dialogues, 144. 102. David Alvarez: “‘Poetical Cash’: Joseph Addison, Antiquarianism, and Aesthetic Value,” in Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38 (2005): 509–31. 103. See Barbara Levick, Claudius (New York: Routledge, 2001), 28–32; Reinhard Wolder, “The Julio-­Claudians,” in The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Coinage, ed. William E. Metcalf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 344–45. 104. This medal is in fact one of a pair; the first shows Claudius accepted into the Praetorian camp, where he was to be recognized as emperor, while the second displays Claudius granting his favor and patronage in return. Seth William Stevenson et al., Dictionary of Roman Coins: Republican and Imperial (London, 1889), 477, 650. 105. Addison, Dialogues, 272. 106. Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 64–91. 107. Important studies of it-­narratives include Christina Lupton, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Leah Price, “From The History of a Book to a ‘History of a Book,’” Representations 108 (2009): 120–38; Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton: University of Princeton Press, 2011); Mark Blackwell, “The It-­Narrative in Eighteenth-­Century England: Animals and Objects in Circulation,” Literature Compass 1 (2004): 1–5; Liz

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Bellamy, Commerce, Morality, and the Eighteenth Century Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Mark Blackwell, The Secret Life of Things: Animals, Objects, and It-­ Narratives in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Danvers: Bucknell University Press, 2007); and Ileana Baird and Christina Ionescu, Objects of Inquiry and Exchange: Eighteenth-­Century Thing Theory in a Global Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 108. Alexander Pope, “To Mr. Addison, Occasioned by His Dialogues on Medals” (31–32), in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 6.203. 109. The term is coined by Arjun Apparurai and Igor Kopytoff in The Social Life of Things (see note 106). 110. John Sutton, “Porous Memory and the Cognitive Life of Things,” in Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 130–41. 111. See Merlin Donald, The Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), and A Mind so Rare: The Evolution of Human Consciousness (New York: Norton, 2001). 112. See Paul Guyer, “The Pleasures of the Imagination and the Objects of Taste,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. James A. Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 393–429; Scott Black, “Social and Literary Form in the Spectator,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 33.1 (1999): 21–42. 113. Addison identified himself as a thinker in the tradition of Locke almost from the moment the Essay was published; as a fellow of Magdalen College, he delivered in 1693 the Encaenia oration, celebrating Locke’s work of only a few years before. “The Pleasures of the Imagination” was first drafted in roughly these years, and Locke’s continued influence runs throughout Addison’s Spectator papers in subtle ways, not least in Addison’s remarks that there is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses, the keystone of the empiricist epistemological mood. 114. Addison, Spectator 414, 3.538. 115. Joseph Addison, “Notes on Some of the Foregoing Stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” in Miscellaneous Works in Verse and Prose, ed. Thomas Tickell, 3 vols. (London, 1726), 1.242. See Lamb, The Things Things Say, 119; Susanne Gippert, Joseph Addison’s Ovid: An Adaptation of the Metamorphoses in the Augustan Age of English Literature (Remscheid: Gardez, 2003). 116. “Perhaps,” Lamb suggests, Addison prefers the ekphrastic relation of an event to direct description because “the episode, shown not as an event but an image, allows him . . . to consider the scene either as a moment in a narrative or as a picture, or as both together” (The Things Things Say, 122). 117. Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 13.231. 118. Addison, Spectator 417, 3.562. 119. Louis Jobert, La Science des Medailles (1697), translated by Roger Gale, The Knowledge of Medals (London, 1715), 144–45. Addison himself mentions that he “took care to refresh my Memory among the Classic Authors” and to “make such Collections out of them as I might afterwards have Occasion for.” Addison, “Preface,” in Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (London, 1703), np. Among the preparatory work Addison did for his trip to Rome was the study of medals at the Sorbonne (especially in the royal collection of Greek and Roman medals) supplemented by formal instruction he received in Rome from

318 Notes to Pages 137–138 numismatist Francesco de’Ficoroni. See Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 51–52. Also see Joseph Spence, Observations, Anecdotes, and Characters of Books and Men, ed. James M. Osborn, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 1.331; Jeffrey Spier and Jonathan Kagan, “Sir Charles Frederick and the Forgery of Ancient Coins in Eighteenth-­Century Rome,” Journal of the History of Collecting 12.1 (2000): 35–90. 120. This is nearly the only explanation Addison offers for the mind’s material workings, and while it is posed merely as the speculations of a hypothetical materialist, a glance at the original manuscript indicates that Addison shoehorned this qualification in at a very late date. John O’Brien argues that Addison subscribed all along to the theory of a mind “plastic, corporeal, and traceable,” adopting the position as early as his Cambridge days and holding it, in one form or another, throughout his life. O’Brien, Harlequin Britain: Pantomime and Entertainment, 1690–1760 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 78. 121. See Stephen Gaukroger, “Descartes: Methodology,” in Routledge History of Philosophy, ed. G. H. R. Parkinson, vol. 6: The Renaissance and Seventeenth Century Rationalism (London: Routledge, 1993), 167–200; Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 5–6. I have also found John P. Wright’s discussion of “Neurological Mechanisms” useful, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), 209–20. 122. John Morris, “Pattern Recognition in Descartes’ Automata,” Isis 60.4 (1969): 452. 123. Descartes, Rules for the Direction of the Mind (ca. 1628), in René Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 13 vols. (Paris: Cerf, 1913), 10.412. Quoted in Morris, “Pattern Recognition.” See also Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003). 124. On Descartes, see John Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Clark, Descartes’s Theory of Mind; Willem van Hoorn, As Images Unwind: Ancient and Modern Theories of Visual Perception (Amsterdam: University Press Amsterdam, 1973), 182. 125. Sutton, Philosophy and Memory Traces, 62. 126. See, however, C. H. Salter, “Dryden and Addison,” Modern Language Review 69 (1974): 37. Also see Richard Hurd, Works of Joseph Addison, ed. Richard Hurd, 6 vols. (London, 1811), 4.417. 127. Addison’s intellectual debts are mixed; critics have proposed Hobbes, Malebranche, and Descartes as possible sources for Addison’s Cartesianism, while his very early Latin oration on the advantages of the new over the old philosophy also seems to count Hooke’s microscopy and Boyle’s pneumatics as latter-­day fruits of the Cartesian turn. See H. H. Campbell, “Addison’s ‘Cartesian’ Passage and Nicholas Malebranche,” Philological Quarterly 46 (1967): 408–12; Clarence DeWitt Thorpe, “Addison and Hutcheson on the Imagination,” English Language History 2 (1935): 215–34; C. H. Salter, “Dryden and Addison,” Modern Language Review 69.1 (1974): 29–38, esp. 36–37; and O’Brien, Harlequin Britain, 77–79. 128. Willis, Cerebri Anatome, trans. Samuel Pordage (London: 1681), 59–60. 129. Addison, Spectator 417, 3.563. 130. Addison, Spectator 100, 1.454. Addison is here speaking approvingly of Locke’s remarks. 131. Addison, Spectator 417, 3.563.

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132. Roy Porter, “Happiness,” in The Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Penguin, 2000), 258. 133. See Deidre Lynch, “On Going Steady with Novels,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 50.2–3 (2009): 207–19. 134. Habit, Charles Taylor observes, now links elements “between which there are no more relations of natural fit. The proper connections are determined purely instrumentally, by what will bring the best results, pleasure, or happiness.” Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 171. 135. Addison, Spectator 447, 4.71. 136. Addison, Spectator 447, 4.69. Addison’s source for the example is Robert Plot’s Natural History of Stafford-­shire (1686). 137. Joseph Warton, Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope (London, 1782), 17–28. 138. H. F. Clark, “Eighteenth-­Century Elysiums: The Role of ‘Association’ in the Landscape Movement,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 6 (1943): 166. Also of interest is William Shenstone, Unconnected Thoughts on Gardening (1764). 139. Addison, Spectator 417, 3.564. 140. Alexander Gerard, An Essay on Taste (London, 1764), 43. 141. Addison, Travels in Italy (London, 1703), 108–10. 142. Addison, Dialogues, 143. 143. Addison, Spectator 476, 4.185. 144. Addison, Spectator 476, 4.186. 145. Addison, Tatler 120, ed. George A. Aiken, 4 vols. (London, 1899), 3.33. 146. Allegory, in this sense, is the allegory of Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964). See also Spectator 3, an allegory on credit, staged at the Bank of England. 147. Addison thus incorporates a conspective overview of the fallen armies into part of a quest, or, as Ronald R. Macdonald puts it, condenses a moment from a “nonnarrative genre” into a stop or stage in a “narrative genre.” Macdonald, The Burial Places of Memory: Epic Underworlds in Vergil, Dante, and Milton (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 186–87. 148. Addison may be hearing an echo of a possible etymology of “exemplum”—­a clearing cut in a wood. Walks like these are common enough in the Spectator that they offer a way of thinking about the Spectator’s ambitions as a whole. He for instance proclaims his “resolution to march on boldly in the Cause of Virtue and good Sense,” so that if he “meet[s] with any thing in City, Court, or Country, that shocks Modesty or good Manners,” he will “make an Example of it.” Addison, Spectator 34, 1.144. 149. Chambers, Loiterature, 93. 150. The history of the garden and of the museum is complexly interwoven, suggesting, moreover, some ways in which the collection of rarities and antiquities developed organically out of open-­air, botanical displays. On gardens as museums and collections of rarities, see the essential works by John Dixon Hunt, “Curiosities to Adorn Cabinets and Gardens,” in The Origins of Museums, 193–203; John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750 (1986; rpt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 73–82. Also see E. B. MacDougall, “A Paradise of Plants: Exotica, Rarities, and Botanical Fantasies,” in The Age of the Marvelous, ed. Joy

320 Notes to Pages 144–147 Kenseth (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 1991), 145–57; Claudia Lazzaro, The Italian Renaissance Garden (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 151. See John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis, The Genius of the Place (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988); Miles Hadfield, The English Landscape Garden (Aylesbury: Shire Publications, 1977). 152. See Smithers, Addison, 277. 153. Among the legends of the Hall is a rumor that a secret cabinet, stuffed with Addison’s manuscripts, still exists on the premises. Judith Court, “The Many Chapters of Bilton Hall’s History,” Coventry Evening Telegraph (June 21, 2003), n.p. 154. Addison to Alexander Pope, October 26, 1713, The Letters of Joseph Addison, ed. Walter Graham (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 281. Addison’s house and grounds are discussed in David Leatherbarrow, Topographical Stories: Studies in Landscape and Architecture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 136. 155. This manuscript was probably penned no later than 1699 but reworked for publication in the Spectator. The manuscript was kept apart from Addison’s other papers, most of which have been lost, and published as a pamphlet by J. Dykes Campbell, Some Portions of Essays Contributed to The Spectator by Mr. Joseph Addison: Now First Printed from His Ms. Notebook, ed. Campbell (Glasgow, 1864). 156. Court, “Bilton Hall”; see also Marsya Lennox, “Residential Property: Grade I Listed and with Tales to Tell,” Birmingham Post (July 11, 2003), n.p. 157. Leatherbarrow, Topographical Stories, 138. 158. Write Whitworth Wallis and Arthur Bensley Chamberlain, “In the formal garden [of Bilton] is a walk known as ‘Addison’s Walk.’” Illustrated Catalogue (with Descriptive Notes) of the Permanent Collection . . . at Aston Hall (Birmingham, 1899), 147. 159. Bilton Hall is on Church Walk, in Rugby, county Warwickshire, National Grid Reference SP 48722 73756. 160. As Raymond Williams notes, “The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation.” Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 149. See John Barrell, “The Idea of Landscape in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840: An Approach to the Poetry of John Clare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 1–63. Also see Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), esp. 9–32. 161. William Howitt, “Joseph Addison,” in Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Writers, 2 vols. (London, 1847), 1.134. On the importance of Claude Lorraine in the construction of British “landscape,” see Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, 6–21. 162. Dabney Townshend, “The Picturesque,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55.4 (1997): 365–76. 163. Stephen Bending, “Horace Walpole and Eighteenth-­Century Garden History,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 57 (1994): 209–26. 164. Ronald Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 19–34. Stephanie Ross, What Gardens Mean (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 59–84. 165. Mavis Batey, “The Pleasures of the Imagination: Joseph Addison’s Influence on Early Landscape Gardens,” Garden History 33.2 (2005): 189–209. 166. Portions of Essays . . . by Mr. Joseph Addison, ed. Campbell, 8; see Marjorie Hope

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Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959), 307–10; Neil Saccamano, “The Sublime Force of Words in Addison’s ‘Pleasures,’” English Language History 58.1 (1991): 83–106. 167. Addison slightly misquotes Virgil: “at latis otia fundis, / speluncae unique lacus, at frigida tempe / mugitusque boum mollesque sub arbore somni / non absunt.” 168. On mediation and the georgic, see Kevis Goodman, Georgic Modernity and British Romanticism: Poetry and the Mediation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 169. See Michelle Syba, “After Design: Joseph Addison Discovers Beauties,” Studies in English Literature 49.3 (2009): 615–35. 170. Nor was Addison alone in identifying the profusion of beauties as the chief attraction of Milton’s verse. James Beattie, for example, finds Milton’s use of figures to be among his principal strengths, putting him in a category with Virgil, Homer, and Solomon. “Tropes and figures,” he writes, “convey to the fancy ideas that are easily comprehended, and make a strong impression”; Milton’s strength is in his “hints,” that expand into fully realized perspectives. Beattie, Essays: On Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind (London, 1778), 255–71. 171. Addison, Spectator 321, 3.171. 172. Addison, Spectator 339, 3.261. 173. Addison puts it this way: “Milton would never have bin Able to have built his Pandæmonium or to have Laid out his paradise had not he seen the Palaces & Gardens of Italy: & it wd be easy to shew several descriptions out of ye old poets that probably ow’d their original to pictures and Statues that were then in vogue.” Addison, Some Portions of Essays (ed. Dykes Campbell), 12. John Dixon Hunt discusses Addison’s thoughts on gardening, Milton’s memory of his tour of Rome, and the Italian gardens Milton saw there. Hunt, Garden and Grove, xix, 180–221. 174. Addison, Spectator 339, 3.261. 175. Wordsworth, “The Tables Turned,” in The Major Works, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 130. Case 4. Inwardness 1. Thomas Taylor, A Descriptive and Illustrated Catalogue of the Calculi of the Royal College of Surgeons (London, 1842), 28. On Sloane as collector, see From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections, ed. Michael Hunter, Alison Walker, and Arthur MacGregor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 2. On Hay’s life and work, see Stephen Taylor and Clyve Jones, “William Hay, M. P. for Seaford,” in Tory and Whig: The Parliamentary Papers of . . . William Hay, ed. Taylor and Jones (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1998), lxi–lxxxvii. 3. Poems and translations are mostly collected in The Works of William Hay, ed. J. Nichols, 2 vols. (London, 1794). 4. See Helen Deutsch, “The Body’s Moments: Visible Disability, the Essay and the Limits of Sympathy,” Prose Studies 27.1–2 (2006): 11–26. 5. William Hay, Deformity: An Essay (London, 1754), 76–81. 6. On the stone as “proof,” see the “Preface” to Works, ed. Nichols, xvii–xviii.

322 Notes to Pages 152–155 7. See Omnelio Pitcarne, Treatise on the Stone (London, 1739), a pamphlet advertisement for the specific; David Hartley, Ten Cases of Persons Who Have Taken Mrs. Stephens’s Medicines for the Stone (London, 1738); Arthur J. Viseltear, “Joanna Stephens and the Eighteenth-­Century Lithontriptics; A Misplaced Chapter in the History of Therapeutics,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 42 (1968): 199–220. 8. “The CASE of William Hay,” in Works of Robert Whytt (Edinburgh, 1768), 460. 9. Kathleen James-­Cavan, “Introduction” to William Hay, Deformity: An Essay, ed. James-­Cavan (Victoria: University of Victoria Press, 2004), 44, 9, 19. 10. Thanks to Simon Chaplin (then curator of the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons) for this information. 11. See Hannah Dawson, Locke, Language, and Early Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 12. Bacon, The New Organon (London, 1620), 124; see Mary Domski, “Observation and Mathematics,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Peter R. Anstey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 144–59. 13. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (3.9.3), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 2.105. 14. This is the arc of Habermas’s argument. See Jürgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization of Society, volume 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols. (1981; Boston: Beacon Press, 1984). 15. Locke, Essay (3.11.25), 2.162–64. See Michael Hancher, “Definition and Depiction,” Word & Image 26.3 (2010): 244–72. 16. See Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature: Artificial Languages in England from Bacon to Locke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Markley, Fallen Languages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2; Richard Kroll, The Material Word: Literate Culture in the Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 17. Spence, The Grand Repository of the English Language (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1775). 18. See Janet Sorensen, The Grammar of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century British Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 19. Locke, Essay (3.9.13), 2.112–13. See also Lewis, Language, Mind and Nature, 222–29. 20. On tacit knowledge, see Michael Polanyi, Knowing and Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 147–48. Also see Alva Noë, Action in Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006) and Noë, Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012). 21. See also Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); Noë, Action in Perception. 22. For instance, Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness and the Body (London: Verso, 1995). 23. Locke, Essay (3.9.5), 105–6. 24. See Polanyi, Knowing and Being, 126–28. 25. Misty G. Anderson offers a related argument in “Tactile Places: Materializing Desire in Margaret Cavendish and Jane Barker,” Textual Practice 13.2 (1999): 329–52.

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26. See for instance Steven Shapin’s collection of essays, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if It Was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 27. Readers of Hay’s Essay are involved in irresolvable paradoxes, and they have been from the start. The book’s dedication is as old as the earliest test of the universality of beauty; it is the same as the motto inscribed on the apple of Discord, the same that Paris awarded to Aphrodite: “detur pulchriori,” it reads, “To the greatest beauty”; this is, as Hay puts it, the same as sending it “into the World,” so that “a thousand Goddesses might seize it as their own.” An essay on deformity is dedicated to a mythical dustup over the relative nature of beauty. Hay, Deformity, 3–4. 28. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Theory of Painting (London, 1715), 206. 29. Donna Haraway, Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997), 39. 30. See Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 292–301. 31. See also Chris Shilling, The Body in Culture, Technology and Society (London: SAGE, 2006), esp. chap. 4. 32. Leder, The Absent Body, 34–35. 33. For instance, Bruno Latour, “How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension of Science Studies,” in Body and Society 10.2–3 (2004): 205–29. 34. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 195. 35. Jay Dolmage, “Between the Valley and the Field: Metaphor and Disability,” Prose Studies 27.1 (2005): 111. 36. Locke adopts Hooke’s solution in the Essay (2.14.4). See also Amit Yahav, “Sonorous Duration: Tristram Shandy and the Temporality of Novels,” PMLA (2013): 872–87. 37. Locke offers a similar solution in the Essay (2.14.1–27), 1.238–56. 38. See Stuart Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660– 1785 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 4, 280nn5–6. 39. This is a species of a more general problem in cognitive philosophy, about how we arrive at, and represent to ourselves, the concept of time. In general, our solutions tend to be metaphorical—­time as a “passage” or “journey.” Among the influential treatments of the general metaphoricity of concepts of time are George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 139–53; Edwin Hutchins, “Material Anchors for Conceptual Blends,” Journal of Pragmatics 37 (2005): 1555–77; and Daniel Casasanto and Lera Boroditsky, “Time in the Mind: Using Space to Think about Time,” Cognition 106 (2008): 579–93. 40. Michael Ramscar, Teenie Matlock, and Lera Boroditsky offer a weak link between time and embodied experience, reviewing these issues in “Time, Motion, and Meaning: The Experiential Basis of Abstract Thought,” in The Spatial Foundations of Language and Cognition, ed. Kelly S. Mix, Linda B. Smith, and Michael Gasser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 67–68. 41. Sherman, Telling Time, 29–108. 42. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, trans. James Benedict (London: Verso, 1996), 99. 43. Pepys, “The Will of Samuel Pepys,” in The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Henry B. Wheatley, 9 vols. (London, 1893), 9.251–52. See Frank Sidgwick, “Introduction” to Bibliotecha Pepysiana: A Descriptive Catalogue of the Library of Samuel Pepys (London, 1914), i–xix.

324 Notes to Pages 160–162 Pepys’s “scheme”—­which loosely follows a system provided by John Evelyn—­remains visible in the Library Pepysiana, established in 1724 at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Composed according to an idea of precisely three thousand books, arranged in order of increasing size and in matter of course new-­numbered with new acquisitions, it is at once a monument to design, and an example of collecting consciously designed to perpetuate a life. 44. For general histories of “the stone,” see Harold. J. Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-­Century London (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 76–105; Harry S. Shelley, “Cutting for the Stone,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 13 (1958): 297–319. 45. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 1.1. 46. Sherman, Telling Time, 33. 47. See Leder, Absent Body, 73–76. 48. Studies of the modernization of the calendar, and of the division of the day by bells and personal timepieces, include David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Robert Poole, Time’s Alteration: Calendar Reform in Early Modern England (London: University College London Press, 1998). Also see Daniel Woolf, The Social Circulation of the Past: English Historical Culture 1500–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Perhaps Pepys was encouraged to count the 26th as a personal celebration by its proximity to the bureaucratic and fiscal new year in England, which in defiance of others on the European continent marked March 25 as its first day. 49. Pepys, Diary, 1.97. 50. Ralph Josselin for instance notes attending two of these feasts. See The Diary of Ralph Josselin, ed. Alan Macfarlane (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 516, 567. 51. Pepys, Diary, 5.255. Pepys’s motto—­mens cujusque is est quisque—­unexpectedly sheds light on his relationship to his stone case: the man who equated himself with his mind (“the mind is the man”) expressed his pleasure with the monument to his stone that he “had it to his mind.” 52. See Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (New York: Knopf, 2002), 62, 83. Pepys’s interest in kidney stones—­especially his own—­is for Tomalin evidence of an empirical mind; she contrasts Pepys with his mother, who passed fragments of a bladder stone, showed them to her son, and cast them into the fire. 53. As Jean Starobinski notes, regarding a strikingly similar meditation on the stone in Montaigne’s “Of Experience,” “We stand at the semiotic dividing line that will subsequently develop into an ever-­widening chasm between the ‘objective’ experiment [expérience in French] of modern science, with its insistence on sophisticated methodology, and ‘personal’ (or ‘inner’) experience, wherein each individual feels the unique quality of his own existence.” Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 143. Michel de Montaigne, The Essayes of Montaigne, trans. John Florio (1600; New York: Modern Library, 1933), 990. 54. Pepys, Diary, 4.60. 55. In addition to Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006),

Notes to Pages 162–166

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see Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Nick Davis, Early Modern Writing and the Privatization of Experience (London: Bloomsbury, 2013); Susan Bernstein, Housing Problems: Writing and Architecture in Goethe, Walpole, Freud, and Heidegger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Kate Retford, “From the Interior to Interiority: The Conversation Piece in Georgian England,” Journal of Design History 20.4 (2007): 291–307; but also Mary Thomas Crane, “Illicit Privacy and Outdoor Spaces in Early Modern England,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 9.1 (2009): 4–22. 56. Graham A. Wilson is speaking about another of Pepys’s bodily self-­preoccupations, also intimately connected to problems of self-­display—­his eyesight. “The Big Brown Eyes of Samuel Pepys,” Archives of Ophthalmology 120 (2002): 972. Writes Richard Ollard, “It is the secret of Pepys’s fascination that one never gets to the end of him”: so goes the construction of the ritually deferred, publicly performed secret of the open diary. Ollard, Pepys: A Biography (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1974), 17. See Aaron B. Kunin, “Other Hands in Pepys’s Diary,” Modern Language Quarterly 65.2 (2004): 195–219. 57. Pepys, a “Survey” of the “present Ill State of my Health,” in Arthur Bryant, Samuel Pepys: The Years of Peril (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 2.410–11. The location of “Aristotle’s well” is lost, but W. D. Bushell suggests that it may refer to Moor Barns or Trinity conduit head, located near what is now Conduit Head Road. Bushell, Hobson’s Conduit: The New River at Cambridge Commonly Called Hobson’s River (Cambridge, 1938), 97–99. 58. Polanyi, “The Structure of Consciousness,” Brain 88 (1965): 801. 59. McKeon, Secret History, 238. 60. Hunter was collecting with an eye toward a “history of the various concretions that are formed in the human body.” Samuel Foart Simmons, An Account of the Life and Writings of the Late William Hunter, M.D., etc. (London, 1783), 50. 61. Hunter had, according to Simmons, “nearly completed that part of [his collection] which relates to urinary and biliary concretions, and prepared a number of illustrations for it before his death” (Account of Hunter, 50). No manuscript is known, though some “short notes” and twenty-­one printer’s proof plates, nearly all taken from Hunter’s calculi and concretions, survive. See Alice J. Marshall’s “Introduction” to William Hunter, Catalogue of the Pathological Preparations of Dr. William Hunter, ed. Marshall and John H. Teacher (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1961), 61. Also see William Tooke et al., A New and General Biographical Dictionary, 15 vols. (London, 1798), 8.302. 62. This is the note of John H. Teacher, who in the late nineteenth century rebuilt Hunter’s collection from his manuscript catalogues. Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Preparations of Dr. William Hunter, ed. Teacher et al. (Glasgow, 1900), 908. 63. Lorna Clymer, “Cromwell’s Head and Milton’s Hair: Corpse Theory in Spectacular Bodies of the Interregnum,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 40.2 (1999): 25. 64. From David Miller, “Secret Subjects, Open Secrets,” Dickens Studies Annual 14 (1985): 17–38. 65. John Evelyn, The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. E. S. de Beer (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 285.

326 Notes to Pages 166–169 66. Sherman, Telling Time, 95. 67. Hans Sloane, “An Account of What Was Remarkable upon Opening the Body of the Honourable Samuell Pepys, Esqre,” in The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys, ed. Joseph R. Tanner, 3 vols. (London: Bell, 1926), 3.311. Sloane identifies morbidity around the ancient wound, and damage to the neck of his bladder. 68. For a more complete discussion of Pepys’s health and the cause of his death, see the companion volume to the ten-­volume Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 10.172–76. 69. Sloane, “Opening the Body,” 3.311–12. Sloane continues: “The stones were all of very irregular figures, with long sharp pointed angles, one of which had allmost piercd the parenchyma just against the hypochondrion. All the parts that were contiguous to the left kidney were extremely inflamed, and that part being mortified to a degree of sphacelus had spread a very great mephitis through the whole abdomen.” On bodies and cutting in Sloane’s works generally, see Kay Dian Kriz, “Curiosities, Commodities and Transplanted Bodies in Hans Sloane’s Natural History of Jamaica,” William and Mary Quarterly 57.1 (2000): 35–78. 70. See W. D. Ian Rolfe, “William and John Hunter: Breaking the Great Chain of Being,” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-­Century Medical World, ed. W.R. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 305. 71. I am thinking of Helen Deutsch’s meditation on Samuel Johnson’s lung, which was prepared as a medical specimen. Would “the label on the jar,” Deutsch wonders, “read ‘emphysema in a 75-­year-­old man’? Or does it proudly bear the author’s name?” Loving Dr. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 30. 72. Pepys had permanently left off diary writing with fears for his failing eyesight ten days before his stone was translated to the company of Richard Evelyn. Pepys, whose own diary begins with his bladder stone, enters Evelyn’s through the mediation of the same thing. 73. Evelyn, Diary, 529. Numerous scholars have worried the question of the size of a tennis ball; “real” or “royal” tennis seems to have been played with a ball about one and a half inches in diameter, or the size (Sloane says of a stone pulled, postmortem, from Pepys’s kidney) of a turkey’s egg. 74. The Hôpital de la Charité was constructed in 1606 by Marie de Médicis and the Brother Hospitallers to provide medical treatment for the poor. Adolphe Lance, Dictionnaire des architectes français (Paris, 1872). 75. Lorna Clymer suggests that “body parts . . . are held as relics or fetishes that partially erase history even as they actively reference a history that is made uncannily present through narrative.” Clymer, “Corpse Theory,” 93. 76. Bann, “Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display,” in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 22. See also Ronald Paulson, Breaking and Remaking: Aesthetic Practice in England, 1700–1820 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989), 4–6. 77. See Bann, “The Rhetoric of Display.” Bann suspects moreover that the poetics of display in general may be about attempting to recapture an absent moment, a sort of restitutive act, in which the culture of Restoration and eighteenth-­century England attempted to recover the full, nostalgically misremembered world as it was before the excesses of iconoclastic piety.

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78. Bann, Under the Sign: John Bargrave as Collector, Traveler, and Witness (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 80. The word-­play on “organ” is more than a pun; the OED suggests that “organ” makes its way into English from the Latin in the sense of an instrument, especially a wind instrument, and only later in the sense of a bodily organ or even a mental one. In each case, the conceptual sense leans on the objective one; the throat is a bodily “organ” because it works like a musical one. 79. Evelyn, Diary, 573. 80. Stewart, On Longing, 126. 81. Bargrave’s objects, gathered from a lifetime of collecting on the Continent, stood in a cabinet in his study; he opened the cabinet for visitors, specified objects—­still in the cabinet—­and told their history as part of a personal history: “I met  .  .  . I remember,” balanced against where “it was,” where it came from, and its “scientific origins.” Bann, “Shrines,” 28–29. 82. Evelyn, Diary, 153. The fate of Becket’s body is discussed by John R. Butler, The Quest for Becket’s Bones: The Mystery of the Relics of St. Thomas Becket of Canterbury (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). 83. See Ben Nilson, Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998), 147–55; M. F. Hearn, “Canterbury Cathedral and the Cult of Becket,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 19–52, esp. 44–47. 84. See Hearn, “Cult of Becket,” 44. 85. See Francis Woodman, Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (London: Routledge, 1982). Robert Willis, The Architectural History of Canterbury Cathedral (1845; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 86. Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Historical Memorials of Canterbury (London: John Murray, 1875), 227. Stanley cites Erasmus, Pilgrimages to . . . Saint Thomas of Canterbury, trans. John Gough Nichols (London: John Bowyer Nichols, 1849), 46–51; John Dart, History and Antiquities of the Cathedral Church of Canterbury (London, 1727) appendix, iv–xviii; and extracts from the “Journey of the Bohemian Ambassador [Leo von Rotzmital] in 1465,” reprinted in Stanley, Historical Memorials, 265–70. 87. Stanley’s account, in the popular and often-­reprinted Historical Memorials, 230. See also Erasmus, Peregrinatio Religionis Ergo, in Colloquies, trans. Craig R. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 295. 88. See Sarah Blick, “Votives, Images, Interaction and Pilgrimage to the Tomb and Shrine of St. Thomas Becket, Canterbury Cathedral,” in Push Me, Pull You: Art and Devotional Interaction in Late Medieval and Renaissance Art, ed. Blick and Laura Gelfand (Leiden: Brill Academic Press, 2011), 21–58. 89. Blick, “Votives,” 58. 90. Kim Bowes, Private Worship, Public Values, and Religious Change in Late Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), chap. 1. 91. Blick, “Votives,” 25. 92. On Becket as healer, and the particular properties of his blood, see Richard Gameson, “The Early Imagery of Thomas Becket,” in Pilgrimage: The English Experience from Becket to Bunyan, ed. Colin Morris and Peter Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46–89. 93. Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Human Nature: Summa Theologiae Ia75–89, transl. Robert Pasnau (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003), 148. Richard Kearney argues that the

328 Notes to Pages 173–175 metaphor of mind as treasury or reliquary becomes “the paradigmatic figure of imagination in Thomistic philosophy, and, one could even argue, in the mainstream of medieval scholasticism as a whole.” Robert Kearney, The Wake of Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1988), 129. But see also Michelle Karnes, Imagination, Meditation, and Cognition in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 23–62. 94. See J. M. Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas, ed. Penelope Murray (London: Routledge, 1991). 95. John Chrysostom, The Golden Book, trans. John Evelyn, in The Miscellaneous Writings of John Evelyn, ed. William Upgott (London: 1825), 115–30. Evelyn twice visited objects associated with St. John Chrysostom while in Rome; the second time (Dec 12, 1664), at St. Peter’s Cathedral, he saw what he believed was the body of St. John, interred alongside what he took to be the head of Thomas Becket. 96. Edward S. Casey, Getting Back into Place: Toward a Renewed Understanding of the Place-­World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 26, 110. 97. Edward S. Casey, “How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena,” in Senses of Place, ed. Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997), 26. 98. Stewart, On Longing, 137–38. 99. On the aesthetics of the relic’s shrine, see Patricia Cox Miller, “‘The Little Blue Flower Is Red’: Relics and the Poetizing of the Body,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 8.2 (2000): 213–36. 100. Louis Marin, Des Pouvoirs de l’Image: Gloses (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), 224. Quoted and translated by Bann in “Shrines,” 20. 101. For these relics, mentioned by Fumerton and others, see Allan Fea, ed., Memoirs of the Martyr King: Being a Detailed Record of the Last Two Years of the Reign of His Most Sacred Majesty King Charles the First (London: John Lane, 1905). 102. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 17. 103. See Clymer, “Corpse Theory.” 104. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa Harlowe, Or the History of a Young Lady (New York: Penguin, 2004), 1384. See Kathleen M. Oliver, “‘With My Hair in Crystal’: Mourning Clarissa,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 23.1 (2010): 35–60. 105. See Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 67–91. 106. See Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 1–24; Helen Deutsch, “Oranges, Anecdote and the Nature of Things,” SubStance 38.1 (2009): 31–55. Also see Sean Silver, “John Evelyn, Numismata, and the Materials of Material History,” Word & Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry 31.3 (2015), forthcoming. 107. Walpole, for instance, owned a locket with a lock of hair taken from the corpse of Mary, Queen of Scots. It is now at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Conn.; Strawberry Hill ID: sh-­000558. 108. Laurence Sterne’s of Eliza Draper, Letter 7, London, March 1767, Letters from Yorick to Eliza. Sterne, A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal. In Works of Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day, 8 vols. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1978–2008), 3.18–19.

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109. Walpole to Mary Berry, Sept. 24, 1794, in The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1937–1983), 12.105. 110. This is Marion Harney’s claim, in Place-­Making for the Imagination: Horace Walpole and Strawberry Hill (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), 129. Strawberry Hill, Harney claims, is “the first purpose-­built antiquarian ‘museum’ interior, a sequence of theatrical spaces . . . specifically designed.” See also Anna Chalcraft and Judith Viscardi, Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Castle (London, 2007); and, by the same authors, Visiting Strawberry Hill: An Analysis of the Eton Copy of the Description of the Villa (Wimbledon, 2005); Michael Snodin, ed., Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill (New Haven, 2009). 111. Ruth Mack, Literary Historicity, 112–15, and “Horace Walpole and the Objects of Literary History,” English Language History 75.2 (2008): 371–72. 112. Mack, Literary Historicity, 117. See also Sean R. Silver, “Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction (2009); Barrett Kalter, Modern Antiques: The Material Past in England, 1660–1780 (Lewisburg, 2012). 113. While the public would therefore seem on the one hand to be “what remains once the element of personal embodiment has been abstracted away” (83), and the private self the product of the turn into inward spaces and inward reflections (the novel, the closet), what Michael McKeon continually discovers is that the public also provides the only meaningful stage for the continual rediscovery of privacy, outwardness for the staging of inwardness. See McKeon, Secret History, 83–95, 219–232. 114. Crane, “Illicit Privacy,” 17. 115. John R. Anderson, How Can the Human Mind Occur in the Physical Universe? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4–7. 116. McKeon, Secret History, 83, 89. 117. Paul de Man touches on this point in “Autobiography as de-­Facement,” Modern Language Notes 94.5 (1979): 921. 118. Designed by architect James Essex and completed in 1777, the Beauclerc Closet and Tower were built to be, in Walpole’s words, “a sanctuary . . . to be saved and not shown to the profane, as the drawings are not for the eyes of the vulgar.” Walpole to George Mason, July 6, 1777, Correspondence, 28.318. The tower was designed after a similar tower at Thornbury castle; this tower contained what was called Buckingham’s Plotting Closet, which was the fabled site of an almost certainly spurious regicidal plot. Walpole’s allusion to the prior tower expresses less of an architectural debt than a cross-­mapping of connotation, a site of intrigue that had passed out of history and into myth. Walpole to the Countess of Upper Ossory, Oct. 9, 1776, Correspondence, 32.322. 119. Walpole to Mason, July 6, 1777, Correspondence, 28.318. 120. Lord Byron, “Preface” to Marino Faliero, in Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1901), 4.339. 121. See Robert Wyndham Ketton-­Cremer, Horace Walpole: A Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966), 215. 122. The stairwell of the public pile of the house stages a version of The Castle of Otranto for its visitors; it offers a vertically arranged vision of public history as it looked to an antiquarian. See Silver, “Visiting Strawberry Hill,” 554–62. 123. In a letter to George Montagu, Walpole records the only known performance of The Mysterious Mother other than Frances Burney’s; Conway and Walpole performed a

330 Notes to Pages 179–182 reading for “Lady Ailesbury, Lady Littleton, and Miss Rich.” Walpole to George Montagu, Apr. 15, 1768, Correspondence, 10.260. 124. “Curiosity” turns up repeatedly in the literature surrounding The Mysterious Mother, not least because the advertisement to the only authorized edition during Walpole’s lifetime uses “curiosity” (and various synonyms) to describe the demand for its publication. See Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother, ed. Frederick S. Frank (Peterborough: Broadview, 2003), 171. 125. But see also Marshall Brown, The Gothic Text (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). Brown suggests that we are misreading Otranto if we think it is public at all; he insists that The Castle of Otranto in fact begins a Gothic tradition remarkable mostly for its intense depictions of psychological interiority. 126. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, in The Works of Horatio Walpole, ed. Peter Sabor, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 3.398. 127. Isaac Reed, in his emendations to David Erskine Baker’s Biographia Dramatica, or, A Companion to the Playhouse, ed. Isaac Reed, 3 vols. (London, 1782), 2.247–49, reports that The Mysterious Mother was “distributed by the author to his particular friends only; and with such strict injunctions of secrecy, that knowing its merits, much astonishment was excited at its being withheld from the public.” Horace Walpole: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge, 1995), 137; also see Richard H. Perkinson, “Walpole and the Biographia Dramatica,” Review of English Studies 15 (1939): 204–6. 128. The Lewis Walpole Library has a handful of such manuscript transcriptions, including LWL Mss Vols. 140–146. 129. See Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (ll. 1.5.60, 2.1.59, 2.1.60, 2.1.129), pp. 189, 193, 193, 195. 130. Walpole, “Postscript,” in The Mysterious Mother, ed. Franks, 255. 131. In the Gothic architecture of the mind, insists Robert J. C. Young, lies the prehistory of the oedipal triangle. “Freud’s [open] Secret,” he proposes, in an essay Swiftian in its irony, is simply that The Interpretation of Dreams is a Gothic novel. “Freud’s Secret: The Interpretation of Dreams was a Gothic Novel,” in The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Laura Marcus (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 206–31. The point is not just that the interior subdivision of space tended to enable private reflection but that the spaces available to eighteenth-­century subjects historically produced an intimately felt, concomitant psychological “interiority,” including a way of theorizing and talking about it. 132. See Maxine Sheets-­Johnstone, The Primacy of Movement (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999), 43–55 and 84n15; 140–61; Mark Johnson, The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 22, 24–27. 133. See Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 136–45, esp. 138. 134. See Walpole to Mrs. Archibald Alison, Feb. 18, 1790, Correspondence, 42.273. 135. Walpole to Lady Ossory, Sept. 15, 1787, Correspondence, 33.576–77. 136. Walpole’s Miscellany: 1786–1795, ed. Lars E. Troide (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 20. 137. The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Knowledge (May 7, 1842): 181. 138. See David Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 207. 139. This is a dramatic subgenre explored in The Eighteenth Century: Theory and

Notes to Pages 182–185

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Interpretation 39.3 (1998), a special issue edited by Ellen Pollak entitled Constructions of Incest in Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century England. See especially J. Douglas Canfield, “Mother as Other: The Eruption of Feminine Desire in Some Late Restoration Incest Plays,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 39.3 (1998): 18–29. 140. Paul Baines, “‘This Theatre of Monstrous Guilt’: Horace Walpole and the Drama of Incest,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 28 (1999): 297. 141. Isaac Reed, “The Mysterious Mother,” Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle 52 (February 1782), 80. 142. These remarks are from an anonymous newspaper clipping in Isaac Reed’s interleaved, extra-­illustrated copy of The Mysterious Mother; I have been unable to trace the clipping further. Reed’s interleaved play is bound with a copy of Eleanora (London, 1751; LWL 24 20 Copy 12). 143. Walpole, The Mysterious Mother (ll. 5.6.72, 76), p. 246. 144. Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, 253. William Mason, in a series of manuscript notes addressed to Walpole, proposed changes to the last scene of the play, turning the Countess’s transgression into a double case of mistaken identity, precisely to soften the “shock” that must otherwise ensue. Lewis Walpole Library, LWL 49 2528A. 145. Walpole, “Postscript,” in The Mysterious Mother, 255. 146. Frances Burney, The Diary and Letters of Madame D’Arblay, ed. Charlotte Barrett, 6 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1905), 3.119–21. 147. Burney, Diary and Letters, 3.171. 148. “What way so easy,” writes one skeptical commentator, to raise the “curiosity of the public . . . as by the parsimonious distribution of a poem, the injunctions of secrecy, and the favourable whisper of friends?” Joseph Haselwood, “The Mysterious Mother,” in Censura Literaria: Containing Titles, Abstracts, and Opinions of Old English Books, ed. Egerton Brydges, 10 vols. (London: 1815), 9.193. Haselwood notes that Walpole practiced a similar imposture in The Castle of Otranto, though this is only partly true; Walpole published under a false name, but did not artificially restrict distribution, insist on secrecy, or prompt “favourable whisper[s].” 149. Walpole to William Cole, Nov. 30, 1780, Correspondence, 2.248. This is a mock-­ lament Walpole repeated to Hannah More (July 10, 1789, Correspondence, 31.309), William Cole (May 24, 1782, Correspondence, 2.319); Walpole also offered it as advice to John Fitzbatrick, 2nd Earl of Upper Ossory (June 23, 1771, Correspondence, 32.45). Walpole echoes Jonathan Swift, while incidentally drawing attention to the difference between Swift’s outwardly directed satire, and Walpole’s own, which is mostly turned inward: “A Copy of Verses kept in a Cabinet, and only shewn to a few Friends, is like a Virgin much sought after and admired; but when printed and published, is like a common Whore, whom any body may purchase for half a Crown.” See Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects,” in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, vol. 4, A Proposal for Correcting the English Tongue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1957), 249. 150. Years later, James Anderton noted that the play remained scarce and desirable; “copies have been sold,” he notes, “at very high prices.” Anderton’s copy of A Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill Collected by Horace Walpole in the Lewis Walpole Library: LWL Quarto 485 842 C76 1, copy 4, p. 42. 151. The trajectory from visible to invisible, outside to inside, was part of larger developments in English culture, a trend toward subdivision of space and the elaboration of

332 Notes to Pages 185–188 the rituals and the architecture of privacy. Public rooms, encountered first, give way to the increasingly private spaces located in the back of the house, in which objects that might have signified as part of a public discourse are made instead to articulate an ostensibly more personal vector. This argument has recently come under fire, but the general contours seem to be true. See McKeon, Secret History; Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009); Crane, “Illicit Privacy”; Orest Ranum, “The Scene of Intimacy,” in A History of Private Life, ed. R. Chartier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 211. 152. See Malcolm Baker, “Public Images for Private Spaces? The Place of Sculpture in the Georgian Domestic Interior,” Journal of Design History 20.4 (2007): 309–22. 153. Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics, 71–72. 154. See Maurice Howard, The Early Tudor Country House (London, George Philip, 1987), 85–88, and Ranum, “The Scene of Intimacy,” 210–11. 155. The Beauclerc Closet in the Beauclerc Tower contained a small number of artifacts related to Diana Beauclerc—­some miscellaneous drawings by her hand, her coat of arms in the window glass, and a copy of her portrait by Joshua Reynolds, among others. 156. Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill Press, 1784), 78–79. 157. Walpole, Description (1784), 80. A flyleaf note on Walpole’s copy of The Mysterious Mother, now at the Lewis Walpole Library (LWL 49 2528B), reads: “This copy to be kept in the Beauclerc Closet to explain Lady Di Beauclerc’s Drawings. H.W.” 158. See Burney, Diary and Letters, 3.119–21. 159. Walpole is referring to actress Jane Pope. Walpole to George Mason, July 6, 1777, Correspondence, 28.318. 160. Also in this room, by 1774, was a locket containing (now at the Lewis Walpole Library, sh-­000558), according to the engraving on its back, the “Hair of Mary Tudor Queen of France cut from her head Sept 6 1784 [sic], when her tomb at St. Edmundsbury was opened.” Walpole, A Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole (Twickenham: Strawberry Hill Press, 1774), 158. Walpole’s 1774 Description was revised a decade later; the 1784 edition (see note 157, above) contains the same text (p. 92). 161. Anderton’s copy of A Catalogue of the Classic Contents of Strawberry Hill, 17.32. 162. See Wilmarth S. Lewis, Rescuing Horace Walpole (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 109. 163. Casey, “Space to Place,” 27. 164. Johnson, The Meaning of the Body, 11. 165. Walpole to Lady Ossory, June 3, 1778, Correspondence, 33.17. 166. For her part, Burney short-­circuited the performance she did not know she was acting; she borrowed the queen’s copy, which was one of the few copies Walpole was never able to retrieve. It was this copy which Burney read in private, and which swiftly resolved the curiosity of her suspense into revulsion and indignation. Burney, Diary and Letters, 3.119–121.

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Case 5. Conception 1. On Walpole’s sudden insight, see The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938–1984), 6.145n13; the editors cite Warren Hunting Smith, “Strawberry Hill and the Castle of Otranto,” Times Literary Supplement 1790 (May 23, 1936), 440. 2. Walpole to Madame du Deffand, Jan. 27, 1775, The Correspondence of Horace Walpole, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis, 48 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938–1984), 6.145. The translation is mine. The original reads: “En entrant dans un des collèges que j’avais entièrement oublié, je me trouvais précisément dans la cour de mon château. Les tour, les portes, la chapelle, la grande sale, tout y répondait avec la plus grande exactitude. Enfin, l’idée de ce collège m’était restée dans la tête sans y penser, et je m’en étais servi pour le plan de mon château sans m’en apercevoir; de sorte que je croyais entrer tout de bon dans celui d’Otrante.” See also Robert Wyndham Ketton-­Cremer, Horace Walpole: A Biography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), 194. 3. These well-­known “origins” are recounted by Frederick S. Frank in his introduction to The Castle of Otranto and The Mysterious Mother (Ontario: Broadview Press, 2003). 4. This is Walpole’s explanation of the origin of the memory; Walpole “had passed three years of [his] youth” in Cambridge (“j’avais passé trois années de ma jeunesse”), returning five years after the 1764 publication of Otranto. Walpole, Correspondence, 6.145. 5. Jonathan Richardson, An Essay on the Whole Art of Criticism as It Relates to Painting, in Two Discourses (London, 1719), 151. Richardson’s formulation captures the paradox of invention. “All that is done in a Picture is done by Invention,” Richardson notes, while also insisting that “Perhaps nothing that is done is Properly, and Strictly Invention, but derived from somthing already seen” (150, 151). 6. On Otranto as itself an original achievement, see Lord Byron, “Preface” to Marino Faliero, in Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge, 13 vols. (London: John Murray, 1901), 4.339. Walpole’s novel is generally agreed to have inspired the genre of the Gothic. See for instance Walter Scott, “Horace Walpole,” in Miscellaneous Prose Works, 6 vols. (Boston, 1829), 3.222– 40; Markman Ellis, The History of Gothic Fiction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 17–47; George Haggerty, Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 15–19; Everett Franklin Bleiler, “Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto,” in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1966), xiii. Otranto is itself about origins, the breaking of ground, and unexpected surprise; it is a novel about things turning up where no-­one was looking for them. See Sean R. Silver, “Visiting Strawberry Hill: Horace Walpole’s Gothic Historiography,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction (2009): 535–64; Ruth Mack, Literary Historicity: Literature and Historical Experience in Eighteenth-­ Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 113–136. 7. Walpole to Sir David Dalrymple, April 4, 1760, Correspondence, 15.66. 8. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. (London: Everyman, 1991), 6. Shandy refers to the pair of eggs laid by Leda, each of which contained twins: Castor and Pollux in the first, with Clytemnestra and Helen of Troy in the second. 9. John Locke, “An Examination of P. Malebranche,” in Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke, ed. Peter King and Anthony Collins (London, 1706), 150–51. 10. See Martha Woodmansee, “The Genius and Copyright: Economic and Legal Conditions of the Emergence of the ‘Author,’” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 17.4 (1984): 425–48;

334 Notes to Pages 192–195 Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship,” Representations 23 (1988): 51–85; Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 3–30. 11. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (2.12.1), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 1.214. 12. For some studies of this historical question, James Engell, The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981); Christopher R. Miller, “Genius and Originality 1750–1830: Young, Wordsworth, and Shelley,” in A Companion to British Literature: Volume III: Long Eighteenth-­Century Literature 1660–1837, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr. et al. (Chichester: John Wiley, 2014), 312–28. 13. Jonathan Lamb, “Sterne’s System of Imitation,” Modern Language Review 76.4 (1981), 794–810. 14. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 160. 15. Locke, Two Treatises of Government (2.5.27), ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 305–7. 16. Joshua Reynolds insisted that the works of an artist’s predecessors should be “considered as a magazine of common property . . . whence every man has a right to take what materials he pleases; and if he has the art of using them, they are supposed to become to all intents and purposes his own property.” The “daily food and nourishment of the mind of an Artist,” Reynolds concludes, “is found in the great works of his predecessors.” Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 107, 217. Lysander Spooner, writing roughly a century later, would simply remark that “the right of property in ideas” is “proved by Analogy . . . with property in general.” Spooner, The Law of Intellectual Property (New York, 1855), 1. 17. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought (New York: Basic, 1999), 241–42; Raymond W. Gibbs, Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 98–99. 18. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 160. 19. Locke, Essay (3.1.5), 2.4–5. Italics are Locke’s. On this phrase and its immediate legacy, see Brigitte Nerlich, “Polysemy: Past and Present,” in Polysemy; Flexible Patterns of Meaning in Mind and Language, ed. Nerlich et al. (The Hague: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003), 50–57. 20. As an example, Leder, evidently unaware of Locke’s remarks, offers a strikingly similar meditation on the digestion of an apple. Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 38–42. 21. Because it follows the route of ideas as they are actively seized and incorporated, Locke’s list also anticipates the “Preface” to the 1798 Lyrical Ballads, for whom poetry is the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings . . . recollected in tranquility.” I am grateful to Brad Pasanek (personal conversation) for this point. 22. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 160. 23. Serres, The Natural Contract, trans. Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 33. 24. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 62; Shandy refers to Locke, Essay (2.1.19). 25. For instance, “And there is nothing can be plainer to a man than the clear and distinct perception he has of those simple ideas; which, being each in itself uncompounded, contains in it nothing but one uniform appearance, or conception in the mind, and is not distinguishable into different ideas.” Locke, Essay (2.2.1), 1.144–45.

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26. See, for instance, Peter Walmsley, Locke’s Essay and the Rhetoric of Science (Cranbury: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 59–72. Locke evinced a lifelong interest in the mysteries of generation. He made extensive notes from William Harvey’s De Generatione (1651), owned numerous studies in fetal development by Dutch, Italian, and French experts, and owned at least two popular handbooks on childbirth. He may, furthermore, have had some “obstetric and pediatric responsibilities” during his time at Exeter House. As Walmsley notes, Locke “shares with the embryologist a sense of the explanatory powers of the study of origins” (65). A few of Locke’s obstetric notes survive in the Lovelace Collection at the Bodleian. See, for instance, Kenneth Dewhurst, “Locke’s Midwifery Notes,” Lancet 264 (1954): 490–91. 27. John Locke, “An Examination of P. Malebranche,” in Posthumous Works of Mr. John Locke, ed. Peter King and Anthony Collins (London, 1706), 150–51. 28. See Judith Hawley, “The Anatomy of Tristram Shandy,” in Literature and Medicine During the Eighteenth Century, ed. Marie Mulvey Roberts and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 84–100. 29. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 54, 74–75. 30. For a similar study of “source,” see David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 31. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, 344–45. 32. See Raymond Stephanson, “Tristram Shandy and the Art of Conception,”
in Vital Matters: Eighteenth-­Century Views of Conception, Life, and Death, ed. Helen Deutsch and Mary Terrall (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 93–108; Tita Chico, ‘“The More I write, the More I shall Have to Write’: The Many Beginnings of Tristram Shandy,” in Narrative Beginnings, ed. Brian Richardson (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2008), 83–95; Bonnie Blackwell, “Tristram Shandy and the Theater of the Mechanical Mother,” English Language History 68.1 (2001): 81–133. 33. Sir Philip Sidney, “An Apologie for Poetrie,” in The Prose Works of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. Albert Feuillerat, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), 3.8. 34. Richardson, Essay on . . . Painting, 139. 35. See Christopher Fanning, “On Sterne’s Page: Spatial Layout, Spatial Form, and Social Space in Tristram Shandy,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 10.4 (1998): 429–50. “The history of printing,” Peter Stallybrass reminds us, “is crucially a history of the blank”—­of “printed works designed to be filled in by hand.” Stallybrass, “Little Jobs: Broadsides and the Printing Revolution,” Agent of Change: Print Culture Studies After Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, ed. Sabrina Alcorn Baron et al. (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007), 340. 36. See Peter Briggs, “Locke’s Essay and the Tentativeness of Tristram Shandy,” in Critical Essays on Laurence Sterne, ed. Melvyn New (New York: G. K. Hall, 1998), 87–109. 37. And not the only such. David Brewer recently located a copy of Tristram Shandy with the blank page filled in. David A. Brewer, “A Drawing on the Blank Page,” Shandean 17 (2006): 158–61. 38. The eighteenth-­century saw midwifery transformed from a tradition managed largely by women to a “modernized” field studied in large part by men. See Adrian Wilson, The Making of Man-­Midwifery: Childbirth in England, 1660–1770 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 39. Hunter is still considered to be the principal figure in the modernization of obstetric medicine. He demonstrated among other things that a mother and fetus share nutrients

336 Notes to Pages 197–200 but not a blood supply. Robert H. Young, “The History of British Gynaecological Pathology,” Histopathology 54.2 (2009): 144–55. 40. For a few discussions in the rich and complex tradition of medical research crossing complexly with the history and rights of women and the poor, see Mary Terrall, “Material Impressions: Conception, Sensibility and Inheritance,”
in Vital Matters, ed. Deutsch and Terrall, 109–29; Marie-­Hélène Huet, Monstrous Imagination (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13–35. 41. See Wilson, Man-­Midwifery. During the seventeenth century, by Wilson’s account, “over 70%” of “male practice in midwifery consisted of emergency calls” (49). 42. See Wilson, Man-­Midwifery, 25–46. 43. See Blackwell, “Mechanical Mother”; Arthur Cash, “The Birth of Tristram Shandy: Sterne and Dr. Burton,” in Sexuality in Eighteenth-­Century Britain, ed. Paul-­Gabriel Boucé (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 198–224; John Glaister, Dr. William Smellie and His Contemporaries (Glasgow, 1894), chap. 16; Robert W. Johnstone, William Smellie, the Master of British Midwifery (Edinburgh: Livingstone, 1952), chap. 13; Walter Radcliffe, “Dr. John Burton and His Whimsical Contrivance,” Medical Bookman and Hisotrian 2 (1948): 349–55; Alban Doran, “Burton (‘Dr. Slop’): His Forceps and His Foes,” Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology of the British Empire 23 (1913): 3–24, 65–86; Hawley, “Anatomy of Tristram Shandy.” 44. See Wilson, Man-­Midwifery, 107–58. 45. Mary Terrall, “Material Impressions”; Raymond Stephanson, “Tristram Shandy and the Art of Conception.” 46. Hunter had “considerable experience in making large casts of anatomical material,” notes biographer and editor Helen Brock. Among other things, he cast or oversaw the casting of at least two whole bodies, flayed to show the musculature, and personally undertook the casting of at least twenty-­one preparations of the gravid uterus. Brock, The Correspondence of Dr. William Hunter, 1740–1783 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007), 2.196–97. 47. See Arden G. Christen and Joan A. Christen, “Martin Van Butchell (1735–1814): The Eccentric, ‘Kook’ Dentist of Old London” History of Dentistry 47.3 (1999): 99–104. “Extract,” London Evening Post (May 9, 1775). See also Hunter, Correspondence, 1.184–85; Jesse Dobson, “Some Eighteenth-­Century Experiments in Embalming,” Journal of the History of Medicine (October 1953), 433–37; Jolene Zigarovich, “Preserved Remains: Embalming Practices in Eighteenth-­Century England” Eighteenth-­Century Life 33.3 (2009): 94–95; Paul Youngquist, Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 129–30. 48. Sir Richard Jebb’s untitled verses are quoted in William Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by William Hunter, ed. Simon Foart Simmons (London: 1784), 55. 49. See Martin Kemp, Dr. William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts (Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 1975), 16. 50. Hunter, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata (London, 1774), n.p. 51. William Hunter, Lectures to the Royal Academy of Arts, in Dr. William Hunter, ed. Kemp (Glasgow, 1975), 38–39. 52. Hunter, “Preface” to the Atlas, n.p. 53. Daston and Galison’s argument strives to locate a single organizing aesthetic in both parts of Hunter’s Atlas—­what they call “truth-­to-­nature.” Objectivity (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 2007), 98.

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54. On Hunter’s practice and its relationship to his skill with wet mounting, wax injections, and other techniques of specimen preparation and preservation, see John H. Teacher, “Introduction,” in Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Preparations of Dr. William Hunter, ed. Teacher et al. (Glasgow, 1900), xxi–lxxi. 55. See Carin Berkowitz, “Systems of Display: The Making of Anatomical Knowledge in Enlightenment Britain,” British Journal for the History of Science (2012): 1–29.The “hardness” of the geometrical diagram may be part of all of Hunter’s drawings, which substituted the hardness of outline for the soft surfaces seen by the unaccustomed eye. See Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 77. 56. Numerous manuscript notes of Hunter’s lectures have survived. One published version, taken from a student’s notes, also exists. Anon., The Practice of Midwifery, with the Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, by a Pupil of the Late Dr. Hunter (London, 1783). Also see Edward A. Schumann, “William Hunter Lecturing on Obstetrics and Infant Care,” Transactions and Studies of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia 9.3 (December 1941): 155–83. 57. See Aris Sarafianos, who calls this Hunter’s “hyper-­naturalism.” “The Politics of ‘Prodigious Excitement’: Art, Anatomy and Physiology for the Age of Opposition,” Center and Clark Newsletter 50 (2009): 5. 58. Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures. I am indebted to Aris Sarafianos’s forthcoming essay on Hunter’s “exhaustive” aesthetic. See Sarafianos, ““Spectacles of Dissection and the Transoceanic Politics of Anatomical Hyper-­Naturalism: The Traffic of Scientific Affects in Hunter, Jenty and Rymsdyk,” in The British Atlantic in an Age of Revolution and Reaction, ed. Saree Makdisi and Michael Meranze (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, forthcoming). 59. For instance, Roberta McGrath, Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 72–89; Barbara Duden, Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 38–41. See also Charles T. Wolfe, “Vitalism and the Resistance to Experimentation on Life in the Eighteenth Century,” Journal of the History of Biography, 46.2 (2013): 255–82. 60. In John Bender’s elegant formulation, “to open a human body is to enter the realm where life and death cohabit.” Bender, Ends of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012), 182. I am grateful to Professor Bender for sharing a pair of unpublished talks (“What Was Pornography” and “Anatomy and Pornography”) from his work on gross anatomy and the scientific view. 61. Youngquist, Monstrosities, 138. See also Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1980), esp. 32–33. For further discussion see Sandra Harding, Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?: Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Katherine Park, The Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (New York: Zone, 2006); the September, 2006 special issue of Isis focusing on Merchant’s contribution to the reassessment of the scientific revolution; and Ludmilla J. Jordanova, “Gender, Generation and Science: William Hunter’s Obstetrical Atlas,” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-­Century Medical World, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 385–412. Ruth Richardson’s Death, Dissection, and the Destitute (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) takes up the dependence of the science of anatomy on a massive

338 Notes to Pages 201–203 underclass. See also Don Shelton, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 103 (2010): 46–50. 62. Lyle Massey, “Pregnancy and Pathology: Picturing Childbirth in Eighteenth-­ Century Obstetric Atlases,” The Art Bulletin 87.1 (2005): 84. 63. See Hunter, Correspondence, 2.129; Elmer Belt, Leonardo the Anatomist (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1955); Hunter, Two Introductory Lectures, 37–39; Massey, “Pregnancy and Pathology,” 80. Kenneth Clark has proposed that Hunter was responsible for Leonardo’s reputation as an anatomist. Clark, “Dr. William Hunter on the Windsor Leonardos and His Volume of Drawings Attributed to Pietro da Cortona,” Burlington Magazine 118 (1976): 228–31. 64. William Hunter, Correspondence, 2.129. 65. Belt, Leonardo the Anatomist. Hunter discusses his study of Leonardo’s sketches in his Two Introductory Lectures, 37–39. In correspondence, he referred to Leonardo as “perhaps the best Anatomist of his time. . . . It would astonish you tosee [sic] how much he has labored in Anatomy.” Hunter to Albrecht van Haller, in Correspondence, 2.129. 66. Anon. MS notes, William Hunter, “Lectures Anatomical and Chirurgical” (1775), Wellcome MS 2966, np. 67. See Charles D. O’Malley and J. B. de C. M. Saunders, trans. and eds., Leonardo on the Human Body (New York: Dover, 1983); George Tombs, “Man the Machine: A History of a Metaphor from Leonardo da Vinci to H. G. Wells” (Ph.D. dissertation, McGill University, 2002), suggests that Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, the well-­known sketch of an idealized human body within circle and square, was “the first image of Man the machine” (47). 68. Park, Secrets of Women, 27. 69. Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1967), 160. 70. See Hunter, Correspondence, 2.177–79. 71. Jan van Rymsdyk, Museum Britannicum, Being and Exhibition of . . . the British Museum (London: 1778), 3. Rymsdyk was himself an active collector of art, who owned a sizeable fraction of the collection once belonging to Jonathan Richardson. See Jennifer Tonkovich, “‘Rymsdyk’s Museum’: Jan van Rymsdyk as a Collector of Old Master Drawings,” Journal of the History of Collections 17.2 (2005): 155–71. 72. “For questionlesse in knowledge,” writes Browne, “there is no slender difficulty, and truth which wise men say doth lye in a well, is not recoverable but by exantlation.” Thomas Browne, Pseudodoxia Epidemica (London, 1646), 18. 73. Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579–1644) embodied many of the mixed influences of early practitioners of the New Philosophy. On the one hand, he was deeply indebted to Paracelsian alchemy, while, on the other, he was part of the new empirical circles that included William Harvey and Francis Bacon. Among the most influential figures influenced by Helmont’s alchemical remarks were Robert Boyle and John Locke. See, for instance, Peter Anstey, “John Locke and Helmontian Medicine,” in The Body as Object and Instrument of Knowledge, ed. Charles T. Wolf and Ofer Gal (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 93–117. The best account of Helmont’s life, intellectual debts, and influence is Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont: Reformer of Science and Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 74. Aris Sarafianos chiefly understands “exantlation” to refer to the exhaustive rendering of detail—­exantlation, that is, as a practice. Sarafianos, “Spectacles of Dissection.” See

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also Sarafianos, “The Contracitility of Burke’s Sublime and Heterodocies in Medicine and Art,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69.1 (2008): 23–48. 75. Browne was, as Kevin Killeen puts it, “a frequent anatomist and vivisectionist.” Killeen, “‘The Doctor Quarrels with Some Pictures’: Exegesis and Animals in Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica,” Early Science and Medicine 12 (2007): 19. There is a small chance that Rymsdyk takes his aesthetic keynote not from Browne but from Jonathan Swift; it is Swift who first explicitly links “exantlation” with its partner trope, incision. “That neither the world nor ourselves may any longer suffer by . . . misunderstandings,” the narrator of A Tale of a Tub opines, “I have been prevailed on, after much importunity from my friends, to travail in a complete and laborious dissertation upon the prime productions of our society, which, besides their beautiful externals for the gratification of superficial readers, have darkly and deeply couched under them the most finished and refined systems of all sciences and arts, as I do not doubt to lay open by untwisting or unwinding, and either to draw up by exantlation or display by incision.” Swift, A Tale of a Tub, ed. Herbert Davis, vol. 1 of The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift¸ ed. Davis et al., 16 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 1.40. Swift, like Rymsdyk, is thinking of Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica. 76. Hunter, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi, np. 77. See John Hunter, Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Oeconomy (London, 1786), 65–66. The preparations associated with John Hunter’s remarks are at the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, RCSHC/2457-­62. 78. Daston and Galison locate the truth to nature in the images of the first half of Hunter’s Atlas, which “carry the stamp of the real,” they argue, “only to eyes that have been taught the conventions . . . of that brand of realism.” See Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 77, 98. 79. From anonymous manuscript notes of Hunter’s lectures, University of Glasgow MS Gen 1630, 42. Numerous manuscript copies of Hunter’s anatomical lectures survive (for instance, University of Glasgow MS Gen 702, 720–721, 769–772, and 790), many of which treat his lectures on obstetric anatomy. 80. William Cruikshank, “Experiments in which . . . the Ova of Rabbits Were Found in Fallopian Tubes,” Philosophical Transactions 87 (1797), 197–214. Though not published until years later, partly because the results were suppressed by Hunter himself, Cruikshank had discussed the experiments as early as 1778. See Hunter, Correspondence, 2.280–82. 81. See N. A. McCullough, D. Russell, and S. W. McDonald, “William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus: The Specimens and Plates,” Clinical Anatomy 15 (2002): 253–62. McCullough et al., count thirteen subjects in addition to the single subject in plates I–IX, but make no allowance for unborn fetuses. 82. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the “Frenzy of the Visible” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 40. In the figures of women, writes Williams, the first filmmaker “abandons” the investigation of “movement altogether for the highly charged emotional tone of what could only be called longing.” See also Jean Marie Goulemot’s related argument about the relationship between pornographic literature and the novel in Forbidden Texts: Erotic Literature and Its Readers in Eighteenth-­Century France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995). 83. Glasgow MS Gen 1630, 57. 84. Hunter, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi, 26ff.

340 Notes to Pages 206–211 85. But see also Martin Kemp, “The Mark of Truth,” in Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. William Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121. 86. I am indebted to Matthias Bruhn’s history of “tomography,” the cross-­sectional rendering of medical preparations, developed in “The Image and the Blade: A Tomological History of Vision,” at Image Operations (ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, 2014). 87. Glasgow MS Gen 1630, 41. 88. Anon. MS, William Hunter, “Lectures Anatomical and Chirurgical,” Wellcome MS 2966, 52r. 89. See Hunter, Correspondence, 279–83. See also Shirley A. Roe, Matter, Life and Generation: Eighteenth-­Century Embryology and the Haller-­Wolff Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Hunter’s untitled MS at the Royal College of Physicians, London MS 367; Wellcome MS 2965, 52r; Lois N. Magner, A History of the Life Sciences, 3d ed. (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2002), 164–66; Thomas Ogle and John Hunter, “The Case of a Young Woman Who Poisoned Herself in the First Month of Her Pregnancy,” Transactions of the Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge 2 (1794): 63–82; John Hunter, Observations on Certain Parts of the Animal Economy, ed. Richard Owen (Philadelphia: Haswell, Barrington, 1840), 91–92. 90. Anon., The Practice of Midwifery, with the Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus, by a Pupil of the Late Dr. Hunter (London, 1783), 14 and 31–33. Sp Coll Hunterian Add. f35, University of Glasgow. 91. Quoted in Francis J. P. Broun, Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Collection of Paintings (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 92. Joseph Farington, The Farington Diary, ed. James Greig, 8 vols. (London: Hutchinson, 1922), 1.147. 93. Farington, Diary, 1.147. 94. See Broun, Reynolds’s Collection, 83. Northcote, The Life of Sir Joshua Reynolds (London, 1819), 189. 95. Northcote, Life of Reynolds, 189. 96. Svetlana Alpers calls this practice, which was evidently common, “a kind of vandalism.” The Vexations of Art: Velázquez and Others (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 211. 97. See The Complete Work of Raphael, ed. Luisa Becherucci et al. (New York: Harrison House, 1969), 188; Konrad Oberhuber, “Leonardo and Raphael in Rome: Part II,” in Essays Presented to Myron P. Gilmore, ed. Sergio Bertelli et al. (Florence: La Nuova Italia, 1978), 2.37. 98. Northcote, Life of Reynolds, 22. 99. Reynolds “tried experiments with several capital ancient paintings” to “ascertain their grounds, to trace their process in laying on, and to analyze the chymical mixture of their various tints” (Northcote, Life of Reynolds, 23). For the importance of recipes and techniques to the history of art—­and the secrecy of rival studios in guarding them—­see Marc Gotlieb, “The Painter’s Secret: Invention and Rivalry from Vasari to Balzac,” Art Bulletin 84.3 (2002): 469–90. 100. Cunningham, The Life and Writings of Sir Joshua Reynolds (New York: Barnes, 1860), 54. 101. Broun, Reynolds’s Collection, 83. 102. Giulio completed for instance a Triumph of Titus and Vespasian (Musée de

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Louvre, Paris) and a fresco of Cupid and Psyche (Palazzo del Tè, Mantua), each of which shares different formal features with Raphael’s Galatea. 103. See Frank Sommer, “Poussin’s ‘Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite’: A Re-­ Identification,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24.3–4 (1961): 323–27. 104. See Alan Griffin, “Unrequited Love: Polyphemus and Galatea in Ovid’s Metaphorphoses,” Greece and Rome 30 (1983): 190–97. 105. See Edward Dudley’s discussion of Galatea’s “cultural epiphany” in “Goddess on the Edge: The Galatea Agenda in Raphael, Garcilaso and Cervantes,” Caliope 1.1–2 (1995): 27–45. Raphael’s Galatea, writes Dudley, is an “unparalleled coup de maître. Its theoretical self-­consciousness seeks to transcend the limits of the art in general” (34). 106. Alpers, The Vexations of Art, 181. 107. See Carl Goldstein, “Towards a Definition of Academic Art,” Art Bulletin 57.1 (1975): 102–9, esp. 104–6. 108. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 99. 109. William Hazlitt, “Essays on Reynolds’ Discourses,” in The Champion (Nov. 27, 1814), 321. 110. William Blake’s note in Reynolds, “Discourse III,” in The Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Edmond Malone (London, 1798), 50. British Library shelfmark C.45.e.18–20. 111. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 96. 112. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 104. 113. Reynolds, Discourse II, 26, 27. 114. See Martin Royalton-­Kisch, “Reynolds as a Collector,” in Gainsborough and Reynolds in the British Museum (London: Trustees of the British Museum, 1978), 61–62. 115. See Broun, Reynolds’s Collection, 147. 116. See Richard Wendorf, Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Painter in Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 117. Broun, Reynolds’s Collection, 17. 118. Northcote, Life of Reynolds, 1.119. Reynolds increasingly imagined his collection as a public resource. He had become involved in establishing the Royal Academy of Arts in part to provide a magazine of materials for Britain’s young painters; the bulk of his lectures were delivered in the middle of the very collection he designed as the institution’s most important resource. It was one of the great disappointments of his life that the Academy, as Reynolds was wrapping up the affairs of his life, refused to buy his collection. See, for example, Reynolds, “A Plan of an Academy . . . of painting, sculpture, architecture, and the arts” (London, 1755). 119. Reynolds, Discourse VI, 107. 120. See Frederick Whiley Hilles, “The Library of a Painter,” in The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge: Archon, 1967), 112–27. 121. See also M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), 159–63, where he treats of “The Mechanical Theory of Literary Invention.” 122. A similar point is raised by Ephraim Chambers, in his magisterial Cyclopaedia, or an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (London, 1728), xii: “Even at most, what we are said to invent, is only what results, or arises from something already in us. There is no new Matter got by inventing: that can only come by the way of Sense and Observation. . . . The sprightly Imagination is led, on various Occasions, to compound its Ideas, and many

342 Notes to Pages 214–217 of ’em, so oddly and boldly that we take its Production for new Things; and thus think we invent ’em, because they did not exist in us before in that form: tho the Matter or Elements thereof did.” 123. Ernest Lee Tuveson, The Imagination as a Means of Grace: Locke and the Aesthetics of Romanticism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960), 17. 124. Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-­ Century England,” in Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (London: Routledge, 2008), 71. 125. Karl R. Wallace, Francis Bacon on the Nature of Man (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1969), 114. 126. See Gombrich, “Reynolds’s Theory and Practice of Imitation,” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 80.467 (1942): 45. 127. Reynolds was working from Francis Bacon, Of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning (London, 1629; or Oxford, 1633), 195. 128. “Sir Joshua’s Reading Notes,” ed. Frederick Whiley Hilles, in The Literary Career of Sir Joshua Reynolds (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), 214. 129. Reynolds, Discourse XII, 215. 130. See Sean Silver, “The Prehistory of Serendipity, from Bacon to Walpole and Merton,” Isis 106.3 (2015). 131. Bacon, Novum Organum, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., 14 vols. (London, 1857–1874), 4.97–98. See Lisa Jardine, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 70; Jardine argues that many of the phrases of Bacon’s method are borrowed from rhetorical handbooks. 132. On the empiricist foundations of Reynolds’s notion of “form,” see Charles A. Cramer, Abstraction and the Classical Ideal, 1760–1920 (Cranbury, N.J.: Associated University Presses, 2010), 38–68, 66. 133. Reynolds, Discourse III, 44–45. 134. See, for example, John Mahoney’s remarks in “Reynolds’s ‘Discourses on Art’: The Delicate Balance of Neoclassic Aesthetics,” British Journal of Aesthetics (1978): 126–29. Trowbridge, “Platonism and Sir Joshua Reynolds,” English Studies 21.1–6 (1939): 1–7. See also Walter J. Hipple Jr., “General and Particular in the Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Study in Method,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 11.3 (1953): 231–47; Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp, 45. 135. See Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 142: “Reynolds does sometimes suggest, in word and phrase, the Neoplatonic ideal. But nothing is actually further from his meaning than the notion of supernal reality mediated to the artist by inner vision, by mystical contemplation. For Reynolds the ideal does not descend to the artist or beholder from supersensory archetypes; it arises from continuously and vigorously pursued empirical observation and search.” 136. See Randall Davies, Six Centuries of Painting (London, 1914), 273. 137. Reynolds, quoted in Northcote, Reynolds, 2.24. 138. Reynolds, Discourse XI, 198. 139. Reynolds, Discourse XII, 219, 221. 140. Reynolds, Discourse II, 30. 141. Reynolds, Discourse III, 47–48.

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142. “Né d’altro si pregiò Vulcan mai tanto, / né ’l vero stesso ha piú del ver che questo; / e quanto l’arte intra sé non comprende, / la mente imaginando chiaro intende.” Original text and translation are from Angelo Poliziano, The Stanze of Angelo Poliziano, trans. David Quaint (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1979), 61. 143. E. H. Gombrich, The Story of Art (1950; London: Phaidon, 1995), 319–20. 144. Dudley, “Goddess on the Edge,” cites Christof Theones’s discussion in “Galatea: Tentativi di Avvicinamento,” in Raffaelo a Roma (Rome: Elefante, 1986), 59–72. 145. See Clark Hulse, The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 86–87; Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, trans. Joseph Peake (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 59–60. On the contested authorship of the letter, see John Shearman, Raphael in Early Modern Sources, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 1.734, and Shearman, “Castiglione’s Portrait of Raphael,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 38.1 (1994): 69–97. 146. Raphael is moreover responding to Poliziano’s Neoplatonism. Christina Storey summarizes scholarship on Poliziano’s Neoplatonism in “The Philosophy, the Poet, and the Fragment: Ficino, Poliziano, and Le stanze per la giostra” The Modern Language Review 98.3 (2003): 602–19. 147. See Hagstrum, Sister Arts: “For Reynolds, and for his friend Dr. Johnson, general nature is a synthesis of scattered excellencies, the abstraction of general form and species from particular manifestations. Such general forms are in nature; otherwise our search would be vain. General beauty is like scientific law: it is disclosed not by revelation but by research” (143). 148. Her “oblique movement as she guides her dolphins through the sexual temptations of the scene” also accomplishes a delicate renegotiation of the “various conflicting forces operative in the lives of the artist . . . as well as in the political and aesthetic issues animating the world of contemporary art.” Dudley, “Goddess on the Edge,” 31–37. Rona Geffen argues that the Galatea’s triumph is to isolate Raphael’s idealist style from the rougher, fleshier styles of Sebastiano and Michelangelo. Geffen, Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 234. 149. A collection of Rymsdyk’s drawings is currently held at Glasgow Special Collections, MS Hunter 658 (Az.1.4). On Rymsyk, see Harry Mount, “Van Rymsdyk and the Nature-­Menders: An Early Victim of the Two Cultures Divide,” British Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies 29.1 (2006), 79–96; Jennifer Tonkovich, “‘Rymsdyk’s Museum.’” 150. See David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 976. 151. Wendorf, Reynolds, 2. 152. Reynolds, Discourse I, 5. 153. Quoted in Wendorf, Reynolds, 3. Wendorf quotes Royal Academy ms Nor/5 (Sept. 21, 1771). 154. Hunter, Correspondence, 1.293. 155. Quoted in John H. Teacher, “Introduction,” Catalogue of the Anatomical and Pathological Preparations of Dr. William Hunter (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1900), xlix. 156. A compact discussion of this point is raised by Martin Kemp in “True to Their Natures: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 46.1 (1992), 77–88.

344 Notes to Pages 222–227 157. See Johann Zoffany, William Hunter Lecturing to the Royal Academy (1772), now at the Royal College of Physicians, London. Reynolds himself may be seen in the audience, identified by his emblematic ear trumpet. 158. This is according to the object records of the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow. See also David Mannings, Sir Joshua Reynolds: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 976. 159. See McCulloch, Russell, and McDonald, “William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus,” 261. 160. Hunter, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi, facing plate 26. 161. McGrath, Seeing Her Sex, 89–90. McGrath insists that the grid of the window unintentionally alludes to an additional grid, the net cast over the womb by the engraver’s art. 162. Anon., “Dr. William Hunter at a Confinement,” Wellcome Library, London, L0015724. 163. Or consider Dr. Slop in Tristram Shandy, who detects a pun in Uncle Toby’s “curtains” and “horn-­works”; these are elements of siege architecture which the man-­midwife of Tristram Shandy hears as thinly veiled gynecological euphemisms. 164. William Hogarth, “Cunicularii, or The Wise Men of Godliman in Consultation” (1726). Hogarth’s “Cunicularii” joins “Dr. William Hunter at a Confinement” and Jan Steen’s The Doctor’s Visit (1658–1662) in the emblematic use of bed curtains to suggest obstetric or gynecological practice. 165. As Luce Irigaray suggests, in her rereading of the fort/da game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the folds of drapery in the infant’s crib are the archetypical womb surrogates that stand in for the absent mother. Irigaray, La Croyance Même (Paris: Éditions Galilée, 1983), 30–32. 166. See Jason Kelly’s reading of these images in The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 167. Reynolds, Discourse III, 49. 168. See for instance Allan Ramsay’s 1760 portrait of Dr. William Hunter at the Hunterian Gallery in Glasgow (GLAHA 44026); Ramsay depicts Hunter gesturing with his index finger to the only prop in the frame, a blank sheet of paper. Also significant, though less convincing on its own, is Mason Chamberlin’s portrait (Dr. William Hunter) at the Royal Academy of Arts (AN 03/712). 169. Locke, Essay (2.1.2), 1.121. Case 6. Dispossession 1. Addison’s most notable patrons were Charles Montagu, 1st Earl of Halifax, and Thomas Wharton, 1st Marquess of Wharton. The best biography of Joseph Addison remains Peter Smithers, The Life of Joseph Addison (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954). 2. “Possessive individualism” is C. B. Macpherson’s phrase, intended as the cornerstone of a political-­economic history, which has come to be widely applied as a description of a mode of being. See C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). Also see Ian Watt, The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Marina McKay suggests that Watt’s application of an aggressively recast and purified understanding of the neoliberal property-­owning subject—­similar to Macpherson’s formulation—­may be traced

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to Watt’s own experiences of dispossession in prisoner-­of-­war camps in Burma. McKay, “The Wartime Rise of The Rise of the Novel,” Representations 119.1 (2012): 119–43. 3. Joseph Addison, The Spectator 411 (June 21, 1712), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 3.538. 4. Karen O’Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 37. Locke’s property-­based model, according to this countertradition, “did not provide an adequate foundation for an idea of moral obligation”; “women writers,” O’Brien continues, “created synthetic accounts of epistemology and ethics that emphasized, above all, the exercise of reason within a domain of knowable and immutable truth.” 5. Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of the Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 22–27. 6. The “Great Recoinage” of 1696–1700 was partly the work of John Locke, who was an outspoken supporter. Patrick Hyde Kelly, John Locke on Money (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), which includes among other things Locke’s Further Considerations Concerning Raising the Value of Money. See also Christine Desan, Making Money: Coin, Currency, and the Coming of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 266–403. 7. Joseph Addison, Tatler 249 (Nov. 11, 1710), in The Works of the Right Honorable Joseph Addison, ed. Jacob Tonson, 4 vols. (London, 1721), 2.362–65. 8. On this point, see James H. Bunn, “The Aesthetics of British Mercantilism,” New Literary History 11.2 (1980): 303–21. 9. Philips, “The Splendid Shilling,” in Eighteenth-­Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology, ed. David Fairer and Christine Gerrard (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 6–10. 10. Philips, “Splendid Shilling,” ll. 1–4. 11. Philips, “Splendid Shilling,” ll. 13–14, 101–2. 12. Philips, “Splendid Shilling,” ll. 102–6. Similarly, waking to find his cupboard bare, he catalogues his breakfast as a series of absent alternatives; he does not taste “the John-­ Apple, nor the downy Peach, / Nor Walnut... / Nor Medlar,” and so on. 13. “The Splendid Shilling” first appeared as an “Imitation of Milton” in A New Miscellany of Poems on Several Occasions, ed. Charles Gildon (London: 1701), 212–21. Gildon’s name will be familiar to students of the eighteenth century, for he was the author of the first novel-­length “it-­narrative,” a story articulating Addison’s fantasy about the stories a coin could be made to speak. Gildon, The Golden Spy: Or, a Political Journal of the British Nights Entertainments (London, 1709). 14. See Pierre Gervais, “A Merchant or a French Atlantic? Eighteenth-­Century Account Books as Narratives of a Transnational Merchant Political Economy,” French History 25.1 (2011): 28–47. 15. Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs of Mrs. Laetitia Pilkington, Wife to the Rev Mr. Matth. Pilkington, Written by Herself, 3 vols. (Dublin, 1748–1754), 3.34. On some of the challenges Pilkington faced, see Nicola Jane Phillips, Women in Business 1700–1850 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006), who touches on Pilkington’s case on pp. 215–16. 16. The presence of Cibber and Richardson in Pilkington’s life, Helen Deutsch notes, “signals the confluence of the novel and the theatre in Pilkington’s life and writing.” Deutsch, “My Faults, My Follies,” London Review of Books 30.14 (2008): 30–31. 17. Aside from her own Memoirs, the best record of Pilkington’s life is Norma Clarke, The Queen of the Wits: A Life of Laetitia Pilkington (London: Faber and Faber, 2008).

346 Notes to Pages 231–233 18. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.205. 19. On Pilkington as a print trader, see Phillips, Women in Business, 215–16. 20. Some of these accusations appear in Pilkington’s own memoirs. See Laetitia Pilkington, Memoirs, ed. A. C. Elias Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 265 and note. Pilkington in the second volume of her memoirs threatens to “insert” the name of “every married Man” who ever “attack’d” her who does not “subscribe to my Memoir.” Pilkington, Memoirs (1748), 2.93. 21. Pilkington was “a constant Customer to a Shop in the Neighbourhood, where they hired out Books by the Quarter,” Memoirs, 2.168. 22. Steele, Spectator 88 (June 11, 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1.272; White’s is mentioned two pages later, as an example of the category; Swift, “An Essay upon Modern Education,” in The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939–1966), 12.46; Addison, Spectator 1 (Mar. 2, 1711), 1.3. On Coffeehouse culture in general, see Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffeehouses: A Reference Book of Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1963). On White’s in particular, see Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the Coffeehouse (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 43, 165–66; Brian Cowan, “Francis White (d. 1711),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 23. Clarke, Queen of the Wits, 202. See Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.240. 24. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.243–44. 25. As I discuss below, this marks Pilkington’s Memoirs as a genre of the credit economy. See Mary Poovey, Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth-­and Nineteenth-­Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 25–86. 26. See Nicholson, Writing and the Rise of Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Rebecca E. Connor, Women, Accounting and Narrative: Keeping Books in Eighteenth-­Century England (London: Routledge, 2004). 27. See Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-­Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). 28. See Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 29. The problem-­solving work of genre is what McKeon calls its “ideological status,” the way in which, “like . . . all conceptual categories,” genre encodes an inherited tradition or way of seeing the world. McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 20. 30. The “transparency” of solutions in technical media—­like plotting a position on a map or capturing an inventory in an account book—­is Herbert Simon’s phrase, from The Sciences of the Artificial (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 153; it is quoted in Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995), 117. 31. Handbooks Pilkington might have consulted—­or sold—­include Alexander Brodie, A New and Easy Method of Book-­Keeping (London, 1722); Thomas King, An Exact Guide to Book-­Keeping (London, 1717); Charles Snell, A Guide to Book-­Keepers (London, 1709); Alexander Malcolm, A New Treatise on Arithmetick Book-­Keeping, or, Merchants Accounts (London, 1731); William Webster, An Essay on Book-­Keeping According to the True Italian Method (London, 1719). 32. Stephen P. Walker notes the difficulty of studying women’s accounting practices in

Notes to Pages 233–238

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“Accounting Histories of Women: Beyond Recovery?” Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal 21.4 (2008): 580–610. 33. See John Richard Edwards et al., “Merchants’ Accounts, Performance Assessment and Decision Making in Mercantilist Britain,” Accounting, Organizations and Society 34 (2009): 551–70; John Richard Edwards, A History of Financial Accounting (London: Routledge, 1989); Yannick Lemarchand, “Double Entry Versus Charge and Discharge Accounting in Eighteenth-­Century France,” Accounting, Business and Financial History 4 (1994): 119–45. See also David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 34. Poovey, Modern Fact, 54. 35. See Andy Clark and David Chalmers, “The Extended Mind,” Analysis 58 (1998): 7–19. See also Clark, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 78–81. 36. See Frederick Adams and Kenneth Aizawa, The Bounds of Cognition (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2008), 135–41; Robert D. Rupert, Cognitive Systems and the Extended Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 25–26, 90–92. 37. See Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, 173. 38. Poovey, Modern Fact, 55. 39. “Figures,” in Pilkington’s sense, means both accounts and rhetorical devices; “numbers” means both the content of an account book and the meter of poetry. 40. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.9. 41. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.245. 42. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.249–51. 43. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.240. 44. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.252. 45. Roger D. Lund, “Burlesque and the Genesis of ‘Joseph Andrews,’” Studies in Philology 103.1 (2006): 92. 46. Roger D. Lund, “Wit, Judgment, and the Misprisions of Similitude,” Journal of the History of Ideas 65.1 (2004). Lund’s remarks develop insights developed by Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). 47. See Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace: 1670–1820 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 145–74. 48. William S. Strong, The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide (Cambridge: Mass.: MIT Press, 1999), 6. 49. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.306. 50. Remarks Joseph Warton, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1782), 2.54: “All is imitation . . . Boiardo has imitated Pulei, Ariosto has imitated Boiardo. The geniuses, apparently most original, borrow from each other.” 51. Pilkington, Memoirs, 3.134: “Zenophon and Plato have borrowed from Socrates . . . Lord Shaftesbury’s Search after Beauty is copied from Socrates; Mr. Pope’s Ethics stolen from both,” and so on. 52. Pilkington, Memoirs, 3.3. 53. See Trevor Ross, “Copyright and the Invention of Tradition,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 26.1 (1992): 1–27.

348 Notes to Pages 238–242 54. Writes Addison in Spectator 253: “It is impossible for us who live in the later Ages of the World, to make Observations in Criticism, Morality, or in any Art of Science, which have not been touched upon by others. We have little else left us, but to represent the Common Sense of Mankind in more strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon Lights. If a reader examines Horace’s Art of Poetry he will find but very few precepts in it, which he may not meet with in Aristotle.” 55. Pilkington, Memoirs, 3.14. 56. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.108. 57. Pilkington, “Memory, a Poem,” in Memoirs, 1.111. 58. See Robert Hume, “Dryden on Creation: ‘Imagination’ in the Later Criticism,” Review of English Studies 21 (1970), 295–314; and Jonathan Lamb, “Sterne’s System of Imitation,” Modern Language Review 76.4 (1981): 794–810. 59. Bacon, Works 4.421–22. See Lisa Jardine, “The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects,” in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. Jardine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3–5. 60. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.108–15. 61. Pilkington, Memoirs, 3.105. 62. Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 47–59, esp. 48. 63. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.252. 64. Thomson, “A Hymn on the Seasons”: “From seeming evil still educing good, / And better thence again, and better still, / In infinite progression.” In Pilkington, Memoirs, ed. Elias, 600. Thomson’s text, A. C. Elias notes, borrows in its turn from the final, tragicomic book of Paradise Lost (12.469–74). 65. Pilkington, Memoirs, 2.253. 66. The line is repeated in the short poem “Mary Gulliver to Captain Lemuel Gulliver” (London, 1727). Though probably written by Pope, the poem was first published in a pirated edition of The Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. George Faulkner, 4 vols. (Dublin, 1735), 3.399-­404. 67. Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Alexander Pope, ed. Maynard Mack, in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 15 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), 10.90. 68. See, for instance, Christina Lupton, Knowing Books: The Consciousness of Mediation in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 62–69; Susan Gubar, “‘The Blank Page’ and the Issues of Female Creativity,” in Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 243–63. 69. Pilkington, “Carte Blanche,” in Memoirs, 1.88. 70. Bernard Tucker, Poetry of Laetitia Pilkington (1712–1750) and Constantia Grierson (1706–1733), ed. Tucker (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1996), 3. 71. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.90. 72. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.90. 73. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.88–90. 74. The difficult history of this poem, which was published under the name of “Miss Talbot a young Lady of 12 Years of Age,” is discussed by A. C. Elias Pilkington’s Memoirs, ed. Elias, 420–21. 75. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, xxi.

Notes to Pages 242–248

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76. Gallagher, Nobody’s Story, xxi. 77. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.58. 78. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.112. 79. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.11–12. 80. Pilkington, Memoirs, 1.11. 81. Gathering neuroscientific evidence is catching up to Pilkington’s sense of knowledge as compensation for pain, suffering, or loss. See, for instance, Richard Davidson and Bruce McEwen, “Social Influences on Neuroplasticity: Stress and Interventions to Promote Well-­Being,” Nature Neuroscience 15.5 (2012): 689–95; Ryan Bogdan and Ahmad R. Hariri, “Neural Embedding of Stress Reactivity,” Nature Neuroscience 15.12 (2012): 1605–7; Volker Baur et al., “Evidence of Frontotemporal Structural Hypoconnectivity in Social Anxiety Disorder: A Quantitative Fiber Tractography Study,” in Human Brain Mapping 34 (2013): 437–46; Cory Burghy et al., “Developmental Pathways to Amygdala-­Prefrontal Function and Internalizing Symptoms in Adolescence,” Nature Neuroscience 15.12 (2012): 1736–41. 82. Charles Taylor, The Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 188. 83. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism, and Watt, Rise of the Novel. 84. Macpherson, Possessive Individualism. 85. Addison, Spectator 411, 3.538. 86. Lord Chesterfield, London Magazine 6 (August 1737), cited in Simon Stern, “From Author’s Right to Property Right,” University of Toronto Law Journal 62.1 (2012): 29. 87. Armstrong, How Novels Think: The Limits of Individualism from 1719–1900 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 11. 88. See Mary Poovey, “The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-­Century British Moral Philosophy,” Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 125–45; John Brewer, “This, That and the Other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Shifting the Boundaries: the Transformations of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1995), 121. 89. See Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994, 18; Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 4–16; Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 41–56. 90. Simon Stern, “Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth-­ Century England,” in Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment, ed. Reginald McGinnis (London: Routledge, 2008), 69, 72. 91. See Jody Greene, The Trouble with Ownership: Literary Property and Authorial Liability in England, 1660–1730 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 92. See Peter Lindsay, “Possessive Individualism at 50: Retrieving Macpherson’s Lost Legacy,” Good Society 21.1 (2012): 132–50. 93. See C. B. Macpherson, “Liberal-­Democracy as a System of Power” and “The Myth of Maximization,” in The Real World of Democracy: The Massey Lectures 1965 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 33–66. 94. Macdowell, Women of Grub Street: Press, Politics, and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace 1678–1730 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 197. 95. Macdowell, Women of Grub Street, 197.

350 Notes to Pages 248–251 96. See G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter, “Toward a Natural History of Mind and Body,” The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 3–44. 97. See, for instance, Laura Brown’s influential reading, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-­Century English Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 106–21. 98. This is the Baron’s desperate arrangement of the “trophies of his former loves,” which he piles up in a sacrificial hecatomb, lights with a perfumed billet-­doux and pants into a blaze. See Sean Silver, “The Rape of the Lock and the Origins of Game Theory,” Connotations 19.1–3 (2009/2010): 203–28. 99. Pope, Rape of the Lock (4.113–16), in The Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 11 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954), 2.193. 100. Pope, Rape of the Lock (4.176), in Poems, 2.198. 101. Janine Barchas suggests a deliberate link in Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location and Celebrity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2012), 204; Julie Park, “The Poetics of Enclosure in Sense and Sensibility,” Studies in Eighteenth-­Century Culture 42 (2013): 237–69. 102. See Kathleen M. Oliver, “‘With My Hair in Crystal’: Mourning Clarissa,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 23.1 (2010): 35–60. Oliver suggests a link between the Clarissa of The Rape of the Lock and the Clarissa of Clarissa. 103. See William Shakespeare, Love’s Labours Lost, in The Plays of William Shakespeare, ed. Samuel Johnson (London, 1978), 2.473. Johnson notes that “the authour has before called the beard valour’s excrement in the Merchant of Venice” (2.473n6). 104. On hair’s attachments, see Lynn Festa, “Personal Effects: Possessive Individualism in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 29.2 (2005): 47–90. 105. See Christiane Holm, “Sentimental Cuts: Eighteenth-­Century Mourning Jewelry with Hair,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 38.1 (2004): 140. 106. Pope, Rape of the Lock (5.113–16), in Poems, 2.208–9. 107. For instance, William Weston, The Complete Merchant’s Clerk (London, 1754), 19. 108. This “loss” is mentioned in the dedicatory letter to the poem. The most famous example of lost property of this sort, at least in Pope’s career, is the collection of private letters Pope “lost” to Edmund Curll. “Losing” the letters was Pope’s transparent strategy for seeing their way into print. See, for instance, Maynard Mack, Alexander Pope A Life (New York: Norton, 1985), 652–63; on Pope’s revisions, Claude Willan, “‘Pope’s Penmanship’: Edmund Curll, Alexander Pope, and the Rawlinson Letters 90,” Library 12.3 (2011): 259–80; on the fate of Pope’s letters, Raymond Stephanson, “Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope and the Curious Case of Modern Scholarship and the Vanishing Text,” Eighteenth-­Century Life 31.1 (2007): 1–21. 109. Pope, Rape of the Lock (5.143–44, 5.149–50), in Poems, 2.211–12. 110. Pope, Rape of the Lock (3.153, 3.148), in Poems, 2.179. 111. See, for instance: “Jack the Clipper Caught,” New York Times (Oct. 2, 1892); “Stranger Cuts Girls’ Curls,” New York Times (Dec. 21, 1902); “The Tri-­Met Barber,” Oregonian (Jan. 10, 2010); “Terrebonne Parish Man Accused in Sex Assaults, Ponytail Thefts,” Herald Tribune (Mar. 7, 2004); Julia Medew, “Protection Ordered After Prisoners Attack Accused Hair Thief,” Age (June 6, 2006); “Haircut Bandit Caught!” Long Beach Gazette (April 5, 2003).

Notes to Pages 252–256

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112. Pope’s most extended defense of borrowing as a principle of composition is in “The Preface of 1717,” in Pope, Poems, 1.3–10, here 1.7. 113. Hunter, “Pope v. Bickham: An Infringement of An Essay on Man Alleged,” Library 9.3 (1987): 268–73; Mark Rose, “The Author in Court: Pope v. Curll (1741),” Cultural Critique 21 (1992): 197–217; Mack, Alexander Pope, 652–57. 114. Daniel Defoe, The Life and Actions of Jonathan Wild, in Defoe on Sheppard and Wild, ed. Richard Holmes (London: Harper Collins, 2004), 89. 115. For instance, in the classified ads of the Post Man and Historical Account (May 24, 1716) and the London Gazette (May 26, 1716), “Stolen on Wednesday the 23rd . . . a Hair Locket in a Heart shape, a Hair Ring with 4 Brilliants made in a Heart, being a Mourning Ring”; in the Daily Post (Sept. 21, 1720), from the “Shop of Francis Bowen, Perruke-­ maker . . . some Wigs and Hair [were] taken out.” 116. See for instance Frederick J. Lyons’s Jonathan Wild: Prince of Robbers (London: Michael Joseph, 1936), 92; Thomas Cook, “Jonathan Wild” (National Portrait Gallery NPG D8021). 117. Among the best studies on London crime are John M. Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England 1660–1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), and Ian A. Bell, Literature and Crime in Augustan England (London: Routledge, 1991); Robert B. Shoemaker, Prosecution and Punishment: Petty Crime and the Law in London and Rural Middlesex, c. 1660–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Elaine Reynolds, Before the Bobbies: The Night Watch and Police Reform in Metropolitan London, 1720–1830 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). See also Ronald Paulson, The Life of Henry Fielding (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 265–285. 118. Judging by newspaper accounts, Wild gathered something on the order of one-­ third of the business in lost property. He was, however, by no means the first person to drive such a trade; he was preceded by Charles Hitchins, among others. See “An Account of Jonathan Wild,” in Horace Bleakley, Jack Sheppard (Edinburgh: Hodge, 1983), 209–41. 119. Daniel Defoe, The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild in Defoe on Sheppard and Wild, ed. Richard Holmes (London: Harper, 2004), 89, 96. 120. Gerald Howson, Thief-­Taker General: The Rise and Fall of Jonathan Wild (London: Hutchinson, 1970), 146. 121. Defoe, Life of Wild, 74. On the “pefect . . . newness” of the “scene” see Andrew Pepper, “Early Crime Writing and the State: Jonathan Wild, Daniel Defoe, and Bernard Mandeville in 1720s London,” Textual Practice 25.3 (2011): 473–91, 484. 122. Defoe, Life of Wild, 7. 123. A review of the Daily Courant, London’s first daily newspaper, indicates that during the years 1714–1725 perhaps one in every ten advertisements was placed by Jonathan Wild or on his behalf. 124. Daily Courant, May 26, 1714. See Duncan Chappell and Marilyn Walsh, “‘No Questions Asked’: A Consideration of the Crime of Criminal Receiving,” Crime & Delinquency 20 (1974), 157–68. 125. Captain Alexander Smith, Memoirs of the Life and Times of the Famous Jonathan Wild (London, 1726), 13. 126. Wild had a number of techniques for returning goods without ever storing or warehousing them himself. See Howson, Thief-­Taker General, 74–80.

352 Notes to Pages 256–262 127. The Daily Courant, just one of three major daily newspapers, contains advertisements for literally hundreds of objects alienated from their owners in this way—­“lost” objects that everybody secretly understood to be “stolen” objects. 128. Like the novel itself, according to Ian Watt’s influential account, which scaffolds its realism around the greater fiction of a stable, property-­owning self. Watt, The Rise of the Novel, esp. 9–30. 129. In this sense, Jonathan Wild was a sort of Grub Street author specializing in a certain sort of low “thing-­poem.” This is Barbara Benedict’s term for the literariness of genres like the advertisement. See Benedict, “Encounters with the Object: Advertisements, Time, and Literary Discourse in the Eighteenth-­Century Thing-­Poem,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 40.2 (2007): 193–208, esp. 194–99. 130. Wild’s offices were just off Grub Street, in the Liberties flanking Fleet Ditch west of St. Paul’s, and just off Drury Lane near both the theater and the future site of Henry Fielding’s Bow Street office. See Pat Rogers, Grub Street: Studies in a Subculture (London: Methuen, 1972), 1–93, for extended descriptions of these areas, which, collectively, were known as Grub Street. For the location of Wild’s Lost Property Offices, see Howson, Thief-­ Taker General, 74–80, 87, 119, 131. 131. Pat Rogers, Grub Street, 50. 132. Wild was an author for whom books are reducible to whatever they’re worth to their owners; he recognizes no distinction between an account book and anything else of personal value. On Wild’s bookshelf when he died, Nathaniel Mist avers, were books of a mostly practical nature, though Wild also owned an old Tacitus. Likewise, the limited literary forms he has left behind are obsessed with value and the small objects of alienable property; the “memoranda” in his imagined office are littered with prices, debts owed, and the values of objects, as are the thousands of advertisements run in the Daily Courant. See Mist’s Weekly Journal 7 (June 12, 1725). 133. See, for instance, Joseph Roach on Samuel Pepys’s pretensions to a sword: It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 52–53. 134. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1.2.15), ed. Alexander Campbell Fraser, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1894), 1.48–49. 135. Locke, Essay (1.2.15), 1.48. 136. H. D., judge’s clerk to Justice R—­—­, The Life of Jonathan Wild, from His Birth to His Death (London, 1725), 15. 137. John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera, in Dramatic Works, ed. John Fuller, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 2.7. 138. A discount wine shop now stands roughly on the site of what nineteenth-­century sensationalist pamphlets called “the Blood Bowl.” There are a number of references to this notional museum in pamphlets contemporary to Wild, but the bulk of accounts were inspired by the 1842 discovery of human remains in the Holborn Viaduct footings. Most of these pamphlets are lost, but an account of the museum as it was imagined and a bibliography of literary sources survive in Lyons’s Jonathan Wild, 313–14. Among these items are anonymous pamphlets with titles like The History of . . . the “Blood Bowl” and Recent and Wonderful Discovery of Two Skeleton Bodies. See Howson, Thief-­Taker General, 141–42; and Lyons, Jonathan Wild, 138–41. Also surviving is William Harrison Ainsworth’s roughly contemporaneous account, in his 1842 novel Jack Sheppard. See Howson’s bibliography in Thief-­Taker General, 317–27.

Notes to Pages 263–270

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139. John Gay, “Newgate’s Garland,” in Poetry and Prose, ed. Vinton A. Dearing, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 1.287. 140. N.P. Weighley, alias Wild, A Poem, in Imitation of Hudibras (London, 1725), np. 141. More than one human skull has been lost on the London Underground and turned up at the Transport for London Lost Property Office. It is my understanding, from a multiply photocopied document circulated by the present-­day office to anyone who asks (“Unusual Items Received at Baker Street Lost Property Office”) that the office finds and processes, on average, one lost human skull every two years, and that false teeth, false eyes, false limbs, and urns of ashes are common enough that the office has its own routines and regulations for handling them. 142. This is a term that turns up a number of times in accounts of Wild, including once in H.D.’s Account (np), and again in Defoe’s Life of Wild, 101. 143. Defoe, Life of Wild, 97–98, 101–6. 144. Defoe, Life of Wild, 101, 97. 145. Patricia Fumerton, “London’s Vagrant Economy: Making Space for ‘Low’ Subjectivity,” in Material London, ca. 1600, ed. Lena Cohen Orlin (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 208. See also Fumerton, Unsettled. 146. On “investment,” see Exhibit 13. 147. Fumerton, “Vagrant Economy,” 219, 220. Fumerton is thinking here of Baudrillard: “Simulacra and Simulations,” in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 166–84. 148. As N. P. Weighley records of Wild, “the first booty which he got” he used “to fit him out for Expedition.” See Weighley, alias Wild, Imitation of Hudibras, 4. 149. John Arbuthnot, The Correspondence of Jonathan Swift, ed. Harold Williams, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963–1965), 3.326. 150. Stewart, Crimes of Writing, 125. 151. See Howson, Thief-­Taker General, 281. 152. See Greene, The Trouble with Ownership. 153. See Christopher R. Miller, “Genius and Originality 1750–1830,” in A Companion to British Literature III: Long Eighteenth-­Century Literature, ed. Robert DeMaria Jr. et al. (Chichester: John Wiley, 2014), 312–28. 154. Pope, “Preface,” in Works (1717). 155. In its original formulation, the formulation of the Roman Republic, the pure, unimaginably private self is the deprived self—­one who has no relational function in the marketplace, who ceases, as a public entity, to exist. See, for instance, Etienne Balibar, “‘Possessive Individualism’ Reversed: From Locke to Derrida,” Constellations 9.3 (2002): 307. 156. Locke, Essay (2.10.2), 1.194 and nn2–3. Conclusion 1. “Historical epistemology” is Dror Wahrman’s term, borrowed from Lorraine Daston. Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-­Century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), xiv, cites Daston, “Historical Epistemology,” in Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion across the Disciplines, ed. James Chandler et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 282–83.

354 Notes to Pages 270–273 2. Sean Silver, “Hooke, Latour, and the Thesis of Extended Cognition,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (forthcoming 2015). 3. The literature on this question is massive. For one relatively recent review, see Michael L. Anderson, “Neural Reuse: A Fundamental Organizational Principle of the Brain,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33 (2010): 245–313. 4. Joseph Roach asks us to think of the eighteenth century as an episode in “deep time”; this is time that, like an underground river, “percolates” up. Joseph Roach, “Performance: The Blunders of Orpheus,” PMLA 125.4 (2010), 1078–86; It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2008), 14. Roach is thinking of Michel Serres, who encourages us to think of time as a river like the Thames, full of vortices and counter-­currents, regularly changing course with the tides. Serres and Bruno Latour, Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time, trans. Roxanne Lapidus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 58–59. 5. See for instance Walter J. Freeman, “Three Centuries of Category Errors in Studies of the Neural Basis of Consciousness and Intentionality,” Neural Networks 10 (1997): 1175–83; Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-­Young and Michael Wutz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999). 6. Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 49 (1950): 452. 7. For a history of intelligence research and stored-­program computer architecture, including the contributions of Alan Turing and John von Neumann, see Ashok Agrawala and Sam Noh, “Computer Systems,” in Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence, ed. S. C. Shapiro (New York: John Wiley, 1992): 241–248; William Clancey, Situated Cognition: On Human Knowledge and Computer Representations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 52–85; and especially Margaret Boden, Mind as Machine: A History of Cognitive Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 168–236. 8. See, for instance, John von Neumann, The Computer and the Brain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958); George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl H. Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1960), 137–38; Heims, The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991); Jean-­Pierre Dupuy, On the Origins of Cognitive Science: The Mechanization of the Mind, trans. M. B. Debevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For one recent overview, see Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). It is also worth noting that theories of ecological cognition took their rise from these very exchanges; present for many of the Macy Conferences was Gregory Bateson, whose Steps to an Ecology of Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972) offers many of the key terms for disassembling the model of the mind as a collection. 9. See, for example, Miller, Galanter, and Pribram, Structure of Behavior, 137–38. 10. On the Enlightenment as a network, see Brad Pasanek and Chad Wellmon, “The Enlightenment Index,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation (forthcoming). 11. See Clancey, Situated Cognition, 225–26. But cognitive systems “have a history: how the parts have interacted in the past,” writes Clancey, “has changed the parts and what constitutes their system environment.” Clancey, “Scientific Antecedents of Situated Cognition,” in Cambridge Handbook of Situated Cognition, ed. Philip Robbins and Murat Aydede (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14.

I n d ex

abstraction: imagination as opposite of, 52–53; in Locke’s epistemology, 23–24, 34, 35, 37 accidents, 89, 109, 112, 132–33. See also digression accounting, double-entry, 233 accounts, book of, 230–40 Acis (mythical character), 212 Adam, in Paradise Lost, 22, 40–41, 43 adaptation, 214 addiction, Addison’s physiological theory of, 139 Addison, Joseph: Akenside’s intellectual debt to, 50; as collector of coins and medals, 5, 129–40; and dark room, 87–88; and dispossession, 226–27; and dreams, 53; as gardener, 144–48; on the Odyssey, 106–7; on Paradise Lost, 148–49; and Reynolds’s aesthetics, 214; Tatler essay #249, on shilling, 228–30; on Virgil, 147–48 Addison’s Walk, 140–50, 146 Aeneid (Virgil), 127, 133 Aeolian harp, 1 aesthetic responses, ownership of, 246 aesthetics: Addison’s, 130, 135–39, 142, 144; Akenside’s, 63; camera obscura and, 88, 91; Hay’s, 155–56; Hogarth’s, 155; Hunter’s, 200–205; Pope’s, 92, 94, 108; Reynolds’s, 213–16 Akenside, Mark, 46–55, 61, 293 n.132 allegory, 99–100: and Addison’s Walk, 143; in Rape of the Lock, 103 Allen, Richard, 90 Ambassadors (Holbein), 73 ampulla of blood of Thomas Becket, 168, 170–75 Analysis of Beauty (Hogarth), 155 anamorphosis, 72–73, 299 n.77 anatomical engraving, 201–2

anatomy, conception and, 197–208 Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus (Hunter), 197, 200–208, 222 Angel: in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 23; etymology of, 22 apprehension: and inward problem of perception, 154–55; Locke’s concept of, 28 Aquinas, Thomas, 3, 39 Arbuthnot, John, 78–79 architecture: intermediate structures and, 86; public and private spaces in, 179 Archytas, 126 Aristotelianism: accidents in, 109; and Descartes, 137; in Milton’s work, 39; and mind as collection, 2; and Turing, 271 Aristotle, 3, 30, 32, 33: and kosmos, 102; and metaphor, 11, 12, 27 artificial intelligence, 272 The Art of Logic (Milton), 39 aspiration, 44 association: beauty and, 140; digression and, 112–13 The Astronomer (Vermeer), 98–99 Atlas (Hunter). See Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Attempt Towards a Natural History of the Fossils of England (Woodward), 75 attention, digression vs., 110 Atterbury, Francis, 139, 244 Augustan period, theory of mind in, 1 authorship, in Locke’s epistemology, 192 autobiography, 230–40 The Avon Gorge from the Summit of the Observatory (West), 90 Bacon, Francis: and empiricism, 8–9; on natural philosophy, 116; on philosophy’s task, 24; on poetic creation, 40; and Reynolds’s view of originality, 215

356 Index Bales, Peter, 112 ballads, 266 Balmori, Diana, 86 Bann, Stephen, 169 Bargrave, John (canon of Canterbury), 169–70 Barrell, John, 64–65 Beauclerc, Lady Diana, 185–86 Beauclerc Closet in Strawberry Hill, 178, 185–86 Beauty: and Addison’s Walk, 149; and association, 140; imagination and, 135 Becket, Thomas (archbishop of Canterbury), 170–75 Beetle-browed Jemmy (character), 265 Beggar’s Opera, The (Gay), 260, 262, 264–67 Belinda (character): and dispossession, 248– 52; in Rape of the Lock, 101–4, 106–8 Betty (character), 103 Bilton Hall, 141, 144–45 birth, 198–99 “Black Act” (1723), 247 bladder stone. See calculus (stone) Blair, Ann, 33–34 Blake, William, 213 blank page, 206, 223–24 blank sheet of paper: Pilkington’s verse about, 240–45; in Tristram Shandy, 190, 195–96 blood, ampulla of, 168, 170–75 Blount, Edward, 87 Blount, Martha, 89 Blumenberg, Hans, 12 bodily experience. See sense experience body: inwardness and, 177; and place, 173; as semantic construction, 156–57 Bolla, Peter de, 71, 81 book of accounts, 230–40 book of commonplaces, 33–37 Borlase, William, 90 borrowing: as form of creativity, 214; in Raphael’s art, 218 Bourdieu, Pierre, 14–15 Boyle, Robert: defense of plain style, 9; Hooke and, 115, 116 Bracher, Frederick, 87 brain: Addison’s anatomical theories, 139; Descartes’ study of structure, 137; Locke’s conception of structure, 63; Pilkington’s theory of, 242–43; Willis’s anatomy of, 61–63 British Museum, 6, 7

Brooks, Peter, 106 Brown, Laura, 92 Browne, Thomas, 202–3 Brush, Tom (character), 237, 238, 240 “building block” theory of language, 95 Burney, Frances, 183–84, 187 cabinet(s): in Addison’s Dialogues, 131; and Augustan theory of mind, 1; empty, 23–24; and great chain of being, 125; Locke’s, 56, 58; in Locke’s epistemology, 23–25, 27–29, 31; and Lost Property Office, 259, 260, 266–67; as mirror, 82, 83; and poetic composition, 96; and Walpole’s theory of mind, 181; Woodward’s, 73–84 cabinet of curiosities, 169–70 cabinet portrait: “Honest Jonathan in His Repository,” 256–57; and Rape of the Lock, 100–101, 248, 251 Cable, Lana, 44–45 calculus (stone), 151–54, 152, 157–67, 158; collections of, 164; John Evelyn and, 167–70; and Hay’s medical discourse, 157, 161 camera obscura: artists’ use of, 97–98; at Avon Gorge tower, 90; at Clifton Observatory, 91; and design, 99; design of, 59; and dualism, 88–89; Hooke’s, 56–66, 57, 115; in Locke’s epistemology, 31, 59; as model for mental work, 62; and organization of Pope’s grotto, 92; philosophical applications, 59–66; Pope’s grotto as, 87–88; practical applications, 59; Woodward’s, 84 Canterbury Cathedral, 170–73, 175 case: defined, ix; dual meaning of, 151–52, 165; for Hay’s stone, 161; medical vs. physical, 165 The Castle of Otranto (Walpole), 189–91 Catalogus impressorum Librorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae (Hyde), 30–31 Cave of Spleen, 104–8 central form, 216–18 Charles I (king of England), 175 Checketts, Richard, 67 Cheselden, William, 97 childbirth, 198–99 chorion, 197, 204, 206, 208, 222 chronos, kairos and, 160 Cicero, 33, 39 Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady (Richardson), 250 Claudius, 130, 132

Index 357 Clerk, Sir John, 81 closet drama, 180 cognitive contact, 24 cognitive ecology(-ies), 13–16, 270–71, 273: and Cave of Spleen, 108; defined, viii; digression and, 110; embodiment and, 157; enactivism and, 267–68; homunculus fallacy and, 63; and Hooke’s theory of memory, 118; materially contingent, 8; and Milton’s intellectual development, 42–43, 45; origin of phrase, 281 n.80; Pilkington’s, 243–44; Pope’s grotto as, 87–89, 97; in Rape of the Lock, 101–2, 108; Romanticism and, 149–50; Strawberry Hill as, 188; in Tristram Shandy, 196 cognitive life of things, 134 cognitive theory of metaphor, 29 coin(s), 85 coin collections, 5, 129, 144 collecting, in eighteenth century, 5–6 collection(s): Akenside’s, 46–55; of bladder/ kidney calculi, 164; completion as death, 159; and early concept of mind, 2–3; and Hooke’s model of intellect, 116–17; importance of organization in, 75; and Lost Property Office, 254; Reynolds’s art, 213–14; Walpole’s, 177 Collectors and Curiosities (Pomian), 99 commonplaces, 33–37, 39, 287 n.61 communal ownership, 248 composition, Pope’s theory of, 96–97 computer model of mind, 271–72 concept, in Akenside’s theory of mind, 52 conception, 189–225: blank sheet of paper, 189–96, 190; emergence as obstetric category, 206; folio sheet with two sketches of a single conception, 197–208; Hunter and Rymsdyk’s engraving, 207; and image, 222; Locke’s use of term, 194–95; Reynolds’s portrait of Hunter, 219–25, 220; Tristram Shandy, 195–96; Triumph of Galatea, 208–19 conceptual metaphorics, Locke’s system of, 30, 194 conceptual systems, 156–57 consciousness, embodiment and, 163 container: and Addison’s concept of imagination, 135; and Locke’s dark room metaphor, 58; Locke’s theory, 30; mind as, 1, 193; Pilkington’s theory, 243 containment: and cognitive theory of metaphor, 29; and Iliad in a nutshell, 111

contemplation, 31, 63 copying. See imitation copyright law, 238, 247 cosmetics, 102–4 Crary, Johnathan, 61 creativity: among the dispossessed, 238; Reynolds’s view of limitations of, 214 “Crook-finger’d Jack” (character), 260, 262 Cruikshank, William, 204 Cuff, John, 66, 106 curatorial function of imagination, 5, 50–51, 137 curves, in Hay’s aesthetics, 155 custom, digression vs., 113 Cynthio (character), 131, 133 dark room. See also camera obscura; digression vs., 113; Locke’s, 31, 56, 58, 63; in Rape of the Lock, 101; and Toilet of Venus, 99–100; Woodward’s, 84 daybook, 233 dead metaphor, 12, 44–45 Defoe, Daniel, 254, 255, 263, 264, 266 deformity, Hay’s aesthetics and, 155 “Deformity: An Essay” (Hay), 151–53, 156 Deluge, the, 78–80 de Man, Paul, 26 dependency, 276 n.22 Descartes, René: Cartesian geometry, 130; Cartesian philosophy, 137; eye structure theory, 60; and mechanist tradition, 137; and mind-body split, 15 description, sensation vs., 89 The Description of Mr. Walpole’s Villa, 178 design, 56–108: accidents vs., 109; in the arts, 67–73; camera obscura and, 99; definitions of, 66; digression vs., 130, 142; engraving and, 67–69; and Hooke’s camera obscura, 56–66, 57; and The Judgment of Paris, 66–73; in manufacturing, 67; and Milton’s idea of inquiry, 39; in Paradise Lost, 149; and Plot’s organization of material, 125; in Pope’s work, 85; and Reynolds’s retouched Triumph of Galatea, 212; stone from grotto of Egeria, 84–97, 85; and Woodward’s gritty pebble, 73–80, 74; and Woodward’s oval portrait, 81–84, 82 detours, 128 Deutsch, Helen, 87 Dialogues on the Usefulness of Ancient Medals (Addison), 130–34, 141–42

358 Index dictionary of draughts, 131 digression, 109–50: Addison’s collection of medals, 129–40; Addison’s walk, 140–50; design vs., 130, 142; Robert Hooke and, 114–24; nature and, 144; Robert Plot and, 124–28, 130; tumuli and, 126–29 Discourses Concerning the Souls of Brutes (Willis), 61 discovery, invention as, 238 dispossession, 226–68: Addison’s shilling, 226–30, 227; and Lost Property Office, 252–63, 253; Pilkington’s verse about blank sheet of paper, 240–45; in The Rape of the Lock, 248–54; and ring containing a lock of hair, 246, 249–52 “The Distrest Poet” (Hogarth), 257, 258 disturbance: The Mysterious Mother and, 186; and Locke’s concepts, 27, 193 “Dr. William Hunter at a Confinement” (woodcut), 223 doctrine of simplicity of ideas, 8, 36–37, 116, 181 Donald, Merlin, 134 dot, 119–20. See also period (punctuation) double-entry accounting, 233, 243 double principle, 88 drapery, 223 draughts, dictionary of, 131 drawing, Hooke’s philosophy and, 64 dream-essay, allegorical, 143 dreaming, 48, 53–55 Dryden, John, 2, 214, 250, 251 dualism: camera obscura and, 88–89; and cognitive ecologies, 15–17; in eighteenth century thought, vii–viii; and homunculus fallacy, 62; metaphor and, 12–13; Milton’s rejection of, 43; modern marketplace and, 247–48; as a problem, 181; as sin, 42 Duff, William, 3–4 ecological theory of knowledge. See cognitive ecology(-ies) ecology, library as, 30 Eden, 148–49 education, suffering’s effect on, 244–45 Egeria, 93–94 ekphrastic representation, 135 Elizabeth Shandy (character), 199 Elkins, James, 72 eloquence, facts vs., 9–10 embeddedness: and Addison’s secondary

pleasures, 136; and cognitive theory of metaphor, 29; dualism and, 15–16; in Locke’s epistemology, 25, 193; metaphor and, viii; in Paradise Lost, 44; “paradisical thinking” as, 148; in Pilkington’s literary work, 231 embodiment: in Akenside’s work, 50; and conceptual systems, 156–57; and conscious experience, 163; and Hay’s aesthetics, 156–57; and inward problem of perception, 154, 155; in Locke’s epistemology, 24; and meaning, 188; metaphor vs., 156; and The Mysterious Mother, 186; and experience, 193–94 embryo, conception and, 197, 204, 206–8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 11 empiricism: and aesthetics, 136–37; and Locke’s concept of mind, 25–26; metaphor and, 9, 12; origins of, 8–9; and regularization of language, 153 encasement, 165 engrams, 134 engraving, 67–69 Enlightenment: and cognitive ecologies, 16; cognitive model for, 271–72; collecting during, 7; guiding metaphor of epistemology, 1; and validation of pleasure, 139 entanglement, 25, 36, 39, 41 environments, ecologies vs., 15 epochs, 163 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 42, 56, 58, 110–11; and enactivist theory of cognition, 267–68; as influence on poets/painters, 50; and Locke’s library, 30–31; theory of mind in, 23–24 Essay on Criticism (Pope), 91–92 Essay on Original Genius (Duff), 3–4 Essay Towards a Natural History of the Earth (Woodward), 78 Eve, in Paradise Lost, 41–42 Evelyn, John: and Bargrave, 170; concept of mind, 173; and engraving, 67–69, 72; finds a coin, 109; and libraries, 8; and Milton’s work, 22; and Pepys’s stone, 167–70, 174–75 excogitation, 122, 123 exantlation, 202–3 exograms, 134, 140–41, 228 experience, as source of ideas, 63 extended cognitive system: ledger as, 234–35; and Hooke’s experiments, 122–23

Index 359 eye: camera obscura’s similarities to, 59–60; ideas and, 62; of Paris, 70–71; in Rape of the Lock, 101; in The Toilet of Venus, 100; Woodward’s pebble as, 74, 80 facts, eloquence vs., 9–10 faculties, ownership of, 246 false perspective, 72 Fame, 53–55 fancy: Akenside and, 50–52; Hunter’s figures of, 200, 204, 207; in Paradise lost, 40–41, 42, 51; in Pope’s Grotto, 105, 107; Reynolds and, 210 figurative language, 279 n.59 Fletcher, Angus, 102, 103, 106 folk models of mind, 14 forgetting, inspiration and, 190 Fréart, Roland, sieur de Chambray, 67, 69–73 “full stop,” 114, 115, 124. See also period (punctuation) Fumerton, Patricia: on autobiography, 240; on dispossession, 228; theories of modern subjectivity, 264–65 Galatea (mythical character), 212, 217–18 Gallagher, Catherine, 238, 242 gardening, 67, 129–30, 144–48 Gay, John: The Beggar’s Opera, 260, 262, 264–67; “Newgate’s Garland,” 263 gaze, 72–73 gender, conception and, 196, 202 genius: Pope’s view of, 267; Reynolds and, 213–16; changing concepts of, 2–3 geology: Pope’s grotto and, 84–86, 90; Woodward and, 7, 73–80 Georgics (Virgil), 147 Giulio Romano, 210–11, 217 Gombrich, E. H., 215 Gothic, the, 177, 79 Gothic drama, 175–88 great chain of being, 125 gritty pebble, 73–80, 74 grotto of Egeria, 84–97, 88, 96 Grub Street, 230, 231, 237, 238, 242, 257 Gulliver’s Travels (Swift), 245 hair, 249–52 haptic experience, 11, 55, 155, 156 Harris, John, 59 Harvey, William, 204 Hay, William, 151–57

Hayles, Katherine, 156, 157 Hazlitt, William, 213 hint, 134, 136, 140 historical epistemology, 270 Hockney, David, 97 Hogarth, William: aesthetics of, 155, 156; “The Distrest Poet,” 257, 258 Holbein, Hans, 73 Hollis, Thomas, 46, 48 Homer, 106–7 homunculus fallacy, 62–63 “Honest Jonathan in His Repository,” 253, 256 Hoogstraten, Samuel von, 66, 87 Hooke, Robert, 8, 42, 102, 114–24; and camera obscura, 56–66, 57; on eye/mind relationship, 60; and homunculus fallacy, 62; and the “full stop,” 114–15, 119; and micrographia, 121; neurophysiology of, 116–19; and problem of time, 157–59; as Keeper of the Repository, 115–17 Horace, 94, 126–27 Hunter, John, 203 Hunter, William: and collections of calculi, 164–65; folio sheet with two sketches of a single conception, 197–208; and Pilkington’s blank sheet of paper, 241; Reynolds’s portrait of, 219–25, 220 Hutchins, Edwin, 281 n.80 Hyde, Thomas, 30–31 Hymn on the Seasons (Thomson), 240 hyperfocus, 110 idea(s): effect on properties, 154; eye and, 62; in fine arts, 200; in Hooke’s theory of mind, 117, 118; imagination as storehouse of, 51; in Locke’s epistemology, 27; from loss, 244; and memory, 32–33; memory and, 63; mind’s arranging of, ix; ownership of, 192–94, 246, 247, 267; and problem of time, 157–59; and Reynolds’s retouched Triumph of Galatea, 211; sense experience as origin of, 3, 12; in Tristram Shandy, 191; from visual stimuli, 60 ideal beauty, 215–16 Idea of the Perfection of Painting (Fréart), 67 Iliad, camera obscura and, 106 Iliad in a nutshell, 111–13, 310 n.14 images: Addison’s concept of, 135; conception and, 222; embodiment of ideas in, 50; in Locke’s epistemology, 49; mind as collection of, 5, 22; from visual stimuli, 60

360 Index imagination: abstraction as opposite of, 52–53; Addison’s concept of, 134–40; and Addison’s theory of pleasure, 140; and Addison’s Walk, 145; Akenside’s theory of, 50–51; Descartes and, 137; in eighteenth century, 3–4; and Hunter, 203–6; and imitation, 2–4, 48–54, 134–38; as laboratory, 42; as opposite of metaphor, 49–50; Reynolds’s view of, 214; Romantic concept of, 3; and secondary pleasures, 135, 136; theories of, 1–4; and writing process, 2 imitation: in fine arts, 200; originality and, 213, 237; in Pope’s definition of learning, 97; and Reynolds’s concept of art, 213, 216; in trade writing, 237–38. See also borrowing, 2, 214, 237, 252 incest, 182, 186 index, Locke’s, 23, 34–36 individualism, possession and, xi, 246 innate ideas, 58 innovation, imitation as strategy for, 237–38 inspiration, 17; forgetting and, 190; and Locke, 23–24, 40; and Milton, 22, 39, 45; from Milton’s bed, 46, 48; and writing process, 2 inspire (term), 22–23 intellectual property, 192–93, 247, 251–52, 267 intention, design as, 66 interiority. See inwardness intermediate structures, 86 inventio, 33, 39, 215 invention: Bacon’s division of, 215; and The Castle of Otranto, 189–91; as discovery, 238; pre-Romantic definition, 238; in Reynolds’s aesthetic, 215–17; and Reynolds’s retouched Triumph of Galatea, 212. See also conception inwardness, 151–88; and William Hay’s stone, 151–57; and The Mysterious Mother, 175–88; and time, 157–67; and two calculi cut and mounted in a small showcase, 157–67 inward problem of perception, 154–55 Johnson, Mark, 29 Johnson, Samuel: on Akenside’s knowledge, 49; on Paradise Lost, 40; on Pope’s grotto, 86 Johnson, Samuel (American), 11 journal (accounting), 233, 234 judgment, 76, 77, 288 n.77

The Judgment of Paris (Raphael), 67–73, 68, 100 Juvenal, 94 kairos, 160 Kearn, Michael, 97 Kent, William, 86 Kepler, Johannes, 60 Kessel, Jan van, the Elder, 98, 99–100 kidney stone. See calculus (stone) knowledge: in Locke’s epistemology, 24; from loss, 241; mimetic/representative, 207–8; from suffering, 244 kosmos, 102, 103, 106 Kramnick, Isaac, 94 Kunstkammer with Venus at Her Toilette. See The Toilet of Venus labor: of abstraction, 37; alienation from, 238, 242, 262; of childbirth, 199; and Hooke’s period, 120, 128; in Pope’s Grotto, 85–86, 91; ownership of, 246; and theories of property, 194 Lacan, Jacques, 72–73 lack: as pleasure, 229; as productive, 230 Lakoff, George, 29 lamps, 1 landscapes: Addison and, 140, 142–45; the Avon Gorge and, 89–90; delineation by camera obscura, 64–65, 75; intermediate structures and, 86 language(s): abstraction and, 23–28, 272; and communication vs. persuasion, 9; displacement of sexual energy into, 182; metaphor and, 9–12, 45, 55, 95, 97, 154, 157, 159; and rational exchange, 156; regularization of, 153–54; time in, 159 Latour, Bruno, 128–29, 270 Laurence Sterne (Reynolds), 225 Law, Jules, 24 LeClerc, John, 34–35 ledger, 233–35 Leonardo da Vinci, 201–2 Lewis, Wilmarth Sheldon, 187 L’Homme (Descartes), 137 library: Addison’s, 144, 147; Akenside’s, 46; and Augustan theory of mind, 1; as cognitive ecology, viii; lending, 232; in Locke’s epistemology, 5, 24–32, 37, 44; as metaphor/ecology, 30; in Pepys’s will, 159; as cognitive model, 8, 15, 18

Index 361 The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 190, 191–96, 224 Lillo, George, 235 lithotomy, 160, 161, 166–69 Locke, John, 22–37; and Akenside’s poetry, 52; and Akenside’s theory of imagination, 53; on apertures in mind, 259; on attention vs. digression, 110; cabinet, 56, 58; and conception as term, 194–95; and conception in Tristram Shandy, 191–92; on custom, 113– 14; dark room metaphor, 56, 58; design’s epistemological meaning, 66; dictionary of draughts, 131; on eloquence, 9; enactivist theory of cognition, 267–68; on eye/mind relationship, 60; and homunculus fallacy, 62; as influence on poets/painters, 50; linkage of ideas and experience, 194; medical notebook index, 23; and metaphor, 10, 12, 24–27; and mind as cabinet, 5; and mind-body split, 15; on ownership of ideas, 247; and Paradise Lost, 42; on perception, 153–54; and production of new ideas, 191–92; and time, 158; and Tristram Shandy, 192–93; on unintelligible ideas, 154 London Merchant (Lillo), 235 Long, Charles, 210, 211 loss: and dispossession, 227–28; knowledge from, 241; and paradox of property, 252; in Pilkington’s cognitive theory, 243–44; in Pilkington’s memoirs, 241; and poetry, 242 Lost Property Office, 252–63, 253 love token, 246, 249–50. See also ring containing a lock of hair Mack, Maynard, 93–94 Macpherson, C. B., 246, 247 Marcantonio Raimondi, 68, 69 marketplace: dualism and, 247–48; subjectivity and, 264–65 Marshall, David, 89 mathematics, 119 matter, accidents and, 109 Mayer, Lance, 64 Mead, Richard, 76 meaning, embodied view of, 188 medals, 129–40, 130 “Method for a Library According to the Intellectual Powers” (Evelyn), 8 Memoir (Pilkington), 230–40 memoranda, 234, 257, 259, 266 memory(-ies): Akenside’s, 49; as discrete

objects, 138; engrammatic/exogrammatic coding, 134; in Hooke’s theory of mind, 117, 118; ideas and, 32–33, 63; imagination and, 137; library model of, 8; in Locke’s epistemology, 5, 31–32; painting from, 221– 22; in Pilkington’s memoir, 238; as storage device, 234; suffering and, 241, 244 “Memory: A Poem” (Pilkington), 239 mentation, brain work and, 243 metaphor, 8–13; in Akenside’s poetics, 51–52; camera obscura as, 63–64; and cognitive ecologies, 13, 15; cognitive theory of, 29; conception as, 194; in eighteenth-century thought, 8–13; embodiment and, 156, 157; empiricism vs., 9; in Enlightenment epistemology, 1; as imagination’s opposite, 49– 50; interiority as, 178; inwardness as, 177; library as, 30; and Locke’s commonplacing system, 34–35; in Locke’s epistemology, 24–28, 32, 33, 267–68; as means of speaking about mind, viii; in Paradise Lost, 45; in Pope’s theory of poetical composition, 96–97; in Rape of the Lock, 103; as tool of persuasion, 9 metaphor theories of language, 9–12, 45, 55, 95, 97, 154, 157, 159 method, digression vs., 110–11 Micrographia (Hooke), 114, 115, 118–24 microscope, 114, 118–21, 123 Milton, John, 38; in Akenside’s dream essay, 55; and design in nature, 149; Paradise Lost, 21–22, 40–45, 148–49, 203 Milton Dictating Paradise Lost to his Daughters (Delacroix), 38 Milton’s bed, 21, 37–46, 48, 55 mimetic knowledge, 207–8 mind: acquisition of ideas by, 244; Canterbury Cathedral and, 173; and Locke’s commonplace index, 36–37; Locke’s concept of, 24–26; and possession, 246; and repetition, 139; Richardson’s theory of, 22; Thomas Aquinas’s concept of, 173 mind-body split: and cognitive ecologies, 15–16; Descartes and, 137. See also dualism mirrors, 81–83 models, value of, 62–63 Mohl, Ruth, 39 monism, 39, 41–45, 148, 203 Morton, Timothy, 16, 17 mourning ring, 246. See also ring containing a lock of hair

362 Index Muse: in Akenside’s dream essay, 54; at Milton’s bed, 37; Satan as, 41–42 museum(s): and Augustan theory of mind, 1; Canterbury Cathedral as, 171; as cognitive ecology, viii; as discipline, 131; evolution in Britain, 6; mind as, 5–6; in Paradise Lost, 22; as site of muses, 22; of Wild’s criminological rarities, 262–63 The Museum: Or, the Literary and Historical Register, 47, 48–49, 53–54 Myers, Gay, 64 The Mysterious Mother (Walpole), 175–88, 176 Narbonne, Countess of (character), 180–86 natural history, 76 Natural History (Pliny the Elder), 111–12 Natural History of Oxford-Shire (Plot), 124–27 natural law, 65, 78 nature: and Addison’s Walk, 145, 147; and design, 65–66, 75–77, 91–92; and digression, 144; and ecological thought, 149–50; and exantlation, 203; imitation in fine arts, 200; painting and, 202–3; and Pope’s grotto, 91, 94; Reynolds’s idea of, 215–16; Woodward’s definition of, 78 Neoplatonism, 216, 218 neural networks, 28 neurology, 137–38 neurophysiology, 63, 117, 123, 139 “Newgate’s Garland” (Gay), 263 new ideas. See novelty; originality New Method of Common-Placing (Locke), 32–33 New Philosophy, 54 Newton, Sir Isaac, 59 Nickel, Helmut, 70, 71 Numa (Roman king), 93–95 O’Brien, Karen, 228 obstetrics: conception and, 194, 196; folio sheet with two sketches of a single conception, 197–208 Odyssey, 106–7 Opticks (Newton), 59 organization: of collections, 75; of Pope’s grotto, 92 originality, 2; and The Castle of Otranto, 189–91; in Locke’s epistemology, 191–92; imitation and, 213; Reynolds’s view of limitations of, 214. See also novelty outward problem of perception, 154

ownership: and Addison’s theory of poetic inspiration, 229; of ideas, 192–94, 246, 247, 267; and possessive individualism, 248 pain: and inwardness, 153, 160, 162–65, 174; and Pilkington’s theory of memory, 245 painting(s): and Bacon’s division of invention, 215, 216; camera obscura as aid to, 66; from memory, 221–22; and nature, 202–3; Reynolds’s collection, 213–14; Richardson’s theory of, 22 palaces, in Akenside’s theory of mind, 51, 52 panel, in Lost Property Office, 259–60 paper, blank sheet of: Pilkington’s verse about, 240–45; in Tristram Shandy, 190, 195–96 Paradise Lost (Milton), 21–22, 40–45, 148–49, 203 paradisical thinking, 148 Parallel of Ancient Architecture with the Modern (Fréart), 67 parenthesis, 120–22, 126 Paris (mythological figure), 69–73 passage, time as, 158 patterns: in cabinet creation, 83; design as, 66 Peachum (character), 260, 262, 265 Pearce, Susan, 6–7 pebble, gritty, 73–80, 74 Pepys, Samuel: and kidney stone, 167–70; stone-case, 161, 174–75; and time, 159–67 perception, 153–55; in Hooke’s philosophy, 64; Locke’s theory of, 77; outward/inward problems of, 154–55 period (punctuation), 114, 115, 119–21, 124 perspective: in The Judgment of Paris, 70–72; and Pope’s grotto, 87; from tower at Avon Gorge, 89–90 perspective glass, 90 Philander (character), 141, 142 Philips, John, 229 philosophical dualism. See dualism philosophical languages, metaphor and, 9 physiology, 139 Pilkington, Laetitia, 230–45 place: body and, 173; and cognitive ecologies, 149–50; and qualities of occupants, 187–88; unity of, 180–81 plagiarism, 238, 239 Platonism, 216 pleasure: Addison’s understanding of, 138–39; repetition and, 138–39 Pleasures of Imagination (Akenside), 50, 61

Index 363 “The Pleasures of the Imagination” (Addison), 88, 144 Pleasures of the Imagination (Akenside), 50–51 Pliny the Elder, 111–12 Plot, Robert, 124–28, 130 Plutarch, 93, 94 poetic genius, limitations of, 214 poetic inspiration, 229, 238 poetry: and Addison’s theory of pleasure, 140; in Addison’s view of travel, 135, 136; and Bacon’s division of invention, 215; in cognitive ecology, 45; loss and, 242; Milton’s theory of, 22; and Pope’s grotto, 86–87. See also specific works Polanyi, Michael, 154, 155, 163 Poliziano, Angelo, 212, 217 Pomian, Krzysztof, 99 Poovey, Mary, 233–34 Pope, Alexander: and dispossession in The Rape of the Lock, 248–54; and grotto of Egeria, 84–97, 88, 96; on ideal coin, 133; on learning, 97; as poet of memory as wit, 238; Rape of the Lock, 100–108 Porter, Roy, 139 portrait: cabinet (see cabinet portrait); of Hunter, 219–25, 220; and Milton’s bed, 21; of Sterne, 224; of Wild, 257–60, 252; of The Distrest Poet, 257–59, 258; of Woodward, 81–84, 82 possession, 246. See also ownership possessive individualism, 227, 247–48 “Present Ill State of My Health” (Pepys), 162–63 primal properties, 154 primary pleasures of the imagination, 135 private property, 246–47 private spaces, 185 progress, time as, 159 properties: effect of ideas on, 154; and judgment, 76 property, legal evolution in eighteenth century, 247 property rights, 247 Pseudodoxia Epidemica (Browne), 202–3 psychology, cognitive ecologies and, 14 public space: Canterbury Cathedral as, 173; and privacy, 177 Rape of the Lock (Pope), 100–108, 248–53 Raphael (character), 43–45, 203 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), 67–73, 210–13, 217, 218

reason: Bacon’s view of, 116; development of, 235; in Locke’s epistemology, 35; in Paradise lost, 40–41, 44 Receiving Acts, 255–56 The Reception of Claudius (medal), 132 reciprocal exchanges, 156–57 recollection, in Locke’s epistemology, 32 refer, transfer vs., 53 reflexivity, 14, 16, 241–42 regularization of language, 153–54 Reid, Thomas, 10–11 relics, 169–77 reliquary, 169, 172 Renaissance: and conception, 204; and Plot’s organization of material, 125 repetition, pleasure and, 138–39 repository, memory as, 238 Repository of the Royal Society, 115–18 representations, originals vs., 88 representative knowledge, 207–8 retouching, 210–11 Reynolds, Joshua, 208, 210–20; and camera obscura, 98; and conception as principle of art, 212–13; Laurence Sterne (portrait), 224, 225; and mind as gallery, 5; William Hunter (portrait), 219–25, 220 Richards, Graham, 14 Richardson, Jonathan: on conception, 196; on invention, 80, 190; and Milton’s bed, 21, 22; on painters, 73; and Reynolds’s aesthetic, 217 Ricoeur, Paul, 11 rights, ownership of, 246 ring containing a lock of hair, 246, 249–52 Rogers, Pat, 85 Roman Aurius, 130 Romantic era, 1, 3 Romanticism: and cognitive ecologies, 16; and ecological thought, 149–50 Rorty, Richard, 9 “Rosicrucian” machinery, 103 Ross, Alexander, 70 Royal Academy, 199, 208, 210 Rymsdyk, Jan van, 202–3 Satan (character), as Muse, 41–42 Scarburgh, Charles, 161–62 Scholasticism, 39 screen: in Addison’s prose, 129; camera obscura and, 59, 64–66; dark room and, 31; in Lacan’s work, 73

364 Index Sculptura (Evelyn), 67–69 secondary pleasures, 135, 136 Sedgwick Museum, 7 Sense and Sensibility (Austen), 249–50 sense experience: and Akenside’s poetry, 52; in Locke’s epistemology, 29; metaphor and, 28; as origin of ideas, 3, 12 Serres, Michel, 194 sexuality: conception and, 195; drapery and, 223; language and, 182 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 67 Shandy (character), 191, 192 shilling (coin), 226–30, 227 Sidney, Sir Philip, 72 simple portrait, 200 simple shapes, 119 simplicity of ideas, 181 sin, dualism as, 42 skeleton of Jonathan Wild, 261, 263 Sloane, Hans: and British Museum, 6, 7; and Hay’s stone, 151, 153, 166–67 Smugglerius, 199 soul, in Hooke’s theory of mind, 117, 118 Spectator (Addison), 129, 130, 134, 148 speed bumps, 128–29 spirit: in Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 27, 133; according to Hunter, 202, 203; in Paradise Lost, 41–45; in The Pleasures of the Imagination, 138; according to Willis, 137; in Wordsworth, 17 spleen, 104–8 “The Splendid Shilling” (Philips), 229–30 Stallybrass, Peter, 108 Stanley, Arthur Penryhn, 171 “Stanze per la giostra” (Poliziano), 212, 217 Statute of Anne, 247 Sterne, Laurence: Reynolds’s portrait of, 224, 225; Tristram Shandy, 191–96 stone: from grotto of Egeria, 85, 95–97; from Hay, 151–57; from Pepys, 159–68; uric acid calculi/kidney stone (See calculus (stone)); in Woodward’s cabinet, 73–84 stone-case, Pepys’s, 161, 174–75 storehouse, memory as, 238 Storer, William, 98 Strawberry Hill, 175–79, 181, 184–85, 187, 188 structure, of collections, 75 Stukeley, William, 128 subjectivity, high/low, 264–65 substances, Locke’s view of, 154 suffering, knowledge from, 241, 244–45

Suky Straddle (character), 265 supellex, 117 surgery. See lithotomy Sutton, John, 137 Swift, Jonathan, 111–13, 239, 245 synoptic method, 77 “Table of Fame” (Addison), 53 “The Table of Modern Fame” (Akenside), 54–55 A Tale of a Tub (Swift), 111–13 Taylor, Charles, 35 Tearne, Christopher, 161 telescope, 90 tension, 181, 182, 184–86 Thalestris (character), 249, 250 theodicy, 240 Theodore (character), 179 thief taker, 254, 255, 263 Thomas à Becket. See Becket, Thomas (archbishop of Canterbury) Thomas Aquinas, 173 Thomson, James, 240 time, 157–67 The Toilet of Venus (van Kessel), 98, 99–100 topos, 1 towers, 178, 180, 184, 187 Tradescant, John, 6 trade writing, 237–38 transfer, refer vs., 53 transmission, persuasion vs., 9 Travels in Italy (Addison), 135 Tristram Shandy. See The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Triumph of Galatea, Reynolds’s retouching of, 208–19 Triumph of Galatea (Raphael), 209, 211, 212, 217–18 trompe l’oeil, 97, 98 tumulus, 125, 126–29 Turing, Alan, 271–72 Two Treatises on Government (Locke), 192 Uffenbach, Zacharias Conrad von, 81, 83 understanding, as emergent property, 58 Urania, in Paradise Lost, 22 urinary calculus. See calculus (stone) uterus, conception and, 197–208, 207, 221–22 Venus, 99–100 Vermeer, Johannes, 98–99

Index 365 Vermuele, Blakey, 95 “Verses on a Grotto by the River Thames” (Pope), 92–93 Virgil, 133, 147 vision, 60. See also eye visual art. See painting(s) Vulcan (mythical character), 217 walking, as metaphor, 19, 128, 140, 142, 148 Waller, Richard, 123 Walpole, Horace, 175–96; on camera obscura, 98; on mind as gallery of images, 5; and The Mysterious Mother, 175–88; origins of his castle’s courtyard, 189; on Travels in Italy, 135 Walter Shandy (character), 199 West, Benjamin, 98 West, William, 90 Westminster Abbey, 175 White, Allon, 108

Wild, Jonathan: and The Beggar’s Opera, 260, 262; and Lost Property Office, 252–63, 253; skeleton of, 261, 263 Wilkins, John, 153 William Hunter (Reynolds), 219–25, 220 Willis, Thomas, 61; on brain’s anatomy, 63, 117; neurologically based view of memory, 137–38 Wilson, Katherine, 119 wit: and memory, 238; as property, 246–47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, ix womb, mind as, 204 women: and childbirth, 199; and dispossession, 228 Woodward, John: collecting by, 7–8; and gritty pebble, 73–80, 74; oval portrait of, 81–84, 82; Alexander Pope and, 84–86 Wordsworth, William, 16–17, 55 workshop, in Hooke’s theory of mind, 117

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A c k n o wle d gme n t s

When I began the book that became The Mind Is a Collection, I thought Tristram Shandy was basically right (see Exhibit 19). I thought that ideas could be owned in the same way that one might own an apple—­just by plucking it from the commons. The arc of this book in many ways traces my own growth; I now suspect that the only things we can really own are debts. The good news is that ideas are the kind of debts that it is a pleasure to repay. The design for this book I owe to conversations over several years at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Clark Library, and the Getty Research Institute. I was fortunate to have good readers of early versions of the manuscript. Pride of place must go to Helen Deutsch, a brilliant reader whose influence will be felt especially in the details, and Anne Myers, from whom I learned the Addisonian love of digression. But I also owe long-­standing debts to Michael Colacurcio, John Alba Cutler, Emily Hodgson-­Anderson, Jesse Johnson, Jayne Lewis, Chris Lohr, Saree Makdisi, James Masland, Jon Naito, Felicity Nussbaum, Tom O’Donnell, Jonathan Post, Taly Ravid, Marcie Ray, Malina Stefanovska, and the members of the Eighteenth-­Century/Romanticist Group, each of whom was an important, careful reader of early work leading to this book. The Mind Is a Collection took its current shape over five years at the University of Michigan, where I benefited immensely from the deep knowledge and selfless support of my colleagues. Debts worth itemizing I owe to Tina Lupton, who helped think through nearly all the objects in this book and many more besides; David Porter, whose idea it was to arrange the project according to objects rather than ideas; Scotti Parrish, whose careful reading of the manuscript in a much earlier form suggested its basic arc and outline; and Adela Pinch, who first suggested to me that Shandy might be wrong. This book also benefited from the advice and careful readings of Kathryn Babayan, David Brewer, Lynn Festa, Jonathan Freedman, Danny Hack, Lucy Hartley,

368 Acknowledgments

Clem Hawes, Judith Hawley, Daniel Herwitz, Emily Hodgson-­Anderson, Sarah Kareem, Tom Keymer, Crystal Lake, Matthew Lassiter, Majorie Levinson, Robert Markley, Steven Mullaney, Brad Pasanek, Mike Schoenfeldt, Terri Tinkle, Valerie Traub, Doug Trevor, Gillian White, and Patsy Yaeger. Some markers can’t be repaid; in this category go my debts to my readers at the University of Pennsylvania Press. And some debts are bad; in this category go my obligations to everyone who has helped me along in this project through a casual insight or careful reading, and whom I have neglected to mention here. This book has been shaped by the spaces in which it was dreamed up, and has benefited from direct institutional support. Thanks especially to the Institute of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, the Lewis Walpole Library, my home department, and the Evan Frankel Foundation. Thanks also to the many people who care for the objects described in this book and cared enough to share them with me; I owe debts especially to Simon Chaplin (then at the Hunterian Museum in London), Dan Pemberton at the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Susan Walker and Margaret Powell at the Lewis Walpole Library, and Anthony Beckles Willson at the Twickenham Museum. The book benefited immensely from the knowledgeable staffs at the Clark Library in Los Angeles, the Houghton Library at Harvard, the University of Glasgow Special Collections, the Wellcome Library, the British Museum, the libraries at the Royal Society and the Royal College of Surgeons, the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, the Royal Mint Museum, the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, the Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, the Society of Merchant Venturers, the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, the British Library, the Bodleian at Oxford, and the staff of the many libraries and rare book collections at the University of Michigan and the University of California, Los Angeles. Have I now covered all my markers? Not yet—­for I owe deep debts of gratitude to Susan and Eric Silver, who watched me working through the first phases of this project, and Nuran Gürsel, who was there throughout the last. To Zeynep Gürsel, who has generously and selflessly learned to care for every object in this book, I owe greater debts than can be tallied. To her and to Ada this book is dedicated.