Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire 9780815363651, 9781351108751

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Prologue: Framing the Narrative of Space
1 The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time
2 Riot-Space: A Brief Archaeology of Scripted, Unscripted, and Chaotic Performances
3 Empires Within: The Spatial Dimension of the Johnsonian Oikos
4 Cultural Logic of Museology I: A Genealogy of the Global “Endeavor”
5 Cultural Logic of Museology II: The Spatial Dimension of Corporate Identity
Epilogue: In Memoriam: Random Thoughts on Archaeological Fragments
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain: An Archaeology of Empire is a provocative intervention that extends the parameters of ongoing dialogues about British identity during the Enlightenment. Drawing on institutional imperatives and theatrical, artistic, and other cultural productions, this book describes how British identity emerges not in spite of but due to its fluid, volatile, and subversive impulses and expressions. The imperial establishment—codified in the logics of the corporation, the academy, the cathedral, the theater, as well the private parlor or garden—derives its power from scripting and championing a resistance to precisely those subversive elements which threaten or undermine the foundations of order and liberalism in civil society. Choudhury argues that imperial Britain can best be understood in terms of this culture’s investment in spatial alignments which celebrated a radial interface with remote points of commercial interest. The volume shows that Daniel Defoe, Arthur Onslow, David Garrick, Joseph Banks, Daniel Solander, Hans Sloane, Francis Barber, Samuel Johnson, and George Frideric ­Handel were not only part of a dazzling lineup of the empire’s architects. In retrospect, their contributions reflect a remarkably modern pattern: the spatial dimension of corporate culture, and this culture’s dependence on, and thus its collusion with, global commerce. Mita Choudhury, at Purdue University Northwest since 2005, began her career teaching Shakespeare at St. Lawrence University and, subsequently, as assistant professor, she taught drama at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Author of Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660–1800: Performance, Identity, Empire (­Bucknell 2000) and coeditor of Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self, and Other in the Enlightenment (Bucknell 2002), her current work explores the spatial dimension of imperial formations in Enlightenment Britain.

Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-Century Literature

15 Wordsworth Before Coleridge The Growth of the Poet’s Philosophical Mind, 1785–1797 Mark Bruhn 16 Political Economy, Literature & the Formation of Knowledge, 1720–1850 Richard Adelman & Catherine Packham 17 Errors and Reconciliations Marriage in the Plays and Novels of Henry Fielding Anaclara Castro-Santana 18 Reimagining Society in 18th Century French Literature Happiness and Human Rights Jonas Ross Kjærgård 19 On Declaring Love Eighteenth-Century Literature and Jane Austen Fred Parker 20 Before Crusoe Defoe, Voice, and the Ministry Penny Pritchard 21 Moral Cupidity and Lettres de Cachet in Diderot’s Writing Jennifer Vanderheyden 22 Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain An Archaeology of Empire Mita Choudhury

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.­routledge.com

Nation-Space in Enlightenment Britain An Archaeology of Empire

Mita Choudhury

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Mita Choudhury to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Choudhury, Mita, 1958– author. Title: Nation-space in Enlightenment Britain : an archaeology of empire / Mita Choudhury. Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Routledge studies in eighteenth-century literature ; 22 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2019001183 (print) | LCCN 2019005750 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: English literature—18th century—History and criticism. | National characteristics, British, in literature. Classification: LCC PR448.N38 (ebook) | LCC PR448.N38 C46 2019 (print) | DDC 820.9/3584107—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001183 ISBN: 978-0-8153-6365-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-351-10875-1 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

For Makhan Lal Choudhury, 1900–1987

Contents

List of Figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

Prologue: Framing the Narrative of Space 1 1 The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time 15 2 Riot-Space: A Brief Archaeology of Scripted, Unscripted, and Chaotic Performances 50 3 Empires Within: The Spatial Dimension of the Johnsonian Oikos 88 4 Cultural Logic of Museology I: A Genealogy of the Global “Endeavor” 124 5 Cultural Logic of Museology II: The Spatial Dimension of Corporate Identity 172 Epilogue: In Memoriam: Random Thoughts on Archaeological Fragments 224 Bibliography Index

251 263

List of Figures

2.1 The Military Prophet, 1750.  Anonymous. Etching and Engraving. © British Library Board. Cup.21.g.37/38 57 2.2 Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris, 1794, Johann Zoffany, G ­ erman, 1733–1810, Oil on Canvas, 39 × 50 inches (99.06  × 127 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1984.49 67 2.3 View of the Encampment in the Museum Garden, 5 August 1780.  ©The Trustees of the British Museum 73 2.4 The Encampment on Blackheath, 1780.  ©The Trustees of the British Museum 74 2.5 Encampment in the Museum Garden, 1780 (A Different View). ©The Trustees of the British Museum 75 2.6 A Trip to Blackheath. ©The Trustees of the British Museum 76 4.1 Pen and Ink Drawing, a View of the Rear of Montagu House and on its North Side. Presumably Early Eighteenth Century. Unknown Artist and Provenance. ©The Trustees of the British Museum 127 4.2 Hans Sloane’s Pharmaceutical Cabinet. ©The Trustees of the British Museum 129 4.3 Sir Joseph Banks’ Shells, drawer 6, Cowrie Collection. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London 132 4.4 Shoes Collected by Hans Sloane. ©The Trustees of the British Museum 133 4.5 John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779), Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr. Daniel Solander and Dr. John Hawksworth, Oil on canvas by John Hamilton Mortimer, c. 1771.  nla. pic-an7351768.  © National Library of Australia 149 5.1 View of the Front and Courtyard of Montagu House (South Prospect), Etching and Engraving, 1728. © Trustees of the British Museum 173 5.2 Minutes of the Committee Meeting Held at Montagu House on 22 February 1754, Page 1.  © Trustees of the British Museum 180

x  List of Figures 5.3 Minutes of the Committee Meeting Held at Montagu House on 22 February 1754, Page 2.  © Trustees of the 181 British Museum 5.4 Minutes of the Committee Meeting Held at Montagu House on 22 February 1754, Page 3.  © Trustees of the 182 British Museum 5.5 Thomas Malton Jr., Old Palace Yard. Circa 1780.  © Trustees of the British Museum 183 5.6 The Hall and Stair Case, Etching by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson (1808–1809). © Trustees of the British Museum 191 5.7 Staircase of the Old British Museum, Montagu House: At Right Sculptures and Painting, and in Background Stuffed Animals, Ceiling, and Back Wall Decorated with Paintings,47 Displaying Landscape and Celestial Scenes. George Scharf, 1845.  Water Color. © Trustees of the British Museum 192 5.8 Plan of the First State Story of Montagu House, showing the arrangement of the collections and the tour route. Circa 1765.  Reproduced by Permission of Tony Spence 194 5.9 Plan of the Second State Story of Montagu House, showing the arrangement of the collections and the tour route. Circa 1765.  Reproduced by Permission of Tony Spence © 195 5.10 The Plan of the Lower Story of Montague House & Offices in Plans of Montague House by H. Flitcroft 1725.  © Trustees of the British Museum 205 5.11 “Plan of the Lower Storey of Montague House & Offices.” This specific plan is “Copied from Mr. H. Flitcroft by W. Brasier, 1740.” BM Uncatalogued Black Box containing Henry Keene Drawings. © Trustees of the British Museum 206 5.12 Page 4 of the Keene Plans. “References to West Wing” This Plan is Signed by Henry Keene, Delin, No Date. BM Uncatalogued Black Box Containing Henry Keene Drawings, circa 1753–1754.  © Trustees of the British Museum 208 5.13 Plan of the Second State Story of Montagu House. With plan of the placement of books belonging to Hans Sloane, The Harleian Library, The Cottonian Library, and those of Mr. Edward. Loose Leaf Insertion, BM Uncatalogued Black Box Containing Henry Keene Drawings, circa 1753–1757.  © Trustees of the British Museum 210

Acknowledgments

I begin with a roll call, one which humbles me even as I try to find the right words to communicate my gratitude to my peers and my students. The community of scholars who come together to fuel the dialogues we engage in—including this one—is the community which will and does, inevitably, present a solid resistance to the reactionary and authoritarian impulses of our current political landscape. Perhaps more than ever before, we feel very acutely both the need for dialogue and the importance of those Enlightenment institutions which provide the space and the imperative for dialogue. This book would not have seen the light of day without John Harwood’s persistent and intrusive queries about progress as well as his seasoned advice and unreserved encouragement. Once upon a time my professor at Penn State, a member of my dissertation committee, and lately my muse, John has been much more than just a sounding board. If every project needs a drum major, John certainly fits the bill for this one. I have not had the opportunity to thank publicly Brian Corman, who has been a steady and constant presence in my academic landscape since 1992; I must do so now. He was the first to see the blueprint of this project; his cautious optimism about the future prospect of the fledgling idea gave me the necessary dollops of early hope of finding a publisher and an audience. I have taken for granted Brian’s guidance in so many projects in the last twenty-five years. For serving as my advisor-at-large, Michal Kobialka occupies a special place in my academic life since we talked years ago about his idea of borders. Then as now, we come together to discuss our passion for identifying the performative elements in pernicious cultural and political divides. For their collegiality and guidance as I have moved from institution to institution to accommodate my personal journey, I thank Joe Roach, the late Srinivas Aravamudam, Paula Backscheider, and Rob Hume. And for their willingness to read chunks of this book as well as their insightful comments, I would like to thank Beth Tobin, Andy Miller, Lisa Freeman, Bettina Jansen, Helen Brooks, and Jesse Cohn. Thanks are also due to the two Routledge reviewers who read the chapters with attention to detail and provided insightful comments. The “historian” reader’s suggestions I have taken seriously although I have not been able to do

xii Acknowledgments full justice to all the elements of the critique, nor have I been able to meet this reader’s high interdisciplinary standard. At Purdue University Northwest (formerly Calumet), the following colleagues have helped me not only to imagine but also to experience a community of scholars who look beyond disciplinary boundaries toward creating an environment based upon academic integrity, diversity, and a steadfast commitment to student success: Bipin Pai, Casimir Barczyk, Miriam Joyce, Craig Hammond (now at Penn State New Kensington), Alan Spector, Dan Dunn, Mark Mabrito, Joseph Bigott, Kate Sweeney, Cezara Crisan, and Frank Colucci. To the following former and current students, a heartfelt thanks for reading bits and pieces of my work in progress and for keeping me centered and motivated: Karen Schmidt, Deb Chatterjee, Lora Mendenhall, Christine Hunter, Paula Zaja, Ariele Morris, Jonathan Winey, John Decker, Courtney Hardin, Jessica Groen, and James Gross. “Across the pond,”—and as I gaze at the small cluster of islands which, with Caliban-like wickedness, I am tempted to call “mine,”—I have and must acknowledge a complicated bond. With London, of which I will never tire, I continue to converse. My interactions with the real and the virtual, the dead and the living, in London’s cafes, pubs and clubs, museums and libraries, restaurants and train and tube stations have been particularly enriched by friends who defy the immigrant-­native dichotomy with great panache: thank you, Muriel Ghosh and Philip and ­Shiuli ­Davis for your warm and India-infused welcomes which I take for granted. I would like to thank Terry Eagleton for accepting my invitation and coming to our campus to speak with my students and colleagues in 2014. Your work hovers over and around the periphery of most of what I say in this book and elsewhere even if I apply small nuggets sloppily and without the rigor which your lifelong study of Marx has helped you to develop. Most of all, I enjoy the naughty humor which is integral to your work and so lacking in serious scholarship on both sides of the ­Atlantic. Ros Ballaster, thank you for helping to instill in my “study-abroad” students the love of the eighteenth century, which you conveyed through your impassioned lecture on Jane Austen in the summer of 2014. The most indispensable human resources in any research project including mine are the managers of maps, charts, manuscripts, rare books, images, and prints and drawings—the invisible agents who are integral to our search and discovery mission. To the following librarians who have helped me in innumerable ways over the years, big thanks: Tammy Guerero, Director of the Purdue Northwest Library; Lawrence Mykytiuk, Humanities Librarian at Purdue West Lafayette; and Francesca Hillier, Archivist and Curator of the Anthropology Library of the British Museum and her expert team: James Hammill, Joanna Lister, Lisa Taylor, and Hollie Heenan. For introducing me to the floor plans of the British Museum, I would like to thank the former archivist at

Acknowledgments  xiii the British Museum: Stephanie Alder. I am especially grateful to Tony Spence for sharing with me the flowcharts of the tours in the early British Museum and also to Elizabeth Bray and Lucia Rinolfi in the British Museum ­I mages department for expert advice and relentless efforts to track down images which managed to retreat into the recesses of the gigantic archives and database of the Museum. Of the British Library as my sanctuary space, no summary will suffice. This is the space where I find peace amid loud noise, stillness amid chaos, and the order which beguiles and seduces. To the staff and reference librarians of the Rare Books and M ­ usic room of the British Library: thank you for your patience, your dedication, and your efficiency. You set an incredibly high bar for librarians across the globe. Thanks are due also to the College of Humanities, Education, and Social Sciences at Purdue University Northwest for a generous stipend to cover the cost of licensing and reproduction of images. I have presented segments of the book at conferences and symposia at the following venues: the University of Minnesota; the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference (2017); the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies conference (2015); the Literary London Society conference (2015; 2017); the Newberry Library Symposium on the Eighteenth Century (2014); the “Obar seminar” at the Department of English at Technische Universität Dresden (2016); the Post-Colonial Seminar Series at the University of Kent (2017); and the Department of Humanities, Indian Institute of Engineering, Science, and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur, India (2017). Part of my research-related travels has been funded by the Purdue Library Scholars Grant (2013), the PNW Bayan College Fund (2017), and small grants from the Purdue Research Foundation during the early phase of development. For providing me with accommodation in London when funding was limited, huge thanks to the following friends and their families: Simone Aronsohn, Chris Barrett, the Bose Rosling family and the Orr Ewing family. My son Alex’s brand of humorous critique provides the necessary corrections to course. He is my rock. This book is dedicated to my grandfather Makhan Lal Choudhury, barrister, peacemaker, minority advocate, and a patriarch who embodied those principles of the Enlightenment which paved the path to India’s independence.

Prologue Framing the Narrative of Space

Expansionism codifies a spectacular archive of success tethered more often than not to the foundation of what has come to be known as “western civilization.” The key word here is expansion: the spatial coordinate of this episteme cannot be emphasized enough; it is in the expansive potential and reality of the Enlightenment, both as a concept and as lived experience, that its newness is immanent. The purpose of this project is twofold: it is to examine how discrete platforms of narration and performance came to embody, sponsor, and represent nation building with a new paradigmatic force in the eighteenth century, creating and recreating the exuberance (Donald Greene 1988) as well as the volatility endemic to the polarities of progress and decadence.1 In the realm of culture, there may not have been a “revolution” in Enlightenment Britain (such as in the scientific realm); yet the likenesses between and among myriad cultural productions reveal a rich archive of spatial consciousness in this culture, a consciousness geared toward harnessing space in the interest of nation—space which both solidified and defied the borders of nation. I use the term paradigm—by borrowing very loosely from Thomas Kuhn and Giorgio Agamben—not so much to identify shifts, but in order to locate “resemblance,” “analogy,” or “acquired similarity relations” in sites and events which cohere in (what I am calling) “nation-space.”2 Simultaneously, the purpose is to consider how parallel and competing modes of cultural production came to cohere through this culture’s overweening preoccupation with the visual—the indomitable imperative for public exhibition and performance—which is imbricated in the premise and promise of empire.3 Travel narratives of the eighteenth century reveal the extent to which, due to the vastness of the newly imagined geography, the familiar had become less remarkable and was thus inevitably passed by for something else that is around the corner, a new sensation, a new ocular pleasure, and a more remarkable site of profit and pleasure. This something else, this virtual possibility, supplies the more enduring image than the one which is palpably close and familiar since the distant lays claim to the more innate human preoccupation with the unseen and the unknown. Local images, gestures, interactions, encounters—unless diabolically or playfully sensationalized—lack the

2 Prologue intensity and the vividness of the moving pictures that neither collective memory nor indeed experiential reality can adequately recall or frame. Nation-space is a conceptual and thus an abstract, rather than a real, framework. I argue that this historiographical framework is a useful way to describe how modernity-in-the-making found expression in a wide spectrum of “spatialized media,” in what might be described as performance- and media-infused spaces. This framework also allows me to launch ideologically inflected micro-histories of how the story of nation developed in tandem with empire building and gained meaning and momentum from and through the spaces in which this story was narrated and experienced. The idea of nation-space that emerges from a culture in flux, at the dawn of full-fledged imperialism, is not only a fluid but also a transnational and trans-medial construct,4 providing for us an incentive to look back and to consider when and where such a construct came to be created, consciously or unconsciously, in an ordered or a random way, and why this construct emerged in disparate or uncharted sites as well as in circumscribed and scripted locations. 5 No one has argued more vociferously than Srinivas Aravamudan that in the eighteenth century “the interest in geographical horizontality is being trumped by a fear of vertical social porousness.” Focusing on the material culture of the English novel, he draws the following conclusion, one which is useful for my purposes here: [T]he pseudo-ethnographic fiction of the period can prompt us to place literary productions within the context of a horizontally integrative “geography” of transnational influence and exchange, rather than the more familiar vertical and genealogical “history” of the national model. The latter was itself a product of later eighteenth century and Romanic models of national culture that retroactively synthesized “the novel” as a particularity arising from a range of disparate genres and modes. In this respect, the agency ascribed to “the novel” is a displaced function of the teleological project of constructing national culture.6 Important to Aravamudan and many of us working in the field is the matter of agency, which I see as being the most tendentious part of my hypothesis, one which I discuss in each chapter with reference to specific manifestations and locutions of nation-space. Moreover, useful for my purposes is the practice of cultural or textual “geography” (not unlike historical geography), which accounts for both processes of linear sedimentation and the “similarity relations” which emerge simultaneously in disparate sites with analogous causes or motivations.7 By reading space through the lens of nation—and emphasizing the horizontality and paradigmatic potential of select nation-spaces—I am able to trace the

Prologue  3 modes of accretion in a handful of eighteenth-century sites of building, extending, redefining, restoring, and establishing a collective identity which could sustain the burdens of empire. The impetus for my argument comes from the following interrelated (and commonplace) observations: since time cannot be seen, it is always framed by, experienced, and felt in space. And space provides the platform for performances enacted in time. Furthermore, in any ­performance—whether public, private, scripted, or unscripted—the visual and the verbal are so intertwined that the one element cannot fully be realized or deployed without the other. Furthermore, in any culture, space allows the visual and verbal regimes to materialize. So, for instance, in eighteenth-century British architecture, urban development, museology, and cartography, these visual and verbal regimes became increasingly significant even as both practicum and theories related to these fields benefited from advancements in science, technology, and “discovery”—all significant markers of a modern state. Narratives of modernity, therefore, came to harness spatial-temporal alignments with increasing sophistication, as this study shows. Against the backdrop of the visual turn and its impact on the humanities (W. J. T. Mitchell 1995, 2006; Martin Jay 2006) and particularly inspired by the theory of counter-visuality presented with remarkable erudition by Nicholas Mirzoeff (2011), I embarked upon this project whose premises are well-established. Therefore, I have not, for instance, rehearsed and reworked the theories of nation and nationhood because countless experts have laid a solid foundation in this area (Linda Colley 1992; Partha Chatterjee 1993; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak and Judith Butler, 2011); I have used some of their ideas to bolster mine. I have also had the privilege of bypassing a discussion on, for instance, the elasticity of the term “Enlightenment” because J. G. A Pocock, among others, has taught us that “[t]here is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as the ‘Enlightenment, but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided.’” To sum up my perspective on the subject of this particular term—Enlightenment—would be difficult irrespective of the scope of this or some other project; but Pocock’s definition might help to explain some of my implicit concerns here: “In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the term ‘Enlightenment’ may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it.”8 I propose that collective identity in the eighteenth century was just as potent, volatile, shifting, and subversive as it is today. Equally, “empire” is a vast and complex template, one whose modernity has seldom been in question.9 Thus, the specificity of the events and narratives which I have selected here allows me to both deep map these events while also presenting strategies for consideration of broader frames of imperial reference codified in them.

4 Prologue I am indebted to recent studies on deep mapping as interpretive maneuver; this approach has helped me to transcend the limits of pure cartography, topography, and geography so as to encompass ideologically inflected narratives of time, place, and space (David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers 1999; Matthew H. Edney 1999; Miles Ogborn 2007; David J. Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. ­Harris 2010). Aligned with historiographical studies of eighteenth-century British culture, my focus on nation-space is designed to fill some lacunae and, simultaneously, to draw attention to the spatial dimension of collective identity as it manifested itself in the eve of full-blown empire. I argue that the British expansionist impulse—its zealous commitment to trade, commerce, colony, and the acquisition of scientific knowledge—can best be understood in terms of this culture’s innate, triumphant, uncanny, and also ambiguous relation to nation-space: space which is imagined and traversed, space which is charted and graphed, space which is harnessed toward fulfilling tangible or ephemeral desires and preposterous or monstrous dreams (Francisco de Goya, 1797–1799; Laura Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury 2002). In each chapter, I describe how the dialectics of human agency and spatial contingencies fuel narratives of nation in this “new” age of information. Where do visual and verbal regimes collide and comingle? Consider, as one example, the newly institutionalized Restoration theatre, which ushered in a paradigm shift, making this theatre noticeably modern in contrast to its precursors in the Renaissance, Jacobean, and Caroline periods. What was modern about this “restored” theatre, this new space? For one thing, the female body on stage—replacing as she did a prepubescent, unalloyed masculine space—came to codify sex and sexuality in hetero-scopic performances which could only have been imagined salaciously in the past (Martin Jay 1993; Laurence Senelick 2000). This new theatrical space then became a space for testing the limits of license and charting new modalities of psychosocial, sexual, and cultural exchange (Lisa Freeman 2017). Other changes of seismic proportion which registered critical-spatial realignments in the eighteenth century include the increasingly sophisticated technologies used to chart rural, exurban, and urban geography; produce geological surveys of colonial terrain including but not limited to land, sea, and estates; and create architectural blueprints of buildings and mansions—all newly empowered by latitudinal and longitudinal graphs as well as geometric technologies associated with Italian neoclassical architecture (Andrea Palladio English trans 1663; 1721). The local (London’s topography) and the distant (such as Australia) could then not only be imagined, drawn, engineered, and built (William Lithgow 1643), but these could be also written about (John Ogilvie 1675) and circulated widely in print. The production and circulation of ideas in the eighteenth century were equally dependent on the technologies associated with the print industry and its allied

Prologue  5 trades. In retrospect, we find, the impact of eighteenth-century science and technology on systems of visualization (manifested through print, performance, museology) appears to be just as ubiquitous and potent as the effect of digital sciences and humanities on the spatialized media of today (albeit in smaller scale).10 I contend that narratives of nation-space—whether packaged as events, normalized as domestic relations, or promoted as public exhibition—are embedded with large or small dollops of spectacle or display; equally, the evidence presented here suggests that these narratives came to codify this culture and define it in terms of ordered or engineered space (Michel Foucault 1970); space which is chaotic and unstructured (E. P. ­Thompson 1966); as well as commemorative space, one which is quasi-religious and marked as a “gift of death” (a concept associated with Jacques Derrida 1992). But spectacle, display, exhibition, and performance often dilute or obfuscate the mechanisms involved in engineering space and the operations of controlling chaos. Therefore, this project benefits from those arguments (including the ones in my early work) which have traced the imperatives of empire as a sometimes latent and sometimes palpable factor in eighteenth-century public culture (Mita Choudhury 2000; Daniel O’Quinn 2005). The operations of empire become doubly significant, I propose here, when the culture invests—serendipitously or ­strategically—in scripting the spatial dimension of its collective identity. This “scripting,” as I show in some detail, may be random, haphazard, or serendipitous, but it pledges steadfast allegiance not only to spectacle and display but also to those systems and symmetries of order and organization upon which Enlightenment modality rests. Indeed, territoriality and expansion were imagined as part of that grand narrative and then codified and realized by “discovery” of the geographical, cultural, and monstrous Other who was inevitably positioned elsewhere (Jonathan Lamb 2001). Mine is a modest contribution to ongoing discussion of (British) imperialism; its goal is to describe how the spatial dimension of collective identity unfolds, locally—in nation-space—and also how this collective spatialized British identity is sustained by borrowed narratives, homogenized materials, naturalized territories, and foreign subjects, objects, and resources (Miles Ogborn, “Talking Plants” 2013). My purpose is also to extend the discussion and revisit the methodologies used in recent observations and discussion about image and text or visual and verbal regimes in the eighteenth century. The most nuanced studies of visual culture are inflected by postmodern preoccupations and polemics related to how technologies of visualization shape space (­Jonathan Crary 1990; Barbara Maria Stafford 1999) or how space coerces, reinforces, reifies, distorts, or challenges visual regimes in ­early-modern literary and cultural productions (Cynthia Wall 1998). More broadly, my study rests and relies upon such nagging questions as the following: why does the reading of space come after its genesis? Or,

6 Prologue why is it necessary to remember that space is never neutral nor transparent (Henri Lefebvre 1974)? Or, why is it so difficult “to break out of the specular totalities of Panofsky’s iconology” (Erwin Panofsky 1991 translation)?11 Or why is it that in the struggle between tradition and innovation, innovation always seems to win? And why are social relations between people always mediated by and through images and spectacle (Guy Debord 1967)? While none of the dire consequences of the Enlightenment (Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno 1944; trans. 1972)12 are front and center of my argument, the unfolding stories of imperial nation-space that I describe here help me to inject this study with the oppositional impulse without which a postcolonial perspective such as mine would fall short of its liberating dialectics. As I develop the conceptual framework of imperial nation-space, I remain particularly conscious of the tendency in the backward glance, one which might proclaim the virtues of historicity without paying explicit homage to the ragged edges and uneven trajectories of historiography (Srinivas Aravamudan 2011)—the historiographies, specifically, of hegemony, inequality, oppression, and domination, which are often masked by and packaged as narratives of progress. Equally, I have embraced the lack of linearity in the sites and events I have selected here in order to steer clear of essentialist biases and to emphasize the point that patterns of recollection do not necessarily produce synthesis, that space as “practice of everyday life” (Michel de Certeau 1984) is haphazardly positioned in reality and also in memory. Insisting upon the usefulness of disruptions and elisions, I have tried to resist the allures of unity. This study is not anchored by literary products and, therefore, it does not engage, except in passing, with “great works,” fictional, dramatic, or in any other genre; rather, in each chapter I deep map instances in which the public, the private individual, as well as institutions, corporate entities, and imperial agencies create, frame, perform, or articulate what become narratives of nation-space. The literary world and London’s intellectual elite are never far removed from the narratives I describe; but they appear and disappear even as I question implicitly the extent to which this Age of Information valued the intellectual, the philosopher, and the poet. And these micro-histories and nonliterary narratives (for instance, the death of Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks’s expedition to the South Seas, Handel’s commemoration in Westminster Abbey, and the Gordon Riots) then become the texts which, I argue, express the full scale of the fluidity, instability, and also the resilience of the imperial agenda which produced in the eighteenth century spectacular narratives of nation. The purpose of Chapter 1 is to outline what I consider to be the critical issues in the institutionalizing of nation-space: I do this in three segments, which are titled as follows: “Urban Development and the Visual Imperative;” “Architectural Self-Fashioning and the Birth of Modern

Prologue  7 Surveillance;” and “Visual Culture: Its Systems and Symptoms in Enlightenment Time-Space.” In order to illustrate and also to underscore the importance of the temporal dimension of space and “the spatial dimension of collective identity,” I begin with a consideration of Daniel Defoe’s masterful and anachronistic meditation in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). My reading of Defoe’s Journal serves as an introduction to a discussion on how the materiality of urban space—marked by specific topographical associations and anchors, signs and symbols—becomes a narrative extension and expression of a restored and robust nation. Configured against the backdrop of public space, one which is threatened by the pollutants of domestic space, Defoe’s docudrama presents a prospect for shared and, in his polemics, also potentially endangered destiny. I then show how and why the act of reading space through the lens of nation and vice versa is the best critical method to study both the troubling and the consoling fictions related to eighteenth-century sites of building, establishing, defining, redefining, extending, and restoring a collective identity, which had the potential to contain if not to defeat serious threats to empire. In Chapter 2—Riot-Space: A Brief Archaeology of Scripted, Unscripted, and Chaotic Performances—I begin anachronistically with a close look at Edgar Allen Poe’s Gothic short story The Man and the Crowd (1841). This story is as much about “the man of the crowd,” whose “countenance . . . at once arrested and absorbed” Poe, as it is about the “character of the crowd” in “the most noisome quarter of London, where everything wore the worst impress of the most deplorable poverty, and of the most desperate crime.” The dialectical relationship between the materiality of the man and the materiality of the Victorian “crowd” (or what Poe calls “press”) manifests itself through the focalization of this “character” whose spectatorship is reliant upon, among other things, the “rays of the gas-lamps.” Molded by the same resistance to poverty and press, eighteenth-century narratives of riots also play with light and darkness while deploying complex strategies of narrative focalization. Indeed, an examination of riot as paradigm for modernity—moving as the concept does from singularity to general rule—benefits from Poe’s perspective on the press of humanity which produces and sustains “the practice of everyday living” in the imperial capital. Poe’s mob, conceptualized as faceless mass and marked by entrenched economic divides, provides for me the vocabulary to talk about the mediated deformity of the eighteenth-century mob and helps me to launch my discussion of eighteenth-century riots in general and the Gordon Riots in particular. Riot-Space represents, I argue in this chapter, public and volatile exhibitions of the chaos/order binary so central to Enlightenment self-fashioning. Multiplicity is not fundamentally subversive or chaotic or indeed violent; but multiplicity, a real and potential threat to the growing eighteenth-century metropolis and the

8 Prologue later (nineteenth-century) megalopolis, embeds density (concentration of population), viscosity (texture produced by difference), and volatility (unpredictable movement). Paradoxically, in this culture, riot-space continues to be reified and polemicized because it is endangered nation-­ space; but, simultaneously, the source of instability and agency—the mob of ­rioters—disappear into a negative mythos because this embodiment of the volatile state could not be sustained alongside the contingencies of empire building. In Chapter 3—Empires Within: The Spatial Dimension of the Johnsonian Oikos—I consider how modernity is scripted in the liminal spaces between the public and private domains.13 Citizenship is made manifest when it is performed and witnessed in public space where bodies meet, mingle, and take action, where business is conducted or entertainment is offered and consumed, and where goods are packaged, marketed, and sold. But the divide between public and private space as well as the hierarchies and economies of class and race become simultaneously fluid and malleable in the eighteenth century if only to accommodate the exigencies of an exuberant modernity—one in which “colony” is ubiquitous and visually and materially present in London (Vincent Caretta 1996; Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih 2004). In this chapter, I zero in on Samuel Johnson’s life when darkness pervades more intensely than in most others—at the death of his wife in 1752 and, more than 30 years later, when his own death was imminent. If there is a connection between these two events it is in the appearance in the first instance and the presence toward the end of Quashey, a Jamaican slave better known as Francis Barber or Frank. Already a celebrity among London’s intellectuals (Joseph Roach 2007), Johnson was introduced to the former slave immediately following his wife’s death in March 1752. I argue that Quashey is an ideal instrument for formulating a “schematic abstraction” of Johnson’s house (hold). 17 Gough Square, which is where Frank first appeared, may have been consistent with what we understand as the prevalent patterns of the “architecture of domestic interiors” (Michael McKeon 2006); however, the presence in this house of Quashey, and also the indigent Anna Williams and other subalterns, subverts almost every known model of the architectonics of eighteenth-century domestic relations due to what I describe as a uniquely Johnsonian and modern organization of oikos (private space) and genos (the cult-oriented clan that inhabited this space). In Chapter 4—The Cultural Logic of Museology I: A Genealogy of the Global “Endeavor”—I present just one angle of the story of the birth of the British Museum. So, for instance, I maintain that the structure of human signatures is not always visible, as the early historiography of the British Museum suggests. With a flamboyant global profile which immaterializes the individual and collective signatures (or agencies) at its birth, the British Museum can best be read using Georgio Agamben’s

Prologue  9 meditation upon the theory of signatures (2009), which is premised upon a linguistic-pictorial materiality. Which signatures are visible and which remain invisible? In the eighteenth century, what might be regarded as the knowledge industry, one which was empowered to educate and to disseminate information, was housed in this Museum. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the foundational principles of this knowledge indus­ ublic try were developed and promoted exclusively on the premise of p utility by parliamentarians (Arthur Onslow), academicians (Joshua Reynolds), discoverers (Hans Sloane), adventurers (Joseph Banks), and those who refined the systems of scientific ordering, categorizing, and cataloguing (such as Daniel Solander, a disciple of Linnaeus). In this early knowledge industry—one which was separate from institutions of higher learning—created as a corporation, empowered by parliament, and authorized by the monarch, there is no evidence of direct influence of the doyens of literary culture: Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), and Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774), to name just a few. Instead, we find the signatures of imperial agents such as Daniel Solander, Joseph Banks, and James Cook, or those, in other words, who directly or indirectly took on the task of demystifying within ­museum-space the dangers and the pleasures of the high seas. They also established protocols to corporatize and to control the channels of knowledge and information gathered from abroad. They were the chief architects of “staging” the twin logics of museology and empire, of building the new information society, whose narrative trajectory ran parallel to but hardly ever converged with the trajectory of literary productions and the burgeoning entertainment industry. The purpose of Chapter 5—The Cultural Logic of Museology II: The Spatial Dimension of Corporate Identity—is to deep map the ­eighteenth-century Montagu House, which is where the British Museum was first housed. This house becomes the text in my reading. The urban geography of London in the first half of the eighteenth century as well as the deep maps of individual townhouses and homes bore an imperial imprimatur derived from the owners’ commitment to collection of foreign artefacts (and knowledge), their global filiation/affiliation, and (what was considered then to be) colonial entrepreneurship. In more senses than one, the British Museum inherited the imperial instinct of its first owners. After its acquisition by the Museum (1754), Montagu House came to symbolize as well as to operationalize this culture’s commitment to optimal utilization of space which was appropriately imagined, surveyed, drawn, constructed, cultivated, and extended to exhibit the Britain which was self-consciously scientific, creative, ambitious, and imperial. With the help of unpublished estate plans of Montagu House, I argue that the systems of organization developed by the corporation and the contingencies related to the Museum’s acquisitions point to a hidden ground zero, where we can find a remarkable sedimentation of

10 Prologue cultural memory. Embedded in the earliest records of this manor house and its floor plans is evidence of how this private space was sanitized and then scripted toward creating a new and “public” nation-space which would be a fitting foundation for an information society. Not only does the history of the manor house and the narratives embedded in its estate plans reveal its imperial past, but this history also tells us how that past was buried even as the building was redesigned and renovated to accommodate the collections of Hans Sloane—a bequest described by historians as the “windfall” that led to the establishment of Britain’s first public museum. In the concluding chapter—In Memoriam: Random Thoughts on ­A rchaeological Fragments—I describe the role of collective memory and its contribution to the spatial turn in the eighteenth century: how memory was gathered and garnered toward the production of narratives of nation in both private and public space. The three cultural formations— the first a community event, the second the fine art of landscape design, and the third a formal and grand performance—I select and juxtapose are as follows: the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769; the Cobham estate and gardens in Stowe, Buckinghamshire; and the Handel commemoration in Westminster Abbey. Prima Facie, these disparate sites do not represent narratives with an overarching or common theme; except for their rootedness in the Enlightenment moment, these expressions of collective identity remain distinct and discrete—fragments in the cultural imaginary. As an example of establishment scripting of the national archive, the Handel Commemoration of 1784 provides us with a unique example of the grandeur of performance space—Westminster Abbey, where Handel’s Messiah was strategically deployed—and how this space renders irrelevant the memories and the archives of inconsistencies, failures, and faults associated with actual opera business under Handel’s management. Westminster Abbey, with the formidable paradigmatic force of its historiography—and symbolizing as it did on this occasion the remarkable union of church, state, musicology (fine arts) and museology (the art of display)—was used to apotheosize the naturalized citizen, Handel, who provided in absentia the means to mitigate and to deflect attention from, among other events, the loss of America. Equally, the gritty setting for the Shakespeare Jubilee in Stratford as well as the bucolic resplendence of the Cobham estate—with colony subsumed by opulent ­neoclassicism—presented polarities of experience but with one common cause: national heritage and its exhibition. What I say about space is not entirely new; but my attempt at a perspectival shift from cultural product to cultural space will, I hope, generate further discussion about culture and raise some possibilities for reading and thinking of cultures beyond the book or the building or the stage, with the goal of broadening the purview of textuality. For those

Prologue  11 of us who study primarily the history of the London stage or the rise of the English novel, how does London look from alternative vantage points lodged elsewhere in the culture industry,14 in, say, closets full of mummies or dead birds?15 In eighteenth-century studies, the concern is less about what is or is not admissible as fodder for study although continuous dialog about choices, elisions, and evasions is not just prudent but also urgent.16 Inextricably linked with the question of what constitutes culture is the polemics of who speaks on its behalf. Despite the vast scope of the Enlightenment archive and the contingencies of acquiring expertise in this field, we must still ask such seemingly impertinent questions as the following: at what points do various and parallel paths of progress in culture diverge and converge? Did cataloguer-extraordinaire of the British Museum Daniel Solander go to the theatre to watch, for instance, The Beggar’s Opera?17 Did he and his colleagues read Roxana (Betty Joseph 2004)?18

Notes 1 Bruno Latour has presented a provocative counterargument to the generally accepted nature-culture dichotomy in narratives of Western progress. Progress is seen as always following from and erasing the markers of decadence so much so that the “[t]he asymmetry between nature and culture then becomes an asymmetry between past and future.” Latour deploys the term “modern” as a conceptual framework rather than one which is date-bound; his is not a dissertation on the eighteenth century, but useful, nonetheless, for me to establish the framework for my intervention. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard UP, 1993), specifically 71 and also “The End of the Passing Past,” 72–74. 2 Giorgio Agamben’s dissertation on paradigm is an admirable summary of both Michel Foucault’s “notion of discontinuity” and Kuhn’s conclusions, one of which Agamben describes as follows: “[w]hen an old paradigm is replaced by a new paradigm that is no longer compatible with the previous one, what Kuhn calls a scientific revolution occurs.” Giorgio Agamben, “What is a Paradigm?” The Signature of All Things: On Method (Zone Books, 2009), 9–32 and specifically 12. See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (U of Chicago P, 1996) specifically “­Postscript—1996,”174–210 and, specifically 189. In the realm of culture, there may not have been a “revolution” in Enlightenment Britain; yet the “acquired similarity relations”—to use a concept from Kuhn—between and among myriad cultural productions provide for us a rich archive of a spatial consciousness in nation building, a consciousness and resultant concerted actions which, I argue, defied the borders of nation and reaffirmed the exceptionalism of this culture. 3 Visuality is, of course, one instinct or phenomenon that defines early-­ modern British culture. Some others were curiosity, globalism, scientism, imperialism, and so on (and I address some of these markers of Enlightenment throughout this study). As Barbara Benedict has argued, [c]uriosity is a historical phenomenon that crests when opportunities and commodities that encourage and manifest it crest: the late seventeenth

12 Prologue and eighteenth centuries. These opportunities and commodities stimulate a distinctly modern pleasure in novelty and consumption that extends to a panoply of curious subjects, topics freshly open to semi-licit inquiry: nature, the supernatural, the occult, sexuality. See Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (U of Chicago P, 2001), 8. 4 By “trans-medial construct,” I mean the many media—print, museological, performative—through which, simultaneously as well as in succession, the story of nation was deployed and disseminated. 5 Immanuel Wallerstein has described very succinctly how a community comes to emerge as cohesive construct but one which is also perpetually in flux: [T]he multiple communities to which all belong, whose ‘values’ we hold, towards which we express ‘loyalties,’ which define our ‘social identity,’ are all, one and all, historical constructs. And, even more importantly, they are historical constructs perpetually undergoing reconstruction. . . . These values, loyalties, identities are never primordial and, that being the case, any historical description of their structure or their development through the centuries is necessarily primarily a reflection of present-day ideology. See Immanuel Wallerstein, “Postscript” in Etienne Balibar and ­I mmanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, trans. Chris Turner (Verso, 1991), 228. I attempt to capture this perpetual state of reconstruction by presenting snapshots of moments when the performance or narration of nation can be fruitfully transformed by and through distinct spaces of expression or immanence. 6 Srinivas Aravamudan, “Fiction/ Translation/ Transnation: The Secret History of the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” A Companion to the ­EighteenthCentury English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula R. Backscheider and ­Catherine Ingrassia (Blackwell, 2005), 48–74 and specifically 70–71. 7 The alignment of geography and culture or geography and textual ­practice—appearing as it does as methodology in the work of Srinivas ­A ravamudan—can be profitably juxtaposed against Miles Ogborn’s following observation: In historical geography, the limitations of the textual vision have been fruitfully explored, for example, in investigations of the history of geographical knowledge which seek to restore to that history the full range of practices of knowledge production, circulation and use, and in attempts to reconsider the archive as a material space or an affective space which is not just about texts, however broadly conceived, and reading. See Ogborn, Distinguished Historical Geography Lecture, 2009: “Francis Williams’s Bad Language: Historical Geography in a World of Practice,” Historical Geography, vol. 37 (2009), 5–21 and specifically 6. 8 J. G. A. Pocock, “Historiography and Enlightenment: A View of Their ­H istory,” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 5, no. 1 (April 2008), 83–96 and specifically 83. www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-­ history/article/historiography-and-enlightenment-a-view-of-their-history/ A35491A94A7C20D15A49293BE0BE9BAA. Retrieved 23 March 2016. 9 The challenge to the basic assumption of “modernity” would come in the late twentieth century. See endnote 1 regarding Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.

Prologue  13 10 Here I allude to the work of Barbara Maria Stafford, who has described various types of resistance to visual culture; I point to two here: “The totemization of language as a godlike agency in western culture has guaranteed the identification of writing with intellectual potency.” On the contrary, intellectual potency can be found in all sorts of expression and in performance. Also important for my purposes is Stafford’s provocative challenge to postcolonial discourse (in this specific context): “Homi Bhabha, echoing Franz Fanon, reduces visuality to an evil, doubling colonial eye that either strips the individual of her proper representation or negatively mirrors the alien appearance projected by an oppressor.” While the critiques of Western civilization in the works of Bhabha, Fanon, and others are valid in most if not all imperial formations, their maneuver could be legitimately construed as counterproductively rejecting outright what Stafford refers to as “complex imagery.” See Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (MIT P, 1996). Specifically 5 and 7. In this context, it is fruitful to recall W. J. T. Mitchell’s words about why we need to pay close to attention to the semiotics of words and images. See Mitchell, “Ekphrasis and the Other,” Picture Theory (U of Chicago P, 1994), 151–81. 11 Mitchell, Picture Theory, 11–19 and specifically 19. 12 So, for instance, I am unable to examine the implications of the following statement even though it is important for a nuanced understanding of some of the limitations of the Enlightenment social pact, particularly as this construct relates to institutions and organizations: As a natural impulse, self-preservation has, like all other impulses, bad conscience; but efficiency and the institutions which meant to serve it—that is, independent mediation, the apparatus, the organization, ­systematization—like to appear reasonable, both in theory and in practice, and the emotions are made to share in this apparent rationality.

13

14 15

16

See Max Horkheimer and Theordor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York 1944; rpt. Continuum Publishing, 2000), 92. There is a substantial body of work dealing with the spatial or geographical coordinates of sex and gender relations. See, for instance, Karen ­Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge UP, 2004). My interest is in tracing the imperial dimension of domestic/private and public space. I use “culture industry” to invoke, specifically Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s dissertation on the subject in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (Continuum, 1995), 120–67. My reference to mummies and dead birds injects the element of foreign in domestic and familiar settings. This perspectival shift that I am referring to has been masterfully described and explained in terms of unconventional narratives by Jonathan Lamb. See his The Things Things Say (Princeton UP, 2011). Among the most insightful studies on narrative elision is the following by Lisa Zunshine, “The Spectral Hospital: Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy and the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 29, no. 1 (Winter 2005), 1–22. I would also single out the study which presents a radical perspectival shift by focusing on “the material remains of Samuel Johnson’s autopsy” and why these remains produce an “autoptic desire to see the thing itself.” See Helen Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson (U of Chicago P, 2005), specifically 7.

14 Prologue 17 My selection of John Gay’s ballad opera (1728) is merely to suggest what I see as a clear bifurcation between the eighteenth-century entertainment industry and the knowledge and information apparatuses. This opera’s enormous success on the London stage in the eighteenth century means that most Londoners with disposable income would have watched the play. 18 It is the very absence of these cultural intersections—at least in the mainstream archives of the Enlightenment—which I would like to invoke at the outset; however, such an investigation is beyond the purview of this study.

1 The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time

The great plague of London in 1665 is an exemplary setting in which to consider how the Enlightenment came to script both space and time. Experience of trauma and the anticipation of a return to that traumatic experience could galvanize agents of change into strategic problem-­ solving—or so the Enlightenment register suggests. Thus, points of resistance to the plague—proverbial pin drops on the map of Enlightenment London—were set down as bulwark in anticipation of this potential doom and the seismic social change a plague could trigger. What exactly were these points of resistance? Consider in this context that the “rare and infallible” medicines for the cure of the 1665 London plague were described in one contemporary pamphlet as “[j]ewels for the recovery and preservation of health.” Availability of the medicines was tied to distribution centers where cures were concocted; the would-be consumer in need of such medicines was then given precise directions to “the places where these Medicines are to be had”: 1 At the author’s own house in Barbican, next door to the Three Crowns. 2 At Mr. Hutchinson’s, Upholsterer, in Birchin-Lane, at that end of the Lane which is near the Royal Exchange. 3 At Mr. Devonshires the Chyrurgeans house in Drury Lane (next to the Earl of Clare) at the sign of the Chyrurgean. This descriptive list published by the quack-cum-pamphleteer ­R ichard Barker appears at the end of the pamphlet titled Consilium Anti-­ Pestilentiale (1665) and is followed by a segment on “the Price of the Medicines.” The rumors that Barker’s house “is visited, and that divers dyed out of it” were lies, Barker contends; to the contrary, he asserts, he is the reliable expert who can provide precise instructions for the prevention of the disease as well as its cure. The pamphlet is divided into two sections: the first provides “Directions to be observed, to prevent this of all most terrible Sickness” and it is followed by “Directions for the Cure of those that are infected.”1 Defensive due to his lack of medical training, Barker claims nonetheless to be the voice of experience. 2

16  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time Highlighting the urgency of the situation at hand, the pamphlet reassures its readers that if preemption fails, the medicines for the cure of the deadly disease were readily accessible to the general public and that these could be procured in a timely fashion at sources having spatial relations to well-known landmarks: “house in Barbican” or “near the Royal Exchange” or “in Drury Lane.” Unwittingly, Barker establishes thus an invisible continuum from the health of the body to the health and well-being of the body politic. Thus, the topography of London, the lexicon of “directions,” and the prospects for a cure are welded together in this “Seasonal Advice,” which is a user-friendly map of resistance to disease, suffering, and death. Toward the beginning of the eighteenth century, no one understood better this notion of a continuum from the health of the body to the health and well-being of the body politic than Daniel Defoe. A much later and far more in-depth elucidation of Barker’s problem-solution model can be found in Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722). This Journal’s documentary specificity has come to represent Defoe’s hallmark; moreover, this “novelistic usurper”3 provides for us a sophisticated example of how geographical space, marked by specific associations and anchors, becomes a narrative extension and expression of the idea of nation—in shared space, vulnerable space, space which represents common and endangered destiny, as well as space which sponsors and promotes national interest. As is well known to those familiar with A Journal, Defoe’s invitation to his readers to reconsider the Plague of 1665 was occasioned by the fact that “the plague was returned again in Holland.” The plague-infested metropolis thus becomes in Defoe’s narrative a representation of chaos (in which the real events in the past would come to haunt the hypothetical threat in the present). Additionally, this narrative also epitomizes chaos, taking it well beyond the singular instance to an urgent statement in sharp contrast to a discussion, say, of mutability or memento mori and the natural progress of decay; instead, Defoe provides for his reader the prospect of sudden and unnatural death. In the context of Defoe’s “plague,” then, the recovery and preservation of an individual’s good health—notably, the processes that cure or sustain the body and give it functional viability as well as ­longevity—can be understood and conceptualized, ex post facto, and in terms of a progression from one type of spatial-spectacular threat (in the past) to another one (looming large in the present): this anachronism in Defoe’s plague narrative rests upon a paradigmatic association where the space which is endangered by disease and death and the space which provides the ameliorated alternative—or the healthy, cleansed, and rejuvenated space—can coexist in narrative-performative space. The sedimentation and the simultaneity of past and present thus become invisible anchors: the present anchored by the past and the past visible through the lens of the present. Is Defoe suggesting, then, that it

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  17 is in the compromised body that has the capacity to respond positively to the power of the palliative that the promise of Enlightenment lies? If there is a narrative obsession with crisis in the body politic, it is precisely because for Defoe the crisis of the plague is a crisis which encapsulates the union of social space and responsible citizenry—a focalization of the “I, among the rest of my neighbors” (Journal 3)—and threatens both equally.4 The Journal is a fine example, in other words, of how the intertwined agencies of public space and collective destiny enter into a dialectical relationship that goes beyond mere reciprocity or symbiosis toward creating a modern and performative nation-space. 5 Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year provides for this project a metaphoric launching pad for a consideration of the tensions between crisis and resistance to it, between chaos and order, between unscripted and scripted performances—a series of binary oppositions/tensions necessary for progress (and the growing pains associated with it). Defoe’s innate sense of the spatial dimension of collective identity leads him to ask how the compromised body, the body which responds not only to a current crisis but one which can visualize the repercussions of future crises on a national-global scale, might be propelled into constructive action. Citizenship is made manifest when it is performed and witnessed in public space where bodies meet, mingle, and take action, where business is conducted or entertainment offered and consumed, and where goods are packaged, marketed, and sold. The divide between public and private spaces as well as the hierarchies of class and economics become fluid and malleable in plague-infested London—an unintended consequence, one which had to be accommodated in light of the exigencies of the crisis at hand, which Defoe describes as follows: The Infection generally came in to the Houses of the Citizens, by the Means of their Servants, who, they were obliged to send up and down the Streets for Necessaries, that is to say, for Food, or Physick, to Bakehouses, Brew-Houses, Shops &c. and who going necessarily thro’ the Streets into Shops, Markets, and the like, it was impossible, but that they should one way or other, meet with distempered people, who conveyed the fatal breath into them, and they brought it Home to the Families, to which they belonged. (72) The message is clear: having a servant denotes privilege but does not guarantee the existence of a buffer between the proliferation of disease in the public sphere and the health and happiness that must necessarily be nurtured and sustained in the private sphere. After all, the servant is “obliged” to walk “up and down the streets” and, thus, cannot help but be a conduit through which disease enters the domain of the household. The servants’ act of securing or gathering sustenance, in other words, becomes the source of danger to the protected, privileged, and private

18  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time body (of the master). As embodiment of health and sustenance on the one hand and purveyor of infectious disease on the other, the servant in this role destroys the public-domestic divide. Ironically, the powerless is empowered as actor in an otherwise intractable hierarchical system. It would be impossible to begin a study such as mine without a reference to Daniel Defoe because he represented the now trite expression “thinking globally and acting locally” more closely than any other intellectual of the eighteenth century. As Max Novak and others have pointed out, there is a remarkable paradox in Defoe’s global perspective: so, for instance, [h]e looked upon Jacob Sawbridge, Sir George Caswell, and Elias Turner, the manipulators behind the Sword Blade Company, the financial arm of the South Sea Company, as a ‘true Triumvirate of modern thieving,’ and they were no different in kind from the highly respected Sir Josiah Child, whom Defoe regarded as the villainous founder of stock-jobbing. Simultaneously, Novak reminds us, “Defoe makes a strong pitch for British colonization of the entire southern section of South America.”6 He was a vociferous proponent of colony but expressed deep distrust for the colonizers, who simply lacked the moral fortitude to carry out what he deemed to be just and rational courses of action. Defoe’s urban space reflects very tendentiously modernity’s unwitting investment in the fluidity of time-space. How can one separate the powerful colonizer (the disease) from the power of the resistance to colonization (in the body of the victim)? He embeds in his breathless narrative of the plague the memory of the traumatized eyewitness who is the embodiment of collective experience, even as the author of A Journal of the Plague Year looks back from the vantage point of triumphant survival decades later, when the containment of deadly disease becomes a reassuring and foregone conclusion. Fiction could very precisely—and with ekphrastic specificity—capture the presence of the threat and document the operations of memory which connect the present to the past while also invoking the specter of future threats to the built and lived space that was Defoe’s London.7 Fictions of endangered space (or species) are thus rehearsals of the abiding human (and also quintessentially Faustian) impulse to live. The (genre of) documentary makes fiction believable, while fiction adds value to the document and robs it of its deadly immediacy;8 the two genres, Defoe understood fully, are merely two sides of the same coin. One might argue that to fictionalize is to distance—and it is this distancing which makes narration (always already) an ideological enterprise. In Defoe’s Journal, the paralyzing fears of imminent doom, the paranoid fantasies of self-effacement

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  19 and ­mutilation—­images embedded in his graphic and dense narrative premised upon the plague—are not markers of a particular individual’s pathology but have to be read as the pathology of a nation that dares to imagine a grotesque end even as it lays the foundations of an imperial future. However rough-hewn his writing might be regarded in retrospect, Defoe demonstrates in the Journal as elsewhere a modernity that was fully capable of diluting the borders of fact, fiction, and fantasy; indeed, it is his authoritative gesture of subversion in the blurring of narrative forms that makes Defoe one of the prime architects of what I am characterizing here as nation-space. The “plague narratives” of Barker and Defoe are important contributions to the cultural imaginary which can be seduced by visions of doom. But those visions of doom evoke a shared response of opposition to it precisely because of what is at stake: Defoe and his readers understood that the destruction of the ­architectural-institutional complex, which collectively embodies the glories of nation, cannot be compromised without compromising the civilizational imperatives of both Enlightenment and empire. In each of the examples of nation-space which I consider in this study, the imperial capital—London—is front and center; it is in this metropolitan modern city that the energy of eclectic visionaries fueled the dynamism of institutions and created a common language of cultural heritage. Of these institutions, the Royal Exchange, the Royal Academy, the British Museum, and St. Paul’s Cathedral are some of the most visible symbols; their reach was both cosmopolitan and global. Their architectural splendor and their spheres of influence far exceeded their spatial location, their rootedness in London. Moreover, their prestige was derived from their self-conscious supererogation. In public space and without the encumbrance of private (distinctive and idiosyncratic) taste, these institutions came to represent a consensus on how the nation might best speak or represent itself—positing, for all practical purposes, a universalist vision and logic of nation. However, nation-space is not limited to enclosed space or institutions such as the Royal Academy or the British Museum which are built-space or structural emblems of ­nation-space. Nation-space that is built-space and institutionalized into significance is complemented by commemorative space and the space for jubilation or the space for protest as well as the nation-space that defies the boundaries of nation and dilutes the private/public divides to include the global. It is self-evident that these parallel and contiguous spaces provided the impetus for collective (and performative) self-expression and identity formation. The story of London’s urban landscape as it manifested itself throughout the long eighteenth century—which provides the spatial-temporal focus of this study—has many dimensions, many texts and subtexts; I examine only a small sliver of this vast template. Indeed, the story is

20  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time made up of a compendium of rich and unmanageable hypertexts, each sustained by a vast and spectacular register of largely contingent and sometimes strategic achievements such as the following: the birth of journalism; the rise of an organized entertainment industry; the launch of the lengthy narrative; the proliferation of spaces for public discourse; the establishment of financial, mercantile, and cultural institutions; the gradual absorption of science in society; the conscious deployment of architecture-as-identity; and, in general, the overarching systemic need for urban development toward creating a coherent narrative of national identity. How are these sweeping changes reflected and codified in the spatial imaginary of eighteenth-century Britain? In part through narratives of urban development and, as the discussion in the next segment will show, particularly those narratives which emphasized the importance of the visual imperative.

Urban Development and the Visual Imperative Daniel Defoe was not learned in the same sense as Aphra Behn, A ­ lexander Pope, Henry Fielding, or Samuel Johnson: his prose was rough and shoddy, his works starkly devoid of classical learning, and his interests of a utilitarian sort.9 With a keen sense and sensibility of history and heritage, however, Defoe worked tirelessly and wrote copiously to establish an organic link between London’s urban geography and British national identity, which he presents with passion in “A Description of the City of London, as taking in the City of Westminster, Borough of Southwark, and Buildings circumjacent.”10 This chapter constitutes Letter II in a series of letters in the second volume of A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–1725), and this “letter” focuses on London.11 A tour through the island necessitates a tour of the imperial capital, which then necessitates a mapping of the city which Defoe accomplishes with consummate skill in the form of thick description. Defoe’s Tour exemplifies his interest in an empirical study of the relations between center and periphery and the ways in which the parts add up to the whole. The notion of Britain or Britishness, Defoe argues implicitly, cannot be sustained by a superficial assessment of parts. It is the collective consciousness of residents, their labor, and their perceptual sense of self as manifested through and by the city that shape and codify a national identity. True to its premise and consistent with its function (to provide information), A Tour Thro’ London is thick description of a city which is the metaphoric compass (a word Defoe uses repeatedly) and also gauge of the nation, directing its course and charting its progress. His audience was the traveler—by implication both native and foreign—as the title page announces: “Particularly fitted for the Reading of Such as Desire to Travel Over the Island.” Defoe reveals a keen awareness of what might be regarded as the “liquidity” (a term most readily associated with

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  21 ­ ygmunt Bauman) of modern London as this segment in the preface to Z the second volume, for instance, shows: New foundations are always laying, new buildings always raising, highways repairing, churches and public building erecting, fires and other calamities happening, fortunes of families taking different turns, new trades are every day erected, new projects enterprised new designs laid; so that as long as England is trading, improving nation, no perfect description either of the place, the people, or the conditions and state of things can be given.12 Of particular interest to Defoe and contributing in no small measure to his frustration are the size and shape of the city of London and the chaos endemic to its uncontrollable patterns of growth, which he expresses thus: London, as to its Figure, must be owned to be very irregular, as it is stretched out in Buildings just at the Pleasure of every Undertaker of them, and as the Convenience of the People directs, whether for Trade, or Otherwise: this gives it a very confused Appearance, being properly neither long or broad, round or square; whereas the City of Rome was, in a manner, round, with very few Irregularities in its Shape. (Tour 91) Defoe’s preoccupation with the physical “figure” and “appearance” of London makes for a delightfully feminized and recalcitrant London that resists, as it were, the masculinist manipulations of the rational urban developer, one who is opposed to misguided and misdirected allegiance to the demands of capital. Defoe’s desire to order the irregular and formless into a malleable and controllable civitas (recognizably a Crusoeque propensity for ordering) is followed by his careful attention to what a spectator, visitor, or citizen might see in London. Implicit in the Tour is the argument that it is the tourists’ visual impression that can either further or destroy the image of the city, either creating or threatening the blueprint for a permanent and positive imprint that posterity inevitably desires. He goes on to observe that “[o]ne sees London, in some Places three Miles broad, as from St. George’s in Southwark, to Shoreditch in Middlesex; or two Miles, as from Peterborough-house to Montague-house; and in some Places not Half a mile, as in Wapping; and less in Rotherhith.”13 In addition, the villages which were once separated from London by fields and marshes, Defoe points out, have now become extensions of the city, as it expands its realm: “We see (emphasis mine) several Villages, formerly standing, as it were, in the County, and at a great Distance, now joined to the Streets by continued Buildings; and more making haste to meet in the like manner” (Tour 91). London’s expansion is positive from the point of view of trade, commerce, and governance, but the city’s unruly impulse needs to be kept in check,

22  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time insisted Defoe, and this task is best accomplished by developing a visual system or mapping of urban development. Defoe’s topographical knowledge and mapping instinct were no doubt enriched by his sources both visual and textual, including but not limited to John Ogilvie’s (visual) Britannia (1696) and the much older Britannia (textual) by William Camden (1586). Thus, he presents not just a street-level view of the city but he also anticipates, I would suggest following Pat Rogers, a proto-­ aerial impulse and add that this impulse was not necessary new; it was akin to the Faustian desire of flight, which Christopher Marlowe had so eloquently dramatized in the segments in which his protagonist destroys the limitations of time-space and embarks upon an imaginary but audacious journey across the Continent.14 What is remarkable is Defoe’s ability to harness several visual-verbal regimes toward a narrative of nation, with a particular focus on London. It is worth keeping in mind that Wenceslaus Hollar’s map—a bird’s-eye view of London (1675)—was in circulation since Defoe’s teenage years as were the maps created by ­Peter Stent, John Overton, Richard Blome, Robert Morden,15 and John Seller Sr. Hollar’s trademark (mostly etchings) were panoramas which he developed from high points on the South Bank. The instinct for aerial views was quite potent in the British cultural imaginary years before the balloons went up into the sky (circa 1784).16 Lines and measurements are critical to Defoe, for he intended to create a scientific basis for evaluating the change and flux that characterized this growing city; but notice that in The Tour these lines and measurements are communicated in words—in what might be regarded as ­linguistic-pictorial projection—and not through diagrams or charts. The rapidly evaporating borders between villages result in a new conceptualization of “London” for the old markings of limit and location are no longer applicable. Thus, according to Defoe, Westminster is in a fair way to shake Hands with Chelsea, as St. Gyles’s is with Marybone, and Great Russel-Street by ­Montague-house, with Tottenham court: all this is very evident, and yet all these put together, may still to be called London. Whither will this City then extend, and where must a Circumvallation or Communication Line of it be placed? I have, as near as I could, caused a Measure to be taken of this mighty, I cannot say uniform, Body; and, for the Satisfaction of the Curiosity, I have here given as accurate a Description of it as I can do in so narrow a Compass,17 or without drawing a Plan, or Map of the Places. And I am forced, in many Places, to take in some unbuilt Ground; so I have, on the other hand, been obliged to leave a great many whole Streets of Buildings out of my Line: So that I have really not stretched my Calculations, to make it seem bigger than it is; nor is there any Occasion for it. (Tour 97)

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  23 The definition of the city along with its constituent parts needed to be adjusted and updated to accommodate what Defoe characterizes as a “shaking of hands”—or establishing organic links between and among the various parts.18 Defoe is conscious of the fact that he is presenting a snapshot (or a linguistic-pictorial projection) of a specific moment in time, for the future of this urban expansionism is unpredictable just as the contours of the city are in a constant state of flux: “Where must a Circumvallation Line . . . be placed?” The “accurate” and thick description that Defoe presents here is to be distinguished from the projects of formal mapmaking or drawing, however, for the latter would force him to accommodate all the “streets of Buildings,” which, he points out, would give the impression that he was making the city bigger than it was. In the absence of photography, it is the verbal regime, the linguistic technology—and not necessarily only the drawing—that came to be harnessed toward creating a visual history of the city soon to become the imperial epicenter. “I am to describe the great center of England, the city of London, and parts adjacent” (Tour 94). Of particular significance, in my view, is the segment in which appears his discussion of the relative merits and demerits of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The history of the planning and building of St. Paul’s Cathedral was not widely known, according to Defoe; therefore, he begins this segment of his discussion with an outline of some of the debates and discussion related to its architectural history, scope, and substance. For instance, the cupola of the cathedral was made of copper, Defoe reminds his readers, although the House of Commons believed at first that the copper dome would be too heavy (Tour 124). But it was the positioning or the framing of this “famous structure” in relation to the city’s geography that is of utmost concern to Defoe. The original plan—for which Defoe compliments architect Christopher Wren— called for a location a little North of its current position: “It should have stood just on the Spot of Ground which is taken up by the street called Pater-noster Row, and the Buildings on either Side; so that the North Side of the Church should have stood open to Newgate-Street, and the South side to the Ground on which the Church now stands” (Tour 125). From Defoe’s perspective, what would be the advantages of this strategic location of St. Paul’s Cathedral? Defoe saw both practical and aesthetic advantages in the original, more strategic, conceptualization of the Cathedral in relation to the public space which it would occupy. “By this situation,” he argues, the East-end of the Church which is very beautiful, would have looked directly down the main Street of the City, Cheapside; and for the West-end, Ludgate having been removed a little North, the main Street called Ludgate-Street, and Ludgate-hill, would have sloped a little W.S.W. as they do now irregularly Two Ways, one within, and

24  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time the other without the Gate, and all the Street beyond Fleet Bridge would have received no Alteration at all. (Tour 125) In addition, Defoe points out that [b]y this Situation, the common Thorough-fare of the City would have been removed at a little farther Distance from the Work, and we should not then have been obliged to walk just under the very Wall, as we do now, which makes the Work appear out of all Perspective. (Tour 125–126) It is this problem of being “out of all perspective” that was “the chief Reason of the Objections” Defoe felt compelled to voice. The building’s “outside Appearance,” in other words, does not do justice to its form and cultural significance, and his verdict is thus uncompromisingly clear: “[H]ad it been viewed at a little Distance, the Building would have been seen infinitely to more Advantage” (Tour 126). The structural exemplarity of this building, St. Paul’s Cathedral, does not, in and of itself, make it exclusive; its cultural capital is dependent upon its relation to the space around it and the metropole where a multiplicity of buildings—a pattern both diverse and fluid, inspired and retrograde—contribute to the cityscape. Defoe’s argument reveals his uncanny sense of the reification of built-space and empty space interspersed with green space and wasted space and how the specific dialectics of these spaces are inextricable from the historiography of urban development—which was also a story of community, cultural heritage, and collective memory. Defoe’s Tour provides solid evidence of his uncanny sense of planned urban development, one which supports thoughtful and strategic growth, replication, and reification without compromising the principles of organic unity and the harmonious exchange between empty space and built-space. Consider, in this context, Henri Lefebvre’s analysis of social space or spatial architectonics, leads back to buildings, the prose of the world as opposed, or apposed, to the poetry of monuments. In their pre-eminence, buildings, the homogeneous matrix of capitalistic space, successfully combine the object of control by power with the object of commercial exchange. The building . . . embraces, and, in so doing reduces, the whole paradigm of space: space as domination/ appropriation (where it emphasizes technological domination); space as work and product (where it emphasizes the product); and space as immediacy and mediation (where it emphasizes mediations and mediators, from the technical materiel to the financial ‘promoters’ of construction projects). It reduces significant oppositions and values, among them pleasure and suffering, use, and labour.19

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  25 Lefebvre’s phrase, “the prose of the world”—or buildings—helps us to understand fully Defoe’s vision of urban architectonics. Quite remarkable is Defoe’s intuitive understanding of a building as “the object of control by power” and how that power might be leveraged toward “commercial exchange”—where “commercial” is not local but national and also global. A building such as St. Paul’s Cathedral is not merely a static structure which houses Protestant rites and rituals; in direct contrast to the “Pomp and Pageantry” of the Popish equivalents (Tour 121), this Cathedral is a dynamic celebration of the “Protestant Plainness” (and, by implication, not Catholic flamboyance) that Defoe finds “exceedingly beautiful and magnificent” (Tour 122). The space for the practice of religion is thus also a space for enacting nation and communicating, for posterity, a sense of the imbrication of past and present. Implicit throughout the Tour is the same sense of social space and its relation to life and living as Henri Lefebvre’s conceptualization of space which is more than what is readily apparent; social space has also to be understood in terms of the invisible philosophy, logic, labor, and acts of m ­ ediation that the public or the spectator cannot necessarily see—­except through the spectator’s engagement with the “prose of the world.”20 In A Tour Thro’ the Island of Great Britain, Defoe emerges as the archetypal mythologizer. Through a consciously constructed act of ­mediation—“upon due Consideration”—Defoe verbally reconstructs that which cannot be rebuilt or resituated; ostensibly reigniting the original vision of Christopher Wren (1632–1723), 21 he provides, in other words, the correct balance between and among the various elements of ­structure-location-observation-spectatorship. A dominant structure in twenty-first-century London, St. Paul’s Cathedral embodies a mythology which is solidly ensconced in the evolving paradigm of eighteenth-­ century British urban architectonics. In Defoe’s linguistic-pictorial projections, the element of performance is omnipresent. The “poetry of monuments”—to use Lefebvre’s phrase once again—occupies significant shelf space in Defoe’s documentation of urban space in A Description of the City of London. Chapters IV and ­ difices, VIII, for instance, include the following: “Of the most noted E Structures, and Square, in and about London” and “Of the Statues, and other public Ornaments” (Tour 101). Statues, unlike buildings, are inherently kinetic, for these objects represent the body in motion. Motion and stillness are not at odds in these artistic renditions, in these ­performative and playful embodiments of style and substance that are designed to memorialize culture-specific historiographies of heritage. So, for instance, Defoe observes that “[t]he Brass Statue of K. James II, in the Habit of a Roman Caesar, in the Privy-Garden at Whitehall, 22 is a very beautiful one, and can hardly be outdone by any modern Performance of that Kind in Europe” (Tour 134). The choice of this particular costume for the king, and through this form, the invocation of Caesar

26  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time was designed to lay claim to Britain’s distant Roman past. Noticeably, the overall historical significance of the real and perceived threat of ­Catholicism during the reign of James II is not of concern to Defoe—at least not in the context of his geographical and aesthetic ruminations in the “tour.” The clashing realms of the religious and the political simmer right below the surface, however, but perhaps only in retrospect, since Defoe’s unruffled anthropological stance does not allow for detours— even religious ones—which disrupt the order of things. The kinetic force of imperial symbology is likewise conveyed with equanimity in Defoe’s docent-like description: At St. Paul’s, the Figures of the Apostles and Evangelists, on the West, North, and South Fronts; and in the Middle of the Area, the Statue of her late Majesty Queen Anne, at full Length, crown’d, with a Sceptre in one Hand, and a Globe in the other, round the Pedestal of which, are Figures of Britannia, France in a pensive Attitude, Ireland, and America. (Tour 135) The imperial aspirations of Queen Anne are divinely sanctioned and thus embedded in and surrounded by the evangelical rhetorics of the Cathedral of St. Paul’s, which occupies a pivotal place in London’s urban mythopoeia. While dynamism defines the Queen as prime representative of empire, the inaction associated with thoughtfulness defines France, while the figures of both Ireland and America remain unremarkable and insignificant in Defoe’s linguistic-pictorial allusion—cast, as they are, in a subservient geopolitical role. For Defoe, the statues of royalty are not necessarily the only “performances” worthy of discussion and description, as some critics have pointed out: “The two Figures over the Gate of Bethlehem Hospital, one representing a Person of melancholy mad, and the other one raving, are inimitable Performances, by Mr. Cibber, Father of the Laureat” (Tour 136). 23 In small measure but with the full force of firsthand knowledge and an unflinching ethnographic instinct, Defoe presents in his Tour the multiple ways in which buildings, gates, statues, and other markers of urban growth and expansion come to represent the visual character of London in the eighteenth century. The qualitative assessments of this or that building, this or that church, this or that statue or gate dwell on what is readily apparent and perceived as being of strategic importance because the human body is capable of change and labor and “all human institutions . . . are extensions of the productive body.” The Journal of the Plague Year and Defoe’s Tour are thus two sides of the same coin: one cannot expect to find an institution without the labor of the (human) body; the materiality of the former, indeed its existence, depends upon the materiality of the body and its capacity for labor. 24 The plague must be stopped so that urban development can go on. In retrospect, the order

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  27 of things (to invoke Michel Foucault) in the eighteenth-century British national register can best be understood through a close examination of the mapping of urban space—an act in which Defoe’s imprimatur remains indelible. The order of things resides in the complex metalinguistic and performative instincts inherent in the spatial dimension of collective identity. 25 Space is both real and mythical; space is both lived and imagined; space is both immediate and far. In the mythical/real space—­ Defoe’s London—the idea of the nation is silently (or noisily) rehearsed, through the endless deployment of images of built-space and carefully constructed historiographies of urban geography and engineering.

Architectural Self-Fashioning and the Birth of Modern Surveillance Enlightenment British culture is replete with examples—some in the fiction and nonfiction and others which are immanent throughout the public culture—of power manifesting itself in theatrical ways, in public space. Recently formulated concepts such as multimediacy might thus be used retroactively to describe the multiple venues where (or avenues through which) a systemic preoccupation with the ocular dimension of power emerges in the eighteenth century. The exercise and machinations of power wielded in the public sphere may not be immediately or necessarily visible to the public, and this lack of transparency can be perceived by some as a systemic problem. 26 As Michel Foucault has argued, power cannot be fully effective or potent until and unless its operations are made visible and either discussed or performed in public venues, where the impact of power must be palpably felt or sensed by the public for whom the performance of power is designed. 27 For my purposes here, it is important to underscore the Foucauldian principle that sovereign power, the power of the state, the power of institutions, and the power inherent in the manipulation of the collective gaze had, first, to be made visible (or invisible, which is not the same as absent) and then harnessed toward creating a disciplined society where order prevails and where the idea of nation can begin to cohere. The notion that architecture provides spectral evidence of power and progress was not new in the eighteenth century; as is well-known, the invocation of Britain’s Greco-Roman (and thus appropriated) heritage can be traced back to the Renaissance, lending as it did credence and ­authority to various architectural and institutional national projects. Likewise, not long after independence, the Americans established a similar set of mythos of rebirth and rejuvenation in the capital. The ­architects ­William Thornton, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, and, later, Charles ­Bulfinch designed and built the U.S. Capitol Building (circa 1793–1830) to exemplify a Wren-like rhetoric of founding principles—in what might be regarded as the production of democracy—by using the neoclassical style

28  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time deemed appropriate for the birth of a nation. 28 To use a more recent example, a hybrid form of circum-Atlantic architectural memory can be witnessed in the works of I. M. Pei, the Chinese-American architect who designed the Pyramide du Louvre (the entrance to the Louvre Museum complex) and the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. The imprint of Africa on the Louvre—and, by extension, on French cultural heritage—can never again be implicit or silent (although controversy surrounded the project, not the least of which was fueled by xenophobic opposition to the architect himself). In the French example, architectural design is summoned to the cause of unifying past and present while lending support to the notion ostensibly of a new kind of trans-medial and intercultural enlightenment, one which could be used to invoke empire, and then to airbrush it into a post-imperial, late-twentieth-century equation. At issue in my discussion here is why the didactic and the performative functions of “civil” architecture29 and spaces of public performance which emerge in the eighteenth century are more than the sum of their concrete parts and far more influential than the structural or technological elements which constitute their material identity. It is in this context that one might consider the cottage industry preoccupied with Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, which continues to pay homage to Michel Foucault (and also, albeit in a lesser degree, to Jacques-Alain Miller), who catapulted this architectural icon buried in anonymity to the realm of spectacular visibility, as a primordial symbol of neoclassical power and its strategic deployment. 30 Describing the Panopticon as “an architectural embodiment of the most paranoid Sartrean fantasies about the ‘absolute look,’” Martin Jay has observed that “[t]he object of power is everywhere penetrated by the benevolently sadistic gaze of a diffuse and anonymous power whose actual existence soon becomes superfluous to the process of discipline.” The symbol thus becomes the locus of attention, while the source of power remains hidden or even disappears. The oxymoron that Martin Jay uses to link the notion of benevolence to that of sadism is worth dwelling upon for a moment if only because it accommodates the deadly nature of the duality at the source of sovereign power: Divinely sanctioned power must necessarily be benevolent but the governing instinct of that same power, one needs to be reminded, had sponsored public executions—raw, unscripted, and performed on the bare stage or scaffold that is primitive in sharp contrast, for instance, to Bentham’s sophisticated and thoroughly scripted Panopticon. 31 Just as the guillotine is simultaneously a technological and a spectral apparatus designed to stage the drama of death, the Panopticon is an equally complex structure designed to stage the pervasiveness of authority and the potency of punishment; thus, this engineered space provokes endless discussion about its proposed psychological, philosophical, penal, and juridical functions.

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  29 What is the relationship of visuality and utilitarianism? A critical assessment of the Panopticon cannot be discussed without considering the strategic position of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) among the ­eighteenth-century Utilitarians and Philosophical Radicals (at least that is where he is generally positioned). Born in the middle of the eighteenth century, Bentham did not become “a radical” till the early nineteenth century, when he was approximately 60 years old. In the later phase of his life, he did come to embrace the tenets of democracy and equality (mostly in respect to property). His unique contribution was to take the utilitarian doctrines of Francis Hutcheson, John Locke, and others and to apply them to practical situations and problems. Indeed, Bentham’s interest in ethics, politics, and society was a result of his interest in jurisprudence and this is precisely why it is so important to examine his ideas—as Foucault and his followers have and as Domenico Losurdo has done more recently—in terms of the penal and social systems that Bentham advocated. Visuality, utilitarianism, and a new kind of chaos in the public sphere have to be understood in terms of larger imperial vectors at play: The war with America had placed unprecedented burdens on the penal system as criminals could no longer be transported to the colonies there, which, in turn, led to the creation of a mass prison population in London. Bentham’s blueprint—with its plan to unleash the full potential of visuality toward disciplining chaos and criminality in the public sphere—would have been the ideal remedy for the management and control of the overcrowded prison system. 32 It is worth recalling in this context that Bentham’s opposition to the aristocracy and its corruption, for instance, or his assessment of the Glorious Revolution ought not to be construed as radicalism, as Losurdo has rightly argued: [I]t is sufficient to look at the attitude Bentham took towards the liberal tradition’s exclusion clauses to realize that we are very far removed from radicalism. . . . Bentham included ‘the still unabrogated sanction given to domestic slavery on account of difference and colour’ among the ‘imperfections of detail’ to be found even in the ‘matchlessly felicitous system’ of the United States. Starting from this rather euphemistic description of the institution of slavery, the English liberal stressed that a project of emancipation must proceed with extreme gradualism, and be implemented exclusively from above.33 Bentham’s professed purpose was to create a social system—through a systematic creation and application of criminal and civil laws—that would make men both happy and virtuous. The Hobbesian and Lockean elements in his argument are not hard to find. In Bentham’s theoretical framework, the happiness of the individual and the greater good of the

30  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time community are inextricably linked; thus, in this framework, the interests of the individual are meant to coincide with the interests of society, at least from the perspective of the supreme authority that the philosopher or the architect bestows upon (or appropriates for) himself. Foucault’s take on “Panopticism” is significant precisely because Bentham in fact expressed contempt for the rights of man, he rejected the idea of liberty, and because he advocated a systemic and systematic approach to the issue of security (a term he used almost in the same sense that we do today when we talk of national security). Although the idea of Bentham’s penitentiary is firmly rooted in utilitarian philosophy, his (utilitarian) vision must also be discussed in relation to the power of sovereignty or in the context of political power that must sanction and approve juridical and penal processes. The architect of the Panopticon is not a free-­ floating visionary or an independent agent of change; therefore, he has to be positioned in the context of not just contemporary philosophy that empowered his vision but also the system of governance and state and imperial powers which were poised to sanction his plan and give it the necessary stamp of approval so that the building could be transformed into concrete materiality. The conditions were perfect. 34 That the Panopticon was never built and never materialized—despite the arduous working and reworking of its ambitious blueprint—does not in any way minimize its imperial scope, and Foucault, in large part, must be credited for keeping this structure in the forefront of discussion on eighteenth-century surveillance and the reliance on vision and visuality in any systemic exercise of (despotic) power. It is important to understand and to address the politics of the space which emerges between the two ends of the surveillance spectrum: At one end is positioned the one who observes (the authority/the master) and, at the other, the one who is observed (the subaltern). The imposition of panoptic order is thus predicated upon an unequal equation whose validity rests upon maintaining this status quo—into perpetuity. The heavily metaphoric “Man and his Doubles”—one of the concluding chapters of Foucault’s The Order of Things—is instructive in this context as one of the scenarios he sketches can be pressed into the service of a variety of theoretical postulations, some of which are pertinent here. Of specific interest to me is the segment in this chapter on “the place of the king,” which introduces the complexities, indeed the slipperiness, of language and representation as well as the seeming transparency of power that, in fact, masks a deadly deception. Foucault’s reference here is to the famous Diego Velázquez painting, Las Meninas (1656). The mirror at the heart of this painting, reflecting the images of the king and the queen ostensibly seated in the audience and facing the painting as a spectator or a voyeur would, has been the subject of endless discussion. The mirror, of course, is just an illusion that forces the sovereign into the position of the spectator, thus naturalizing his power even as his

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  31 preeminence among the spectators is artfully deployed. Foucault’s exact words, describing Las Meninas, are worth recalling in this instance: All the interior lines of the painting, and above all those that come from the central reflection, point towards the very thing that is represented, but absent. At once object—since it is what the artist represented is copying into the canvas—and subject—since what  the painter had in front of his eyes, as he represented himself in the course of his work, was himself, since the gazes portrayed in the picture are all directed towards the fictitious position occupied by the royal personage, which is also the painter’s real place, since the ­occupier of that ambiguous place in which the painter and the sovereign alternate, in a never-ending flicker, as it were, is the spectator, whose gaze transforms the painting into an object, the pure representation of that essential absence.35 The dramatic twist comes right after this long and breathless rumination, when Foucault seems to perform an unexpected about-face: “Even so (emphasis mine) that absence is not a lacuna . . . for it never ceases to be inhabited,” he claims. The sovereign, who is written into the fabric of the painting, is not absent from the representational space; the artist ensures that the sovereign’s omniscience or omnipresent presence is felt (even if “with its back to us”) and this presence then lends authority to the painting such that sovereign power is (in)visible and sustained through this necessary anchoring. Implied here is the interchangeable positions of the painter and the sovereign—a mutually sustaining power relation—that is at the very least ontologically (if not epistemologically) united with the collective spectatorial gaze “for which the painting exists and for which, in the depths of time, it was arranged.”36 The issue of power and its devious operations are implied here and also explicitly explained in Discipline and Punish, which is where Foucault presents his theory of Panopticism. But even here the artist or the architect is never cast out in the lacuna of free-floating agents; the artist and the architect are forever tied to the source of power, the sovereignty, which is coerced into seeming transparency, into inhabiting the space that the powerful authority always-already symbolically occupies. Martin Jay rightly points out that Foucault insisted upon an important distinction between Guy Debord’s theory of the ocular and his own. “Our society is not one of spectacle, but of surveillance,” Foucault declared, adding that “[w]e are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panoptic machine.”37 The prescience of this Foucauldian declaration can hardly be ignored, especially in this new millennium that has been so defined by the preemptive force and function of surveillance in (what has been packaged post 9.11 as) the war on terror. In addition, Jay, following Foucault, points to the ready association of the concept

32  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time of liberty with that of the Enlightenment and how that lofty association is also shackled—simultaneously—by the invention of disciplines. The harnessing of knowledge, the division of disciplines, the categorization of subjects, and the ordering of objects are all part of the Enlightenment project. Drawing attention to the “Rousseauist-Benthamite principle of perfect visibility,” Martin Jay reminds us that it was Foucault who “linked the Panopticon to Rousseau’s utopian vision of crystalline transparency.”38 A powerful concept at the time and the controlling idea behind revolution, “the principle of perfect visibility,” however, cannot be discussed in retrospect without pointing to the systemic principles which form the philosophical and epistemological basis for Foucault’s attention to Las Meninas or the Panopticon. The “principle of perfect visibility”—coercive, hierarchical, authoritarian—becomes particularly revealing when examined through the Foucauldian lens: the “place of the king” in The Order of Things hard wires the concept of invisible complicity, the unwritten and unacknowledged complicity between the architect and the sovereign or between the artist and sovereign. 39 The difference between Debord’s spectacle and Foucault’s surveillance is rooted in differing notions of transparency—transparency which the spectacle (or the painting) might mistakenly be construed as having and transparency that the surveillance technology is ostensibly built to further; but beyond what I see as their complementary social functions, both the concept of spectacle and the concept of surveillance are performances that require, at one end, objects in (actual or perceived) action and, on the other, spectators or viewers endowed with (or denied) the power of the gaze (the power to surveille). The theatrical element in surveillance and the impulse toward surveillance in what I would describe as punitive performance (such as in public executions) point to the multifaceted implications of Panopticism in eighteenth-century British culture. Indeed, in the surveillance, assessment, and regulation of manners, morals, and behavior, the stage, the amphitheater, and other panoptic machines are all equally versatile as tools of imperial manipulation or ensnarement. For the sake of simplicity, one might say that the imperial consciousness is one which is created on the fundamental premise of a superior-­ inferior binary. Echoing the words of Nicholas Mirzoeff, I would also say that “all visuality was and is imperial visuality, the shaping of modernity from the point of view of the imperial powers.” Indeed, it was in the Enlightenment that the “hierarchy of the ‘civilized’ and the ‘primitive’” was set down as the highest stake, the golden Argonaut, the manifest destiny, without which progress could not have been envisioned and performed with such spectacular panache.40 In this insidious binary formulation, knowledge, culture, and civilization are articulated such that the “lack” (of these cultural attributes), perceived (by the imperial authority) at both the real and the conceptual levels, is automatically

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  33 associated with the category of the condemned. The Panopticon was designed and advertised as “a new principle of construction” that would be “applicable” to not just penitentiaries and asylums (to combat and control aberrant behaviors), but also to what we call sweat shops, factories, and every other type of space associated with industrial labor. This principle was then applied to a “plan of management” that was carefully laid out toward the reformation of manners, the preservation of health, the invigoration of industry, the diffusion of knowledge or instruction, the alleviation of public burdens, the strengthening of the economy, and so on. The utilitarian principles upon which the plan is constructed are thus clearly spelled out in the preface. In the very first letter, Bentham underscores the point that this “simple idea in Architecture” can be applied “without exception to all establishments whatsoever, in which within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection.” Thus surveillance, whether then or now, is predicated upon the existence or creation of a superior body endowed with the capacity to engineer “a new mode of obtaining power” through strategically designed technologies of inspection.41 In the eighteenth century, public space came to be scripted and controlled in accordance with the principles of utilitarianism to ensure both the order and the hierarchy upon which the image of the civilizedcum-­imperial self is first created and then sustained. The public façade of London in the eighteenth century must accommodate the public space that is scripted and controlled in accordance with contemporary principles of hetero-masculinist ideology, and in this project, the realm of the domestic becomes just as critical as the realm of the public or global. In fact and in fiction, the female and colonial subjects are conceived and perceived as subservient to the imperial authority that is almost always despotic, wielding arbitrary authority and with a propensity for inflicting cruelty.42 How is private space scripted and controlled? The realm of the domestic is neither sacrosanct nor impervious to imperial manipulation because the public-private divide is denuded by the same forces of Enlightenment that championed the cause of transparency.43 One might argue that in the eighteenth century, the forces of curiosity, scientism, and empiricism conjoin to invoke the following question: Why should the private sphere be invisible or inscrutable? Consequently, intrusive mechanisms of surveillance, reportage, and narration are deployed to make private desires, action, and discourse visible to the public. The eighteenth-century historian, the editor of periodicals, the proto-anthropologist, and the novelist come to share common ground and in broad, sweeping, and universalist gestures they sought to make public that which might otherwise have been private. Thus, in contemporary journals, pamphlets, and magazines, the private lives and personal predicaments of individuals are discussed and dissected ad nauseum.

34  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time Recall in this context that Sir Peter Lely’s full-length, nude portrait of Nell Gwyn was painted “for Charles II’s personal enjoyment.” Gwyn had started her career in the King’s Company as Charles Hart’s mistress; her reputation as orange-woman turned comic-actress-­extraordinaire was further enhanced when she became the mistress of Charles, Lord Buckurst; but it was as the mistress of Charles II, and particularly after 1671 when she left the stage, that she became truly legendary. One might argue that the portrait of Gwyn, which “Pepys had seen at the back of a large press in James II’s apartments,”44 becomes visible even when her body is veiled in privacy precisely because of this body’s illicit association with power and privilege. In this instance, the public-private divide opens up a tantalizing space where knowledge of the sovereign’s private gaze makes the public fascination for the object of his royal gaze even more intense than when the audience experiences the spectatorial pleasures of witnessing a “gay couple” on stage. In this example, even as the body of the female actor is metamorphosed afresh within the veiled confines of an exclusive, powerful, and private performance, this body—or this simulacrum, to use Jean Baudrillard’s term45 —continues to serve a public function and to underscore symbolically the complicity among the sovereign, the artist and the performer—all of whom sponsor and promote public voyeurism. The promotion of voyeurism then comes to connote a defiance of the confines of the theater, its parameters of acceptable behavior, as well as a reification of the private space where royal privilege trumps social hierarchy. Eighteenth-century Britain was a “society of the spectacle” in the sense that this early-modern culture had immersed itself in the pleasures of spectral phenomena. Since Debord’s critique of the postindustrial, late capitalist systems incorporates the pivotal role of twentieth-­century media in consumerist cultures, his theory resists easy application to ­early-modern and modern systems including the ones developed in the eighteenth century. However, several of his axioms could be applied with a degree of caution to the evolution of the spectral society during the long eighteenth century. Debord maintains, for instance, that “[t] he spectacle appears at once as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification.” I find Debord’s formulation of the modes and methods of “unification” useful because I shall argue that the spectral quality of what I am characterizing as narratives of nation reveals how power is transformed from the abstract to the real and made manifest through visual and performative means—through exhibition and public commemoration, through celebration and the suppression of unruly behavior—with the print medium providing a linguistic foundation and impetus for such performances (or narration). Modern communities are thus structured around images and events that are not only unifying forces but also the most affective means of identity formation. More important, Debord argues that “[t]he spectacle is not a collection of

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  35 images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.” The goal of this project is to examine select cultural sites where individual and collective power mirrors not only the power of sovereignty but also the power of institutions codified in and transmitted through multiple images, tableaus, and performances that produce the idea of nation. Echoing Debord, I argue that “[i]n form as in content the spectacle serves as total justification for the conditions and aims of the existing system.”46 I would argue, in addition, that the actual source of power, however anonymous or seemingly distant, is never superfluous nor absent from the locations I describe because it is reinforced repeatedly by different performances in discrete and distinct spaces both simultaneously and in rapid succession, so much so that the Panopticon—elaborate and ambitious though it was—remains only one but symbolizes many such mechanisms for the reinforcement and deployment of imperial power. The sources of power cannot be allowed to dry up because the performance must go on. But, reading retroactively as we now do, we are able to see very precisely how—to use the words of Franz Fanon—the “aesthetic of respect for the status quo” was generated from within and also from beyond the status quo.47

Visual Culture: Its Systems and Symptoms in Enlightenment Time-Space A concept of nation-space such as the one I am developing here is not very different from that segment of “social space” in which Henri ­L efebvre discusses nation. His thinking on this subject is of critical importance to my hypothesis if only because he emphasizes the role of the “market” in conscripting nationhood. When considered in relationship to space, the nation may be seen to have two moments or conditions. First, nationhood implies the existence of a market gradually built up over a historical period of varying length. Such a market is a complex ensemble of commercial relations and communication networks.48 This part of Lefebvre’s argument in relation to social space applies to any context where capital is high-stakes reality and when receptive and ready markets at home and abroad fuel economic development at both or multiple ends of capitalist networks. In the eighteenth century, the market was firmly established in favor of the imperial power which went in search of resources and raw materials elsewhere; consequently, the market at home—as a direct result of global trade and commerce—­ attained and retained the exuberance that we recognize. It is in the delineation of the second “moment” that Lefebvre might surprise the reader for he makes the following statement: “Secondly, nationhood implies

36  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time violence—the violence of a military state, be it feudal, bourgeois, imperialist, or some other variety.” He then elaborates this point thus: “It implies, in other words, a political power controlling and exploiting the resources of the market or the growth of the productive forces in order to maintain and further its rule.” His conclusion, which follows in short order, is decisive: “[O]ur hypothesis does affirm that these two ‘moments’ indeed combine forces and produce a space (emphasis not mine): the space of the nation state.”49 A full-fledged invocation and discussion of the Marxist foundation of Lefebvre’s approach to the nation state and its materialization is well beyond the scope of this book. But just a nuanced reading of nation-space (such as the one I am attempting here) reveals that empire and its operations—even if not conjoined with fullblown and visceral forms of violence—simmer right below the surface of a polished and civilized face, one where order has been ironed and systematized into a coherent narrative. Barbara Maria Stafford provides one of the most compelling explanations of how and why “it was precisely in the eighteenth century that the persistent rational philosophical attitude toward images hardened into systems.” She goes on to argue that [s]uch theories claimed that pictures and perceptual apprehension . . . were an inferior gnosis. This consumption of presuming and popular images by an official hermeneutic of higher interpretive words was evinced in the academic demotion of pictures to an ornamental, or merely craft, status when bereft of a superior nonvisual method. Significantly, this modern visual culture is distinctly different from the visual culture of the Renaissance because of the conscious deployment of technologies of the visual in the eighteenth century. 50 The premise of my argument rests upon a set of related issues which I would prefer to frame as questions thus: What is the relationship of the visuality to the concept of nationhood in Britain? What are the strategies by which the idea of a nation—or the cultural imaginary of history and ­heritage—are visualized and experienced? More important, where does this real and metaphoric staging or framing of nation take place? And, conversely, how does the framing of nation renegotiate and reconfigure public space and the divide between the public and the private? Implicit in the last question is the following: how impenetrable or porous are the borders between private and public and why should this matter? The answers to these questions are not as organized as I would want them to be; discussion on these issues is scattered throughout this book even as I continue to acknowledge the difficulties inherent in recuperating histories and narratives choreographed into a vast and complex template from the perspectival advantage of authority—the authority derived from and also endowed to the establishment and the

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  37 institutions, the authority ceded by the establishment to the imperial or metropolitan agent and agency. The power of visuality and recent thinking on the need for a language and logics of countervisuality have helped me to frame a discourse of space and spatiality such that we continue to invoke the imperial scope and substance of space. This is my challenge; I wish to underscore (albeit in a rough and shoddy manner) that we need to revisit the foundations of visuality in the eighteenth century and examine how visuality came to be deployed in Britain; more specifically, I would like to propose that we look at how visuality and the collective consciousness are engineered and sustained in public, private, and domestic spaces and in space which is infused by the ethos of nation. In his groundbreaking formulation of Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell points out that, in our times, “in what is often characterized as an age of . . . all-pervasive image-making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.” The “pictures” in the eighteenth century are less retrievable in a sense because records of the visual are more often than not conveyed through the linguistic medium, producing an altogether different set of ideological and receptive parameters from the ones that the image-­making instincts of the twentieth and the twenty-first centuries—through photography, cinema, TV, and new media—have produced. Toward the end of the twentieth century, when “scopic regimes”—a term associated with ­Martin Jay—intersect with every facet of lived experience, the problems of reading what Mitchell describes as “nonlinguistic symbol systems” are readily apparent. 51 These problems become acute in considerations of the eighteenth-century archive and its symbolic systems and also might be seen as providing the impetus for further discussion. This study juxtaposes two radically distinct modes of identity formation: the nonlinguistic systems of identity formation and the linguistic expressions of the sense of self and collective or national identity. But these two modes of self-expression are not distinct and independent from each other. Part of the purpose of this study is to show how these two expressions interact and inform each other toward (re)creating a symbology of national heritage in both private and public nation-spaces. When Nicholas Mirzoeff claims “[v]isuality sutures authority to power and renders the association ‘natural,’” what does he mean? The explanation must come in the form of a reference to the genealogy of “authority” within the European linguistic framework, and, therefore, Mirzoeff explains the term thus: Authority is derived from the Latin auctor. In Roman law, the auctor was at one level the “founder” of a family, literally the patriarch. He was also (and always) therefore a man empowered to sell slaves,

38  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time among other forms of property, which completed the complex of authority. Authority can be said to have power over life, or biopower, foundationally rendered as authority over a ‘slave.’ However, this genealogy displaces the question: who or what empowers the person with authority to sell human beings?52 Mirzoeff’s question can no longer be regarded as provocative; its implications remain vast; and, in light of it, the following pronouncement becomes necessary even if requiring careful and meticulous attention to specific locations and dislocations of power, privilege, and authority: “The authority of coloniality has consistently required visuality to supplement its deployment of force.”53 Foucault would have been in complete agreement here. Visuality could also be deployed toward the reification of a benevolent power—one in which the birth and death cycles (reminiscent of medieval mystery plays) mimicked a perpetual resurrection. So, for instance, in the eighteenth century, both coronations and birthday celebrations of royalty were public and ostentatious events, choreographed to elicit among the suppliant public loyalty and respect for the king or queen. There is evidence to suggest that these celebrations became grander toward the early years of Queen Anne’s reign (circa 1706) when the war with France and the fear of Catholicism had intensified.54 In this context, consider, for instance, the coronation of George III, which was not only an elaborately crafted ritual designed to reaffirm the power of church and state, but it was also systematically recorded and aggressively disseminated through the print medium in the interests of posterity: An Account of the Ceremonies Observed at the Coronation of Our Most Gracious Sovereign George III and his Royal Consort Queen Charlotte, 55 in print very soon after the fact, extends the scopic regime from the realm of the spectacular but effervescent to the more permanent domain of scripted historiography—from where the performance can be re-“viewed” in retrospect. What needs to be underscored in addition is that this scripted historiography—this “account”—has a graphic and dynamic function, a pictorial (or ekphrastic) instinct, which diminishes the divide between the event and its narration, between the dynamic and the static image, between the ocular and the imagined subject. These eyewitness accounts of royal coronations cannot be regarded as straightforward narratives of events; they are the surrogates of actual ceremonial events, designed to reproduce an equivalence of print and visual culture that worked in unison toward the same end, in this case toward reifying monarchy and displaying what it looks. 56 As an example of the union of church and state—highlighting the divinely sanctioned and thus critical element in monarchy—consider the twinning of performance and textuality, spectatorship and readership in the following: Two sermons, preached at Henley-upon-Thames, on

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  39 the Jubilee, occasioned by King George the Third Entering the Fiftieth year of his Reign. 57 In this example, the performance of preaching is conjoined through words and sentiment to the festivities occasioned by a royal jubilee. The moral and ethical justification for monarchy is best discussed in a church or chapel; it is in this appropriate venue that nation-space is configured and experienced as an extension and a symbology of collective identity—and nothing solidifies this identity more effectively than state- and church-sponsored ceremonies captured in rich linguistic expressions of grandeur and magnificence, designed for those who were not in attendance but could read. A thorough counterhistory of what I am calling the emergent ­nation-space in eighteenth-century Britain—one which is beyond the scope of my brief analysis—must, in other words, confront the scopic regimes and performances of not just divinely sanctioned imperial power but also the twinned and allied relations of privilege and authority, which came to be rehearsed and articulated endlessly in mediated loops throughout the public sphere. As a result and at the very least, these mediated and mediatized messages invoked and stood for the n ­ ormative— that which is socially sanctioned is thus also moral and, therefore, cannot be challenged on any rational ground.58 So, for instance, my study cannot begin to address the question which Domenico Losurdo has asked: “Why should we continue to dignify John Locke with the title of father of liberalism?”59 But this question must be invoked at the outset. Launching the first chapter of Liberalism with “a series of embarrassing questions,” Losurdo juxtaposes Lord Acton and John C. Calhoun to showcase a transatlantic philosophical genealogy in their thinking and pronouncements. Both echoed the sentiments of Locke, who “regarded slavery in the colonies as self-evident and indisputable, and personally contributed to the legal formalization of the institution in Carolina.”60 The paradox inherent in free labor (which the slaves provided) which was also forced labor (since they did not seek such employment) is the irrevocable reality against which all representation and cultural enactments and achievements of the British Empire (and its competitors) must be positioned. The spatial dimension of Enlightenment time cannot be charted without reference to the illogicalities and contradictions in liberal thinking, in the idea that “‘civilization’ . . . could visualize, whereas the ‘primitive’ was ensconced in the ‘heart of darkness.’”61 From the perspective of the eighteenth-century metropolitan subject, prima facie, free and forced labor happens elsewhere, on the continents of Africa and the Americas far away. At the same time, however, books and artifacts of (inter)national heritage were systematically collected, ordered, and catalogued by private entities as well as by institutions which were designed to be repositories of the grand narrative of nation. In other words, the idea of the museum—epitomized by nationalist enterprises such as the British Museum or The Royal Academy of Arts—was thus

40  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time yoked to the idea of a global nation. In fact, this “idea” could be supported by the power and legitimacy of the institution and the institution was in a position to leverage the idea of new global trajectories leading to infinite resources.62 In Chapters 4 and 5, therefore, I underscore the importance of reiterating that this “new” museological space—the museum—led to a scientism which was new and purportedly transparent. Notice that there is no avowal or disavowal of nationalism in these manifestations of agency, in these operations of empire; if there is any ideology, it is imposed from the far reaches of the future (now) that could hardly have been visualized as such in the eighteenth century. Orchestrated efforts to spread knowledge, to engineer curiosity as well as discovery, and to disseminate knowledge and information—part and parcel of the liberal tradition—cannot readily be equated with the dialectics of domination and control.63 And this is precisely why an archaeology of empire as guiding principle adds some value to ongoing discussions of power, culture, and authority whose by-products are economic and social inequalities and insidious divides which solidify over time and in fluid global space, creating institutionalized expressions of the same. The power of individuals or groups is generally sustained by the power of institutions that support and collude with contemporary power bases, ceding authority, ensuring legitimacy, and endowing privilege.64 Both institutions and concerted, authoritative, collective action on the part of individuals—the latter sporadic, unpredictable, and mostly subsumed by the “institutional” authorities—create the nation-space from within which modern narratives of nation can perform their functions.65 At issue in this study are the articulations of nation-space which are reinforced by ostensibly independent agents or non-nationalist state apparatuses and agents—colonies functioning as laboratories for the advancement of science education, for instance, or museum operatives hired for broadening the knowledge base of the middle class or art exhibitions frequented by the doyens of the literary world66 —because these are just as effective in constructing the nation as those state apparatuses, such as the British navy (or the lesser-known support structures provided by the Sick and Hurt Board or the Victualling Board), which protected and extended the  borders of nation toward ensuring its global presence. Beginning in the very early days of the eighteenth century, the explosion of print culture and the proliferation of what counted as news—more than any other unified force—helped to solidify the notion of Great Britain (1707) and to give expression to the identity that binds and empowers. Linda Colley draws attention to the underlying motives behind, for instance, the massive art exhibit sponsored by The Society for the Encouragement of Arts in 1761: Samuel Johnson wrote the preface to the catalogue; thousands of people gathered to view the exhibition; and, as a result of this orchestrated effort, this exhibition became the biggest public display of British art to date. But this large-scale promotion of the arts was not

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  41 just for the sake of art appreciation; it was a self-consciously patriotic performance of Britishness and designed to score critical points over France, Britain’s competitor in not just empire but also in the domains of what counted as culture and civilization.67 A number of influential studies have shown why the concept of nation is such a critical factor in understanding constructions of individual, communal, or national identity and how that identity, in turn, facilitates, subverts, and explains individual or collective thought and action.68 Moreover, delineations of actual and imagined communities have helped to chart the scope, potential, and limitations of historical processes and products which contribute to the idea of nation.69 In some instances, such as during the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution (1680s), both state apparatuses and unruly mobs, in equal or unequal measure, ignited the power of mass hysteria to restore or to sustain faith in the institution of Protestant monarchy.70 But whether in the throes of mass hysteria (Gordon Riots) or in the words of reasoned rhetoric (Daniel Defoe), constructions of identity are seldom based upon an understanding of what Britons are but what they are not—“Britons never will be slaves.”71 Fear of annihilation, of ignorance and darkness, of chaos and civil disorder, of the loss of empire, of miscegenation and subversive mixing, these fears do not debilitate a nation in ascendancy. These fears are rehearsed in public and private spaces which register and perform both the vectors of change and, simultaneously, the resistance anchored in tradition.

Notes 1 Richard Barker, Consilium Anti-Pestilentiale: Or, Seasonable Advice, Concerning Sure, Safe, Specifick, and Experimented Medicines, Both for the Preservation from, and Cure of, this Present Plague Offered for the Publick Benefit of this Afflicted Nation, by Richard Barker, Med. Lond. London, Printed by the Author, Anno 1665. Quotations and references to this pamphlet are from Appendix I of Cynthia Wall’s edition of A Journal of the Plague Year (Penguin, 2003). All references to Barker’s pamphlet are from this edition. 2 See also Richard Bradley, FRS. The Plague at Marseilles Consider’d: With Remarks upon the Plague in General. (W. Mears, 1721). A Fellow of the Royal Society, Bradley’s dissertation, in sharp contrast to Barker’s, is an informed opinion and assessment of the London plague. 3 Significantly, as I have attempted to propose here, the narrative of nation is neither “novel” nor anchored by tradition, neither teleological nor accidental. In this context, one might recall what Srinivas Aravamudan has pointed out: “[N]ovel” is the name Bakhtin gives to whatever force is at work within a given literary system to reveal the limits, the artificial constraints of that system.” In other words, “novel” puts a static hierarchy of genres into dynamic and transformative inter-relationships. However, why is it that historians of the English novel are often gleefully willing to use Bakhtin

42  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time to document those aspects of the incipient novel that are polyglot and transgeneric in their subversion of epic, romance, and poetic modes, but suddenly partisan and forgetful when the novelistic usurper is installed on the throne in full regalia and declared the legitimate heir? It is not so much that the noncanonical are excluded from entry into the hallowed hall of legitimate narrative but that the centrality of the novel sets up precisely the sorts of limitations that inhibit and permanently retard—as I describe at some length in this book—a consideration of the multivalent and unscripted narratives of nation. See Srinivas Aravamudan, “Fiction/­ Translation/Transnation: The Secret History of the English Novel,” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture, eds. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia. (Blackwell, 2005), 48–74 specifically 49. See also ­M ichael Holquist, whom Aravamudan cites: Introduction to Michael ­B akhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist (U of Texas P, 1981), xxxi. 4 The mathematical meaning of neighborhood conveys precisely the sense of topological space where the distance between two points can be zero or close to zero. “Neighborhood” thus embeds an inherent elasticity in the proximity of one point (an individual or entity) to another (his neighbor). 5 Charlotte Sussman has argued that in A Journal of the Plague Year (1722), Daniel Defoe is not telling a story of individuals but of “a collective subject” or “a fiction of population” in which “the face of London dissolves into every face, as those faces become a ‘we’ and then shift back to the personification of the city.” See Sussman, “Memory and Mobility: Fictions of Population in Defoe, Goldsmith, and Scott,” A Companion to the ­Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine ­I ngrassia (Blackwell, 2005), 192. 6 See Maximillian E. Novak, Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas (Oxford UP, 2001), specifically 571 and 640 and “Describing Britain in the 1720s”, 624–47 passim. 7 For a consideration of the phenomenon of spatialization in postmodern cultural space, see Fredric Jameson, “Space,” Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1991), 154–80. 8 “[F]iction emerges out of the inherent limitation of the documentary,” Slavoj Žižek has so aptly pointed out in The Parallax View. Žižek goes on to show how it is sometimes more ethical to capture a scene in fiction than to subject (in his example) the cinematic object to unnecessary and even obscene scrutiny as documentaries tend to do. See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (The MIT P, 2006), 30–31. 9 See Paula R. Backscheider, Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation (UP of Kentucky, 1986), specifically “The Bent and Genius of the Age,” 3–11. 10 In this linguistic endeavor to map London, Daniel Defoe may have been the most illustrious agent but he was not alone. Assessment of the scope and substance of the metropolis and its patterns of growth and development were actively and dialectically presented for public consideration and scrutiny. See, for instance, Edward Hatton, A New View of London; or an ample account of that city, in two volumes (London, 1708). 11 Daniel Defoe, “A Tour Thro’ London,” A Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies 3 Vols. (G. Strahan, W. Mears, R. Franklin et al., 1724–25), II: pages of letter 2 here. Page references to this work will appear parenthetically in the text as “Tour.” Those who wish to use a different edition of the work will notice substantial variations.

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  43 12 For an understanding of “liquid times,” see Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Polity P, 2007), specifically v. For an understanding of Defoe’s modernity, see Pat Rogers who has rightly endorsed G. M. Trevelyan’s assessment of Defoe: “[T]he account this man gives of the England of Anne’s reign is for the historian a treasure indeed.” More important for my purposes here is Trevelyan’s assessment that “Defoe was one of the first who saw the old world through a pair of sharp modern eyes.” See Rogers (who discusses Trevelyan briefly), “Defoe’s Tour and the Identity of Britain,” The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe, ed. John Richetti (Cambridge UP, 2008), 102–20 and specifically 105. 13 “In 1700, after half a century of relentless expansion, London had overtaken Paris to become the largest—if disputably the finest—city in Europe. It stretched in a great arc of continuous building along the north bank of the Thames, some five miles as the crow flies from Tothill Street, Westminster to Limehouse in the east. It was linked to the south bank and the burgeoning Borough of Southwark . . . by the 500-year-old London Bridge. . .. North to south, across that single bridge, London was more shallow than broad, just two and a half miles from the ‘stones’ end’ in Shoreditch to the farthest point of Blackman Street, Southwark. This was a walkable city, just three hours across . . . and less than two hours north to south.” See Jerry White, A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard UP, 2013), 1. The tile of White’s book echoes the words of Defoe as they appear in the Tour. 14 In both the 1604 and the 1616 texts of Dr. Faustus, referred to as the A and the B texts, the passage I am referring to appears at the very beginning of Act 3 scene 1. In reference to Defoe’s Tour, Pat Rogers has, likewise, observed the following: “All Defoe’s claims about the size and grandeur of Britain, its spectacular growth, its economic power, its competitive advantages, its opportunities of further increases in commercial and civic development, as well as personal property—all these start from a vivid bird’s eye view of the whole island.” See Rogers, “Defoe’s Tour and the Identity of Britain,” 104 and 112–13. 15 Robert Morden drew maps of the then Ceylon and also of the American colonies. One assumes that he traveled around the world and was perhaps an apprentice under Joseph Moxon. 16 See Pat Rogers, 102–03. 17 Defoe makes repeated references to the “narrow compass,” as, for instance, in the beginning of the letter, where he writes the following: “I am now to describe the City of London, and Parts adjacent; a Work infinitely difficult to be performed in the narrow Compass of a Letter” (Tour, 90). Defoe’s obvious frustration for having to conform to the conventions of form is readily apparent here and elsewhere. His performance or style, in other words, is always in jeopardy when he is thus forced to conform to the established conventions of a “narrow Compass.” 18 On this point about how the different parts of the narrative cohere and how Defoe “brings them together in a single organic unit,” see Rogers, 119. 19 See Henri Lefebvre, “Spatial Architectonics,” The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Blackwell, 1991), 169–228 and specifically 227. In this segment, Henri Lefebvre goes on to say that “[s]uch condensation of society’s attributes is easily discernible in the style of the administrative buildings from the nineteenth century on, in schools, railway stations, town halls, police stations or ministries.” Lefebvre, “Spatial Architectonics,” 227. The style of administrative buildings in the British colonies during

44  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time

20 21 22

23

the eighteenth century reveals quite decisively the imposed aesthetics of the imperial power, as, for instance, he Writers’ Building in Kolkata. According to Lefebvre, “prose of the world” stands in contrast to the “poetry of monuments,” although his precise argument is complex and beyond the scope of my discussion here. See Lefebvre, 227 and also 74–75. Christopher Wren produced the First (architectural) Model of the St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1670; under his supervision from beginning to the end of the project, the building was completed in 1711—when Wren was 79 years old. The best-known landscape paintings of the Privy-Garden at Whitehall are from the mid-eighteenth century and done by Italian artist Giovanni Antonio Canaletto (1697–1768). Westminster Abbey with the Procession of Knights of the Bath (1749) is also by Canaletto. The pictorial instinct and image consciousness in representations of the social self are not limited to Defoe’s writings; these sentiments can be found in all sorts of places. In the first chapter of An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber, for instance, appears the following passage: Now, Sir, when my time comes, lest they should think it worth while to handle my memory with the same freedom, I am willing to prevent its being so oddly besmeared (or at best but flatly white-washed) by taking upon me to give the public this, as true a picture of myself as natural vanity will permit me to draw: For, to promise you that I shall never be vain, were a promise that, like a looking-glass too large, might break itself in the making. . .. In a word, I may palliate and soften, as much as I please; but, upon an honest examination of my heart, I am afraid the same vanity which makes even homely people employ painters to preserve a flattering record of their persons, has seduced me to print off this Chiaro Oscuro of my mind.

See B. R. S. Fone, ed. An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (Dover, 2000), 7. 4 Terry Eagleton, whom I quote and paraphrase here, has explained this point 2 succinctly and some of it is as follows: A human body is in one sense a material object, part of Nature as well as part of history. Yet it is a peculiar kind of object. . .. For one thing, it has the capacity to change its situation. It can also turn Nature into a kind of extension of itself. . .. Human labour works Nature up into that extension of our bodies which we know as civilization. All human institutions . . . are extensions of the productive body. See Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (Yale UP, 2011), 138. 25 Henri Lefrevre has discussed at length the specific ways in which interpretations of culture must accommodate the trajectory “from absolute space to abstract space.” See Lefebvre, 229–33. 26 Post 9.11, there has been discussion about whether surveillance cameras should be visible or invisible. Such concerns are not new. In the eighteenth century, sovereign power needed to proclaim itself and be both seen and heard. Take, for instance, the sentiments expressed in Thoughts on the Coronation of his Present Majesty King George the Third. Or, Reasons offered against confining the Procession to the usual Track, and pointing out others more commodious and proper. (London: F. Noble, J. Noble, W. Bathoe, and H. Yates, 1761). In this eight-page pamphlet (mimicking a homily), the anonymous author expresses concern for the following strategic mistakes in the coronation plan of George III as well as his predecessors: “Our Kings . . . have crept to the Temple through obscure Passages; and the Crown has been

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  45

27 28

29

30

31 32

33 34

worn out of Sight of the People” (3). The purpose of the coronation ceremony, after all, is to present for the collective gaze a focal point of power. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Vintage Books, 1979). Born in Leeds, Benjamin Latrobe traveled all over Europe and then came to America. The fashion for Greek Revivalism had already begun when ­Latrobe immigrated to America in 1796. In 1798, Latrobe traveled to Philadelphia where he quickly established himself as a talented architect of Greek Revival buildings. The White House was designed by Pierre Charles L’Enfant in the Georgian style, which also belongs to the Greek Revival genre. It is important to recall in this context that Benjamin Franklin believed in the philosophy of “politically relevant architecture.” For a definition of the term and its eighteenth-century usage, see, for instance, Sir William Chambers, A Treatise on Civil Architecture, in which the principles of that art are laid down, and illustrated by a great number of plates (London, 1759). All references to this text are from Jeremy Bentham, Panopticon: Or, the ­Inspection-House. . . With a Plan of Management Adapted to the Principle . . . in a Series of Letters, Written in the Year 1787, From Crecheff in White Russia, to a Friend in England (Thomas Byrne, 1791). I make the distinction between scripted and unscripted performances in Chapter 2 of this book titled “Riot-Space: A Brief Archaeology of Scripted, Unscripted, and Chaotic Performances.” See Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker, “The State in Chaos: 1776– 89,” London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of the Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2015), 333–93 and specifically “Punishment in Crisis,” 334–42. Domenico Losurdo, Liberalism: A Counter-History (Verso, 2011), 173–74 and 173–77 passim. The role of the architect (in this context) or the author or puppet master deserves scrutiny in any discussion of the performance of state (or authorial or imperial) power. Foucault approached “the problem of the subject” with reference to “the history of theories, concepts, or themes” as being symptoms of systemic order or disorder. So, for instance, he underscores the distinction between science and the scientist thus: In distinguishing between the epistemological level of knowledge (or scientific consciousness) and the archaeological level of knowledge, I am aware that I am advancing in a direction that is fraught with difficulty. Can one speak of science and its history . . . without reference to the scientist himself—and I am speaking not merely of the concrete individual represented by a proper name, but of his work and the particular form of his thought? . . . Is it legitimate, is it even useful, to replace the traditional ‘X thought that . . .’ by a ‘it was known that . . . ‘? . . . I should like to know whether the subjects responsible for scientific discourse are not determined in their situation, their function, their perceptive capacity, and their practical possibilities by conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them. Does the system overwhelm the individual completely and eradicate all potential for self-determination? I think not entirely; nonetheless, Foucault’s argument does stand on solid ground and can fruitfully be applied to most critiques of eighteenth-century systems. See Michel Foucault’s foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Random House, 1970), xiii–xiv.

46  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time 35 Ibid., 308 and 307–12 passim. 36 Ibid., 308. Martin Jay provides the following, very useful, commentary on this painting, underscoring its position in the history of ideas related to ­visual culture thus: “For in it, the absent sovereigns, visible only in their reflections in the small mirror on the back wall of the painter’s studio, are the ones who ‘see’ the picture in front of us. But in this doubled space of representation, the seeing subject can only be inferred, not perceived directly. We are thus not yet in a fully humanist age characterized by the positive appearance of the Man.” See Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (U of California P, 1994), 404. “The appearance of Man” is a reference to Foucault’s claim that “[b]efore the eighteenth century, man does not exist—any more than the potency of life, the fecundity of labour, or the historical density of language.” See The ­Order of Things, 308. 37 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 217. See Martin Jay’s discussion of this point in Downcast Eyes, 411. See also Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Zone Books, 1994). 38 See Jay, 411–12. 39 See my discussion of Johan Zoffany in the next chapter, Riot-Space. 40 Nicholas Mirzoeff, “Imperial Visuality and Countervisuality, Ancient and Modern,” The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Duke UP, 2011), 196. 41 Bentham, Panopticon, title page and preface, iii. 42 John Dryden’s Amboyna is a good example to consider in this context. Benjamin Schmidt has argued that this play epitomizes the competitive and confrontational relationship between the British and Dutch due of course to their imperial aspirations. Dryden ensures the success of this play by “conveying English audiences to a steamy East Indian archipelago and thrusting before them . . . a ‘tragedy’ of strikingly global proportions.” See Schmidt, “Mapping an Exotic World: The Global Project of Dutch Geography, circa 1700” ed. Felicity Nussbaum, The Global Eighteenth Century (The Johns Hopkins UP, 2003), 21 and 21–24. 43 See my discussion in Chapter 3: “Empires Within: The Spatial Dimension of the Johnsonian Oikos”. 4 4 For a detailed discussion of Nell Gwyn’s rise as the unparalleled star of the Restoration stage and her ‘role’ in perfecting the ‘gay couple,’ see Elizabeth Howe, The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700 (Cambridge UP, 1992), 66–73 and specifically 69. See also James Jensen’s introduction to Leviathan, Part One in The Sensational Restoration (Indiana UP, 1992), specifically 3, where Jensen discusses Hobbes’ take on power. 45 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser (U of Michigan P, 1994). The invisible Gwyn—no longer the object of public gaze—becomes an empty signifier but remains powerful even as a simulacrum by gaining access to the inner chambers from where sovereignty wields power and imposes order. 46 See Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, 12–13. 47 On this point, see Mirzoeff, who quotes Fanon and describes “how to think with and against visuality.” 3. 48 Henry Lefebvre, 112. 49 Ibid., 112. Also 111–28 passim. 50 In her discussion of the philosophical resistance to pictures in the eighteenth century as a result of the primacy of the written word, Barbara Maria Stafford points to the paradox that I describe from a different angle in this book:

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  47

51

52 53 54 55

56

57 58

59 60

the optics and power of display in the museum. Stafford observes that “[n]ot surprisingly, this attempt at textual control occurred in a century unprecedented for sophisticated visual practices, technological inventions, and sheer pictorial production.” In fact, she rightly points out that [t]he prejudicial implications of continuing to see images linguistically, that is, as a lesser, transitory, and illusory form of written communication, are still playing themselves out.” See Stafford, Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images (MIT P, 1996), 22. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (U of Chicago P, 1994), specifically 13 and 11–34. I would like to draw attention to two critiques in Mitchell’s introductory chapter, one positive and one I believe to be legitimately negative: First is his candid admiration for the work and contributions of Erwin Panofsky. Referring specifically to Panofsky’s 1924 essay titled “Perspective as Symbolic Form,” Mitchell observes the following: “This essay remains a crucial paradigm for any ambitious attempt at a general critique of pictorial representation. Panofsky’s grand synthetic history of space, visual perception, and pictorial construction remains unmatched in both its sweep and its nuanced detail.” About Jonathan Crary’s ‘techniques of the observer, Mitchell points out the following: “the surest sign that the well-worn paths of idealist history are being retracted in this book is the way it absorbs all possible theories and histories of the observer into a single-minded, non-empirical account of a purely hypothetical observer.” See Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (MIT P, 1990) and Mitchell, Picture Theory, 22. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 7. Ibid., 6. See Olive Baldwin and Thelma Wilson, “England’s Glory and the Celebrations at Court for Queen Anne’s Birthday in 1706,” Theatre Notebook, vol. 62, no. 1 (2008), 9. This event—on Tuesday, September 22, 1761—is recorded in a 48-page pamphlet, published in London by G. Kearsley in 1761.The multiplicity of such documents suggests a ready market for such narratives. See An Account of the Ceremonies Observed in the Coronations of the Kings and Queens of England (G. Kearsley, 1761). Henri Lefebvre, in his masterful and self-consciously Marxist delineation of the concept of space, makes the following observation when discussing the nature of reality in post modern society: “If reality is taken in the sense of materiality, social reality no longer has reality, not is it reality. On the other hand, it contains and implies some terribly concrete abstractions (including, as cannot be too often emphasized, money, commodities and the exchange of material goods), as well as ‘pure’ forms: exchange, language, signs, equivalences, reciprocities, contracts, and so on.” See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 81. James Churchill, Happy Nation. Two Sermons, Preached at Henley-­UponThames, on the Jubilee, Occasioned by King George the Third Entering the Fiftieth Year of His Reign (Conder, 1809). In this context, it would be fruitful to glance at Mirzoeff’s succinct analysis of Thomas Carlyle’s position on the French revolution: “Order required governing, governing required great men, great men visualized history as its sole actors.” Ergo, the emancipation of slaves would be an absurdity. See Mirzoeff, 143–46 and specifically 144. Losurdo, Liberalism, 3. Ibid., 1–7.

48  The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time 61 Mirzoeff, 15. 62 The museum is traditionally viewed as neutral space, designed specifically for the enlightenment of the masses. In popular discourse, power, or social, political, and cultural capital, is seldom associated with the concept of the museum. Almost always, establishment narratives of the scope and substance of museums shy away from any hint of ideology. Yet Benjamin Franklin, for instance, believed in the philosophy of “politically relevant architecture.” The British Museum website understates its impact, claiming only that it is “the first national public museum in the world.” The reference to statistics related to visitors, however, reveals its gigantic impact more accurately: “Visitor numbers have grown from around 5,000 a year in the eighteenth century to nearly 6 million today. See www.britishmuseum.org/about_us/ the_museums_story/general_history.aspx. Retrieved 26 May 2018. 63 Representation of space/place (through material objects that are local as well as global) and representational space (in the museum, academy, mental institution, or theatre) are not one and the same thing, but their domains overlap, as Henri Lefebvre has shown. See Henri Lefebvre, for instance, 79. Likewise, places of performance beyond the physical scope of the theater become the urban architectural spaces in which parallel and public narratives may be performed. See Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Cornell UP, 1993). 64 See Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, Eds. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism (Cornell UP, 1994), passim. 65 As a result, the doctrines of universality that anchor the myriad projects of self-definition are fundamentally flawed. In their discussion of the “Ideological Tensions of Capitalism,” Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein explain the ways in which late eighteenth-century (what they call) ­politico-moral documents embed universalist principles. See their Race, ­Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (Verso, 1991), 29–36. See also Felicity A. Nussbaum, who has explained the purpose of “The Global Eighteenth Century,” which is to “develop conceptual frameworks distinct from national history,” by which she means a totalizing, universalist national history. While the goal of Nussbaum et al. is to “freshly appreciate the ways that the local, regional, and the global are imbricated within one another” (Introduction, 10), mine builds upon this premise to determine the ways in which an imperial subjectivity emerges through a complex process of imagining, re-imagining, rehearsing, and performing a nationalist collective identity, one with various agents and agencies undergirding it. 66 See Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (MIT P, 1994; rpt. 1999). 67 See Linda Colley, “Profits” Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Yale UP, 1992). In her discussion of economic and cultural nationalism, Linda Colley has outlined succinctly the multiple uses of an institution such as The Society for the Encouragement of Arts. So, for instance, it gave incentives for the discovery of cobalt and the growing of madder—both of which would benefit the textiles industry. These incentives are similar in principle, say, to the National Science Foundation’s commitment to projects that further the national interest of the US. See Colley, “Profits,” 90–91. 68 Of particular relevance to me here is Partha Chatterjee’s, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, a Derivative Discourse (U of Minnesota P, 1993). More recently, in his discussion of “the coercive power of the state to transform premodern institutions and practices,” Chatterjee observes that “[a]tleast in the cultural disciplines, if not in the social sciences as a

The Spatial Dimension of Enlightenment Time  49 whole, there is a much greater sensitivity today to the destructive social and cultural effects of large-scale, centralized, state-sponsored projects of modernization.” See Chatterjee, “Critique of Popular Culture,” Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008), 325. See also Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation” The Location of Culture (Routledge, 1994), 139–70. 69 Here I invoke Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (Verso, 2006). 70 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge UP, 1990). 71 This is the last line of James Thomson’s Rule Britannia, the preceding part of which goes as follows: When Britain first at heaven’s command Arose from out the azure main, This was the charter of the land. And guardian angels sung this strain: ‘Rule Britannia, rule the waves, Britons never will be slaves. Linda Colley uses this segment of “Rule Britannia” to introduce her discussion of the “Protestants” in Britons, 11.

2 Riot-Space A Brief Archaeology of Scripted, Unscripted, and Chaotic Performances

The Gordon Riots of 1780 constituted not just the “primary riot in eighteenth-century England”;1 the series of events spanning several days in early June might be considered, in retrospect, to be a paradigmatic event2 if we consider the turbulence not in terms of the public dimension alone within which it unfolded or the visual spectacles which these riots spawned and whose thick descriptions are plentiful. Indeed, we must also consider the extent to which the performative and visual force of these riots far exceeded the original sources of violent opposition led by George Gordon and his incensed followers. The Blue Cockades, as Gordon’s followers came to be called, interpreted the Catholic Relief Act as an insidious and sectarian conspiracy to undermine if not to destroy Protestantism; this Act was for them an arbitrary flaunting of parliamentary authority, one which was antithetical to national interest. ­Gordon’s followers at first presented themselves as custodians of the nation; as their numbers increased, very quickly their resistance to arbitrary rule acquired the characteristics of a mob. The target of mob violence then shifted from the Catholics to the penal system and the establishment at large, a divergence and realignment of goals and objectives which appear, in hindsight, to be inevitable. 3 Part of the purpose in this chapter is to highlight how and why, by late century, the ideas of subversive—and politicized—urban space was so heavily mediated and also mediatized over and over again. Quite perceptibly, the riot-related acts of mediation4 were closely aligned to the image-making imperatives of this culture and also public perceptions of and participation in the formation of crowds which could (probability rather than certainty) and often did mutate into mobs and then into riots. The materiality of a crowd (which has all the ingredients of a mob except the volume and kinetic energy) may not be the same as the materiality of a riot, but a mob tends to precede riot and sets the stage for riot’s full-blown exhibition of chaos. Eighteenth-century visual culture registered the collective anxieties in response to riot as well as its precursor, the unruly mob; but we cannot stop at mere analyses of types of riot or forms or modes of visuality which were deployed on the occasion of the Gordon Riots, or any other riot, and then to trace the

Riot-Space  51 varying degrees of success or failure which these aesthetic (and literary) responses these produced. Shifting the discursive focus if only slightly, I ask the following questions: what is riot-space and how did the materiality of this space reflect and reinforce or erase the materiality of bodies in violent opposition to a broad spectrum of targets? How did riotous bodies appropriate public space and co-opt other mechanisms for performing resistance, anger, passionate opposition to authority, and so on? And how did the resistance to riot—emanating from the authority endowed upon the state—limit if not destroy avenues for protest? In order to consider these questions, I begin, anachronistically, with a close look at Edgar Alan Poe’s 1841 short story, The Man of the Crowd. This meditation on the art of seeing, surveillance, objectification, focalization, and characterization, then, allows me to draw some conclusions about how the earlier, eighteenth-century, regimes of observation and objectification, mediation and mediatization, codification and control came to be understood, disseminated by, and absorbed into the vocabulary of public space and its always-already propensity to be endangered, to be threatened, or to be under attack. Implicitly I argue that visuality and visual culture do not necessarily belong to images. Narrative can and did embed visuality—not a new idea by any means—and, more important in the context of this discussion, I describe how the visual logics of narrative can represent an intellectual (even theoretical) mechanism for “disciplining” public space or enhancing its utility value while nurturing those social hierarchies which the eighteenth century had perfected and solidified into inflexible coda. In order to show how representations of eighteenth-century crowds were both rhetorical and reactionary, dialectical and dialogic, I have selected three unrelated but mediated narrative threads which allow me to read space through the lens of nation: in the first section, I analyze an obscure and illustrated poem, one which was published anonymously but found its way into the transatlantic archive of the eighteenth century. 5 In the next section, I focus on a painting by German émigré Johann Zoffany, one which, prima facie, seems to have no ties to Britain. And, in the final section, I draw attention to a set of images related to policing in various locations in London, right after the Gordon Riots. Taken together, these spaces of riot and resistance help me to make some provisional observations about the construct of riot-space and how this space was framed by the establishment (made up of institutions, broadly construed) as well as by those who might be regarded as independent operatives (with or without connections to the establishment). At issue here are the historiographical implications of the framing of riot, what this framing includes, what this framing elides or suppresses altogether, and to what end. In all three examples, my interest is in showing how the institutional counter-resistance to public unrest6 or turbulence was solidified and sustained by multiple and also independent

52 Riot-Space actors (operating beyond the purview of institutions), who had a stake in suppressing chaos in the public sphere. This counter-resistance was often couched in and as thoughtful consideration of the “character of the crowd”; but this ostensibly independent counter-resistance was in fact more aggressive than the uncontrollable crowd; its purpose was to mimic establishment concerns about the innate volatility of the crowd— and this crowd’s potential to undermine and to destroy monarchical government and related markers of civil society believed to have and to hold abiding value in the eighteenth century. In other words, if the crowd is mediated and then “sold” as fundamentally distasteful or even unstable, we ought not to assume that this public perception emanates from the establishment, or governmental entities, or the institution which fears the crowd’s unstable nature and its potential to destabilize the order upon which institutions are founded and sustained. It is easy enough to see and to argue that the characterization of the crowd as distasteful stems from the authority which envisions the progression from crowd to mob to riot, the same authority which is charged to regulate and to police patterns of collective behavior in public space. But there is a missing element in this corollary: who is the authority and how can we accommodate those just as committed as the establishment to counter-resistance initiatives and operations which seek to suppress riots? The institutional counter-resistance to riot becomes effective, I argue here, when it is deployed as a collective, universal, and socially responsible resistance to riot, one which has public support; as such, this universal resistance to riot then becomes one of the cornerstones of the modern state and can be codified as part of that state’s immutable interest in both studying and controlling instability in the public sphere (or chaos). But the operations of crowd control, the management of turbulence, or the suppression of violence (by any entity) are intertwined with an unwritten and unspoken recognition of (and reliance upon) a divided public, one good and the other fundamentally unstable (or evil).7 This divided public embeds those who saw themselves—to use Tim Hitchcock’s words—“not just as subjects of the law, but as partners in its implementation.” In this context, consider the case of John Fielding who, circa 1770s, redesigned his house and converted it to a site of “private” tribunals; this unorthodox use of private space brought into sharp focus the problems of privatization of the criminal justice system—­providing for us an excellent example of split publics.8 Recall that Brackley Kennett, Lord Mayor in 1780, allegedly a supporter of the American Revolution, may not have shared the establishment view of the Gordon rioters; in any event, he failed to enforce law and order and was subsequently tried and found guilty of criminal negligence.9 A clean line between establishment and antiestablishment is thus hard to draw. But if the unstable public elements can be considered as the alterity which must lurk in (and provide the foundation for) every assertion

Riot-Space  53 of authority and its interest in maintaining law and order—because it does10 —then that recalcitrant alterity can neither be controlled nor repressed indefinitely. The public is always-already divided. It is in public space that the tensions and battles between or among the two or more publics are played out, supplying the basis during the Enlightenment for grand narratives of winners and losers.

The Mature (and Gothic) Early-Victorian Crowd The dialectical tension in the divided (and splintered) public sphere requires, I would like to propose, the authority which distances itself from the mass and wields power on behalf of the divinely sanctioned (in the context of the eighteenth century) or state-sponsored entity (then and now). Even as the crowd acts and enacts its resistance to authority, the authority which resists and acts upon these enactments are more often than not relegated to the position of the reactionary. In any event, the character of the crowd is always difficult to sketch both because of the multiplicity of its reference points and the infinity of singular elements and defining features in it. Likewise, the intentions and motivations of individuals in the crowd appear to be foggy and inevitably diluted in the mass. In the context of this discussion, then, consider Edgar ­A llen Poe’s Gothic short story The Man of the Crowd (1841) which is as much about “the man of the crowd,” whose “countenance . . . at once arrested and absorbed” the narrator, as it is about the “character of the crowd.”11 This Gothic story allows me to develop some general principles of analysis and also provides me with the vocabulary to look back at eighteenth-century London, which is where the epicenter of riot is located for the purpose of discussion here. But how could Poe’s narrator, a man sitting in a coffee house with a cigar in his mouth and a newspaper in his lap, be brought into a dialectical relationship with the “crowd” in the streets when he has already disparaged the “promiscuous company” in the coffee house—from the space of positional and perspectival superiority—reducing them to a bundle of moral depravity? He does not venture out immediately. Looking out into the city, the narrator identifies two mechanisms for observing the crowds, the first is an overview and the one succeeding it the result of scrutiny of the discrete elements: “At first my observations took an abstract and generalizing turn. I looked at the passengers in masses, and thought of them in their aggregate relations. Soon, however, I descended to details, and regarded with minute interest the innumerable varieties of figure, dress, air, gait, visage, and expression of countenance.”12 In this detailed prospect, the narrator establishes a series of equivalences between the trade or profession of an individual and the clothes or countenances which the individual sports. So, for instance, he notes that “the greater number of those who went by had a satisfied, business-like demeanor, and seemed to be

54 Riot-Space thinking only of making their way through the press.” He also notices “noblemen, merchants, attorneys, tradesmen, stock-jobbers,” but these faces do not excite the narrator.13 Of the “gentlemen who live by their wits,” he identifies “two battalions—that of the dandies and that of the military men. Of the first grade the leading features are long locks and smiles; of the second frogged coats and frowns.”14 The frowns on the faces of the military men represent the gravity of their responsibility. In Poe’s schema, and channeled through his narrator, we find a psychosocial continuum from a man’s profession to his physical appearance to his character. Off-duty military men—in uniform and still wearing the countenance of their calling (“frowns,” signifying the burdens of their duty)—could rub shoulders with active-duty Bobbies or Peelers in the London Poe describes. In Poe’s narrative, the dialectical relationship between the materiality of the man (singularity) and the materiality of the Victorian “crowd” (multiplicity) is manifested through the focalization of the narrator whose ability to witness is predicated upon maintaining not just a physical but specifically an intellectual distance from the crowd by which the narrator becomes, nonetheless, increasingly mesmerized.15 The class divide—between the narrator and his subject, at first the “crowd” and then the “man of the crowd”—then emerges in full force in the following section, which I am going to quote at some length here: Descending in the scale of what is termed gentility, I found darker and deeper themes for speculation. I saw Jew pedlars, with hawk eyes flashing from countenances whose every other feature wore only an expression of abject humility; sturdy professional street beggars scowling upon mendicants of a better stamp, whom despair alone had driven forth into the night for charity, feeble and ghastly invalids, upon whom death had placed a sure hand . . . women of the town of all kinds and of all ages . . . the loathsome and utterly lost leper in rags—the wrinkled, bejeweled, and paint-begrimed beldame making a last effort at youth . . .; drunkards innumerable and ­indescribable—some in shreds and patches, reeling, inarticulate, with bruised visage and lack-lustre eyes—some in whole although filthy garments .  .  .; beside these, pie-men, porters, coal-heavers, sweeps; organ-grinders, monkey exhibitors and ballad mongers . . . ragged artizans and exhausted laborers of every description, and all full of noisy and inordinate vivacity which jarred discordantly upon the ear, and gave an aching sensation to the eye.16 Amid the mass and contributing to its composition are myriad particulars which produce “an aching sensation to the eye.” Nonetheless, this authoritative “eye” must continue to surveille and to pontificate about social hierarchy.

Riot-Space  55 What happens next is somewhat unexpected as the narrator finds his focal point amid the mass: “I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age.)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression.” Why idiosyncratic, we might ask. Poe’s narrator anticipates this question and answers it thus: “Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before.”17 Novelty attracts him to the narrative focal point. Notice also how the continuum from observation to curiosity to engaged action—expressed soon after in his resolution to follow the stranger—is thus established as a logical and rational progression. Mere observation is dull and reflected in the lethargy of the promiscuous coffee house consumer, a lower-­order voyeur whose inaction is inseparable from his state of inebriation.18 The narrator is not part of that coffee house crowd. Poe’s use of the word “press” is designed to invoke Victorian urban multiplicity and, metonymically, the density and weight of the crowd; moreover, in using the word “press” interchangeably with “mob” he inserts into this press a sense of unpredictability. Poe’s is a Gothic short story, one which provides me with several interpretative maneuvers useful for my analysis of narratives of eighteenth-century crowds. Furthermore, my examination of riot as paradigm for chaos and criminality made visible benefits from Poe’s perspective on singularity, exemplified by the “man,” as well as generality, which he locates in “the crowd.” Very much like the crowd, a riot, any riot, reveals social hierarchies— with “Jew peddlars, with hawk eyes” and “the loathsome and utterly lost leper in rags” inhabiting the bottom rungs of society. Crowds and riots also anchor and sustain those perceptions of public metropolitan space which had evolved throughout the eighteenth century and had become, at the time Poe was writing, hardwired into definitions of the cosmopolitan metropolis. Additionally, Poe’s mob, conceptualized as faceless mass and marked by economic divides, provides for me the framework to talk about the mediated (and also mediatized) deformity of the eighteenth-century mob. Thoroughly mediated and then mediatized by contemporary social media, the eighteenth-century riot-space represents, I argue here, public and volatile exhibitions of the chaos/order binary so central to Enlightenment self-fashioning. Beyond that, riot-space can be used to show how multiplicity is not fundamentally subversive or chaotic or indeed violent, as Poe’s narrative demonstrates; but multiplicity could pose a real or potential threat to the growing eighteenth-century metropolis and the later (nineteenth-century) megalopolis. Multiplicity embeds density (concentration of population), viscosity (texture produced by difference), and volatility (unpredictable movement or action). In a culture which is deeply invested in grand narratives of progress—progress

56 Riot-Space which is teleological and linear, with continuous improvement over what is perceived to be the limitations of the past—riot-space, curiously, is not shunned or marginalized; on the contrary, narratives of riot-space continue to be reified and polemicized in the eighteenth century. The fascination for riot-space may be explained in terms of the intrinsically mesmerizing characteristics of riot—and its visual, often spectacular dynamic—because riot-space represents that endangered nation-space which tests and sets the limits of transgression for its citizenry. “Culture is a commodity produced for gain (whether pecuniary or otherwise) and offered for sale to the public, with or without success.”19 The following discussion demonstrates the validity of this hypothesis in the context of the packaging and selling of riot as commodity, a commodity which materializes at specific moments and adds value to the space in which it is performed.

The Eighteenth-Century Crowd In the print illustration below, titled Military Prophet; or A Flight from Providence, 20 the impetus for flight is an earthquake; two such were recorded in 1750 and led to considerable consternation among Londoners, many of whom saw this as divine retribution. Whether the message is a reference to the Book of Ezekiel (The Old Testament) or to the Book of Revelation (The New Testament), both the visual depiction of flight and the verbal explanation of the stupidity of flight are premised upon the allegorical struggle between the forces of good and evil. Notice how the guardsman brandishes what appears to be a flag of prophecy (extreme right center). This allegory is then mediatized in a densely populated part of London—identified as Piccadilly Square by Victorian art critic Frederic George Stephens (1827–1907)—and presented with the realism endemic to the clutter and chaos of densely crowded public space. This urban space is the ideal location for the representation of crowd volatility (Figure 2.1). The subtitle of this engraving uses an archaic phrasing to convey to us the opposite of what it meant then: “Address’d to the timid and guilty who foolishly withdrew themselves on the alarm of another earthquake, April 1750.” Those who “withdrew themselves” were not the ones peering out of the windows or those who stayed on in London; instead, the reference here is to those who we see fleeing from fate, from the site of their wrongdoings. Addressed to the “timid and guilty,” the words appended to the illustration combine satire and sermon to produce what was deemed to be an appropriate explanation of the basic argument in this illustration, with rhyme providing the necessary populist flavor that explains—from the densely pictorial to an epistemic simplicity—the nature of the transgression: “Dismay’d, aghast, they fly their own Abodes,/ And throng in dismal Groupes thro’ different Roads.” But Divine

Riot-Space  57

Figure 2.1  T  he Military Prophet, 1750.  Anonymous. Etching and Engraving. © British Library Board. Cup.21.g.37/38.

retribution in the face of human frailty and immorality cannot be mitigated by flight: “Vain Wretches! Blush, kneel down, confess your shame: / Know Providence is everywhere the same.” A flight from providence may be the natural instinct of the “weak” and the “wicked,” but immorality cannot be corrected retroactively and, consequently, flight from reality, truth, and, more importantly, sin is fundamentally ludicrous and thus fit for chastisement and caricature. Flight or frenzy cannot bring about atonement. The vocabulary of providence and providential rhetoric is couched in popular vernacular such that the picture goes beyond its frame to become an image which is sustained by not only this picture but by familiar images and experiences of death, destruction, and similarly dire consequences of sinful action. W. J. T. Mitchell has presented a succinct distinction between picture and image, identifying the distinction thus: You can hang a picture, but you cannot hang an image. The image seems to float without any visible means of support, a phantasmatic, virtual, or spectral appearance. It is what can be lifted off the picture, transferred to another medium, translated into a verbal ekphrasis, or protected by copyright law. The image is the “intellectual property” that escapes the materiality of the picture when it is

58 Riot-Space copied. The picture is the image plus the support; it is the appearance of the immaterial image in a material medium. That is why we can speak of architectural, sculptural, cinematic, textual, and even mental images while understanding that the image in or on the thing is not all there is to it. 21 If adequately polemicized, riot-space reveals how the image of a much broader construct than the picture on the wall—the crowd and its ­volatility—“escapes the materiality” of radically different and discrete pictures of the crowd, with each picture having its own rhetoric of reaction, resistance, or subversion. My concern here is with the referential continuity and ubiquity of those images of disruption which go well beyond finite pictures, proliferating across Enlightenment time-space, toward creating consensus. The message of The Military Prophet, however, is not entirely consistent or uniform in that the theme one derives from the foreground is different from the one that is in the background. Notice that everyone is not caught up in the act of flight; so, for instance, the windows of the building overlooking the square are packed with those who watch the flight rather than joining it. The spectacle on the street level is dependent upon the “flight” which is best represented by the running dog, the raised whips of the coachmen, and also the horses and carriages in motion; but the figures in the foreground are clearly not in flight and appear to be congregating in town center. Indeed, these stationary characters, standing in clusters, are not looking in the direction of the motion—from right to left of the frame—but talking, drinking, or holding up what might be an admonition in the form of the same pamphlet addressed to “the foolish and guilty.” Significantly, those in flight and those that are congregating in town center cannot be divided along the lines of class even though the poem refers to this difference in the following words: “Sad stupid Age! Alike in Church and State;/ Too credulous the Low, meet Apes the Great.” If the two men at the left bottom of the frame are dressed humbly, the women in the foreground appear to be privileged, much like the woman in the carriage. The chaos endemic to this crowd—its form—is characterized by the following binary oppositions: spectator/spectacle, action/inaction, stationary/in motion, flight/resistance to flight, privileged/underprivileged, human/animal, and riding/walking or standing. It is in this lack of esprit de corps, in this dissonance created by difference (in character, motivation, and action), that subversion lurks in the form of a nascent mob. The muddle of motives and intention in the aesthetic may be described in terms of the epistemology of incoherence. This incoherence is played out in the public sphere and has, therefore, a common antecedent in the turmoil commonly associated with any mob. The structure of this specific crowd, as well as its correlation to chaos, is a reference to the general

Riot-Space  59 principle of chaos in the publics and, specifically, the uncontrollable structure of a mob. The pathology of the crowd—which defies intention, concerted action, and unidirectional goal—thus becomes the most important challenge in interpretations of it as well as the interpretation of the public space in which this pathology is manifested and registered. 22 As a particular cultural expression circa 1750, as a single example, The Military Prophet would be an insignificant item in the refuse of eighteenth-century pictorial ephemera. Its importance emerges only in relation to other representations of crowd volatility in the eighteenth century, such as William Hogarth’s The March of the Guards to Finchley (oil on canvas, 1750). What are the common elements in representations of crowd volatility? The radical dissonance in The Military Prophet, strikingly transparent, stems from the following two divergent reactions to the prospect of another earthquake: part of the crowd is happy to congregate, to wait, to see what happens next, while others, driven by the fear of divine retribution, are seen fleeing the space associated with sin and sinning, the urban epicenter in Piccadilly. This ­dissonance—represented by parallel if not competing motivations for action and inaction—is further refined in Hogarth’s March to Finchley such that both the singular and the distinctive elements of the figures represented coagulate to form a “press,” a chaotic conglomeration of people. The assumption that Hogarth’s crowd or indeed the one represented in The Military Prophet, constituting and defining the idea of chaos, is also fundamentally lacking in both moral and geographical compass demands very careful scrutiny. How can historical materialism (or indeed postmodernism or any other interpretive tool), which purports to be revisionist or humanist, make sense of the rhetoric of these objets d’art and their paradigmatic force or influence? In his essay titled “The Gordon Riots as Sublime Spectacle,” Ian Haywood has described—following Ronald Paulson—The March to Finchley as a representation of a “paradigmatic mob.”23 The troop movement from Tottenham Court Road toward Finchley in the north was orchestrated to thwart the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Representations such as these keep the register of events live and allow us to visualize the past, one might legitimately argue; but this is also precisely the point at which the simulation or the picture is made to stand in for its (most often distant) point of reference. As the subject (of The March to Finchley in 1745), the event, becomes an object in a discursive field elsewhere, at a future time (1750), the social relations at the point of origin are rendered irrelevant and immaterial. 24 The picture becomes the historical agent, replacing if not obliterating the source material which supplied its substance. The materiality of the march is thus eclipsed by the materiality of the picture. Any historiography or narrative, indeed any pictorial representation or image-making project, ought to reveal a chronology—a clear sense of what comes first and what comes next; but that is not how

60 Riot-Space a story is told. So, for instance, Henri Lefebvre argues that “even if the reading of space . . . comes first from the standpoint of knowledge, it certainly comes last in the genesis of space itself.” This is because, he goes on to explain, space was produced before being read; nor was it produced in order to be read and grasped; but rather in order to be lived by people with bodies and lives in their own particularly urban context. In short, ‘reading’ follows production in all cases except those in which space is produced especially in order to be read. . . . It turns out on close examination that spaces made (produced) to be read are the most deceptive and tricked-up imaginable. 25 Spaces which are produced to be read are more often than not the spaces selected and mediated for the purpose of propaganda. In the March to Finchley, the retreating soldiers are barely visible in the background; but whether, as a result, we focus on the “prostitutes . . . viewing the street scene below” or the “overburdened street scene,” itself26 the facts related to this crowd are sublimated into a commentary on chaos in the public sphere. The eighteenth-century consumer who purchased prints, (etchings and engravings) such as Hogarth’s March to Finchley (engraved by Luke Sullivan), for instance, were psychically and physically removed from the potentially ripe riot-space and, therefore, this March is reduced to a good picture, which decorates a wall. Unsurprisingly, 250 years later we too remain equally culpable of both reductionism and oversimplification if we look at the March and think it captures the essence of that moment which Hogarth narrativized. The following questions, however, help us to understand why the artistic rendition is always an incomplete picture, even when it is good: does the prostitute as a category of embedded spectatorship or designated voyeur provide a lascivious counterpoint to the ethos of the mob? How or why? Is temptation less seductive in Protestantism than in Catholic orthodoxy? Can this image or picture be made to stand in for an organized march to Finchley in protest of the Jacobite invasion of 1745?27 Why or why not? With greater density but having an equally complex tone, texture and layer (form, function, and structure) than the The Military Prophet, the crowd in The March to Finchley is ostensibly stirred up by religious zeal; but notice that this crowd appears to be far less motivated for action than those whose actions are spurred on by fear of divine retribution in the form of an earthquake. The overall impression of this “march” to Finchley is of a multivalent and dense mass, a perfect picture of chaos and turmoil, which is not rational political resistance to (resulting in concerted action against) Catholic infiltration. Likewise, the poetic admonition in The Military Prophet imposes a forced coherence which the rhetoric of the picture subverts through a

Riot-Space  61 series of individualized vignettes—subsections or clusters of interest— each with its own divergent meaning and modus operandi; thus, there is no reciprocity or commonality between and among the clusters which constitute the crowd in The Military Prophet as well as in The March to Finchley. The crowd is always code word for chaos in the public sphere. Multi-directionality is its essence, an essence in perpetual flux and mindless motion. Ergo, there can be no rational political resistance since the materiality of riot-space is always-already chaotic and can only produce irrational acts. When (print) illustrations are made to stand in for the “real,” the referent remains forever illusive (and thus elusive). And, unless the artist or framer—the agent—is forced into the dialogics of the print or painting, we cede authority to that framer in absentia; as a result, the quintessential puppet master continues to operate with impunity. P ­ ostmodernism— as interpretive maneuver and also as revisionist ideology—allows us to acknowledge the challenges inherent in unpacking cultural production as does historical materialism. Fredric Jameson has described cultural production as a “degraded collective ‘objective spirit’” which “can no longer gaze directly on some putative real world, at some reconstruction of a past history. . . . If there is any realism left here, it is a ‘realism’ that is meant to derive from the shock of grasping that confinement and of slowly becoming aware of a new and original historical situation in which we are condemned to seek History by way of our own pop images and simulacra of that history, which itself remains forever out of reach.”28 The “original historical situation” which endows upon the Gordon Riots a paradigmatic force and frame of reference cannot be reconstructed fully from the cultural productions—pictures—which were plentiful and which continue to fuel our curiosity. Why turn to these pictures, then, if they are spurious, misleading, or otherwise unreliable? We cannot show the falsity of references a priory. Post hoc, the pictorial collective allows us to study not so much the singularity of the Gordon Riots and this event’s tangled relationship with the concept (and the generality) of the volatile crowd but to consider how, why, and through whose intervention the pictures became images and were then metaphorically and analogically framed with an eighteenth-century consumer in mind (and perhaps for posterity). While paintings were not always for sale, the proliferation of prints and engravings related to the Gordon Riots was quite staggering. Of the burning of Newgate, Ian Haywood has identified the following three as being significant contributions to the genre of Gordon Riots prints: Burning and Plundering of Newgate and Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob (published by Fielding and Walker of Paternoster Row), The Devastations Occasioned by the Rioters of London, Firing the New Gaol of Newgate, and Burning Mr. Ackerman’s Furniture (designed by William Hamilton, engraved by T. Thornton, published by Alexander

62 Riot-Space Hogg of Paternoster Row), and An Exact Representation of the Burning Plundering and Destruction of Newgate by the Rioters on the memorable 7 June (designed by O’Neil and engraved by H. Roberts, and published by P. Mitchell of Grosvenor Square and J. Fielding of Paternoster Row). I mention the designers, publishers, and engravers in this unorthodox way, in the body of the text rather than in footnotes, because they were the producers of print culture; they were also the purveyors of sensational news; and, as their counterparts today, they profited by supplying what was in demand. Haywood points out that “these three prints dominated the visual reportage of the riots” and that “these publishers followed the usual practice of charging sixpense or one shilling for the purchase of a black and white print, substantially more for a colored version, and a range of rental costs.”29 So, the next question here may be summarized quite simply as follows: who were the consumers of graphic “spectacle,” the buyers of these prints representing the Gordon Riots? Eighteenth-century consumers of culture—particularly elite culture, which would include the world of theater, opera, books, and works of art—had to have some discretionary income in order to be viable consumers. In the period 1660–1740, occasional and habitual consumers of culture30 comprised a very small percentage of the total population of London. In “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England,” Robert D. Hume makes the following point related to purchasing power in the eighteenth century, one which is directly relevant in this and any other discussion of who was selling and buying what and at what cost: What we learn . . . is that pretty consistently, between 1688 and 1801, no more than 3 percent of the families in England and Wales had sufficient income to purchase more than a bare minimum of “cultural” products. No doubt some lower-income individuals or families splurged—or scrimped and saved—to buy books or attend the theater, but many of those with more money probably spent little on such fripperies. . . . The clear implication is that significant discretionary purchasing power was the prerogative of only a small number of families throughout the period. 31 Purchasing power continued to increase steadily through the long eighteenth century, so much so that “[b]etween 1660 and 1740 we can see a gradual shift in elite culture as its focus moves from court and aristocracy and toward consumers of the middling sort.”32 What we think of as the middle class, however, remained very small even at the end of the century and “[w]e should not . . . assume that culture had become ‘­middle-class.’” In fact—Hume points out—“[a]s late as 1800 male literacy was only about 60 percent and female literacy about 40 percent— and had increased very little in half a century.”33 It is with this hard evidence on hand that we need to look at the price of three of the most

Riot-Space  63 popular prints of the Gordon Riots: sixpence each. “Sixpence sounds like nothing, but is not negligible to anyone who earns 12d. for a day’s labor, and may be significant to someone who earns £100 per annum but has a family to support.”34 For painting, Hume observes that we make another quantum leap in magnitude of expense. Early in our period the prices can be shocking; by later eighteenth century they boggle the mind. By the 1670s, Lely was charging £60 for a portrait—or in modern buying power terms, something like £12,000—£18,000. . .. . By the 1790s, Reynolds could get 200 guineas for a whole-length, and he wanted 300 for a whole-length with two children.35 The black-and-white prints of the Gordon Riots were meant to be mass produced and then sold quite cheaply when compared to fine art. The financial stakes in the production and dissemination of art, high or low, cannot be emphasized enough because those who bought these “cheap” prints were not those who inspired the prints or those who instigated— to use Jameson’s words—the “original historical situation.” On the subject of graphic representations of the Gordon Riots, Ian Haywood’s intervention remains the most useful. Using an interpretive strategy that combines Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime and Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of the carnivalesque, Haywood describes the actual/real “drama” enacted in public space through and in terms of the mediated prints which exhibit elements of theatricality, with their ensemble cast and special lighting effects: “The spectacle can be enjoyed so long as a safe distance is maintained between the spectator and the crowd. This idea clearly derives from Burke’s theory of sublime pleasure. . . . Burke insisted that a sublime experience could only be properly enjoyed and appreciated if ‘certain distances’ were preserved from the originating source. This is not a recipe for simple voyeurism” because the spectators position themselves “so close to the source of fear and terror that he or she falls temporarily under its spell.”36 This interpretive strategy, Haywood rightly points out, reveals how the sublime robs the riot of its teeth—which is at least one way to destroy the subversive potential of spectacular theatricality (the concept) as well as the riot in question (as exemplar). At the very least, the carnivalesque conventions in the graphic depictions of the crowd—if and when identified as such— must be seen as catering to the modern consumerist culture in the eighteenth century when death and destruction caused by rioting became lucrative and the subject and object of pleasure, enabling capital gain at the expense of disenfranchised or protesting labor; this consumer is distant and aloof, a voyeur, a pleasure-seeker, or the curious adventurer like Poe’s narrator, who remains unscathed by the violent eruption of this or any other sociopolitical resistance to what the rioters deemed as

64 Riot-Space authoritarian or arbitrary rule. If aestheticized and stylized, what happens to the riot and the rioters?37 The graphic print of the Gordon Riots, any one of them, then—to use Jean Baudrillard’s words—“is nothing but the object of social demand, and thus as object of the law of supply and demand, it is no longer subject to violence and death. Completely purged of a political dimension, it, like any other commodity, is dependent on mass production and consumption. Its spark has disappeared, only the fiction of a political universe remains.”38 In the context of the eighteenth century, even in the absence of mass production and consumption in the late-capitalist sense, Baudrillard’s hypothesis remains useful in the context of my discussion. His hypothesis helps us to argue that because of art’s innate tendency to extricate itself from the “political dimension,” it remains susceptible to the interests of the creators of commodity, and it can, therefore, masquerade as innocuous and aesthetically pleasing expressions of human folly (rioting) or desire (basking in the sun).

Zoffany and the Art of Plunder Violence has to be enacted, performed, experienced, witnessed, recorded, mediated as well as mediatized before its full impact can be perceived and its implications understood; its interpretation appears or its impact is felt more often than not from a time-space distance. Inevitably, we must ask who records and who mediates through words or through a work of art or some other medium the violence or turbulence in the public sphere. Aesthetically pleasing works of art are not, in fact, autonomous; these artistic expressions are tethered to the artists who conceive and execute their ideas and their ideologies through the medium of their choice, as the discussion in this segment shows. The purpose here is to consider the role of the artist and the philosopher—specifically, the nature of artistic or philosophical intervention in times of sociopolitical turbulence; and the French Revolution provides thus the ideal pressure point and focus for a discussion of Johan Zoffany’s Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris (1794). In this context, I refer only superficially to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), which anticipates, as it were, the equally powerful—and visual—argument in Zoffany’s Plundering; indeed, one can get a good sense of the British resistance to the idea of revolution in late century by considering the twin logics of these two faithful adherents of monarchical systems of governance, Johan Zoffany and Edmund Burke. Nothing compromises the basic structure of the public sphere than its plunder; the public sphere under attack by any force becomes, paradoxically, the embodiment of the establishment, the physical manifestation of the high moral ground, having custodial rights to the social, political, and cultural foundations of civil society. So, for instance, the

Riot-Space  65 paradigmatic force of a revolution, such as the one in France, inflicts the same violence upon the body politic as does a plague. The scopic regimes which register the extreme violence and instability endemic to revolutions or the plague (or terrorism, such as it is defined in our times) derive their strength from the magnetism of disorder and, equally, the infinite potential for the reification of chaos. The source of the disorder, the enemy, then becomes the object of heightened policing and intense scrutiny—producing speculation, fiction, and evidentiary materials which could be part fake, part fact, and often an amalgamation of both. The end game of the status quo is to protect the institutions, which are the foundations of civil society. Plunder is thus always-already antiestablishment. Edmund Burke’s opposition to the revolution in France rests in part on his belief in an entirely inflexible social hierarchy, one whose foundation rests upon destiny. France could have followed the example of the English “who had kept alive the ancient principles and models of the old common law of Europe meliorated and adapted to its present state”; but it had not done so. Implicit in this part of Burke’s argument in Reflections is the notion of the superiority of common law over civil law, the former uncodified and the latter codified. If France had followed the English example, Burke argues, you would have had a protected, satisfied, laborious, and obedient people, taught to seek and to recognize the happiness that is to be found by virtue in all conditions; in which consists the true moral equality of mankind, and not in that monstrous fiction, which, by inspiring false ideas and vain expectations into men destined to travel in the obscure walk of laborious life, serves only to aggravate and to embitter than real inequality, which it never can remove. Note, however, that this unalterable hierarchical order in civil society is not bereft of equality: “[T]he order of civil society establishes as much for the benefit of those whom it must leave in a humble state, as those whom it is able to exalt to a condition more splendid, but not more happy” (emphasis mine).39 On the syntactic level, the agent is “order.” Order and destiny thus become interchangeable. And then there is the great equalizer, according to Burke, which is misfortune and this equalizer is also tied to destiny and not to economics or to political systems.40 Both the high and the low, the privileged and the deprived, in other words, are equally susceptible to misfortune and the resultant corollaries of unhappiness. From the vantage point of postmodernity, it is easy enough to dwell on Burke’s denunciation of “that monstrous fiction” of equality, as many commentators on the Reflections do. But when they do, they do not necessarily consider in tandem the establishment, or the status quo which Burke represents, one which was invested in

66 Riot-Space the sanctity of the public sphere—shared nation-space. The materiality of this nation-space and its enduring values were seen to be dependent upon a predestined order. One can only concede that at the time besides a monarchical system there was no historically validated knowledge of alternative systems of governance which could be harnessed toward ensuring the safety and security of an orderly society (unless one were to turn to the Barbarians/Turks or go further East to find more images of “negative carnivalesque” or chaos).41 In my view, the part of the Reflections which is most useful for a consideration of the polemics in Zoffany’s Plundering is Burke’s articulation of the principles of good government: “Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.” Burke then goes on to stress the importance of wisdom: “Men have a right that these wants should be provided for by this wisdom.” And what is the precondition of wisdom? Among these wants is to be reckoned the want, out of civil society, of a sufficient restraint upon their passions (emphasis mine). Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection, This can only be done by a power out of themselves; and not, in the exercise of its function, subject to that will and to those passions which it is its office to bridle and subdue. In this sense the restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights. But as the liberties and the restrictions vary with times and circumstances, and admit of infinite modifications, they cannot be settled upon any abstract rule.42 Note that Burke is careful to make the distinction between “mass” and “individuals.” Whether acting alone or in concert, the entity or collective body whose passions are inappropriately unleashed must be controlled by the “power out of themselves”—one residing in good government—which alone can “bridle and subdue” these passions. In this context, the Othello-Oroonoko intertextuality comes readily to mind—an intertextuality which opens up insidious resemblances and reaffirms the rootedness of the European Iago principle in social norms and practice. For Burke, the National Constituent Assembly, which he referred to as French National Assembly, became the epitome of a tyrannical (and thus passionate) power, unrestrained by law, morality, customs, experience, and religion.43 Neither Catholicism nor indeed a chance meeting at a Royal Academy dinner44 was what united Edmund Burke and Johan Zoffany; their response to the revolution in France was perfectly consistent with their commitment to the institutions in which

Riot-Space  67 they played prominent roles: Burke as member of the British Parliament (1765–94) and Zoffany as member of the Royal Academy.45 Their commitment to the system of government which had sponsored their rise to eminence—despite their identity as émigrés—could not have been and was not shaken by the trial of Warren Hastings, which could be regarded by some as the point at which these two might have parted ways. ­A fter all, Hastings was Zoffany’s patron in India (where Zoffany spent six years, from 1783 to 1789)46; and on the House of Commons floor Burke had argued vociferously, with Richard Brinsley Sheridan, against Hastings and for his impeachment (1788 to 95). This line of argument goes against our understanding of not only the significance but also the enormous power of institutions (such as the Royal Academy) in Enlightenment Britain (Figure 2.2). In his magisterial history painting titled Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris, 10 August 1792 47 (1794), Johan Zoffany produced what art historian Martin Postle has described as a “pictorial tour de force.”48 Postle, the editor of Johan Zoffany, RA, observes among other things that the artist “was horrified by stories of mob violence in Paris, tales that could only have strengthened his feelings of loyalty towards his own adopted country and his monarchist sympathies.”49 But just as Defoe did not witness the plague of 1665 in quite the way he describes it in

Figure 2.2   Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris, 1794, Johann Zoffany, ­G erman, 1733–1810, Oil on Canvas, 39 × 50 inches (99.06  × 127 cm), Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1984.49.

68 Riot-Space the Journal (since he was only five years old at the time), Zoffany did not witness the French Revolution; he returned to Britain in the summer of 1789, a few weeks after the storming of the Bastille, after having spent six years in Lucknow and in Calcutta, among other places in north ­I ndia. Why, then, did Zoffany have such a visceral reaction to the revolution in France? The focus on Zoffany in this segment of the chapter serves several purposes: this German émigré was not only an “artist abroad,” to use Postle’s descriptive framework, but he was also an artist who experienced and understood the panoramic and expansive geography of empire.50 Zoffany did not have to witness an event in order to produce in oil on canvas (the material he seems to have favored above all others51) the detail, the power, the texture, and the dramatic tonality of a given scene. Consider, in this context, the following case of what I would call the artist as missing eyewitness: there is no conclusive evidence which suggests that Zoffany had, for instance, witnessed a “sati”; yet he painted one as if he were an eyewitness. 52 The descriptive title of Sacrifice of a Hindoo Widow upon the Funeral Pile of Her Husband points to Zoffany’s full awareness of his audience: the educated Briton who had an interest in India and Indian subjects but one who did not necessarily have the local knowledge or language skills which he had acquired while he was in India and seemed to have cherished. Significantly, Sacrifice of a Hindoo Widow is dated 1795, which was six years after his return to London from India. This piece is thus a good example of “society observed” and then reproduced by the artist, some years later, from memory. Zoffany had a remarkable facility for detail so much so that the distinctive and singular characteristics are clearly discernable and not lost amid the multiplicity of focal points on a canvas such as this one. In the case of Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris, likewise, he did not have to witness the destructive force of “mob violence” in Paris to polemicize or to reproduce the violence on canvas. But unlike the counterproductive ethos of romance (or nostalgia?) in the Sacrifice of a Hindoo Window— focalized by a beautiful young woman dressed in the customary white garb of a widow and elevated above the ground, on a pyre, with her dead husband’s head resting upon her lap—“plunder,” within the context of the French revolution, is treated with decisive harshness and uncompromising hostility toward the revolutionaries represented as inebriated and chaotic mass. Gillian Forrester contends that Louis XVI’s death by guillotine on 23 January 1794, the September massacre in which 1400 people were killed, and, soon thereafter, the execution of Marie-Antoinette “clearly resonated powerfully with Zoffany,” who exhibited Plundering the King’s Cellar at the Royal Academy in 1795. A mezzotint engraving of Plundering was published on 1 January 1795.53 An artistic expression of his indignation and anger, Plundering the King’s Cellar evokes speculation:

Riot-Space  69 did Zoffany’s talent fade by this point in his career and was he, therefore, pledging undying loyalty to the monarch, his patron? ­Zoffany did not stop there, however, and attempted a second painting circa 1794; this was titled A Scene in the Champ de Mars, Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers on 12 August 1792, with a Portrait of the Duke of Orleans. According to Gillian Forrester, “Zoffany evidently abandoned the painting before it was finished, possibly in response to the unfavorable critical reception of Plundering the King’s Cellar, which may have impressed upon him that the graphic rendering of a highly freighted topic was unmarketable.”54 The question of how best to analyze Zoffany’s Plundering remains tricky. So, for instance, the catalogue description of the painting in ­Martin Postle’s Johan Zoffany draws attention to how and why Zoffany’s painting, which depicted the revolutionary mob raiding the palace’s wine cellars, intoxicated by alcohol and bloodlust, was extremely unusual, in both choice of subject and treatment. The chaotic composition is a social and ethnographic mélange comprising aristocratic and plebeian revolutionaries, male and female and a number of half-naked; the dead bodies of soldiers, clerics, blacks; and a solitary Jewish figure bargaining for the jacket of one of the Swiss soldiers. At the centre of the composition is a figure wearing a red cap of liberty, and staring defiantly at the viewer. . . . The vividness of the scene suggests reportage. 55 Postle also points to the contemporary remarks made by Anthony Pasquin and the more recent criticism of William L. Pressly. 56 The comparison with William Hogarth (specifically Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane) is inevitable. But this is where the historical archive gets muddled. Admittedly, both Hogarth and Zoffany focused on a mass of entangled bodies in various stages of dishabille; and this mass, one might argue, shows up humanity as irrational, out-of-control, and violent. Besides, certain important elements of the painting are cast in the same tradition as Gin Lane. So, for instance, Plundering the King’s Cellar establishes a correlation between irrationality and underprivileged, therefore wild and unruly, sport. The subjects in Zoffany’s painting are uniformly crude and unmistakably the representatives of the lower orders. Several black entities are interspersed with whites, and in the foreground is a black boy in intoxicated stupor. The bright orange hat on one of the characters looks rather like a Turkish turban, which hints at the barbarity of the profligates. Intertwined as they are in a mass of madness and mayhem, these heterogeneous entities—blacks, browns, and whites— are equally culpable and equally worthy of Zoffany’s scorn. Their profligacy deserves to be decisively rejected and, thus, the artist’s argument is abundantly clear: the ruling class, even in absentia and outside the

70 Riot-Space framework of the painting, can be the only viable authority for reestablishing order in civil society and ensuring the smooth governance of that orderly society. The artist, in other words, restores order by proclaiming the necessity and the inevitability of the restoration of monarchy in France.57 The aesthetics which invokes disgust rather than appreciation is the fundamental principle which drives satire, and no one in mid-century did satire better than Hogarth. One might argue that in Zoffany’s painting the individualized characteristics of the figures, in corporeal closeups, reveal the artist’s revulsion and his distaste for mob license. That is where the comparison ought to end, however, because there is nothing in Zoffany’s work which approaches the very acerbic and pointedly satirical thrust of Hogarth’s work. Instead of highlighting systemic flaws as Hogarth often did, Zoffany makes a case for reinstating the system whose power is derived not from the people but from higher or divine and thus more trustworthy authority (in his opinion), the monarchy. Outlined clearly in Zoffany’s Plundering is the rhetoric of clear and present danger, the brutality of crowds, the volatility precipitated by inebriated actors, the destruction of public property, and, thus, the assault on order and civil society. Dominating the ethos of the painting is an architectural infrastructure whose stability mocks the instability and abandon represented by the riotous mob. After looting “the King’s Cellar,” is implied, the rioters made their way to what appears to be a section of the Tuileries Garden. Here, the continuum from private to public space showcases the trajectory of violence as spreading throughout the realms; both public space and private property are at the receiving ends of uncouth and uncontrollable license. A rampart that is sustained by a majestic arch spans much of the top half of the canvas representing the triumphs in this painting of human engineering and industry. In sharp contrast, the human subjects—depicted by a flock of people sprawled across the top of the arch, also hanging in a human chain from top to bottom, and strung along the bottom of the arch—appear grotesquely inebriated, lethargic, and clearly lacking in revolutionary zeal. Their “violence” is mindless, self-inflicted, and thus impotent. If this scene is disturbing, as it was no doubt meant to be, it is so because of the sheer power of rioter’s self-destructiveness that—at least from Zoffany’s ­perspective—destroys any possibility of their eventual glory or heroism. The seductiveness of the painting diffuses the discomfort and draws attention to the power in the “lack”: in other words, glory resides in the absent authority whose royal prerogative has been usurped and then destroyed by the mindless majority—but only temporarily, the painting argues—since reason will soon be restored. An attack on public culture and the pillars of civil society is destined for failure, Zoffany argues. Thus, it helps to be reminded that in the eighteenth century public space as visualized in artistic expressions of chaos is still very much tethered

Riot-Space  71 to that which operates in absentia, divinely sanctioned authority and its ameliorative powers. Plunder is necessarily disorganized. But what are the overlapping constitutive elements in “crowd” and in “plunder” that anticipate riot and help us to dissect its paradigmatic power? Reductive though it is, the order-disorder dichotomy helps us to categorize the phenomena of crowd and plunder as well as the divide between two cultures—one high, one low, one powerful, the other negotiating “from a position of weakness”58 —with competing interests on opposite sides of what Ronald Paulson describes as “social edifices” in Art of Riot: that is, one side is inherently destructive and the other is committed to maintaining the status quo. This is the impasse that merits scrutiny and is thus the focus of the next segment of this chapter. Among other things, the goal of revolution, to put it simply, is to reduce the gap between income derived from labor and income derived from inherited property. Plundering the King’s Cellar, by privileging inherited property, reduces the Revolution to a grand spectacle of chaos and violence, which destroys the rationale for sweeping reform or change. Progress, as defined by Zoffany, is s return to the old order, a regressive and reactionary maneuver, opposed to a progressive one which would acknowledge the insidious nature of economic divides and the impact of these divides on the disenfranchised and marginalized who were always-already condemned. The English monarchical system had been viewed with envy by French philosophers and historians. “Diderot held up England as an example of ‘temperate monarchy’,” Domenico Losurdo argues, adding that “two years prior to the storming of the Bastille and the intervention of the popular masses on the political scene, the English model seemed to have triumphed in France as well. Supported by a wide popular consensus, the noble parlements challenged royal absolutism.” But then, something went wrong and “the rot set in when people rushed towards ‘pure ­democracy’ and laid claim to change ‘the very structure of society.’”59 Zoffany, as architect of one such narrative of “something rotten in the state” south of the Channel, produced a remarkable tribute to monarchical systems of governance (in France and in his adopted country, Britain) by dramatizing in spectacular shapes, colors, and contours of violence unleashed, its absence, its lack, thereby reinstating the power, omnipotence, and governing principles of monarchy. Indeed, the contexts within which Zoffany ought to be positioned circa 1794, when Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris was completed (and when the Scene in the Champ de Mars was begun), are multiple and some of these contexts might appear at first glance to be fairly straightforward while others are not. On the issue of freedom and the French Revolution, consider a slightly different context, the slave revolutions of, say, Saint-Domingue (easily one of the most profitable French colonies established by slave labor). Using Walter Benjamin’s term “optical unconscious,” Nicholas Mirzoeff has described how slaves awoke

72 Riot-Space from “the realms of ‘sleep’ to shake off their bondage and to assert their ‘right to existence’.” “Against all hitherto existing concepts of history,” Mirzoeff explains, “the enslaved and their allies visualized themselves not only as acting within history, but as making history.”60 Therefore, the question that would best frame the discussion here might be articulated simply as the following: who is making history? Unlike Madame La Roche, the silhouettiste in Saint-Domingue who created “new spatial imaginaries” of freedom—an example Mirzoeff uses to define counterhistories of visuality61—Zoffany’s characters remain locked in the rhetoric of negative kinesis (or random, directionless movement). From our vantage point, an interrogation of the idea of liberation or the interpretation of the spatial-temporal enactment of liberation must remain tethered to the question of who is making history and also for whom.62 Zoffany as agent and British monarchy as prime agency thus infuse the representation of Plundering and infect the ethos of this painting such that the power relations become clear: the counterrevolutionary Zoffany remains in charge, playing puppet master from beyond the frame, albeit with an implied presence in it. Liberation, when handed over to the mob, turns to chaos—and Zoffany’s subject of representation is steadfastly rooted to the point of view of the status quo. Particularly due to the polemic of Plundering the King’s Cellar, ­Johan Zoffany must also be positioned in the metropolitan landscape—in ­London—one which was replete with the reality and the mediated images of fear, suspicion, and a constant sense of insecurity sparked by the French Revolution. After his return from India (1789), Zoffany found himself in the thick of social and political turmoil. The public sphere was particularly vulnerable at the time, responding to and registering as it did the reverberations of revolution-related terror emanating from south of the Channel. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker have described with reference to Old Bailey records how the metropolis had become in the 1790s “suspicious London.”63 It was as if this city, anthropomorphized, had become pathologically fearful of its own citizens. The establishment of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) in January 1792 did not help matters, Hitchcock and Shoemaker remind us. They describe as follows the preemptive measures taken by the state to combat both the reality and the potential for turmoil in the public sphere: In response—both to the French Revolution itself (as it descended into the Terror) and the rise of the LCS—the government embarked on a period of sustained political repression. Seditious meetings and publications were outlawed, and loyalist associations were promoted (and encouraged to disrupt radical meetings). Habeas Corpus was suspended, radicals were prosecuted for sedition and treason, and new Combination Acts were passed prohibiting trade union activity. At the same time, and motivated by similar concerns, policing

Riot-Space  73 and punishment were strengthened. Innovations that had been designed to address the plebeian challenges to public order of the preceding decades, but had been deemed too ambitious, could now be justified on account of the crises of revolutions and radicalism.64 The “challenges to public order” have been felt most acutely during and in the aftermath of the Gordon Riots; therefore, the policing of public space had become part of the London landscape. But how did such policing shape the materiality of the cityscape post-Gordon Riots?

Policing Public Space during the Gordon Riots: Provisional Conclusions65 In Figure 2.3, “View of the Encampment in the Museum Garden, A ­ ugust 5th, 1780,” we see (presumably) the north side of the British Museum (toward Russell Square). Two-thirds of this “view” emphasizes not just open space but the expansive sky above. The tranquility implicit in the clouds and the trees bordering the Museum property as well as the pathways behind the museum convey a sense of calm which two months after

Figure 2.3  V  iew of the Encampment in the Museum Garden, 5 August 1780. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

74 Riot-Space the Gordon Riots would be the exact opposite of what one might expect, given the temperature of the city not only as we imagine it but also richly recorded in the contemporary archives.66 Was this propaganda and, if so, whose message do these illustrations convey? A straightforward observation about these images may be summarized as follows: members of the public, individualized as well as collectivized, are seen interacting and intermingling with the troops in shared space and in an atmosphere which exudes amicable intercourse and complete trust. This “trust” factor is most forcefully conveyed through the presence of children, a significant number of children, who are accompanied by adults but also ostensibly free to roam. Indeed, both Figures 2.3 and 2.5 give the impression that a day at the British Museum could be followed by an afternoon spent on the Museum grounds,67 which is represented here as “safe space” protected by the troops and thus free from the violence and mayhem which was unleashed in Bloomsbury and other parts of the city only two months prior. The clothing of both adults and children suggest the exclusivity of this particular establishment, the British Museum, which is devoid of the (presumed) congenital meanness of rioters in general and the working class in particular. In other words, these images do not help us to understand what Ian Haywood has described very astutely as the working class’s “new relationship with the state.” Indeed, the illustrations above mask and exclude the elements which contributed to chaos in the public sphere. This exclusion then

Figure 2.4  T  he Encampment on Blackheath, 1780.  ©The Trustees of the ­British Museum.

Riot-Space  75

Figure 2.5  E  ncampment in the Museum Garden, 1780 (A Different View). ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

opens up for us, retrospectively, the space for further investigation— which continues to provide fresh evidence of the ways in which the idea of benevolent policing was mediated and then mediatized such that the “public” could be visualized as occupying safe urban spaces. Additionally, the public could also be visualized as mingling with and in close proximity to those state agents who had unleashed considerable terror among the masses—particularly in the ten-year period following the Gordon Riots.68 Figures 2.4 and 2.6 present us with another angle on the same idea of benevolent policing during the Gordon Riots when the state apparatuses were particularly prone to sabotage and destabilization. These scenes of public-police/troops interface during the Riots take place in Blackheath, which gained notoriety in the eighteenth century as the popular haunt of highwaymen. It is not surprising, therefore, that troops would be positioned in this south-east London heath spanning two boroughs: Greenwich and Lewisham. The collective message in these pictures proclaims, in other words, that the center epitomized by the British Museum in Bloomsbury and the periphery defined both literally and metaphorically with reference to Blackheath were equally protected during and right after the Gordon Riots. In Blackheath, moreover, both the working class (Figure 2.4) and the upper echelons (Figure 2.6) might meet if not mingle, a view facilitated by the presence of the troops who then come to

76 Riot-Space symbolize not just peace but all those values and virtues consistent with freedom and liberty. Public space and its uses, just as public performance and its operations, are not necessarily transparent. Sight seen veils narratives and sights unseen; the latter remain embedded beneath projections and articulations of the state which has the power and the authority to wield multiple state apparatuses toward the suppression of freedom and liberty—the same liberty which liberalism (a brand inextricably linked to France, Britain, and, later, America) claims as its hallmark.69 Riot-space is often manifested in space where riot is absent and masked, in space which has been cleansed and disciplined into ideal cityscapes and locations of pleasure. It is in this aestheticized and anesthetized space, one which is committed to routing out riot in the public sphere, where liberalism becomes firmly entrenched. What is riot-space and how does the materiality of this eighteenth-­ century space compete with other locations of anxiety and incentives or imperatives for collective identity-formation? For one thing, riot-space is not just about riots or indeed the (public) space upon which riot inflicts different degrees of trauma. The discussion in this chapter reveals that collective reactions to riot and collective memories of riot coagulate into a chaotic historiographical register. At one end of this register is rational discourse or reportage about causes and effects and at the other end raw emotion and unchecked passion. In contemporary image-making

Figure 2.6  A  Trip to Blackheath. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

Riot-Space  77 projects, we could “put our relation to the work[s] into question, to make the relationality of image and beholder the field of investigation,” as W. J. T. Mitchell has proposed in What Do Pictures Want? Our relationship to the historical register—a small sliver of which includes the six images discussed in this chapter—has been tainted by time-space. The artistic reactions to the Gordon Riots could not have embedded the consciousness of audiences such as “us” or any “us versus them” scheme—all of which would have been for “them” in the distant and unforeseeable future. So, for instance, the subject-object position and the authoritative intrusion from the twenty-first century have been always-­ already deprived of synchronicity and immediacy. But even in the asynchronous relationship such as ours, some of Mitchell’s questions might be applied, selectively, in order to launch a fruitful discussion: The idea is to make pictures less scrutable, less transparent; also to turn analysis of pictures toward questions of process, affect, and to put in question the spectator position: what does the picture want from me or from “us” or from “them” or from whomever? Who or what is the target of the demand/ desire/ need expressed by the picture? One can also translate the question: what does this picture lack; what does it leave out? What is its area of erasure? Its blind spot? Its anamorphic blur? What does the frame or boundary exclude? Most pertinent to this discussion is the latter set of questions related to the pictures’ lack, what Mitchell calls “its area of erasure.”70 Fifty years prior to the establishment by Robert Peele’s administration of a centralized metropolitan authority charged with maintaining law and order, during the Gordon Riots, military troops were called in and their encampments were set up throughout the city, in parks, in Blackheath,71 as well as in the grounds of the British Museum off of Russell Square. “As the parks and open spaces of London were filled from 1780 onwards with troops who had recently demonstrated their willingness to fire on unarmed civilians (killing 285 in the Gordon Riots themselves), the whole of the London working class were forced to accommodate a new relationship with the state.” This relationship between the public and the troops, Tim Hitchcock has argued succinctly, was “a result of the evolution of imprisonment itself”; but, significantly, the representations of this tense and even violent relationship between the public and the authorities do not appear in the visual and also verbal historical register to be consistent with the facts.72 Referring specifically to the period from 1757 to 1840, Michel Foucault, for instance, has described how “the entire economy of punishment was redistributed.” For one thing, both punishment and torture, which had been the most elaborate forms of public spectacle, disappeared into the confines of the prison. “The pillory was

78 Riot-Space abolished in France in 1789 and in England in 1817.” Additionally, this disappearance was accompanied by the elimination of bodily pain. The object of pain ceases to be the body, Foucault argues. Instead, “[t]he body now serves as an instrument or intermediary. If one intervenes upon it to imprison it, or to make it work, it is in order to deprive the individual of a liberty that is regarded both as a right and as property.” In the consideration of “the body of the condemned,” Foucault concludes, this historical moment was important: “The old partners of the spectacle of punishment, the body and the blood, gave way. A new character came on the scene, masked. It was the end of a certain kind of tragedy; comedy began, with shadow play, faceless voices, impalpable entities. The apparatus of punitive justice must now bite into this bodiless reality.”73 The characterization of the condemned man as being masked is not a metaphor for erasure or of death itself. In fact, the condemned criminal would be made to wear a veil—a practice which seeks to obscure or even obliterate the harshness endemic to the penal system at this time. In a related sense, this practice of masking—as the criminal disappears into the confines of the prison and the troops appear as the protectors of public space—emerges most forcefully in pictorial representations of policing the public sphere, in the mezzotints representing troop presence post-Gordon Riots, in the British Museum gardens and other locations of geo-social significance in late eighteenth-century London. The problems related to the records of the Gordon Riots are not difficult to summarize. These stem entirely from our limited “view” of the riots. The cultural impact of riots—and particularly the preeminent riot of the eighteenth century—reveals a bifurcated system of mediatization. Eighteenth-century reportage is typically confused or conflated with or, worst, replaced by aesthetic expressions of what happened, stylized versions of who did what to whom. Admittedly, some of the reports of the Gordon Riots—such as the one published by Thomas Holcroft (1780)—might be regarded as reliable; but in the title of the pamphlet, “A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Gordon Riots,” we find an unselfconscious assumption of authority and, more importantly, the disavowal of any competing narrative angle.74 Simultaneously, the same print and the consumer culture which sustained Holcroft’s narrative perspective went into high gear to produce highly stylized and “sublime” illustrations of the Gordon Riots. Both textual and visual narratives, therefore, continued to hammer away at the same general principle, one which represented the bourgeois perspectives and preferences of men (and presumably a small percentage of women) with purchasing power and a lot to lose in civic unrest of whatever kind; in fact, these illustrations of the mayhem and conflagration shifted the emphases from reality which unfolded in public space to an affective and thoroughly engineered composite, one which capitalized on the optic sensation of fire, mayhem, and utter chaos on the streets. This shift from the domain of the real to

Riot-Space  79 affective and anesthetized reproductions cast the following as irrevocably evil: the carpenters, weavers, glovers, cobblers, and other members of the working class, who identified themselves as the Blue Cockades and followers of George Gordon at first and then morphed into larcenists; in a sense, they were wiped out of the narrative since both the visual and the textual reportage reduced them to a monstrous “mass” or “press” and, therefore, the legitimate or illegitimate bases of their dissent were erased from the historiography of this eighteenth-century riot. A significant disruption of the bifurcation which I am highlighting here can be found in the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African.75 Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould have drawn attention, for instance, to Ignatius Sancho’s opposition to the Gordon Riots, specifically to his “disdain for the anti-Catholic mob in his description of ‘the worse than Negro barbarity in the populace.’” In the letter’s rhetoric of denunciation of “those who conflate freedom and irresponsibility,” Carretta and Gould locate the seeds of a different kind of resistance. They argue that Sancho “implicitly highlights the absence of ‘liberty’— freedom responsibly exercised—for most Britons, white or black.”76 As perhaps the only black voter at the time, Sancho’s voice was important then and continues to be significant now. I would only add that this nuanced resistance to the riot gets lost in the sheer volume of opposition to it not because Sancho was black or because his position of opposition would not be appreciated by Laurence Sterne or contemporary immigrants and emancipated entities. It gets lost because “the subject who takes the decision is only partially a subject; he is also a background of sedimented practices organizing a normative framework which operates as a limitation on the horizon of options.” Ernesto Laclau helps me to emphasize that “this background persists through the contamination of the moment of the decision”—in Sancho’s case, the moment he speaks out to unravel, even if in moderation, the shaky foundation of liberalism. Laclau goes on to explain, in the segment of his discussion on “politics and the negotiation of universality,” that this decision also reveals “the limitation of the ethical by the normative” and, simultaneously “the subversion of the normative by the ethical.”77 But the subversive potential of resistance—as the French revolution discussion in this chapter shows— was always-already contained and mediatized by forces far more powerful, the forces of institutions which could withstand almost any attack. The dematerialization of the eighteenth-century rioters and their rematerialized identity as aesthetic objects blurred by the pictorial thickness of fire-induced fog (in select pictures) make them at once visible and invisible signs signifying the primary riot of eighteenth-century England. Riot-space, even it makes us conscious of its materiality, allows us to consider the following: how the materiality of humans interacts with the materiality of space to create new patterns or reinforce older forms of human agency. The fluidity of riot-space calls for strict vigilance. Even

80 Riot-Space as multiple agents continue to control and codify riot-space, this space continues to create various, often competing forms of human agency. It is in the ready association of institutions as constructive and riot as destructive agencies—in this essentialist bifurcation of agency—that the conversation comes to a dead halt. Riot-space is simply a conscious and visible invocation of space, one which draws attention to the materiality of riots and institutional imperatives which engender the dematerialization of rioters.78 The paradigmatic power of the Gordon Riots must acknowledge this dematerialization, this exclusion, this erasure, this blank narrative space of dissent.

Notes 1 See Ronald Paulson, specifically “Facts and Fictions,” The Art of Riot in England and America (Owlworks, 2010), 45–80, specifically 45. 2 Recall that following Michel Foucault and Thomas Kuhn, Georgio Agamben has argued that “[p]aradigms obey not the logic of the metaphorical transfer of meaning but the analogical logic of the example. . . . More akin to allegory than to metaphor the paradigm is a singular case that is isolated from its context only insofar as, by exhibiting its own singularity, it makes intelligible a new ensemble, whose homogeneity it itself constitutes.” My definition of “paradigm” is derived from Agamben who explains how singularity constitutes and is constitutive of generalities: “We can . . . say, joining Aristotle’s observations with those of Kant, that a paradigm entails a movement that goes from singularity to singularity and, without ever leaving singularity, transforms every singular case into an exemplar of a general rule that can never be stated a priori.” The singular events which I describe in this chapter make up “a new ensemble.” And this ensemble reveals how and why public space becomes nation-space. See Agamben, The Signature of All Things, 18, 22, and 26–28. 3 On this point, see Tim Hitchcock, “The Gordon Riots and the Criminal Justice System,” The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain, eds. Ian Haywood and John Seed (Cambridge UP, 2012), 188–89. Henceforth, all references to this collection of essays will appear as The Gordon Riots. Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker have argued that following American independence in 1776, “it was the new-lived, and by 1780 widely shared, experience of mass imprisonment that transformed the Gordon Riots from an anti-Catholic protest into an organized proto-revolutionary series of attacks on the prisons of London.” London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of Modern City, 1690–1800 (Cambridge UP, 2015), specifically 333. 4 Throughout this study, I distinguish between the act of mediation and that of mediatization. The former quite simply is the act of rendering into narrative or artistic form any event or occurrence. The latter takes the mediated product to the next level as it becomes—through sale, performance, or exhibition, for instance—a consumer product. More specifically, I use the term “mediation” with an emphasis on the dialectics of purification/mediation, as defined by Bruno Latour. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Harvard UP, 1993), specifically the chapter on “Revolution” and the section in this chapter titled “Philosophies Stretched over the Yawning Gaps,” 55–59. Equally helpful is John Guillory’s analysis

Riot-Space  81 of “a linked series of evolving terms: persuasion, communication, means, medium, media, and mediation.” According to Guillory, “The concept of ­mediation—implicit in the concept of medium but autonomously developed in social theory as a high-order abstraction for understanding relations among social domains—comes to be understood as a process arising from the proliferation of media.” I would add that this “social theory” is not time-specific, but social practice is rooted in time-place—an important distinction. In the social practices which inform eighteenth-century media and mediation, we find that the element of persuasion has much more than an “inaugural role” and shows no signs or symptoms of “dropping out of the subsequent networks and their permutations”—albeit this element (of persuasion) could have been subsumed by other, contingent, goals, and objectives of media. See Guillory, “Enlightening Mediation” in Clifford Siskin and William Warner Eds. This Is Enlightenment (U of Chicago P, 2010), 37–63, specifically 39–40. On the issue of “mediatization of theatrical space,” see Christopher Balme, “Audio-Theatre: The Mediatization of Theatrical Space,” Intermediality in Theatre and Performance, eds. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (Rodopi, 2006), 117–24. 5 The Library of Congress owns a print version of this etching and engraving, for instance: www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2006682137/. Retrieved April 1, 2018. 6 I use the terms resistance and counter-resistance in the following senses: George Gordon’s resistance to what he perceived as arbitrary and detrimental to national interest met with a show of institutional force, a counter-­ resistance, one which counters the resistance of the Blue Cockades. 7 Tim Hitchcock and Robert Shoemaker have described this unstable “crowd” appropriately as “plebeian Londoners” who were a complex group, but they shared a common relationship to authority. These Londoners were at the sharp end of the administration of criminal justice and poor relief—they were the men and women tried at the Old Bailey, committed to houses of correction and punished as vagrants. And they were the most vulnerable of Londoners forced by their poverty to apply for parish relief. Their common characteristic was that they were confronted by the need to negotiate from a position of weakness. See Hitchcock and Shoemaker, London Lives, 4. The very first figure in Hitchcock and Shoemaker’s book is of A Crowd (circa 1760), which is currently at the Tate Gallery, London. It is attributed to Samuel Scott who was a little-known landscape painter in the eighteenth century (3). The representatives of high life are seen to the left of the frame, gathered toward the building from which they are depicted as exiting, while the low life to the right are cast in a haze of mass, barely distinguishable, shadowy, and open to many interpretations not the least of which is to illustrate the “position of weakness” that Hitchcock and Shoemaker describe. This “crowd” is similar to the crowd in The Military Prophet (discussed next) in that both the high and low life are represented. In this context, see also Terry Eagleton, who has shown how and why evil is constructed as being about character rather than about deeds. On Evil (Yale UP, 2010), specifically the introduction, 1–18. 8 See Tim Hitchcock, “Renegotiating the Bloody Code: The Gordon Riots and the Transformation of Popular Attitudes to the Criminal Justice System,” The Gordon Riots, 185–87. The “authority” was a split category; Henry, John Fielding, and their Bow Street Runners, in other words, appropriated

82 Riot-Space some of the authority of the bureaucracy governing Newgate and Tyburn, complicating thus the notion of “authority” and “establishment.” 9 I have not been able to ascertain whether Kennett was indeed an owner of brothels and taverns or whether this was just a smear campaign. See Garland Garvey Smith’s introduction to Thomas Holcroft’s, A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Gordon Riots, London, 1780 (Emory U Library, 1944), 9. See also my discussion of Edmund Burke (below) and what has been interpreted by many commentators as his about-face in Reflections on the Revolution in France. 10 The Riot Act of 1714–1715 (which preceded the Metropolitan Police Act of 1829 by more than a hundred years) failed to control the Gordon Riots. 11 All references will be from the following: Arthur Hobson Quinn, ed. The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe, with bibliographical notes by Edward H. O’Neill, 2 Vols. (Knopf, 1967), I: 310–11. 12 Ibid., 309. 13 Ibid., 309. 14 Ibid., 310. 15 An earlier example of focalization in Gothic literature and the kind of mesmer I describe here can be found in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when Walton first meets Victor Frankenstein and describes the singularity of this “creature” thus: “I never saw a more interesting creature; his eyes have generally an expression of wildness, and even madness; but there are moments when, if any one performs an act of kindness towards him . . . his whole countenance is lighted up, as it were, with a beam of benevolence and sweetness.” Of peripheral importance to my discussion here but still worth mentioning is Shelley’s careful attention to wildness, madness, and kindness as manifested in “his eyes” and also her use of the play of (beams of) light and darkness throughout the narrative to create a sense of the Gothic macabre. See Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein, 2nd ed., ed. Susan J. Wolfson (Pearson, 2007), 13. 16 Ibid., 310–11. 17 Ibid., 311. 18 In the introduction to The Infinity of Lists, Umberto Eco describes the impetus for writing the book and reminds us that “the history of literature (from Homer to Joyce to the present day) offers examples of lists” and it is in this book that I read an extract of Poe’s story and found a connection that I had never considered before: the connection between a list and a crowd. Mass, momentum, movement, density, and viscosity are all essential elements of a crowd which replicates, grows, and multiplies much like lists do. Lists embed a potential for infinity; lists convey topoi of ineffability and so do crowds. See Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (Rizzoli, 1999). 19 Robert D. Hume, “The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4 (December 2006), 487. 20 The production of this print followed the usual pattern: from etching to engraving to print. Used here by permission of The British Library. Location: Cup 21, g 37/38. 21 See William John Thomas Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (U of Chicago P, 2005), 85. 22 Henri Lefebvre’s definition of social space provides the best guidelines for a discussion of form, structure, and function such as this. Particularly instructive and pertinent to this discussion is the following statement: “[t]he application to materials of a practical action (technology, labour) tends to blur, as a way of mastering them, the distinctions between form, function

Riot-Space  83

23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37

38

and structure, so that the three may even come to imply one another in an immediate manner.” See Lefebvre, The Production of Space, specifically 148 and 68–168 passim. See Ian Haywood, “The Gordon Riots as Sublime Spectacle,” The Gordon Riots (Cambridge U Press, 2012), 126–27. On this specific point, Lefebvre, citing Marx, is clear: “[M]erely to note the existence of things . . . is to ignore what things at once embody and dissimulate.” See Lefebvre, “Social Space,” 81. Ibid., 143. See Haywood, “Sublime Spectacle,” specifically 126–27. Ian Haywood “‘A Metropolis in Flames and a Nation in Ruins’: The Gordon Riots as Sublime Spectacle,” The Gordon Riots (Cambridge U Press, 2012), 127. See Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism or; the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Duke UP, 1991), 25. Haywood, 119–20. Those who lived in London—“habitual consumers”—cannot be conflated with those who lived in the country—“occasional consumers.” Both could have equal purchasing power. Robert D. Hume, “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power—and Some Problems in Cultural Economics,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 4 (Winter 2015), 377. See Robert D. Hume, “The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740,” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4 (2006), 524. Ibid., 525. Ibid., 532. Hume, “The Value of Money,” 390. Haywood, “The Gordon Riots as Sublime Spectacle,” The Gordon Riots, 126. See Carol Houlihan Flynn, “Whatever Happened to the Gordon Riots? Problems in Revolutionary Representation”, A Companion to the ­Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture, eds. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Iingrassia (Blackwell, 2005) 459–80. Jean Baudrillard, “The Procession of Simulacra,” Simulacra and Simulation (U of Michigan P, 1994), 26. In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord points to how and why goods and commodities become indistinguishable when packaged as spectacle thus: The spectacle is a permanent opium war waged to make it impossible to distinguish goods from commodities, or true satisfaction from a survival that increases according to its own logic. Consumable survival must increase, in fact, because it continues to enshrine deprivation. The reason there is nothing beyond survival, and no end to its growth, is that survival itself belongs to the realm of dispossession: it may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.

Survival, growth, deprivation, dispossession, and poverty are not separate economic phenomena but, rather, each is interdependent on the other, as Debord has definitively shown. 39 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Frank M. Turner (Yale UP, 2003), 31–32. 0 One finds in Burke’s writings in general the invocation of a continuum from 4 order to destiny to religion. 41 “A negative carnivalesque response to the prints is certainly available,” Haywood says, pointing in one example to the “ragged woman dancing a jig”

84 Riot-Space

42 43

4 4

45

46 47

48 49

50

and, in another print, to “two violent blacks (one with an axe, another looting) and the presence of other rioters at different stages of inebriation.” See Haywood, 123 and passim. Negative carnivalesque serves little purpose if there is no discussion about whether this technique promotes or creates a stereotype or whether it challenges a stereotype—or whether it functions in some other capacity. In this context, consider also that Bishop John Bramhall of the Church of Ireland may have influenced Burke, who argued against the fundamental principles in Hobbes’s Leviathan as Bramhall had done. “Bramhall criticized Hobbes’s entire materialist metaphysics and his theory of society based on self-preservation as antithetical to a proper understanding of both God and man. . . . [He] found Hobbes’s proposed formation of a government without reference to religion deeply wanting.” See Frank M. Turner, “Introduction: Edmund Burke: The Political Actor Thinking,” ­Reflections on the Revolution in France, xxvii. Ibid., 51. On the hypothesis of two different forms of Enlightenment in France and in Britain, see, for instance, Darrin M. McMahon, “Edmund Burke and the Literary Cabal: A Tale of Two Enlightenments,” Ibid., 233–47. McMahon argues that “Burke’s powerfully hostile characterization of the French Enlightenment constitutes one of the chief polemical foundations of the Reflections and produced what is perhaps its most lasting impression.” McMahon, 234. Apropos religion: As for Catholicism, Johan Zoffany and Edmund Burke’s shared some common ground but Burke’s religious heritage was mixed as his mother was a Roman Catholic and his father belonged to the Protestant Church of Ireland. He studied at the Trinity College, Dublin, which was open to Protestants only. A couple of days after his birth, Johan Zoffany was christened in the cathedral of St. Bartholomew in Frankfurtam-Main. For a quick biographical overview, see Turner, “Introduction,” xi–xliii. According to Penelope Treadwell, “at a dinner to celebrate the opening of the exhibition” of the Royal Academy in Somerset House in 1770, Edmund Burke was present and also, Treadwell contends, “Zoffany was almost certainly present.” See Treadwell, Johan Zoffany: Artist and Adventurer (Paul Holberton, 2009), 171 and 174. George III nominated Zofany as a member of the Royal Academy. Joshua Reynolds, then president of the Academy, announced this addition to the original list of founding members on 11 December 1769. See Martin Postle, “Johan Zoffany: An Artist Abroad,” Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed (Yale UP, 2011), 29. Ibid., 347–49. The significance of the date 10 August 1792 is well-known to students and scholars of eighteenth-century French history. Often referred to as the “journée du 10 août,”—when monarchy effectively came to an end—this was a defining moment in the French Revolution. Postle, “Johan Zoffany: An Artist Abroad,” 43. Ibid. 43. See also William Pressly, The French Revolution as Blasphemy: John Zoffany’s Paintings of the Massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792 (U of California P, 1999). Gillian Forrester has rightly referred to Pressly’s study as “exemplary.” See Forrester in Postle, 294. Zoffany as naturalized British citizen was always-already abroad and his trip to India was thus a small sliver of his pan-European and also global identity. As Maya Jasanoff has rightly pointed out, Zoffany arrived in Britain (1760) at a time when it was “engaged in global war and empire

Riot-Space  85

51

52 53

54 55 56

57

building.” Therefore, “[l]iving and working at the centre of this expanding empire, Zoffany encountered Britain’s global reach in numerous guises.” See Jasanoff, “A Passage through India: Zoffany in Calcutta and Lucknow,” Johann Zoffany, ed. Martin Postle (Yale UP, 2011), 125. For Zoffany’s choice of canvas types, favorite pigments, and so on, see ­Jessica David, “Zoffany’s Painting Technique: The Drummond Family in Focus,” Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed, ed. Martin Postle (Yale UP, 2011), 167–74. See, for instance, Charles Grieg, “In Zoffany’s Footsteps: Journeys in Upper India, Past and Present,” Johann Zoffany, ed. Martin Postle (Yale UP, 2011) 147. This mezzotint is housed in the British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings. Since this was published on 1 January 1795, Plundering the King’s Cellar no doubt preceded it and was thus completed circa 1794 (and then exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1795). See Forrester, “Revolution, Reaction and Retirement” in Postle, ed. Johann Zoffany, 294. See Forrester in Postle, ed. Johann Zoffany, 296. See Postle, 294. Postle cites William L. Pressly who was the first to focus exclusively on Zoffany’s French Revolution pieces in a book-length study. See endnote 49. According to Postle, the critique of Zoffany’s paintings (related to the French Revolution) also appears in “a gratuitous footnote” in Anthony Pasquin’s, An Authentic History of the Professors of Painting, Sculpture, & Architecture, Who Have Presented in Ireland (H. D. Symonds, 1796). See Postle, 294–95. There is a sense in which the artist is so embroiled in scenes of destruction and chaos that his (or her) denunciation of violence can be interpreted as an endorsement of such violence. Ronald Paulson points out that The problem was set forth by Edmund Wilson in The Wound and the Bow, where he showed Dickens preaching against the mob but clearly putting all his energy into the representation of the fire and destruction, especially of the prison (a memory of his father’s experience of prison, an insight that would equally apply to Hogarth): “The satisfaction that he obviously feels in demolishing the sinister old prison, which, rebuilt, had oppressed him in childhood, completely obliterates the effect of his rightminded references in his preface to ‘those shameful tumults.’”

58 59 60 61

62

Furthermore, according to Paulson, “[t]he artist has two basic positions to choose between: the parallel action of the riot and the artist to break open and burn and level the social edifices of order or to suffer with the peaceful protestors who are fired upon and massacred by the representatives of law and order.” Johan Zoffany’s, Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris, I argue implicitly here, presents us with a third and alternative position: The artist breaks the social edifices but maintains tight control of his message about the culpability of the evil mob. See Paulson, 79. See endnote 7. See Losurdo, 128, 130. See Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, specifically 78–79. Ibid., 79. See also Domenico Losurdo, “The Revolution in France and San Domingo, the Crisis of the English and American Models, and the Formation of Radicalism either Side of the Atlantic,” Liberalism: A Counter-­ History, trans. Gregory Elliott (Verso, 2011), 127–80. Here I use the term “liberation” to highlight and to draw attention to the vexed historiography of liberalism in the European archive, specifically as

86 Riot-Space

63 64 65 66

67 68

the concept is defined and explained by Domenico Losurdo. See his Liberalism, passim. According to Losurdo, the repression of the paradox of liberalism is a vulgar form of historicism and, therefore, this vulgar form needs first to be understood and then to be systematically undermined. “As we register the disappearance of the old certainties, a great saying comes to mind,” Losurdo argues, using Hegel: “‘What is well-known, precisely because it is well-known, is not known, In the knowledge process, the commonest way to mislead oneself and others is to assume that something is well-known and to accept it as such.’” See Hitchcock and Shoemaker, “The Attack on Suspicious London,” London Lives, 398–407. Ibid., 399. A fully searchable database is available at: www.oldbaileyonline.org/index.jsp. My interpretation—which teases out the implications of the dissonance between the facts/reportage, on the one hand, and, on the other, the contemporary representations of the facts—is by no means new. See, for instance, Ian Haywood who says the following about James Heath’s Riot in Broad Street: “In its refusal to demonise the crowd and its depiction of restrained retaliatory violence, Riot in Broad Street can be interpreted as an effective and impressive piece of Whig propaganda, countering government claims that the City authorities had deliberately inflamed the riots by failing to authorize a military response.” See Haywood, “The Gordon Riots as Sublime Spectacle,” The Gordon Riots, specifically 122–23 and 135–36. The shadows drawn in so deliberately do suggest that the time shown is afternoon. Tim Hitchcock points out, for instance, that Convictions at the Old Bailey reached an absolute peak for the century in 1784, when 133 death sentences were passed and 56 executions performed. The following year fewer sentences were passed, but 97 people were executed. The murderous bulge of convictions and executions continued through 1787, when 104 capital sentences were passed and 92 people hanged. Almost five hundred people were hanged in London alone in the seven years following 1780.

69 70 71

72

73

See Hitchcock, “The Gordon Riots and the Criminal Justice System,” The Gordon Riots, specifically 192–94. See also Michel Foucault, “The Body of the Condemned,” 3–31. See Losurdo, Liberalism, specifically “Were Eighteenth- and the ­Nineteenth-Century England and America Liberal?” 95–125. See W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 49. There are unsupported claims about how Blachheath was used as a pit for the burial of plague-infested Londoners in the medieval times as well as during the 1665 Plague. Blackheath was always the assembly point for English armies. In 1673, the Blackheath Army was assembled to fight in the Anglo-Dutch War. Blackbheath is divided between the Borough of Greenwich and the Borough of Lewisham, SE London. See Tim Hitchcock in Haywood and Seed, The Gordon Riots, 197–98. See also E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (Merlin P, 1991), 185–258. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (Vintage Books, 1977), specifically 7–17.

Riot-Space  87 74 Thomas Holcroft was a shoemaker’s son, who eventually became a minor strolling player, actor, and writer, but he was never part of the establishment. “In 1792 he became a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, an organization which upheld the principle of the French Revolution.” See Garland Garvey Smith, 8 and endnote 9. 75 Vincent Carretta, ed. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (­Penguin, 1998). 76 Philip Gould and Vincent Carretta, “Introduction,” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic (UP of Kentucky, 2015), 1–13 77 Ernesto Laclau, “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, eds. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (Verso, 2000), 82–86. 78 See Terry Eagleton, “Materialisms,” Materialism (Yale UP, 2016), 1–35, specifically 16–17.

3 Empires Within The Spatial Dimension of the Johnsonian Oikos

(Samuel) Johnsonian authority is so deeply entrenched in the “­eighteenthcentury studies” part of the academy that both apprentices and experts can turn to this authority for answers to postmodern conundrums.1 Intensely scrutinized and heavily mediated, Johnson’s life (with a lower-­ case “l”) illustrates, for instance, the ways in which probability (what might have happened) converges with certainty (what actually transpired) toward the creation of a biographical composite which is more truth than fiction. In the grey area between these two ends of the investigative spectrum—between the performance and the reportage, between the witnessing and the narrating—lies the space for considering logical possibilities and reasonable assumptions, as the recent debates about Johnson’s legendary life have shown. Take, for instance, Marshall Waingrow’s observation that “[r]eaders of the [Samuel] Johnsonian persuasion may be expected to look at Boswell’s source materials for new light on the subject of the biography.” Why go beyond the biography to source materials? “Such a hope would seem to betray a certain lack of confidence in the author; that is, a willingness to believe that he was not always capable of recognizing or discovering the truth, or, worse, that he was capable of suppressing or distorting it.”2 As Waingrow and others have noted, Boswell’s reportage based upon direct interactions with Johnson and his firsthand knowledge of the subject began well after May 1763, when the two met for the first time. But, in fact, whether one considers Boswell’s direct knowledge or the information he gathered from other sources, the Life of Johnson remains a heavily mediated and mediatized piece of work.3 Having a strong affinity with fiction, biography as literary genre is at least twice removed from life which is where the “source materials” are assumed to reside. The biographer’s mediation adds the necessary layer, one without which public access to domestic space and domestic activity would mirror the chaos endemic to scattered and random facts as well as unscripted and spontaneous performances written out of the record. Consider also that memory and modes of recollection do not follow a linear or indeed an ordered path; a biography, in contrast, can mold the randomness inherent in recollection and beat the basic ingredients into a

Empires Within  89 comprehensible and digestible narrative, one which establishes cause and effect and favors a linear structure. The reader who wants to grasp or to understand the subject thus finds satisfaction in order and coherence in structure. The material can be ordered in at least two ways: generally favored is the Aristotelian formula in which the story begins at the beginning, is followed by a middle, and progresses logically to the end (James Boswell’s biography of Johnson) or one which follows a nonlinear structure akin to patterns of recollection (John Hawkins’s biography of Johnson). Metacritiques of Boswell’s mediation, including but not limited to his methods of collection (of facts) and recollection, have been the subject of exuberant discussion. But even when scholars interrogate the stability of Boswell’s narrative and the reliability of his source materials, they conclude that he remains the indisputable authority on Johnson. Rather than revealing new or fresh information, postmodern investigations have invited us to reconsider the elusiveness of not just biography—the finished product—but also the inherent instability of raw materials which provide the foundations of an authentic composite. From this postmodern perspective, Boswell’s biographical narrative as well as the sources and source materials4 which helped to construct the biography appear to be in continuous dialectical tension—making the Johnson-Boswell friendship one of the most enduring stories in the literary historiography of Britain. That Johnson’s life was rigorously and enthusiastically mediatized by various contemporaries, some more reliable than others, has not been in question, in other words. Therefore, my purpose here is not to mine the sources (of Johnson’s life) once again nor indeed to challenge the gaps between meaningful suppositions and received opinions about him;5 instead, I would like to “see” Johnson through the lens of the public, private, and domestic spaces within which Boswell and others positioned, interacted with, and described him. Specifically, I suggest that an examination of the spatial dimension of Johnsonian domesticity and privacy6 —and its seductive potential for publicity—provides thus an interpretive maneuver out of the conundrum of searching for authenticity in biographical narrative and steers the conversation toward the evolving perceptions of the public-private divide in the eighteenth-­ century British metropolis.7 I argue here that in the spatial dimension of acts of ­mediation—the spaces where source materials are created, where biographer meets biographical subject—one finds not only distinct areas of cultural discomfort and resistance to change: examined through the lens of nation, the porous borders between the public and private spheres reveal, in addition, this culture’s deep investment in enforcing strict demarcations between the two spheres so as to regulate the boundaries of the normative. The distinction between historical writing and biographical writing, according to Michael McKeon, was “traditionally understood as one between a focus on the public and the focus on the private life.” In this older schema, “the exemplars of ‘private’ life would be great

90  Empires Within men, figures of public importance.” Accepting the premise established by Thomas Babington Macaulay that “intimate knowledge of the domestic history of nations is . . . absolutely necessary to the prognosis of political events,” McKeon goes on to assert that “[i]n the eighteenth century, biographical exemplarity underwent a revolution that replaced the illustrious by the domestic example.”8 The singularity or the importance of the domestic realm takes on a number of related meanings during the long eighteenth century so much so that the domestic becomes, as Michael McKeon has convincingly argued, “the self-sufficient signified, the key not to public history but to history as such.”9 In defiance of boundaries both real and perceptual, imposed or imagined, I argue, the Johnsonian brand of domesticity came to co-opt and to threaten established models of house, home, and household or oikos.10 Indeed, Johnson’s witting and unwitting actions to disrupt the normative provoked intense curiosity and created a demand for greater public access into the domain of the private where his imprint as public intellectual was just as remarkable as on the published page.

Fiction in Real-Space Consider, preliminarily, the following episode in Samuel Johnson’s biography by W. Jackson Bate. The context for this segment of the Bate biography is the subject’s deep depression circa 1729, a condition which led Johnson to display “aggressive hostility turned against himself.”11 This hostility toward self—perpetuated by many triggers—could be traced back to his exit from Oxford and continued beyond his university days as a by-product of depression. In addition, Bate contends, “[a]nother by-product of his attempt to control aggressions by turning them against himself was more conspicuous if less painful.” Referring to Johnson’s “embarrassing tics and other compulsive mannerisms,” Bate then goes on to describe the following episode: when William Hogarth saw Johnson for the first time at the home of Samuel Richardson, “standing by a window” and “shaking his head and rolling himself about in a strange ridiculous manner,” he concluded Johnson was “an ideot (sic), whom his relations had put under the care of Mr. Richardson.” Then, to Hogarth’s surprise, this imposing figure stalked over to where Richardson and he were sitting, and “all at once took up the argument, and . . . displayed such as power of eloquence, that Hogarth looked at him with astonishment, and actually imagined that this ideot (sic) had been at the moment inspired.” Bate’s conclusion, which coincides with most if not all biographies, is as follows: “Johnson was only too aware of the grotesque impression that these compulsive movements and tics made on others, and detested them both for their own sake, and as one more example of what could seem to him an appalling inability to control himself.”12 Positioned as he was at the periphery of a room in Richardson’s house,

Empires Within  91 “standing by a window,” Johnson was thus a noticeable presence, but one which was clearly at odds with acceptable social norms of physical control, posture, and demeanor. We have in this biographical segment a remarkable instance of an eighteenth-century authoritative source—William Hogarth no less— who is drawn to a curious “subject” and then interprets the subject’s performance in accordance with the then cultural standards of the normative. Specifically, Johnson’s nervous tics and bodily movements, which are clearly out of control, contribute to Hogarth’s conclusion about the man’s mental agility, which Johnson’s facility in argumentation could not erase: Johnson, Hogarth assumed, had had a momentary flash of brilliance when he spoke so well; ergo, the brilliance, Hogarth assumed, was but a passing phase in an aberrant moment of clarity. In other words, the permanence of the physical impairment of Johnson was thus assumed while his mental acuity, unexpected and thus surprising, was taken to be a fleeting condition, one which would soon lapse into its prior abnormal state. “Seeing” Johnson or indeed listening to him converse did not help Hogarth to understand Johnson at first, or so the biographical authority (Walter Jackson Bate) asserts implicitly. In sharp contrast, Joshua Reynolds did not view his subject in the same light. More than one contemporary source confirmed the following: “Sir Joshua Reynolds was supposed to have been told that he should not paint Johnson in a full-length portrait because of the ‘uncouth formation’ of his limbs. On the contrary, far from thinking Johnson’s limbs unsightly, Reynolds thought they were well-formed.”13 Set in the home of Samuel Richardson, in the private sphere, the tableau described above has received considerable attention and been recorded repeatedly for posterity.14 This first meeting of Hogarth and Johnson (no date) occurred well before Boswell arrived in London (1763), an arrival which was a couple of years after Richardson’s death in 1761. The source of this story is thus Hogarth but most references to what I am calling a tableau—a still life of Johnson’s utterly flawed corporeality as witnessed by Hogarth—identify Boswell as source and go no further.15 This tableau is powerful, particularly in retrospect, because it affords the reader of biography a rare glimpse into the exclusive and privileged enclave of the following: the author who broke with convention to create the first modern British novel (Richardson); the artist who by the 1760s had a significant record of achievement which began with A Harlot’s Progress in 1732, Hogarth; and the man who embodied the most visually striking dissonance between mind and body, Samuel Johnson. This tableau is thus a rich historiographical source for studying how the private gets codified in public discourses related to celebrity even when the authenticity of the original source might be in question. The authenticity of this particular document in Richardson’s house lies in its probabilistic truth claim rather than in verifiable evidence. In retrospect, Hogarth appears

92  Empires Within shortsighted, Reynolds sage, and Johnson the quintessential underdog whose flashes of brilliance position him at the threshold of celebrity. Therefore, the demand for this narrative might be regarded as the demand for public access to the exclusive enclaves of male intellectuals in the modern-day agora. Inevitably, sex added value to narratives of domestic relations which were also private because the worth of cultural capital was often (and still remains) tied to taboo. It is in this context that the peephole through which the private is made visible becomes significant. So, for instance, Peter Martin relates how “Garrick loved to tell an anecdote about Tetty and Johnson’s sex life at Edial, which with his unmatchable talent for mimicry and ridicule he caricatured to devastating effect.”16 Circa 1736, when Edial Hall (the school which Johnson started) opened its doors to a small group of students, Garrick was about eighteen and both he and his brother, George, were admitted to this school. Martin cites Boswell who noted that “[Johnson’s] oddities of manner, the uncouth gesticulations, could not but be the subject of merriment to them; and, in particular, the young rogues used to listen at the door of his bed-chamber, and peep through the keyhole, that they might turn into ridicule his tumultuous and awkward fondness for Mrs. Johnson.”17 The scene at Edial Hall involves a conversation with Mrs. Desmoulines, one which Boswell describes in his Life goes as follows: BOSWELL: ‘Do you know, Ma’am, that there really was a connection between him and his wife? You understand me.’ MRS. DESMOULINS: ‘Yes, yes, Sir, Nay, Garrick knew it was consummated, for he peeped through the keyhole, and behaved like a rascal, for he made the Doctor ridiculous all over the country by describing him running round the bed after she had lain down, and crying “I’m coming, my Tetsie, I’m coming my Tetsie! Ph! Ph! (blowing in his manner).’18 David Garrick died in 1779 and the conversation Boswell had with Mrs. Desmoulins took place circa 1783, “the year before Johnson died.”19 Thus, almost 50 years after the actual event (of the keyhole episode at Edial Hall), Mrs. Desmoulins reported the event to Boswell, presumably having heard the story from Garrick at some point because it is unlikely that Johnson would have divulged the story to Mrs. Desmoulins or to anyone else. Johnson would not have had the privileged perspective of the peephole; he was in this instance and in others like it the object of the voyeur’s playful curiosity and not the author supplying the same. There was no way to verify the story told by Mrs. Desmoulins to Boswell nor indeed to ascertain her motives. Johnson was again cast as the object of Garrick’s curiosity more than a decade after the Edial Hall episode while (circa 1749) he was presumably

Empires Within  93 finishing his work on Irene and Garrick was manager of Drury Lane. This particular voyeuristic vignette ascribed to Garrick, and once again reliant upon the peephole as prop, goes as follows: “When [Johnson] absently mistakes the bedclothes for his shirt-tails and begins to stuff them hurriedly into his breeches, [Tetty] finds herself suddenly exposed on the bed.”20 The reporter as voyeur declassifies the sex act and mediatizes it, thus simultaneously humanizing a dour intellectual and satisfying the curiosity of a prurient inner circle which then works as vehicle for wider dissemination of a “motion picture”21 of an “amorous” Johnson. Caring very little for authenticity and truth, this public craves for a story which endears the celebrity and makes him ordinary, a story which Boswell relished to supply. 22 The eighteenth-century biographer and the postmodern counterpart or literary critic have this in common: their instinct is to break down the walls which create exclusivity and guard the intimacies of private space, space which is constructed to keep private lives out of easy reach of the public. Inevitably, therefore, the private sphere is the source of speculation; in it resides all the clues and the cues or the ingredients which help the biographer to construct the whole out of bits and pieces of facts which escape the preserve of the private. In this pursuit of the truth or the “true” character, the materiality of the spaces of encounter are seldom considered to be significant and thus remains invisible or unremarkable, much like the physicality of the stage which fades into the background (in fact and in theatre history) even as the actors force the audience into willing suspension of disbelief. But unlike the theatre—where illusion and disbelief are integral to meaning—and where people enter to escape from the real, the home or oikos provides a place of refuge but does not provide an escape-route from the real. On the contrary, the private spaces within homes are simultaneously abstract (the public has an idea of what is in it) and real (because people live in it), and thus imbued with an aura of authenticity. If an action unfolds within the house it must be true, we assume, because it is in this private space, without the impediments of audience and affect, where private individuals come into their own and reveal their “true” character. Therefore, while the performance on stage is deliberate, guided by scripted dialogue, and commercially viable, the performance at home, behind closed doors, is believed to be natural even if always contingent: it is seldom recorded, inevitably fleeting, and of no commercial value—until and unless the biographer-cum-reporter breaks down the walls and the doors to reveal those spaces where meaning is assumed to reside in its pristine and potable state. In the latter half of the eighteenth century and due largely to the contributions of James Boswell, we find evidence of not necessarily the “truth” but of a heightened consciousness of the ways in which private conversation could be displayed in public, 23 toward launching public discussion among other issues on morality, judgment, and the codification of socially acceptable

94  Empires Within behavior. The legislative dimension of public debate would then invariably double back to the domain of the private.

The Spatial-Temporal Dimension of an Ethnographical Divide The slice of Johnson’s life beginning with his residence at Gough Square has received a fresh coat of narration (2015) in Michael Bundock’s biography of Francis Barber (1742/1743–1801). Largely a peripheral entity and a convenient means to a biographical end for Boswell, Francis Barber had not received till recently the same attention as, for instance, Olaudah Equiano. “More is known of Equiano’s life than the life of any other black person in eighteenth-century Britain.”24 The “fortunes of Francis Barber”—the framework of Bundock’s biography—are not easy to relate since Johnson, one assumes, would steal the show from Barber whose identity becomes significant only in relation to Johnson and his celebrity. Johnson’s authority, however, lends credence to Barber whose naturalization depends upon what might be described as a uniquely Johnsonian brand of endowing both legitimacy and distinction to a former slave, a subaltern and a servant, one who became a member of the Johnsonian oikos in March 1752. One also assumes that through his relationship (and longtime association) with Johnson, Barber would allow us to interrogate the eighteenth-century idea of emancipation in several related senses. This has been the common assumption; Bundock’s “true story” establishes, for the first time, a drastic perspectival shift, one which adds depth and texture to these assumptions and, for my purposes here, also opens up the possibilities for a consideration of the palpable and very visible materiality of colony in the realm of the domestic. The number of blacks in London in the eighteenth century has been estimated to have been “in a fluctuating range of 5,000 to 10,000.”25 This number was neither large nor small enough to disappear into the realm of invisibility. Ignatius Sancho describes, for instance, “the ill-bred and heart-racking abuse of the foolish vulgar” during a visit to Vauxhall Gardens (1777) where he and his family were not only the object of inquisitive gaze but they were also followed. 26 Against the urban landscape of this curiosity which bleeds readily into hostility, consider the optics of the association of Johnson and Barber, two “characters,” one a celebrity, the other a onetime slave. Michael Bundock’s chapter titled “The House in Gough Square” might be regarded as an attempt at addressing the erasure of the optical dimension of what was then perceived as a curious, odd, or transgressive juxtaposition 27 and part of it goes as follows: On a summer’s day in 1752, two conspicuously odd figures are making their way through the hubbub and grime of London’s Fleet Street. The Street is mobbed with people of all kinds—merchants

Empires Within  95 off to do business, beggars after a penny for gin, travelers hurrying to catch the stagecoach, and pedlars trying to sell their wares—but these two stand out. Each on his own would attract attention, but there seems to be something particularly comical about the sight of the two of them together. 28 The street scene which Bundock describes has the depth, texture, and kinetic energy of a motion picture, one which students and scholars of the eighteenth century can find in popular historiographies of the period.29 The oddity of the two subjects amid the familiar urban landscape is refined further: as they walk “westwards from the sinking Fleet Street,” Bundock’s proto-daguerreotype invites us to follow these two figures to “a corner by an inn” beyond which they “disappear into a dark alley.” Next, they pause so that one of them can press “a coin into the hands of a sleeping figure curled up in a doorway.” Their destination is “a rather imposing house in the corner of the square is their home.”30 This is 17 Gough Square. The dissonance between Johnson’s intellect and his uncontrollable bodily movements—his nervous tics—was remarkable; but so was the dissonance between his physicality—his height, his gait, his skin color— and that of his servant, Francis Barber. Bundock continues to describe the “two conspicuously odd figures” with brush strokes of a motion picture, invoking cinematic verisimilitude, even as he fictionalizes their daily domestic routine thus: Standing at a desk at one end of the garret, the older of the two dominates the room. He is a heavily build man, forty-two years old and very tall by the standards of the day—he stands almost six feet in height. But although he is powerfully build, his appearance is disconcerting. His clothes are shabby and stained, and the wig which perches on his head is tattered, and even burnt in places, as if the its wearer had once leaned too close to a candle—as indeed he had. Worse, his face is disfigured, with a long scar down one side of his neck, and one sightless eye partially closed. At the time, Barber had just arrived at Johnson’s Gough Square residence and he was about 10 years old. He is “seen” sitting at a desk “scribbling on one of the many scraps of paper left lying around.”31 Why is Michael Bundock’s composite of the Johnsonian oikos authentic? For one thing, the close-up adjustment of lens reveals a still life of “dictionary Johnson,” which Bundock has created by culling anecdotal evidence from a variety of contemporary records. Equally effective is the production of the “motion picture” of their walk toward the house which Johnson and (what has been described as) his “mélange of misfits”32 called home. What makes Bundock’s “motion picture” or dramatic ekphrasis of the “practice of everyday life” distinct from fiction?

96  Empires Within “Stories,” according to Michel de Certeau, “carry out a labor that constantly transforms places into spaces and spaces into places.”33 ­Notice specifically how the optics of the odd companions—one tall, one short, one black, one white—becomes “real” when the sketches are positioned in real space, represented by streets, a square, and a five-story house, now endowed with nostalgia and still sitting awkwardly among the haphazard and by all appearances unplanned postmodern built-space off of Fleet Street. Today, the incongruity of the square’s cobbled pavement and the oddity of the eighteenth-century house itself, hidden amid an uncontrollable urban sprawl, contribute to that sense of living history. Johnson’s life and times is on display now—in museum space. Reinscribed as national heritage the site and the subject have considerable cultural capital which has accrued over time. At what point does narrative, such as in Bundock’s mediatized version, for instance, transcend the limits of biography toward becoming a mixed medium—nonfictional in spirit, documentary in scope, but also entirely fictional and still reliant upon finite (and mostly reliable) sources locked in distant eighteenth-­ century time-space? The image of beggars on the street, Johnson ensconced in the garret, and of Barber scribbling away are examples of virtual reality which document ostensibly routine occurrences or a day in their lives; these routine occurrences establish not only a pattern but also a norm: this scene was enacted and re-acted routinely, Bundock’s narrative implies, elevating the “walk” to a record of experiential reality while injecting in it both rhythm and motion. Authenticity, as this biographical segment shows, is not reliant upon hard evidence but circumstantial ones. Part of the problem of establishing the normative in this or any other instance is to figure out how to catapult the singularity (or the exemplarity) of the one example into the realm of the general or universal—and this narrative maneuver then marginalizes the discomfort, the friction, and also the violence endemic to contact zones both foreign and domestic, in the colonies and close to home. The discomfort caused by unwanted gaze registered in the letters and memoir of Ignatius Sancho is reproduced far more viscerally and visually in, say, John G. Stedman’s narrative of his experience in Surinam (1773–1778). William Blake’s illustrations accompanying this narrative are well known: A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows and The Execution of Breaking on the Rack continue to shock and to make a mockery of those ideas of liberty and emancipation which continued to be debated in the public sphere—with little to no immediate impact on public policy or the penal system and with no major realignments in the private sphere where the ­master-servant equation remained robust throughout the eighteenth century. How can one separate the Johnson-Barber relationship from this vexed register of inequality and oppression juxtaposed against the hegemonic productions, reproductions, and reification of images of benevolence (charity as

Empires Within  97 represented by Johnson) and images of complete moral bankruptcy and failure of Enlightenment (as pictorialized by Blake)?34 Biographers including Hawkins believed that in the years immediately following Oxford—particularly circa 1729–1731 but also throughout his adult life—Johnson’s mind was in imminent danger of becoming like the aging Michael Johnson’s (his father’s) and speculated that Johnson would turn “mad,” unhinged, and out of joint. In later life, in London, Johnson illustrated for Hawkins “the short-sightedness of wisdom and the effects of ill-directed benevolence.”35 Johnson’s mentorship of Barber, who was also named as his heir, would come to be considered as a sign not only of civic transgression but also a debility of the mind because this relationship defied eighteenth-century conventions related to ethnic, social, and class differences. Biological traits (Johnson and ­Barber’s differences in height, in weight, in skin color) were transposed into a ­cultural category with a negative connotation so much so that the optics of assimilation was rejected outright by many of Johnson’s contemporaries. Hawkins’s daughter, Laeticia-Matilda, described Barber’s inheritance as evidence of Johnson’s “wild benevolence.”36 It is in the context of “the domestic privacies”37—where filiation has both potency and immediacy—that the Johnsonian paradigm of oikos-genos, exemplified by his domestic arrangements (with a focus on Gough Square38), produces fictions of domesticity which are worth reconsidering, particularly in discussions of modernity and the global eighteenth century. By oikos, I mean quite simply household; the definition of this household becomes complicated when the category of “genos” is inserted into the equation and found to be absent from the Johnsonian model of oikos. Genos is the social group which derives its distinctness from common descent and is the basic organization of groups in ancient tribal society. In this context, it would help to turn to the passage in Hawkins’s biography—quoted at length by Michael Bundock—to see how genos was codified and understood in the late eighteenth century, after Johnson’s death when the issue of Barber’s inheritance became urgent: How much soever I approve the practice of rewarding the fidelity of servants, I cannot but think that, in testamentary dispositions in their favour, some discretion ought to be exercised; and that, in scarce any instance they are to be preferred to those who are allied to the testator either in blood or by affinity. Of the merits of this servant, a judgement may be formed. This segment in Hawkins’s footnote is followed by a description of Barber’s marriage and the birth of his two daughters which reminds one of Senator Brabantio’s reference to “barbary horse” in Othello. And then, in a tone of sanctimonious disbelief, Hawkins delivers the following

98  Empires Within judgment: “Notwithstanding which, Johnson, in the excess of indiscriminating benevolence, about a year before his death, took the wife and both the children, into his house, and made them a part of his family; and, by the codicil to his will, made a disposition in his favour, to the amount in value of full fifteen hundred pounds.”39 Consider in this context, the reaction of Reverend William Johnson Temple, who was James Boswell’s “most intimate friend.” His letter to Boswell after Johnson’s death is instructive because it also illustrates the breadth and potency of opposition to Johnson’s Will and what was believed to be its irrational premise. The first part of the letter—written in sympathy—outlines the various ways in which Boswell’s life would change following Johnson’s death and some of it goes as follows: “The death of Dr. Johnson, will I fear, increase the depression of spirits you complain of. You will be deprived of his society and conversation, and of something, which you derived from your known intimacy with him. . . . This event, may in some degree cool your ardour for your London Settlement, as perhaps the Doctor was somehow connected with it.” The indictment, related to Johnson’s Will and expressed in no uncertain terms, appears next: I have read his Will in the News Paper and am disappointed and angry at nor seeing your name in it. Your partial and even enthusiastick attachment to him well deserved some fond memorial. I fully expected he would have left his Papers to your care, and desired as the last act of a long friendship that you would be his editor and historian. Think of making his Will on the very night in which he died, and leaving so large a sum to a Negroe. An annuity of £20 or £30 would have been a more suitable Legacy for him to give or the other to receive. Is the old blind Lady dead that he does not mention her? Even Mrs. Thrale, to whom he owed so many civilities so much Devotion and so many delicate suppers is not honoured with a picture or a book. Indeed I cannot help accusing him of insensibility and ingratitude.40 According to Reverend Temple, there were two legitimate beneficiaries: James Boswell and Hester Lynch Thrale; but both had been excluded from the Will. Two important elements in this clearly emotional diatribe against Johnson deserve a brief discussion: first, notice that in this invective Johnson is reported as having left a large sum of money not to Francis Barber, not to the Negro, but to “a Negroe.” Temple frames the nature of Johnson’s transgression such that the actual beneficiary becomes irrelevant even as he stands in for the species. Barber is not named by Temple because he is not an individual but a representative of a much larger group or tribe, one with a distinct connotation and which requires no elucidation toward the end of the eighteenth century.41 Second, Temple’s

Empires Within  99 reference to Barber and to the latter’s undeserved bounty triggers an association with Anna Williams. She too is not named. “The old blind Lady” presents two defining markers, advanced age and ­blindness—one a handicap (or disability in today’s term), the other a deformity—which brand her as the Other potentially undeserving legatee and Barber’s partner in crime. The invocation of the oikos-genos paradigm—imposing as it does, anachronistically, an ancient framework on to a modern one—makes room for further discussion of the increasingly porous borders between filiation and affiliation, between the private and the public, and between the domestic and the imperial (Edward Said and Mike Dibb)42 at a time when full-blown empire as well as related paradigm shifts were imminent.

Transformations in the Public Sphere My reading of the Johnsonian oikos is predicated upon the clear understanding that this spatial trajectory (at once private and imperial, at once local and global) is not universally applicable and is thus a singular cultural formation; thus, the Johnsonian oikos ought to be considered as an exemplar and part of this exemplarity has to do with the emergent sensibility and rising consciousness of the category of celebrity.43 Beginning in the 1750s, in fits and starts and over almost a 40-year period, Johnson established himself as an indisputable literary and cultural celebrity. Simultaneously, the public sphere in London was undergoing change, the kind of change whose nature and parameters could and can still be debated but its manifestations cannot be denied: for Johnson and his circle, who were prime witnesses and legislators of the registers of change, life in London could not be conceptualized without reference to life elsewhere, even when that elsewhere was Scotland or Ireland and not across the seas. Johnson as celebrity encompasses an expansive register and adds value to the public figure whose private choices and decisions led to prescient contributions to the idea and the reality of a benevolent oikos. This hypothesis of the creation and sustenance of a benevolent oikos has to be understood in terms of a benevolent nation, a continuum from home to land—a continuum which has acquired considerable geo-political significance post 9.11. For us the security of the home is predicated upon the security of the “land,” even though that land is deeply invested in and dependent upon the elsewhere, morally, psychically, and economically.44 Oikos as I use it here also allows me to suggest a continuum from the head of household—Johnson—to his property, to an uncodified system of ownership and authority which this property represented, and, also, to the built space within which the household came to be established. In this private space, domesticity was not tied to bloodline. The Johnsonian

100  Empires Within oikos is a significant cultural marker, I argue, because it reflects critical elements in the “transformation of the public sphere,” which is necessarily evolutionary, and which dislocates and dislodges the inherently immobile social structures of the time (including those of class, social status, and so on). The “transformation” of the e­ ighteenth-century public sphere, which Jṻrgen Habermas and others have described, has been variously interpreted and appropriated for the purposes of diverse arguments. Disenchanted by the Habermasian formulation of the relation between privacy and the public sphere, Patricia Meyer Spacks makes the following observation, which I find helpful for reasons which I discuss below: Jṻrgen Habermas’s seminal formulation of the modern relation between public and private exemplifies the way in which what might be called the third term of privacy gets elided in discussion. Initially, he ignores the subject, defining the key concept of the “bourgeois public sphere” without reference to privacy: “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of public people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor (27).” The precursor to this development, Habermas goes on to say, involved “a public sphere in apolitical form.” . . . This apolitical sphere “provided the training ground for a critical public reflection still preoccupied with itself—a process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness” (29). Now Habermas involves privacy (I assume the equivalence of “privateness” and “privacy”) in his public-private distinction, claiming the experience of privacy as a vital precursor to the development of a new public.45 Why, according to Spacks, does this formulation of the “new public” fall short? This explanation of the “transformation” remains limited, she argues, because “[t]o value the state of privacy as a precursor to public functioning of course makes it only a means to a dramatically different end.” More to the point, she underscores, “it remains conceivable that the individual in privacy might at least explore some marginal realm of personally rather than publicly ordained standards.”46 The agency of the eighteenth-century private citizen (such as Samuel Johnson)—whether it be geared toward “self-clarification” or any other form of expression of self-interest—had the potential for expression in ways which neither Habermas nor Foucault fully accommodates; and on this point my reading of the eighteenth-century private sphere comes close to that of Patricia Meyer Spacks. The Johnsonian oikos models an exception to

Empires Within  101 the norm; but in its elision of modern frameworks of the public-­private divides and decorum, it also threatens the foundations of public authority and, simultaneously, calls attention to the universalist principles which governed private choices and “the practice of everyday living” in the eighteenth century. Is there anything “transformational” about the Johnsonian formulation of the oikos? In the eighteenth century, the element which begins to link the materiality of the private to the materiality of the public is more often than not public opinion, which, Michael McKeon has rightly pointed out, “mediates between individual and group, fixity and dynamism, direct and indirect address.”47 The materiality of space and its potential as the seat of transformation, in other words, is conceptualized and understood, even if not articulated as such, by the immaterial and fluid discursive practices and principles which undergird public opinion. McKeon does not reject Habermas’s theory of the transformation; far from it. In fact, McKeon explains how the eighteenth-century public sphere may be understood in terms that Habermas has laid out because, as most scholars would agree, it was in the eighteenth century when the resistance to social status derived from a hierarchical and preordained structure began to emerge albeit randomly and without any concerted effort on the part of any one or more entities or agencies. “Habermas’s point is that social status was no longer (as it had been) the very precondition for participating in debate and that the validity of an argument, like the assumption of merit, was not seen (as it had been) to be predicated on status.”48 The responsiveness of the public space to this new citizenry with a new impulse toward engagement in public discourse establishes what I would call the spatial dimension of public discourse. In reference to the Johnsonian oikos, then, one might consider how the private sphere and the social relations in private space might have displayed overlapping and diverging constituents—with social relations extending well beyond the borders of oikos, genos, and incorporating unknown points of origin (nātĭō) residing well beyond the borders of nation. When “social status was no longer . . . the very precondition for participating in debate,” individuals, collectively, can come together in the public sphere to voice consent or dissent, for instance. They can voice their opinions and find common grounds for scripting their opposition to authority and/or the dissatisfaction with policy and/or the frustrations which transcend the divides of class and social status. In the Habermasian construct, the individual subject is an integral, indeed an indispensable, part of the “bourgeois public sphere”; but that public sphere, consisting of the collective, comes into formation due to the individual’s growing consciousness of common interest—which forces the individual from the domain of the private to the public. “The ‘social’ could be constituted as its own sphere to the degree that on the one hand the reproduction of life took on private forms, while on the other

102  Empires Within hand the private realm as a whole assumed public relevance,” according to Habermas. The most pertinent part of the Habermasian thesis to my discussion follows immediately after this statement: “The general rules that governed interaction among private people now became a public concern.”49 The public-private distinction is never compromised as a result; to the contrary, the individual continues to operate out of self-interest (or private motivations and desires) but realizes the necessity of alignment with common goals which had to then find public expression. Private interest is thus sutured to public interest, creating a mutually sustaining paradigm which is one way to conceptualize and to locate structural transformations. A conversation with self or with family—within the oikos more broadly construed—would not yield the desired political results. The public sphere provided both the space and the common grounds for advancing a common cause. In retrospect, part of the “transformation” must be attributed to this levelling; however, “[t]he public sphere ideal of inclusiveness is not the ideological formation of a self-conscious class strategically concerned to universalize its own interest,” McKeon asserts. “It is the discovery, in a society stratified by status, that the idea of the public interest (or the national interest, or the commonwealth) has meaning only if it is premised on the conviction that interests are multiple and that no single interest—not even that of the monarch—is universal or “‘absolute’.”50 As a result of the dramatic impact of a burgeoning print culture, Michael McKeon goes on to explain, “[t]he emergent public sphere was understood by contemporaries as a virtual collectivity, a metaphorical place of assembly constituted principally by publication and its readership.” But the public sphere was also “associated with actual spaces”51—spaces which are marginalized in readings (of the public-private sphere) which gravitate toward fictional renditions and uses of space.52 Where is Clarissa raped? How can one conceptualize the dark and dangerous corners or spaces behind closed doors in Mr. B’s estate in Bedfordshire?53 Literary critics have spent an inordinate amount of time and effort on deconstructing and dissecting fictional space, and, in the process, they have endowed it with enormous referential weight. Real life was almost as tantalizing as fictional lives, especially when one considers the possibilities and probabilities surrounding the daily lives of the boarders in Johnson’s house. What makes the Johnsonian oikos so remarkable is that it became a dynamic register for the narratives of a life increasingly deemed by public intellectuals of the time to be significant. And in their search for the “real,” Johnson’s contemporary biographers were particularly privileged because they were welcomed into his private sphere where they could “find” the real man and tap into his infinite reserves of knowledge and information. Even as his celebrity among literary circles in Britain most immediately and France more tangentially began to escalate, significantly, Johnson’s oikos acquired

Empires Within  103 many of those traits we commonly associate with the eighteenth-­century public sphere: the Paris salons, the London and provincial coffee houses, and the spaces within churches such as St. George’s and St. Paul’s where crowds congregated and news and information could be freely exchanged or where debates of all sorts might ignite passion and heightened or charged emotion. 54 In these “public” spaces, religious and secular interests fused into common concerns and unified goals which facilitated political action but need not have gone in that direction; the passivity of farmers or gentlemen reading newspapers could be just as significant as the rallying cries of, for instance, the Wilkes or Gordon supporters. Can private space mimic these impulses of the public sphere and embed the same tensions and volatility of the streets and the cafes? Demarcated by the enclosed architectural space, the family collective is ostensibly ensconced in privacy and sets itself apart from the public. But the privacy of Johnson’s home was always-already compromised. As is well known to eighteenth-century scholars, he had a constant flow of visitors whose presence was imbricated with a less fluid but equally significant set of boarders. Johnson’s biographers, whether one considers John Hawkins or James Boswell or indeed Hester Lynch Thrale, all of whom had access to Johnson’s private domain so that they could r­ elate— from memory or from notes, diaries, and other documents—the inner workings of Johnson’s mind even as he interacted with a myriad people in exclusive and, in this sense, private settings. The invention of conversation as key to character is Boswell’s most original contribution, one which he perfected in his Life of Johnson without giving due credit to the novelists who first experimented with conversation and used it as a tool to dramatize meaningful interactions. Sketching masterfully the differences between conversation and dialogue, Lennard J. Davis, for instance, has argued that “novelists invented conversation.” Conversation, in other words, was first established in literature, then emulated as the norm, and “in its inscribed form as a literary phenomenon had to grow to acceptance during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” The main difference between dialogue and conversation, Davis maintains, is that “natural conversation is social, interactive, and communal by nature whereas dialogue is not.” Therefore, he concludes, “[dialogue] is monolithic, non-negotiable, and in that sense not egalitarian and democratic.” In fact, dialogue does not come close to a “rough mimesis of speech”55 because it is an artificial construct, one which has been cleaned up and whipped into shape so as to conform to a given narrative or dramatic convention. In the absence of “reality shows,” how can one recreate the lived “private” space (or exclusive exchange) and its inherently unstructured (because unseen) dimension which enables and supports domestic relations and conjugal or other close relationships? My premise is that neither biography nor indeed the historical sources which inform such subject-specific biographical narratives can capture fully the

104  Empires Within fluidity of evolving relationships, the physicality of private space, and the ways in which bodies interact in, define, design, and accommodate each other in private space. Samuel Johnson is one of the best “characters” in literary history56 because his “life” is so fascinating that it receives more attention than his works. Reconstructed by Boswell, for whom both John Hawkins and Mrs. Thrale are archrivals, Johnson’s “Life” was meant to be a factual record. As a result, his story epitomizes the pitfalls inherent in any retrospective view which purports to be “truth,”57 by transcending the divide between the public personae and his domestic/private space. Scholars tend to agree that Boswell’s own pursuit of moral action is thus reflected in the “life” of his subject in whom he looks for (and thus finds inevitably) those enabling qualities which were important to both biographer and subject. Due to the collective efforts of his biographers, Johnson has been described as a monument because a monument is “a rallying point for a community; it must be the focus of a large and usually diffuse cultural will, the center of a network of imaginary relationships and real desires.” The Age of Augustus is thus quintessentially also the Age of Johnson; he is one and many, or so the mythology contends. Extending further this point about monumentality, Kevin Hart goes on to observe that those who go to the Johnson Birthplace Museum in Lichfield “move with visible relief from the grand to the tiny, from the public to the private.” Thus, in the museum at least, what is “a public property, a national heritage, an official face of the British culture” is also, endearingly, domestic and familiar. 58 Johnson’s life, in its exemplarity and its multiple avenues of filiation, not only precedes but also hoodwinks the historiography which frames it after the fact.59 It is as though the ‘real’ and ‘lived’ (or experiential) life anticipates and preempts the telling of the story and robs the constructed narratives of their autonomy.

The Anthropologist at Home The town house in Georgian London has attracted substantial scholarly interest in recent years. In discussions of the architecture of town houses, scholars confront the same problems as literary and cultural critics who study biography: how can one recuperate the life which was lived within the house, let alone assess how it was lived? Moreover, one might also ask how the private space—the house—was used by the tenants, what their attitudes to it might have been, and how or whether they perceived entering into a relationship with it. Inanimate but at the same time evolving and malleable, the space within the house is the primordial site of domestic arrangements and relationships. Rachel Stewart observes that in the eighteenth century “the house’s use comprised much more than how life was lived in it on a day-to-day basis, or even how it served special occasions, and included how it functioned in the context of the

Empires Within  105 family relations, financial, legal and property transactions and the market, as well as in the construction of personal identity.” In other words, the eighteenth-century “town” house had more than just a single role; it served multiple purposes and was not necessarily only temporary or only for show.60 Very clearly, Samuel Johnson’s “town” houses provided serial stability,61 were modest, and suitable for his focus on work and conversation—conversation with the boarders in his house and visitors such as Sir John Hawkins, later James Boswell, Joshua Reynolds, David Garrick, and many others. These visitors’ presence and conversation intersected at times with the conversations with the boarders, the latter a distinct group of individuals whose presence symbolized among other things Johnson’s philanthropic sensibility. Besides Barber, the Johnson oikos included Anna Williams, the blind Welsh poet, Dr. Robert L ­ evett, a mostly intoxicated quack, Elizabeth Desmoulins, Poll Carmichael (who might have been a prostitute), and others. The story of Johnsonian interiority might be conceptualized as the performance which is witnessed in private spaces, where he lived and wrote, as well as in the recesses of his mind which he revealed through his works and words and which his biographers continue to mine and to draw out. The production of this interiority or an inscription or record of it—involving numerous spectators or witnesses to his life—was thus an arduous task and one which was believed to be linked to Johnson’s privation. The indigent and the itinerant shadowed Johnson, who was both although not always. John Hawkins adopted for the purpose of writing Johnson’s biography an impersonal and unforgiving tone, one which was bereft of any empathy for his subject but, unwittingly, he dwelled upon the inner workings of Johnson’s mind, his privacy, and the choices he made in his domestic relations. Hawkins’s many annoying digressions—from a postmodern perspective, his hypertexts—were not just symptoms of his aversion to linearity; frequently, these were forays into the psychology of his subject. So, for instance, after the death of his wife in 1752 Johnson, his biographers note, became inconsolable. Hawkins’s description of this significant event is characteristically acerbic and some of it goes as follows: The melancholy, which seized Johnson, on the death of his wife, was not, in degree, such as usually follows the deprivation of near relations and friends; it was of the blackest and deepest kind: . . . the apparition of his departed wife was altogether of a terrific kind, and hardly afforded him a hope that she was in a state of happiness.62 Dramatic and intending to capture Johnson’s state of mind, Hawkins conjures up an “apparition” which would create an image of a man haunted by his past, a past which was not happy but tortured and yet a repository of nostalgia, valuable in retrospect. Instead of elaborating

106  Empires Within on the circumstances surrounding the death of Mrs. Johnson and what transpired right after, Hawkins delves into the biography of Anna ­Williams. This detour establishes how the exit of Johnson’s wife is followed right after by the entrance of Williams, a “constant companion of Mrs. ­Johnson for some time before her decease,” one who then became a permanent resident of the Johnson household.63 Hawkins relates ­Williams’s position in what I am calling the Johnsonian oikos thus: Johnson’s wife had “consigned to his care a friend of her own sex, a person of very extraordinary endowments, whom, for a benevolent purpose  .  .  . Johnson had invited to a residence in his house.”64 And in this sketch we find that Johnson’s wife had been replaced by a person with severe disability—­reinforcing the idea of darkness, of the complete lack of the possibility of future comfort.65 Circa 1740, 10 years after moving to London with her father Zachariah Williams, who was a surgeon, physician, and mathematician, Williams developed cataracts in both her eyes. Eventually, she was “totally deprived of her sight” due to complications arising out of a cataract operation. The exact date of the operation is hard to ascertain from Hawkins’s account although he had accompanied Anna Williams to “Mr. Samuel Sharp, a senior surgeon of Guy’s hospital”; therefore, Hawkins had firsthand information about the operation and its failure and he goes on to say the following: For the convenience of performing the intended operation, Johnson took her home, and . . . kept her as the partner of his dwelling till he removed into chambers, first in Gray’s Inn, and next in the Temple. Afterwards, in 1766, upon his taking a house in Johnson’s Court in Fleet-Street, he invited her thither, and in that, and in his last house at Bolt Court, she successively dwelt for the remainder of her life.66 By this account, Williams had thus lived with Samuel Johnson, whether continuously or not, for approximately three decades. Johnson’s inconsolable grief at his wife’s death is then described by John Hawkins in considerable detail and without an iota of sympathy— some of which goes as follows: Those who were best acquainted with them both, wondered that Johnson could derive no comfort from the usual resources reflections on the conditions of materiality, the instability of human happiness, resignation to the divine will, and other topics; and the more, when they considered, that their marriage was not one of those which inconsiderate young people call love-matches, and that she was more than old enough to be his mother; that, as their union had not been productive of children, the medium of a new relation between them was wanting; that here inattention to some, at least, of the duties of a wife, were evident in the person of her husband, whose negligence

Empires Within  107 of dress seemed never to have received the least correction from her, and who, I the sordidness of his apparel, and the complexion of his linen, even shamed her. This uncompromising if not scathing critique of Mrs. Johnson is carried over to an equally negative critique of her husband whose complicity in matters of his own personal hygiene, Hawkins suggests, made both look suspect in the eyes of the outside world—and this point becomes particularly significant in view of Johnson’s inconsolable grief. The materiality of the body is thus sutured to the materiality of a mind even as the sordidness of the linen stands in for both. Hawkins then claims that his are but reasonable doubts: “For these reasons I have often been inclined to think, that if this fondness of Johnson for his wife was not dissembled, it was a lesson that he had learned by rote, and that, when he practiced it, he knew not where to stop till he became ridiculous.”67 This record of Hawkins as eyewitness is significant. There is no record of what Mrs. Anna Williams thought of this mode of grieving68; and Francis Barber and James Boswell were yet to appear on the scene. Biographers of Johnson, including but not limited to Peter Martin, have argued for the need to emphasize Johnson’s lifelong struggle with varying degrees of privation, an economic condition which, some have argued, led to his psychological imbalance; his propensity for melancholy is well known. Martin D. Yeager has summarized succinctly what John Hawkins and, more recently, Peter Martin have observed in this respect: Each of Johnson’s major projects—the Dictionary, the Rambler and the Idler essays, the edition of Shakespeare, and the Lives of the Poets—Martin sees as a product of financial need and as a means to stave off melancholy. The letter to Chesterfield on the publication of the Dictionary, which signaled the end of an age of patronage, represents the same pride in poverty as well as arrogance that characterized Johnson at Oxford. The bleakness of Rasselas, written to defray the cost of his mother’s funeral in 1759, is attributed to Johnson’s dependency and melancholia. . . . Martin sees the life in terms of two forces: melancholy and poverty.69 The embodiment of privation, the boarders came from radically different socioeconomic circumstances and backgrounds, led to the creation within the Johnson home of a genos which is not only unique but also quintessentially modern. The uniqueness of this genos can be described as follows: this genos comprises categories which transcend the thoroughly institutionalized master-servant model of engagement and service to be found in eighteenth-century homes on both sides of the Atlantic. Had Johnson harbored Francis Barber alone, and there were

108  Empires Within no other boarders in his house, the spatial dimension of this relationship would have been considered as standard practice and the “private” coordinates of an illustrious life could then have been reconstructed in the context of the slave trade and its extra-commercial value found in various models of domestic indentureship following emancipation. But this was not the case here. Markman Ellis has recently drawn attention to another exemplary relationship in the same period: “Over nearly two years, between July 1766 and March 1768, a correspondence, and subsequent friendship, blossomed between Ignatius Sancho—‘a Negro, a Butler, and a Grocer’—and Laurence Sterne, a clergyman, a novelist, and a literary celebrity.” This relationship, while not predicated upon a master-servant model, was built upon the premise of shared interest: “To their contemporaries,” Ellis notes, “such a connection was unusual enough to appear a kind of wonder of the age, not only crossing firmly demarcated boundaries of status, education, and race but also revealing what they shared: an enthusiasm for, and ambition within, the cultural elite of London society.”70 This particular “wonder of the age” was produced by common intellectual pursuits. In the case of Johnson and his boarders—including Francis Barber—the gap in intellectual interest and accomplishment was vast and incommensurable.

The Spatial Dimension of Patriarchy, Property, and Inequality But what does the bond of privation do to those time-honored values of hierarchy and subordination which Johnson championed in the Rambler, for instance? Can these values be upheld and sustained in the private sphere where space is finite and restrictive, where voices carry and bodies collide, and where the collective psyches must accommodate the pressures of melancholy, clashes of culture, and other tensions endemic to shared space? Johnson’s philanthropy—which is one way in which the boarders’ presence could be explained—produced a new model of civic engagement in the private domain. Any description of public life in what has been described as the “culture city” must accommodate, in other words, models of privacy and exemplarity (even if unique) in private associations and relationships. The widening purview of charity (informed by Christian piety) facilitated engagement between the rich and the poor in a number of areas. Roy Porter has pointed out the various ways in which “practical piety found abundant expression in energetic philanthropy in a century notable for charitable foundations.” Private philanthropy and bequests led to the establishment of five new London hospitals: Westminster General Infirmary (1719), Guy’s Hospital (1725), St. George’s Hospital (1733), The Foundling Hospital (1739), The London Hospital in Whitechapel (1752), and the Middlesex Infirmary (1745, with extensions and

Empires Within  109 additions in 1754 and 1791). Guy’s had a wing for the insane. In addi­ ying-In tion, a number of charities were set up, including the British L Hospital (1749), St. Luke’s Hospital for the insane (1751), and the Lock Hospital for venereal diseases (1746), among numerous others.71 Thus, a wide range of public institutions, symptomatic of an exuberant culture of philanthropy—one which was neither entirely secular nor ­religious—presented a solid resistance to widespread poverty, squalor, and disease in eighteenth-century London. The point to note here is that these institutions were public in nature and sponsored by well-to-do Londoners including, for instance, Henry Hoare, David Garrick, and Fredric Handel. Set against this backdrop of public philanthropy, the Johnsonian model of philanthropy was not only unique but also one which contemporaries like John Hawkins could neither fully understand nor explain. On the subject of “intimacies,” Hawkins saw a major discrepancy between Johnson’s philosophy (derived from Dr. Frank Nicholls) and his practice of selecting “associates.” Hawkins faults Johnson on two accounts. For Johnson, Hawkins pointed out, [i]t was a point of wisdom to form intimacies, and to choose for our friends only persons of known worth and integrity; and that to do so had been the rule of his life. It is, therefore, difficult to account for the conduct of Johnson in the choice of many of his associates, and particularly of those who, when his circumstances became easy he suffered to intrude on him. Of these he had some at bed and board, who had elbowed through the world, and subsisted by lying, begging, and shifting; all which he knew, but seem to think never the worse of them. In his endeavours to promote the interests of people of this class, he, in some instances, went such lengths as were hardly consistent with that integrity, which he manifested on all other occasions; for he would frequently, by letters, recommend those to credit, who would obtain it by no other means, and thereby enabled them to contract debts which he had good reason to suspect, if they ever could, they never would pay.72 In this decision to take on boarders, Johnson, according to Hawkins, lacked wisdom. He lacked wisdom because he had taken in as boarders entities who had no “integrity” (a word Hawkins uses twice in this passage, once to point to the general principle which Johnson professed to espouse and, next, to describe Johnson’s lack of wisdom, which displayed his lack of integrity). Johnson lacked wisdom also because he catered to the “interests of people of this class.” His lack of integrity was thus inextricably linked to the shortcomings of these “people” who relied upon him for credit which they could never secure without his recommendation.

110  Empires Within The second related point Hawkins outlines is as follows: “These connections exposed him to trouble and incessant solicitation, which he bore well enough, but his inmates were enemies to his peace, and occasioned him great disquiet.” He then describes the cause of the “disquiet” thus: “[T]he jealousy that subsisted among them rendered his dwelling irksome to him and he seldom approached it, after an evening’s conversation abroad, but with the dread of finding it a scene of discord, and of having his ears filled with the complaints of Mrs. Williams of Frank’s neglect of his duty and inattention to the interests of his master, and of Frank against Mrs. Williams, for the authority she assumed over him, and exercised with an unwarrantable severity.” As Hawkins’s diatribe continues in the same section of the biography, the reader is asked to consider the ingratitude of the inmates and their continuous squabbles: “Even those intruders who had taken shelter under his roof, and who, in his absence from home, brought thither their children, found cause to murmur; their provision of food was scanty, or their dinners ill dressed; all which he chose to endure rather than put an end to their clamours, by ridding his house of such thankless and troublesome guests.” To drive home the point about their utter ingratitude, he embellishes the insult with injury: “[E]ven [Robert] Levett would sometimes insult him; and Mrs. Williams, in her paroxysms of rage, has been known to drive him from her presence.” The punchline, framed as a question, appears as follows: “Who, that reflects on Johnson’s pusillanimity in these instances, can reconcile it to that spirit which prompted him, or with those endowments which enabled him to maintain a superiority over all with whom he conversed?”73 The equilibrium of the oikos, and its utility as social text infused by philanthropy, depended upon Johnson maintaining his inherently superior status and, simultaneously, ensuring that his boarders would respect borders, that they would occupy a position subordinate to his. Hawkins outlines a virtual collapse of the “order of things,” which was in direct contradiction to Johnson’s own formulation of the thesis related to hierarchy. Consider in this context James Boswell’s report that “[o]n his favorite subject of subordination, Johnson said, ‘So far is it from being true that men are naturally equal, that no two people can be half an hour together, but one shall acquire an evident superiority over the other’.”74 Broadly, both Johnson and Boswell subscribed to the view that hierarchy orders civil society, with the king adorning the top and the pauper inhabiting the bottom. Importantly, and for the purposes of the discussion here, it helps to point out what Kevin Hart and others have done that “Johnson’s interest in subordination is centered on what is needed for the steady governance of a country, and while that requires the principle and the reality of an ultimate power it is no justification for absolutism.” Hart then cites the most relevant segment from Rasselas in which “Imlac tells Rasselas that ‘Oppression is, in the Abissinian dominions,

Empires Within  111 neither frequent nor tolerated but no form of government has been yet discovered, by which cruelty can be wholly prevented.’”75 In an ideal society, in other words, oppression cannot be tolerated if only because the divine right of kings endows upon them the power to maintain peace and distribute justice. For Johnson, this ideal is always-already present even if not always in its perfect state. What complicates the Johnsonian model of oikos-genos might be described in the following way: although Johnson argued vociferously against Rousseau’s hypothesis about inequality, he seems to have had, more or less, the same understanding as Rousseau of why even a wise man could not dismiss fortune and rank. Johnson’s reference to savage versus civil society appears at first to be against any position which begins with the hypothesis of an untainted and pure life lived in nature (and like a savage); but a close examination of his position reveals clearly his pragmatism and the extent to which he came close to the position articulated by Rousseau (in the Discourse on Inequality): “Now, Sir, in civilized society, external advantages make us more respected. A man with a good coat upon his back meets with a better reception than he who has a bad one. Sir, you may analyze this, and say what is there in it? But that will avail you nothing, for it is part of a general system.” What follows sounds like a digression and goes as follows: Pound St. Paul’s Church into atoms, and consider any single atom; it is to be sure, good for nothing: but put all these atoms together, and you have St. Paul’s Church. So it is with human felicity, which is made up of many ingredients, each of which may be shewn to be very insignificant. In civilized society, personal merit will not serve you so much as money will. Sir, you may make the experiment. Go into the street, and give one man a lecture in morality, and another a shilling, and see which will respect you more.76 The corruption of civil, urban society—which manifested itself in people’s groveling allegiance to money, wealth, and all sorts of tokens of affluence—was equally problematic to both Johnson and Rousseau. For Rousseau, Patrick Coleman explains, as society moves away from a state of nature toward a state of organized agriculture “the natural inequalities of strength and intelligence that were of little importance in the state of nature produce more enduring effects.” Ownership of property leads to demarcations actualized and symbolized by the fence. And “[t]he fence is the permanent sign of individual appropriation and of the neighbor’s recognition of that gesture.” For Rousseau, property is a d ­ ouble-edged sword because it “marks a deep form of alienation. It requires of men an involuntary and permanent preoccupation with other people.” Slaves to property, owners become self-centered (or alienated) and also interdependent and, therefore, naturally prone to corruption. “In the new world of property,

112  Empires Within men will only work for others if they ‘find their own profit’ in doing so.”77 It would be hard to distinguish between Johnson’s position on property and the one espoused by Rousseau if we consider, for instance, Boswell’s record of a conversation held on 20 July 1763: Why, now, there is stealing; why should it be thought a crime? When we consider by what unjust methods property has been often acquired, and that what was unjustly got it must be unjust to keep, where is the harm in one man’s taking the property of another from him? Besides, Sir, when we consider the bad use that many people make of their property, and how much better use the thief may make of it, it may be defended as a very allowable practice. Yet, Sir, the experience of mankind has discovered stealing to be so very bad a thing, that they make no scruple to hang a man for it. When I was running about this town a very poor fellow, I was a great arguer for the advantages of poverty; but I was, at the same time, very sorry to be poor. . . So you hear people talking how miserable a King must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place.78 Johnson’s reference to the “unjust methods” by which “property has been often acquired” introduces the strong possibility of his use of “property” to include material possessions in general, that is, both human property and landed property. “Bad use” of property—whatever his precise meaning in this context—would, in any event, position his own use of property for philanthropic purposes to be at the opposite end of the moral spectrum with which he identified strongly. Embedded in this narrative thread is the notion of unequal justice where the punishment is disproportionate to the offence and also, a related point which appears to be a deeply held belief, the notion of inherent inequalities which form the basis of civil society. In this series of conversations which took place, according to Boswell, circa July 1763, Johnson does not bring up the issue of slavery and nor does he tease out the many nuances which conjoin the issues of inequality, property, and enslavement. In September 1777, however, Boswell records Johnson as presenting a far more explicit if not detailed position on slavery: “He had always been very zealous against slavery in every form, in which I, with all deference, thought that he discovered a ‘zeal without knowledge.’” Boswell’s audacity is writ large in this instance when he describes Johnson’s zeal as lacking (presumably experiential or direct) knowledge of slavery while his own position on the subject remains unstated. On the same day, Boswell reports Johnson as making the following, fairly definitive, remarks: It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal; and very difficult to imagine how one would be subjected to

Empires Within  113 another but by violent compulsion. An individual may, indeed, forfeit his liberty by a crime; but he cannot by that crime forfeit the liberty of his children. What is true of a criminal seems true likewise of a captive. . .. If we should admit, what perhaps with more reason be denied, that there are certain relations between man and man which may make slavery necessary and just, yet it can never be proved that he who is now suing for his freedom ever stood in any of those relations. He is certainly subject by no law, but that of violence, to his present master; who pretends no claim to his obedience, but that he bought him from a merchant of slaves, whose right to sell him never was examined. Inflexible and intractable, Johnson might be seen here as a Shylock in the court scene of The Merchant of Venice where Shakespeare, through the vehicle of the villain, asks how Venice or indeed European society could claim to be just when slavery quite blatantly contradicts the very premise of a just society. Ergo, slavery defies “reason” if we consider both law and liberty to be the fundamental premise of that just society. The justifications for slavery cannot be entertained under any circumstances; therefore, the absence of challenging the status quo—which is the same as acquiescence—cannot be defended on any grounds, pragmatic and moral. Johnson’s persistent references in this context to Jamaica in particular and the West Indies in general reveal his emotional and rational opposition to the means and ends of acquisition, ownership, expansion, and property in the colonial context. Even in the absence of direct and experiential knowledge of the actual conditions of slaves in the colonies, Johnson could, in the London of the late eighteenth century, know about those conditions and be able to operationalize his resistance to illegitimate authority (which was based upon phony justification) by acting out that resistance. Governed by the principle that “no man is by nature the property of another,” Johnson is clear on the point that justice has to uphold that which is a natural right of man.79 Given Johnson’s position on the matter of slavery which he saw as standing in stark opposition to inalienable human rights, his benevolence (as manifested in his treatment of his various boarders including Barber) is not difficult to understand. In his case, there was complete conformity between the ideal and the action which mimicked the ideal and made it a different kind of manifest destiny, albeit in a small and largely immeasurable way. What makes the story of the boarders and, in particular, Johnson’s unusual mentorship of Francis Barber so remarkable is that this story unfolds outside the boundaries of an institution; it is, in this sense, not charity, which was mostly institutionalized, especially in cases where charity would exceed, say, the limits of giving alms to the poor. This story, in fact, unfolds in the private domain—­beginning at Gough Square circa 1752—where Johnson had the authority to cast

114  Empires Within aside, ignore, and even flout both class and ethnicity as being essential to the creation and sustenance of an oikos.

The Conduit for Publicity: Barber’s Role in the Production of Johnson As by-product of both technology (photography in particular) and advancements in the natural and social sciences, the study of slaves emerged in the mid-twentieth-century American academy within the context of not only anthropology but also biology—the two fields most committed to the study of evolution, human nature, and racial difference. One such study has received recent attention in the mainstream American media and part of the report in The New York Times (5 March 2017) goes as follows: “In 1976, archivists at Harvard’s natural history museum opened a drawer and discovered a haunting portrait of a shirtless enslaved man named Renty, gazing sorrowfully but steadily at the camera. Taken on a South Carolina plantation in 1850, it had been used by the Harvard biologist Louis Agassiz to formulate his now-discredited ideas about racial difference.” The anthropological daguerreotypes developed by Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–1873) were the result of his field trip to Columbia, South Carolina (circa March 1850). In both the fullface and the profile versions of Agassiz’s daguerreotypes, the “enslaved man named Renty” appears shirtless. And these images were part of the discussion forty years later at Harvard university, initiated by its current president, “to explore the long-neglected connections between universities and slavery.”80 A little less than a hundred years earlier, far removed from the South Carolina plantation where Agassiz conducted his anthropological research and in the heart of the consumer culture in London, Francis Barber’s portrait appeared. This portrait of a black man by Joshua Reynolds—identified by some to be Francis Barber—presents a striking contrast to the logics of Agassiz’s anthropology because the portrait represented the category of the black man rather than a specific subject with an identifiable history. Given the paucity of models who could sit for such a portrait, Francis Barber (or perhaps Reynolds’s own servant) supplied what might be regarded, therefore, as Reynold’s empty typology. Barber was never an anthropological subject in that anthropology is always predicated upon the dichotomy of observer/recorder and observed/recorded; instead, I would argue that he was a vital component in the technological cog which led, specifically, to the production of ­Johnson—a production which neither a domestic servant nor indeed a friend could have engineered single-handedly. The primordial ­eighteenth-century biographical subject—Boswell’s Johnson—could not have been completed without the help of Francis Barber who had unique

Empires Within  115 private access to Johnson due entirely to a new and emergent concept of oikos and genos. The Johnson-Barber relationship, circumscribed by domesticity and inheritance, dislodged and shifted if not entirely destroyed the deeply entrenched modality of servitude (in a way which comes close to the Jeffersonian model of colonial engagement). James Boswell was in Scotland when Johnson died. John Hawkins crafted a parsimonious funeral.81 Along with Joshua Reynolds and William Scott, Hawkins was an executor of Johnson’s will; and, as an executor, he had temporary access to Johnson’s diaries and papers. For Boswell, from his Scottish distance, the access to these papers could take only one route: through Francis Barber, who was the residuary legatee in Johnson’s will. On behalf of Barber, therefore, he crafted a quasi-legal letter and instructed Barber to deliver it to all three executors. That letter was worded as follows: Sir: As residuary legatee of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson I do now request that his Diary and every other book or paper in his handwriting in the possession of his Executors or any of them be delivered to____ on my account as I understand them to be an undoubted part of my property (emphasis mine).82 What makes Boswell’s wording of Barber’s claim to Johnson’s “property” so enormously significant is the tacit acknowledgment on the part of Boswell of Barber’s unique position and the biographer’s reliance upon this indispensable source. Hawkins would not, on his own volition, deliver these papers to Boswell; but with the law on his side, Barber could and did. These papers—“in his handwriting” and thus manuscripts—­ constituted a critical mass of source materials without which the production of Johnson would be incomplete and thus the mediatized image of Johnson would be less compelling. Frances Barber’s reply to Boswell (dated 9 July 1787) is quoted in full by Michael Bundock and some of it goes as follows: Sir: I had the unspeakable satisfaction of receiving your Letter on Saturday last . . . and agreeable to your request with a heart full of joy and gratitude. I took Pen in hand to enform (sic) you that I am happy to find there is still remaining a friend who has the memory of my late Master at heart that will endeavor to vindicate his cause in opposition to the unfriendly proceedings of his Enimies (sic); as I myself am incapable of to undertake such a task. The aspersions Sir John has thrown out against my Master as having been his own Murderer are intirely groundless.83 On the day Johnson passed away, several visitors stopped by, including John Hoole and Miss Morris; however, only two individuals were present

116  Empires Within at the time of his death: Francis Barber and John Desmoulins.84 With the exception of Desmoulins, another boarder in the Johnson household, no one else could demolish Hawkins’s claim—and this Barber does quite decisively in his letter to Boswell. Barber was determined to quash what he regarded as “that impious production of Sir John Hawkins relating to the Life of my Dear Master”85; and, in this endeavor of course, he had the full support of Boswell. Their interests were aligned and during that slice of time Barber shared with Boswell a power derived from full access to private space, continuous interaction with the subject, a common “cause,” and firsthand knowledge of Samuel Johnson.86 Johnson’s relationship with Barber presents us with at least one conundrum which may have to be the dead-end street which no ­mediation— not even Boswell’s—can open up in order to resolve. In Johnson’s exchange with Boswell about the British expeditions to the South Seas,87 Jonathan Lamb finds “a denial of every principle of anthropological research: native informants are ignorant; a savage life is only the sum of what can be collected from an imperfect memory; mythology is a fiction invented either by the savages themselves or by those who wish to render them interesting; there is no truly primitive state of savagery to be observed.”88 Given Johnson’s sentiments in general and the broad thrust of his philosophy as expressed in the Life, one would expect from him not just a naïve repudiation of primitive society—premised upon his belief that fieldwork is useless because the subject is unworthy of scientific ­exploration89 —but an informed judgment based on direct observation or study. That is as far as we can go, given the evidence. His disenchantment with or lack of interest in the seductions of elsewhere90 did not impede his desire to live with a young man who was both actually and also visually from that elsewhere, from a place and space where savages roam. Undue and unthinking allegiances Johnson felt to the past may seem to us to be incongruous with his brand of cosmopolitanism; but nothing in his writings either justifies or explains his choices regarding his domestic life and how he chose to order it through disorder and complete irreverence for established cultural practices of British bourgeois society in the eighteenth century. McKeon’s hypothesis related to the “motives for domestication” is important for my purposes here: “If modernity involves the systematic multiplication and authorization of private entities—rights, opinions, interests, desires, ethical subjectivities, genders—it also is obliged to reconceive the nature of the realm of the public, which can, precisely by virtue of its impersonality, acknowledge and comprehend this indefinite potential of private entities.” What the Johnsonian oikos demonstrates is that “indefinite potential of private entites.” The private individual plays an incommensurable double role, one inside and one outside; thus, any judgment of character or action of this entity would necessitate collapsing those borders of private/public. Moreover, in the case of the

Empires Within  117 Johnsonian brand of privacy we find a conglomeration of the illustrious (visitors) and the indigent (domestic), the celebrity and the commoner, the famous and the pauper in ways which blur the distinctions of a range of divides. That which is private could become public and vice versa; that which is illustrious loses some of its luster through domestic interactions and entanglements. In addition to the fluidity of exchange between the public and the private spheres, what emerges in the eighteenth century is the idea that the realm of the private, as biography most aptly captures, is also the realm of the ethical because this is the space where ‘prudence’ and ‘virtue’ (or their absence) find expression in a common humanity. So, for instance, public discourse could be rehearsed at home and religious or legislative edicts put into practice (or not) in the private domain by homeowners and private citizens for the purpose of living ethically and according to the rules established in the publics, by civil society. Inevitably, biography, dogged as it is by the subjectivities of the biographer who relies upon and draws much of its sustenance from the realm of the domestic, is not as stable as one would want it to be.91 Positioned at the crossroads between the known and the unknown, between the familiar and the unfamiliar, both biography and anthropology thrive due to this tendentious space of resistance from both ends of a porous public-private divide.

Notes 1 Helen Deutsch has shown that biography as recuperative act is driven by “author love.” See Deutsch, Loving Dr. Johnson, specifically “Introduction,” 1–41. 2 One could legitimately argue that source materials have an autonomy which biography appropriates in order to authenticate its foundation. On this subject, see Marshall Waingrow, ed. The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson (Yale UP, 2001), xxviii. 3 While the act of mediation involves selecting, filtering, sifting, sorting, and arranging, a narrative which is mediatized is processed further. The latter is consciously crafted with an audience in mind, especially a public audience, one which lacks the perspective of the domestic. Therefore, all mediatized material is mediated, but not all mediated materials are disseminated for a wide (mass) audience. Mediatized objects thus enter into the realm of the consumer culture as a product with an exchange value. 4 Here I am making a distinction between individuals with knowledge of Johnson (sources) and the record of events and occurrences as well as contemporary legal or personal documents and diaries (source materials). 5 Scholarship on Johnson in the 1980s, and indeed, all biographies written by his contemporaries tended to focus on literary form and constructed “character” by examining the attitudes and opinions expressed in their works. These works of criticism and biography continued to pledge allegiance to an inflexible correspondence between works and life—privileging the written word and building character through the authors’ words. The best among these acknowledged the problems inherent in insisting, say, upon Boswell as

118  Empires Within a reliable narrator. So, for instance, Ralph W. Rader noted that “[t]he wellknown, often answered, but still recurring charge that Boswell was nothing but a tape recorder is a ghost that ought to be permanently laid, but it will continue to haunt us until we perceive with more clarity and certainly than we yet have that Boswell’s book is . . . not a recording of fact but always and everywhere an implicitly affecting artistic selection and construction of an aspect of fact.” Rader’s critique of how Boswell dramatizes “scenes” is particularly masterful in the analysis of the Johnson-Wilkes meeting. But true to the title of his essay, Rader continues to drill into “literary form” and the analysis of this scene is thus heavily reliant upon Boswell’s superior syntactical maneuvers. Thus, a critique of the aestheticization of a “real” event does not go far enough to consider the culture where the contrasting and competing values of Wilkes and Johnson might have produced an acceptable/ unacceptable binary in modes of civil discourse. Wilkes’s public behavior had to be adjusted Johnson’s character had to be revealed. With the help of Boswell, Johnson in this case at least comes out the clear winner. See Rader, “Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson,” James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, ed. Harold Bloom (Chelsea House Publisher, 1986), specifically 11 and 22–24. For an example of a biography which focuses exclusively on the writer’s works, establishing a clear correspondence between works and life, see Carol Houlihan Flynn, Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters (Princeton UP, 1982). 6 The distinction between privacy and domesticity that I am making is as follows: private moments can be enjoyed with friends in a salon or tavern while the sphere of the domestic is positioned within the house which is home. 7 “Eighteenth-century England did not originate the concept of privacy, but the evidence indicates a new level of attention to it during the period. Such evidence includes architectural history, which obviously bears on questions of physical privacy.” See Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (U of Chicago P, 2003), 6. 8 See Michael McKeon, “Domestication as Pedagogy,” The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Johns ­Hopkins UP, 2005), 337–42 and specifically 338. 9 Ibid., 118. 10 For a detailed discussion of polis and oikos, see McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity, 7–10. 11 See Walter Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson (Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975; rpt. 1977), 124. 12 Bate, Samuel Johnson, 125. 13 See Peter Martin, Samuel Johnson: A Biography (Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2008), 120 and 538n. Martin’s sources are James Boswell and Hester Lynch Piozzi (Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson. LLD during the Last Twenty Years of His Life, 1786). Reynolds’s portrait of Samuel Johnson (housed in the National Portrait Gallery) appeared in the first edition of The Dictionary (1755); therefore, Reynolds was of course influenced by the massive intellectual achievement of his subject while Hogarth’s first glimpse of Johnson was probably in the 1730s, in Richardson’s London residence, and well before Johnson became a celebrity in London. 14 This scene has been thoroughly mediated first by Boswell and then by Marshall Waingrow, Walter Jackson Bate, and, most recently, by Helen Deutsch. Pointing to the same episode, Helen Deutsch has argued that “Johnson’s verbal mastery here becomes the subject of ‘display’ to the artist’s eye, a shockingly visible figure against the background of his bodily

Empires Within  119

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

23 24

25 26 27

28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

incongruity. . . . [T]his vision of the great man is profoundly disorienting since here the objectifying eye scrutinizes not the physical antics of a known genius but rather Johnson’s defining and usually disembodied trait, his eloquence.” See Deutsch, 101–02. The limitations of Boswell as witness to the life of Johnson have, of course, received attention. So, for instance, Rader observed the following: “The creative and unifying role which Boswell’s internalized idea of Johnson plays in the Life can be forcefully demonstrated from his treatment of those portions of the life in which he himself had played no part. Critics have not sufficiently noticed the very many occasions when Boswell shows his dramatic talent quite independent of his memory.” See Rader, “Literary Form in ­Factual Narrative,” 13. Martin, Samuel Johnson, 127. Ibid., 127–28. Quoted in Martin, 128. Ibid., 128. Ibid., 128. See below for my discussion of “motion picture” in relation to parts of ­M ichael Bundock’s biography of Francis Barber. See, for instance, Peter Martin’s chapter on “Tetty and ‘Amorous Propensities’,” 253–63. On the subject of limitations in the Boswell biography, see James L. Clifford and Donald J. Greene, Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies (U of Minnesota P, 1970). Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy, 115. Michael Bundock correctly attributes the greater visibility of Equiano (when compared to Barber) to his biography The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) and also to the investigative work of Vincent Carretta. See Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir (Yale UP, 2015), 84. The title of Bundock’s book mimics delightfully the narrative which Barber might have written; both “interesting narrative” (Equiano) and “true story” (Barber) reflect the eighteenth century’s investment in curiosity and the verifiability of experience. Jerry White, A Great and Monstrous Thing (Harvard UP, 2013), 127. Ibid., 127. In reference to Barber’s service in the Royal Navy, Bundock observes that “[i]t is not known whether at this period in his life Barber encountered prejudice or hostility” due to the color of his skin. Bundock, The Fortunes of Francis Barber, 82. Bundock, 1. See, for instance, Jerry White, “Samuel Johnson’s London—Britons,” A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard UP, 2013), 85–123. Bundock, 1. Ibid., 1 See White, 89. I refer here to Michel de Certeau, “Spatial Stories,” The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (U of California P, 1984; rpt. 1988), 115–30 and specifically 118. See Robert J. Allison, ed. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, written by himself with related documents (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), specifically 222–25. Bundock, 179.

120  Empires Within 36 Ibid., 180. 37 See Samuel Johnson, The Rambler 60, ed. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, vols. III–V (Yale UP, 1969). Pertinent in this context is Greg Clingham’s observation that “Hawkins’s biography of Johnson did not engage what Johnson himself called, in Rambler 60, “the domestick privacies,” “those parallel circumstances, and kindred images, to which we readily conform our minds,” achieved “by an act of imagination, that realizes the event however fictitious, or approximate or however remote.” See Clingham, “Hawkins, Biography, and the Law” in Martine Watson Brownley, ed. Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Johnson (Bucknell UP, 2012), 137. 38 Johnson moved to Gough Square circa 1747 or even earlier. From 1748 or earlier till her death in 1752, Elizabeth Johnson lived in their home in Hampstead. 39 Quoted by Bundock, 178. 40 Quoted in Waingrow, 35. 41 See my discussion of Johnson in the same terms on page 4: he was both one and (stood in for) many. 42 For a discussion of filiation-affiliation in postcolonial discourse, watch Makato Sato and Mike Dibb, directors. Edward Said: The Last Interview. Multiple Formats. 8 September 2009. 43 Johnson did not consciously create his persona to acquire and to have celebrity; rather, his contemporaries endowed him with a degree of attention consistent with celebrity status and conferred him the respect that his works increasingly demanded. His celebrity is thus in marked opposition to the self-­ fashioning of actors and others having celebrity status described so astutely by Julia Fawcett, Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696– 1801 (U of Michigan P, 2016). For a brief overview of the “autobiographical performances of eighteenth-century celebrities” and how these performances shaped modernity, see “Coda: Overexpression and Its Legacy,” 206–14. 4 4 About Johnson’s dependence upon Francis Barber, see Bundock, “The Stag,” 78–97. 45 Spacks, 4. 46 Ibid., 4–5. 47 In “Publishing the Private,” Michael McKeon cites Edmund Burke to elaborate on “Public Opinion” and how it is generated and spread: “By 1777 Edmund Burke could write that ‘[i]n a free country every man thinks he has a concern in all public matters; that he has the right to form and a right to deliver an opinion upon them.’” McKeon, 49–109 and specifically 68. 48 Ibid., 75. 49 It is in this section—“On the Dialectic of the Public Sphere (Hegel and Marx”)—that Jürgen Habermas shows why “the structure of this [public] sphere would have to be transformed from the ground up.” See Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (MIT P, 1991), 117–29 and specifically 127. 50 See McKeon, 75. My discussion of Edmund Burke and Johan Zoffany in the previous chapter shows, on the contrary, that the monarchical system and its strength derived not only from the “interest” of the monarch but also from the interest of those who wished to support and sustain monarchy unconditionally, whether or not this meant unconditional support of an absolutist form of government. 51 Ibid., 75.

Empires Within  121 52 As, for instance, in the study of “privacy” by Patricia Meyer Spacks cited above. 53 See, for instance, Derek Hughes, “Rape on the Restoration Stage,” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 46, no. 3 (2005), 225–36. 54 See McKeon, 76. 55 See Lennard J. Davis, “Conversation and Dialogue,” The Age of Johnson, 1: 347–53, specifically 347, 358, and 362. 56 Kevin Hart describes the Johnsonians’ objections to Boswell thus: “[T]he Life not only appropriates Johnson, transforming a favored author into a mere character, but also misappropriates him. The Life, they say, is too partial and too skewed to be regarded as authoritative biography, and they suggest that we seek out Johnson without Boswell.” See Hart, Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property (Cambridge UP, 1999), specifically 101. About The Character of Dr. Johnson with Illustrations from Mrs. Piozzi, Sir John Hawkins, and James Boswell, see F. A. Pottle, “The Character of Dr. Johnson,” TLS, 22 May 1930, 434. 57 See Clingham’s comments on the issue of fact versus truth in “Boswell’s Art in the Life,” James Boswell, 4–9. 58 See Hart, “The Monument,” Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property, 16. 59 Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson was first published on 16 May 1791, approximately seven years after the death of Samuel Johnson in 1784. The first edition of Johns Hawkins’s Life of Samuel Johnson was published in 1787 and served as the “printer’s copy” for the second edition which also appeared in 1787. In the second edition, Hawkins made several corrections, introduced new errors, but, nevertheless, this was “what the biographer wished the public to read.” For the scholarly edition of Hawkins’s biography, based upon the second edition, see O. M. Brack, Jr., ed. The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. by Sir John Hawkins, Knt. (U of Georgia P, 2009), see his preface, xi–xiv and specifically xi. 60 This view contradicts the one which claims that the country home was the primary residence while the town house was for socializing and show. See Rachel Stewart, The Town House in Georgian London (Yale UP, 2009), 5. Stewart points to A. A. Tait, who, “in an article on Home House in Portman Square, built and lavishly decorated from 1772 for the Dowager Countess of Home by James Wyatt and then Robert Home, . . . distinguishes between the country house, which ‘dealt in family, continuity and territorial power’ and the town house, which was ‘essentially a place of show, often temporary but always dazzling, She goes on to say that [w]hile this characterization of the London house may be true for Home House it is not true for all or even most of the others,” 5. 61 After his residency in Gough Square, Johnson moved to Bolt Court. According to Jerry White, Johnson had 33 addresses in 47 years. See White, 87. 62 Hawkins here implies—perhaps unwittingly—that the deepest and darkest melancholy is not generally associated with the death of a close relative; specifically, he implies that Johnson’s inconsolable grief was unconventional if not abnormal and thus remarkable. Hawkins, 2nd edition, 316. 63 See Brack, The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. by Sir John Hawkins, Knt., 194–95. 64 Hawkins, 2nd edition, 321–22. 65 See, for instance, Martin’s chapter “Darkness Fall,” 276–84. 66 Hawkins, 323. See endnote 17. Hawkins’s account of when Mrs. Williams moved into the Johnson household does not match Francis Barber’s version. Barber’s recollection would place Mrs. Williams at Johnson’s Gough Square/

122  Empires Within

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81

82 83 84

85 86

Johnson Court residence in 1752, after the death of Elizabeth Johnson and prior to the arrival of Barber. Hawkins, 313. See also Fawcett, passim. Boswell never wrote to Anna Williams asking her direct questions as he did of Francis Barber and others (after the death of Johnson) because she died over a year before Johnson on 6 September 1783. See Myron D. Yeager, “Hawkins’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and Modern Biographers,” Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Johnson, ed. Martine Watson Brownley, 93. Martin, Samuel Johnson (Harvard UP, 2008). Markman Ellis, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form.” See Roy Porter, London: A Social History (Penguin, 1994), 2000–2001 and, more generally, “Culture City: Life under the Georges,” 194–224. Hawkins, 407–08. See Hawkins, 407–09. R. W. Chapman, ed. James Boswell: Life of Johnson (Oxford UP, 1980), “15 February 1766,” 360. See Hart, “Subordination and Exchange,” 103–04, 109. Boswell, Life, “Wednesday 20 July 1763,” 311. Patrick Coleman, “Property, Politics, and Personality in Rousseau,” Early Modern Conceptions of Property, eds. John Brewer and Susan Staves (Routledge, 1995), 254–74 and specifically 258. Boswell, Life, “Wednesday 20 July 1763,” 312. Boswell, Life, “Tuesday 23 September 1777,” 876–78. Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–1873), a naturalist who was born in Switzerland. Agassiz made two photographic portraits, one a profile and one fullface. The two photographs or daguerreotypes were then used for anthropological purposes, to study racial difference, and toward developing a theory of polygenesis. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/arts/confronting-­academiasties-to-slavery.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-­i phoneshare&_r=0. Web. Retrieved March 8, 2017. This issue was reignited in early 2017 after an event organized by Harvard to explore “the long-­neglected connections between universities and slavery.” See also http://mirrorofrace. org/louis-agassiz-full-face-and-profile/. Web retrieved March 8, 2017. Hawkins’s daughter Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins wrote the following decades after the fact, to divert attention from her father’s role in the cheap ceremony at Westminster Abbey: “The immortalized Frank, the faithful black servant of Dr. Johnson, could scarcely, I think, less deserve the reflected credit given him.” She then went on to blame Barber who, she claimed, made the decision that Johnson “needed not to be buried with the precision of rank.” Quoted by Michael Bundock, 172–73. Bundock, 189. Bundock, 189. See Bundock, 171. Peter Martin maintains that Francesco Sastres, an Italian friend of Johnson who had settled in London in 1777, was also at his side at the time of his death. See Martin, “The Last Days,” 516–24 and specifically 522. Bundock, 190. In this case, it is relatively easy to see why the subaltern cannot and ought not to be interpreted as mute and lacking the potential for self-realization—even if that self-realization and emancipation, in Barber’s case, led to reckless abandonment of the values which would have helped him to sustain stable

Empires Within  123

87 88 89 90 91

financial and domestic states. “No matter the structural inequalities at play, we should be careful about inferring the powerlessness of the subjugated and muteness at the margins.” See “Native Books and the ‘English Book,’” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 1 (January 2017), 135–41 and specifically 140. See also Deepika Bahri, “Hybridity, Redux,” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 1 (January 2017), 142–48. Boswell, Life 3, 49–50. Jonathan Lamb, “Anthropology,” Samuel Johnson in Context, ed. Jack Lynch (Cambridge UP, 2012), 114. Lamb, “Anthropology” 114. Johnson traveled to the Hebrides and to France—and those were the farthest points of his travels. Greg Clingham has reminded us that Boswell’s belief that his art will make Johnson more fully known than he was in life, in the same way as he was known in life, is paradoxical. It implies a concern to produce not just any image of Johnson, but one that Boswell believes is authentic and factual. . . . When Boswell creates images of Johnson as being fully, vividly present in his physical and spiritual dimensions, and as a man troubled by melancholy and torn by moral awareness, triumphing over the evils, suffering, imperfections and temptations of this world in a grand affirmation of a Christian path, he tells us something about Johnson, but also about his own values, concerns, and sensibility. Since this is not the only or even the most obvious way of reading Johnson’s life, especially if . . . we read Johnson’s works with openness, Boswell’s Johnson belongs not only to biography, but also to Boswellian autobiography. See Clingham, James Boswell: The Life of Johnson (Cambridge UP, 1992), 7–8.

4 Cultural Logic of Museology I A Genealogy of the Global “Endeavor”1

I draw upon a number of theoretical pivots—stemming from critiques of modern science and discourses of race and colony—to structure the narrative in this chapter (and the next) of the cultural logic of museology in eighteenth-century Britain. The focus on the British Museum in this chapter allows me to frame my analysis in relation to the following question which frames my discussion here: how was the study of natural history in distant colonial space in Tahiti or Australia, for instance, conflated with and narrated as part of the mission of science and the logics of nation-space in Britain? In order to answer this question (which I can do only superficially here), one would have to look closely at why this nation-space—the British Museum—was launched as one of a kind, with its mission articulated at birth (1753) to make public the knowledge and information which had till the middle of the eighteenth century been the exclusive preserve of the rich and influential not just in Britain but throughout Europe. From the outset, the British Museum claimed—and rightly so—a status superior to its counterparts across the Continent where restrictions prohibited full public access to knowledge and information in libraries and museums. 2 Of particular significance in the context of my argument is the alliance between and among knowledge, information, modes of research, as well as patterns of sourcing (the last being a critical concept which has currency now in both business and technology). The study of science, in fact, could not be separated from the task of “gathering” or “sourcing,” and these activities were then inextricably tied to discovery. But what were the avenues for synthesizing the knowledge gathered, the sources mined, and the information extracted? Exhibition of knowledge gathered from various discoveries was the answer, albeit one which was not then— circa 1753—time-tested. Why the mid-eighteenth century? Samuel J. M. M. Alberti and other historians agree that “[a]s well as innovations in display and governance, later nineteenth-century museums were fueled by the colonial enterprise during the ‘payday of empire.’” There is no doubt that “[e]specially from 1880, the character and size of the British imperial project played a significant part in museum growth and foundation, and the peak of colonialism matches the height of the credibility

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  125 of the museum, from the ‘scramble for Africa’ to the fall of the Raj.”3 Nuanced readings of the colonial contexts of the birth of modern science in general and natural history in particular4 help us to establish the imperial premise of the imbrication of science, colony, and museum. I shift the focus of cultural formations related to this triad—science, colony, museum—to the mid-eighteenth century so as to describe how “the credibility of the museum” was developed in stages, beginning with the birth of the British Museum (1753–1754); indeed, the founding principles of this Museum reveal the unflinching commitment and remarkable foresight of the original board of trustees, who ensured the viability and sustainability of not just the British Museum but also, serendipitously, museology. The foundational work related to science and the systems it spawned was carried out with all the force of modernity-in-the-making in the eighteenth century, well before the apogee of empire. Indeed, the impact of natural history on the management structure of the newly created [British] Museum was significant and this cross-fertilization of scientific content and corporate structure is the subject of the next chapter. As prime repository of history and heritage, the British Museum came to institutionalize and to transform into an industry various processes related to the extraction of foreign source materials toward the establishment of sustainable local (scientific and cultural) knowledge. The cultural logic of museology5—as it developed in stages during the first few decades of the inception of the British Museum (1750s through 1770s)—relied in large measure on the elaborate schematics of natural history. As is well known and documented masterfully by James Delbourgo,6 the credit for the primacy of natural history within the framework of the Museum must go to Hans Sloane (1660–1753), whose collections in this area were, to put it modestly, vast; therefore, natural history had its own space within the Museum—space for the display at first of Sloane’s natural history collection as both scientific object and aesthetic artefact, and catalogues of the same, all of which served as samples and surrogates of an infinite archive spread across the globe and collected for study by British scientists (and also by the Swedes, the Dutch, the French, and others). The global DNA of objects of natural history—and the beguiling infinity of their presence on land and sea as well as in dead matter7—thus came to be contained and classified within the logics of museum.8 Part of the purpose in this chapter and the next is to describe how the eighteenth-century British Museum manifests its modernity through the display of “artful science”9 and carefully choreographed juxtapositions of creative and intellectual works as well as “humana,” artefacts, and specimens of natural history; furthermore, the purpose here is to discuss how this modern museum serves as both medium and message for the dissemination of knowledge and information while staging the interplay of space and objects, creating thus a dynamic and global living history of progress in nation-space. In this chapter, the concept of “nation-space”

126  The Cultural Logic of Museology I helps me to outline the complexities of the triumphalist curiosity of British culture even as it celebrates its kinship with and knowledge of various other foreign and distant cultures.10 In the first section of this discussion, therefore, I propose some ways to read the displacement (of objects, artefacts, items of natural history) and I also consider ways to think about the juxtaposition of like and unlike objects. In addition, I explore some of the ramifications of collecting, gathering, and ordering artefacts from ­elsewhere—artefacts which are indigenized and remain, at once, borrowed narratives upon which rest notions of progress and Enlightenment. The relationship between the dominant culture and the cultures of source materials, the cultures observed and mined, the cultures discovered and studied, remains thus unequal and incommensurate. Moreover, the philosophy that seeks to universalize and to globalize through the space of the museum both artistic endeavors (work associated with generating or developing, building or creating art works) and aesthetic judgment (the critiques of such works) overlaps with the philosophy of civilizing missions.11 And in the mid-eighteenth century, one such civilizing mission was deeply invested in staging the museum as part of the emergent urban architectonics which began to materialize, I argue, as a bona fide blueprint for empire. In the second segment of this chapter, I describe why this particular civilizing mission, however, was not geared toward the savage or the Barbarian elsewhere; instead, this mission was aimed at the Briton or the (potentially) civilized citizen, one who, the establishment assumed, had aspirations to be educated about global culture as framed by the Museum. As a field of study, natural history could not be sustained, we fully understand now, without access to collections from “various parts of the globe.”12 In these endeavors, the voyages of discovery were the means and natural history was the end. The collection then necessitated at the Museum end rigorous cataloguing of flora, fauna, fungi and also “artful” display. To those familiar with the historiographies of ­eighteenth-century voyages of discovery, expeditions to make known the unknown, journeys to trading posts in all hemispheres, Daniel Solander (1733–1782) hovers in the peripheral vision while the focus tends to be on James Cook and Joseph Banks. As Museum operative-­extraordinaire, as classifier of knowledge, as organizer of information, Solander provides the strategic link between the sciences (discovery, classification) and the fine arts of staging (cataloguing, curating, display); therefore, I position him in the last segment of my discussion in this chapter to underscore the importance of the two strands of supererogation in his work, one in collection and the other in cataloguing and display. Any encyclopedist or organizer of a grand scheme would have to have a Solander. His unique imprimatur helps us to understand the complexities of the form/content divide and why “collection”—as noun and verb, as object and action— must necessarily be followed by the relentless continuum of identification, categorization, curating, cataloguing, and display.

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  127 The cultural logic of museology dictated that, in the interest of science, a sophisticated system of spatialized operations had to be created and these operations came to defy the borders of nation. This “science without borders,” if we can call it that, has a provenance with full awareness of which historical geographers have asked the following question: “In what spaces has the geography of scientific knowledge taken shape and been operating?” This consciousness of space is not new, as Nicholaas Rupke has shown. In his discussion of the “ideological coordinates of . . . nineteenth-century geographies of science,” Rupke contends that scientists of the period “were deeply convinced of the constitutive importance of location for the development of civilization, including science.”13 I would like to inject in my discussion here this sense of place-specific considerations, which, I argue, arose well before what has been termed “‘the spatial turn’ in the historiography of science” in the nineteenth century.14 In the first few decades of the eighteenth century, no one could have imagined the museological turn and its global scale. At the time, the nature-culture contest in what we consider to be London still favored nature. Just a handful of pictorial representations from this period reveal a bucolic setting of the “old” Montagu House (see Figure 4.1) where the British Museum came to be housed officially, later, in 1754. In some senses, the Museum emerged from an ex-urban tabula rasa— amid which stood a mansion known as Montagu House in the parish of St. Giles, later St. George. Absent in the first half of the eighteenth century was the density of population and the multiplicity of built space in this area, not the kind of cityscape we associate with London’s urban development in late century and in the Victorian period.15

Figure 4.1  P  en and Ink Drawing, a View of the Rear of Montagu House and on its North Side. Presumably Early Eighteenth Century. Unknown Artist and Provenance. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

128  The Cultural Logic of Museology I In Figure 4.1, cows are seen grazing in the pastures behind the manor house. Another print from the same period—one whose provenance and ownership are not known and, therefore, not reproduced here—shows the verdant and bucolic open space with hayfields to the north of Montagu House, then owned by John, the First Duke of Montagu.16 The cows in Figure 4.1 or the hayfields in the second drawing clearly depict the area in the outskirts of the city (presumably owned by the Foundling Hospital, a little more than half a mile away17) at a time when no one could have anticipated the imminent global and intercultural reach of Montagu House, its filiation with high culture—culture which was soon to sever ties with agricultural nature. These representations of Bloomsbury in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are important if only to underscore the remarkable pace of progress. Ex-urban space would quickly become civilized space where the predominance of nature (animals, pastures, hayfields) would be replaced by the predominance of culture (a phase which began with full force circa 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War). The three segments in this chapter address variously my preoccupation with the following: how deep-mapping the idea of collections reveals, in retrospect, the incommensurable distance/difference between the two ends of the collection-display spectrum endemic to the British Museum and how this distance frames the cultural logic of museology in the eighteenth century. At one end of this spectrum were the operations related to collection of natural history specimens (in foreign location and lands). At the other end of the spectrum was the space for display of databases and archives of scientific knowledge (at home).

Borrowed Narratives and the Birth of the Leviathan18 “The Museum’s raison d’etre,” as described by one of its more recent historians, David M. Wilson, “is to illuminate and to explain the past of the whole world through material culture; it must, therefore, illuminate and explain its own past, for it has been a formidable element in the universal cultural history of the last two and a half centuries.”19 The past can indeed be “illuminated” or reconstituted through narratives from within the logics of cultural heritage and thus tethered to the original civilizing mission of this institution; equally compelling are the narratives which emerge from the museum’s deep-mapped preserves and archives—but ones which acknowledge its gigantic contributions to knowledge over a period of centuries and, simultaneously, underscore very decisively its role in expanding the domain of British culture through the mechanism which Pierre Bourdieu has described as the “neutralization of the very function of representation.”20 The cultural logic of Enlightenment museology must be understood, I argue here, in terms of what Kwame Anthony Appiah, Pierre Bourdieu, and other philosophers of culture have described as the inherently

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  129

Figure 4.2  Hans Sloane’s Pharmaceutical Cabinet. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

problematic nature of the juxtaposition of works of art and natural productions (content-on-display) without which the museum (form) would be devoid of meaning and message. Marked by the quirks of the collectors, collections cannot and generally do not cohere—and this was especially the case in the first British Museum; but, nevertheless, the collections had to be on display and framed in appropriate space, especially since they supplied the utilitarian, pedagogical, aesthetic and not just the scientific demands of the Enlightenment. Consider in this context that for an object or an artefact to be included in an exhibition, it has to satisfy specific criteria which link this object or artefact to a set of prevailing aesthetic values as well as preferences, biases, and prejudices. But this relationship between the object and its social or cultural value is neither neutral nor stable. So, for instance, the object does not always function as a mere recipient of meaning and significance; and (the dominant or native) culture—ordered or fractious and fractured, but omnipresent— does not always function as the superior entity with the power to endow meaning and privilege to both the collection and the institution which houses the collection. The point that needs to be highlighted here is that the culture-artefact relationship is reciprocal—dialectical—and also

130  The Cultural Logic of Museology I multivalent because just as the culture determines the worth of an object, the object or artefact (from elsewhere) endows upon the culture the status that the ostensibly superior entity (British culture) seeks. Thus, the museum provides both the logic and the space where this reciprocal relationship (between culture and object) can be rehearsed and performed, so that this culture-artefact relationship can be made visible and marked as significant by the information society which the object or specimen or artefact helps to create. But why then is the artefact always positioned as tool and considered to be instrumental if not inferior? What purpose does the artefact serve? The complications related to “cultural patrimony” also deserve careful scrutiny in this discussion. 21 To us, the image above (Figure 4.2) looks at first glance like a tray consisting of (49) symmetrical compartments placed haphazardly within which are a number of asymmetrical, unlike, multicolored, multi-­textured, and mostly unidentifiable things—things whose surface qualities catch the eye and invite several questions. What are these items (identity)? What do they do (functionality)? Where do they come from (provenance)? Indeed, it is the elusive identity and functionality of these odd and ersatz objects which pique our curiosity. 22 A glance at the descriptive tag, which identifies this display as “Sir Hans Soane’s pharmaceutical cabinet,” removes part of the confusion. In short order, this label naturalizes if not explains fully the identity of the objects and makes, simultaneously, a claim about their usefulness. In this context, consider that the property-identity split is most readily located in the institution of slavery, which came to embody the severance of identity and roots from the body of the slave before the value of this body could be determined within a network of trade. Notice, however, that neither the identity of the Sloanian objects nor indeed their functionality is self-evident because their points of origin are buried, their usefulness long lost; therefore, the naturalization—Sir Hans Sloane’s cabinet—is facilitated by the illustrious owner whose “collection” authenticates this box and makes it a scientific cabinet which once contained instruments of cure which were then transformed into instruments of knowledge. This cabinet is now a scientific curiosity, a small example of the Enlightenment project to acquire and then to spread knowledge. Indestructible, unseen, and silent, the molecules and particles making up these things in the box carry the trace elements of usefulness which are deep-coded and dead—a usefulness destroyed by the very processes of displacement. In the eighteenth century, the stories such boxes told or the stories buried in them contributed to the local (British) knowledge of vast natural resources elsewhere—a selection of which was codified as specimens of natural history and displayed in the British Museum as trophies of civil and scientific society. As part of the Sloanian collection, this cabinet contributes to the grand narrative of nation, I contend. But how? What remains (and what

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  131 we can see and we are told) is a remnant of the beginning of pharmacology for which these enigmatic curiosities serve as surrogates and leave us with a vague sense of the past when diseases were cured, wounds dried, and pain ameliorated. 23 Moreover, we learn that this cabinet belongs to a specific mode of organization (of scientific instruments and objects) generally associated with Hans Sloane, who stored in thousands of glass boxes “seeds, fruit, bark, roots, gums and resins, all carefully made to keep out insects.”24 Sloane was not the only one to use these boxes, albeit he may have been one of the first to do so in Britain. Joseph Banks too had collected thousands of shells, among other things, during his Endeavor Voyage (see Figure 4.3 below); and Banks had learned this system of organization from Daniel Solander, whose mentor Carl ­Linnaeus used such boxes toward perfecting the system of ordering, arranging, cataloguing, and labeling. 25 As examples of the science of systematic collection, cataloguing, and curating during the Enlightenment—as history of research procedures and methods—these “Solander” boxes and their contents continue to have utility. Alongside this establishment narrative, however, must be placed a contiguous historiography which describes both the boxed space and the contents of these boxes as curiosities which have been robbed of their environmental and cultural contexts. On his way back from ­Jamaica, for instance, Sloane’s luggage was full of specimens as well as live animals, “none of which survived to see England.”26 These dead and live or partially live collections are, in fact, autonomous specimens of foreign ecosystems. Displayed as they were in the British Museum, they became singular and rootless, bearing no trace elements of their points of origin (except in their invisible DNA). Transferred from the ecosystem of their point of origin, these foreign objects are thoroughly mediated and given a new identity, and coded as bona fide markers of a British foreign scientific system albeit reliant upon foreign source materials. These objects are naturalized, in other words, not in habitats similar to their points of origin, but in engineered space, in sanitized and ordered contexts, in distant “civil” society. Due to this displacement and the passage of time, the contents of these boxes inevitably lose their potency, their capacity to serve their original functions. This post-utility—and heavily curated—scientific object is thus transformed into an aesthetic artefact; then, it enters the realm of the purely spectral space and begins to elicit wonder and awe, producing a different kind of utility from the one for which it existed once upon a time-space. Natural and artificial productions—a distinction which was important to the cataloguers and corporate managers of the British Museum— are no different in an important respect: shells, in other words, are no different from shoes. Logic would dictate that the pharmaceutical box or the box of shells be placed in space different from where Hans Sloane’s collection of shoes (see Figure 4.4 below) would be displayed, the latter

132  The Cultural Logic of Museology I

Figure 4.3  Sir Joseph Banks’ Shells, drawer 6, Cowrie Collection. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London.

somewhere with other footwear from distant lands. James Delbourgo has pointed out that “Sloane seems not to have arranged his curiosities into cultural, racial or geographical groupings, but into varieties of the same artefact from around the world.”27 Sloane’s prodigious appetite for collecting was thus not meant for public display; the sheer pleasures of owning, understanding, tagging, and cataloguing seem to have driven him to a new form of what I would characterize as global domesticity (in the confines of his house in Chelsea) which was devoid of the order and organization which the public domain would demand. The burdens of classifying objects by their points of origin and identifying them by national, ethnic, and cultural demarcations would fall upon the curators and librarians of the British Museum. Nonetheless, refined by expert curatorial intervention, aesthetically juxtaposed with like or unlike objects, Sloane’s collection of shoes, one would image, elicited a response similar to the pharmaceutical objects or shells: for the eighteenth-­century Museum visitor, a nostalgic or aspirational sense of voyage, discovery, and distant lands; for the scientist or royal academician, a necessary step in

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  133

Figure 4.4  Shoes Collected by Hans Sloane. ©The Trustees of the British Museum.

the scientific process garnered toward understanding the globe and its infinite natural resources. Problems inherent in the de-contextualization of natural and artificial productions and their placement in sanitized and ordered environments (such as in the British Museum) would become self-evident much later, when, in the late twentieth century, modernity would be questioned by that all-encompassing but inevitably nonspecific barometer of progress: post modernity. In the eighteenth century, modernity remained mired in a sophisticated and scientifically validated system of searching, gathering, consuming, with the British Museum serving as the prime example of progress carrying trace elements of a feudal instinct. 28 As meaning gravitates from utility (in distant time-space) to pure aesthetics (within British museological space), new fictions of time-space emptied of contextual content but endowed with scientific significance and anointed with new meaning are created—with the museum absorbing (but refusing to acknowledge) the burdens of borrowed narratives.Borrowed narratives from diverse cultures thus came to share common shelf-space in the modern British Museum—which one might think of as a Sloanian subvention—producing incommensurable juxtapositions. Modernity mythologized these juxtapositions of the unlike and incommensurable; postmodernity attempts to demythologize the same processes. Thus, the building and dismantling of the systems of science are carried out in endless cycles so as to assess, to reinforce, or to undermine the premise of scientific pursuits. At issue now is the following: how did Enlightenment science perfect the methods of narrating and the claims of the universality of collective (global) identity and spatial experience? Unsurprisingly, the logics of museology have never been so hotly debated as in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, but if there is a

134  The Cultural Logic of Museology I consensus among the battling cultural brigades on all sides of the issue, it is on this point: the rational basis for the establishment of a museum is rooted firmly in Enlightenment culture which facilitated for the first time both the means and the modes of systematic acquisition, cataloguing, and exhibition of rare and useful objects and artefacts from all over the world as well as indigenous printed books and manuscripts, all for the betterment of (in this example, British) society. And it is this “rational” basis for the establishment of the museum which has ignited debate and prompted Pierre Bourdieu (among others) to make the following observation. An art which. . . is the product of an artistic intention which asserts the absolute primacy of form over function, of the mode of representation over the object represented, categorically demands a purely aesthetic disposition. . . . This demand is objectified in the art museum; there the aesthetic disposition becomes an institution. Nothing more totally manifests and achieves the autonomizing of aesthetic activity vis-à-vis extra aesthetic interests or functions than the art museum’s juxtaposition of works. Though originally subordinated to quite different or even incomparable functions. . ., these juxtaposed works tacitly demand attention to form rather than function, technique rather than theme, and, being constructed in styles that are mutually exclusive but all equally necessary, they are a practical challenge to the expectation of realistic representation as defined by the arbitrary canons of an everyday aesthetic, and so lead naturally from stylistic relativism to the neutralization of the very function of representation.29 Bourdieu’s hypothesis has important implications in any assessment of the “judgment of taste,” but particularly so in discussions of modern (or monopoly capitalist) frameworks for the alliance of art/artefact and commerce—frameworks which were partly responsible for the “global eighteenth century” such as we have come to define and understand it. 30 This “global” premise is further refined and then rehearsed and articulated today by museum administrators whose job is to package postmodern museums and to present them as primordial staging spaces for both indigenous and exogamous cultural materials—making them speak to each other and—reflecting international and universalist praxis. 31 Both then as now the museum lobby has fashioned itself as a powerful force in public education with a global flavor; and, from this establishment perspective, the “art museum’s juxtaposition of works” (think of Sloane’s collection of shoes from Asia) not only provides curatorial opportunities for creative experts but is also the most efficacious means of exhibiting objects and empowering them to speak of the notion of a shared cultural space.32 While packaging of products typically denotes order,

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  135 the packaging of global products within the museum produces a tension caused by the inherent randomness of acquisitions and, frequently, the incompatibility of the categories of objects acquired—as the history of British Museum amply demonstrates: natural productions, man-made objects, specimens of flora and fauna, manuscripts, and rare coins and medals from unknown cultures became meaning-producing elements in the constant (unidirectional) flow of acquisitions which produced, as it were, a veritable Babel of Enlightenment (if only these acquisitions had voices). This deluge of acquisitions, I contend, bury the ideologies of the eighteenth-century consumer culture, one whose voracious appetite for knowledge and information was satisfied by the collector, Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, and many other “royal academicians,” men of science, who ushered in the modern information age. As a part of the scientific source material of empire, natural history and the collections related to this field of study were of vital importance; equally important were the “artificial productions” or man-made objects, and rare and curious manuscripts all of which contributed to a vast but soon-to-be consolidated and integrated national archive. Learned societies of the eighteenth century knew very well that a systematic approach to the practice of purchasing and collecting printed books and ancient manuscripts had been introduced by Thomas Bodley (1545–1613) and Robert Cotton (1570–1631) toward the end of Elizabeth I’s reign. Representing the core values of the Renaissance, encyclopedic in scope and grand in spirit, the Bodleian and the Cottonian collections preceded by approximately 100 years the Harleian collection, which was equally ambitious in essence but vaster in scope and substance. Collected over several decades and beginning with the purchase of the first collection of manuscripts in 1705 by Robert Harley, the Speaker of the House, Earl of Oxford and Mortimer, later Lord High Treasurer, and perhaps best known to eighteenth-century literary scholars as the patron of Daniel Defoe,33 this encyclopedic project34 was further enhanced after ­Harley’s death in 1724 by the efforts of his son, Edward, Lord Harley. The system of collection that Harley employed became the established system of acquisition in Enlightenment Britain, in direct competition with similar endeavors throughout Europe, although the European as well as the British traditions of collecting rare books, artefacts, and manuscripts had this in common: the business of collecting was confined to the church and the seminary until the Renaissance when (in the example of the sixteenth-century Italian scholar-collector Pietro Bembo, for instance) the notion of private collections emerged in conjunction with the gradual shift in intellectual pursuits from the realm of the religious to that of the secular. By 1741, at the time of the death of Edward Harley, the family collection had become one of the most comprehensive repositories of learned materials in Europe, with thousands of volumes, which were

136  The Cultural Logic of Museology I systematically counted and catalogued so as to facilitate access to them. It was at the first Committee meeting of the trustees of the British ­Museum, held on 11 December 1753 that the Board of Trustees decided to inspect the various collections prior to acquisition, beginning with the Harleian Manuscripts. “These were mostly still in a single room and two adjoining closets at the bottom of the garden of the house of the Countess of Oxford in Dover Street.” The roughly 80,000 volumes in this collection were in 101 presses (or book cases). On 22 January 1754, the Trustees visited Sloane’s house in Chelsea to carry out a similar inspections and inventory. On 5 February they inspected the Cotton manuscripts.35 A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts (1759), “purchased by authority of Parliament, for the use of the publick,” is an impressive compendium of the collection that was bequeathed to the British Museum by Edward Harley’s daughter and heiress, The Duchess of Portland.36 The preface to A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection describes this bequest as “[a]n event which hath not only united two very valuable Collections of ancient Manuscripts, but happily secure to this country the most compleat and extensive Fund of national Antiquities that any Kingdome can boast of.” This union of Harley and Cotton, “compleat and extensive” and in the service of nation, was the most logical complement to the foundations in natural history laid down by Hans Sloane. Diverse fields of expertise, multiple strands of knowledge, representing various strengths of nation, thus came to codify modernity and the futures of knowledge- and information-gathering garnered toward display, creating as it did new modalities as well as high stakes for the project of Enlightenment. Hans Sloane’s single-minded pursuit of the acquisition of knowledge37 was entirely in sync with his pursuit of acquisitions of natural history which would advance his own knowledge and the knowledge of English society which his collections, he hoped, would eventually enlighten. 38 In this endeavor to promote the interests of science, his methods were no different from the scientists of the seventeenth century. Robert Boyle (1627–1691), for instance, never wavered from his belief in facts and how these facts could be gathered through experiments done within the confines of laboratories where, in what we now call controlled environments, natural laws would be observed and general principles developed, theories propounded, and then disseminated among the scientific community. The Royal Society promoted the cause of Nullius in Verba—do not take anybody’s word for it—and championed not only the work of scientists such as Boyle, John Wilkins, and Robert Hooke, but also, more importantly, their method, which was strictly experimental. Sloane was born in 1660, the year in which Christopher Wren delivered his historic lecture at Gresham College which would become the founding document of the Royal Society; the first Royal Charter for the establishment

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  137 of this Society was granted in 1662 by Charles II. Trained at the University of Montpellier, where young British scientists could interact with their continental counterparts, Sloane was traversing the same scientific territory as John Ray and Robert Boyle, two of his esteemed English predecessors who had also studied at this prestigious French institution. Sloane became a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25 (in 1685) and a Fellow of the College of Physicians two years later (in 1687). Aged 31 when Robert Boyle died, Sloane was nurtured by and had inherited a scientific culture which was by the time he entered it an established community, one which had high stakes in framing the enlightenment in terms of its systems of verification and proof, through experiments—systems in which the primacy of the laboratory could not be challenged even by Hobbes.39 But unwilling to settle into a comfortable life of a physician in London, Sloane jumped at the opportunity to work as the 2nd Duke of Albemarle’s personal physician and it was in this capacity that he traveled to Jamaica where the Duke (son of General George Monck, master politician of the Interregnum-Restoration era, who was the 1st Duke of Albemarle) had been appointed Governor (1687–1688). British Museum historian David Wilson points out that on their way to Jamaica (1687), this party had called at Madeira, the Canaries, Barbados, and many islands of the West Indies. “Throughout the voyage Sloane made observations and collected specimens, both animal and botanical, as he did for the fifteen months of his residence in Jamaica before the death of the governor.” In 1719, Sloane became President of the College of Physicians and then President of the Royal Society in 1727, succeeding Isaac Newton (1642–1727).40 In the British Museum or any other similar institution, “the juxtaposition of works”—or the ways in which works are made to relate to like things or the ways in which works are categorized as distinct from others—has to be conceptualized in terms of the contingencies inherent in the dialogics of space and empire.41 But in this particular example of museology—the eighteenth-century British Museum—the policies and procedures related to acquisitions evolved piecemeal and because of tactical responses of the trustees to gifts, donations, and bequests rather than due to strategic planning on their part. The second Committee meeting of the Board of Trustees of the British Museum, for instance, set the tone for procedures related to corporate decision-making. So, for instance, they established the practice of gathering (empirical) data and, based upon the data, they assessed the suitability of the acquired space and its ability to accommodate the size and condition of the collections or donations. “Held at the Manor House at Chelsea”—which was Hans Sloane’s residence and repository—the meeting of the Committee on 22 January 1754 (Committee I: 3–7),42 was called for a very specific purpose: “To inspect the present state and condition . . . of the collection of the late Sir Hans Sloane, Bart.” They “first took an account of the

138  The Cultural Logic of Museology I number of volumes of the catalogues of the collection and library of the said Sir Hans Sloane and that the particular volumes relating to the several parts of the said collection and to the said library” (Committee I: 3). Given the fact that Sloane’s collection was the foundation of the Museum and, equally, given the prestige of the donor, there was no selection process. Everything he owned and had collected would be part of the Museum’s collections. The list of items in the Sloanian Collection reveals, among other things, the diversity of objects as well as their inherent incompatibility. “Artificial” and “natural” productions were thus unified not because they had been collected from specific geographic areas and sources (Jamaica or Australia, for instance) but by the same agents (at first Sloane and then, later, others), ones who employed the same scientific techniques and methods of collection. Below is a selection of the items in the Sloanian collection which were itemized and presented to the Committee at their second meeting (on 22 January 1754)— revealing, as this list does, the chaos inherent in Sloane’s encyclopedic “collections.” Taken together, these items would then create what I am calling “borrowed narratives,” ones which were defiantly dismissive of source, unity, consistency, and cultural specificity. The Catalogue of the Collection and Library of Sir Hans Sloane consist of 89 Vols. in Folio and 10 Vols. in Quarto Viz. Folio . . . Eight Volumes of the Coins and Medals of Different Countries, Antient and Modern. Folio . . . One Volume of Cameos, Intaglios, Rings, Amulets, Eastern coins & Medals &c. the Account of them drawn up by Dadichi, Negri & Dr. Scheutzers account of Sir Hans Sloane’s Echinites. An Account of the Number of Medals in the Collection. Quarto . . . One Volume of Cameos, Intaglios &c. Quarto . . . One Volume of Gold Coins Antient and Modern by Dr. Scheutzer ... Folio: One Volume of Precious Stones, Metals &c. ... Folio . . . One Volume Corals, Sponges, Serpents, Echinites, Crystacea, Stella Marinas, Humana & Folio . . . Five Volumes of Vegetables. Folio . . . One Volume of an Index to the 5 Preceding Volumes. ... Besides which there are: Three Volumes of Ray’s Hist Planterum43 in large paper with Ms. notes which serve as an Index to all the Volumes of Sir Hans Sloane’s Hortus Siccus.

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  139 And Sir Hans Sloane’s History of Jamaica, with the Original Drawings and Ms notes serving as Index to his own Collection of Jamaica Plants. (Committee I: 3–4) Antiquarian and collector extraordinaire by any modern or postmodern standards, Hans Sloane had not only collected items of natural and artificial productions but he had also recorded and written (and left for posterity) their specificities in volume after volume of published books and unpublished manuscripts as well as catalogues.44 Barbara Benedict has reminded us that “[h]is catalogues include all the circumstantial details of the item: its provenance, date of acquisition, narratives associated with its discovery, donors, prices and vendors.” Sloane’s system of codification may be thorough and detailed; but, as Benedict rightly points out, his catalogues “mingle cultural and natural items: a rope snapped by a strong man, an Italian stiletto, objects of virtu, raw materials and experimental results.”45 Some of the items were gathered during voyages of discovery while educational tracts were written during and after the fact-finding voyages and designed for expert audiences; other materials were generated and packaged for pedagogical purposes and for the dissemination of knowledge and information among general audiences who had easy access to printed materials facilitated by the booming print industry. Inevitably, then, the unity and consistency of the collection was of derivative significance, a significance derived from the collector and his vision for shaping an information society premised upon modern scientific knowledge and his plan for the dissemination of this freshly minted knowledge throughout civil (British) society.46 Post 1754, the randomness implicit in Hans Sloane’s c­ ollections-cumdonations is replicated over and over again, as new donors continued to fuel the national repository and to create the need for rational juxtapositions, so that like could be separated from unlike, so that categorical borders could be erected and removed by the dictates of finite space, the space which continued to assert its resistance to the repository’s demands for infinite elasticity. Examples abound. The Minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting held at Montagu House on 27 February 1756, for instance, reveal that the Committee was presented with a report of the “Egyptian” bequest made by the late Colonel William Lethieullier’s nephew, Pitt Lethieullier. Both “Egyptian and Natural Curiosities” were donated to the British Museum by this family and some of these items were as follows: A Mummy in it’s Original Sycamore Coffin with the Hieroglyphical paintings placed over it’s Breast and Leggs, and the Masque (or covering of the face) brought to England from Egypt by himself. (Committee I: 67–68)47

140  The Cultural Logic of Museology I This section is marked on the left margin as “Egyptian.” Among the “natural” items listed below this section are the following: A Hornet’s nest, in a Glass Case A large East Indian Bat A Pelican of the Wilderness A High-Bone & Web Foot of a very large East Indian Water-Fowl A Bird of Paradise, in an oblong Glass Case; with a small BirdsNest inclosed therein, with it 53 Glasses, containing Serpents, Lizards, Birds, Fruits, Animals etc. preserved in Spirits. (Committee I: 68)48 The record of another donation in the General Committee meeting of 18 December 1760 reveals not only the same pattern of dissonance, unpredictability, as well as a randomness but also a radical lack of social hierarchy in the donations, as philosophers, a monarch, and birds (from the world first mythologized in Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko) come together, as it were, to reinforce the idea of encyclopedia; a small segment of the list of items in this bequest goes as follows: “The Portrait of Locke, S. Evremond, and Voltaire, two Birds from Surinam, a silver medal of Queen Elizabeth, and a Collection of Books not before in the Museum, presented by Dr. Maty.” These items were seamlessly presented in the Minutes following a list of Latin dissertations on various subjects as well as, for instance, a Historical Vindication of the Church of England (see General II: 339–40). Donations, bequests, benefactions do not follow any order and are as quirky as the characters and interests of those who give.49 How then can these items be logically categorized and then housed? Any attempt at ordering the collections at the recipient’s (or the British Museum) end would necessarily be arbitrary even if not entirely illogical. Given the constant influx of presents from donors and recognizing unpredictability as a persistent symptom of robust acquisition, the Trustees of the British Museum decided to generate circa 1760 a form letter which could be used to acknowledge gifts from donors. That letter was presented at the General Committee meeting on 19 June 1760 and reads as follows (including corrections made in pencil which appear here in parentheses): I am ordered [directed] by the Trustees of British Museum to signify to [inform] to [strike through] you, that they have received the present of [mentioned on the other side] ___________ which you were [have been] pleased to make [to] them on ___________ & [I have] to return you their [best] Thanks for the same. N.B. Before the word present the word valuable, or very valuable may be inserted, as the occasion shall require. (General II: 324)

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  141 A form letter saved time and effort. Moreover, another way to read this straightforward “form” letter of acknowledgment is as the beginning of an ordering mechanism designed to divide all the gifts into two broad categories of valuable/very valuable—a categorization which does not begin to address a vast number of specifications and distinctions related to genus and species that preoccupied many of the original librarians including Daniel Solander, Matthew Maty, and others. The imposition of order on the borrowed narratives worked best in theory; in practice, such narratives continued (and still continue) to defy discipline and order (in the Foucauldian sense).

Deep-Mapping the Idea of Collection50 The field of natural history, which bears the strong and decisive imprimatur of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, was a burgeoning and very well-endowed field in Britain in the eighteenth century, having its own coterie of standard bearers. Elected to the Royal Society in 1754, John Ellis (1710–1776) was one such natural historian and he is known best for the following publications: An Essay towards the Natural History of the Corallines (1755) and The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes (1786).51 The word “zoophyte,” meaning plants which resemble animals, is no longer in use. 52 For a brief overview of the expansive geography which sustained the study of zoophytes, one might glance at the latter publication, which Solander “systematically arranged and described” although his sudden death in 1782 prohibited him from publishing the work, which task was then assumed by Ellis’s daughter, Martha Watt.53 The advertisement for the book on zoophytes notes that it was the success of Ellis’s publication on Corallines that encouraged him toward further study and being then the king’s agent for the province of West Florida;54 and agent of the island of Dominica; and in correspondence and intimacy with the learned Dr. Linnaeus, and the most celebrated natural historians of the age; he was enabled to collect information from the distant countries, which he pursued with unremitting ardour; and with the assistance of his inestimable friends, Dr. Fothergill55 and Dr. Solander, he intended to have laid before the public a complete history of Zoophytes. We learn, furthermore, that after the deaths of both John Ellis and Daniel Solander, the book was published “at the request of Sir Joseph Banks”56 to whom “the daughter of the author,” Martha Watt, then dedicates the book. 57 The British sphere of influence in the eighteenth century, one which reached far beyond its circum-Atlantic circuitry, was no longer triggered by trade and commerce alone; this influence was

142  The Cultural Logic of Museology I just as much due to its scientific pursuits and the development of global laboratories across a wide swathe of space, which included Asia and the Pacific. Ellis and other scientists were equally invested in creating a consumer culture at home, one which was reliant upon plants and fruits originally found elsewhere. The advertisement of Zoophytes notes, for instance, the following: “The historical account of Coffee, published by [John Ellis] in 1774, was designed to encourage the consumption of that article, raised by the planters in the West Indies: while the accounts of the Mangostan and Bread Fruit Trees, with directions for conveying seeds and plants from the most distant parts of the globe in a state of vegetation, were published with the view to introduce those, and many other plants into our own settlements.” But “consumption” was not the sole motivation; these items were transplanted so that “they might become beneficial to the public for the purposes of medicine, agriculture and commerce.” John Ellis’s aspirations far exceeded the fields of zoology and botany; the advertisement concludes by asserting that “his active mind was constantly employed in devising means for promoting the welfare of society, until the time of his death, which happened on the 15th of October, 1776.”58 The welfare of the state, the advancement of science, and the creation of consumer culture in Britain thus worked in tandem with various imperial projects and initiatives. The British Museum was the prime repository for absorbing the fruits of collective labor undertaken in the colonies—the intellectual labor of Ellis, John Fothergill, Sloane, Banks, and many others like them as well as slave labor. Intellectual labor was distinctive, individual, rewarded; so, for instance, in November 1768, John Ellis received the prestigious Godfrey Copley Prize Medal for his distinguished contributions to the field of natural history. Slave labor, contrariwise, was not only wiped out from the archives of the Enlightenment; it was also perceived as “mass,” thus lacking individuality, rationality, and distinctive attributes linked to distinct enterprises—which Peter Hulme, in reference to John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, has discussed in terms of the “labor theory of value” which is “close to a theory of humanity.”59 Random examples from the book on zoophytes reveal the scale and magnitude of the Enlightenment discipline which would later come to be absorbed into botany and zoology. As editor of The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes, Daniel Solander presents numbered categories, listing the Genus first. So, for instance, under the genus Actinia (numbered I), he lists ten different species and under Pennatula (numbered VII) he lists nine. Corresponding illustrations are presented in a separate section at the end of the book. Distinctive types are first identified by their Latin names (in the left column) and then explained in English (in the right column). Each entry also includes a brief explanation or description including the history and provenance of the item, which appear below the two columns. So, for instance, in the

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  143 section on the genus Pennatula argentea (left column), the species called Silver Sea-Pen (right column) is described thus: “This Sea-Pen has much the appearance of a writing pen; it is of long spear shape; with a round smooth stem; the upper part is very close set with fins, which lie one upon the other; they are dentated and striped.” The description of this item goes as follows: This curious animal was brought from Batavia60 by William Weber, Esq., F. R. S. Its fins are not unlike those of a bat, with several sharp points. They are striped black and white, with a shining surface, not unlike silver: they are often found above a foot long, and are said to be very luminous in the sea at night. There is one of them in the British Museum near eighteen inches long.61 Likewise, in the section on the genus Millepora caerulea, the Blue Millepore is described thus: “This Millepore is flat, rough, and divided into thick plates, bending different ways; the tops of these are sometimes lobated, and both sides are furnished with cylindrical pores almost like stars.”62 We learn, furthermore, in the descriptive section below that “[t]his coral grows in immense masses in the East-Indian Ocean; it is now and then brought to us from Prince’s Island, in the Straits of Sunda.”63 From the straits between Java and Sumatra, these Millepore were brought “home”—either observed, categorized, and catalogued or in sample form—so that the scientists (without borders) could complete their projects which might be described as social welfare, so that the knowledge base of the modern information society would be free and unhampered by constraints.64 The catalogue of zoophytes was thus also a catalogue of the laboratories across the globe—characterized by makeshift spaces and tactical maneuvers—where fauna could be studied and recorded, dissected and described, categorized and catalogued. The ­recorder-cataloguer-scientist-social worker-educator is a foreign entity in the colony (whether member of a scientific team such as Hans Sloane’s or an operative of the Dutch East India Company), a figure of authority, an imperial agent. At the time of the publication of the records of his voyage to the West Indies (1707), dedicated to Queen Anne (1702–1714)65 (hereafter referred to as A Voyage to Jamaica), Hans Sloane was Fellow of the College of Physicians and Secretary to the Royal Society. In the preface to this tome, Hans Sloane notes that he was personal physician to the second Duke of Albemarle, the then governor of Jamaica (in 1688) and General George Monck’s son, Christopher Monck (1653–1688). During his travels, Sloane was able to “see what I had heard so much of.” So, for instance, he wanted to compare those plants which “had been cultivated in English gardens” but grew wild in other countries. He took notes of all the natural productions he observed—plants, fishes, birds,

144  The Cultural Logic of Museology I insects—and brought back with him “800 plants, most whereof were new, with the designs before-mentioned” and “shew’d them very freely to all lovers of such curiosities” (Preface). Acknowledging the groundbreaking work of many botanists, including Arthur Rawdon, William Sherard, and Jacob Bobart the Younger, Hans Sloane then describes his process of verification thus: “I thought it necessary to look into the books in several languages, which treated of those subjects either designedly or accidentally. Some men seem to have a great desire to be the first Authors of discovering such or such plants, and to have them carry their names in the first place, but I endeavoured rather to find if anything I had observed was taken notice of by other persons.” His goal was to compile a catalogue of plants which he had “met with in Jamaica” and “which may be of some use to inquisitive persons, especially when they shall have this history of the things therein contained” (Preface). Natural productions, he goes on to say, “afford great matter of admiring the power, wisdom, and providence of Almighty God, in creating and preserving the things he has created” (Preface). Sloane makes it clear in the preface that his method of observation is superior to “reasonings, hypotheses, and deductions” which frequently result in mistakes; but a history of nature based upon direct observation leads to a reaffirmation of the powers of the creator since very clearly natural productions are not “productions of chance” (Preface). More than anything else, his interest was to underscore the usefulness of this history. He believed that this history would be useful to the “inhabitants of the parts where these plants grow,” to the researchers who want to know “who has written of such or such a plant in Jamaica,” and to philosophers whose knowledge will go beyond a consideration of the strangeness of nature to an understanding informed by facts (Preface). A large portion of the introduction to A Voyage to Jamaica is taken up by how Hans Sloane had used the herbs and plants for the treatment and cure of diseases, including but not limited to fever, gonorrhea, gangrene, consumption, ringworm, venereal diseases, pleurisy, sleeping disorders, burns, bruises, ruptures, and so on. Many of the herbs and plants are transportable and useful in Britain not just because of their medicinal value, Sloane argues, but also because they can be acclimatized (naturalized) and are then the source of visual pleasure such as in the garden of the Duchess of Beaufort (Preface). And to those Enlightenment skeptics who might have argued that these herbs and plants are of no use to Britons, Hans Sloane provides the following rebuttal: [M]any of them and their several parts have been brought over, and are used in medicines every day, and more may, to the great advantage of physicians and patients, were people inquisitive enough to look after them. The plants themselves have been likewise brought over, planted, and throve very well at Moyra, in Ireland, by the direction

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  145 of Sir Arthur Rawdon; as also by the order of the right Reverend Dr. Henry Compton, Bishop of London, at Fulham,; at Chelsea by Mr. Doudy; and Enfield by the Reverend Dr. Robert Uvedale; and in the Botanic Gardens of Amsterdam, Leyden, Leipsick (sic), Upsal &c. but especially at Badminton in Gloucestershire, where they are raised some few handfuls high, but come to perfection, flower and produce their ripe fruits, even to my admiration. (Preface) There were a whole host of recipients and beneficiaries, in other words; therefore, the justification for voyages of discovery, particularly the scientific endeavors, could be supported by incontrovertible evidence of utility derived from the natural products. The introduction to A Voyage to Jamaica includes Sloane’s own journal of the weather in Jamaica, circa 1688–1689, written during his travels there.66 And at the conclusion of a long introduction (154 folio pages) is a foldout of the following: “A New Map of the Island of Jamaica” at the top and “A New Chart of the Western Ocean” and “A New Chart of the Caribee Islands” sharing equal space at the bottom. Additionally, an exhaustive description of the voyage is followed by (and bound in the same volume as) The Natural History of Jamaica, which is divided into two volumes. In addition to the preface, the introduction, and a description of the outbound voyage to Jamaica, the first volume contains Book 1 which is further subdivided into 17 chapters on the plants of Jamaica (including submarine plants, mushrooms, mosses, herbs, and so on). The second volume includes an introduction, eight books, each further subdivided into chapters, and a description of the return journey from Jamaica.67 Numbered tables follow the descriptive sections of both volumes with some full-page drawings of the plants and trees and some even larger drawings which are folded to fit the folio size. Completed over a period of almost 20 years, these two volumes represent Hans Sloane’s encyclopedic grasp of natural history which he displayed in this work by holding the magnifying glass up to Jamaica—one of the largest and most considerable of George I’s plantations in America, as the dedication of the second volume (1725) to the King points out. Natural history was one part of the encyclopedic space created in the British Museum whose displays remain silent about the spatial and radial links between center and periphery in the logics of empire. Of concern to postmodern historiographers of the eighteenth century has to be the negation (or, more appropriately, an anthropological elision) of the human presence at the root and originary point of collection, the places where natural productions (including botanical and zoological samples) or the source narratives of museum were found and where Western scientists observed, catalogued, described, and charted flora, fauna, climates, weather patterns, geological and astronomical characteristics and quirks for the purposes of knowledge-gathering. In these narratives of science

146  The Cultural Logic of Museology I and discovery—and the hunt for collections—the “hunter” would often chance upon the native and tag him as the intruder or “savage”—that sometimes dangerous and sometimes merely annoying obstacle in the path of a higher pursuit. One such narrative (among an infinity of them) records the reversal of the hunter-hunted roles and appears in the appendix to A New Introduction to the Knowledge and Use of Maps which contains “remarks on Dr. Solander and Mr. Banks’s voyage to the southern hemisphere, and also some late discoveries near the north pole; with observations astronomical, philosophical, and geographical.” The specific geographical location is marked with scientific exactitude (which is routine) and then the intrusive element is identified as being native to that location: “In latitude 38° 42ʹ South, Longitude 181″ 36ʹ West; is Poverty Bay, called by the natives Taoneroa, or Long Sand.” Captain James Cook had given this name to the bay, off the coast of New Zealand (1769), because even though Solander, Cook, and their cohorts were able to collect some herbs from this location, they faced an obstacle. We are told that they were unable to pick up sufficient provisions because “the inhabitants are unruly, savage, revengeful and cannibals—destroying and eating their enemies.”68 The naming convention which produced “Poverty Bay” was based upon the depravity of the hostile natives (where poverty equals depravity) and then further embellished with latitudinal and longitudinal attributes, as the example in the same narrative showcases: “In Latitude 41° 5ʹ, Longitude 184° 30ʹ West, near Lieutenant Cook’s Straight, in New Zealand, are also a most barbarous set of Savage Indians, who are very fond of human flesh, and always eat with voracious appetites their enemies.”69 Poverty as economic reality and poverty conceptualized as obstacle to scientific study come together in this formulation, with the geographical location signifying both source materials and sources of resistance to foreign incursion. The following hard evidence of cannibalism is provided next as justification for such characterization of natives: “Mr. Banks found here several baskets with human bones, the flesh of which the natives had just been feeding on.”70 And then the narrative takes a turn toward those natural productions for which the journey had been undertaken in the first place: These parts afford abundance of fine timber, and is very pleasant and fertile.—At Queen Charlotte’s Sound, Latitude 41° South; Longitude 184° 45ʹ West, in New Zealand are plenty of fine woods in which are a great quantity of delightful singing birds, that are very melodious in the night, singing somewhat like our nightingales, but much finer; they begin their enchanting harmony with the setting Sun, nor do they cease their captivating music until Sun rise—they are never heard in the day-time.71

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  147 The “delightful singing birds” could not have acted as impediments to scientific discovery and work; their human counterparts, on the other hand, were endowed with size and the physical strength with which they could combat the foreign invasion. Therefore, while the innate talent of birds is praiseworthy, the strength of large mammals is swiftly designated as danger. What better way to subvert the notion of native resistance to foreign incursion and aggression than to point to the fundamentally inhumane practice of cannibalism which prevailed in these parts and was endemic to this culture?72 Categories of foreign, native, dangerous, and destructive are muddled even as the Eurocentric narratives of “discovery” such as this record sketchy vignettes of native resistance to territorial occupation and appropriation of (their) natural resources. Such narrative interruptions in the pursuit of discovery and science are common. So, for instance, in the introduction to the second volume of A Voyage to Jamaica, Hans Sloane addresses many of the criticisms that had been directed at the first volume. One of the problems he articulates thus: “In that distant climate the heats and rains are excessive, so that there are often hindrances upon those accounts.” Moreover, the parts which are sparsely populated “are often full of serpents and other venomous creatures, which tho’ of themselves they will fly from men, yet if the places where they nestle, or have their young, are come near, they are thought to make very fierce and dangerous attacks upon mankind.” The snakes are not the only sources of danger, he goes on to elaborate: “The same places remote from settlements are very often full of run away negroes, who lye in ambush to kill the whites who come within their reach.”73 The gathering of scientific evidence and samples is seen here as part of a manifest destiny, and the flora and fauna are considered to be part of a vast natural laboratory from where samples can be assembled and then taken back home for study and for display or dissemination. In this endeavor, there is thus a laser-sharp sense of purpose and entitlement on the part of the European, in this case the British, scientific community. When tagged, catalogued, and displayed in museum-space, then, the objects of natural history bore no trace elements of their cohabitation with sapiens, thereby, quite simply, creating a narrative (of natural history) sanitized and codified with limited liability.74 The figure of the alien and intrusive entity in these narratives associated with the dangers of scientific discovery stands in sharp contrast to the figure of the former slave who was naturalized or otherwise civilized. The first is invariably (and naturally) positioned elsewhere while the latter is usually “brought to England” and naturalized such that the triumphs of both the transplanted entity and the liberal state could be framed together, so to speak. The title page of Thomas Bluett’s biography of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo—Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the

148  The Cultural Logic of Museology I Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in West Africa (1734)75 — presents the background thus: “[Diallo] was a slave about two years in Maryland; and afterward being brought to England, was set free, and sent to his native land in the year 1734.” Bluett’s biography was dedicated to John, the 2nd Duke of Montagu—whose home in Bloomsbury became the home of the British Museum and—among whose protégés were two of the most prominent Blacks in eighteenth-century Britain: Ignatius Sancho and Francis Williams. Regarding the encounter of Sir Hans Sloane and Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, Thomas Bluett had this to say: once Diallo learned the (English) language and was convinced that he would never be enslaved again, he went cheerfully among his friends to several places, both in town and country. One day being at Sir Hans Sloane’s, he expressed his great desire to see the royal family. Sir Hans promised to get him introduced when he had clothes proper to go in. Job knew how kind a friend he had to apply to upon occasion and he was soon cloathed in a rich silk dress, made up after his own country fashion, and introduced to their majesties, and the rest of the royal family. Her Majesty was pleased to present him with a rich gold watch; and the same day he had the honour to dine with his Grace the Duke of Montague, and some others of the Nobility, who were pleased to make him a handsome present after dinner. His Grace after that, was pleased to take Job often in to the country with him, and shew him the tools that are necessary for tilling the ground, both in gardens and fields.76. . . About the latter end of July77 last he embark’d on Board one of the African Company’s ships, bound for Gambia, where we hope he is safely arrived, to the great joy of his friends, and the honour of the English nation.78 The “honour of the English nation” rests upon the idea of freedom as articulated by social contract theorists including but not limited to John Locke and Edmund Burke. Lacking the distinctiveness of a Sancho or a Diallo—the tokens of empire, the noble savages—the “negroes” in Jamaica could only be categorized as dangerous Other. As Peter Hulme has noted, the “strategies of colonial discourse were directed in the first place at demonstrating a separation between the desired land and its native inhabitants.”79 This “separation” also informs the actual practice of science studies and procedures for gathering specimens of natural history. Laboratory space was always-already British (or other European) territory. While productions of nature were valuable because these were means to an end, the natives of these foreign preserves were an impediment to the eighteenth-century science academy as well as to the museum-in-the-making.

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  149

The Structure of Human Signatures My use of the term “structure of human signatures”—a term which I borrow from Giorgio Agamben80 —is a way to draw attention to a radial interface between the materiality of a signature (ink on paper)— which might be a contract, a symbol of ownership, or even a commercial bond—and the materiality of the institution within which the contract operates and drives its value. But foundational or originary signatures often remain invisible when the corporate structure and governing principles of an institution are subsumed by the corporation’s spatial manifestations, by its architectural splendor or its global influence.81 This is certainly the case with the British Museum. In this example (as in other similar institutions), the composite of collective memory, history (of science and system), and ancient and modern heritage was relegated to the archives and to the library of written records; as a result, the singular, the exemplary, and the individual signatures came to be hidden from public view—of which the focal point was display. This invisibility of the archive or the written records becomes ideologically potent in retrospect, when one deep-maps the early historiography of the British Museum to find, as I did, that its magnificence (visual plane) and its newness (curious plane) dematerialize the individual and collective signatures at

Figure 4.5  John Hamilton Mortimer (1740–1779), Captain James Cook, Sir Joseph Banks, Lord Sandwich, Dr. Daniel Solander and Dr. John Hawksworth, Oil on canvas by John Hamilton Mortimer, c. 1771. nla.pic-an7351768.  © National Library of Australia.

150  The Cultural Logic of Museology I its birth and obfuscate the roles of the power brokers who shaped this nation-space. (I discuss the visual impact of the architectural structure at some length in the next chapter.) The structure of human signatures and architectural structure have different functional domains. “[A] signature does not merely express a semiotic relation between a signans and a signatum; rather, it is what . . . displaces and moves it into another domain, thus positioning it in a new network of pragmatic and hermeneutic relations.”82 Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of the theory of signatures is useful because it helps me to refer—albeit only superficially here—to just a couple of key players, who operated behind-the-scenes to establish the blueprint of the British Museum and to create, simultaneously, an institutional paradigm (Figure 4.5). The British Museum Act, which was passed on 7 June 1753,83 rendered George II as an impotent signatory albeit a powerful impediment while showcasing the expert (and by all accounts admirable) political maneuvers on the floor of the House of Commons of the then Speaker, Arthur Onslow (1691–1768). With more than three decades of distinguished service to the Commons (1728–1761), this speaker of the house seems to have made his mark as a skillful negotiator and an agent of change, one whose “abhorrence of persecuting anybody on account of their opinions in religion,” for instance, was just one indelible contribution for which he gained the respect of some of his peers. In the wake of Hans Sloane’s death, on 19 March 1753, a parliamentary debate ensued, and this is where Onslow’s intervention—his signature—was critical.84 At issue was whether to honor Sloane’s last wishes which were described thusly in his will: “I do hereby request and desire that the said trustees or any seven or more of them do make their humble application to his majesty or to parliament at the next sessions after my decease, as shall be thought most proper, in order to pay the full and clear sum of twenty thousand pounds of lawful money of Great Britain, unto my executors.” In return the state would have his entire collection. George II, failing to recognize the magnitude or the future prospects of this deal, said that the state coffers may not have £20,000 demanded by Sloane, but we know that the Speaker of the House “quit the chair to take part in the debate,”85 a performance whose details cannot be found in the sketchy summaries of parliamentary proceedings of this period and (to the best of my knowledge) have yet to be fully reconstructed from eyewitness accounts. Based upon the information we have, it would be appropriate to think of Arthur Onslow as more than a Lockean uber-politician. He was a constitutionalist, a traditionalist, and a champion of religious toleration. More important, as a member of the Board of Trustees, his “signature” appears consistently in the minutes of the Board of Trustees86 even beyond his tenure as the Speaker (which ended in 1761), after which time he was elected to the Board as a private member. Neither the Dictionary of National Biography nor any records of the proceedings

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  151 of the British Parliament87 register the full extent of what appears to be ­A rthur Onslow’s sustained and diligent efforts to solidify British cultural heritage and to secure for it a sustainable narrative space in the British Museum: indeed, the processes of establishing this “Cabinet of Curiosities”—which is what historians came to call the Museum—as well as its signatories (such as Onslow) became “mute signs,” relinquishing their visibility to the mission at hand and the resultant institution. The institution thus came to co-opt and to make invisible those signatures upon which it came to rest so magnificently. The composition of the Board of Trustees tells us how governmentality and corporatization developed in tandem. From 1753 until the British Museum Act of 1963, the Board of Trustees included the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker of the House of Commons; these were the three principal Trustees ex officio. Others included the Lord Chamberlain, the Bishop of London, the Prime Minister, each of the Principal Secretaries of State, the Attorney General, the Solicitor General, as well as representatives from the families of Sloane, Harley, and Cotton, the three most important original donors.88 An Act of Parliament was required to add or change the list.89 A useful comparison of what I am characterizing here as the interplay of politics, policy, and culture in the 1750s might be with similar patterns in the1690s when—according to Peter Laslett—“[t]here was a knot of Lockean members of parliament, a group cutting across political ‘connection,’ as it is now beginning to be understood, the only known example of an association of politicians for the purpose of a set of rationally conceived policies, a program based not only on common sentiment but on superior information and abstract thinking. It was all done by a typically Lockean foundation called the ‘College’ whose main function was correspondence, but which met as a club when Locke was in London: its patron was John Somers . . . Lord Chancellor from 1697 and the chief figure in William III’s government until 1700.”90 Add to this the point made by British Museum historian David Wilson that “[t] he universalist approach to knowledge exhibited by the philosophes was a reflection of Sloane’s lifelong work with the animate and inanimate, sharpened by his sympathy and friendship with John Locke.” This comparison between the 1690s and 1750s allows me to at once highlight the Lockean foundation of eighteenth-century institutions and also to allude to a complex network of a host of principal stakeholders, power brokers, operatives, all of whom helped to establish a strong foundation. The structure of this collective power, even if not entirely disassociated from the Crown, emanated primarily from the will of elected and selected members of parliament whose “superior information” and knowledge base created the right chemistry for facilitating the progress from abstraction to action, leading to the physical manifestation of a leviathan in real time-space.

152  The Cultural Logic of Museology I The record of progress, from collection to acquisition to the development of the logics of museology, is meticulous and superbly preserved in the British Museum. Moreover, the Minutes of the Board of Trustees reveal the care with which each phase of planning, each decision, and each call for action was carried out, with scientific precision. Indeed, decisions were made and policies laid down following scrupulous examination of the advice of experts who were called upon to weigh in on challenges big and small—and all the proceedings were then recorded for immediate use and for posterity, for setting up the precedents and best practices which were absent in 1753. The operational side of this museum, as it developed in stages, was, however, not visible to the public; this corporation was thus, from the beginning, modern in that its display of artefacts inside and its architectural splendor visible both inside and outside were taken to be the thing itself. The workings of the corporation—its base—remained invisible while the superstructure was becoming a powerful and visible symbol of nation. Trained by Carl Linnaeus, encouraged by his father Carl Solander, who was also a scientist albeit an amateur one, and who was probably acquainted with Anders Celsius, Daniel Solander (1733–1782) had grown up in the scientific world of Uppsala in mid-eighteenth century. Solander’s interest in natural history was thus not accidental. He moved to London in 1760 and soon after he assumed the position of Assistant Keeper of the British Museum, he decided to make England his permanent home. Solander’s work at the British Museum and his friendship and scientific partnership with Joseph Banks came to have coequal status in his life in England—highlights of which can be gleaned from the extant letters of these two second-wave scientist-cum-pioneers, often referred to as the “naturalists of the Endeavor,” those who globalized the concept of the laboratory in the modern world. They honed the practice of “travel to collections”—my term—which by then was becoming an essential part of the research methodology so much so that discovery, observation, classification, and preservation justified voyages to distant lands where the flora and fauna revealed new patterns of life and living. The order and display of scientific discoveries then became the inevitable necessity and who better suited to bring those discrete modalities of ­research—experiential, experimental, theoretical, hypothetical, and pedagogical—into a choreographed expression of nation-space at the British Museum than Daniel Solander, the first Swede to go around the globe, and in whom Joseph Banks had found a conscientious ally.91 Specifically, the role of Daniel Solander in helping to script the logics of the British Museum in its earliest phases of development is little known and thus rendered unremarkable (unless viewed through the lens of those who study the history of botany and zoology, and for them he is a quintessential eighteenth-century man of science and nothing else). Besides, his profile is easily dwarfed by his celebrity fellow-voyagers such

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  153 as Joseph Banks and James Cook. Daniel Solander’s double role as a voyager-scientist and corporate employee in the British Museum bridges the two worlds of discovery, one which ensured the steady supply of materials and the other which created the demand for it: the scientist’s discovery of source materials and the public’s discovery of knowledge facilitated by the museum platform. Several extant letters reveal the full extent of not only Solander’s role in the British Museum but his sense of where he stood in terms of what we now see as an Enlightenment project of mammoth scale. But scientific expertise alone was not sufficient. His commitment to both his field of expertise and the scientific community in Britain—in his adopted home and—within which he was in the process of getting deeply ensconced can be found in the following letter to an English physician of distinction. FRS, MD, a graduate of Halle and Wittenberg, a Fellow of the Royal Society, and a member of the Board of Trustees, William Watson (1715–1787) was also an advocate of Linnaeus. Watson was the recipient of Solander’s letter, one which I quote in full (except for the post script) and then I tease out some of the nuances of what I am calling Solander’s signature. I should have done myself the pleasure to write to you before this, but have defer’d it so long, always thinking to return soon to London, and then to desire the favour of consulting further with you, about the proposals for making a Catalogue of the Natural curiosities of the British Museum; but finding now that I shall not even this week come to town, I will lay my thoughts relating that affair before you, as one that can give me the right advise. . . . I imagine that with the assistance of Mr. Epsom, who so well knows the History of these natural curiosities, the most essential part of them might be described & properly ranked in a catalogue in two or three years time. I believe the animals may require a year considering the many undescribed Shells and Insects there are. I suppose that the fossils will not quite take up so long a time. But the plants again certainly will give one enough to do for a whole year or rather more, so I am confident there are a great number not properly taken notice of, and wants to be minutely considered, for to determine their characteristics. However, I now speak with uncertainty, as I never had an opportunity to see the whole of these Treasures,92 you can more perfectly judge hereof. I readily offer myself to the Trustees of the British Museum for the service, and at the same time promise to do it with as much diligence & exactness as I am capable of. A yearly salary of 100 pounds is certainly the least I can support myself with, which I am employed in it, especially as it will hinder me from pursuing any other study during that business, because I should think it proper to spend at least 4 to

154  The Cultural Logic of Museology I 5 hours a day for the most part of the year, in examining the Natural curiosities of this inestimable collection. A Catalogue such as I should think proper and fit for the purpose should consist of the true generical name with a differentia specifica and a trivial name; a good Synonyme—the native country—the use, if any—and in case it was a new subject, then to add a short description. The further management of this, I entirely submit to your judgement, as I am fully convinced of your disinterested conduct93 in an affair of that importance. I therefore take the liberty to recommend myself to your favour, and am with due respect, Sir Your most obedient humble servant Daniel L. Solander Busbridge, January 26, 176394 Solander’s references to entities with connections to the British Museum position him as a player within a network of individuals invested in the same goal: to advance the field of botany and to secure for it a permanent place within the British Museum. At this time, the head of the Museum or principal librarian was a man named Gowan Knight, who had studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, had become a physician, and had written a number of papers on, for instance, the compass, which the British Navy found very useful. Among the three under librarians were two MDs, Matthew Maty and Charles Morton, and the third was James Empson, a man who seems to have had no formal education but had been the curator of Sloane’s collection at Chelsea and was hired by the Trustees of the British Museum for his expertise in what I am calling the uber-source-narrative: the collections of Hans Sloane.95 ­Solander also had working relations with John Ellis, the author of The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes and the ­naturalist-merchant who is discussed above. In this letter, then, Solander refers obliquely to his training—one in which “diligence & exactness” played a big role96 —and also invokes common acquaintances, or comrades devoted to the same cause, toward solidifying his own position within the corporate structure of the British Museum. The reference in the letter to his salary expectation suggests a behind-the-scenes attempt on his part to ensure not only a position within the Museum management structure for two to three years but also a salary commensurate with his experience and his commitment to generating the “Catalogue of the Natural curiosities of the British Museum.” In seeking Watson’s “advice,” Solander was in fact pleading

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  155 for the board member’s support, and this lobbying initiative yielded the right result. At the General Meeting of the Board of Trustees held on 26 February 1763, it was Resolved, that Dr. Solander be employed to assist Mr. Empson in making a Catalogue of the Collections of natural history in the Museum, at the yearly salary of £100, to be paid out of the money given by his majesty to the Corporation: and, that it be referred to the standing committee, to consider of & determine the time when it will be proper to enter upon this work; & also the manner of carrying the same into execution. (General II: 444) A report in the Original Letters and Papers (pertaining to the British Museum), dated September 1764, suggests that Solander got to work immediately and was asked to submit progress reports by the Board, as this example shows: In consequence of the order given by the Honorable Trustees of the British Museum at their last committee, Dr. Solander begs leave to report that he has made a systematical catalogue of the greatest part of the animals, viz the Insects that are deposited on the Tables in the two rooms called the Insect-room & the Spirit-room, & them that were preserved in some Books; the Quadrupeds & some of the Birds and Amphibia; that he has likewise begun with the figur’d fossils on the Tables in the Fossil-room; that he has always given particular attention to, & taken compleat Descriptions of, everything that has been new & not before properly known, where of he has found a great number.97 On 6 October 1764, “Dr. Solander having been ordered to give a Report of the progress he had made in drawing up the Catalogue of Natural productions and having accordingly given it in; it now lies upon the Table, for the perusal of the General Meeting” (General III: 523). On 1 December 1764, the General Meeting minutes record the order “[t]hat Dr. Solander be directed to lay before the Standing Committee what progress he has made in the Catalogue of the Natural Productions in Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection” (General III: 530). On 29 June 1765 it was reported that “In pursuance of the direction of the last General Meeting, Dr. Solander has presented his report, which lies upon the table” (General III: 540). It is easy to miss the significance of or indeed to overlook the space in which knowledge is displayed; on the table. On the question of whether in this period there was a new kind of curiosity “about exotic plants and animals,” Michel Foucault is clear and his articulation of the primary

156  The Cultural Logic of Museology I difference between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment (which he calls the classical age) points to the importance of the “table”: What has changed was the space in which it was possible to see them and from which it was possible to describe them. . . . The natural history room and the garden, as created in the Classical period, replace the circular procession of the ‘show’ with the arrangement of things in a “table.” What came surreptitiously into being between the age of theatre and that of the catalogue was not the desire for knowledge, but a new ways of connecting things both to the eye and to discourse. A new way of making history.98 As a bona fide botanist on board the Endeavor, Solander worked in ­Tahiti with not only Captain Cook and Joseph Banks but also with such veterans of voyages of discovery as John Gore, Robert Molyneaux, Richard Pickersgill, and Francis Wilkerson.99 His primary functions, aligned to his expertise, were to collect plants and to interpret or to apply Linnean binomials as well as to provide nomenclature whenever necessary. Solander’s biographer Edward Duyker writes, “[i]t is hard to imagine that Solander was not especially delighted to discover that the ubiquitous ‘Tiare Tahiti,’ the favorite flower of the islanders which blooms throughout the year, was a new species of Gardenia—a genus he had vigorously helped establish Linnean credentials for!” Solander’s sudden death in 1782 meant that many of the names he gave to flora and fauna never achieved “nomenclature status because they were not published.” Later, botanists have found many instances in which Solander’s manuscript names had been purloined by others, with the exception of John Richardson who acknowledged his Solander borrowings. “Richardson studied many of Solander’s descriptions and Parkinson’s illustrations of fish collected in Tahiti and cited them appropriately. . . . He also gave the specific epithet solandri to a sharp-nosed puffer fish of the genus Canthigaster in honor of Solander who had first described it in Tahitian waters in 1769.”100 Solander is thus best known for accompanying his patron Joseph Banks in the Endeavor on Captain Cook’s first expedition to the South Seas in 1768 while his membership in the corporate structure of the British Museum goes unnoticed. Solander applied to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Speaker of the House of Commons (Arthur Onslow’s successor, Sir John Cust) for leave of absence, the circumstances of which are explained in what appears to be a report in the Original Letters and Papers and some of it goes as follows: Doctor Solander having had an offer from Mr. Banks to accompany him on a Voyage which he is going to undertake, probably in the South Seas, to make observations in the different branches of Natural History, was very desirous to avail himself of this opportunity, both

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  157 with a view of improving his own knowledge, and of—­enriching this Museum with new subjects; and finding by the act of Parliament, that the power of granting leave of absence, and having his place supplied by a Deputy during the absence, is vested in the Arch Bishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor and the Speaker of the House of Commons;—he applied to them for such a leave, which they have been pleased to grant him.101 The links between and among the British Museum Corporation, Parliament, and the voyages of discovery emerge clearly in these documents. Furthermore, Solander’s desire to please his English employers and, at the same time, to advance the interests of science can be found in the next part of this report, which goes as follows: “Dr. Solander hopes that during this intended voyage, he may be of great utility to the ­British ­Museum, in collecting Natural Curiosities for that repository, from countries that perhaps never before were investigated by any curious men and don’t doubt but that it then will be in his power to shew with what ardor he wishes to increase that grand collection.”102 Countries never before investigated are thus the objects of inquiry by “curious men.” Investigation and curiosity anchor the voyages of discovery which would result in the advancement of knowledge and science. In the eighteenth-century scientific community, Solander’s reputation rested primarily upon his contributions related to the work he did on ­Australian plants as a member of Cook’s First Voyage (1768–1771) when he accompanied Cook and Joseph Banks to the South Seas. Cook’s ­Second Voyage took place soon after and lasted from 1772 to 1775.103 The quick succession of these two voyages left the scientific community in a bit of a lurch: would there be sufficient time to publish and to disseminate the findings of the First Voyage? This concern is articulated in a letter written by Linnaeus to John Ellis on 22 October 1771 and some of it goes as follows: Whilst the whole botanical world, like myself, has been looking for the most transcendent benefits to our science, from the unrivalled exertions of your countrymen, all their matchless and truly astonishing collection, such as has never been seen before, nor may ever be seen again, is to be put aside untouched, to be thrust into some corner, to become, perhaps, prey of insects and of destruction. I have been every day been figuring to myself the occupation of my pupil Solander, now putting his collection in order, having first arranged and numbered his plants in parcels, according to the places where they were gathered, and then written upon each specimen its native country and appropriate number. I then fancied him throwing the whole into classes; putting aside, and naming, such as were already known; ranging others under known genera, with their species.104

158  The Cultural Logic of Museology I Linnaeus then appeals to Ellis to ensure “the publication of these new acquisitions” so that “the learned world will not be deprived of them.” The British Museum and the scientific community in Britain were perfectly aligned when it came to the ordering, numbering, and categorizing of the specimens. Linnaeus, stoking the British-French competitive fire, identifies the advantage of this publication in terms of the sponsorship of science: this publication would establish “that the English nation promotes science more than the French, or all other people together.” The plants of Banks and Solander are thus of prime importance toward substantiating these claims made by the Swedish scientist.105 Unsurprisingly, upon his return from the Pacific expedition, Solander was put in charge of The South Sea Room in the British Museum. The scientific system of categorizing, ordering, and labeling—derived quite clearly from the system developed by Linnaeus in Uppsala and then passed on to the British Museum through Daniel Solander—led to some of the most remarkable lists in modern times. In his recent dissertation on The Infinity of Lists, and specifically in the chapter titled “the List and the Catalogue” where the focus is on Homer, Umberto Eco draws attention to an important mode of artistic representation “one where we do not know the boundaries of what we wish to portray, where we do not know how many things we are talking about and presume their number to be, if not infinite, then at least astronomically large.” In these instances, Eco observes, “[w]e cannot provide a definition by essence and so, to be able to talk about it, to make it comprehensible or in some way perceivable, we list its properties.” He then goes on to demarcate two types of infinity thus: The infinity of aesthetics is the subjective feeling of something greater than us. It is an emotional condition, a potential infinity. On the contrary, the infinity we are talking about now is an actual infinity made up of objects that can perhaps be numbered but that we cannot number—we fear that their numeration (and enumeration) may never stop. . . . The infinity of aesthetics is a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire while the other form of representation suggests infinity almost physically, because in fact it does not end, nor does it conclude in form. We shall call this representative mode the list, or catalogue.106 The infinity of nature’s bounty was within human reach once catalogued and enumerated in lists. Cartography, geography, maritime prowess, scientific labor—representing a multifaceted and corporate “endeavor”— thus came to rely upon the infinite bounty culled from all continents having rich preserves of raw materials and specimens. Gathered and sourced from the distant global laboratories, the multiplicity of Noah’s Ark (creation at the source) could be brought home and conjoined with scientific knowledge (proto-Darwinian evolution) toward establishing

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  159 the preeminence of European civilization. The scientist’s fascination for that beguiling infinity—his experience of “a sensation that follows from the finite and perfect completeness of the thing we admire”—and the public’s thirst for novelty were unified in one narrative and made available, for the first time in the 1750s, in the elaborately choreographed space within the British Museum. Cataloguer extraordinaire, Daniel Solander provides for us just one interpretive entryway into the archive from which both the scientist (the purveyor of knowledge) and the layperson (the recipient of knowledge) were to come away with “the subjective feeling of something greater than us.” Likewise, the coalition of scientific, aristocratic, and political communities, consisting of the institutional stakeholders and power brokers, responded unwittingly to that very fear of infinity which Eco describes; their purpose was to impose order by compressing and cataloguing the mammoth scale of things and knowledge to fit the space of the national repository, which would then stand in for the globe—in an imperial act of surrogacy—using an inductive representational mode where probability could be wiped out and certainty established by the evidence presented, where the suggestion is of that infinity beyond, and where the distance is no longer fearful but alluring. Western civilizational practice—a civilizing mission always at work—was perfected here, in the British Museum. This civilization came to be anchored by museum-space and this museum’s claims of authenticity—at its foundation and in perpetuity—as well as its self-validating mechanisms which could be repeatedly reified by “unencumbered spaces in which things are juxtaposed.”107 The historico-political logics of museology, manifested in the spatial logics of order, authenticity, and display, provide the cornerstone of the British Museum.

Notes 1 This is a reference to Captain James Cook (1728–1779), who set sail on HMS Endeavor ostensibly to observe, on behalf of the British government, Venus eclipsing the Sun; in fact, this government-funded expedition was to discover a southern (Pacific) continent (1769–1771). The alliance of James Cook, Joseph Banks, and Daniel Solander—an alliance discussed at some length in this chapter—is just one way to study the alliance between the governmentality and the birth of the British Museum. While Cook was not directly involved in the corporatization of the British Museum, both Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander were instrumental in building the foundations of this institution, the former as Board member and scientist of distinction and the latter as cataloguer extraordinaire. 2 Home to the royals and with a history dating back to the middle ages, the Musée du Louvre, to cite one example, has a textured past, one which, in the eighteenth century and even after the Revolution, was markedly different from the British Museum. The birth of the first Paris salon can be traced back to when The Royal Academy of Painters and Sculptors held their first meeting at the Louvre in 1699. Even when the Palace was converted to a Museum (1793) and the Museum Central des Art opened its doors, the

160  The Cultural Logic of Museology I focus remained on arts works and sculpture—making this French repository a decidedly different institution in terms of its mission and its flavor from the one in London where the “idea” of a museum developed in tandem with Britain’s investment in science and discovery. Britain’s investment in science continued to be aggressively aligned to its interests in trade and commerce, leading to its highly competitive global presence mirrored quite accurately in the British Museum’s encyclopedic scope. 3 Samuel J. M. M. Alberti, “The Status of the Museum: Authority, Identity, and Material Culture,” Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (U of Chicago P, 2011), 51–72 and specifically 53. 4 See, for instance, Miles Ogborn, “Francis Williams’s Bad Language: Historical Geography in a World of Practice,” Historical Geography 37 (2009), 5–21, and Sujit Sivasundaram, “Islanded: Natural History in the British Colonization of Ceylon,” Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, 123–48. 5 By using the term “cultural logic, I invoke Fredric Jameson, who, in Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, has observed, for instance, the following: “The crisis in historicity now dictates a return, in a new way, to the question of temporal organization in general in the postmodern force field, and indeed, to the problem of the form that time, temporality, and the syntagmatic will be able to take in a culture increasingly dominated by space and spatial logic.” See Jameson, Postmodernism (Duke UP, 1991), 25. 6 James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2017). 7 Here I am referring to bezoars “‘or concretions in the stomach’, ‘stones formed in animals, which are so many diseases of the creature that bears them’ and stones from ‘the kidneys and bladders[s]’ of people.” See Delbourgo, xix. 8 James Delbourgo refers to this enterprise as “Putting the World in Order.” See Chapter 6 in Collecting the World, 258–302. 9 The false dichotomy of real/unreal (or the pragmatic as well as the theoretical dependence of the one on the other) has been discussed by many commentators. Scientific progress in the eighteenth century, Barbara Maria Stafford has shown, inevitably led to “wrestling with the problems of manipulation and distortion, phantom and illusion.” Stafford goes on to argue that “the eighteenth century offers compelling evidence for just how complicated the verification of authentic experience was and still is.” Indeed, the theory of “artful science” developed by Stafford—and pertinent to my argument here as well as throughout this argument—helps me to locate the space “lying somewhere between entertainment and information, pleasure and learning.” See Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education (MIT P, 1994; rpt. 1999), xxiv and xxxv. 10 Kwame Anthony Appiah, for instance, has summed up nicely the importance of establishing the cultural patrimony of art and artefacts. One has to make a sharp distinction, he has argued, between an object that belongs to a certain culture and an object that this culture can access in order to gain knowledge of the culture that produced the artefact. The word ‘belong’ is thus metaphorical and must be considered as such. See Appiah, “Whose Culture Is It?” Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities, ed. James Cuno (Princeton UP, 2009), 71–86 and specifically 75.

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  161 11 Early-modern civilizing missions were akin to the postmodern polemics (and just-war theories) of Western governments (and particularly the US) to “democratize” various parts of the globe. While “reason” ostensibly undergirds the current logics of democratizing the world, the eighteenth-century civilizing missions were not empowered by people but by monarchies which funded and subsidized a vast network of scientific adventurers and their missions to various parts of the globe—parts which were subsequently or simultaneously colonized. 12 John Ellis, “Collected from Various Parts of the Globe by the late John Ellis, Esq. F.R.S. . . . Author of The Natural History of Corallines, and Other Works, Systematically Arranged and Described by the Late Daniel Solander, M. D. F. R. S.,” The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes (Benjamin White and Son and Peter Elmsly, 1786). Henceforth Zoophytes. Among the three copies of the item in the British Library, one seems to have been owned by Joseph Banks and bears his signature. See item with Shelfmark 461.l.19. 13 Nicholaas Rupke, “Putting the Geography of Science in its Place,” Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science, 439. 14 Ibid., 439. 15 The image above was reproduced in Building the British Museum; however, the authors were unable to trace the current owner. Christy’s and Sotheby’s did not have any records of the current owner. Last published in color in Country Life, its subsequent ownership or provenance is not known. Check Frederic Madden Scrapbook (printed) in the British Library (four volumes) for images of the early years of the BM. 16 The drawing I am referring to was produced possibly in the 1730s but no earlier than 1731. Unknown artist and provenance. The view of the hayfields, seen in from the North looking toward the South with Montagu House to the right, Southampton House to the left, and St. George’s Church (architect Nicholas Hawksmoor 1731) set back, in the middle. “Those who began it [the British Museum] had no idea of the dimensions which the building, of which they laid the foundation, was to attain. And although those who have watched over its fortunes have been uniformly eager to do the best for it, it cannot be said that there has been any settled policy governing the lines on which the development was to be conducted.” This, according to Sir George Hill, Principal Librarian 1931–1936 and quoted in as well as discussed at some length by Marjorie Caygill, “Sloane’s Will and the Establishment of the British Museum,” Sir Hans Sloane, ed. Arthur MacGregor (British Museum P, 1994), 45–50 and specifically 45. 17 See Jerry White, A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard UP, 2013), 73. 18 Thomas Hobbes used the metaphor of the Leviathan to showcase two sides of the state—figured in his study as Leviathan—mirroring the two avatars of the sea monster, one in Job 40:15–41:26 and the other in Isaiah 27.1: The Jobian sea monster is a symbol of awesome power while the one in Isaiah is ferocious, a symbol of evil. Both subject to God’s will and subordination (divine sovereignty), Hobbes’s sea monster is a political symbol thus has the potential to be either the one or the other. See Noel Malcolm, “The Name and Nature of Leviathan: Political Symbolism and Biblical Exegesis,” Intellectual History Review, vol. 17, no. 1 (2007), 21–39. Invoking this dual possibility, I use the term here to denote the mixed legacy of the “Enlightenment” museum: on the one hand, its definitive contribution to knowledge and information and on the other its inevitable reliance upon

162  The Cultural Logic of Museology I imperial strategies of acquisition (mostly if not entirely “unthinking”) leading to long-term destabilization of ecosystems and indigenous social structures and also damage to the environment. I use the term “unthinking” in the sense in which Ella Shohat and Robert Stam have used it: Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (Routledge, 1994). 19 David M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History (British Museum P, 2002). See Wilson, “Introduction,” 8. “The past of the whole world” and the British past are here as elsewhere in establishment narratives conjoined and inseparable. Given this premise, the methods of acquisition and ­collection— which I outline in some depth in this chapter—are automatically sidelined or indeed made irrelevant. The collected object with a severely attenuated past then becomes the chief attraction in the imperial capital. 20 An important concept, one which I have borrowed from Pierre Bourdieu. See Endnote 30 below. To make something neutral is to rob the idea or act or object of the many ideologies and politics and contingencies of praxis which ideas, acts, and objects necessarily embody and embed. In this context, recall how in Unmarked, Peggy Phelan’s purpose was to examine “the implicit assumptions about the connections between representational visibility and political power.” She points out that “[a]mong the challenges this poses is how to retain the power of the unmarked by surveying it within a theoretical frame” without resorting to the “surveillance of the object” which replicates the power relations inherent in oppression.” It is my contention here that the connections between representational visibility and political power remain unmarked in the “marked” and visibly dominant institutions of the Enlightenment in the first blush of the modern moment; these unmarked narratives have not been sufficiently explored and theorized or “deep-mapped,” to use a term of greater currency today. See Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (Routledge, 1993), 1–2. 21 Regarding the tangled history of “cultural patrimony,” see Kwame A ­ nthony Appiah, Whose Culture? 71–86 and specifically 73–74. 22 With reference to William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), and specifically the distinctions between movable and immovable property, Mark Blackwell has noted that “people have been shaped by their changing relationships with the things they own.” See Blackwell, “Introduction: The It-Narrative and Eighteenth-Century Thing Theory,” The Secret Life of Things (Bucknell UP, 2007), 9–14 and specifically 10. This book pioneered the study of “it-narratives,” making such narratives part of discourse about eighteenth-century material culture. In this context, see also Jonathan Lamb, The Things Things Say (Princeton UP, 2011). 23 See Delbourgo, Plate 10: Pharmacopoeia drawer. See also Papers Relating to the British Museum, Birch Collection, BM Add MS 4449, 153 (recto and verso). This printed text appears right after the printed version of the following: M. Maty, “A Scheme for the More Convenient Shewing of the Museum,” dated 13 April 1759. 24 See write-up in the Enlightenment wing of the British Museum. 25 The British Museum and others throughout the world still use “Solander boxes” for storage of rare materials, manuscripts, prints, and drawings. 26 See Arthur MacGregor, “The Life, Character and Career of Sir Hans Sloane,” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum, ed. Arthur Macgregor (British Museum P, 1994), 13. 27 James Delbourgo also notes that “[r]esearch under way also points to the likelihood that each of his rooms combined objects of many different

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  163 kinds—this was a collection whose display was perhaps as much defined by pragmatic storage concerns as by discrete categorizations.” See Delbourgo’s “Collecting Hans Sloane,” From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections, eds. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor and Michael Hunter (The British Library, 2012), 14 and more generally 9–23. 28 In a section of We Have Never Been Modern titled “Even a Longer Network Remains Local at All Points,” Bruno Latour makes the following observation, citing Deleuze and Guattari: “The network-lengthening process had been interrupted in earlier periods, because it would have threatened the maintenance of territories.” He goes on to observe that “by multiplying the hybrids, half object and half subject, that we call machines and facts, collectives have changed their topography.” Substitute, for the purposes of the discussion in this chapter, artefacts for “machines.” “Since this enlistment of new beings had enormous scaling effects by causing relations to vary from local to global, but we continue to think about them in terms of the old opposite categories of universal and contingent, we tend to transform the lengthened networks of Westerners into systematic and global totalities.” See Latour, 117. 29 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Harvard UP, 1984), and see specifically “The Titles of Cultural Nobility,” 18–62 and 30. 30 I am invoking here an important publication which underscores the importance of the “global” dimension of all eighteenth-century cultural productions as well as the real and cognitive landscapes which framed the concept of the Enlightenment: Felicity Nussbaum, ed. The Global Eighteenth Century (The Johns Hopkins UP, 2003). 31 The museum is, by its very nature, an encyclopedic museum and James Cuno (of the Art Institute of Chicago) defines the concept thus: Encyclopedic museums, like the British Museum, with collections representative of the world’s diverse, artistic production, encourage tolerance and inquiry. They are the legacy of the Enlightenment, and are dedicated to the principle that access to the full diversity of human artistic industry promotes the polymath ideal of discovering and understanding the whole of human knowledge, and improves and advances the condition of our species and the world we inhabit. Cuno’s utopian conceptualization of the encyclopedic museum carries a lot of weight because of the success of museological endeavors for the last 275 years. Moreover, he sees the controversy surrounding museums to be one in which there are two distinct sides, the one represented by museum directors, curators, and other related personnel and the other represented by archaeologists. Cuno rightly points out that “[a]rchaeologists hold that looting is caused by the market in antiquities and the degree to which museums participate in the market, either by acquiring antiquities directly from or indirectly as gifts from private collectors, they are said to be encouraging looting and the destruction of the archaeological context.” However, there is more to this argument than the ones expressed by the two sets of key players that Cuno identifies. See James Cuno, “Introduction” and “The Value of Museums,” Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate over Antiquities (Princeton UP, 2009), 1–35 and 37–38. 32 The theme of “living and dying” embraced by the British Museum in 2013 (and still the theme of the Africa wing of the Museum) brings together the experiences from around the globe to showcase how people respond

164  The Cultural Logic of Museology I to grief and joy and how these responses reflect a common humanity. The juxtaposition showcasing different cultures is essential to this universalist approach to assembling narratives of traumatic experiences from across the world and putting knowledge on display. 33 Robert Harley was instrumental in Defoe’s release from Newgate Prison where he was incarcerated following the publication of The Shortest Way with Dissenters (1701). Shortly after the meeting of the two, Daniel Defoe traveled around England and Scotland while spying on behalf of the then Secretary of State and first Prime Minister, Robert Harley, whose impressive list of titles ensured a degree of protection for Defoe and spies like him. The footage of shelving was as follows: Sloane, 4,600; Harley, 1,700; ­Cotton, 384; and Edwards, 586. See Harris, 3. 34 The footage of shelving at the British Museum presents a comparative view of the size of the following collections: Sloane, 4,600; Harley, 1,700; Cotton, 384; and Edwards, 586. See Harris, 3. 35 See P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1773 (The British Library, 1998), 3. 36 “Since the Duchess of Portland (the daughter of the second Earl of Oxford) was anxious to be rid of the Harleian Manuscripts, the General Meeting decided on 7 April 1755 that they should be moved to Montagu House as soon as possible and placed in the West Wing.” See P. R. Harris, 3. All references to “Select Committee” meetings will appear parenthetically in the text as Committee with volume and page number(s); likewise, references to the General meeting of the Trustees—held, for the most part, four times a year—will appear parenthetically in the text as General with volume and page number(s). See General I: 51–52. 37 “Lord Cadogan delivered up the keys of the eleven chests—deposited in the bank, being part of the collection of the late Sir Hans Sloane, which keys were put into the hands of Lords Charles Cavendish for the use of the Corporation.” The General Committee, which met on 2 February 1754 observed, in addition, that “The Catalogues of the Collection and Library of Sir Hans Sloane consists of 89 volumes in folio and 10 volumes in quarto” which included, in folio, “eight volumes of coins and medals of different countries antient and modern. One volume of cameos, intaglios, rings, amulets, Eastern coins and medals etc.” See the next chapter for a discussion of this point. General Meeting, I: 11–12. See Marjorie Caygill, Books to Bezoars for the problems related to nailing down the number of volumes in the Sloane collection. 38 The public did not have access to his collections at home in number 3 Bloomsbury Place and then later in Chelsea, however. The visitors were his friends most of whom—such as George Fredric Handel—belonged to London’s economic and cultural elite. 39 In this context, see Latour, “The Double Artifact of the Laboratory and the Leviathan” and “the Constitutional Guarantees of the Moderns.” Latour shows that Hobbes and Boyle had a lot in common: Together, they described how God must rule, how the new King of ­England must legislate, how the spirits or the angels should act, what the properties of matter are, how nature is to be interrogated, what the boundaries of scientific or political discussion must be, how to keep the lower orders on a tight rein, what the rights and duties of women are, what is to be expected of mathematics. In practice, then, they are situated within the old anthropological matrix; they divide up the capacities of things and people, and they do not yet establish any separation between a pure social force and a pure natural mechanism.

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  165 See We Have Never Been Modern, specifically 24–27, 29–30. Joshua ­Reynolds, Daniel Solander, and others who made “discovery” their raison d’etre merely shifted the laboratory from built space within a scientific academy to distance lands and topographies which served also as laboratories for the gathering of source materials. These laboratories elsewhere were provisional ones, form where specimens were gathered and then transported to Britain, to controlled environments, such as museum or an academy, where the specimens would be studied further, categorized, catalogued, and staged for viewing, creating thus another line of Enlightenment specialization in the art of museology. 40 All biographical information has been taken from David M. Wilson, “Beginnings,” History, 11–34, specifically 12. 41 I borrow this term “dialogic” from Mikhail Bakhtin who first made the distinction between the monologic and the dialogic imagination. The “dialogics” of space may be defined as the dialogic encounter—the conversation or the conflict—of one space and its contents with another, adjacent, near, or distant space. If space is designed, choreographed and made ­exhibition-ready, it is in a dialogic relationship with other, competing spaces. The element of dialogue (in the dialogics of space) allows me to emphasize here and throughout this discussion the fundamentally malleable nature of the original (British) museum which is perpetually in ­rehearsal-mode and, simultaneously, in performance-mode. The plurality of the dialogic impulse—the dialogics of space—is also deliberately inserted here and signifies the parallel and competing voices and dialogues which contribute to the making of the museum. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and ed. Michael Holquist (U of Texas P, 1983). 42 This was the second meeting of the “select” Committee. The first meeting of the Committee was held on 19 January 1754. 43 This is a reference to John Ray author of Historia Plantarum (1686–1704): “Sloane’s own heavily-annotated copy of John Ray’s Historia plantarum gives cross-references allowing the location of specimens of a given species in the various volumes of the herbarium.” See Charlie Jarvis, Mark Spencer, and Robert Huxley, “Sloane’s Plant Specimens at the Natural History Museum, with a Supplementary Account of Sloane’s Fossils by Cyrille Delmer,” From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections (The British Library, 2012), 138. 44 Delbourgo here. 45 See Barbara M. Benedict, “Sloane’s Literary Reputation,” From Books to Bezoars, 35 and more generally 33–40. 46 I would like to underscore “civil society” because there is no evidence of preoccupations related to the education of natives in, say, Tahiti, or Australia or elsewhere. Proselytizing missions ran a parallel course producing trajectories that never converged with voyages of discovery, which were unselfconsciously secular for the most part. (While Hans Sloane talked about providence and doing God’s work, the scientists of the Endeavour seem to have been largely secular.) For Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks and others, the focus was on Enlightenment society and its education and what we now consider to be the quality of life of the educate and/or urban elite. 47 According to John H. Taylor, The first mummy to enter the British Museum was part of the founding collection of Hans Sloane, acquired by the nation in 1753. It comprised a small wrapped bundle in a painted wooden coffin, and was an example of a type which has been subsequently shown to be (at least in part)

166  The Cultural Logic of Museology I a fabrication made from ibis bones and scraps of ancient mummy wrappings. . . . This was followed in 1756 by two complete and authentic mummies—one the bequest of Colonel William Lethieullier (1701–56) and the other donated by his nephew Pitt Lethieullier. William Lethieullier’s mummy and its coffin had been obtained in Egypt in 1721 . . . and were well-documented by engravings made by George Vertue in 1724 and by Alexander Gordon in 1737. . . . In 1766 another mummy, sent from Egypt by Edward Wortley Montague (1713–76), was presented to the British Museum by King George III. All of these mummies probably came from the Memphite necropolis, near to Cairo, the principal source of such remains in the 18th century when Upper Egypt was as yet rarely visited by Europeans. See John H. Taylor, “The Collection of Egyptian Mummies in the British Museum,” Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum, eds. Alexandra Fletcher Daniel Antoine and J. D. Hill, Research Publication 197 (The British Museum, 2014), 103–04. Possession of Egyptian antiquities or rare objects, while being somewhat of an obsession, especially after 1800, did not necessarily lead to love for Egypt. On the complex and contradictory scripting of Egyptomania (in both England and America), see Edward Chanay, who has pointed out, for instance, that Milton . . . placed Isis among the fallen angels in Paradise Lost and in Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden chose Pharaoh to represent Louise XIV, Egypt thereby standing for wicked old absolutist (and papist) France. In London in 1688, John Evelyn, who on the Grand Tour fourty years earler had collected a handful of Egyptian objects, heard what he described as a “very excellent” sermon in which the parson waxed lyrical about our nation “being brought out of the Egyptian darkness of popery and superstition,” that is, liberated from the so-called tyranny of the Catholic James II by the more monotheistic Dutch-enable Glorious Revolution. See Edward Chanay, “Egypt in England and American,” Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines, eds. Maurizio Ascari and Adrianna Corrado (Rodopi, 2006), 39–69 and specifically 53. 48 This is a selection and not a comprehensive list. See Committee I: 68. A proliferation of “lists” can be found in these early proceedings, representing the steady flow of items. See, for instance, the Committee meeting held on 18 June 1756: Committee I: 94–95. 49 In this context, see, for instance, the last will and testament of David Garrick: “I give and bequeath the statue of Shakespeare after my wife’s death and all my Collection of old English Plays to the Trustees of the British Museum for the time being for the use of the Publick.” Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I: (new series) No. 89, 359, dated February 1779. 50 In the robust field of study pertaining to deep maps and mapping in general, I have found the following two works most useful for my purposes: David Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, for instance, have energized the discussion of the use of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies toward generating a new vocabulary and new methods for spatial humanities, including the study of geography, history, and narratives of all kinds. They rightly point out that the “[h]umanities are fully conversant with space as concept or metaphor—gendered space, the body as space, and racialized space, among numerous other rubrics . . . —but only recently have scholars revived what had been a dormant interest in the

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  167 influence of physical or geographical space on human behavior and cultural development.” See Bodenhamer et al., The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship (Indiana UP, 2010), vii–xv, specifically vii. See also Matthew H. Edney, who has presented a large body of work on revisionist approaches to historical geography. Of particular interest to me is Edney’s discussion of eighteenth-century maps and geographical data which were conceptualized as “unambiguous” so that the “archive of knowledge” could be presented as coherent and scientifically validated. See Edney, “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive,” Geography and Enlightenment, eds. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (U of Chicago P, 1999), 165–98 and specifically 170–71. 51 John Ellis, The Natural history of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes (Benjamin White and Peter Elmsly, 1768). 52 Chemical experiments were done to determine whether corals and corallines were plants or animals. 53 In Zoophytes, see dedication page following title page and before the advertisement. 54 This particular post (in West Florida) required tremendous diplomatic finesse and political maneuver since the British interests in Florida had to be defended in a continuous tug-of-war with Spain (which managed to hold on to St. Augustine) with (or without) the help of native Americans who were being manipulated by both imperial powers. Under these circumstances, natural history was no doubt a much sought-after refuge from the volatility of real politic. 55 John Fothergill’s credentials were impeccable: member of the Royal College of Physicians, fellow of the Royal Society, member of the Royal Medical Society of Paris. 56 Zoophytes, Advertisement, v–vi. 57 Ibid. See Dedication page preceding the Advertisement. 58 Zoophytes, vi–vii. 59 In reference to Locke’s position on labor (Puritan, even Calvinist), Hulme contends that “since industry of those who appropriate land to themselves by their labour and, consequently through pursuing their private interests contribute to the public good, also thereby demonstrates . . . their closeness.” Defined by reason, Locke’s humanity establishes a division “between those who ‘improve’ and those who merely ‘collect.’” By plucking off a fruit from the branch, the Indian (in Locke’s example) has “used his labour—but not in the productive process, and so without . . . showing any exercise of reason.” See Peter Hulme “The Spontaneous Hand of Nature: Savagery, Colonialism, and the Enlightenment,” The Enlightenment and Its Shadows, eds. Peter Hulme and Ludmilla Jordanova (Routledge, 1990), 16–34 and specifically 29–30. 60 Sunda was the capital of the Dutch East Indies, now Jakarta. This is a reference to the strait between Java and Sumatra. 61 Zoophytes, 66. 62 Ibid., 142. 63 Ibid., 142–43. 64 My disagreement with Terry Eagleton. 65 Hans Sloane, MD, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, Four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles &c. Of the last of those islands, to which is prefix’d an introduction wherein is an account of the inhabitants of Air, Waters, Diseases, Trade &c. of that place, with some

168  The Cultural Logic of Museology I relations concerning the neighboring continent, and islands of America. 2 Vols. (Printed by B.M. for the Author, 1707). 66 Ibid., xxxiii. 67 Hans Sloane, MD, A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christophers and Jamaica, with the Natural History of the Herbs and Trees, four-footed Beasts, Fishes, Birds, Insects, Reptiles &c. Of the last of those islands, to which is prefix’d an introduction wherein is an account of the inhabitants of Air, Waters, Diseases, Trade &c. of that place, with some relations concerning the neighboring continent, and islands of America. Vol. 2 (Printed by B.M. for the Author, 1725). The eight books in volume 2 are Of the Trees of Jamaica; Of Insects; Of Testaceous Animals; Of Crustaceos Animals; Sea Stars and Blubbers; Of the Fishes of Jamaica; Of the Birds of Jamaica; Of Quadrupeds and Serpents of Jamaica; and Of the Stones, Earths, Sands, Minerals. 68 S. Harrington, A New Introduction to the Knowledge and Use of Maps (S. Crowder and J. Walter, 1774), 169. All quotations and references are from this first edition. The author is unidentified in this edition. There were at least four editions in quick succession and the fourth edition (1775) identifies the author as S. Harrington who is presumably also the author of Jupiter and Saturn: Their Appearance in the Heavens and Influence on Earth (J. Walter and S. Baldwin, 1782). 69 Ibid., 169. 70 Ibid., 169. 71 Ibid., 169. 72 Homo sapiens have existed on this planet for roughly 2.4 million years and sapiens, the human descendants, for approximately 150,000 years. While these specifics were not known in the eighteenth century, the fact that almost any habitat, anywhere in the world, would consist of both sapiens and what was referred to as natural productions (which was the basis for natural history) was well known. The desire to find uninhabited islands in the South Pacific, where there was a cornucopia of nature besides paving the way for territorial expansion, was also an extension of this desire to access natural productions without having to encounter resistance from sapiens. 73 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to Jamaica, II: xviii. 74 Anna Neill’s analysis extends “[f]rom Cook’s three voyages into the Pacific to Bligh’s breadfruit expedition to Tahiti a decade later” when “passions are everywhere in the tensions among the crew and between the sailors and their indigenous hosts, on board the ship and on shore.” She goes on to note that “[b]oth Cook and Bligh encounter South Sea ‘savagery’ in the tempers and appetites of sailors as much as in the barbaric or licentious customs of Pacific peoples.” See Neill, “South Sea Trades and the Character of Captains,” The Global Eighteenth Century, 296. 75 Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, Son of Solomon (Richard Ford, 1734). 76 This is no doubt a reference to Boughton; see the discussion in the next chapter about John, Duke of Montagu and his estates in the country and in town. 77 According to Bluett, then, Diallo left Britain in July 1733. 78 Memoirs of the Life of Job, 31–33. See Delbourgo, 251–57. 79 See Peter Hulme’s point discussed by John Patrick Montańo, The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland (Cambridge UP, 2011), specifically 167. 80 “Before disappearing from Western science at the end of the eighteenth century, the theory of signatures exerted a decisive influence on science and magic in the age of the Renaissance and the Baroque. . . . Its most significant

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  169 development came in the theoretical realm, especially in the theory of the sacraments.” Agamben’s take on a “sacred semiology” which informed the early-modern theory of signatures also helps me to underscore—albeit ­implicitly—the gradual shift from a religious to secular cultural paradigm, with the British Museum serving as one of the most significant manifestations of this shift. See Giorgio Agamben, “The Theory of Signatures,” The Signature of All Things: On Method, trans. Luca D’lsanto and Kevin Attell (Zone Books, 2009), 33–80 and specifically 43. 81 The second general meeting of the trustees was held on 17 December 1753, six days after the first (both held at the Cockpit at Whitehall). It was at this meeting that the word “corporation” was used. It was ordered “That the seal now laid before the trustees, ingraved with these words, The Trustees of the British Museum, be the common seal of this Corporation and Continue to be used as such till another seal be provided: and that the said seal be kept in the custody of the Right Honourable the Lord High Chancellor.” See General Meeting, I: 3. 82 Agamben, 39–41 and specifically 40. 83 Squeezed in between several bills, the British Museum Bill appears in retrospect to be insignificant and unremarkable, just yet another item on the roster for that day. So, for instance, notice the method of listing the items under discussion and the issues immediately before and after which were presented before George II and the House of Lords: 3. An Act for the better preventing of Clandestine Marriages. 4. An Act to explain, amend, and continue, several Laws, more effectually to prevent the spreading of the Distemper which now rages amongst the Horned Cattle in this Kingdom. 5. An Act for purchasing of the Museum, or Collection, of Sir Hans Sloane, and of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts; and for providing One general Repository for the better Reception and more convenient Use of the said Collections, and of the Cottonian Library, and of the Additions thereto. An Act to render more effectual an Act made in the Twelfth Year of the Reign of Her late Majesty Queen Anne, intituled, “An Act for providing a publick Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea.” See House of Lords Journal 28, June 1753. www. british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=114361. Web. Retrieved 18 March 2018. There is very little if anything here that signals the passing of a remarkable Act, one with far-reaching implications for globalizing Britain and also bringing the globe to London, the imperial capital. 84 See, for instance, Item #6 in Original Letters and Papers. This item, dated 1 May 1755, bears Onslow’s signature and conveys a sense of urgency in the matter of the removal of the Harliean Collection of Manuscripts from the house of the Countess of Oxford. Original Letters and Papers I: No. 6. The page numbers are erratic; therefore, items can be located by their numbers more easily. But the item numbers are not continuous. Circa 24 February 1769 a new series of item numbers was introduced. 85 Trustee Charles Gray was also a key player in this debate. See David M. Wilson, “The Legacy,” 18–21. 86 No one actually signed the Minutes (of the meetings of the Board of Trustees); I use “signature” here to indicate presence and continued involvement. 87 For a biography of Arthur Onslow, see, The History of Parliament, the House of Commons, 1715–1754, ed. R. Sedgwick (Boydell and Brewer, 1970). www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1715-1754/member/onslow-

170  The Cultural Logic of Museology I arthur-1691-1768. Onslow was against the concept of detailed minutes; he considered such recording to be a breach of privilege—in sharp contrast, for instance, to the position of John Wilkes who argued the opposite just a decade or so after the end of Onslow’s tenure as speaker. 88 For a full list of the Board, see David M. Wilson, 346n. 89 As is well known among Museum historians and fully documented by them, the first General Meeting of the trustees of the Museum was held on 11 December 1753 in the Cockpit at Whitehall, which was part of the Lord Chancellor’s offices and present at this meeting, in addition to him, were the following dignitaries: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Duke of Portland, Earl of Holderness, the Earl of Oxford, the Earl of Macclesfield, Lord Cadogan, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, the Attorney General. On this day, this elite body elected and nominated fifteen other distinguished men for reasons that were stated in the minutes of the meeting as follows: The Trustees proceeded to the election and the nomination of fifteen other persons to be associated to them in the execution of the trusts reposed in the said Trustees by the Act of Parliament Intitled An Act for the purchase of the Museum or Collection of Sir Hans Sloane and of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, and for providing one general repository for the better reception and more convenient use of the said collection (italics mine) and of the Cottonian Library and of the addition thereto and unanimously elected and nominated the fifteen person following. This second list consisted of, among others, the Duke of Argyle, the Earl of Northumberland, Thomas Birch, John Ward and others. See General I: 1–2. 90 See Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge UP, 1960; rpt. 1994), specifically “Locke and the Politicians,” 40–41. 91 For a brief but insightful sketch of Daniel Solander’s life, see Edward Duyker and Per Tingbrand eds., “Introduction,” Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence, 1753–1782 (Melbourne UP 1995), 1–9. 92 Solander was the ideal kind of highly skilled scientist-émigré in every sense of the term—and like the postindustrial skilled labor he too fulfilled his duty to the best of his ability, which happened to be outstanding and perfectly compatible with his training and tutelage under Carl Linneaus. The British Museum needed the tunnel vision of this expert. 93 Meaning unbiased assessment. 94 British Museum Central Archives Collection, Original Letters and Papers, I: No. 58, 175–76. See also Daniel Solander, Collected Correspondence, 1753–1782, eds. and trans. Edward Duyker and Per Tingbrand (Melbourne UP, 1995; rpt. Miegunyah P), 253–54. Henceforth Duyker and Tingbrand. 95 He was the curator at the Chelsea residence of Sir Hans Sloane. Appointed as the third Under Librarian, with specific duties to oversee the Natural and Artificial curiosities in the Sloane collection, Empson came to the British Museum with considerable experience since he had been Sloan’s curator for 15 years. James Empson did not have any formal scientific training and may have been appointed due to his mother who had lived with Sir Hans Sloane for 29 years and thus someone who must have had considerable influence. “He was . . . clearly a hard worker who produced rather incoherent, but important, documents for the Trustees based upon his knowledge of the Sloane collections and of the manner in which they were housed.” Daniel Solander of the University of Uppsala succeeded him. See David M.

The Cultural Logic of Museology I  171 Wilson, 29. The document quoted above does not reflect the incoherence that Wilson talks about in reference to Empson. 96 Solander had an unusual capacity for diligence, as Joseph Banks noted in reference to their time spent on the Endeavor: During this voyage, which lasted three years, I can say of him that he combined an incomparable diligence and an acumen that left nothing unsettled, with an unbelievable equanimity. During all that time we did not once have any altercation which for a moment became heated. We often freely contested each other’s opinions in all subjects, but always ended as we had begun, good-humouredly and generally being of the same opinion after one of us had accepted his opponent’s reasons. Quoted in Duyker and Tingbrand, 132. 97 The report continues as follows: “Dr. Solander at the same time begs—leave to tell the honorable Trustees that he has been very much interrupted & hindered by the companies passing three times a day through the rooms where he has been at work, and therefore humbly proposes if a room in the base story could not be appropriated for him where he undisturbed could go on at a much quicker rate; this he thinks to be so much the more necessary, when he now intends to begin with the Plants, as great many Books are then wanted to be looked over at one & the same time. If this should meet with approbation Dr. Solander proposes to go on with the rest of the natural curiosities in the rooms above on the hours when no company is in the house, and at other times do his business in the room below, that the Honorable Trustees should please to appoint for that purpose.” Here we have an ideal example of a scholar who finds solace and time-space in solitude. See Original Letters and Papers, September 1764. 1: No. 67. The page number (unreliable) is 190. The item numbers are not continuous. Circa 24 February 1769 a new series of item numbers was introduced. 98 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Vintage Books, 1994), 131. 99 See Edward Duyker, Nature’s Argonaut: Daniel Solander, 1733–1782 (Melbourne UP, 1998), 139. The reference in Duyker’s title to Tahiti as the Golden Fleece is in equal measure apt and thought-provoking. 100 Duyker, Nature’s Argonaut, 150–51. 101 Original Letters and Papers, dated 24 June 1764. I: No. 88, 225. 102 Ibid. 225. 103 Johan Zoffany was supposed to accompany James Cook on his second voyage circumnavigation of the world; Zoffany was Joseph Banks’s choice but due to “a disagreement between Banks and the Admiralty,” Zoffany was replaced by William Hodges. The Death of Captain Cook (oil on canvas, 1798) is thus based upon what Zoffany had heard and read and not on what he had witnessed. See my discussion of Zoffany’s Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris in Chapter 2. 104 See Illustrations of Australian Plants collected in 1770 during Captain Cook’s Voyage around the World in H.M.S. Endeavour. Published “With Determinations by James Britten” by the Department of Botany of the British Museum in 1905; this publication is attributed to both Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander. See Introduction. 105 See Introduction, Illustrations of Australian Plants. 106 Umberto Eco, The Infinity of Lists (Rizzoli, 2009), 16–17. 107 Foucault, 131.

5 Cultural Logic of Museology II The Spatial Dimension of Corporate Identity

John, the Second Duke of Montagu (1690–1749) owned Montagu House near Bloomsbury, originally built circa 1786 by French architect Pierre Pouget. This manor house was handed over to the Trustees of the British Museum by Montagu’s two daughters, Mary and Isabella, and their husbands who jointly inherited the property after the Second Duke’s death.1 Montagu House was just one of many properties which John Montagu inherited from his father, Ralph Montagu (1638–1709); his Boughton House estate and gardens and the one in Barnwell (both in Northamptonshire)2 —regarded as the core Montagu estates—were at the center of his (and his father’s) interest in real estate. On the subject of John’s real estate ownership, Northamptonshire records reveal that “[i]n London there were substantial residential estates, one around Holborn and Chancery Lane (including Southampton Buildings) and the other around the Strand . . . and Distaff Lane in the city. These were probably sold by Duke John who disliked urban property.”3 The extent of John Montagu’s estates matched the range of his titles and the breadth of his interests. MD at Cambridge University, Fellow of the College of Physicians and the Royal Society, Knight of the Garter, Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of England Freemasons, Governor of the Isle of Wight, and one of the founding governors of the Foundling Hospital. John Montagu, however, is seldom associated with the islands of St.  ­Lucia and St. Vincent. In 1722 George I appointed him as the governor of these two Caribbean islands which he then helped to plant.4 Sugarcane production in St. ­Lucia and St. Vincent—the primary interest of the British and the cause of their ongoing rivalry with the French over entitlement to this trade—was made possible by the trade in African slaves which ensured the availability of free labor on these plantations. Montagu House in Bloomsbury was thus one small sliver of a vast and deep-coded circum-Atlantic financial template, embedding as it did narratives of trade, commerce, and colony, well before this mansion was purchased by the British Museum from the Montagus in 1754. 5 What is the purpose of invoking this foundational and architectural as well as (from our perspective) ideological core—embedded in the historiography of the building which was to become the British Museum?

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  173

Figure 5.1  View of the Front and Courtyard of Montagu House (South Prospect), Etching and Engraving, 1728.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

The corporate model of organization and order which the British Museum developed to the point of perfection in its early years provides the most remarkable instance of the interpellation of the interests of nation and its interest in empire. Therefore, I argue that John Montagu’s imprimatur is a critical piece in a complex material and philosophical edifice upon which rests the idea of modern British museology. ­ useum As is well known, circa 1845 the original home of the British M was demolished and architect Robert Smirke’s new vision of a national repository materialized on the same site but on a much grander, appropriately Victorian, scale. The demolished Museum then gained mythological status. The eighteenth-century (“old”) Montagu House in Bloomsbury,6 the site which would be the grand repository and home of the British Museum post-1753 (when the British Museum Act was signed), has three-dimensionality and colorful depth and definition today not only because of the few very stylized etchings and drawings of the original mansion which have survived (see Figure 5.1), but we can also effectively “visualize” a three-dimensional eighteenth-century Montagu House thanks to two series of estate plans which have survived.7 Of the existing two series, the first was developed and drawn by Henry Flitcroft in 1725. A second series consists of adaptations of some of the original Flitcroft floor plans, includes some updated plans developed by William Brasier (1689–1775) in 1740,8 and provides a remarkable

174  The Cultural Logic of Museology II register of the building’s transition from a mansion house to a museum in the next phase (1754–1777). The second series of estate plans—I can safely ­conjecture—were first produced circa April 1754 by the principal ­ useum, Henry surveyor hired by the Board of Trustees of the British M Keene (1726–1776), and his two associates, James Horne and James Morris. Keene’s signature appears clearly on several pages of the second series of estate plans. Montagu House contributes very substantially to our understanding of the narrative of the urban geography of London in the first half of the eighteenth century, as the city continued to encroach upon the outskirts (Bloomsbury). Indeed, deep maps of individual town houses and homes bore a global imprimatur derived from the owners’ desires for both real estate and collection, broadly construed—desires registered in the archives of the Sloanes and the Montagus, who laid the foundations of a city in exuberant flux and obsessive commitment to development, all fueled by private money, some directly linked to colony. In more senses than one, the British Museum inherited this quintessentially expansionist deep map. Moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, this institution also symbolized the culture’s commitment to optimal utilization of public space which was suitably imagined, drawn, constructed, cultivated, and extended to exhibit a self-consciously scientific, creative, ambitious, and (not entirely consciously at first) an imperial Britain. This chapter argues that the systems of organization developed to address the contingencies related to the Museum’s acquisitions must be studied from ground zero, from the earliest point (in the 1750s) when the estate plans of a mansion had to be reimagined and redrawn to accommodate most urgently the collections of Hans Sloane9 which served as the “windfall” leading to the establishment of the British Museum.10 Generated at the outset, when the Board of Trustees energetically espoused the rapidly developing idea of Britain’s first public museum, the Keene floor plans represent this ground zero from which emerges, among other tropes, not just the British but the pan-European eighteenth-century investment in order and exhibition— one which continued to strive, Sisyphus-like, for unity and order. The spatial dimension of collective identity can best be conceptualized and understood in terms of this investment in spatialized order and organization and the “mechanisms by which knowledge comes into being,”11 which were perfected by the British Museum Corporation. And the elasticity of order—its responsiveness at once to a scientific system and the dialectics of supply and demand (of acquisitions) as well as categorization and display of acquisitions—is manifested most remarkably in the early British Museum where the corporatization of knowledge and information evolved against the backdrop of empire. The next four sections, leading up to a discussion of the Keene plans, reveal how this

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  175 museum came to codify the intertwined interests of display, science, spectatorship, and empire—creating thus a new kind of nation-space, which I read as the ideal site for launching a postmodern critique of the grand narrative of nation.

The Spatial Dimension of a Public-Service Mission The value and valuation of the real estate which frames an institution such as the British Museum must proceed with the full awareness of the challenges of aligning a public-service mission with the space which will speak to its importance. But who is the agent in charge of this valuation? Montagu House was not the presumptive site when the British Museum Act was passed in parliament in June 1753. Soon after the passing of the British Museum Act, a select committee of the trustees of the British Museum focused exclusively on the immediate challenges of locating a suitable repository.12 At the first several meetings of the Board of Trustees and in light of the first wave of acquisitions, the spatial deficiencies in the original repositories (houses of donors) were ascertained, duly noted, and recorded in the minutes. The discovery of these deficiencies led the Board to take decisive steps to ensure that the new site—the ideal ­repository—would overcome these deficiencies and provide space suitable for the preservation of national heritage and the exhibition of global art, artifact, and natural productions. The first four months of 1754 were productive in this respect. The Committee met at the Harleian ­Library of Manuscripts in Dover Street on 19 January 1754, for instance (with the Earl of Northumberland, Lord Charles Cavendish, Lord ­Willoughby of Parham, the Honorable Mr. Yorke, Sir George ­Littleton, Bart, Colonel Sotheby, Dr. Birch, and Dr. Ward in attendance). Meeting on location, the purpose of the Trustees was to “inspect” the “state” of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts which were “kept in presses in a single room and two adjoining closets, built partly on the ground, and partly on an arch, at the bottom of the garden of the House of the Countess of Oxford13 in Dover Street; and the rest of the said MSS in other presses in two rooms on the ground floor of the said house.” This arrangement was far from satisfactory, particularly given the significance of this collection, which was huge, containing “8,000 volumes,” and included, among other items, “The General History of Great Britain, and the particular Histories of the several counties and families, and many of them to that of France.” The Committee also noted that “[b]esides which there is a very considerable number of old copies of the classical and other ancient writers” (Committee 1:1). The practical matter of concern to the committee was the issue of space, the space in which the Harleian Collection had been housed in Dover Street and which had to be taken into account in the assessment

176  The Cultural Logic of Museology II of the state of the collection and its worth or value before its acquisition by the British Museum. The process of valuation involved an assessment of the environment of the original repository of the Harleian collection, following which the Board’s concern was voiced thus: Upon opening and inspecting most of the presses, the MSS contained in them appeared to be in a good condition, tho’ the lower presses standing on the floor of a room, built, the greatest part of it, upon the ground, and in which there is but one small fireplace, seem too much expos’d to injury from the damp attending such a situation which render it unsafe for any person to continue long enough in the said room to make any considerable use, or even a particular inspection of the said collection.” (Committee I: 2–3) Three key terms emerge in the context of this concern: (a) the environment of storage space where the manuscripts were kept (had only one small fireplace and was thus damp), which had (b) an adverse impact on the use of the manuscripts (due to “unsafe” reading conditions), which would thus (c) have a negative impact on public or expert access to the collections (Committee I: 2–3). The use of the collections was tied (in theory and in practice) to access to the collections and this “public service” mission was to be provided by the British Museum where space commensurate with the significance of the collection could and had to be found or created and designed. In addition, considerations of space were inextricably linked to systems of order. Regarding the Harleian Collection, the trustees were informed that it was “wanting an alphabetical catalogue or a general index to the present Catalogue.” The committee’s conclusion was that “[t]ill which defect shall be supplied, this treasure of MSS will be of much less use, than they would be with the assistance of such catalogues and index, to point out the various particulars of the Collection, and in which part of it they may be found” (Committee I: 2). Cataloguing embedded the idea of a common culture and this culture’s investment in access to knowledge and information. A catalogue, however vast, could be used to number and to alphabetize titles so that the mass could be reduced to a digestible and concise compendium, so that the infinite would be within reach, so that the encyclopedic could become less daunting and more user-friendly. This was modernity in the making, the beginning of the Age of Information in a modern nation-state. In approximately five years after the Committee meeting and the generation of the related report described above, an alphabetical catalogue of the Harleian collection of manuscripts was published in two folio volumes (with unnumbered pages), the first one consisting of a detailed listing of 1,867 items and the second one consisting of an additional 5,751 items as well as an index.14 The preface to this publication gives a

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  177 “general account” or justification for the publication and part of it goes as follows: The great repute in which the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts hath for several years past been confessedly held, not only in England but throughout Europe, the many useful materials already drawn from its stores, as well by foreigners as our own countrymen, and the rank it justly claims amongst the most celebrated Libraries at present subsisting, have induced the learned world to express an impatience for a more intimate knowledge of its contents. In order therefore to give the requisite satisfaction, and that every student may, with as little inconvenience to himself as possible, be informed what helps this treasury of erudition will furnish him with in promoting his researches, the catalogue, together with a copious index, is now submitted to the public.15 The relationship of the institution to the learned scholar is described in the Preface in the following words: [I]t would be a gross and unpardonable injustice to those who have been great benefactors to the public, to omit the present opportunity of acknowledging, that the Harleian Manuscripts, being placed in the British Museum, as an Addition to the Cottonian Library, to be consulted by the Curious, and for Public Use to all Posterity (emphasis not mine), confer an obligation on the learned, for which they stand indebted to the generous and public spirited offer made by the late Duke of Portland, and his Dutchess, the only daughter and heiress of Edward Earl of Oxford, and to the favour and munificence of Parliament.16 In this equation, “the learned” have an obligation to acknowledge their privilege—an indirect privilege—which has been granted by the donors specifically for the curious, for the public, and for posterity.17 In other words, this vehement insistence on “public use” was to establish through the engineered space of the museum a decisive move away from exclusivity toward inclusivity. And in this move, the British example breaks with European tradition to foster a new kind of mass enlightenment within the context of the Age of Information. The story of the assessment of the Sloane collection followed a similar pattern where the materiality of objects was linked to the material conditions or the environment within which the objects were housed. On 22 January 1754, the trustees called upon William Empson to present a comprehensive report related to Hans Sloane’s residence which was also the repository of his collections. Empson presented “a particular account of the number and dimensions of the rooms in which the collections and

178  The Cultural Logic of Museology II library are kept, and the number of the cabinets in the said rooms, and a general account of the contents of the chests” and so on (1: 5).18 According to Empson’s report, the first story rooms 1 through 7 housed “the library.” Additionally, the report includes (but is not limited to) the following: 8. The gallery in which are thirty three cabinets and many things placed in their spaces between the cabinets, and upon them. Above these are, continued all round, four shelves of books viz. two of ­folios, one of quartos, and one of octavos. 9. The room wherein are kept the books of drawings etc. ... 15. Contains the skeletons etc. 16. Contains the antiquities. 17. Contains the things in spirits of wine etc. (Committee I: 5–6) There were 18 rooms on this floor; Sloane’s Chelsea home was by no means small. Empson also provided for the trustees a detailed list of all the books which Hans Sloane had loaned out to several individuals and families (including to Dr. Mortimer, to Dr. Birch, one of the trustees present at this meeting, to Mr. Prevost, and so on), which means that the inventory of the Sloane collections by itself would not necessarily provide an accurate assessment of holdings in the Chelsea Manor house alone; there was more to the collection, literally, than met the investigators’ eyes since there was no system of borrowing or lending privileges and thus no records of such honorific exchanges (Committee I: 7).19 The overall and very clear impression one gets from this report is of a large mansion house in Chelsea20 —Sloane’s—crammed with a multiplicity of objects, which continued to defy order and cataloguing despite the best intentions and vast knowledge of the collector. Therefore, the conclusions of the committee appear in retrospect to be predictable: four days after hearing Empson’s report, on 26 January 1754, the committee noted that “the said collection cannot be publicly shown in the said Mannor (sic) House at Chelsea without great inconvenience and danger, unless at a considerable expence (sic) in providing new presses with glasses or wires for the security of many things of value and curiosity, which at present lie loose and exposed to be lost” (Committee I: 8). These initial investigation and assessment operations by the Committee and their officers then led to the search for the ideal site. The Committee meeting on16 February 1754 was important because it was at this meeting that the decision was made to “view Montagu House on Friday next the 2nd instant at eleven o’clock in the morning precisely” (Committee I: 10).21 It was at a meeting of the Trustees of the British Museum held at Northumberland House on 16 February 1754 that the Committee “took into consideration the offer of Montagu House” for a “general repository.”22 Since Montagu House had been empty for many years, 23 the Trustees’

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  179 main concern at first was the structural integrity of the house, which they expressed in these terms on 22 February 1754: The Committee appointed by the meeting of the Trustees on the 13th instant to enquire into the circumstances, situation, and condition of any place which hath been proposed for a general repository etc. being attended by Mr. Horne, Mr. Keene and Mr. Morris, surveyors, took a view of Montagu House and its offices and gardens: after which they received the report of the strength and condition of the said House by the said surveyors. (Committee I: 11) The report of the General Committee meeting (held on 3 April 1754) records the same facts thus:24 “The Committee then appointed Mr. James Horne, Henry Keene, and James Morris to survey the said house and to examine the strength and condition of it and what repair and alteration appear absolutely necessary but without forming any plan for fitting up and finishing the said House, and that the said Surveyor should attend the Committee on the Friday morning following, the 22nd of February” (General I: 30). The surveyors (James Horne, Henry Keene, and James Morris) testified (once again) at the Board of Trustees general meeting on 3 April 1754, 25 vouching for the structural integrity of the selected site and part of the minutes of this meeting goes as follows: That the said house is a substantial, well build brick building, and that the foundations thereof are sound and free from any material cracks, settlements or other damage otherwise than the stacks of chimneys which having at the original building sunk, or settled somewhat lower than the external walls . . . . The roof is also sound and in good condition as to the timber work excepting the gutter which not being done at first, in a proper manner have overflowed & greatly damaged the cornices so that upon the whole they are of the opinion that with a proper repair, such as all buildings may be supposed to want, that have been build the time that [this] has it may be capable of receiving any alteration, addition, etc. that may be thought necessary to make it proper and convenient for the intended purposes. (General I: 30–31)26 Implicit in these original structural/architectural as well as aesthetic (pertaining to painting and wainscoting, for instance) assessments by the three surveyors is the idea that Montague House, in addition to its fundamentally solid structure, would lend itself to “alteration” and “addition” even though the nature of its future expansion in light of its “intended purposes” could not have been fully foreseen or predicted at the time of this first report by Keene, Horne, and Morris. Nevertheless, the surveyors made very specific recommendations for repair and expansion—renovations which would require authorization of funding which the General Committee alone had the authority to

180  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.2  M inutes of the Committee Meeting Held at Montagu House on 22 February 1754, Page 1.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

approve. They recommended, for instance, that “the roof be repaired and covered with Westmorland slate”; that “the cornice be repaired, or new cornice if necessary, put up, and new gutters made round the whole building”; that “new slabs be put in the place of the present, which are too narrow, & consequently less secure against fire.” As Figure 5.3 shows, as of February 1754, the surveyors made a total of 11 recommendations and suggestions, including the point “that there be no new floors being necessary” (Committee I: 12).

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  181

Figure 5.3  M  inutes of the Committee Meeting Held at Montagu House on 22 February 1754, Page 2.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

But the minutes of the 26 February 1754 meeting of the Committee, held “at the clerk’s room adjoining the House of Lords,” reveal that Montagu House had yet to be selected as the repository for the various collections. At this meeting, John Vardy, the Clerk of Works at White Hall, Westminster, and St. James’s, answered several questions raised by the trustees about the comparative merits of Montagu House versus a new building to be built for this purpose: “If such a building were immediately begun, and not interrupted for want of money, in what space of time would it be finished?” Vardy’s response was “in four years.”27 “How many squares of building will be sufficient for such a repository?”

182  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.4  M  inutes of the Committee Meeting Held at Montagu House on 22 February 1754, Page 3.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

Vardy responded: “164 square, provided it be placed so as to receive light on all sides.” The total cost at £300 a square, Vardy calculated, would add up to a total of £60,000 (Committee I: 15).28 “With respect to the necessary expence (sic) of furnishing a general repository, whether erected or provided, the Committee postponed the particular consideration of it till the place of the said repository, upon which it will depend, shall be determined” (Committee I: 16). The rest of this particular early meeting was focused on the nagging questions related to dampness and

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  183

Figure 5.5  T  homas Malton Jr., Old Palace Yard. Circa 1780.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

lack of adequate light at one of the proposed sites: “What is the height of the situation of Montague House compared with that of the new repository proposed?” This “new repository” reference is to space in Old Palace Yard (see Figure 5.5)29 which had been identified as a possible site for a new building. Vardy responded: “I cannot answer that particularly, but have heard it commonly said, that the upper end of Albemarle Street is upon a level with the top of St. James’s Palace” (Committee I: 16). Vardy knew well that Great Russell Street, where the “old” Montague House was located (and where the current British Museum is located) is more than a mile northeast of Albemarle Street—and by implication stands on much higher ground than the Old Palace Yard, which had been identified as a possible site for the British Museum. 30 The Old ­Palace Yard was ruled out as a place suitable for building a repository due to its low elevation and possibility of water damage to collections. Montague House was identified as the ideal space for the purpose. The meeting of 10 April 1754, one which was held at Montague House, reveals that a decision had been made and this house was to be repository for the collections. The surveyors Horne and Morris were present at this meeting and answered several structural questions; they were then asked to present a plan, including estimates, for repairs (Committee I: 17–18). On 24 April 1754, “Mr. James Horne, Mr. Henry Keene and Mr. James Morris,—surveyors delivered in their reports of the state of the repairs of the main building of Montagu

184  The Cultural Logic of Museology II House” (Committee I: 18). 31 The surveyors were in charge of the renovations, remodeling, and expansion of Montagu House, on an asneeded basis. The records of the British Museum reveal, in addition, that their responsibility was not only to create new space based upon hypothetical or projected spatial needs and requirements but that they had to measure the footage occupied by acquired books in their original repositories so as to ensure that there would be adequate space to house them in the British Museum at Montagu House. So, for instance, on 3 July 1755, James Horne and Henry Keene submitted the following report at the General Meeting of the Board of Trustees: In obedience to your order of 2nd of June last directing us to measure the superficial feet of the books of Sir Hans Sloane, the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, and the Cottonian & Major Edwards’s ­Libraries, distinguishing the number of feet in each of the said ­Librarys and Collections & to make a report of the same, Humbly acquaint you that we have carefully measured the same. (Original Papers, Volume 1, 3 July 1755) Signed by surveyors Horne and Keene, this report then reveals that according to their calculations Hans Sloane’s books would require 4,600 feet of space; the Harleian Collection would require an additional 1,700 feet; the Cottonian Collection would require 384 feet; and Major Edwards’s Collection would require 576 feet.32 For the trustees, the urgency of the matter at hand required deliberations and decision-making on a trifecta of space-cost-collections where no one element surpassed the others in importance or gravity. Quantitative measurements were thus designed to ensure the positive outcome of the qualitative assessments. Notice that “the collections” were in the foreground while those who engineered the space for housing the collections receded into the “minutes” which reflect the precision of the system: legible, date-­specific, and necessarily linear, these minutes acquired the agency which was ceded to them, as it were, by the signatures and signatories of the framers and builders. A corporate structure, both organizational and architectural, thus came to render invisible the agents of change while their agency continued to speak through the purposeful words and recorded actions manifested in the minutes.

A Corporate Identity and the Spatial Alignment of Reason and Order “The first concern of the Trustees was to establish their corporate identity and to take care of the money they had received from the lottery. A temporary seal was ordered and strict regulations for its control were laid down; there was much discussion about its design, before its final

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  185 form and the inscriptions on it were approved.”33 This is according to David M. Wilson, author of the most recent comprehensive history of the British Museum (2002). Wilson goes on to note that “[t]he question of the use of the term ‘British’ at this period has recently received some attention,” but “[t]here has never been a serious attempt to change the Museum’s name.”34 Indeed, there seems to be no record in any of the public documents at the time of the establishment of the British Museum of how and when the decision was made to name this institution and how or why the idea of the public museum was inextricably linked to “British.” It seems to have been a given; therefore, one might argue that the “idea of the museum” was organically linked to the notion of a national archive. “British” was never contested, never discussed, and was not selected after deliberations such as the ones related to space, corporate structure of the new entity, size and footage of collections, and the ordering or placement of books and natural and artificial productions. “Better reception” of the items on display was from the very beginning a top priority as was “convenient use.” Even as plans evolved and financial and legal matters were ironed out, the “publick” remained in the forefront of all the discussions and dialogues related at first to the identification of the appropriate space for the repository and then focused on the organization of the repository such that it would be—in our terms—user-friendly. So, for instance, the following manuscript fragment—presumably written by Dr. Gowan Knight, the first Principal Librarian of the Museum (1756–1772)—goes as follows: Though the principal intention in founding the British Museum is for the use of learned & studious men, as well natives as foreigners, yet as this foundation has been made at the Expense of the publick, it may thought reasonable that it’s use should be made as general as possible, consistent with the principal intention, thro preservation, duration & security of the several parts of the Collection, & such attendance of the officers as may be justly required of them. The Trustees have therefore thought it expedient to provide & enact such statutes & regulations relating to the use of the museum as shall appear to them most conducive to the publick utility. 1st whereas in the all institutions of so general a nature it is impossible to contrive any regulations that will be equally convenient and agreeable to every individual, to remove all grounds of complaint and to show the disinterestedness of the Trustees in what they have ordained, it is unanimously agreed & enacted by them . . . The first rule That no Trustee shall claim to himself any right or privilege in

186  The Cultural Logic of Museology II regard to the use of the Museum, or anything appertaining thereto, that the following Laws & Regulations do not give him in common with every other member of the publick. 35 The trustees themselves did not claim or want privileges which the public did not have. Their “disinterestedness” positions them on a moral and principled managerial high ground, which also facilitates, from the very outset, their invisibility. As members of parliament and members of the Royal Academy, the trustees had a public face; in the Museum context, however, their power was exercised from behind-the-scenes and their authority remained deeply embedded in the stylized artistic renditions of the august structure (see Figures 5.1) while the collections inside displayed proudly the imprimatur of the collectors and the expertise of the management including but not limited to the librarians. The executive and financial decisions were made behind closed doors. In the retrospective view, the power of the minutes increases over time as these alone have allowed the “publick” to gain access to the information on how the information society was first conceived in space which was earmarked for the mediation of knowledge and information. As the plans evolved and the operating procedures came to be reviewed, access to the manuscripts came to be modified and this was discussed by the Trustees of the British Museum at their general meeting held on 10 June 1757. On this date, the Committee Resolved, that the following draught of a rule be laid before the next General Meeting, pursuant to the order of the General Meeting of the 7th of May. “That whensover, and as often as, any person shall have occasion to consult or inspect any book, charter, deed, or other manuscript for evidence, or information, he is to apply for leave so to do, to the Trustees, in a General Meeting, or Committee. But if it shall so happen that sufficient time cannot be allowed for making such application, the person is to apply for such leave to the principal librarian, or, in case of the death or absence, then to any two of the Trustees, which leave the Principal Librarian, or the two Trustees as aforesaid, is and are hereby impowered to grant. Provided always, that no such person shall be permitted to consult or inspect any such book, charter, deed, or other manuscript, except in the presence of the Principal Librarian, or one of the officers of that department, to which such book, deed, charter, or other manuscript shall belong. (Committee, I: 321–22) In other words, the public could access knowledge and information but not without applying for appropriate permission in advance. The system of access developed was to ensure the safety and security of the collections. Public use was thus scripted and developed with meticulous care

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  187 to detail, including building in provisions for contingencies, “in case of the death or absence” of the permissions-granting authority. The library had been a symbol of enlightenment in the ancient world and, moreover, prestigious collections had also been supported by sovereign endowments precisely because of their cultural capital, for being the repositories of knowledge (for paving the way to an enlightened society) and cultural heritage (for remembrance of an illustrious past). What, then, was new in this case? Consider, in this context, the careful attention which was given to the word “museum.” Specifically, on 1 June 1754, the trustees discussed the significance of the word “museum” in the Greco-Roman epistemology and how this framework might serve the interests of the British Museum. “It need not be observed here that the word Museum properly signifies a building dedicated to the service of the Muses—there were several of these antiently (sic) in Greece and other countries particularly at Alexandria, which is described by Strabo, as assigned for the residence of Learned and Studious men, with a walk and gallery furnished with seats belonging to it. It is said to have been founded by Ptolemy Philadelphus, whose celebrated library was deposited there, tho in afterages it received large indownments from several of the Roman emperors” (General 1:44) Derived from classical roots, the concept of the “museum” was understood as being the most appropriate nomenclature for the institution that was being established. Notice that the word “British” as an adjective or a descriptor was neither mentioned nor debated at this (or any other juncture). “British” was the ineffable foundation rooted in national identity, upon which the idea of this Museum was conceptualized. Some contemporary accounts suggest that the naming was a fait accompli. Cited by more than one historian of the British Museum is the following letter written by Miss Catherine Talbot (1721–1770) addressed to Mrs. Anne Berkeley, and a small segment of it goes as follows: “One evening we spent at Montagu House, henceforth to be known by the name of the British Museum.”36 The minutes of 1 June 1754 also reveal that there was discussion about one important difference between other existing models of museums designed upon ancient precepts and nomenclature and the modern British version that was being conceptualized: “But of later times the name Museum has been commonly applied to signify any repository of natural and artificial curiosities and that either with or without a library.”37 The comprehensive nature of this new type of museum was understood and this difference (from extant ­European models) was accommodated in the design of the seal for the British ­Museum thus: As the British Museum therefore contains both these, it was thought not improper to represent it upon by the seal by the front of a building, together with the images of those deities, and their different

188  The Cultural Logic of Museology II attributes, which agreeable to the ancient mythology might emblematically denote the several parts of which this Museum consists. Thus in Number 1. On the right side of the building is placed the Figure of the Goddess Fellus, as representing the natural productions of the Earth; and on the left side Minerva, as the titular Deity of Arts and Sciences, and above the building the Sun, as the symbol of Apollo, who was not only considered as presiding over the Muses but also as the inventor of the art of medicine, which is the principal subject of the Sloanian Library. Tho as an additional ornament, it was then imagined that it might not be amiss to introduce also the figure of Britannia with her proper attributes, as the patroness of this Museum. And she is accordingly placed in the pediment of the building, with her left hand pointing towards the entrance thereof. 38 This segment of the minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting on 1 June 1754 suggests that “Britannia” was considered as a useful appellation and appropriate to some extent but not necessarily an essential element in the symbolic scheme that was being envisioned: “However, when that was executed, as the face of the seal appeared by this means too much crowded, it was thought that if Britannia was omitted, the Sun might stand with greater advantage and beauty in her place within the pediment and therefore this alteration was afterwards made in Number II.”39 In all of these deliberations related to nomenclature as well as in the choice of the seal, the precise symbolic representation of the Museum was at issue and also the signs which would best declare its mission, its goals and objectives. Significantly, it was believed that “Britannia” as symbol would not capture the full potential of the project—suggesting, in retrospect, the enormous operative force of universality and the imperative to establish classical antecedence as the guiding force behind the idea of this British Museum. In other words, the philosophical provenance of this Museum was conceptualized on a much vaster scale than the island so much so that it had to have closer ties to the notion of Western civilization rooted in the Greco-Roman tradition than to Britannia with her more contained (and local) power and significance.40 The seal had a very specific function, which was described as follows: “From the several figures so disposed, together with the inscription round the building, it was presumed that any foreigner abroad, who was at all conversant with such things, might be sufficiently informed both of the History of this Museum, and the general parts of which it consists by inspecting, only the device of the seal.”41 In the framing of this grand narrative, the perspective of the “foreigner abroad” was a key element. The assessment of the worth of this institution, in other words, would never be based upon local criteria or value; the

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  189 assessment of this venture had to be conceptualized in global terms where the “foreigner . . . conversant with such things”—an enlightened foreigner—would become the ideal witness and from whose perspective this remarkable nation-space would be viewed. A retrospective analysis of these early discussions on framing the modern museum reveals two overlapping and, in retrospect, ideologically inflected maneuvers: the Sun is expansive and capable of invoking the power of universality and global impact. The Seal would codify and embody for the domestic and foreign visitor a glorious pan-European history. The scopic and spectral regimes embedded in these associations and alignments—from the particular to the universal, from the local to the global—were thus conceived by the board of trustees such that Britain would not be contained by national and cultural borders. In this context, the Board of Trustees were not just planners and executors or indeed mere managers; they were the ṻber-visionaries, entities who were fully aware of the strategic importance of signs and symbols. Theirs were not just discussion of minutiae but enlightened deliberations with far-reaching implications for empire.

Spectral Logic and the “Order of Things” While the foreigner was useful for conceptualizing a gaze directed inward from the enlightened world outside and was, therefore, accommodated in the governing documents42 —based upon universalist principles—the Museum’s mission remained steadfastly rooted to the enlightenment of Britons. Soon after it “opened for Public inspection on the 15th of January 1759,” “observation” was found to be insufficient for some visitors; therefore, the regulations were revised or amended to accommodate the specific needs of the visitors, and this practice to emend continued as and when the need arose. Matthew Maty (Principal Librarian 1772–1776)43 for instance, pointed to the need for such revisions based upon experience of the first ten years of operation: “Experience having, I think, discovered some Inconveniences in the present Method of shewing of the Museum, and encouragement being given to the Officers to offer their thoughts, about that and any other subject that may tend to render the use of the Noble Institution more universal and more easy; the following scheme is humbly submitted to the consideration of the Trustees, in hopes that it may be further improved by them; and coincide with their views for the advantage of the Public.”44 This Museum was to be responsive to fluctuations in demand, over time, which triggered modifications at the supply end—in terms of spatial design and managerial oversight—as this passage from the minutes of the Board of Trustees meeting held on 7 April 1759 reveals: “As several persons may have occasion for a more particular inspection

190  The Cultural Logic of Museology II of some parts of Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection of Natural and Artificial Productions, than is consistent with that transient view allowed in the common method of viewing the same, the Committee have drawn up an article for that purpose, impowering them to grant leave for a more particular inspection of what should be so desired during the two hours in which the officers of that department are not engaged in shewing the same.”45 “Viewing”, “shewing,” and “inspection,” actions associated with public accommodation and access to collections, were used at the supply end as guideposts toward the formulation and execution of order. Without order, the public’s aesthetic appreciation would be seriously compromised, they would be confused due to the sheer volume of information, and also be confounded by the range and complexity of the materials at hand. Pictorial representations of the Museum in the first few decades after its inception—specifically, the drawings and prints of the contents within the museum and the museum experience––reveal an absence of images depicting scholars and their intellectual activities even though, as most accounts show, a considerable amount of time was spent in both General and Standing Committee meetings on discussions of bulk acquisition of books, their display (glass versus wire bookcases), and the precise positioning of specific collections (in which room and to what effect). Furthermore, there are no written records of those who wanted “more particular inspection” (scholars, for instance, such as Samuel Richardson, Sarah Fielding, and Samuel Johnson) because the eighteenth-century letters of request for admission and the admission registers have not survived.46 Significantly, in the pictorial representations, the “transient” visitor is center stage, dressed for the occasion and clearly enamored of every ocular sensation that the Museum had to offer, as Figure 5.6, the “grand hall and staircase,” shows. The upward gaze represents the allure of anticipation and great expectations (and illustrations of how this gaze was engineered can be found in both Figures 5.6 and 5.7). But notice also that the invitation to enjoy presents a nonreciprocal relationship between the spectator and the artistic objects (paintings, sculptures, and frescoes) or natural curiosities (stuffed reindeer in the background). The spectator is dwarfed by the scale of museum-space and the scope of the content. The “celestial scenes” on the ceiling and the “gigantic paintings” adorning the staircase structure the hallowed pathway whose significance goes well beyond the intricate design of the wrought iron balustrades or the width of the stairs leading irrevocably upwards. I would like to suggest that the staircase as pathway is the first modern conceptualization of the information superhighway whose impact goes beyond the palpable and visible materiality of the building and its internal adornments toward creating an allusion of infinite knowledge. The staircase as focal point, as symbolic pathway,

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  191

Figure 5.6  T  he Hall and Stair Case, Etching by Augustus Pugin and Thomas Rowlandson (1808–1809). © Trustees of the British Museum.

then works in unison with the Sun and the Medal to create an experiential reality which is imperial in scope and substance. Catherine Talbot’s report of her 15 August 1756 visit to the Museum helps to illustrate yet another dimension of what I am characterizing as the Museum’s spectral logic and some of it goes as follows: “I was delighted to see Science in this Town so Magnificently and elegantly lodged: perhaps you have seen that fine House and Pleasant garden: I never did before, but thought I liked it much better now, inhabited by Valuable MSS, Silent Pictures and Ancient Mummies, than I should have

192  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.7  Staircase of the Old British Museum, Montagu House: At Right Sculptures and Painting, and in Background Stuffed Animals, Ceiling, and Back Wall Decorated with Paintings,47 Displaying Landscape and Celestial Scenes. George Scharf, 1845. Water Color. © Trustees of the British Museum.

done when it was filled with Miserable Fine People.”48 The reference to “fine people” is a reference to the Montagus, the original owners of the manor house. Talbot here unwittingly anthropomorphizes the “valuable” collections, which “inhabit” the house and make it “much better now.” In this reaction, science can be seen/witnessed and the magnificence and elegance of the building and gardens become then the optical manifestation of scientific progress and nativist pride. The Pugin and Rowlandson etching (Figure 5.6) as well as the George Scharf watercolor (Figure 5.7)—denoting as they do an intertwined

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  193 system of order and aesthetics—stand in sharp contrast to the qualitative assessment articulated by some early visitors. In 1782, for instance, German tourist Carl Philip Moritz reported that “So rapid a passage through a vast suite of rooms in a little more than one hour of time, with opportunity to cast but one poor longing look of astonishment on all the vast treasures of nature, antiquity and literature, in the examination of which one might profitably spend years, confuses, stuns and overpowers the visitor.”49 The superficiality of engagement which the allocated time restriction imposed upon this German visitor was perhaps not as serious a complaint as the one reported by William Hutton in 1784, and a part of this critique goes as follows: I was not likely to forget Tuesday, December 7th, at eleven . . . . We began to move pretty fast when I asked with some surprise whether there were none to inform us what the curiosities were as we went on? A tall genteel young man in person, who seemed to be our conductor, replied with some warmth50: “What! Would you have me tell you everything in the Museum? How is it possible? Besides, are not the names written upon many of them?” I was much too humbled by this reply to utter another words . . . . In about thirty minutes we finished our silent journey through the princely mansion, which could well have taken thirty days. I went out much about as wise as I went in.51 The studious and the curious were thus accommodated in theory; in practice the time restriction and the sheer magnitude of the materials displayed were not conducive for in-depth appreciation and veiled the lack of knowledge of the museum staff, who could not have possibly acquired the encyclopedic knowledge required to explain the contexts or indeed the contents. A couple of conjectural reconstructions of the paths taken by the visitors have been produced by (current) British Museum staff and these help us to understand how the flow of traffic was directed within the museum, what the spectators would see first, next, and eventually (see Figures 5.8 and 5.9). These planned programs of viewing have been documented by recent historians with reference to the minutes of the meetings of both the general and select committees. As the contemporary accounts discussed above show, the visitors’ depth of engagement with the substance was of no concern within these logics. The visitor was guided through the controlled environment of the Museum by entities appointed for the purpose of ensuring the optimal visual experience and stimulation—the emphasis having been placed on visual and impressionistic responses rather than on informed responses. These “tours” were wholly committed to eliciting pleasure and soliciting a stake in national pride.

194  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.8  Plan of the First State Story of Montagu House, showing the arrangement of the collections and the tour route. Circa 1765.  Reproduced by Permission of Tony Spence.

Categorical Hierarchy and the “Order of Things” In the conceptual framework of this argument, I am inserting an important distinction between “spectral logic” as this was established to accommodate visitors to the British Museum, and “categorical hierarchies,” which were being developed in tandem and consistent with contemporary European models of order and classification. (I discuss Linnaeus and his influence in the previous chapter.) Spectral logic refers to those mechanisms put in place to provide for the visitor visual stimulation and ocular pleasures. As the previous section highlights, raconteurs and their impressionistic accounts, their engagement with information and display, however fleeting, are just as potent as the deepcoded knowledge embedded in art, artifacts, books, and natural and

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  195

Figure 5.9  Plan of the Second State Story of Montagu House, showing the arrangement of the collections and the tour route. Circa 1765.  Reproduced by Permission of Tony Spence ©.

artificial productions. The categorical hierarchies, contrariwise, refer to those scientific systems of organization of the contents which are not visible but are an integral part of the logics of the museum. Both are necessary corollaries in the schematics of the new Museum and can (and certainly does) coexist. But spectral logic and categorical hierarchies are not mutually exclusive; they have to coalesce in order to produce the right and balanced meaning. A couple of specific examples in this section highlight how spectral order came to be achieved through categorical hierarchies. Take, for instance, the “Proposal of a Plan” written by James Empson and dated 27 August 1756: Undertakings of whatever kind being attended with more or less inconveniencies, we humbly presume the Honoroble Committee will allow us, to take first steps for the removing and placing the Sloanian Curiosities, as will save time and appear less inconvenient. We should make no objection at all against packing up and removing

196  The Cultural Logic of Museology II these curiosities in the method hitherto pursued, was there sufficient room in Montagu House to set them down in separate appartments (sic) (not those in which they are to be put up) and place them in the same manner as they stand now at Chelsea. For, in that case it would be easy for us to have recourse to the several cabinets so placed, and take out, from time to time, such articles as are proper to be placed and arranged in the Repositories of those rooms allotted us for that purpose. Our undertaking would not be liable to the least confusion, nor would we be subject to an inconveniency much greater than the former, which is, that, in case things are continued to be packed up and removed in the manner already began, we shall be obliged continually to search, in the cases pack’d up, for articles to be sorted with others, and often undo what we have done. We propose therefore to lay before the Committee at their next meeting, a Plan, which being approved of and pursued, will not in the least retard the remaining of the curiosities (which may very well be compleated (sic) by Michael Mass next) but prevent all confusion, given a distinct idea of the whole, and enable us, almost at the same time of the curiosities being removed, to place them in order. We shall likewise then produce the necessary Draughts for the better judging of our Plan, and contrive some specimens in the repositories at Montagu House, of the Manner in which we propose to arrange matters to the best advantage. 52 In his “proposal,” Empson teases out the fundamental difference between the ordering of the items in private space, in the Chelsea residence of Hans Sloane, versus ordering of the acquisitions in a public museum, in ordered and scripted space; the message, in other words, has to be adjusted for the audience. From collection to exhibition is a gigantic leap and the spatial dynamic of each purpose is thus radically different—with Empson providing in this case a vital link between the two states. Appointed as the third Under Librarian, with specific duties to oversee the Natural and Artificial curiosities in the Sloane collection, Empson came to the British Museum with considerable hands-on experience in library science since he had been Sloane’s curator for 15 years.53 The “Proposal” was followed by “The Plan itself”—which is how the title appears—although this handwritten document (presumably also by James Empson) does not have a date.54 This “Plan” begins with a consideration of the difference between private and public, consistent with the principles of a persuasive proposal that it purports to be: “How much soever a private person may be at liberty arbitrarily to dispose & place his curiosities, we are sensible that the British Museum, being a public institution subject to the visits of the judicious & intelligent, as well as the curious, notice will be taken whether or not the collection has been arranged in a methodical manner.” This new method, therefore, was not imposed by an individual; it was not arbitrary or reflective of the quirks of an individual and his private collection. Instead, this method was scientific

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  197 and understood as such because it had been tried and tested and proven to be the most expeditious one, suitable for the task at hand. The insistence is also voiced in “reason”: “For this reason we have pitch’d on the following course, being the most simple & most natural, and on that account appearing to us the most eligible to be pursued.” That which is simple is also natural and, therefore, cannot be rejected on any artificial or contrived, let alone arbitrary, grounds. The specific proposal is to “immediately divide the whole collection into two parts, viz, the natural & artificial curiosities.” The natural curiosities are further subdivided into three, the first of which consist of items belonging to the vegetable kingdom followed by the ones belonging to the animal kingdom and finally the fossils or native minerals. In the arrangement of these “natural curiosities” the spectator’s line of vision is of utmost importance and described as follows: “We intend, according to the nature and characteristic of each of these matters, to subdivide them & in disposing of each subdivision, to take particular care, that those matters may be brought nearest the sight, as are most pleasing to the eye and most consideration, placing the rest, in proportion as they are less so, higher & higher, on the shelves above them and those that are still inferior, in the drawers under each subdivision.”55 Housing this collection is not just for preservation or education but also for exhibition—­the display whose logic is dictated by an awareness of the eye of the consumer of culture, the judicious, intelligent, and curious observer who is a critical, albeit silent, contributor to this idea of the modern museum. Regarding the fossils or the native minerals—including pebbles, marble, alabaster, crystals, gems, and precious stones—the “plan” once again points out the benefits of positioning objects so as to please the spectators’ eye and to cater to the best possible vantage point for their gaze, blending spectral logic with categorical hierarchy: “If the apartment just before mentioned, on account of a great variety of pleasing objects, will make a beautiful appearance, as it really will, this last one will be yet more so, as a still greater variety will be contained in it, and as the far superior number of agreeable objects will more strongly attract the eye of the spectator. . . . As one of our principal intentions is to dispose of things in such a manner as will be most advantageous to view, it will little answer this end, should we take different species together and crowd them on the shelves, or place things to the very depth of the shelves, where no distinct view can be had of them.”56 Written by Dr. Gowan Knight, the first Principal Librarian, “A Plan for the general Distribution of Hans Sloane’s Collection” provides a good example of how the “juxtaposition of works” in the category of natural history—“the greatest & most valuable part of this Collection”—was first spatially conceptualized and then presented to the trustees as a proposal with justifications for the specific order of things. 57 This “plan” is quoted almost in full below because it is one of the most comprehensive dissertations on the issue of “order” as defined and operationalized by the British Museum.

198  The Cultural Logic of Museology II All the articles that come under this head may be properly classed in the three general divisions of Fossils, Vegetables, and Animals. Of these the fossils are the most simple; & therefore may properly be disposed in the first Rank. Next to them the Vegetables, & lastly the Animal substances. By this arrangement the spectator will be gradually conducted from the simplest to the most composed & most perfect of Nature’s Productions. I wou’d therefore humbly propose that the Fossils may be placed in this first Room next to the saloon, & when they are properly disposed, to begin with the Vegetables, where the fossils end, either in the same room or in the next, according as the space will permit. In like manner the vegetables may be succeeded by the animals & animal substances. And since there is found in Nature a gradual & almost insensible transition from one kind of Natural production to another I would endeavor both in the general & particular arrangement to exemplifie (sic) those gradual transitions as much as possible.58 Notice that the “insensible,” which I take to mean organic and unobtrusive, “transition from one kind of Natural production to another” does not, in fact, exist in nature where plants, animals, and fossils exist and mingle freely; but there is a perception—one which we ought not to reject summarily—that there is an implicit order in nature, an order which must be made manifest in the logics of the museum. Museology as strategic intervention is not contra nature but meant to mirror the system which nature embodies. Knight then continues as follows: As the class of vegetable substances will be imperfect unless a good collection of dyed plants make a part thereof. Such a collection seems to be much wanted to render this Branch of Natural History complete. I would therefore beg leave to propose, as the Hortus Siccuses would take up too much room, & are already otherwise disposed of, to make a collection quite new; & to digest them according to Linneaus’s system & deposit them in a cabinet to be constructed for that purpose according to the proportion laid down by Linneaus himself in his Philosophia Botanica. His proportions are, in Paris measure, 7 feet ½ in height, 16 Inches in breadth, & is 12 inches in depth. Such a cabinet may very well stand against one of the jambes of ye windows, which are at present vacant. If the fossils and vegetables can be contained in the two first Rooms, the Room at the West End with the slip adjoining will remain for the animals and animal substances. Some of the Vegetables and a considerable & valuable part of the animals are preserved in spirits, & would be a great ornament to the Collection if placed in the Cabinets. And I presume it would give more satisfaction to the publick to see them each arranged there with things of the same kind, than to have them put together in the Base story.

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  199 At the same time the monsters & anatomical preparations will be best joined with the skeletons & other parts of anatomy in the base story. More especially as all these are not proper objects for all persons, particularly women with child. The large room in the base story at the West End will be very fit for this purpose & being under the rooms to which its contents belong will have a communication with it by the Back stairs. 59 Vegetables and animals preserved in spirit would be better positioned in the cabinets on the main floors rather than in the basement where they may be less accessible. Caution is then advised so as not to expose pregnant women to monsters, skeletons and other parts of the anatomy. These items ought to be placed in the basement, Knight suggests. If on account of this disposition the two rooms allotted to the animalia should be found too small to contain the whole; a continuation of this class may be made in the two rooms adjoining to the committee room. As to the antiquities they may be put in the largest room in the base story at the east end, to xx which the next room may be added if necessary. This situation will be the more proper on account of the medals, if they should be placed above, as there will be a communication by the back stairs. The little room at the West End opening upon the back stairs may contain the miniatures, pictures, and a cabinet of some of the most valuable and curious Productions of Art. The rest may be put in the base story, as also the instruments, Habits, Indian curiosities.60 This report is reproduced verbatim for the Trustees who then went on to order “that the sum of one hundred pounds be impressed to Dr. Knight by a draught upon Mr. Race.” The draught was accordingly made, and signed by the Trustees present.61 The Committee meeting minutes for 14 January 1757 reveal that “Agreeable to the desire of the Committee, Dr.  Knight delivered in a plan for the General Distribution of Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection of natural and other productions.” A hierarchy or a gradation is thus sanctioned by the Board, such that the spectator would see the developments from the fossils to the plants and then on to the “animal substances.” This gradation is premised upon the comparative value of each category of “natural curiosity” and how the “spectator” would perceive and process these distinctions and gradations: “By this arrangement the spectator will be gradually conducted from the simplest to the most composed & most perfect of Nature’s Productions” (Committee 1: 174–75). Dr. Matthew Maty62 presented before the Standing Committee (on 15 February 1765) a report on “The Order of the Catalogue.”63 Using the example of the Sloanian Collection, Maty pointed out that the classical arrangement is one that he would not change because “no reason can oblige us to deviate materially from it.” He then goes on to explain that

200  The Cultural Logic of Museology II “[a]ccording to that method, books are first divided under some general heads, and afterwards subdivided into particular classes properly connected with one another.” The result would be to “present at once a system of universal knowledge in all its branches, and a historical notice of whatever has been written upon any subject.” Of course, this classical system does not preclude problems, Maty went on to explain, and some of these problems he describes as follows: “[T]he advantages of this method are somewhat balanced by the necessary indetermination of it. The different connexions of the different sciences, and the variety of things often contained in one book must necessarily affect differently different minds. Hence we find considerable varieties in the few catalogues planned in this manner.”64 He continued to explain the challenges of cataloguing thus: “In the perplexing diversity we could wish to have some rules to determine our choice. If the following ones do not sufficiently answer this end, they may show at last that we intend to trust as little as possible to our own judgment.”65 The quirks of individuals and the vagaries of taste and judgment are precisely the sorts of stumbling blocks that a systematic method can transcend. Maty’s knowledge of contemporary methods of cataloguing perfected elsewhere in Europe is vast; so, for example, he praises “Prosper Marchand’s ingenious system of Bibliography published as head of his catalogue of Paultrier’s Library in 1709” and expresses his admiration for “the Sion Catalogue published in 1724, the Scheme of the Hanoverian66 Library printed in 1727,67 and lastly the elaborate and voluminous Catalogue of the Royal Library in France.”68 The Catalogue of the French King’s Library provides the best system and one which the British Museum must follow, according to Maty: “Our general division will be that, which has the greatest antiquity and the multiplicity of examples on its side. The six heads of Divinity, Law, History, Philosophy, Physick, and Philology having—both these advantages, will be preferred to other arrangements, which might otherwise appear more ingenious, more simple, and more comprehensive.”69 Tactical measures, anticipating a variety of contingencies, and strategic planning, which was based upon scientific precept and experiential knowledge, were thus brought into alignment with this nation-space on a continuous basis. The built space had then to accommodate the spectral logic of the museum as well as its commitment to categorical order and related hierarchies dictated by the acquisitions and in terms of the stated intention to accommodate the public.

Deep-Mapping the Keene Plans Before, it was the map which reflected and recorded the shapes of the territory. Now, it was the turn of the territory to become a reflection of the map, to be raised to the level of orderly transparency which the maps struggled to reach. It was the space itself which was

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  201 to be reshaped or shaped up from scratch in the likeness of the map and according to the decisions of cartographers.70 Zygmunt Bauman goes on to describe in this context the “strict, detailed, and comprehensive, advance planning of the city space” as the necessary corollary to progress, which is always the end-goal of cultures of globalization. In this formulation, one which he builds with the help of Bronislaw Baczko, Bauman argues that modernity’s propensity to map space ensures that the space measures up to its own potential, which only the map can plan and help to materialize.71 This seemingly circular logic helps me to launch the argument in this section about the fundamentally expansionist potential and thus the potency of the Keene Estate Plans of Montagu House. These plans represent the inevitable sedimentation of Montagu House plans in general—leading to a gradual disappearance—with the older ones being embedded continually, as the new plans, post-1753, designed to accommodate fresh contingencies, came to be drawn and deployed. The etchings and engravings of the north prospect of Montagu House and its gardens as well as the “view of the front and courtyard” (Figure 5.1, produced circa 1728) capture the essence of the pre-British Museum phase of this building. A legacy of the medium which affects the message, these etchings and drawings convey a pristine equanimity, manicured geometry, as well as the consoling fiction of stability. Thus represented, this building appears to be impervious to change, robbed of textured history, and embodying, as it were, a condition of stasis, which the estate plans, particularly the post-1753 ones, continued to dismantle. It is this sense of historical continuity and utopian pride conjoined with a visibly powerful imprint of a new public space replete with evidence of cultural supremacy which is captured by Catharine Talbot, after her first visit to the British Museum. In the post-1754 spatial realignments registered in the Keene plans, the dialectics of demand and supply (of knowledge and information) become visible and destroy some of the studied placidity and colorful harmony of the earlier plans. The Keene Plans—mostly in tatters—have remained dormant because no one has attempted to theorize the narrative of these plans against the backdrop of enlightenment in action.72 Estate plans are not just dead material objects, not just drawings which lead from conceptualization to realization, from map to manifestation of material culture, or mundane indication of what was placed where. My contention is that these plans help us to understand an important element in the operations of harnessing infinity (knowledge and information) toward the production—in the new space created in the ­Museum—­of an encyclopedic compendium (a structural and philosophical oxymoron) of British identity during the Enlightenment: acquired as it was by the Museum from the Montagus—­superimposing upon the narrative of a “colonial” manor house the narrative of enlightened nation73 —the building was in

202  The Cultural Logic of Museology II 1754 an inheritance deep-coded by its imperial foundation, which erases the divides between source and substance, between resource and consumer, between natural and artificial preserves mined from elsewhere and those cultures of consumption in Britain. Moreover, deep-mapping the Keene plans allows us to trace the evolution of a tightly scripted system of managerial command and control which was self-consciously invested in aligning a corporate identity, with highly strategic systems of display, toward establishing the ground rules for modern museology, in this new nation-space. The ground zero of modern museology mirrored the macrocosmic urban development of Bloomsbury of which it was a part. A historiography of Montagu House is, in this sense, tied to the historiography of Bloomsbury and to those invisible historiographies related to British colonies in North America. Toward the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century, the northern limits of London became fashionable and two houses in particular stood out from among the rest in the area south of what was to become Russell Square: Southampton (later Bedford) House and Montagu House; the latter stood on seven acres of land to the north of which was open countryside.74 Figure 4.1 (see Chapter 4) and other such pen and ink sketches and drawings communicate, among other things, a placid and bucolic landscape where a nascent information-age was about to materialize and to continue to have a powerful imprint on the cultural imaginary. “Cultivation,” etymologically linked to agriculture (or the cultivation of land), has to split and sever the “agro” component from “culture” so as to facilitate the creation of an enlightened society populated by the cultivated, the educated. In “the practice of everyday life” (Michel de Certeau), in other words, Londoners and provincial or foreign visitors alike would have to make a decisive shift from their routine rituals to accommodate this process of cultivation facilitated, among other built space, by the British Museum. For a culture to be cultured, it had to promote and to sustain a certain degree of mass acculturation, as the spatialized early developments of the British Museum attest to. The evolving connotation of culture continued to absorb the fluidity of the public culture. In this sense, the “implementation into everyday use of freshly coined terms” such as culture is not to be taken lightly as Philippe Bénéton, among others, has argued. According to Bénéton, at its inception the idea of ‘culture’ was typified by the following three characteristics: optimism, that is to say, belief that the potential for change in human nature is limitless; universalism, or an assumption that the ideal of human nature and the potential to meet its demands is the same for all nations, places and times; and finally,

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  203 eurocentrism, the conviction that the ideal was discovered in Europe and that it was there that it was defined by legislators in political and social institutions, and by the ways and models of individual and communal life.75 Optimism, universalism, Eurocentrism are vast templates, which cannot be accommodated into one rubric of engagement with the concept of culture or one particular trajectory of the processes of mass acculturation. I argue here that “the map” or estate plan as material object—reflecting the spatial alignments and realignments in Montague House—­embodies, quite naturally, the spirit of the future and an inherent optimism not because of its aesthetic appeal or merely because of its functionality but because this map is a template of larger social and cultural markers and movements of which it is but a small part. Henry Flitcroft (1697–1769), who began his professional career as a carpenter at Burlington House (home of the Royal Academy), rose through the ranks, became a draughtsman, and eventually an architect who is now associated with the Palladian style of architecture prominent throughout Enlightenment London. Flitcroft’s estate plans of Montagu House dated 1725 clearly meant to showcase John Montagu’s Bloomsbury residence in all its resplendence albeit at a time when Bloomsbury was in rapid decline. The ornate green and burgundy design of the borders on each page makes this series a superb example of modern architectural plans. The full set of Flitcroft floor plans are housed in the British Museum Central Archives in a burgundy box (roughly 23″ × 15″) with the following spinal title: “Plans of Montagu House 1725.” In this bound volume, the first plan is of the entire estate, the second one is a plan of the “lower story of Montagu House and Offices,” the third is “The Plan of the First State Story,” the fourth is “The Plan of the Second State Story,” and the fifth is “The Plan of the Upper Story.” The following evidence suggests that these plans seem to have been used when the mansion was in the process of being converted to a museum. There are two sets of drawings attached to the spine and inserted at the back: the first set is ostensibly the “Plan of the Garden Steps as prepared to be altered” and “Another Plan of restoring them as before given to the surveyor when so resolved.” On the second inserted page, Number 1 is the “Plan of the Center Room of Library of the Museum under the Saloon.” Number 2 is “the section of the floor of the saloon shewing the proposed iron framing under it.” Underneath Number 2 is the “Plan of the Ceiling.” Clearly, the Flitcroft plans were being reviewed either right before or right after the hiring of the first three surveyors of the British Museum. Flitcroft continued to work for John Montagu: we know, for instance, that the “new” Montagu House, which was built for John Montagu and stood by the Thames in the Privy Garden, Whitehall, was designed by Flitcroft; construction of this house “took place between

204  The Cultural Logic of Museology II 1731 and 1733”—a few years after he had drawn the Montagu House plans (of 1725).76 In 1740, William Brasier revisited and reproduced the Flitcroft floor plans. Both the 1725 and the 1740 drawings of floor plans were presumably commissioned by John Montagu. The reasons for commissioning the first two sets of plans (Flitcroft 1725; Brasier 1740) are not known and nor do we know—except conjecturally—who exactly spearheaded or indeed supervised these two earlier projects, the first of which precedes the second by 15 years. As principal steward of Montagu House from 1720 and also surveyor and draftsman at large for the John Montagu estates, John Booth (1688–1733) drew maps of Boughton and other properties belonging to his master and lived “in Great Russell Street near Montagu House.” Since he dealt with “all aspects of the management of the estates”77 of the Montagus, one might assume that the first set of floor plans drawn by Henry Flitcroft were, in all probability, commissioned and supervised by Booth (at the behest of his master). Not much is known about Brasier. His track record as surveyor for the 4th Earl of Cardigan in 1752 and earlier, as surveyor and draftsman for John Montagu is complemented by the fact that he had worked in North America and in the West Indies.78 Therefore, Brasier too had colonial credentials that help us to see, once again, a direct link—structural, architectural, and ideological—between the built spaces in the colonies and in London. Brasier’s plan was used by Keene and thus appears along with the latter’s imprint. To the untrained eye and at first glance, the difference between these two plans—the first by Flitcroft (Figure 5.10) and the next carrying the imprimatur of Brasier (Figure 5.11)—are minimal. But, in fact, several contrasting points emerge once these two pages are juxtaposed: Brasier’s “copy” does not have the same density of trees in the NW corner of the property. Instead of being a shortcut or an oversight in his version, this may, in fact, simply indicate the state of landscape surrounding Montagu House 15 years after the original plan was drawn, following the overall decline of the estate (as has been noted in several contemporary accounts) as well as the general area (Bloomsbury) presumably in the 1730s on. In the late seventeenth century, and during the lifetime of Ralph Montagu, this was a fashionable area. Brasier’s imprimatur is still legible and appears at the bottom righthand corner of the 1740 estate maps of Montagu House of which there are three in all: the Plan of the Lower Storey of Montagu House & Offices, the Plan of the First State Storey of Montagu House, and the Plan of the Second State Storey of Montagu House. The Plan of the Upper Storey appears in the Flitcroft cluster (1725) but not in the Brasier one (1740). Perhaps more important, both versions assign numbers to the rooms, beginning on the top floor and going down to the lowest level; there were 102 rooms in all. These “Brasier” palimpsests must have been drawn

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  205

Figure 5.10  T  he Plan of the Lower Story of Montague House & Offices in Plans of Montague House by H. Flitcroft 1725.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

for purposes of estate management as these lack the ornate border of Flitcroft plans and have, instead, a matter-of-fact black border; also, the Brasier plans do not have any coats of arms as in the Flitcroft plans of 1725. Whether there was a set of stand-alone Brasier plans is not known. The extant Brasier plans must have resurfaced circa 1754–1755 when the principal surveyor (architect) of the newly established British Museum, Henry Keene, took on the reins to study and to renovate what had been a private mansion toward aligning it to the needs of a public museum. Where do Keene’s plans appear? Keene’s interventions may be interpreted as uniting all three versions (Flitcroft, Brasier, Keene): the Flitcroft plans remediated by Brasier in 1740 and the Keene plans beginning in 1754 which present further remediations of the earlier two sets of plans. Thoroughly remediated and also presenting the logistics of fresh evaluation and action, the Keene plans are bound in one volume and reveal clearly the processes of layering, sedimentation, and progression. This (Keene) bound volume is housed in a black box in the British Museum Archives (16″ × 20″), with the following spinal title: “Montagu House Plans Flitcroft/Brazier (sic).” The box itself is uncatalogued and Keene is not acknowledged on the spine and, therefore, his name is largely

206  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.11  “  Plan of the Lower Storey of Montague House & Offices.” This specific plan is “Copied from Mr. H. Flitcroft by W. Brasier, 1740.” BM Uncatalogued Black Box containing Henry Keene Drawings. © Trustees of the British Museum.

absent from the Montagu House archives. Keene’s “signature” on these plans—barely visible but significant in the Georgio Agamben sense of the term79 —helps us to understand the spatial dimension of a new museology. It is worth noting that the Flitcroft set of estate maps (1725) are in very good physical condition while the Keene set (encompassing the Brasier set) is loosely bound in leather, rough-hewn, and now fairly tattered—registering, as it does, the repeated use of these plans for the purposes of the upgrades and renovations of the British Museum. Responding to the request from the Board of Trustees, Keene began his work by studying, presumably, the Flitcroft floor plans of 1725 as well as the palimpsests, loosely defined, made by Brasier. The existing floor plans were thus his starting point, the point from which the elasticity of the existing built space could be determined and then the renovations/adjustments/expansion could be planned and executed within the structural parameters (and limitations) of the existing building. Dismissed perhaps due to a hodgepodge of Museum blueprints, this Black box containing the Keene plans encase the following items: •

Four full pages (in color) with floor plans of each floor of Montagu House on a separate page. The first three floors, beginning with the “lower storey of Montagu House & Offices,” then the “first

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  207

•

•

state storey of Montagu House,” followed by “the second state storey of Montagu House” are on the first three pages of this binding. “The Plan of the Upper Storey of Montagu House” is placed in what appears to be the middle of the binding. All four of these pages carry the following acknowledgment in the lower right-hand corner: “Copied from Mr. Henry Flitcroft by W. Brasier 1740.” Five floor plans on five pages, with two pages carrying the signature of “H. Keene, delin.” The handwriting on all five pages are the same and, therefore, it is safe to assume that all five pages were generated by Keene and/or his assistants. A number of pages of drawings, in varying sizes of (a) doorways; (b) bookcases; (c) kitchen; (d) Montague House Garden, and so on were added much later, in 1779, and, for some reason, placed in this binding.

From the reproductions of the Flitcroft plans by Braiser, we know that the upper floor of Montagu House contained 16 rooms; the second “state” floor contained 32 rooms (17–48); the first “state storey” consisted of 28 (49–76) rooms; and the lower floor consisted of 26 rooms (77–102), adding up to a grand total of 102 rooms in all. Page four of this volume is the first Keene intervention and it contains the kind of details that the Flitcroft plans do not have. So, for instance, this page produces a slice of the West Wing of the mansion and in it Keene shows how the floor space would be subdivided to accommodate the offices of the principal officer as well as the bedchambers and apartments for the various officers and their assistants. Keene color codes his drawing so that it would be easy for the Board of Trustees to see the grand plan; their approval would be the first step toward fulfilling his duties as chief surveyor and to begin work on the project. Notice that the drawing (Figure 5.12) shows three floors in the West Wing and color coding helps to showcase the utility of each segment of the floor space on all three levels. With reference to Figure 5.12, the three floors begin with the “Lower Cellar Story” which is at the bottom of the page. Above it is the “Front or Parlor Story” and then the “Upper Story.” Each story is divided into two segments: one colored in India ink80 and the other in red. A1, A2, and A3, colored in India ink show the offices of the principal officer (A1); then the apartment on the first story (A2), and also “the bedchamber on the upper story.” B1, B2, and B3 show the offices, apartment, and bedchamber of another officer. C4 and C5, on the first parlor story and the upper story only show the assistant officer’s room and bedchamber. The management structure of the museum is thus not only physically aligned to and incorporated in the museum space but it also immediately present, within the same precinct so that managers have continuous and direct access to all aspects of the operations. Whether the surveyors were

208  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.12  Page 4 of the Keene Plans. “References to West Wing” This Plan is Signed by Henry Keene, Delin, No Date. BM Uncatalogued Black Box Containing Henry Keene Drawings, circa 1753–1754.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

regarded as “officers” is not easy to determine since the quarters were not labeled with individual names or specific duty or task-based designations; instead, the broad category is indicated and the hierarchy of officers is discernable from the space assigned to them, with the higher-ups getting more space. Within this corporate structure, and specifically within the physical space of the Museum, the officers were accommodated with a pragmatic eye toward ensuring the proximity of their public and private lives (or indeed the marginalization of the private). The organizational principle of housing the officers in the ­Museum, one might argue, subordinated their private space, their individual identity, to the public service mission of which they were an integral part. Their seamless transitions from private to public space exemplify, in retrospect, the utilitarianism which this institution perfected. One way to read the housing of management within the museum is to see it as an early expression of the Argus Panoptes mythology, 40 years before Jeremy Bentham’s model for disciplining aberration or criminality through an intricate system of surveillance. This was, clearly, an early framework for the kind of corporate

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  209 efficiency and accountability which, one might argue, late capitalism has failed to deliver. In conclusion, two specific markers may be used to underscore the hypothesis here of the modernity of this institution where public space was designed and engineered for the purposes of providing easy access to knowledge and information. Within this corporate structure, the work of the surveyors in particular can be seen as registers of the fl ­ uidity of various functions ranging from decisions to action to further decisions, from buildings and grounds, to bookshelves and shelf space, and mechanisms for safeguarding rare objects and books; indeed, spatial alignments and realignments were at the core of this evolving concept of museology. The functions of the Board and the functions of the surveyors (and librarians) continued to reflect a dialectical synchronicity which was perfectly aligned to the corporate mission at hand. Take, for instance, the General Meeting minutes for 19 February 1757, some of which goes as follows: Mr. Keene, by order of the Committee, having delivered in drawings and estimates of cases, now lying upon the table, for the Cottonian, the Harleian, and other manuscripts, the Committee were of opinion, that new cases be provided: and that the Plan with wire doors marked No. 2, leaving out the pediments, is the most eligible, The fitting up the rooms Nrs. 20, 21, 25, thus, with brass wire doors, will amount to four hundred eighty pounds, six shillings: and if the wire doors are omitted, will amount only to two hundred and seventy three pounds. The former of these rooms it is imagined, may contain the Harleian Collection: and the latter Nr. 25, will more than contain the Cottonian. (General Meeting, I: 146) The East Wing plan and specific layout (Figure 5.13), generated in early 1757, is clearly more complicated and therefore Keene uses six colors to highlight the different functions of the spaces on each level. In addition, the corporate identity of this new concept of museology registers a clear separation of crown and corporation. George II’s reluctance to grant Hans Sloane’s wishes for housing his collections is well documented. Indeed, it was the Parliament and particularly the Speaker of the House Arthur Onslow who was instrumental in preparing the grounds for and then passing the British Museum Act in 1753. Quite remarkably, in four years (and during the Seven Years War with France), the British Museum became the repository of the Royal Library. The minutes of the General Meeting held on 12 July 1757 reveal the following: “As the Committee have reason to apprehend, that the passing of the Grant of the Royal Library will soon be completed, they desire the General Meeting will give orders concerning the bringing it to the Museum, and placing it when it shall be brought.” And, once again, the

210  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Figure 5.13  P  lan of the Second State Story of Montagu House. With plan of the placement of books belonging to Hans Sloane, The Harleian ­Library, The Cottonian Library, and those of Mr. Edward. Loose Leaf ­ I nsertion, BM Uncatalogued Black Box Containing Henry Keene ­Drawings, circa 1753–1757.  © Trustees of the British Museum.

surveyor is pressed into service toward, at first, an assessment of the spatial parameters at the point of origin and then to determine the spatial requirements at the British Museum end: In order to save time, the Committee have directed Mr. Keene to take superficial measure of the said Royal Library, which appears to be 440 feet the manuscripts, and 1450 feet the printed books in the whole 1890 feet. The manuscripts therefore will be conveniently placed in the room E22 of the second state story and the printed books might be contained in the rooms 57 and 58 of the first state story, unless the General Meeting should think it an objection, that this will interrupt the continuity of the Sloanian Library. In which case, the King’s Books might be placed distinct in the rooms 54 and 55 of the same story, which at present are occupied by part of Sir Hans Sloane’s Library, and might be removed into the rooms 57 and 58 aforesaid. In the account recited it is supposed that the room 58 of the first state story is quite empty which will not be the real case, unless means are found out to enlarge the space in the adjoining Rooms: and this may be done by placing shelves over the chimneys, which is recommended to the consideration of the General Meeting.81

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  211 Notice that “the King’s books” are subject to the same set of planning and logistics as all the other collections of national heritage. Thus, the Sloanian Library and the King’s Library come to share shelf space, as it were, bringing about the kind of leveling which might not have been consciously imagined or executed; but in this public Museum. Worth or cultural capital came to be determined not entirely by social status but more often than not by the strength of the collection itself. The designation of “Royal” was added on to the value of the collections in general and contributed to the idea of a national repository which was still firmly lodged in a monarchical system. That the goals of monarchy and the goals of discoverers, adventurers (such as Hans Sloane, Joseph Banks, and others) and their expeditions coincided and marched in coordinated step toward the establishment of both science and empire has to be discussed (as I have done in Chapter 4) with reference to agency. Who are the agents of empire? And how do they, consciously or unconsciously, erase the modalities and methods of their operations?

In Conclusion: The New Corporate Culture of Nation-Space Timothy W. Luke, Zygmunt Bauman, and others have proposed ways of identifying the lines of divide between traditional societies and the modern state. For them, “engineered, modern space” had changed irrevocably and “become ‘processed/centered/organized/normalized,’ and above all emancipated from the natural constraint of the human body.” Bauman locates, in addition, a key element in modern narratives thus: Writers of modern utopias did not distinguish between social and architectural order, social and territorial units and divisions; for them—as for their contemporaries in charge of social order—the key to an orderly society was to be found in the organization of space. Social totality was to be a hierarchy of ever larger and more inclusive localities, with the supra-local authority of the state perched at the top and surveilling the whole, while itself protected from day-to-day invigilation.82 In the British Museum and from the very outset, “the authority of state” came to be lodged very firmly in members of parliament rather than in the power (derived from divine authority) of the king (in the early history of the British Museum of George II and George III). But the authority of the state and surveillance, in the Panopticon sense, would not apply to the logics of this Museum—at least not in the eighteenth century— and this despite the preeminence of all sorts of hierarchy (in natural and artificial productions and personnel) which I have discussed in this chapter. Easy equations between then and now, between Enlightenment

212  The Cultural Logic of Museology II and postmodern managerial and corporate structures and visual/verbal regimes, inevitably falter for reasons that might be explained, in part, with reference to Foucault’s following observation on “the limits of representation”: The complex phenomenon of biology, of the history of languages, and of industrial production, were not, in the last years of the ­eighteenth century, introduced into forms of rational analysis to which until then they had remained entirely foreign; nor was there a sudden ­interest—provoked by the ‘influence’ of a budding ‘­romanticism’—in the complex forms of life, history, and society; there was no detachment, under the pressure of its problems, from a rationalism subjected to the model of mechanics, to the rules of analysis and the laws of understanding. Or rather, all this did in fact happen, but as a surface movement: a modification and shifting of cultural interests, a redistribution of opinions and judgements, the appearance of new forms in scientific discourse, wrinkles traced for the first time upon the enlightened face of knowledge. Based upon the evidence presented in this chapter, I would agree that “forms of rational analysis” did not suddenly emerge in the e­ ighteenthcentury intellectual and philosophical plane; equally, “there was no ­detachment . . . from a rationalism subjected to the model of mechanics.” In the context of my argument, the identities and differences which underlie the systems of organization manifested in museum-­space depended (then) upon a system of representation on a visible surface, without reference to what Foucault describes as the “condition” which links various “spatialized” objects on a table.83 In theory, and particularly in Foucault’s formulation of order and representation which I have found very useful, “things, in their fundamental truth, have now escaped from the space of the table”—except that they have not done so if we consider postmodern museology and its modern foundations, in the eighteenth century; “fundamental truth” always escapes “from the space of the table.” Adjacencies, hierarchies, connections, unthinking Eurocentrism are still very much present (in part because these are also the underlying themes in successful global business models of which museums are just one example). Rational analysis notwithstanding, systems of modern representation have mutated into systems of postmodern representational praxis. Therefore, if anything, we must identify and acknowledge a resilient core (when we think of adjacencies, connections, and so on in the unifying narratives presented or displayed in museum-space) and the necessity for both guarding against essentialism and explaining why things “in fragments, outlines, pieces, shards”84 —things lacking in any inherent order or unity—continue to be disciplined into a forced unity and aesthetic organization.

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  213 In a postmodern hypothesis on the modern spatial and visual regimes which undergird such abstract notions as progress, enlightenment, and civilizing mission, the British Museum provides the best and most sophisticated source materials. The arduous tasks and coordinated planning and development carried out by the original Board of Trustees of the British Museum and their expert operatives laid the foundation for modernity with all the essential ingredients of seduction (Jean Baudrillard, Zygmunt Bauman), which we generally associate with our current Age of Information: the surfeit of visual stimuli, the promise of intellectual fulfillment triggered by those stimuli, the excitement of voyeurism, a fascination for the ancient world, the contraction of time-space, the “discovery” of source materials, the birth of the global laboratory, the creation of markets and demand, the immediacy of the outré, as manifested, for instance, in Egypto-­ necrophilia, and the list could go on. Likewise, I would like to emphasize in conclusion that the methodological pitfalls of demarcations between the Enlightenment and “liquid modernity,” in Zygmunt Bauman’s theoretical formulation, lie in the unsustainability of exceptionalism. Inevitably, some exceptional traits and operations of a select developmental phase of culture find expression in the coordinates of another discrete developmental phase—as this discussion of the British Museum might be used to explain. If we say, however, that the “culture of liquid modernity has no ‘populace’ to enlighten and ennoble” we might agree with Zygmunt Bauman, but with major qualifications. In other words, if we say that liquid modernity (our modernity) does not seek to enlighten but only to seduce, we have reduced both the liquid state of now and the seemingly solid or static states of the past to stationary by products of demand and supply. In the case of the eighteenth-century British Museum, we find in fact a constant state of fluidity—or liquidity—manifested in the ways in which this institution funneled and channeled both existing and new systems of knowledge and information toward creating an elaborate real/symbolic structure which was at once cultural and architectural, at once informative and entertaining, at once imperial and nation-bound. If the primary “function of culture is not to satisfy existing needs but to create new ones—while simultaneously maintaining needs already entrenched or permanently unfulfilled”—once again we find that the eighteenth-century British Museum fulfills this “modern” criterion. 85 A postmodern historiography of the early British Museum reveals that the full extent of its totalizing vision, its universalizing mission, its unthinking marginalization of Other national archives—this grand narrative—can be found in how it spatialized its identity through what I am characterizing as nation-space, one which defied national coordinates and, unreservedly, embarked upon the project to globalize Britain and to expand its borders.

214  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

Notes 1 At the time of the sale of Montagu House, the property on Great Russell Street (in the parish of Saint George Bloomsbury, earlier of the parish of Saint Giles) was jointly owned by the Edward Montagu, the second husband of Isabella Duchess Dowager of Manchester (whose first husband was William, late Duke of Manchester), George Brudenell, 4th Earl of Cardigan, and Mary, Countess of Cardigan. Isabella and Mary were the two surviving children and thus the heirs of John, Second Duke of Montagu (1690–1749); they inherited his estates including Montagu House. The seals of all four owners and their signatures appear at the bottom of the following legal document signed on 3 June 1754: Articles of Agreement for the Purchase of Montagu House, BM Central Archives CL 302–333. 2 Boughton House and Gardens continue to be a prime tourist attraction today, with the current mansion resembling closely if not into the one which Ralph Montagu inherited in the mid-1780s. 3 I have no direct evidence of John Montagu’s intention or wish to sell Montagu House; the evidence related to the sale of his other London properties appears to be sketchy and also not directly related to the argument here. It is worth noting, however, that “[l]ike many aristocratic families Duke John seems to have classified his inheritance into the core holdings which should not just be preserved but expanded if possible, and then the peripheral estates which could be disposed of as necessary.” See P. H. McKay and D. N. Hall, Eds. Estate Letters from the Time of John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, 1709–39), transcribed by Alan Toseland (Northampton Record Society, 2013), specifically “The Estates,” xxv–xxvi. Henceforth cited at Estate Letters. 4 For the geographical locations of Montagu Point (Point St. Martins for the French) and Montague Fort, see A Relation of the late Intended Settlement of the islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent, in America; In right of the Duke of Montagu, and under his Grace’s Direction and Orders, in the Year 1722 (J. Peele, 1725), specifically “A Plan of the Petite Carenage Harbour in the Caribee Island of St. Lucia.” Plan #1 inserted between pages 118 and 119. See also the first insert after the title page: “A New and Correct Draught of the Caribbee Islands, which indicates that St. Vincent was divided up into “Indian Habitations” and “Negro Habitations” and adds the following description: “On this Island are about 1,200 men, Negroes, and Indians, with some French.” 5 In May 1695 Sloane married Elizabeth “daughter and co-heir of John Langley, a London alderman, and widow of Fulk Rose, formerly of Jamaica. The marriage was an advantageous one for Sloane, since his wife inherited not only her father’s estate but also one third of the income from her former husband’s properties in Jamaica.” See Arthur MacGregor, “The Life, Character and Career of Sir Hans Sloane” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum, ed. Arthur MacGregor (British Museum P, 1994), 13. MacGregor’s source is the unpublished Memoirs relating to the life of Sir Hans Sloane Bart formerly President of the Royal Society by Thomas Birch, BL Additional MS 4241. 6 There can be confusion related to the “old” Montagu House and the “new” Montagu House—references not to the same mansion but to two different ones owned by John Montagu: one in Bloomsbury, which he inherited from his father Ralph, the one which then came to house the British Museum, and one in Whitehall, which he built on a much grander (some sources suggest more modest) scale. 7 The Robert Smirke (1780–1867) set of floors plans are extant and in good condition. Smirke was the architect of the “new” British Museum which he

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  215 designed and which is the core of the current building. Smirke’s building, in Greek revival style, was erected after the demolition of Montagu House circa 1845. The importance of the eighteenth-century floor plans derives in part due to the absence of the “original,” which has to be reimagined. Note that Marjorie Caygill and Christopher Date’s focus has been on the Flitcroft Plans. 8 I am not aware of any other Brasier plans except those which are in the bound “second-series” volume. 9 Hans Sloane’s botanical collections, his coins and medals, classical antiquities, Egyptian antiquities, prehistoric antiquities, Medieval and later antiquities, Oriental antiquities, ethnographic collections, prints and drawings, and books and manuscripts. Among Sloane’s collections which did not survive (either because they disintegrated, disappeared, or were burned and destroyed) were, for instance, his entomological collection, his vertebrate and invertebrate collections, his collection of “humana” (or anatomical, pathological, and curious human specimens), all of which, nonetheless, took up museum-space. Histories of these collections rely upon the Hans ­Slaone’s catalogues for information about these items since very little of his collections (in these categories) have survived. See, for instance, M ­ ichael Day, “Humana,” (69–76); Juliet Clutton-Broack “Vertebrate Collections,” (77–92); and Mike Fitton and Pamela Gilbert, “Insect Collections” (175–200) in ­A rthur MacGregor, Sir Hans Sloane. 10 See Marjorie Caygill, “Sloane’s Will and the Establishment of the British Museum” Sir Hans Sloane, ed. Arthur MacGregor (British Museum P, 1994), 45–50. 11 See, for instance, Sara Mills, Michelle Foucault: Taylor and Francis 2003. ProQuest Ebook Central. Web. 31 May 2016. 12 There were two separate bodies with overlapping membership: the general meeting of the trustees was held four to five times a year identified here as General. Identified here as Committee, a select and smaller body, from the same pool of the board of trustees, met once a month or more frequently if necessary. Volume and page numbers will be provided for both parenthetically in the text. While the Board of Trustees deliberated and passed resolutions on important issues including but not limited to acquisitions, placement of collections, the appointment of Museum personnel, and so on (their minutes referred to here as General Meeting), the Committee consisting of select members of the Board met separately and conducted business related to the physical upkeep and maintenance of the building as well as addressing practical problems and issues. 13 This was Henrietta Harley, wife of the 2nd Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer (1689–1741). A “Copy of a Letter dated 20 December 1748 from the Bishop of St. Asaph to the Countess of Oxford concerning the Collection of Mss at her house in Dover Street” reflects, among other things, that prior to this there had been no comprehensive inventory of the books and manuscripts in this collection (“about 8,000 volumes” in “101 presses”), no rules and regulations related to borrowing privileges, and nor were there any mechanisms for keeping track of items on loan. The Harleian Collection of Manuscripts was to become one of the core collections of the British Museum. See BM Original Letters and Papers (1743–1784) Vol. 1, no. 2. 14 A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, Purchased by Authority of Parliament, for the Use of the Publick; and Preserved in the British Museum. Published by the Order of the Trustees. 2 vols (Dryden Leach, 1759). 15 A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, Preface.

216  The Cultural Logic of Museology II 16 Ibid. Preface. In this context, it is important to note that n 8 May 1761, the trustees ordered that Samuel Johnson and Francis Wade be admitted to the library as readers (Committee III: 686) at the recommendation of Dr. Morton. The mid-eighteenth-century intellectual community played no part in the framing and indeed in the running of the corporation established to enlighten the public; therefore, this community of writers, philosophers, and thinkers were part of the “public” and subject to the same rules of admission. Literary criticism was not a defining feature of the culture where knowledge and information had high stakes. 17 But access for the general public compromised the quality of the work environment for the librarians and curators, as Solander pointed out to the General Meeting members: “Dr. Solander having been ordered to give in a Report of the progress he had made in drawing up the Catalogue of the Natural Productions and having accordingly given it in, it now lies upon the Table, for the perusal of the General Meeting, And Dr. Solander having represented that he had been much interrupted by the company passing through the rooms where he is employed, and having desired a room free from such impediment might be allotted him in the base story, the said request has been granted.” See General (6 October 1764), III: 523. 18 Empson, with this insider’s knowledge of the spatial parameters of Sloane’s home, continued to be an asset to the trustees. So, for instance, on 30 July 1755 (when the trustees met at Montagu House), the Committee ordered that the surveyors deliver estimates of the size of book cases “with their plain pediment” and so on. At the same meeting, the Committee ordered “that Mr. Empson be directed to search for and send if found to the Committee the Drawings made by Sir Hans Sloane’s directions by Mr. Mallet for the placing of his Curiosities.” See Committee I: 41. Empson’s firsthand knowledge of the original repository was then used by the surveyors to estimate the space that would be needed in the new repository. So, for instance, on 17 December 1756, the Committee “Ordered, that Mr. Keene the surveyor deliver in estimates of the expence (sic) of making new cases, with brass wire doors, for placing the Cottonian, Harleian, and other Manuscripts; and of repairing the old presses, and adding brass wire doors to them.” See Committee 1: 159. 19 The logic of the borrowings—based upon common interest—can be found in the General Committee minutes of 2 January 1754. In these we find that these individuals had borrowed some scientific and medical books published in the previous century. See General 1: 16, for instance. 20 There is some patchy evidence that might lead historians to conjecture that Hans Sloane had actually lived in Montagu House prior to his death in 1753 since he was the personal physician to the “mad” Duchess of Montagu. 21 At this meeting the Committee “first took into consideration the offer of Montagu House.” They recorded that from the “indenture dated 19 th June 1675 it appears, that William Russell Esq., second son of the Earl of Bedford, and his lady, granted [Montagu House] to Ralph Montagu Esq. for the sum of £2610 the said ground containing 7 acres and 20 perches forever, at the rent of £5 a year, but with a clause, restricting the erecting any building beyond the range of Southampton House, except for the accommodation and enlargement of the Chief Mansion House.” See Committee, I: 10. 22 See Committee, I: 10. 23 “Montagu House was completely empty when it was taken over by the Trustees.” See Wilson, 31. See Edward Miller, 52.

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  217 24 The Select Committee is not to be confused with the General Committee; each is identified parenthetically as Committee for the first or General for the second. 25 A number of repairs—to the roof, chimney stacks, outside cornice, and so on—had to be completed of course. The report of repairs and their costs were compiled and presumably submitted to the board by the surveyors Horne, Keene, and Morris. These reports, agreements, and contracts can be found in a bound volume of manuscripts titled Surveyors, and Workmen’s Estimates. For the period in questions, see Vol. I, 1754–1777, specifically 1–23 and 23 which contains the signatures of all three principal surveyors. 26 The Committee meeting report for 22 February 1754 has the same wording of the surveyors’ report, beginning with “That the said House is a substantial well built brick building, and that the foundations thereof are sound and free from any material cracks, settlements, or other damage.” See Committee, I: 11. The minutes of these two bodies reveal the dialectics of the vetting and strategic planning processes: the (Select) Committee would deliberate and deal directly with personnel and issues which were then reported to the General Committee. On occasion, and whenever necessary (as in the discussions related to structure and reports by the three surveyors), the same (originally three) experts would be called upon to testify or to present their reports. 27 See Committee, Volume I (minutes of 26 February 1754), page 15. Present at this Committee meeting were the following Trustees: the Duke of ­A rgyle, Duke of Portland, Earl of Oxford, Earl of Macclesfield, Lord Charles Cavendish, Lord Willoughby of Parham, Lord Cadogan, the Honourable Mr.  Yorke, Mr. Hart, Mr. Grey, Colonel Sotheby, Mr. West, Mr. Sloane, Mr. Hardinge, Dr. Birch, and Dr. Ward. 28 This was no doubt the approximate cost which accounts for a total £10,000 higher than the exact calculation would yield. 29 The “New” Palace Yard is also attributed to Thomas Malton Jr. The differences between the two versions—old and new—seem to me to be negligible. 30 St. James’s Palace is southeast of Albemarle Street and close to River Thames. Those familiar with London’s topography know that the land rises gradually as one goes north of the Thames, with the highest point in London being Highgate Hill, just to the north of Hampstead Heath. Water damage to books and manuscripts continued to be of great concern to the Board of Trustees. The lower the ground, the greater the potential for flooding or seepage, if not at the time then later on. Implicit in the deliberations of the Trustees is the clear understanding that a repository of national heritage and of this magnitude had to be situated in safe ground, well above water level. 31 The next meeting of the board of trustees took place a year later, on 15 April 1755. In the middle of page 20 (Volume I) appears the following: “British Museum at Montagu House, 15 April 1755.” This is neither an announcement nor indeed a proclamation. At issue here are the repairs by “several artificers” (carpenters, brick layers, masons and so on). Henry Keene’s plans for Montagu House repairs undoubtedly belong to this period, and, therefore, I would date the contents of the uncatalogued black box containing his repairs to be circa May 1755 (see minutes of 5, 7, 13, 22, and 29 May 1755; Committee I: 22–30). The dimensions of the Upper State Story were presented by James Horne and Henry Keene to the Board of Trustees on 17 July 1755 (Committee I: 39). On 18 September 1755, for instance, the committee asked the surveyors to deliver estimates for a toolhouse in the kitchen

218  The Cultural Logic of Museology II

32 33

34

35

36 37 38

39

garden (Committee I: 47). References to book cases are in the minutes of the meeting held on 7 February 1756 (Committee: I: 65). See also BM Original Letters and Papers Volume I: Item cluster 6. For the most part, each item is numbered separately; but in this instance, several original papers having the same theme are clustered together. The General Meeting minutes for 6 February 1762 reveals, for instance, that “the total amount of stock, now remaining in the funds, belonging to this corporation is only £30,500 exclusive of his Majesty’s late donation.” See General Meeting II: 404–05. See David M. Wilson, The British Museum: A History (British Museum P, 2002), 22. This publication makes redundant Edward Miller’s That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum (Andre Deutsch, 1973) and also P. R. Harris, A History of the British Museum, 1753–1953 (The British Library, 1998). The eighteenth century is relegated in all three of these important books to either “The Beginning” or “Beginnings,”—with one to two short chapters devoted to it—which is where my interest lies. Wilson, reflecting the critical trends at the end of the twentieth century, has one chapter titled “War and Space, 1897–1945.” The notion of museum space, however, was equally important in the eighteenth century even though there was no explicit statement about the space-place-significance tripartite and its critical interpretations associated with postmodernity. David M. Wilson, 346n. He cites Linda Colley as an example of those who have given “some attention” to the term British although Colley’s concerns are different from the ones that Wilson addresses in this study. Marjorie Caygill, also a historian of the British Museum, expressed similar interest in the subject of why no one ever questioned the basis for the name and left the naming untouched even when there were so many changes and shifts in the selection of the seal and overall philosophy of this institution (Conversation with Caygill in March 2013). See the Birch Collection: Papers Related to the British Museum, 1753–60. BM ADD MS 4449, 118–20, specifically 120. Henceforth identified as Birch Collection. The handwritten scrawl along the margin identifies this document to have been written by Gowan Knight, first Principal Librarian of the British Museum. The page numbering in this volume—which is interspersed with printed material and handwritten documents—is quirky if not unreliable. The printed materials are followed by a cluster of manuscripts, beginning with a “Proposal for the Establishment of the British Museum,” beginning on page 82 (in the continuous pagination system). Each document has internal pagination as well. For information about Thomas Birch’s involvement with the British Museum, see A. E. Gunther, An Introduction to the Life of the Rev. Thomas Birch, D. D., F. R. S. 1705–1766 (Halesworth P, 1984), “As Trustee of the British Museum,” 79–83. According to David M. Wilson, “Nowhere else in Europe did such a public institution exist.” See Wilson, 24. David M. Wilson quotes the passage and cites Marjorie Caygill and Christopher Date, 13. The latter’s source is BL Add MS. 39311. f.82. Ibid., 44. Ibid., 44. A photographic reproduction of the seal is to be found in David M. Wilson’s book, Plate 4 and also in James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2017), Plate 42. At this point in the narrative, the “minutes” seem to capture discussions that went well beyond a single day. This was perhaps a summary report of

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  219

40

41

42

43 4 4

45 46

47

48 49

the processes involved in the first idea and, after the flaws of the first version were revealed, were followed by a second one. The manuscript (and very rough) draft of the “Additional Rules for the better preservation of the Museum,” which is part of the Statutes and Rules of the British Museum (Rule Number IV, presumably 1758) includes the following dictum: “That the draught of the Building in the arms of the Corporation, with the words MUSEUM BRITANNICUM placed under it, be ingraved in a Copper Plate of a proper size and form and that printed Copy thereof be affixed to the back of the Title Page of all the Printed Books; as also to the most Convenient and Conspicuous part of every manuscript, which will admit of it.” Pages 129 and 126–29 passim. This manuscript is followed by the printed version of the Statutes and Rules to be observed in the management and use of the British Museum, by Order of the Trustees (1758), 130–37 in Papers Relating to the British Museum, Birch Collection. General Meeting Vol. I: 44. See also Item # 89, page 359, dated February 1779: “I give and bequeath the statue of Shakespeare after my wife’s death and all my Collection of old English Plays to the Trustees of the British Museum for the time being for the use of the Publick.” General Letters and Papers, Vol. I, 1743–84. “To grant leave to any Foreigner of distinguished Eminence, or who, upon account of his sudden Departure, cannot obtain Tickets in the common Course, to see the museum at any Time, when it is open for the common inspection, attended by the Principal Librarian.” See “General Orders and Rules for the Management of the Museum, and the Affairs thereof,” Birch Collection, 155. For a brief biography of Maty, see endnote 59. See “A Scheme for the more convenient Shewing of the Museum,” Papers Relating to the British Museum, 1753–1760, Birch Collection pages 146–52. This printed document is assigned to “M. Maty” and dated 13 April 1759. This document had been published soon after the General Committee meeting of the Trustees. See note below for reference to General Meeting date. See General Meeting, Volume II, 22 December 1758 to 18 May 1764, 255–56. From the minutes of the Board, we know that on 8 May 1761 the trustees ordered that Samuel Johnson and one Francis Wade be admitted to the library as readers (Committee III: 606) at the recommendation of Dr. Morton. The ocular element of collections of books—their existence, their display, their allusion to an infinite intellectual capital—was thus the central organizing principle; the actual use of such intellectual capital by contemporary intellectuals were mostly implicit rather than explicit factors considered by the corporate decision-makers. The “public,” broadly construed and nonacademic thus had prime spectator status while the doyens of literature and culture, whether highbrow or low, were personae non grata in the simultaneously grand and utilitarian logic of this Museum. Probably a Chéron ceiling which was the distinctive signature of Ralph Montagu’s Boughton House estate, which featured a stone staircase (unlike the wood used here) and wrought iron balustrades and paintings in gilt paint (like here). Marjorie Caygill and Christopher Date, The Building of the British Museum (London: British Museum Publications, 1999), 13. Carl Philip Moritz, Journeys of a German in England: A Walking-tour of England in 1782. This passage appears in Marjorie Caygill, The Story of the British Museum (London: British Museum Publications, 1981), 13.

220  The Cultural Logic of Museology II 50 51 52 53

54 55 56 57

58 59 60

Here, meaning anger. William Hutton, Journey to London, 1784. Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I, no. 16, 39. James Empson did not have any formal scientific training and may have been appointed due to his mother who had lived with Hans Sloane for 29 years and was thus someone who must have had considerable influence. “He was . . . clearly a hard worker who produced rather incoherent, but important, documents for the Trustees based upon his knowledge of the Sloane collections and of the manner in which they were housed.” Daniel Solander of the University of Uppsala succeeded him. (See Chapter 5 which deals with the contributions of Solander.) See David M. Wilson, 29. The document quoted above does not reflect the incoherence that Wilson mentions. See Original Letters and Papers Vol. I, no. 17, see 40. Ibid., I: 40. Ibid., I: 42. Original Letters and Papers, I, no. 21, 51–52. This item is written and signed by Gowan Knight and dated 7 January 1757. The Committee meeting minutes for 14 January 1757 also confirm that this was written by Gowan Knight. Compare with pages 136 recto and verso and 137 recto, which are signed by Gowan Knight. Ibid. 51–52. Ibid. 52. “A Plan for General Distribution of the Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection” dated “Jan 14. 1757 is in the bound volume titled Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I: 51 and 52. BM CE4/1. This “Plan” was discussed by the General Committee: Agreeable to the desire of the Committee, Dr. Knight delivered in a plan for the general Distribution of Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection of natural and other productions. [Plan etc.] The greatest and most valuable part of this Collection consists of things relating to natural history. Wherefore that part will first claim our attention, and will merit a particular regard in the general distribution. All the articles that come under this head may be properly classed in the three general divisions of Fossils, Vegetables, and Animals. Of these the Fossils are the most simple; and therefore may properly be disposed in the first Rank; next to them the vegetables; and lastly the animal substances. By this arrangement the spectator will be gradually conducted from the simplest to the most compound and most perfect of nature’s productions.

See Committee, I (14 January 1757): 174–76. 61 Meeting of 14 January 1757. (Committee I, Plan covers pages 174–80). This meeting was chaired by the Earl of Macclesfield and was attended by Lord Cavendish and Dr. Birch only. Since there was no quorum, there could be no resolutions. But the discussion, reading of the reports, and the signing of checks could be carried on. “Agreeable to the desire of the committee” refers to those members present only. 62 Matthew Maty (1718–1776), an MD from Leiden University, moved to London in 1740 where he practiced medicine and moved in literary circles. He was appointed as one of the first three Under Librarians hired by the British Museum in 1756 and was, at first, in charge of the Sloanian Collection. In 1757 he was put in charge of the printed books. See, for instance, Wilson, 28– 29. Praising Maty’s eighteen-volume Journal Britannique, Edward Gibbon

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  221

63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70

adds that the “author . . . sometimes aspires to the character of a poet and philosopher.” But whether as a person in charge of the Sloanian Collection or as Under Librarian of Natural and Artificial Curiosities (from 1765), which was his next post, Maty had little (if any) knowledge of (or credentials to assess) the kinds of collections which he went on to help the British Museum to acquire from Greenwood: dead birds. His overall positive reputation in the Museum management circle might have helped to seal the deal between the Museum and Greenwood. At the time of the Greenwood negotiations, Maty was Under Librarian. Matthew Maty was the Principal Librarian, 1772– 1776. At the time of this acquisition, Maty was Under Librarian, sharing the latter position with Charles Morton, and James Empson. Greenwood’s cabinet of birds consists of items which “are arranged male & female, eggs & young, with each specie together, agreeable to the system of Linneaus.” For information about the relationship of Maty and Greenwood and the plan to introduce the dead birds as a separate category in the Museum, see Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I, No. 11, 244–45. Note that a second series of numbers and numbering system begins circa 24 January 1769. This document is handwritten by M. Maty and signed and dated (15 February 1765) on the last page. Additionally on the last page, right-hand side and vertical, appear the following: Dr. Maty’s Proposals about making the Catalogue of 27th April 1759 & Report of 15 February 1765. See Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I, no. 76, 203–08. This document consists of 12 manuscript pages. “According to the orders of this Honourable Board, I beg leave to lay before them a small specimen of our intended Catalogue, together with a short account of the method which we propose following in the prosecution of this work. This, tho’ but a sketch too hastily drawn up and much improveable by further thoughts and future experience, yet as it may show both what our views are and what directions we mostly stand in need of, will I hope in some measure answer to what is expected from us.” Original Letters and Papers, I: 76, page 203; page 1 of report. This report must have been presented at the General Committee meeting. At the June 1765 meeting of the General Committee, Maty and his cataloguing scheme were not discussed except for a passing reference, some of which goes as follows: “Pursuant to the directions of the last General Meeting, the several officers have delivered in their reports of the progress that has been made by them in the Catalogues of the respective departments, which lye upon the table.” See (BM CE 1/3) General Meeting, Volume III, 30 June 1764 to 26 September 1776, 30 June 1764, 517. Original Letters and Papers, I: 203 and page 2 of this (Maty) manuscript, which goes from 1 to 12. I: 205. Page 5 of manuscript. This is a reference to Hanover in Germany and not to the Hanoverian Dynasty, with its German royal imports to Britain. Page 2 of Maty’s Report, page 203 verso of Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I. Ibid. page 2 of manuscript report. I: 205. Page 5 of Report. Zygmunt Bauman underscores in “Spatial Wars: A Career Report” the changing processes of maps and how they shaped social relations. His “before” and “after” have to be adapted to the present discussion with attention to the remarkably modern processes of mapping and planning which this segment of my argument describes. See Bauman, Globalization: The Consequences (Polity P, 1998), 35.

222  The Cultural Logic of Museology II 71 “In his eye-opening study of modern utopias Bronislaw Baczko speaks of ‘a double movement: that of the utopian imagination to conquer urban space and that of dreams of city planning and of architecture in search of a social framework in which they can materialize.’” Quoted in Bauman, 37. 72 Edward Miller does not show any interest in the floor plans. P. R. Harris begins his lineup of illustrations with the plans of George Saunders, dated 1810: “The only major change to Montagu House which had occurred by this date to the house since it had been occupied by the British Museum in the 1750s was the addition of the Towneley Gallery, to the north-west, in 1806.” See Harris, A History of the British Museum, 794. David M. Wilson, likewise, does not include the eighteenth-century floor plans. He reproduces George Saunders’ Townley Gallery (spelling varies) floor plan and also a view of the interior (spelling varies), in addition to George Scharf’s watercolors of Robert Smirke’s new building circa 1845 and the foundations of the Lycian Gallery. 73 It is beyond the scope of this chapter to develop fully the notion that a “colonial” manor house is not only the one located in the colonies because this restriction limits the range and depth of the narratives of built space in the imperial capital. The British homes which were fueled if not entirely built by colonial investments and income derived from the colonies ought to be included in this category. Ralph Montagu’s wealthy second wife whom he married in 1692, for instance, was the widow of the Second Duke of Albemarle, who was appointed as the Governor of Jamaica in 1687. 74 “To the north was open countryside, leading to the heights of Hampstead and Highgate [Hill].” See, for instance, David M. Wilson, 24–25. 75 Summarized by Zygmut Bauman in “Culture in a World of Diasporas,” Culture in a Liquid Modern World (Polity P, 2011), 53. 76 The “new” Montagu House in Whitehall is not to be confused with the “old” Montagu House in Bloomsbury. While Bloomsbury was fashionable during the life of Ralph, the 1st Duke of Montagu, it had declined considerably during the 1720s on. There is some evidence to suggest that John Montagu wanted to sell “some property in London” circa 1722–1724, but whether Flitcroft was asked to generate the floor plans of Montagu House toward an assessment of its value and eventual sale is not known. Also, whether Booth asked Brasier to do the same circa 1740 for a sale is not known. Photographs of recent archaeological findings—which I have seen— reveal that the Montagu House gardens on the north side may have been used to raise livestock. The remains of cows, believed to have died circa 1741 due to a cow disease, have been discovered. See Estate Letters, xix and passim, for John Montagu’s real-estate dealings after the death of his father. See also a rare sketch of the rear view of Montagu House (from the north) in BM Collection Wrapper 2 (Box 1) which shows cows in the garden. Unknown artist and provenance. 77 See Estate Letters, xxxv–xxxvi. 78 William Brasier was a draftsman to the Board of Ordnance. If this is the same W. Brasier, most of his work (or his son’s?) was done in America during the revolutionary years. I have been unable to find any connection between John Montagu and W. Brasier. In general, there is evidence to show that many of the draftsmen, surveyors, and architects who worked in London in the eighteenth century carried out commissions in the colonies, particularly in America. But it is not known whether Brasier went to St. Lucia and St. Vincent as surveyor and mapmaker for John Montagu. See Estate Letters,

The Cultural Logic of Museology II  223 xxxvii–xxxviii. Brasier would have been precisely the sort of draughtsman who could generate the maps discussed in this segment of the chapter. 79 I apply Georgia Agamben’s theory of signatures to the issue of British Museum acquisitions. Constituting an important element in the imperial project to develop and to sustain a culture of consumerism, acquisitions tend to conceal the signatures of imperial agents who collect them and traverse with impunity the two worlds of domestic and foreign. 0 India ink was first invented in China. In eighteenth-century Britain the ink 8 that was used was, more often than not, sourced in India. See, for instance Padmini Tolar Balaram, “Indian Indigo” The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400–1800, eds. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Day Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin, Rev. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012), 139–54. 81 12 July 1757, 184–85. The resolutions passed at the same meeting—held on 12 July 1757—were as follows: Resolved, that as soon as the Grant of the Royal Library, to this corporation, shall be completed, the standing committee be impowered to give directions for the removal thereof, in such manner as they shall think fit (page 190). Resolved that the manuscripts of the Royal Library be placed in the Room E 22 of the second state story: and that the same be put under the care of, and be part of the Department of the Under Librarian, and assistant, who have the care of the Cottonian and Harleian Collections of manuscripts: and that the printed Books belonging to the Royal Library be placed in the Rooms 54 and 55 of the first state story, or in the Rooms 60 and 61 of the same story, as the Standing Committee shall judge proper: and that such of Sir Hans Sloane’s Books as are in any of the said Rooms, be placed in the rooms D 57 and e 58 of the same story: and that the standing committee do give the necessary directions for these purposes. General Meeting I, 190–91 82 Bauman, Globalization, 16–17. 83 For my discussion of “things in a table”—a Foucauldian formulation—go to Chapter 4. Also, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (Routledge, 2002; rpt. 2010), specifically “The Limits of Representation,” 258–59. 84 Foucault, The Order of Things, 260. 85 Bauman, 16–17.

Epilogue In Memoriam: Random Thoughts on Archaeological Fragments

Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from prejudice. Some seem to admire indiscriminately whatever has been long preserved, without considering that time has sometimes co-­operated with chance; all perhaps are more willing to honour past than present excellence; and the mind contemplates genius through the shades of age, as the eye surveys the sun through artificial opacity. The great contention of criticism is to find the faults of the moderns, and the beauties of the ancients. While an authour is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best. —Samuel Johnson, The Plays of William Shakespeare (1765)

The archives of heritage and the historiographies of nation in ­eighteenthcentury Britain reveal quite decisively the mechanisms by which memory came to be coerced into and through spatialized, mythologized, advertised, and propagandized regimes of narrative and performance. In this concluding chapter, I would like to examine a few intersecting topoi including that of space, myth, advertisement, and propaganda toward mapping the concept of memorial—that which transforms the ineffable and immaterial memory to a culturally significant moment.1 Experience and commonplace observation tell us that memory and patterns of recollection are inherently haphazard, chaotic, and prejudiced (as Samuel Johnson, the quintessential modernist, has explained with characteristic clarity). Equally, the operations and productions of memory defy linear structures and continue to undermine both discipline and order; conversely, order which is the guiding principle of narrative, hammers into coherent story lines the chaos endemic to memory. Forever at odds, memory (collective and individual, impalpable and immaterial) and narrative (the manifestation of authorial intervention, palpable and material) continue to produce the dialectical friction undergirding all acts of record keeping as well as the production of meaning via medium. Moreover, as the preceding chapters have shown, the historical register of nation, any national register, requires not just order and coherence

Epilogue  225 but also space in which this order can be manifested or enacted—that is, space for mediation and space for launching, performing, and disseminating the mediatized product. 2 The purpose of this concluding chapter is to suggest how both Shakespeare and Handel came to occupy in the eighteenth century those spaces in living memory where national interest was codified in and simultaneously subsumed by celebration, jubilation, and commemoration. Shaped by public expressions of collective memory, the celebration of their lives—these spectacular and theatrical events unfolded in real time-space even as some of these acts championed a glorious past beyond the boundaries of living memory. The public, as both actor and acted upon, was deeply invested in mythopoeic engagement with an illustrious past. Indeed, this public’s inability to distinguish between myth and the rationale as well as the mechanisms by which this myth was produced ensured the success of these performances, these shared narratives.3 Thus, the architects of the grand narratives—in this discussion, David Garrick, Richard Temple, and Charles Burney—came to be the uber-producers of the Enlightenment moment. Some broad themes which emerge from an assessment of what I am calling celebratory historiography—a historiography premised upon an apotheosis of celebrity—may be summarized as follows: private aspirations coalesced with public interest toward the creation of sustainable myths of nation which reinforced the sense of common heritage and also the hierarchies of class and status and, simultaneously, universalized the concept of culture and the mechanisms for its consumption.4 The spatial dimension of these historiographies—the places and spaces where they were performed or exhibited and framed—and not just their artistic and innovative frameworks had suasive links to the logics of expansionism and empire. I propose ways to read celebratory space which is always strategically engineered and often co-opted for purposes other than the originally intended or the readily apparent ones. Recall in this context that Shakespeare’s memorial statue (William Kent, designer, and Peter Scheemakers, sculptor) was erected in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey in 1741 (125 years after his death) and that David Garrick’s monument was erected in the Abbey in 1797 (almost 30  years after his death).5 The year in which Shakespeare’s statue was erected in Westminster Abbey (1741), Andrew Miller produced an engraving of the statue. Significantly, in the statue, in the engraving, and in prints of the same appears the scroll which Shakespeare is seen pointing to and this scroll has continued to attract attention. Adapted from The Tempest, the words in the scroll, as they appear in the engraving, are as follows6: The Cloud wrapp’d Towers, The Gorgeous Palaces, The Solemn Temples, The great Globe itself,

226 Epilogue Yea all which it inherit, Shall dissolve, And like the Baseless Fabrick of a Vision Leave not a Wreck behind. [move #6 here] Beginning in the mid-eighteenth century and gathering particular momentum in the mid-twentieth century due to the emergence of postcolonial consciousness, academic dialogues, and activism related to the same throughout the world, Shakespeare’s global reach has become indisputable. This transcultural reach is produced by an exuberant blend of textual, extratextual, and intertextual forces as well as by innovation in performance and casting—all of which continue to be harnessed toward transposing the printed pages onto every conceivable media including the stage. Tagged at first as a “romance,” The Tempest, as we know, lends itself to postcolonial interpretation because of Prospero and his imperial and imperious instinct to control and to rule. In the discussion here, we acknowledge that Shakespeare as “magician” was an ­eighteenth-century construct and the Shakespeare-Prospero equation has enjoyed remarkable longevity in part because of the emphasis placed on their collective magical powers in the service of a mythical empire. So, for instance, on 7 August 2016, at the ceremony at Westminster Abbey to mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Peter Holbrook, the chair of the International Shakespeare Association, laid a wreath in the South Transept of the memorial and actor Janet Suzman read Prospero’s speech from The Tempest, Act IV, scene 1.7 Prospero’s message still resonates and is particularly potent in the context of Brexit: towers, palaces, temples appear and then dissolve—as in a Faustian flaunt of global travel— even as this vision conjured by the tempest remains indestructible as is Shakespeare’s influence; Prospero-Shakespeare’s global vision lingers on in nation-space. Representing the most remarkable sedimentation of architecture infused with religion, politics, and culture, and dating back to circa 1245, the current structure of the Abbey was put in place by Henry III. A church, a mausoleum, and a museum, Westminster Abbey is that quintessential British-heritage site which exudes authority, paradigmatically, not only because of its geometric scale but also because of how it links organically past to present. This Abbey’s linear narrative, produced by accretion over a thousand years, is superimposed upon the structure’s Leviathan-like proportionality. And, therefore, very much like the British Museum, the materiality of this cathedral cannot be conceptualized without giving due consideration to its elasticity—its infinite capacity to absorb and to display the material remains of collective heritage and memory while continuing to serve as the main stage for the coronations of British monarchs since 1066 as well as many royal weddings. The Abbey as sacred nation-space provides in this chapter the backsplash

Epilogue  227 against which I evaluate two alternative spaces created for the collective celebration of national heritage: Stratford and Stowe: the former was a venue for a public spectacular and the latter a private indulgence. While these venues shared some key attributes of the Abbey, they were developed in and for the eighteenth century and thus have a constricted scope. Both Stratford and Stowe, moreover, lacked the grandeur of the Handel commemoration—discussed in the final segment of this c­ hapter—which took place in Westminster Abbey in 1784, 25 years after the death of the artist.

The Jubilee and the Spatial Dimension of Nativity This section explores the ways in which the concept of Shakespearean “nativity”—a word which resonates with religious significance in the Christian world—is harnessed toward a nationalist project of great significance in the eighteenth century. The project to restore Shakespeare and to cast him as a cultural icon—to nationalize his image, as it were— was a project of the Enlightenment.8 As the architect of the Shakespeare Jubilee, David Garrick (1717–1779)9 is credited for his intuitive understanding of how a festive, populist, performance-based, and commemorative event—designed to reinscribe Shakespeare as a vital element in the national mythos—could be shaped out of the growing demand for a collective national identity, one which was naturally aligned with the seductions of (and indisputably reliant upon) past glory.10 In the eighteenth century, the “idea” of Shakespeare as the national poet is focalized in Stratford because this place—chosen by Garrick—resonated then (as it does now) with rich images of birth (or rebirth and Renaissance) as well as cultural heritage, history, roots, and lineage. This space is where a nationalist populism could be crafted and, as generations of scholars have shown, Garrick’s approach to crafting this populist narrative was thus strategic and timely. Shakespeare was not just a London playwright and actor, in other words; indeed, Garrick’s invocation of Shakespeare’s greatness with reference to his impact beyond the borders of the metropolis helped to frame this thread of national narrative in universal terms, with Stratford providing a significant point of departure from elitist cosmopolitanism and its bias toward urban mythopoeia (circumscribed by London). The idea of Shakespeare as the national poet could not have been launched and sustained if this idea lacked popular appeal. In this narrative, the mulberry tree assumes symbolic significance precisely because it epitomizes the participatory power of the people and the logics of root. More than anything else, the mythology of the mulberry tree rests upon the premise that there was grassroots support for the Jubilee and that the Jubilee was not Garrick’s idea but the result of an unstoppable public demand for an appropriate commemoration; Garrick could then

228 Epilogue be positioned as the leader of a movement, responding to popular sentiment and sensitive to the needs of his Shakespearean constituency—if the residents of Stratford can be conceptualized as such—rather than as just a man of the theater, who happens to have an obsession for Shakespeare. Garrick’s biographer Thomas Davies provides a summary of the “mulberry-tree event” in his Memoirs thus: A wealthy clergyman purchased the house and gardens of Shakespeare at Stratford upon Avon. A man of taste in such a situation, and master of so enchanting a spot, would have congratulated himself on his good fortune, and have deemed himself the happiest of mortals; but the luckless and ignorant owner trod the ground which had been cultivated by the first genius of the world, without feeling those warm emotions which arise in the beast of the generous enthusiast. The mulberry tree, planted by the poet’s own hand, became an object of dislike to this tasteless owner of it, because it overshadow’d his window, and rendered the house, as he thought, subject to damps and moisture. In an evil hour the unhappy priest ordered it to be cut down. In this narrative, the sinful man is none other than a man of the cloth and the sacred tree the only living symbol of the poet; the tree would have retained its sanctity had the property been purchased by “a man of taste.” The sacred is thus redefined not just in secular but in populist terms, as the priest is stripped of his cloth and the Bard is endowed with divine sanctity. More important, the divide between public property and private property collapses in this mythic moment of sacrilege (when the tree was cut down) and the decimation of national space is met with solid local resistance. “The people of Stratford, who had been taught to venerate everything which related to the immortal Shakespeare,” Davies notes, “were seized with grief and astonishment when they were informed of the sacrilegious deed; and nothing less than the destruction of the offender, in the first transports of their rage, would satisfy them.”11 In order to quell the rising tide of anger, Garrick would step in as the supremely suitable mediator or high priest. The tree that had been felled was subsequently sold to a carpenter, who “knowing the value which all the world professed for anything which belonged to Shakespeare, very ingeniously cut it into various shapes, of small trunks, snuff boxes, teach-chests, standishes, tobacco stoppers etc.”12 The residents of Stratford, according to Thomas Davies, had two specific requests that deserve discussion here. Along with the gift sent to Garrick of a box made of the mulberry tree wood, the residents asked for, “in very polite terms, a bust, statue, or picture of his admired Shakespeare, which,

Epilogue  229 they informed him, they intended to place in their town hall.” The “first transports of their rage” had dissipated and been replaced by what might be regarded as rational steps toward reinstating their national hero to his rightful place at a secular altar, as it were, in the town hall. Davies adds that “[i]n the same letter, with equal politeness, they assured him, that they should be no less pleased if he would oblige them with his own picture, to be placed near to his favourite author, in perpetual remembrance of both.”13 In this carefully crafted historiography, Thomas ­Davis underscores repeatedly the “politeness” of the residents of Stratford. Neither uncontrolled vulgarity nor volatile crudity would have been the appropriate passion associated with the events that preceded and provided justification for the Jubilee in 1769.14 The narrative presented by Davies is sufficiently embellished to add tone and texture to the sentiments surrounding the reification of the Shakespeare-Garrick relationship, which cannot be sustained by the straight facts alone, summarized thus: in 1768, the Corporation of ­Stratford-upon-Avon had indeed asked Garrick to provide works of art that would be placed in the town hall in commemoration of the Bard and his most visible advocate. In addition to presenting the town with a statue of Shakespeare, Garrick had also commissioned from Thomas Gainsborough a portrait that perhaps most famously attests to the union of the national poet and the national actor.15 Separate portraits of Shakespeare and Garrick—even if placed side by side—would have done less justice to a relationship whose symbiosis must be visualized within the same frame. This portrait might have been interpreted as the most baldfaced instance of arrogance had it not been for the elaborate publicity machinery that went into high gear in the period leading up to the Jubilee and also after it, with the Davies biography serving as the first ‘official’ postmortem of the facts. Polite requests, in other words, must be answered with polite responses and there is no arrogance in politeness. Consider in this context The Jubilee in honour of Shakespeare, “a Musical entertainment” in which the Irishman acts as the ideal character to represent the outsider’s view of the unfolding events. He arrives in Stratford right before the inauguration of the festivities and finds himself in a fix, as he explains to the ‘serenaders’ thus: I did not come down to the Jubilee ‘til past twelve o’clock last night; and I wandered for more than an hour to look for a lodging, and bit of something to eat; but the devil a tooth-full of either one or t’other could I get: So at last I was obliged to take up my lodging in the first floor of this post-chaise, at half a crown a head; and they have crammed a bedfellow with me into the bargain; so I could not get one wink of sleep ‘til you were pleased to waken me with your damned scraping and nonsense.—But, pray, Sir, will you be after telling me what this Jubilee is?

230 Epilogue The seranaders’ response is in keeping with the farcical overtone of the entire piece, for he responds as follows: “Sir, at the Jubilee you must expect odes without poetry, music without harmony, dinners without victual, and lodging without beds.”16 The concept, the idea, is greater than the thing itself. The theater, for which the Jubilee could serve a metaphor, is pure magic, since it is not the substance but the illusion of it that captures the imagination and enriches the experience of an accidental spectator such as the Irishman. The farce continues thus to invoke laughter as, for instance, in the scene in which a peddler tries to sell a “a piece of mulberry” to the Irishman, who is simultaneously confronted by a 2nd peddler who warns him against a rash purchase thus: “Don’t buy of him, your honour; he ha’n’t a bit of the true mulberry; all his ladles are made out of old chairs ad joint-stoold; I bought the whole tree, and see here, your honour, here’s my affidavy of it.”17 If anything, The Jubilee clearly indicates the awareness on the part of Garrick that his was a marketable project, consisting of a number of interrelated products and services that framed the spectacle and catered not to the elite but to the commoner for whom spectatorship was neither an intellectual activity nor a high cultural event; for the residents of Stratford, spectatorship was boisterous fun and thus pure entertainment. Consistent with the imperative for entertainment, the rough humor of the dialogues is interrupted intermittently by verbal tableaus of “the mob,” some fighting, much “noise and confusion,” and the announcement from the Irishman (therefore, by implication, neither serious nor accurate) that “Shakespeare was a mad man.”18 The Stratford Jubilee is undoubtedly the cornerstone of the “eighteenth-century Shakespeare.” In this creation of collective memory, in this mythologizing project, the ramifications of the rural setting take on new meaning. The nation-space created by Garrick to seal the Shakespearean legacy is not circumscribed by cosmopolitan interests and taste; this legacy is quintessentially British and transcends the urban–rural divide. The persistent presence of Ireland and the Irish in this mythologizing project reflects, moreover, the extent to which populism was always-already tied to parochial and provincial sentiments embedded in the experience of nation.

British “Worthies” in Private-Estate Space This public and populist Shakespeare which Garrick created had a quieter, decidedly private, and earlier avatar. Well before the statue of Shakespeare was erected in Westminster Abbey and decades before the Shakespeare Jubilee at Stratford, Richard Temple, first Viscount Cobham (1675–1749), had commissioned and built several allegorical gardens at his seat at Stowe, sometime in the mid-1730s.19 In one such allegorical garden—named the Temple of British Worthies—Shakespeare was ensconced along with his peers. “Shakespeare at Stowe” provides thus a

Epilogue  231 parallel and competing modality, one which is embedded in a bucolic landscape of the Cobham estate in which Shakespeare (represented by his bust) is positioned along with his peers from diverse intellectual, social, and political realms. The names of the discrete but thematically linked gardens at the Cobham estate illustrate their common thread and heuristic structure: the Temple of British Liberty, the Temple of Ancient Virtue, and the Temple of Modern Virtue, for instance, were laid out alongside the Temple of British Worthies. The message here is that a true patriot worships a pantheon of British divinity even as the divides between Christian and pagan iconography are diluted; implicit in this landscaped private space is the vituperation against Catholicism 20 even though the pagan signs and symbols in the Cobham estate are associated with Catholic and Orthodox theophany in the beginning of the Christian era. Moreover, Temple’s framing of national heritage is such that Britain emerges as the true inheritor of all that is sublime and magnificent in Western civilization (and not just in Britain). The critique of contemporary society and politics was woven into the fabric of the garden. Thus, “the Temple of modern Virtue” appeared “in Ruins” while “opposite to it,” “the Temple of antient Virtue” is, according to one account, “in a very flourishing condition.” The description goes on as follows: The Building is a Rotunda of the Ionic order by Mr. Kent; on the Outside, over each Door is this Motto: Priscae Virtuti. To antient Virtue. The four niches of the Temple of Ancient Virtue had the following four statues: Epaminondas, Lycurgus, Socrates, and Homer. The Epaminondas inscription goes as follows: “Whose courage, prudence, and moderation, gave liberty and empire, an happy establishment, as well civil as military, to the Theban Commonwealth; but whose Death snatched from it the Enjoyment of these Blessings.”21 Although Cobham’s last name, Temple, and his veneration for classical temples might be regarded in retrospect as being prophetic or merely accidental, his objective to reinvigorate a national identity, which he saw as being threatened by wide-ranging corruption in the government and directly associated with Robert Walpole’s machinations, was deliberate and strategic. 22 How he incorporated his nationalist project into his private space is remarkable: through a modern patriotic theme park which included the Temple of Worthies where he placed Shakespeare’s bust. Among the British writers only Congreve received special status, with a stand-alone temple dedicated to him. Designed by William Kent and attributed to the Flemish sculptors Peter Scheemakers (1691–1781)23 and Flemish sculptor John Michael Rysbrack (1694–1770), 24 the Temple of British Worthies was different from most of the other thematic structures: this temple (of British Worthies) consisted of the busts of real historical and contemporary personages as opposed to moral abstractions

232 Epilogue or monuments dedicated to contemporary royalty and pagan or fictional entities which adorned adjacent parts of the gardens. Cobham’s British Worthies are Alexander Pope, Thomas Gresham, Ignatius Jones, John Milton, Shakespeare, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Francis Bacon, King Alfred, Edward, Prince of Wales, Elizabeth I, William III, Walter Raleigh, Francis Drake, John Hampden, and Sir John Barnard. 25 The Beauties of Stow, or a description of the most noble house, gardens and magnificent buildings therein was probably first published in 1753. This edition contains “A List of Prints, Drawn in Perspective by; Chatelaine and Bickham, Which may be bound up with the Description, Price Five Shillings.” “Stowe, a Poem,” probably written by Gilbert West, is the focus of this publication, which provides a definition of “Princes, Patriots, Bards, and Sages” thus: Men, who by merit purchas’d lasting praise, Worthy each British Poet’s noblest Lays: Or bold in Arms for Liberty they stood, And greatly perish’d for their Country’s Good: Or nobly warm’d with more than moral Fire, Equal’d to Rome and Greece the British Lyre; Or Human Life, by useful Arts refin’d, Acknowled’d Benefactors of Mankind. 26 The 1756 edition, also attributed to George Bickham, is not the first nor the last of its kind, 27 but unique because it includes more than 30 copper plates, an eight-page description of the interior of the house, and it also contains a short introduction, part of which goes as follows: Here you are presented with an illustrious set of the greatest wits, patriots, and heroes, that are to be met with in our chronicles. This is an edifice of a very singular taste, without roof or gate, built in the shape of a quadrant; But when you view those bustoes, or that awful assembly, is not your breast warmed by a vanity of grand ideas, which this sight must give birth to? . . . To the cool reasoned, serious philosophy, without any ornament but truth, was recommended: to the gayer disposition the moral song was directed, and the heart was improved, while the fancy was delighted: . . . Folly is put to the test of ridicule, and laughed out of countenance. . . . On the other side you are presented with a view of those illustrious Worthies, who spent their lives in actions, entered into the bustle of mankind, and pursued virtue in the dazzling light in which she appears to patriots and heroes. 28 The inscriptions written on the busts amplify the same message with references to the particular virtues associated with the particular ‘worthy’

Epilogue  233 and some of them are as follows: “Thomas Gresham . . . who, by the honorable profession of a merchant, having enriched himself and his country, for carrying on the commerce of the world, built the Royal Exchange”; “John Milton, whose sublime and unbounded Genius equalled a subject that carried him beyond the limits of the world”; William Shakespear[e], whose excellent genius opened to him the whole Heart of Man, all the Mines of Fancy, all stores of Nature; and gave him Power, beyond all other Writers, to move, astonish, and delight Mankind”; “John Locke, who, best of all philosophers, understood the Powers of the human Mind, the Nature, End, and Bounds of Civil Government; and with equal Courage and Sagacity, refuted the slavish systems of usurped authority over the rights, the consciences, or the reason of mankind.” “Sir Isaac Newton, whom the God of Nature made to comprehend his Works; and from simple principles, to discover the laws never known before, and to explain the Appearance, never understood, of this stupendous universe.”29 How does Richard Temple’s artistic and innovative framework for blending landscape and architecture anticipate the logics of expansionism and empire? The Temple of British Worthies contextualizes the Bard within a Whig historiography in which “Shakespeare and Milton are . . . being claimed as anti-ministerial writers,” as Michael Dobson has pointed out, and the “antitheses of the Grubstreet hacks bribed to write on behalf of Walpole.”30 Notice also how the indigenous iconographic transplant from the Renaissance—William Shakespeare—­ mingles seamlessly with Doric and Ionic architectural elements since both had become by the eighteenth century “classical” and thus also integral to the patriotic framework that rejects time-space distinctions in favor of broad, universalist logics. The expression of Britishness is not contained within indigenous cultural artifacts. Indeed the “worthies” commemorated in the temple—William Congreve, for instance—saw domestic comedy in universal terms. The story of Mirabell and Millamant in Congreve’s Restoration comedy The Way of the World was not just a story about romantic entanglements and impediments on the path of love; instead, the story was framed in universal terms; both pure love and illicit or extramarital affairs have currency everywhere, if we hold the mirror up to nature.

Handel on the Holodeck31 The contingencies of institution building, the financial vagaries of the eighteenth-century culture industry, as well as figurations of the new consumerism in this period have all been grist for the academic mill. The Handel Commemoration of 1784, coming as it did at a significant moment in the national-imperial imaginary, epitomizes critical patterns in Enlightenment institution-building as well as strategic scripting of

234 Epilogue the national archive. It is in the spatial dimension of the commemoration at Westminster Abbey that we find—to use Fredrick Jameson’s words—a remarkable instance of time being subjected to the service of space.32 Subsumed if not entirely erased by the scale of the building as well as the commemoration were the memories and archives of inconsistencies, failures, and faults associated with actual opera business; indeed the facts related to that business were rendered irrelevant and dwarfed by the framing of the national archive which was described by Charles Burney, author of An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey and the Pantheon (1785). As the most appropriate apologist for the occasion, Burney is critical to our understanding of the establishment rationale: “A Public and national tribute of the gratitude to deceased mortals, whose labours and talents have benefitted, or innocently amused, mankind, has, at all times, been one of the earliest marks of civilization in every country emerged from ignorance and barbarism.” Indeed Handel’s “deification and apotheosis” marked Britain’s decisive move away from “ignorance and barbarism” to the “civilization”33 in which “praise of Handel is not the effusion of credulity, but the emanation of Science.”34 According to Burney, Handel’s contribution to the civilization of the British cannot be in dispute. It was not, however, Handel’s genius alone which had to be recognized. Burney framed the narrative of commemoration in terms of Handel’s “service” to the British people, which Burney described in these words: Handel, whose genius and abilities have lately been so nobly commemorated, though not a native of England, spent the greatest part of his life in the service of its inhabitants: improving our taste, delighting us in the church, the theatre, and the chamber; and introducing among us so many species of excellence, that, during more than half a century, while sentiment, not fashion, guided our applause, we neither wanted nor wished for any other standard. He arrived among us at a barbarous period for almost every kind of music, except that of church. . . . [N]o music has since, with all its refinements of melody and symmetry of air, in performance, had such effects on the audience.35 In addition, the craft itself—music—had a unique role in the civilizing mission: The delight which Music affords seems to be one of the first attainments of rational nature; wherever there is humanity, there is modulated sound, The mind set free from the resistless tyranny of painful want, employs its first leisure upon some savage melody. Thus in those lands of unprovided wretchedness, which your

Epilogue  235 Majesty’s encouragement of naval investigation has brought lately to the knowledge of the polished world, though all things else were wanted, every nation had its Music; an art of which the rudiments accompany the commencements, and the refinements adorn the completion of civility, in which the inhabitants of the earth seek their first refuse from evil, and, perhaps, may find at last the most elegant of their pleasures.36 Handel’s peak years of productivity in London (roughly coterminous with the establishment of the Royal Academy in 1719 and then the Second Academy in 1729) are sufficiently removed from his Westminster Abbey commemoration in 1784 (25 years after his death) so as to provide for my purposes here two ends of a useful spectrum spanning much of the eighteenth century. But post-1660—and despite several enlightened moves not the least of which was the introduction of female actors and superior technologies of stagecraft—the institutionalization of entertainment could not be sustained by talent alone; the industry began to make new demands on management in light of heightened competition between and among theaters. The Royal Academy of Music as well as the Queen’s Theatre, later the King’s Theatre, formidable institutions which benefited from the Handel association were, for instance, not uniformly or consistently stable; these institutions were plagued at different points by dubious contractual arrangements between managers and their reckless stewardship of facilities and personnel, which led to severe financial debilitation—the complex causes and results of which beg the following questions which, according to Robert D. Hume, are not easily answered: Who bore financial responsibility for the ‘Second Academy’? Did Heidegger betray Handel in 1734 . . .? Above all, why did John Rich agree to take Handel in at Covent Garden in 1734? If Handel’s operas proved unpopular and unprofitable, why did Rich not promptly throw him out? What were the financial arrangements between them? Why did Rich not . . . relegate Handel to his Lincoln’s Inn Fields theatre, which was standing vacant for most of the time?37 Hume points out, for instance, that “[s]ubsidy notwithstanding, the Royal Academy had lost £2,000 per annum.”38 At least one contemporary report states that circa 1734 “Handel had lost his audience and had incurred such ‘ruinous expense’ that he would have to leave London.”39 The bragging rights of the eighteenth-century London institutions cannot easily be challenged—particularly today in light of their aggressive marketing stance on display in their constantly refreshed websites. The current perspective about the status of Italian opera in England that comes close to the eighteenth-century establishment rhetoric is to

236 Epilogue be found in Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp’s work on Handel’s Operas; in it they praise the Royal Academy unreservedly since, according to them, this institution made “the most comprehensive attempt in the eighteenth century to establish high-quality opera in London, and arguably the most ambitious scheme of its kind before the foundation of the Arts Council in the present century. Not only did it import the greatest performing artists of the age—that has often been done since, it commissioned large numbers of operas from three of the leading composers in Europe.” Thus, English musical life changed forever due to the establishment of the Academy and this city has never been without opera since, they argue. Furthermore, they take issue with Judith Milhous and Robert D. Hume, who have categorically rejected the plans of the Academy as being “naïve,” a critique which rests upon the financial instability of English opera in London and the shortsightedness of the later managers of the Haymarket Theatre including but not limited to Richard Brinsley Sheridan. With a brief nod at Milhous and Hume, “to whom we owe the discovery and elucidation of much valuable documentation on the period,” Dean and Knapp go on to assert in a combative tone that the Royal Academy “was neither naïve nor foolish, nor was it even extravagant. That legend arose in the eighteenth century as the result of inaccurate statements about the amount of capital raised.”40 They dismiss any suggestions that the Academy had anything in common with the South Sea Bubble, which “was floated on air; the Royal Academy, born coincidentally at the same time, was inspired by love of a great art form.”41 Of particular importance to my argument here is the “Proposall for carrying on Opera by a company and Joynt Stock”—which Dean and Knapp quote from Milhous and Hume’s full transcription.42 At the beginning of this document is a defense of opera, no doubt written by John Vanbrugh, one of the original directors of the joint-stock company, and part of it goes as follows: Opera’s are the most harmless of all publick Diversion. They are an Encouragement and Support to an Art that has been cherished by all Polite Nations. They carry along with them some Marks of Publick magnificence and are the great Entertainment which strangers share in. Therefore it seems very strange that the great and opulent City hath not been able to support Publick Spectacles of this sort for any considerable time. The reason of which seems to be chiefly that they have been hitherto carried on upon a Narrow Bottom of Temporary Contributions Extreamly Burthensome to the People of Quality and entirely unproportioned to the Beauty Regularity and Duration of any great Design. Vanbrugh’s reference to opera as being “the most harmless of all publick Diversion” allows me to consider contemporary notions of harmful/

Epilogue  237 harmless public diversions. What marketing strategies differentiate this metropolitan institution (Westminster Abbey circa 1784), this urban and cosmopolitan venue,43 from its precursors or its rural counterparts, imbuing it with the status of modernity? It is useful in this context to consider briefly the opposite end of the entertainment spectrum. Neither urban nor necessarily rural entertainment, English fairs, festivals, and feasts conjure up images of roughhewn bacchanalia associated with beggars, pickpockets, and prostitutes on parade, as well as bullfighting, bearbaiting, and freak shows. Seldom do we think of these fairs and festivals as being quintessentially urban sport. Yet Bartholomew Fair, for instance, was the preeminent London-based and cross-class urban fair promoting as it successfully did for several centuries both trade and entertainment, the latter crude and rude but providing useful fodder and an eponym for Ben Jonson’s Jacobean social satire. The unwitting associations of rough with rural and polished with London are common, and symptomatic perhaps of attitudes derived from such divides in postmodern rural-urban-exurban coordinates. As E. P. Thompson has reminded us, It is tempting to explain the decline of old sports and festivals simply in terms of the displacement of “rural” by “urban” values. But this is misleading. The more robust entertainments, whether in their ugly form of animal baiting and pugilism, or in more convivial festivities, were as often, or more often, to be found in the 18th century in London or the great towns as in the countryside. They continued into the 19th century with a vigour which recalls both the unruly traditions of the London apprentices of Tudor times, and also the very large proportion of 19th-century Londoners who were immigrants from the village.44 E. P. Thompson concludes, significantly, that “[t]he urban culture of 18th-century England was more ‘rural’ (in its customary connotations), while the rural culture was more rich, than we often suppose.”45 One might argue that the spatial-temporal extravaganza of the Handel commemoration of 1784 did not bear any trace elements of the kind of interpellation of old and new or urban and rural that Thompson describes in The Making of the English Working Class. The “half-price riots of 1763” might be regarded as a public diversion that was theatrical—since it erupted within the theater—but not terribly harmful—since the destruction of property was contained. These riots broke out at a performance of Thomas Arne’s opera Artaxerxes, which was an English adaptation of Metastasio’s work. On 23 February 1763, a group of protestors interrupted the performance of Arne’s opera because David Garrick, the then manager of the Drury Lane, had put a stop to the half-price entrance for those spectators who arrived after

238 Epilogue 9 pm. This was not the first such disruption; others had taken place not just at Drury Lane but also at Covent Garden. Several satiric pieces about these riots appeared in a number of publications. Drawing attention to these riotous events and the responses to them in the popular press, Michael Burden—in his immaculately researched London Opera Observed—points out that “[t]he sixth and last of these pieces appeared first in the St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post, published on 1 May 1763. Entitled Fitzgig’s Triumph; or, The Power of Riot, it used the form of an ode, and billed itself as being ‘In honour of the 25th and 26th of January and the 24th of February 1763’. The anonymous author used as a source for his text the Newburgh Hamilton (1691–1761) version of John Dryden’s 1697 ode, Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Music, which, when set by Handel, was a perennial favourite with London threatregoers.”46 Anonymously published, Fitzgig’s Triumph pokes fun at the rioters while, at the same time, legitimizing their dissent through an ode associated with not only a poet laureate in the previous century but also with Handel. Lo! The Plunderers rise! See the Sconces they tear, How they clash in the Air, And the Rapine that glares in their Eyes! Behold a dirty Band, Each a Club in his Hand. The end result, according to this anonymous poet, is that “[So] Merit lost, and Riot won the Cause.”47 There were a series of noisy events which were fresh in the minds of many if not all London spectators who thronged to witness the Handel commemoration in 1784; I describe some of these haphazardly if only to underscore the importance of the order-dissonance and accord–discord theme which runs through the nation-space. Notable among these were such expressions of public dissent as the various movements, rallies, and riots instigated by and associated with John Wilkes; these were often violent and inevitably viewed as harmful both by the monarchy and, broadly speaking, by the establishment. These diversions framed public discourse in ways that we now recognize as having distinctly modern patters of mediation, remediation, dissection, and analysis in print and other media, analyses which followed immediately after an event and then led to the emergence of seemingly polyvalent perspectives which were disseminated through multiple and relentless channels of discourse.48 Recall in this context that in 1768, after his return from exile in France, John Wilkes decided to run for the House of Commons seat from Middlesex, which “comprised not just wealthy rural parishes and market towns but those City suburbs that had become a byword for poverty and

Epilogue  239 the trading classes of the ‘inferior sort’, from Wapping to Whitechapel in the east, from Shoreditch to Clerkenwell in the north with Holborn and St. Giles in the west.”49 What characterized this county at this point in time was inflation leading to high prices and a high rate of unemployment and disaffection among the citizenry, both of which led to friction between employers and workers. It was en route to Brentford, where the polling took place, when the supporters of Wilkes were seen in a caravan of hundreds of coaches brandishing their blue attire which symbolized their newfound power. The crowd’s cheering (for Wilkes) and jeering at as well as destroying the property of Lord Mayor Harley, for instance, or Lord Bute represented the growing power of the disenfranchised and disillusioned and provided palpable evidence of the perilous state of parliamentary monarchy, perhaps the first decisive blow to it since George III’s accession. Wilkes’s success in this election (in which he got 1,292 votes against his two rivals both of whom managed to secure a total of only 1,634 votes) did not hinder the king and his ministers from pressing charges pending against him from four years ago, before he fled to France. But even after he was charged and committed to prison on 27 April 1768, Wilkes’s supporters refused to give in to any law enforcement authority. Instead of heading to the King’s Bench prison where he had been committed, “­Wilkes was dragged in his coach through Westminster, beneath Temple Bar and across the city to a tavern in Spitalfields for a jubilant celebration of his rescue.”50 In this instance, as in many others, the tavern emerged as the site of Falstaffian resistance to authority and law, producing very serious repercussions. Although Wilkes turned himself in to the authorities later that night, the protest did not die down because his supporters—in particular the freeholders—wanted him to take his seat as the representative from Middlesex when parliament was opened on 10 May 1768. The St. George’s Massacre involved the full force of the 3rd Regiment of Foot which was pitted against a very robust and determined mob of Wilkes’ supporters. Inherently sensational, the news of the loss of innocent lives spread fast and thick after the soldiers opened fire on the crowds. Among the dead were an orange seller, a man driving a hay cart and a farmer’s son. 51 The violent suppression of dissent led to a nationwide movement for parliamentary reform and also laid the foundations for the practice of reporting the proceedings of parliament. The Gordon Riots of 1780, which began as an attack on Catholicism and ended up being an uprising of the poor and disenfranchised, benefited from the mechanisms of reportage of public events and parliamentary proceedings that had been put into place in the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s. Authority, power, privilege, and the boundaries between high and low, public and private, as well as establishment and antiestablishment were inherently unstable—as any historiography of this period reveals—and more transparent than ever before, thanks mostly to the opportunistic

240 Epilogue print and other media which smelled profit in the spectacular riot and also to Wilkes and his relentless attacks on various civic codes and constitutional constraints. The order promulgated by the law courts could not be conceptualized as the operational opposite of chaos associated with the mob since Wilkes had used both—the mob and the law courts—to advance his agenda. 52 The crowd, which could very easily transmogrify into a mob, may have had differing motives and maneuvers—depending upon the provocation at hand—but in each venue and time, it revealed the indisputable power of collective agency—misguided, misinformed, or indeed ideologically weak or confused as it may have appeared to the supporters and detractors of such mass mobilizations. Off the city streets and inside the theaters, the turbulence of the times was registered in, for instance, the Opera House disputes which ensued at the end of the first year in which Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Thomas Harris assumed their positions as the managers of the King’s Theatre. The Case of the Opera-House Disputes, Fairly Stated (1784) relates to  the financial difficulties of this institution from 1781 to D ­ ecember 1784. The anonymous author of this tract lays the blame for the interruption of Italian opera very squarely on mismanagement and corruption, laying the blame squarely on the shoulders of William Taylor who controlled the opera house after Sheridan sold his share of the opera house to him. Under attack in this pamphlet is also Giovanni Gallini, the dancer turned manager, who was outmaneuvered by Taylor in what Michael Burden has rightly described as “the torturous and ‘dizzying’ events of these years.”53 Identifying the “most illustrious patronage in this country” as being the “nobility and gentry,” the author of The Opera House Disputes goes on to describe the events of the early ‘80s as only an insider could do. The opera house, the pamphleteer argues in conclusion, is considered by the public at large as “a theatre, forming part of HIS MAJESTY’S immediate household.” This is not just about opera, but about an institution—and one which is the greatest in all of Europe. Any indecorous conduct, therefore, displayed by the managers, is an indignity to the SOVEREIGN which his subjects out of affection will resent. That their zeal in the cause of right may have knowledge for is basis, the information contained in the preceding pages, were offered to the world. It will now appear who have been the parties aggrieved, who the aggressors; and what have been the causes of the ‘disputes’, which have occasioned an interruption in the entertainment of the theatre, the first in EUROPE, and the splendid spectacles of which have so long been the boasts of this country. 54 Handel’s commemoration at the Westminster Abbey sought to ameliorate and to subdue various real and metaphoric pressure points arising out of a number of disparate narrative threads of disruptions of civic

Epilogue  241 order. When the King dissolved Parliament in March 1784, it was three years earlier than was necessary. Charles Fox was instantly hailed as “the Champion of the People” or Carlo Khan, depending upon the partisan alignments of various print media, and the polling continued from 30 March through 10 May 1784. Handel’s Commemoration, which had originally been set for April 21, 22, and 24, was, due to the sudden dissolution of Parliament, postponed to May 26, 27, and 29, till after the elections. This important election was the result of the King’s dismissal of the Fox-North government coalition in December of the previous year. The delayed May commemoration was so successful—the demand for tickets being the biggest indicator of success—that there was a repeat performance by royal command, one which included the opening concert as well as the Messiah and this was held on 3 and 5 June. “The History of the Westminster Election . . . By Lovers of Truth and Justice” (1784) reported an assembly of a “motley . . . groupe” which included “Lords, Candlers, Baronets, Glaziers, Knights, Shoe-boys, Pickpockets . . . mixed among a considerable number of the Electors.”55 Needless to say, the register of those who organized the Handel Commemoration and those who attended (or did not attend) the ceremony in Westminster Abbey provides some of the most important foundations for a historiography of this grand performance. As William Weber, for instance, has pointed out: “The organizers of the commemoration were the directors of an aristocratic London concert series called the Concerts of Ancient Music” and they included the Earl of Sandwich (who achieved a degree of notoriety not necessarily for arresting Wilkes but for corruption charges and the murder of his mistress); Sir Watkin Williams Wynn; Richard Fitzwilliam; and Joah Bates, the chief organizer of the event, who had been a secretary to the Early of Sandwich. Both Wynn and Fitzwilliam were collectors specifically of Handel manuscripts and prints and musical manuscripts in general. While William Weber is right when he says that the “four key leaders of the commemoration show an interesting example of the growing integration of Britain’s diverse regional elites,” the bottom line is that each one of the organizers had strong Tory ties with the possible exception of Bates, who seems to have aspired for social intimacy with the aristocracy. In other words, the organizers’ metropolitan and political allegiances override, in retrospect at least, their regional diversity (Wynn belonged to a Welsh gentry family, for instance) and underscore the element which framed their investment: their mutual interest in “Ancient Music.”56 The roll call of attendance at this prestigious event is significant and contemporary reportage related to the list of attendees perhaps even more important due the robust circulation of news media toward the end of the century. Predictably, Charles James Fox was not present at the Commemoration and the Duke of York was reported to have come in as a private gentleman. And while the Duchess of Devonshire was

242 Epilogue at the post-1985 annual performances (no doubt to be seen more than to see), I have not found any evidence of her attendance at the May 1784 Commemoration. The line of Whig-Tory divide was drawn quite clearly and the opportunistic absent were, in fact, able to make a political statement. The 5 June performance was attended by in addition to Sir Charles Burney, Joshua Reynolds, and James Boswell. Within the grand hall of Westminster Abbey where Handel’s works were played by more than 500 musicians, there was another absence: the absence of an unruly crowd that had throughout the eighteenth century destabilized the public sphere and turned London into a complex amalgam of hybridity which emerged from and through various forms and expressions of resistance to authority. My reading of the Handel Commemoration emphasizes the spatial dimension of commemoration, the perspective derived from street-level and the throng of the crowds; the crowd outside is imbricated with the crowd inside. The prints and drawings of the Abbey which captured the momentous occasion, several now extant, are inevitably unidirectional, from the level of the ticket holder/spectator as eyewitness, seated on ground level and directing as it were his or her gaze upwards, toward the splendid symmetry of the high and arched ceiling. In representation after representation, the grandeur of the performance is driven home by this upward perspective, one which apotheosizes both size and scale—where the architectural splendor (built space) visually echoes, joins in, and rejoins the reverberations of the music. It is this sweeping and resplendent symmetry, the architectonics of the Abbey, which creates the geometry of imperial scope—one which usurps Handel’s legendary status and positions it center stage in order to drown out the sounds of a discordant nation. In conclusion, I would like to reflect on two ideas which Peter Gay has used to launch his study of “the social conditions that would foster or dishearten” the many modernisms which emerged at the turn of the twentieth century.57 The first idea which is instructive in the context of my study is the two shared attributes of the modernists and these Gay identifies as “the lure of heresy” and “principled self-scrutiny.” The second idea relates to how the metropolis contributes to (or provides the conditions for) certain types of movements, including but not limited to modernism. In each example I have highlighted in Nation-Space, we could locate precisely the logics of order and establishment which are the preconditions of the heresy of the modernists. In other words, without the systematic and sustained commitment to order and organization— which emerges most forcibly when examined through the lens of the spatial dimension of lived experience in eighteenth-century Britain—there would have been no need for modernist heresy, no urgency to dismantle or to destroy the foundations of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment “project” had to have been in place for a considerable length of time for the acts of dismantling to have any significance in

Epilogue  243 and noticeable impact on Western culture. Recall in this context that with the Nine Years’ War (1688–1697) uppermost on his mind, Daniel Defoe wrote An Essay upon Projects (written circa 1692). His introduction to this tract reveals his preoccupation with war and what now appears to be his very reactionary stance on conflict, as this short extract shows: The art of war, which I take to be the highest perfection of human knowledge, is a sufficient proof of what I say, especially in conducting armies and in offensive engines. Witness the now ways of rallies, fougades, entrenchments, attacks, lodgments, and a long et cetera of new inventions which want names, practised in sieges and encampments; witness the new forts of bombs and unheard-of mortars, of seven to ten ton weight, with which our fleets, standing two or three miles off at sea, can imitate God Almighty Himself and rain fire and brimstone out of heaven, as it were, upon towns built on the firm land; witness also our new-invented child of hell, the machine which carries thunder, lightning, and earthquakes in its bowels, and tears up the most impregnable fortification. 58 In this philosophical framework, war provides the best condition for “the highest perfection of human knowledge” and the machines of ­warfare—or technology—“can imitate God Almighty Himself.” This “divine” status of technology is replicated and reified in the “projects,” both historical and contemporary, which Defoe describes with characteristic panache. In “the History of Projects,” one can hardly miss his obsessive references to “building.” In order to identify and to devise a desirable or necessary “project,” one had to build something. Thus for Defoe “the building of the ark by Noah” and “the building of Babel” were early examples of “human work” and models for contemporary projects. Among the “happy projects,” he lists are “the water-houses for supplying of the city of London with water” and “[a]fter the Fire of London the contrivance of an engine to quench fires.”59 Just as Defoe wrote voluminously about how to design, build, and sustain a culture (British) and a civilization (imperial), the high modernists wanted to interrogate and also to destroy those very foundations and institutions upon which Western civilization rested its claims of superiority, reason, and order. Peter Gay points out, for instance, that One favorite modernist topos was the urgent necessity to destroy those havens of reaction, the museums. As early as the 1850s, the French realist critic and novelist Edmond Duranty had suggested that the Louvre, that ‘catacomb,” be burned to the ground, an idea that the Impressionist painter Camille Pissarro happily endorsed some two decades later. The demolition of these “metropolises of art,” he thought, would greatly advance the progress of painting.

244 Epilogue Indeed, at their most bellicose, modernists refused to entertain any traffic with what Gauguin snidely called “the putrid kiss of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts.60 I use this segment from Peter Gay’s hypothesis on modernism to pose the following question: what is a good or a bad project? Defoe’s definition might suggest that the project which helps to build a city and sustain its operations is a good project. This definition, clearly based upon (the Platonic principles of) observation, experience, and logical reasoning, also displays the myopic self-interest of imperialists who were pragmatists rather than philosophers. Indeed, philosophy and philosophical speculation—often crippling when practiced—as in the case of Samuel Johnson (or Hamlet) might lead to incapacity for action. What is the role of metropolitan space in the scripting of Enlightenment aesthetics, sensibility, and consciousness? Just as modernism would have been unthinkable in the absence of the metropolis,61 the Enlightenment would have been impossible to achieve without the very conditions which allowed for the enactments and self-­ expressions of progress. The grand narratives of progress had to be enacted in real time and in newly engineered space. These narrative spaces were not just private and driven by motivations of self (such as Cobham’s expression of interest in the classics or, in the next century, such as the Impressionists’ search for self-expression); they were equally a record of how engineered and shared space could best be harnessed toward the manifestation of a unique and new idea of nation against the backdrop of empire. “Antiquity, like every other quality that attracts the notice of mankind, has undoubtedly votaries that reverence it, not from reason, but from prejudice.” Samuel Johnson’s words allow us to consider how that “­prejudice”—triggered by the lure of a classical other, for instance—was packaged in the eighteenth century as science, as the knowledge base which defines Western civilization and sets it apart from the barbaric or savage Other. A matter of taste or “prejudice” (or even passion) thus becomes, paradoxically, the foundation of reason. But how is the narrative of empire inscribed upon the desire to appropriate the elusive classicism of ancient Greece and Rome? Consider that among the collection of Hellenic Art at the Art Institute of Chicago is a “Fragment of a Funerary Naiskos (Monument in the Shape of a Temple),” which is clearly identified as Greek and from Athens. Dated circa 330 bc this fragment is described as follows: These three figures are chiseled so deeply into the stone that they, like the head of man on the left, are nearly carved in the round. From the preserved portions of males’ right arms, it is clear they once clasped hands in farewell. Their impassive expressions contrast with the poignant gaze and gesture of the woman in the center, who places her right hand, palm up, on the standing man’s shoulder. Perhaps he is the one who has died.62

Epilogue  245 Anglo-American acquisition of classical artifacts did not begin or indeed end with the Elgin Marbles originally named after the man who assembled a mammoth collection, which came to be housed permanently in the British Museum: Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin (1766–1841).63 The Art Institute “fragment” described above represents a severing of ties with the culture of origin in a way which is different from the Cobham Temple of British Worthies. The former is a “real” artefact sourced elsewhere and collected and displayed by and in the West. Conversely, the Cobham Temple is a replication of an imagined reality, one which is infused with knowledge (and the rhetoric of Enlightenment); and both the real and the engineered artefact defy time-space boundaries. These two temples help us to consider the imperial attributes of real: real and imaginary, real and artificial, real and that which is normalized and engineered into real. In search of that real, we expect to see ancient artefacts when we visit a museum in the West or the magnificent estate of a colonist once upon a time (Cobham, Berkeley, Boughton). The memory of ancient Greece and Rome was an engineered memory for the eighteenth-century Briton. It is in the erasure of the distance between points of origin and display that we can locate significance and cultural capital. In anticipation of empire, collective memory came to be engineered, scripted, institutionalized, and spatialized in the materiality of the Enlightenment moment.

Notes 1 Narratives and performances of nation reside not just in literary texts; nor are these only promulgated in institutionalized performances (in licensed theaters). In fact, narratives and performances can be found throughout the public sphere—creating for us the impetus to go beyond the page and the stage. On the point of the necessity of going beyond language and textuality, see Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (­Routledge, 1992). 2 The act of mediation is a deliberative if not always a narrative act. It requires selecting, shaping, and molding material into story lines. But the story becomes public if and when it is mediatized and disseminated in some form for a consumer society. See a discussion of this distinction in the Samuel Johnson chapter. 3 Borrowing an anachronistic frame of reference, I would like to point here to Partha Chatterjee’s discussion of how, beginning in the mid-twentieth century, “the audience of the popular Indian cinema was unable to distinguish between fact and myth.” Chatterjee cites Chidananda Das Gupta to underscore that “unlike folk art that is produced organically within communities, the popular cinema is industrially produced, and ‘vast manipulative forces’ are at work.” This distinction between folk art and industrially produced performance can be used, as I do here, to think about the forces at work in select modern myth-making projects during the Enlightenment. See Partha Chatterjee, “Critique of Popular Culture,” Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 2 (2008), 322.

246 Epilogue 4 Ibid., passim. 5 In his Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Thomas Davies—­encapsulating the populist flavor of the times—points to the symbiotic relationship between the two cultural icons thus: If any author ever merited the celebration of a periodical festival, ­Shakespeare certainly called for that distinguished honour. Many persons of high rank and approv’d taste had admired many excellent critics and commentators on this divine bard, had exerted their talents in the illustration of his text, and bestowed upon his writings a profusion of just panegyric; but the idea of a jubilee, or grand festival in his honour, was reserved to David Garrick. Thomas Davies, Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. Interspersed with Characters and Anecdotes of his Theatrical Contemporaries (1780), Vol. 2, 208. 6 w w w.bl.uk /collection-items/print-of-the-shakespeare-memorial-in-­ westminster-abbey-1741#. Retrieved 9 April 2018. 7 http://westminster-abbey.org /press/news/2016/august /abbey-marks-­ shakespeare-anniversary. Retrieved 9 April 2018. 8 One of the more recent and most comprehensive accounts of the Shakespeare Jubilee is by Kate Rumbold; see Rumbold’s “Shakespeare and the Stratford Jubilee,” Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Fiona Ritchie and ­Peter Sabor. (Cambridge UP, 2012), 254–76. Of particular important to the discussion here is also Vanessa Cunningham’s Shakespeare and Garrick (Cambridge UP, 2008). 9 Garrick’s name is inextricably linked with the Shakespeare Jubilee. Celebrated from September 6 through 9, 1769, this elaborate “Stratford venture” was entirely masterminded and executed by David Garrick although, despite his best attempts, he failed to produce a successful extravaganza, as George Winchester Stone, Jr. points out: “It had been puffed, praised, rained out, and ridiculed by people possessing varying attitudes towards Garrick, and by the forces that control the weather.” The financial loss from this venture, however, was wiped away by the success of his afterpiece titled The Jubilee. Regarding the afterpiece, Stone observes this: “It created a record run for any piece on the London stage for a whole century, by receiving ninety performances during this one season alone.” See George Winchester Stone, Jr., Ed. The London Stage, 1660 –1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Part 4 (Southern Illinois UP, 1972), 1419. 10 In this context, see Michael Dobson, who has argued that “[t]he promotion of Shakespeare as both national symbol and exemplar of British national identity” in the eighteenth century produced the phenomenon that might now, in retrospect, be regarded as inevitable: “[T]he more securely Shakespeare was enshrined as a figure of national authority, the greater were the potential legitimating rewards of appropriating that authority by adaptation.” Indeed, “amending Shakespeare’s plays became part of the vital nationalist project of rewriting the national past in order to validate the aspirations of the present.” Dobson, The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769 (Clarendon P, 1992), Chapter 5, “Nationalizing the Corpus,” specifically 185–87. 11 See Davies, 209–10. 12 Davies, 210. Beginning on a small scale, thus arose the Shakespeare memorabilia industry that can in our times legitimately flaunt a transatlantic if not

Epilogue  247

13 14

15

16 17 18 19

20

21

22

23 24

global presence, from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC to prestigious museums everywhere. Davies, 211. Whether this underlying rhetorical instinct in Davies’ narratology—an instinct for reification that pledges allegiance to product, production, and ­capital—could be seen as a mimicry or a residual function of ‘civic humanism’ is, of course, debatable. The term ‘civic humanism’ is generally associated with J. G. A. Pocock, who developed this paradigm and claimed that civic humanist language and rhetoric flourished between 1690 and 1727. For a critique of Pocock’s position on this issue, see Michael McKeon, “Civic Humanism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation,” The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock, eds. D. N. DeLuna and Perry Anderson (Archangul, 2006), 59–99. For a discussion of how this portrait accommodates the legacy of the wellknown theologian and editor of Shakespeare William Warburton (whom Garrick knew well), see Vanessa Cunningham, 43–75 and specifically 47–48. The dust jacket of Vanessa Cunningham’s book features a copy of the Gainsborough portrait “Garrick embracing the bust of Shakespeare,” commissioned by the Corporation of Stratford-Upon-Avon (1768). David Garrick, The Jubilee in honour of Shakespeare, A musical entertainment (Waterford: 1773), 6. Henceforth The Jubilee. The Jubilee, 11. The Jubilee, 10. Stowe is in Buckinghamshire, the southern border of which merges with greater London. In the eighteenth century, the distance between London and Stowe would have been perceived as being greater than it is now. Sufficiently rural, indisputably idyllic, and, yet, not too distant from London, the location of the Cobham seat was ideal for a patriotic theme park, which continues to be a tourist attraction in the early twenty-first century. The relationship of Richard Temple and William Congreve (1670–1729) was built upon their allegiance to the Whigs. See (attributed to William Bond, 1700 ca. –1735), Cobham and Congreve. An Epistle to Lord Viscount Cobham, In Memory of his Friend, The late Mr. Congreve (E. Curll, 1730). See also A Letter from Mr. Congreve to the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham (A Dodd and E. Nutt, 1729). See A Description of the Gardens of Lord Viscount Cobham, at Stowe in Buckinghamshire (W. Dicey, 1748), 12–13. Note that Epaminondas was regarded as the greatest warrior-cum-statesman of the ancient Thebes. Cobham had very self-consciously cast his own image in the likeness of Epaminondas. The friendship of Epaminondas and Pelopidas is very much like the friendship of Congreve and Temple—a fourth century B.C. and ­eighteenth-century equivalence which highlights both a new and old form of heroism while underscoring the power of homosociality in an otherwise heteronormative social framework. Michael Dobson has drawn attention to the fact that Cobham was the leader of the coalition group in the Opposition that was known as the Patriots. The animosity between Cobham and Walpole can be traced back to 1733, when the two clashed over the Excise Bill. See Dobson, 135. Scheemakers was the sculptor of Shakespeare’s memorial statue in Westminster Abbey (1741). The bust of Shakespeare in the Cobham estate was created by John Michael Rysbrack and is now at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. See the write-up in the Victoria and Albert Museum site: http://collections.

248 Epilogue vam.ac.uk/item/O77808/william-shakespeare-bust-rysbrack-john-michael/. Retrieved 18 April 2018. John Vanbrugh designed some of the monuments, suggesting that the gardens at Stowe were a product of collective and collaborative artistry. The pyramid, for instance, was designed by Vanbrugh, according to the (unnamed) author of “Stowe, a Poem”: The pointed Pyramid: This too is thine, Lamented Vanbrugh! This thy last design. Among the various Structures that around, Form’d by thy Hand, adorn this happy Ground, This, sacred to thy Memory shall stand: Cobahm, and grateful Friendship so command.

25 26 27

28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36

See George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow; or, a description of the most noble house, gardens, and magnificent buildings therein (1753?), 12. See also a reference to “two Doric edifices” attributed to Vanbrugh, 6. Sir John Barnard was a city MP, “at the time Walpole’s most outspoken critic in the Commons.” See Dobson, 136. George Bickham, The Beauties of Stow, 7–8. Several versions of this “narrative” of Stowe were published over a period of several decades, sustained no doubt by public interest and a testimony to the success of the gardens as a sought-after recreational and educational venue not far from London. There were at least three separate editions that appeared in London and Dublin in 1732. At least two versions of the London edition are attributed to Gilbert West and titled Stowe, the Gardens of the Right Honorable Richard Lord Viscount Cobham, address’d to Mr. Pope. The Dublin edition is also by Gilbert West but includes Taste, a poem by Pope. See also anon. Stow, the Gardens of the Right Honourable Richard Lord Viscount Cobham. This version is divided into three sections thus: “I. Forty views of the temples and other ornamental buildings, II. A Description of the Buildings. III. A Dialogue upon the Said Gardens (1751).” A “new edition, with all the alterations and improvements” appeared in London in 1769 and two separate editions appeared in 1788 and 1797 with the following title: Stowe. A description of the house and gardens of the most noble and puissant prince, George Grenville Nugent Temple, Marquis of Buckingham. George Bickham (1756?), 21. Bickham, 22–23. In this context, see Dobson’s explanation of how Pope fits into this matrix. The quotation here is from (Dobson) 137. I use the term (from Star Trek) here to convey a sense of staging and simulation, of performance and fantasy. For a creative use of the term see Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (MIT P, 2017). I echo here the words of Fredric Jameson to say that this event might be regarded as writing an opportunistic history with a false reference. See his Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke UP, 1995), chapter on “Utopianism after the End of Utopia,” specifically 154. Charles Burney, An Account of the Musical Performances in ­WestminsterAbbey, and the Pantheon, In Commemoration of Handel (T. Payne and G. Robinson, 1785). See “Preface,” i. See Burney, “Dedication to the King,” 3. Burney, Preface, iii. See Burney, Dedication.

Epilogue  249 37 Robert D. Hume, “Handel and Opera Management in London in the 1730s,” Music and Letters 67, 4 (October 1986), 347. In this article, Hume goes on to say that “[s]ubsidy notwithstanding, the Royal Academy had lost £2,000 per annum.” See Hume 349. The accounts of, for instance, John Mainwaring and Charles Burney, Hume argues, contradict each other. Did Heidegger drop Handel and rent the King’s Theatre to the Opera of the Nobility? A summary of three plausible scenarios appears in this article, page 350. In any event, in 1734 Handel moved to Covent Garden. 38 See Hume 349. 39 Here Hume cites Prevost, 352. 40 Winton Dean and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 1704–1726 (­Oxford UP, 1987), 298. 41 Dean and Knapp, 299. By February [1719] the Attorney General had confirmed the legality of the scheme, and the King had not only reacted favourably—hence the title Royal Academy of Musick—suggested perhaps by the Academie Royale de Musique, the official title of the Paris Opera—but signalized his willingness to provide a subsidy of £1,000 for seven years. He formally granted this in early May and ordered the incorporation of the Company (Dean and Knapp, 300) 42 Printed in full by Milhous and Hume, ibid. 165–67. [“New Light on Handel and the Royal Academy of Music in 1720,” Theatre Journal, xxxv (1983), 149–67.] 43 I am indebted to Mary Helen McMurran for her artful consideration of the many facets of postmodern cosmopolitanism and its precursors in the eighteenth century. See McMurran, “The New Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 1 (2013), 19–38. 4 4 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Vintage, 1966), 404. 45 Thompson, 405. 46 Michael Burden, ed. London Opera Observed, 1711–1844, 5 vols. (Pickering and Chatto, 2013), I: 236. 47 Quoted in Burden, I: 273–74. 48 In this context, see Kathleen Wilson, “Patriot’s Apogee: Wilkite Radicalism and the Cult of Resistance, 1763–74,” The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge UP, 1995), 206–36. 49 Jerry White, A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth Century (Harvard UP, 2012), 525. 50 White, 525. 51 White, 525. 52 E. P. Thompson has discussed at length the long-term impact of the W ­ ilkite resistance to authority: “Even in the 1790s, each attempt to introduce a ‘continental’ spy system, each suspension of Habeas Corpus, each attempt to pack juries, aroused an outcry beyond the reformers’ own ranks.” See the chapter on “The Free-born Englishman” 77–101 and specifically 80. 53 Burden, III: 15. 54 Burden, III: 46. 55 Quoted in White, 545. 56 See William Weber, “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual.” Journal of British Studies, vol. 28, no. 1 (January 1989), specifically 47 and 52–55. Weber argued that “the commemoration celebrated this reunion of Whigs and Tories, indeed the reshaping of British politics itself, and the festival’s origins in early eighteenth-century Tory culture thus fit in with a

250 Epilogue

57 58 59 60 61 62 63

larger pattern in the persistence and adaptation of political language.” I do not see this event as having brought about a reunion of the Whigs and Tories even though there might have been people of both parties in attendance at the Commemoration. However, I agree with Weber when he says that “[t]he aristocratic tenor of the Concerts of Antient Music, together with the organization’s lofty claims for a musical canon, invested in it a sense of cultural authority that suited well the needs of defending the new political order in a high-flown ritual context.” See Weber, 51. Peter Gay, Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond (Vintage Books, 2007), ix. Gay makes it clear that his is not a “history” because it does not cover poets, architects, and so on. See Daniel Defoe, “An Essay upon Projects” (1692–93), “Author’s Introduction.” www.gutenberg.org/files/4087/4087-h/4087-h.htm. Retrieved August 4, 2017. See Defoe, “The History of Projects.” www.gutenberg.org/files/4087/4087h/4087-h.htm. Retrieved on 4 August 2017. See Gay, 13. See Gay, 19. Art Institute of Chicago, Ancient and Byzantine Art, Gallery 151. ­A lexander White Collection 1928, 162. www.artic.edu/aic/collections/ artwork/55887?search_no=1&index=2. These are now called the Parthenon Marbles. See Christopher Hitchens, The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification (Verso, 2008).

Bibliography

Manuscripts and Archival Materials British Museum Minutes of the Board of Trustees (Committee) Minutes of the Board of Trustees (General) Museum Floor Plans (Boxed Sets), Henry Flitcroft (1725), William Brasier (1740), and Henry Keene (circa 1754–) Original Letters and Papers, Volume I, 1743–84. Surveyors’ and Workmen’s Estimates, Volume I, 1754–77. British Library Birch Collection. Papers Relating to the British Museum, 4449–4451, 3 vols. 1753–60.

Printed Books A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts, Purchased by Authority of Parliament, for the Use of the Publick. British Museum. Published by the Order of the Trustees. 2 vols. Dryden Leach, 1759. Agamben, Giorgio. The Signature of All Things: On Method. Translated by Luca D’Lsanto with Kevin Attell. Zone Books, 2009. Alberti, Samuel J. M. M. “The Status of Museums: Authority, Identity, and Material Culture.” Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. Ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, U of Chicago P, 2011, pp. 51–72. An Account of the Ceremonies Observed in the Coronations of the Kings and Queens of England. G. Kearsley, 1761. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition. Verso, 2006. “A Plan for General Distribution of the Sir Hans Sloane’s Collection.” 14 ­January 1757. Original Letters and Papers, Volume I. BM CE4/1. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. “Whose Culture Is It?” Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Ed. James Cuno, Princeton UP, 2009, pp. 71–86. Aravamudan, Srinivas. “Fiction/Translation/Transnation: The Secret History of the English Novel.” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel and Culture. Ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 48–74.

252  Bibliography ———. Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel. U of ­Chicago Press, 2011. Articles of Agreement for the Purchase of Montagu House, BM Central A ­ rchives CL 302–333. Auslander, Philip. Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. Routledge, 1999; rpt. 2008. Backscheider, Paula R. Daniel Defoe: Ambition and Innovation. UP of ­Kentucky, 1986. Backscheider, Paula R., and Catherine Ingrassia, editors. A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture. Blackwell, 2005. Bahri, Deepika. “Hybridity, Redux.” PMLA, vol. 132, no. 1, 2017, pp. 142–48. Bakhtin, Mikhail M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Translated by Caryl Emerson and Edited by Michael Holquist. U of Texas P, 1983. Balaram, Padmini Tolar. “Indian Indigo.” The Materiality of Color: The Production, Circulation, and Application of Dyes and Pigments 1400–1800. Ed. Andrea Feeser, Maureen Day Goggin, and Beth Fowkes Tobin. Revised ed., Routledge, 2012. Baldwin, Olive, and Thelma Wilson. “England’s Glory and the Celebrations at Court for Queen Anne’s Birthday in 1706.” Theatre Notebook, vol. 62, no. 1, 2008, pp. 7–19. Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Wallerstein. Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Verso, 1991. Balme, Christopher B. “Audio Theatre: The Mediatization of Theatrical Space.” Intermediality in Theatre and Performance. Ed. Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 117–24. Banks, Joseph, and Daniel Solander (Attributed to). Illustrations of Australian Plants collected in 1770 During Captain Cook’s Voyage around the World in H.M.S. Endeavour. Published “With Determinations by James Britten.” Department of Botany of the British Museum, 1905. Barker, Richard. Consilium Anti-Pestilentiale: Or, Seasonable Advice, concerning Sure, Safe, and Specifick, and Experimented Medicines, both for the Preservation from, and Cure of this Present Plague. Offered for the Publick Benefit of this Afflicted Nation. Printed by the Author, 1665. Bate, Walter Jackson. Samuel Johnson. Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975; rpt. 1977. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. U of Michigan P, 1994. Bauman, Zygmunt. Globalization: The Consequences. Polity P, 1998. ———. Culture in a Liquid Modern World. Polity P, 2011. Benedict, Barbara M. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. U of Chicago P, 2001. ———. “From Benefactor to Entrepreneur: Sloane’s Literary Reputation, 1685– 1800” From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections. Ed. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter, The British Library, 2012, pp. 33–40. Bentham, Jeremy. Panopticon: Or, the Inspection-House . . . With a Plan of Management Adapted to the Principle . . . in a Series of Letters, Written in the Year 1787, From Crecheff in White Russia, to a Friend in England. Thomas Byrne, 1791.

Bibliography  253 Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994. Bickham, George. The Beauties of Stow; or, a Description of the Most Noble House, Gardens, and Magnificent Buildings Therein, Of the Right Hon. Earl Temple, Viscount and Baron Cobham. G. Bickham, [1753?]. Birch, Thomas. Memoirs Relating to the Life of Sir Hans Sloane Bart formerly President of the Royal Society. BL Additional MS 4241. Bluett, Thomas. Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, Son of Solomon. Richard Ford, 1734. Bodenhamer, David J., John Corrigan, and Trevor M. Harris, editors. The Spatial Humanities: GIS and the Future of Humanities Scholarship. Indiana UP, 2010. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Translated by Richard Nice. Harvard UP, 1984. Brack, O. M. Jr., editor. The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. by Sir John Hawkins, Knt. U of Georgia P, 2009. British Museum Original Letters and Papers, Vol. I (1743–84). BM CE4/1. Bundock, Michael. The Fortunes of Francis Barner: The True Story of the ­Jamaican Slave Who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir. Yale UP, 2015. Burden, Michael, editor. London Opera Observed, 1711–1844, 5 vols. Pickering and Chatto, 2013, I, pp. 236. Carlson, Marvin. Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture. Cornell UP, 1993. Carretta, Vincent, editor. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African. ­Penguin, 1998. ———. “Introduction.” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould, Kentucky UP, 2015, pp. 1–13. Caygill, Marjorie. “Sloane’s Will and the Establishment of the British ­Museum.” Sir Hans Sloane. Ed. Arthur MacGregor, British Museum P, 1994, pp. 45–50. ———. “Sloane’s Catalogues and the Arrangement of his Collections.” From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections. Ed. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor and Michael Hunter, The British Library, 2012, pp. 120–36. Caygill, Marjorie, and Christopher Date. The Building of the British Museum. British Museum Publications, 1999. Chambers, William. A Treatise on Civil Architecture, in which the Principles of That Art are Laid Down, and Illustrated by a Great Number of Plates. London: Printed for the author by J. Haberkorn, 1759. Chanay, Edward. “Egypt in England and American.” Sites of Exchange: European Crossroads and Faultlines. Ed. Maurizio Ascari and Adrianna Corrado, Rodopi, 2006, pp. 39–69. Chapman, R. W., editor. James Boswell: Life of Johnson. Oxford UP, 1980. Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, a Derivative Discourse. U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. “Critique of Popular Culture.” Public Culture, vol. 20, no. 2 (Spring 2008), pp. 321–42. Choudhury, Mita. Interculturalism and Resistance in the London Theatre, 1660–1800: Identity, Performance, Empire. Bucknell UP, 2000. ———. “Fact, Fantasy, or Mimesis? Narratives of Freedom/Imperial Masquerades.” Monstrous Dreams of Reason: Body, Self and Other in the

254  Bibliography Enlightenment. Ed. Laura Rosenthal and Mita Choudhury, Bucknell UP, 2002, pp. 255–75. Churchill, James. Happy Nation. Two Sermons, Preached at Henley- upon-­ Thames, on the Jubilee, Occasioned by King George the Third entering the fiftieth year of his Reign. Conder, 1809. Cibber, Colley. An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. Edited by B. R. S. Fone. Dover, 2000. Clifford, James L., and Donald J. Greene. Samuel Johnson: A Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies. U of Minnesota P, 1970. Clingham, Greg. James Boswell: The Life of Johnson. Cambridge UP, 1992. ———. “Hawkins, Biography, and the Law.” Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Johnson. Ed. Martine Watson Brownley, Bucknell UP, 2012, pp. 137–154. Clutton-Brock, Juliet. “Vertebrate Collections.” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. Ed. Arthur MacGregor, British Museum P, 1994, pp. 77–92. Coleman, Patrick. “Property, Politics, and Personality in Rousseau.” Early Modern Conceptions of Property. Ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves, Routledge, 1995. Colley, Linda. Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. Yale UP, 1992. Cook, Diana, and Samantha Fox, editors. New Materialism: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Duke UP, 2010. Crary, Jonathan. Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. MIT P, 1990. Cunningham, Vanessa. Shakespeare and Garrick. Cambridge UP, 2008. Cuno, James, editor. Whose Culture? The Promise of Museums and the Debate Over Antiquities. Princeton UP, 2009. David, Jessica. “Zoffany’s Painting Technique: The Drummond Family in Focus.” Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed. Ed. Martin Postle, Yale UP, 2011, pp. 167–74. Davies, Thomas. Memoirs of the Life of David Garrick, Esq. Interspersed with Characters and Anecdotes of his Theatrical Contemporaries, vol. 2, London, 1780. Davis, Lennard J. “Conversation and Dialogue.” The Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Journal, vol. 1 (1987), 347–53. Day, Michael. “Humana: Anatomical, Pathological, and Curious Human Specimens in Sloane’s Museum.” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. Ed. Arthur MacGregor, British Museum P, 1994, pp. 69–76. Dean, Winton, and John Merrill Knapp, Handel’s Operas, 1704–1726. Oxford UP, 1987. Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Translated by Donald ­Nicholson-Smith. Zone Books, 1994. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Rendall. U of California P, 1984; rpt. 1988. Defoe, Daniel. “A Tour Thro’ London,” A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Divided into Circuits or Journies. 3 vols, vol. II. G. Strahan, W. Mears, R. Franklin et al., 1724–1725. ———. A Journal of the Plague Year. Ed. Cynthia Wall and Revised ed. Penguin Classic, 2003.

Bibliography  255 Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2017. Derrida, Jacques. A Gift of Death. U of Chicago P, 1996. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Dr. Johnson. U of Chicago P, 2005. Dobson, Michael. The Making of the National Poet: Shakespeare Adaptation and Authorship, 1660–1769. Clarendon P, 1992. Dollimore, Jonathan, and Alan Sinfield, editors. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism. Cornell UP, 1994. Duyker, Edward. Nature’s Argonaut: Daniel Solander, 1733–1782. Melbourne UP, 1998. Duyker, Edward, and Per Tingbrand, editors. Daniel Solander: Collected Correspondence, 1753–1782. Melbourne UP, 1995. Eagleton, Terry. The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson. U of Minnesota P, 1982. ———. On Evil. Yale UP, 2010. ———. Materialism. Yale UP, 2016. Eco, Umberto. The infinity of Lists. Rizzoli, 1999. Edney, Matthew H. “Reconsidering Enlightenment Geography and Map Making: Reconnaissance, Mapping, Archive,” Geography and Enlightenment. Ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, U of Chicago P, 1999, pp. 165–98. Ellis, John. “Collected from Various Parts of the Globe by the late John Ellis, Esq. F.R.S.” The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes. Arranged and Described by Daniel Solander, Benjamin White and Son and Peter Elmsly, 1786. Ellis, Markman. “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Liberalism and the Politics of Form.” Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. U P of Kentucky, 2015, pp. 199–217. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself. Ed. Robert J. Allison. Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 2007. Fitton, Mike, and Pamela Gilbert. “Insect Collections.” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. Ed. Arthur MacGregor, British Museum P, 1994, pp. 112–22. Flynn, Carol Houlihan. Samuel Richardson: A Man of Letters. Princeton UP, 1982. ———. “Whatever happened to the Gordon Riots? Problems in Revolutionary Representation.” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture. Ed. Paula Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 459–80. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Random House, 1970. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Vintage Books, 1977; rpt. 1979. Freeman, Lisa. Antitheatricality and the Body Public. U of Pennsylvania P, 2017. Garrick, David. The Jubilee in Honour of Shakespeare, A Musical Entertainment. Waterford, 1773. Gay, Peter. Modernism: The Lure of Heresy, from Baudelaire to Beckett and Beyond. Vintage Books, 2007. General Letters and Papers, Volume I: 1743–1784. BM MS # missing.

256  Bibliography Guillory, John. “Enlightening Mediation.” This is Enlightenment. Ed. Clifford Siskin and William Warner, U of Chicago P, 2010, pp. 37–63. Gunther, A. E. An Introduction to the Life of the Rev. Thomas Birch, D. D., F. R. S. 1705–1766. Halesworth P, 1984. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Goldberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, Routledge, 1992, pp. 277–94. Harrington, S. A New Introduction to the Knowledge and Use of Maps, First ed. S. Crowder and J. Walter, 1774. Harris, Tim. London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis. Cambridge UP, 1990. Harris, P. R. A History of the British Museum Library, 1753–1773. British Library, 1998. Hart, Kevin. Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property. Cambridge UP, 1999. Hatton, Edward. A New View of London; or, An Ample Account of that City. R. Chiswell, A. and J. Churchill, T. Horne et al. 2 vols. 1708. Haywood, Ian, and John Seed, editors. The Gordon Riots: Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge UP, 2012. Hitchcock, Tim, and Robert Shoemaker. London Lives: Poverty, Crime and the Making of the Modern City, 1690–1800. Cambridge UP, 2015. Hitchens, Christopher. The Parthenon Marbles: The Case for Reunification. Verso, 2008. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodore W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford UP, 2006. House of Lords Journal. Vol. 28 June 1753. British History Online. www.­britishhistory.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol28/pp147-156. Web. Retrieved 18 March 2018. Howe, Elizabeth. The First English Actresses: Women and Drama, 1660–1700. Cambridge UP, 1992. Hughes, Derek. “Rape on the Restoration Stage.” Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, vol. 46, no. 3, 2005, pp. 225–36. Hulme, Peter, and Ludmilla Jordanova. The Enlightenment and Its Shadows. Routledge, 1990. Hume, Robert D. “Handel and Opera Management in London in the 1730s.” Music & Letters, vol. 67, no. 4, 1986, p. 347–62. ———. “The Economics of Culture in London, 1660–1740.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 2006, pp. 487–533. ———. “The Value of Money in Eighteenth-Century England: Incomes, Prices, Buying Power—and Some Problems in Cultural Economics.” Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 4, 2014, pp. 373–416. Hutton, William. A Journey from Birmingham to London. Pearson and Rollason, 1785. Jameson, Fredric. “Space.” Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Duke UP, 1991, pp. 154–80. Jarvis, Charlie, Mark Spencer, and Robert Huxley, “Sloane’s Plant Specimens at the Natural History Museum (With a Supplementary Account of Sloane’s Fossils by Cyrille Delmer).” From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and His Collections. Ed. Alison Walker, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter, The British Library, 2012, pp. 137–57.

Bibliography  257 Jasanoff, Maya. “A Passage through India: Zoffany in Calcutta and Lucknow.” Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed. Ed. Martin Postle, Yale UP, 2011, pp. 124–139. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. U of California P, 1994. Jensen, James. The Sensational Restoration. Indiana UP, 1992. Johnson, Samuel. Johnson on Shakespeare. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Ed. Arthur Sherbo. Vols. 7–8, Yale UP, 1968. ———. The Rambler. The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. Ed. Walter J. Bate and Albrecht. B. Strauss. Vols. 3–5, Yale UP, 1969. Jones, Robert W. “Sheridan and the Theatre of Patriotism: Staging Dissent during the War for America.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 26, no. 1, 2002, pp. 24–45. Joseph, Betty. Reading the East India Company, 1720–1840: Colonial Currencies of Gender. U of Chicago P, 2004. Laclau, Ernesto. “Identity and Hegemony: The Role of Universality in the Constitution of Political Logics,” Contingency, hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Ed. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Verso, 2000, pp. 45–89. Lamb, Jonathan. Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680–1840. U of ­Chicago P, 2001. Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by Catherine Porter. Harvard UP, 1993, pp. 109–117. ———. The Things Things Say. Princeton UP, 2011. ———. “Anthropology.” Samuel Johnson in Context. Ed. Jack Lynch, Cambridge UP, 2012. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Translated by Donald ­Nicholson-Smith. Blackwell, 1991. Lithgow, William. The Present Surveigh of London and Englands State. Printed by J. O., 1643. Livingstone, David N., and Charles W. J. Withers, editors. Geography and Enlightenment. U of Chicago P, 1999. ———. Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. U of Chicago P, 2011. Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. Cambridge UP, 1960; rpt. 1994. Losurdo, Domenico. Liberalism: A Counter-History. Translated by Gregory Eliot. Verso, 2011. MacGregor, Arthur, editor. Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. British Museum P, 1994. Makato, Sato, and Mike Dibb, directors. Edward Said: The Last Interview. Multiple Formats. 8 September 2009. Marsden, Jean I. “Rape, Voyeurism, and the Restoration Stage.” Broken Boundaries: Women & Feminism in Restoration Drama. Ed. Katherine M. Quinsey, U of Kentucky P, 1996, pp. 185–200. Martin, Peter. Samuel Johnson: A Biography. Belknap P of Harvard UP, 2008. McKay, P. H., and D. N. Hall, editors. Estate Letters from the time of John, 2nd Duke of Montagu, 1709–39). Transcribed by Alan Toseland, Northampton Record Society, 2013.

258  Bibliography McKeon, Michael. “Civic Humanism and the Logic of Historical Interpretation.” The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock. Ed. D. N. DeLuna and Perry Anderson, Archangul, 2006, pp. 59–99. ———. The History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. McMurran, Helen. “The New Cosmopolitanism and the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 1, 2013, pp. 19–38. Milhous, Judith, and Robert D. Hume, “New Light on Handel and the Royal Academy of Music in 1720.” Theatre Journal, vol. 35, no. 2, 1983, pp. 149–67. Miller, Edward. That Noble Cabinet: A History of the British Museum. Andre Deutsch, 1973. Mills, Sara. Michel Foucault. Routledge, 2003. Mirzoeff, Nicholas. The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality. Duke UP, 2011. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. U of Chicago P, 1994. ———. What do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. U of Chicago P, 2005. Montaňo, John Patrick. The Roots of English Colonialism in Ireland: Critical Perspectives on Empire. Cambridge UP, 2011. Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. MIT P, 2017. Novak, Maximillian E. Daniel Defoe, Master of Fictions: His Life and Ideas. Oxford UP, 2001. Nussbaum, Felicity A., editor. The Global Eighteenth Century. Johns Hopkins UP, 2003. Ogborn, Miles. “Francis Williams’s Bad Language: Historical Geography in a World of Practice.” Historical Geography, vol. 37, 2009, pp. 5–21. ———. “Talking Plants: Botany and Speech in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica.” Science History Publications, vol. 51, no. 172, 2013, pp. 251–82. Ogilby, John. The Traveller’s Guide, or a Most Exact Description of the Roads of England. Printed for W.B. and sold by J. Churchill, D. Brown, J. Nicholson et al., 1712. O’Quinn, Daniel. Staging Governance: Theatrical Imperialism in London, 1770–1800. Johns Hopkins UP, 2005. Palladio, Andrea. The Architecture of A. Palladio; in Four Books. Containing a Short Treatise of the Five Orders, and the Most Necessary Observations Concerning All Sorts of Building, 2 vols. John Darby, 1721. Panofsky, Erwin. Three Essays on Style. Edited by Irvin Lavin. Memoir by ­William S. Heckscher. MIT P, 1995. Pasquin, Anthony. An Authentic History of the Professors of Painting, Sculpture, & Architecture, Who Have Presented in Ireland. H. D. Symonds, 1796. Paulson, Ronald. The Art of Riot in England and America. Owlworks, 2010. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. Routledge, 1993. Pocock, J. G. A. The Political Imagination in History: Essays Concerning J. G. A. Pocock. Edited by D. N. DeLuna and Perry Anderson. Archangul, 2006, pp. 59–99. ———. “Historiography and Enlightenment: A View of Their History.” Modern Intellectual History, vol. 5, no. 1, 2008, pp. 83–96.

Bibliography  259 Poe, Edgar Allan. The Complete Poems and Stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Arthur Hobson Quinn. Introduction and Notes by Edward H. O’Neill. Knopf, 1967. Porter, Roy. London: A Social History. Penguin, 1994. Postle, Martin, editor. Johan Zoffany RA: Society Observed. Yale UP, 2011. Pressly, William L. The French Revolution as Blasphemy: Johan Zoffany’s Paintings of the Massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792. U of California P, 1999. Rader, Ralph W. “Literary Form in Factual Narrative: The Example of Boswell’s Johnson.” James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson. Ed. Harold Bloom, Chelsea House Publisher, 1986, pp. 9–34. Roach, Joseph. Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance. Columbia UP, 1996. Rogers, Molly. “Louis Agassiz: Full Face and Profile.” Mirror of Race. http:// mirrorofrace.org/louis-agassiz-full-face-and-profile/. Web. Retrieved 8 March 2017. Rogers, Pat. “Defoe’s Tour and the Identity of Britain.” The Cambridge Companion to Daniel Defoe. Ed. John Richetti, Cambridge UP, 2008, pp. 102–120. Rumbold, Kate. “Shakespeare and the Stratford Jubilee.” Shakespeare in the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Fiona Ritchie and Peter Sabor, Cambridge UP, 2012, pp. 254–76. Rupke, Nicolaas. “Afterword: Putting the Geography of Science in Its Place.” Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. Eds. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers. U of Chicago P, 2011, pp. 439–54. Schmidt, Benjamin. “Mapping an Exotic World: The Global Project of Dutch Geography, circa 1700.” The Global Eighteenth Century. Ed. Felicty ­Nussbaum, Johns Hopkins UP, 2003, pp. 21–37. Schuessler, Jennifer. “Confronting Academia’s Ties to Slavery. The New York Times. 5 March 2017. www.nytimes.com/2017/03/05/arts/confronting-­ academias-ties-to-slavery.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-­ iphone-share&_r=0. Web. Retrieved 8 March 2017. Schwarz, Joan I. “Eighteenth-Century Law and Clarissa.” Clarissa and her Readers: New Essays for the Clarissa Project. Ed. Carol Houlihan Flynn and Edward Copeland. Vol. 9, AMS P, 1999, pp. 269–308. Sedgwick, Romney, editor. The History of Parliament. The House of Commons, 1715–1754. Arthur Onslow (1720–27; 1727–61). www.­historyof parliamentonline.org/volume/1715-1754/member/onslow-arthur-1691-1768. Web. Retrieved 18 March 2018. Senelick, Laurence. The Changing Room: Sex, Drag and the Theatre. ­Routledge, 2000. Shakespeare, William. Four Hundredth Anniversary. http://westminster-abbey. org/press/news/2016/august/abbey-marks-shakespeare-anniversary. Retrieved 9 April 2018. Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft. Frankenstein, 2nd ed. Edited by Susan J. Wolfson. Pearson, 2007. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. Routledge, 1994. Singh, Jyotsna. “Othello’s Identity, Postcolonial Theory, and Contemporary African Rewritings of Othello.” Women, ‘Race,’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period. Ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, Routledge, 1994, pp. 287–99.

260  Bibliography Sivasundaram, Sujit. “Natural History in the British Colonization of Ceylon.” Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science. Ed. David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers, U of Chicago P, 2011, pp. 123–48. Sloane, Hans. A Voyage to the Islands Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica. Vol. 1. Printed by B.M. for the Author, 1707. Smith, Garvey. Introduction to Thomas Holcroft’s A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Gordon Riots, London, 1780. Emory University Library, 1944. Spacks, Patricia Meyer. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self. U of Chicago P. 2003.Stafford, Barbara Maria. Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education. MIT P, 1994; rpt. 1999. ———. Good Looking: Essays on the Virtue of Images. MIT P, 1996. Stewart, Rachel. The Town House in Georgian London. Yale UP, 2009. Stone, George Winchester Jr., editor. The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments and Afterpieces, Part 4. Southern Illinois UP, 1972, p. 1419. Stow: The Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham. B. Seeley, 1751. Stowe, the Gardens of the Right Honorable Richard Lord Viscount Cobham, address’d to Mr. Pope. Attributed to Gilbert West. L. Gilliver, 1732. Stowe. A Description of the House and Gardens of the Most Noble & Puissant Prince, George Grenville Nugent Temple, Marquis of Buckingham. J. Seeley, J. Edwards, and L. B. Seeley, 1797. Straub, Kristina. Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology. Cornell UP, 1992. ­ efoe, Sussman, Charlotte. “Memory and Mobility: Fictions of Population in D Goldsmith, and Scott.” A Companion to the Eighteenth-Century English Novel and Culture. Ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia, Blackwell, 2005, pp. 191–213. Swan, Beth. “Raped by the System: An Account of Clarissa in the light of ­Eighteenth-Century Law.” Ideas, Aesthetics, and Inquiries in the Early Modern Era, vol. 6, 2001, pp. 113–29. Taylor, John H. “The Collection of Egyptian Mummies in the British Museum: Overview and Potential for Study.” Regarding the Dead: Human Remains in the British Museum. Ed. Alexandra Fletcher, Daniel Antoine, and J. D. Hill, Research Publication 197, The British Museum, 2014, pp. 103–114. The London Stage, 1660–1800: A Calendar of Plays, Entertainments, & ­M asterpieces. Ed. Emmett L. Avery et al., Part 1, vol. 1, Southern Illinois UP, 1965–1968. The Yale Center of British Art. Figures of Empire: Slavery and Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century Atlantic Britain. October–December 2014. https://­ britishart.yale.edu/exhibitions/figures-empire-slavery-and-portraiture-­ eighteenth-century-atlantic-britain. Web. Retrieved 18 March 2018. Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class. Vintage Books, 1966. Thoughts on the Coronation of his Present Majesty King George the Third. Or, Reasons offered against confining the Procession to the usual Track, and pointing out others more commodious and proper. F. Noble, J. Noble, W. Bathoe, and H. Yates, 1761.

Bibliography  261 Two African Gentlemen in London. Vitoria and Albert Museum. www.vam. ac.uk/content/articles/t/two-african-gentlemen-in-london/. Web Retrieved 18 March 2018. Uring, Nathaniel. A Relation of the Late Intended Settlement of the Islands of St. Lucia and St. Vincent, in American: in Right of the Duke of Montagu, and Under His Grace’s Direction and Orders, J. Peele, 1725. Waingrow, Marshall, editor. The Correspondence and Other Papers of James Boswell Relating to the Making of the Life of Johnson. Yale UP, 2001. Walker, Alison, Arthur MacGregor, and Michael Hunter, editors. From Books to Bezoars: Sir Hans Sloane and his Collections. The British Library, 2012. Wall, Cynthia. The Literary and Cultural Spaces of Restoration London. Cambridge UP, 2006. Wallerstein, Immanuel. “Postscript.” Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities. Ed. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Verso, 1991, pp. 228–32. Way, Kathie. “Invertebrate Collections.” Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum. Ed. Arthur MacGregor, British Museum P, 1994, pp. 93–111. Weber, William. “The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual.” ­Journal of British Studies, vol. 28, no. 1, 1989, pp. 52–55. White, Jerry. A Great and Monstrous Thing: London in the Eighteenth C ­ entury. Harvard UP, 2013. Wilson, David M. The British Museum: A History. The British Museum P, 2002. Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism, 1715–1785. Cambridge UP, 1995. Wycherley, William. The Country Wife. Peggy Thompson, Textual Editor and J. Douglas Canfield, General Editor. The Broadview Anthology of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Drama. Broadview Press, 2001, pp. 1038–1100. Yeager, Myron D. “Hawkins’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., and Modern Biographers.” Reconsidering Biography: Contexts, Controversies, and Sir John Hawkins’s Life of Johnson. Ed. Martine Watson Brownley, Bucknell UP, 2012, pp. 89–98. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. MIT P, 2006. Zunshine, Lisa. “The Spectral Hospital: Eighteenth-Century Philanthropy and the Novel.” Eighteenth-Century Life, vol. 29, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–22.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abbey, Westminster 10 An Account of the Ceremonies Observed at the Coronation of Our Most Gracious Sovereign George III and his Royal Consort Queen Charlotte 38 An Account of the Musical Performances in Westminster-Abbey and the Pantheon (Burney) 234 act of mediation 25, 80n4, 117n3, 245n2 see also mediation act of mediatization 51, 78, 80n4 Agamben, Giorgio 1, 8–9, 11n2, 149–50, 206, 223n79 Agassiz, Jean Louis Rodolphe 114, 122n80 Alberti, Samuel J. M. M. 124 Alexander’s Feast; or, The Power of Music (Dryden) 238 Alfred, King 232 Amboyna (Dryden) 46n42 American Revolution 52 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 128, 160n10 Aravamudan, Srinivas 2 archaeological fragments: random thoughts on 224–45 architectural self-fashioning, and London 27–35 Arne, Thomas 237 Artaxerxes 237 “artful science” 125 Art of Riot (Paulson) 71 authority: and crowd acts 53–6; Mirzoeff ’s definition of 37–8; and visuality 37–8

Babel of Enlightenment 135 Bacon, Francis 232 Backscheider, Paula 42n3 Baczko, Bronislaw 201 Bakhtin, Mikhail 63, 165n42 Balibar, Etienne 48n65 Banks, Joseph 6, 9, 126, 141, 142, 153, 156, 159n1, 171n98, 211 Barber, Francis 94, 95, 107; and Boswell 115; and Johnson’s will 115; role in production of Johnson 114–17 Barker, Richard 15 Barnard, John 232 Bate, W. Jackson 90 Baudrillard, Jean 34, 64, 213 Bauman, Zygmunt 201, 211, 213, 221n70 The Beauties of Stow, or a description of the most noble house, gardens and magnificent buildings therein 10, 227, 230, 232, 247n19, 248n24, 248n27 The Beggar’s Opera? 11, 14n17 Behn, Aphra 20, 140 Bembo, Pietro 135 Benedict, Barbara 11n3, 49n69, 139 Bénéton, Philippe 202 Benjamin, Walter 71 Bentham, Jeremy 29–30, 208 Berkeley, Anne 187 Bhabha, Homi 13n10 Bickham, George 232 biography: and biographer’s mediation 88; vs. historical writing 89; as literary genre 88

264 Index Birch, Thomas 170n91, 178 Blackheath 75, 76, 86n71; encampment on 74 Blue Cockades 50, 79 Bluett, Thomas 147–8 Bodenhamer, David 166n51 Bodley, Thomas 135 Book of Ezekiel (The Old Testament) 56 Book of Revelation (The New Testament) 56 borrowed narratives, and birth of Leviathan 128–41 Boswell, James 88–9, 98, 103, 105, 107, 242; and Barber 115; interest in subordination 110; on Johnson’s view of slavery 112–13 Bourdieu, Pierre 128, 134, 162n20 Boyle, Robert 136, 137 Brasier, William 173, 204, 207, 222n78 Britannia (Ogilvie) 22 British Lying-In Hospital 109 British Museum and prints 9, 19, 124; and borrowed narratives 128–41; and natural history 141–8; and structure of human signatures 149–59; and public service mission 175–84; and corporate identity 184–9; and spectral logic 189–95, 197, 200; and the “order of things” 189–94 British Museum Act (1753) 150, 151, 175, 209 British Museum Bill 169n84 British Museum Corporation 157, 174 British Navy 40, 154 British Parliament 67, 150, 151 British “Worthies”, in private-estate space 230–3 Bruce, Thomas (7th Earl of Elgin) 245 Bulfinch, Charles 27 Bundock, Michael 94–5, 115, 119n24; “motion picture” of Francis Barber and Samuel Johnson 95 Burden, Michael 238, 240 Burke, Edmund 63, 64, 148; and revolution in France 65–7 Burney, Charles 225, 234, 242 Burning and Plundering of Newgate and Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob 61

Calhoun, John C. 39 Camden, William 22 Carmichael, Poll 105 Carretta, Vincent 78 The Case of the Opera-House Disputes, Fairly Stated 240 A Catalogue of the Harleian Collection of Manuscripts 136 categorical hierarchy, and “order of things” 194–200 Catholicism 26, 38, 84n43, 231, 239 Catholic Relief Act 50 Caygill, Marjorie 215n7 Celsius, Anders 152 Certeau, Michel de 96 Chambers, William 45n29 chaos 16; and London 21 Charles II (King of England) 137 Chatterjee, Partha 48n68, 245n3 citizenship 8, 17 Clingham, Greg 123n91 Cobham Temple of British Worthies 245 Coleman, Patrick 111 Colley, Linda 40 commemorative space 5, 233–42 Congreve, William 233, 247n20 Consilium Anti-Pestilentiale 15 Cook, James 9, 126, 153, 156, 159n1 corporate identity: and spatial alignment of reason and order 184–9; spatial dimension of 172–213 Corrigan, John 166n51 Cotton, Robert 135, 151 Crowd: Victorian 53–6; eighteenth century 56–64 cultural geography 2 cultural logic of museology: colonial space 124–59; corporate space 172–84; corporate identity 184–9 cultural production 61 Cuno, James 163n31 Cust, John 156 Date, Christopher 215n7 Davies, Thomas 228–9 Davis, Lennard J. 103 Dean, Winton 236 Debord, Guy 31, 34–5, 83n38 deep-mapping 4; and idea of collection 141–8; and Keene plans 200–11

Index  265 Defoe, Daniel 7, 16–18, 42n5, 135, 164n33, 243–4; on London’s appearance 21–3; and nation-space 19; and urban development 20–7; urban space concept 18; vision of urban architectonics 25; and visual imperative 20–7 Delbourgo, James 125, 132, 162n27 A Description of the City of London (Defoe) 25 Desmoulins, Elizabeth 105 Desmoulins, John 116 Deutsch, Helen 117n1, 118n14 The Devastations Occasioned by the Rioters of London, Firing the New Gaol of Newgate, and Burning Mr. Ackerman’s Furniture (Hamilton, Thornton and Hogg) 61–2 Diallo, Ayuba Suleiman 147–8 Dictionary of National Biography 150 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Foucault) 31 discontinuity, Foucault’s notion of 11n2 Dobson, Michael 233, 246n10, 247n22 Dollimore, Jonathan 48n64 domesticity: vs. privacy 89, 118n6 Drake, Francis 232 Dryden, John 46n42, 238 Dutch East India Company 143 Duyker, Edward 156 Eagleton, Terry 44n24 early-modern civilizing missions 161n11 East Building of the National Gallery of Art 28 Eco, Umberto 82n18 Edward (Prince of Wales) 232 eighteenth-century crowd 56–64; in artistic expressions 70–1 elite culture 62 Elizabeth I (Queen of England and Ireland) 135, 232 Ellis, John 141, 154, 157 Ellis, Markman 108 Empson, James 154, 195, 196, 216n18, 220n53 Empson, William 177–8 empty space 24 Endeavor 131, 156 Enlightenment 1, 3, 15, 126, 129, 156, 201, 211, 213, 227; museology 128; time-space and visual culture 35–41

Enlightenment Britain 135 Enlightenment British culture 27 Epaminondas 247n21 Equiano, Olaudah 94 An Essay towards the Natural History of the Corallines (Ellis) 141 An Essay upon Projects (Defoe) 243 An Exact Representation of the Burning Plundering and Destruction of Newgate by the Rioters on the memorable 7 June (O’Neil, Roberts, Mitchell and Fielding) 62 Exclusion Crisis 41 The Execution of Breaking on the Rack (Blake) 96 expansionism 1, 23, 225 Fanon, Franz 35 Fielding, Henry 20 Fielding, J. 62 Fielding, Sarah 190 Fitzgig’s Triumph; or, The Power of Riot 238 Fitzwilliam, Richard 241 Flitcroft, Henry 173, 203–5, 207 Forrester, Gillian 68–9 Fothergill, John 142 Foucault, Michel 11n2, 27, 28, 30, 77–8, 155; “The Order of Things” 189–200; limits of representation 212 The Foundling Hospital 108 Fox, Charles 240 French Revolution: and Burke 65–7; and Zoffany 64–73 Gallini, Giovanni 240 Gardenia 156 Garrick, David 92–3, 105, 109, 166n50, 225, 227–30, 237, 246n9 Gay, John 14n17 Gay, Peter 242–4 genos: Johnsonian concept of 8, 97; oikos-genos paradigm 97, 99, 111; uniqueness of 107; see also oikos Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technologies 166n51 George II (King of Great Britain and Ireland) 150, 169n84, 209 Glorious Revolution 29, 41 Goldsmith, Oliver 9 Gordon, George 50

266 Index “The Gordon Riots as Sublime Spectacle” (Haywood) 59 Gordon Riots of 1780 50, 239; black-and-white prints of 63–4; engravings related to 61; institutional counter-resistance 51–2; policing public space during 73–80; and volatile crowd 61 Gore, John 156 Gould, Philip 78 Greene, Donald 1 Gresham, Thomas 232 Guillory, John 80n4 Guy’s Hospital 108 Gwyn, Nell 34 Habermas, Jurgen 100–2 Hamilton, Newburgh 238 Hamilton, William 61 Hampden, John 232 Handel, George Frideric 109, 164n39, 225, 227, 234–6; Commemoration of 1784 233–4; on the Holodeck 233–45 Harleian Manuscripts 136, 177 Harley, Edward 135, 136, 151 Harley, Henrietta 215n13 Harley, Robert 135, 164n33 A Harlot’s Progress (Hogarth) 91 Harris, P. R. 222n72 Harris, Thomas 240 Harris, Trevor M. 166n51 Hart, Kevin 104, 121n56 Hastings, Warren 67 Hawkins, John 97, 103–10, 115–16; account of Johnson’s wife death 106–7; Johnson’s biography 105–6 Haywood, Ian 59, 61, 63 Historia Plantarum (John Ray) 165n44 Historical Vindication of the Church of England 140 historical writing vs. biography 89 Hitchens, Christopher and The Parthenon Marbles 250n63 Hoare, Henry 109 Hobbes, Thomas 137, 161n18 Hogarth, William 59, 69, 90–1 Hogg, Alexander 61–2 Holbrook, Peter 226 Holcroft, Thomas 78, 87n74 Hollar, Wenceslaus 22 homo sapiens 168n73

Hooke, Robert 136 Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno 6, 13n14 Horne, James 174, 179, 183–4 Hulme, Peter 142, 148, 167n60 Hume, Robert D. 62–3, 235–6 Hutcheson, Francis 29 Hutton, William 193 “Ideological Tensions of Capitalism” (Balibar and Wallerstein) 48n65 imperial symbology 26 inequality 108–14 The Infinity of Lists (Eco) 82n18, 158 institutional counter-resistance 51–2 The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Bundock) 119n24 International Shakespeare Association 226 Jacob Bobart the Younger 144 Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 59 Jameson, Fredrick 61, 160n5, 234 Jay, Martin 28, 31–2, 37 John (First Duke of Montagu) 128 John (Second Duke of Montagu) 148, 172, 214n1 Johnson, Michael 97 Johnson, Samuel 9, 20, 40, 190, 224, 244; authority 88; Bate’s episode in Johnson’s biography 90–1; Garrick ancedote on 92–3; interest in subordination 110; interiority 105; Hawkins’ biography of 105; nervous tics 91, 95; oikos 91–5, 105; philanthropy 108; on slavery 112–13 Johnsonian model of oikos-genos 97, 99, 111 Jones, Ignatius 232 Journal Britannique 220n62 A Journal of the Plague Year (Defoe) 7, 16–19, 42n5 The Jubilee in honour of Shakespeare 229–30 Keene, Henry 174, 179, 183–4 Kennett, Brackley 52 Kent, William 225, 231 Khan, Carlo 240 Knapp, John Merrill 236 Knight, Gowan 154, 185, 197, 199 Kuhn, Thomas 1

Index  267 Lamb, Jonathan 116 Lane, Drury 237–8 Laslett, Peter 151 Las Meninas (Velázquez) 30–1 Latour, Bruno 11n1 Latrobe, Benjamin Henry 27, 45n28 Lefebvre, Henri 24–5, 35–6, 47n56, 60 Lely, Peter 34 Lethieullier, Pitt 139 Lethieullier, William 139 Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African (Sancho) 78 Levett, Robert 105 Leviathan: borrowed narratives and birth of 128–41, 161n18 Life of Johnson (James Boswell) 88–9, 103 Linnaeus, Carl 131, 141, 152–3, 157 “liquid modernity” 213 “liquid times” 43n12 Locke, John 29, 39, 142, 148, 151, 232, 233 Lock Hospital 109 London: appearance 21–3; architectural self-fashioning 27–35; and chaos 21; and nation-space 19; vs. Paris 43n13; public façade of 33; town houses 104–8; urban landscape 19–20 London Corresponding Society (LCS) 72 The London Hospital in Whitechapel 108 London Opera Observed (Burden) 238 Lord Chamberlain, the Bishop of London 151 Losurdo, Domenico 29, 39, 71, 86n62: Liberalism: A CounterHistory 33n45, 85n61 Louis XVI 68 Luke, Timothy W. 211 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 90 McKeon, Michael 89–90, 101–2, 120n47 The Making of the English Working Class (Thompson) 237 The Man and the Crowd (Edgar Allan Poe) 7, 51, 53–4 Mangostan 142 The March of the Guards to Finchley (Hogarth) 59–60

Marlowe, Christopher 22 Martin, Peter 107 Maty, Matthew 141, 154, 189, 199–200, 220n62 mediation 24, 80n4, 88, 89 see also act of mediation The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare) 112 Middlesex Infirmary 108 Military Prophet; or A Flight from Providence 56–61, 57 Miller, Andrew 225 Miller, Edward 222n72 Milton, John 232, 233 Mirzoeff, Nicholas 3, 32; definition of authority 37–8; on slave revolutions 71–2 Mitchell, P. 62 Mitchell, W. J. T. 37, 47n51, 57, 77 Molyneaux, Robert 156 Monck, Christopher 143 Monck, General George 137, 143 Montagu, Edward 214n1 Montagu House 9, 127, 128, 139, 164n37, 172–5, 173, 178–82, 180, 181, 184, 187, 192, 194, 195, 196, 201–7, 210, 214n1, 214n6, 216n21, 216n23, 217n31, 222n72, 222n76 Montagu, John 172, 203–4 Montagu, Ralph 172 Morden, Robert 22 Moritz, Carl Philip 191 Morris, James 174, 179, 183 Mortimer, John Hamilton 149, 178 Morton, Charles 154 museological space 40 museology, cultural logic of 124–59 Museum Central des Art 159n2 mythical space 27 narrow compass 43n17 nation, concept of 41 Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, a Derivative Discourse (Chatterjee) 48n68 nation-space: definition of 2, 5; image and text 5–6; and deep mapping 6; and commemorative space 19; and Defoe 19; described 2; imperial 6; and London 19; narratives of 5; Aravamudan on 2 nativity, spatial dimension of 227–30 The Natural History of Jamaica 145

268 Index The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes (John Ellis) 141–2, 154 negative carnivalesque 66, 83n41 A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows (Blake) 96 new corporate culture of nation-space 211–13 A New Introduction to the Knowledge and Use of Maps (Harrington) 146, 168n69 Newton, Isaac 137, 232, 233 The New York Times 114 Nine Years’ War 243 “nonlinguistic symbol system” 37 “notion of discontinuity” see discontinuity, Foucault’s notion of Novak, Maximillian 18 “novelistic usurper” 16 Nussbaum, Felicity A. and global eighteenth century 9 Ogborn, Miles 12n7 Ogilvie, John 22 oikos: Johnsonian 8, 91–5, 97, 99–105; oikos-genos paradigm 97, 99, 111 Onslow, Arthur 150, 151, 156, 209 The Opera House Disputes 240 “optical unconscious” 71 order, spatial alignment of 184–9 “order of things” 189–94; categorical hierarchy and 194–200 The Order of Things (Foucault) 30, 32 Original Letters and Papers 155, 156, 169n85 Oroonoko (Aphra Behn) 140 Overton, John 22 Pacific expedition 158 Palladio, Andrea 4 Panopticon 28–30, 33 “paradigmatic mob” 59 Pasquin, Anthony 69 patriarchy 108–14 Paulson, Ronald 59, 71 Pei, I. M. 28 Pelopidas 247n21 philanthropy 108; private 108–9; public 109 Pickersgill, Richard 156 Picture Theory (Mitchell) 37, 47n51 Plague of 1665 (London) 16–17

“A Plain and Succinct Narrative of the Gordon Riots” (Holcroft) 78 plunder, art of 64–73 Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris, 10 August 1792 (Zoffany) 64–73, 67 Pocock, J. G. A. 3, 247n14 Poe, Edgar Allen 7, 51, 53–4; on riotspace 55 politicized urban space 50 Pope, Alexander 20, 232 Porter, Roy 108 Postle, Martin: Johan Zoffany 69 postmodernism 61 Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Jameson) 160n5 Pouget, Pierre 172 Pressly, William L. 69 “principle of perfect visibility” 32 privacy: vs. domesticity 89, 118n6; Johnsonian brand of 117 private-estate space: British “Worthies” in 230–3 private interest 102 private philanthropy 108–9 private space: controlling 33; vs. public space 17; and visuality 37 property 111–12 public philanthropy 109 public-service mission: spatial dimension of 175–84 public space: and crowd 61; policing, during Gordon Riots of 1780 73–80; vs. private space 17; transformations in 99–104; and visuality 37 “Publishing the Private” (McKeon) 120n47 purchasing power 62–3 Queen Anne 143 Raleigh, Walter 232 The Rambler (Johnson) 108 random thoughts on archaeological fragments 224–45 Rawdon, Arthur 144 Ray, John 137, 165n44 real space 27; fiction in 90–4 reason, spatial alignment of 184–9 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 64, 65–6 Renaissance 135, 156, 233

Index  269 Reynolds, Joshua 91, 105, 115, 242 Richardson, John 156 Richardson, Samuel 9, 90, 190 Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham 225, 247n20; and Temple of Ancient Virtue 231; and Temple of British Liberty 231; and Temple of British Worthies 230–3; and Temple of Modern Virtue 231; and private-estate space 230–3 Riot Act of 1714–15 82n10 riot-space 7–8, 55–6, 76; eighteenthcentury crowd 56–64; mature (and gothic) early-Victorian crowd 53–6; see also Gordon Riots of 1780 Roberts, H. 62 Rogers, Pat 22 Royal Academy of Music 235 The Royal Academy of Painters and Sculptors 159n2 Royal Society 136, 141 Rule Britannia 49n71 Rupke, Nicholaas 127 Rysbrack, John Michael 231 Sacrifice of a Hindoo Widow upon the Funeral Pile of Her Husband (Zoffany) 68 St. George’s Hospital 108 St. James’s Chronicle or the British Evening Post 238 St. Luke’s Hospital 109 St. Paul’s Cathedral 23–4, 25, 26 Sancho, Ignatius 78, 94, 96, 108, 148 Saunders, George 222n72 A Scene in the Champ de Mars, Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers on 12 August 1792, with a Portrait of the Duke of Orleans (Zoffany) 69 Scheemakers, Peter 225, 231 Scott, William 115 “scripting of national archive” 5, 10, 233–4 self-expression 37 Seller, John 22 Seven Years War 128, 209 Shakespeare, William 225, 232, 233 Shakespeare Jubilee 227–30, 246n9 Sharp, Samuel 106 Sherard, William 144 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 67, 236, 240

Shoemaker, Robert 72, 81n7 The Shortest Way with Dissenters 164n33 Sinfield, Alan 48n64 slave labor 142 slavery 112–13 Sloane, Hans 6, 131, 136, 142, 143, 151, 170n97, 190, 211; natural history collection 125; pharmaceutical cabinet 129; shoes collection 131, 132, 133; A Voyage to Jamaica 143–5, 147, 167n66, 168n68 Smirke, Robert 173, 214n7 “social edifices” 71 social space 24, 35, 82n22 The Society for the Encouragement of Arts 40 The Society of the Spectacle (Debord) 83n38 Solander, Carl 152, 159n1 Solander, Daniel 9, 126, 131, 141, 142, 152 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in West Africa (Bluett) 147–8 Somers, John 151 space: commemorative 5; described 3, 4; Henri Lefebvre concept of 47n56; materiality of 101; mythical/ real 27 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 100 spatial alignment: of reason and order 184–9 spatial dimension: of corporate identity 172–213; of nativity 227–30; of public-service mission 175–84 “Spatial Wars: A Career Report” (Bauman) 221n70 spectral logic 189–94 Stafford, Barbara Maria 36, 46n50, 160n9 Stedman, John G. 96 Stent, Peter 22 Stephens, Frederic George 56 Sterne, Laurence 108 Stewart, Rachel 104–5 “structure of human signatures” 149–59 Surveillance, birth of 27–35 Sussman, Charlotte 42n5 Suzman, Janet 226

270 Index Talbot, Catherine 187, 191, 201 Taylor, John H. 165n49 Taylor, William 240 The Tempest (Shakespeare) 225–6 Temple, Richard see Richard Temple, Viscount Cobham Temple, William Johnson 98–9 textual geography 2 Thompson, E. P. 237, 249n52 Thornton, T. 61 Thornton, William 27 Thrale, Hester Lynch 98 Tim Hitchcock 52, 72, 81n7 topological space 42n4 A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (Defoe) 20, 23–5 town houses: London 104–8; role of 105 transformations in public sphere 99–104 see also public space travel narratives 1 A Treatise on Civil Architecture (Chambers) 45n29 Two sermons, preached at Henleyupon-Thames, on the Jubilee, occasioned by King George the Third Entering the Fiftieth year of his Reign 39 Two Treatises of Government (Locke) 142 University of Montpellier 137 urban architectonics 24–5 urban development: and Daniel Defoe 20–7; and London 20–7; planned 24 urban space 18; politicized 50 utilitarianism 29 “The Value of Money in EighteenthCentury England” (Hume) 62 Vanbrugh, John 236, 248n24 Vardy, John 181–3 Velázquez, Diego 30–1 visual culture: and Britain 37; Enlightenment time-space and 35–41; modern vs. Renaissance 36

visual imperative: and Daniel Defoe 20–7; and London 20–7 visuality 11n3, 29; and authority 37–8; and benevolent power 38; and private space 37; and public space 37 visual turn 3 A Voyage to Jamaica (Sloane) 143–5, 147, 167n66, 168n68 voyeurism 213 Waingrow, Marshall 88 Wallerstein, Immanuel 12n5, 48n65 Walpole, Robert 231 Ward, John 170n91 Watson, William 153 Watt, Martha 141 The Way of the World 233 Weber, William 241 We Have Never Been Modern (Latour) 163n28 West, Gilbert 232 Western progress 11n1 Westminster General Infirmary 108 What Do Pictures Want? (Mitchell) 77 Wilkerson, Francis 156 Wilkes, John 238, 240 Wilkins, John 136 Williams, Anna 105–6, 107 Williams, Francis 148 Williams, Zachariah 106 William III of England 151, 232 Wilson, David M. 128, 137, 151, 185, 218n34 Wren, Christopher 23, 25, 136 Wynn, Watkin Williams 241 Yeager, Martin D. 107 Žižek, Slavoj 42n8 Zoffany, Johann 51, 84n50, 171n105; and French revolution 66–8; Plundering the King’s Cellar at Paris 64–73, 67; and revolution in France 66–7