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Diagrams of Emotion: Hogarth’s Blush and Maori Tattoos

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Thomas Willis (1621-1675) thought there were two equal and opposite impulses at work when a person blushed, a modest retreat and an aggressive advance. In his book on mimicry, Dazzled and Deceived (2009), Peter Forbes has argued that all systems of natural mimicry, whether functioning as camouflage or warning, follow the same basic pattern of modest retreat and obtrusive truculence.  Using the pictorial tools of analysis offered by William Hogarth, I discuss the relation of blushing to tattooing by comparing Sidney Parkinson‘s drawings of tattooed Maori heads (1773) first with Hogarth’s diagram of a blush, and finally with Titian’s Diana and Actaeon, hoping to suggest with a reasonable amount of plausibility that these all belong to the patterns of mimicry discussed by Forbes.

In one of the most testing passages of Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty (1753) he attempts a theory of three-dimensional viewing by asking us to suppose a hollow sphere.  He invites the reader to imagine that the sphere is observed from two positions, from the outside where the surface appears convex, and from the inner where it will seem concave.  By having an eye placed at some distance from the object and the other sitting at the centre of it we shall obtain, he promises, “the true and full idea of what is called the outlines of a figure.”  If we habituate ourselves to this combination of a real and imagined position vis-a-vis the things we presently see, he promises we “will gradually arrive the knack of recalling them . . . when the objects themselves are not before [us],” so that not just spheres, cubes and pyramids but even the most subtle or irregular shapes will be as present to the fancy as if they were still in front of us (Hogarth 1810:  44-5).  In staking this claim Hogarth flies in the face of one of the central tenets of empiricism, namely that an object and our impression or idea of it are entirely different.  Thomas Reid was adamant about the “unphilosophical fiction of images in the brain” because it was axiomatic with him that “no sensation can resemble any external object” (Reid 1997: 121, 176).  His conclusion concerning what he calls the “geometry of visibles” is precisely the opposite of Hogarth’s:  “The geometrician, while he looks at his diagram, and demonstrates a proposition, hath a figure present to his eye, which is only a sign and representative of a tangible figure . . . and that these two figures of have different properties, so that what he demonstrates of the one, is not true of the other” (Reid 1997: 105-6).   The imagined position of the eye at the centre of a scooped out egg, for example, is a figment adding nothing to our visual knowledge of the whole shape.

I labour this point because it is important for two reasons, first because it illustrates a significant difference between the sensationism of empiricists such as Hobbes, Locke, and Reid, and the Epicureanism of thinkers such as Walter Charleton and Thomas Stanley in the seventeenth century and David Hartley and Joseph Priestley in the eighteenth who believed, like Hogarth, that there was an immediate and intimate relation between the impression of a thing and the idea we have of it.  Like Lucretius, their chief source of Epicurean materialism, these philosophers believed that there was no firewall protecting the mind or soul from the bombardment of the senses by light and sound.  Indeed, Lucretius believed that every sensation arose from the print made by traces of the actual object, whether it was its film or effigy lodging in the eye, its effluvia entering the nose, or its reverberations penetrating the ear.  The idea of a thing was therefore continuous with its material reality, it was not a sign or a symbol fashioned by the mind.   Lucretius believed that sight, for instance, was something like a motion picture, with a succession of images emitted at great speed from the object striking the retina to give us not the illusion of shape, colour and motion but the immediate print of it (Lucretius 2006, 279-97; iv, ll. 26-268).

Figure 1: from The Analysis of Beauty by William Hogarth

Figure 1: from The Analysis of Beauty by William Hogarth

The second important reason for emphasising these rival epistemologies is that it gives us some sense of what is at stake when in the Analysis Hogarth arrives at the topic of light and colour, and begins to consider how they affect his three-dimensional approach to volume and depth.   Pre-eminent in the artist’s palette, he says, is flesh-colour, which in portraiture moves between the extremes of black and white via the bluish tints around the temple and the rosy flush on healthy cheeks and lips.  It is here that he tackles the nature of the blush, making an extraordinary attempt at a diagram with a black and white line drawing (Figure 1).  Now there are three points I want make about this image.  The first and simplest is that it attempts to circumvent the limitations of copperplate by treating it as if it were an acquatint, using shading to suggest variations in colour.  Second, since there is no possibility of suggesting a blush on a woman’s cheek by means of cross-hatching without making it look like a bruise, Hogarth presents his blush as if it were a photographic negative, reversing the values of black and white so that a very faint thinning of the ink over the cheek can suggest the blush, while the whiteness of the lips stand for red.  Thus he exploits (he says) the natural gullibility of the eye, an organ easily imposed upon and which, if it were not controlled, would show us things double and upside down (177).  Third, he is adapting his technique of 3D inside/outside vision not for a sphere or an egg but for the face.  He has told us that the skin is composed of two envelopes.  There is the outer cuticle that is as transparent as isinglass, and “would show the fat, lean and all the blood-vessels, just as they lie under it” (187) if it were not for the inner cutis which, although it is opaque, is constituted of fibres whose coloured juices and meshes determine the individual complexion.  In some young women, he says, “the texture is so fine . . . that they redden, or turn pale, on the least occasion” (188).   Somehow Hogarth has managed in this diagram of a face to install an inner eye, capable of locating a lightening of the concave interior of uniform blood-red just in those places where, on the convex outside, red would be most on display against the surrounding white.

We call this a diagram, but it is not the sort of structure Reid is thinking of in his geometry of visibles, because instead of establishing a decisive difference between the thing itself and the formal outline that represents it, it is doing the opposite by insisting, perhaps rather awkwardly, on their coincidence.   In some important respects this kind of diagrammatic experiment conforms to the insights about Hogarth’s art which John Bender began to analyse in his essay “Matters of Fact: Virtual Witnessing and the Public in Hogarth’s Narratives” when he talked about his facticity as a kind of staged realism.   Far from schematising the relation between the spectator and the object, this staging (Bender argued) restores the possibility of a first encounter’s immediacy–perhaps beyond the zone of comfort, for he quotes Jean Rouquet to the effect that Hogarth’s vision “corresponds too closely to the objects it represents” (Bender 2012: 59; Rouquet 1746: 2).  In his recent book The Culture of Diagram, Bender and his co-author Michael Marrinan study this proximity of vision to object by turning to the function of correlation that the non-perspectival organisation of diagram encourages.  By dividing the sight-lines up between different points, the artist makes it possible for the viewer to assemble the different parts in a new configuration, and in effect to initiate a cognitive event (Bender and Marrinan 2010: 74).  They single out Hogarth’s “Satire on False Perspective” as an exemplary lesson in diagrammatic correlation because of its overlay of `fractional visual fields’ that challenge the assumptions of one-point perspective by situating in the eye in a grid of rival viewing positions.

Such a challenge is not just practical or technical; it is also affective.  Bender and Marrinan write, “Hogarth’s humour erupts at the juncture where the fixed, mathematically governed focus of classical linear perspective meets the curvature of physical eyes and their continuous scanning motion” (Bender and Marrinan 2010: 63).  And what this humour produces they call “the effect of disequilibrium called amusement” (63).  The affective element in games of visual disruption is much enhanced when the object is a blushing face, for the lines of it are easily understood as indices of temperament or emotion, lowered eyelids and the face turned away and so on, but when they are reinforced by a colour directly expressive of timidity, joy, anger, arousal, or shame then the impact is greater.  And when that colour is perceived as it were from the inside rather than the out, disequilibrium makes room for affect.  It is not too far-fetched then to venture the claim that Hogarth’s tiny outline of a blush turned inside out is in fact a diagram of emotion.

Figure 2: "Moko" Maori facial tatoo. Sidney Parkinson, from Hawkesworth's Account of Some Voyages (1773).

Figure 2: “Moko” Maori facial tatoo. Sidney Parkinson, from Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages… (1773).

Twenty years after Hogarth published the Analysis, the British public was treated to further examples of this diagrammatic art in the shape of Sidney Parkinson’s two portraits of Maori from the Poverty Bay region of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s North Island, published in John Hawkesworth‘s An Account of the Voyages and Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere (1773).  These show two very different types of facial tattoo.  One is called moko (Figure 2), composed of whorls and scrolls typical of Maori carving on the finials of meeting houses and the stern-posts of canoes, often framing an ancestral figure or poupou; the other is called puhoro (Figure 3), which bears a remarkable resemblance to Hogarth’s diagram (Figure 1) .  It is a much freer design of volutes and lines derived from the decorative art on the rafters of buildings, known as kowhaiwhai.  The history of puhoro as a facial tattoo is difficult to tell, since by the early 19th century it seems to have been reserved exclusively for thigh ornament; whereas moko very soon after contact became the exclusive design for the face.  Very quickly one observes that moko is an ornament inscribed on the surface, like ink on paper and not, like puhoro, making its way through the ink in the manner of Hogarth’s blush.  Done by chiselling the charred black of candlenut into the subcutanenous layer of the skin, moko was a visual challenge intended to emphasise the contours and furrows of the countenance, particularly those that come into play in grimaces of aggression and fury.  It is also worthwhile pointing out that a moko was unique to each individual and was commonly supposed to reveal a shorthand genealogy as well as the identity of the owner, rather like the heraldic devices on the shields of knights at arms.  Many of the chiefs who signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 did it with their moko.  So as well as the emotions incident to the close encounters of battle, this kind of tattoo was the cicatrice of an exceedingly painful set of incisions in the flesh, the perpetual demonstration of a fearful glory, or mana, connecting each hero to his ancestors by means of a design carved into his memory as well as his skin.

Figure 3: "Puhoro" Maori facial tattoo. Sidney Parkinson. Hawkesworth's "An Account of the Voyages..." (1773).

Figure 3: “Puhoro” Maori facial tattoo. Sidney Parkinson, from Hawkesworth’s Account of the Voyages… (1773).

Puhoro on the other hand, being seen in negative with white lines defined by a shaded ground, seems much more discreet.  If moko is the sublime, a powerful emission of energy outwards, associating the surface of the skin with the external ornaments of buildings and canoes, puhoro is the beautiful, belonging to the inside of houses, and in some sense the interior of persons.  What the nature of this interior might be is best approached via the idea of tattoo as an affective diagram.  To early European visitors moko seemed not hard to work out:  it was designed to disturb the symmetry of the face, fixing it in a glare that would be frightful in war–at least this was the opinion of Joseph Banks on Cook‘s first voyage, and of J.R. Forster on his second.  Neither of them however was able to view the phenomenon dispassionately:  Banks found himself revolted by faces rendered “enormously ugly,” but at the same time he was fascinated by “the immence Elegance and Justness of the figures in which it is form’d” (Banks 1962: 2.213-4).  It prompted Forster to remember the other side of the affective spectrum, for these carved masks of rage reminded him of the scars left in the foreheads of Polynesian women who cut themselves in order to exhibit in the blood streaming down their faces the reality of their grief for dead relatives or departing friends (Forster 1996: 347).  The most extensive analysis of aggressive disruptions of symmetry in Polynesian art is Nicholas Thomas’s essay “Kiss the Baby Goodbye,” where he explores the implications of objects, whether tattooed, carved or painted, which come too close to their viewers and throw them off guard.  “Like erotica, these artifacts have effects which are indexed in a viewer’s body, which precede and supersede deliberate reading . . . unstable patterns would disempower people and empower others” (Thomas 1995: 101, 99).   So it is mobile and haptic; it means to constitute a physical event for whoever looks at it.  Thomas suggests that the bulges and bends of Sepik and Asmat shields, accentuated by the designs carved and painted on them, exhibit a palpable instability and a pulsing energy–energy analogous, I’d suggest, to the humour that erupts in Hogarth’s “Satire on Perspective,” except that the latter is a diagram of amusement, and these are diagrams of dismay.

Of Parkinson’s tattooed faces, Bernard Smith remarked that they showed no emotion (Smith 1985-87: 1.34-43), and there are perhaps two reasons for that.  The first is that in drawing a facial tattoo a conflict inevitably occurs between the outline of the face and the structure of the design, since that was what was intended by it.  The second is that the conflict is palpable, an effect of the proximity of face to viewer that floods the shared space with energy:  the face is not showing emotion in the sense of representing it, it is causing it to happen.   But how exactly does it do it?  Is it simply by the hydraulics of power, sucking it out of the viewer and storing it in the object being viewed?   Banks is certainly repelled by tattoos, but he is also attracted by them; and in the process of a visual dialectics Bronwen Douglas calls countersigning (Douglas 2005, 51) it is evident that the energy transmitted by a tattoo, lodged in the body when the tattoo was made, is expelled and then returned to it via the body it affects, whether the impulse is provided by revulsion or fascination.   In this respect the link between moko and the aesthetics of the sublime grows stronger, for Longinus noted not only that it struck the auditors or viewers like a blow, leaving them prostrate and in the condition Kant calls Hemmung, but that it was soon followed by a surge of power he called Ergiessung, and Longinus “transport,” when the projected force is rebounded upon the projector, and the victim feels suddenly like the aggressor (Longinus 1739: 14).    Like any challenge, then, moko is an incitement to fight; it is not meant to terminate in the paralysis of the enemy.  It is both the menace of violence and the expectation of it, a weapon and a shield, the trace of blood spilt and the promise of more to flow.

snake

Figure 4

Blood has a milder but still dynamic function in puhoro, where force is not projected so much as apprehended.  As if positioned in a blood-red interior, the inner eye encounters another eye outside that may be wishing to see more than it should.  Its lattice of white perpendicular white lines and transverse volutes, showing up against a darkened or blushing skin, acts like a fan or jalousie to obstruct one option of the viewer and to encourage another.  It obstructs whatever advantage might have accrued from seeing a face reacting to the surprise of being seen, and it encourages the intrusive eye to enjoy its own curvature, and to indulge the scanning motion that is its natural rhythm.   According to Nicholas Thomas kowhaiwhai above all Maori designs figures the motion of things and amuses the eye by inviting it to roll from one optical complexity to another (Thomas 1995:  103-4).

Figure 5: Gunboat HMS Kildangan in dazzle camouflage, 1918. Imperial War Museum, London. Printed in Forbes, Dazzled and Deceived.

Figure 5: Gunboat HMS Kildangan in dazzle camouflage, 1918. Imperial War Museum, London. Printed in Forbes, Dazzled and Deceived.

If tattooing owed anything to forms of mimicry in the natural world, then moko would belong to those dazzle patterns of snakes that advertise their venom with loud bands of yellow and red (Figure 4), a technique adapted during the second world war to confuse measurements of the heading and speed of warships while proclaiming very distinctly their deadliness (Figure 5).  Puhoro on the other hand would belong with the arts of camouflage that make nakedness look like something else, such as those butterflies that simulate leaves, and spiders that get by in life by pretending to be bird-droppings (Figure 6).

Figure 6. Photo by Flickr user ToddinNantou.

Figure 6: Photo by Flickr user ToddinNantou.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Figure 7: Titian, 'Diana and Actaeon', 1556-59 © The National Gallery London / The National Galleries of Scotland

Figure 7: Titian, ‘Diana and Actaeon’, 1556-59 © The National Gallery London / The National Galleries of Scotland

The swirl of energy around the variety of positions charted by adaptive mimicry, what Roger Caillois calls “sculpture photography” (Forbes 2009: 135) and we have been calling 3D affective diagrams, provides the drama one of Titian’s greatest pictures, Diana and Actaeon (Figure 7), painted in the mid-sixteenth century and recently the inspiration of a new three-part ballet called Metamorphosis: Titian 2012, first performed in London in at the Royal Opera House in the summer of 2012.   While hunting in the forest Actaeon stumbles on Diana’s pool, and sees her naked; the goddess is outraged, and is about to fling water in his face that will turn him into his own quarry, a deer.  Of the many artists attracted to this scene, Titian is one of the few to have shown Diana blushing, and almost I think the only one not to show Actaeon with horns growing out of his head. We can see that her blush organises what we might call the diagram of the whole picture, for with the exception of Diana, her black companion and the nymph peering from behind the arch, all the other faces are unlit or half-shaded, as if each is ashamed at having caused the figurehead of chastity to be caught in her bare skin by a man.  Whatever erotic charge might have been in store for Actaeon has backfired, and so we find him engaged in two contrary motions at once, coming forward to look and going back to hide.  Diana herself is engaged in the same awkward manoeuvre, lifting a veil and an arm to conceal her face while at the same time seeming to wind herself up for the throwing of water.  So at either side of the composition a pulse of inward/outward movements is in play that renders the two main figures quite awkward, for Actaeon’s feet seem to be going in a different direction from his torso and his head, contributing to a total effect of what might have been wonder in a painting by Poussin but here looks like extreme uncertainty.  The swivelling of Diana’s body is not at all sinuous, for the leg being dried by her attendant throws it out of balance, while equivocal position of her upper body makes her head look as if it were borrowed from a smaller person.  Her well-lit blushing face, shadowed by the black one alongside, condenses the alternatives set out in the picture at large between the aggressive dazzle of red laid on white, and the recessive possibilities of shade.   Here white emerges from the dark ground of the black woman’s face as if in mimicry of a blush–just like Hogarth’s diagram and Parkinson’s rendition of puhoro.

The woman staring from behind the column quadrates the picture, for while at either side the drama of attraction and repulsion is being played out, there is another occurring on the transverse axis that connects the peering half-hidden nymph on the inside to the spectator on the outside.  Her gaze is directed diagonally at Actaeon suggesting that ours is directed at parallel angle towards Diana, implicating us in Actaeon’s erotic shock.  At an exhibition at the National Gallery mounted to coincide with the performance of the ballet Metamorphosis, this picture was hung by the artist Mark Wallinger near a side room where visitors could look through a peephole into a cabinet where a real naked woman was taking a bath.  Asked what he was aiming at, Wallinger replied, `to make the viewer a little uncomfortable.’  Let me end with a quotation of Thomas Willis, a close affiliate of those Epicureans I began by invoking, on the dual pulse of the blush

Concerning this Passion [of shame], ‘tis observable that when the Corporeall Soul being abashed, is enforced to repress its Compass, she notwithstanding being desirous, as it were to hide this Affection, drives forth outwardly the Blood, and stirs up a redness in the Cheeks. (Willis 1683, 54).

He suggests the blush veils the shame, but insofar as it is directed outwards against a likely witness, it belongs to what he calls the power of dilation or emanation, when the soul “erects and stretches out it self beyond measure’ in its desire to `enlarge the Sphear of [its] Irradiation” (Willis 1683: 45).  The vital energy that animates the blush of anger is mixed up with the blood that signals the contraction of the soul’s compass.  One blush is looking to camouflage itself from an intrusive gaze, the other to dazzle the eye that has presumed to look where it shouldn’t; but the energy they draw upon is the same. In Diana and Actaeon, in Hogarth’s diagram from The Country Dance, and in moko and puhoro tattoos, the same double pulse of energy is in play.  In all three the action of looking and the response to being seen are distributed in three dimensions, so that even the viewer’s eye is implicated in a set of visual contingencies that Lucretius would have called an event.

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References

  •  Joseph Banks  1962, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, ed. J.C. Beaglehole, 2 vols., Sydney: Public Library of New South Wales and Angus and Robertson.
  • John Bender  2012,  `Matters of Fact:  Virtual Witnessing and the Public in Hogarth’s Narratives,’ in Ends of Enlightenment, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  •  John Bender and Michael Marrinan  2010, The Culture of Diagram, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
  • Bronwen Douglas  2005, “‘Cureous Figures,’ European Voyagers and Tatau/Tattoo in Polynesia, 1595-1800,” in Thomas, Cole, and Douglas eds., Tattoo.
  • Peter Forbes  2009, Dazzled and Deceived, New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
  • John Hawkesworth ed.  1773, An Account of the Voyages and Discoveries in the Southern Hemisphere, 3 vols., London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell.
  •  William Hogarth  1810, Analysis of Beauty, London: Samuel Bagster
  •  Longinus  1739,  On the Sublime, trans. William Smith, London: J. Watts.
  • Lucretius (Titus Lucretius Carus)  2006, On the Nature of Things, trans. W.H.D. Rouse, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
  •  Thomas Reid  1997, An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense, ed. Derek R. Brookes, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
  • Bernard Smith and Ruediger Joppien  1985-88, Art of Captain Cook’s Voyages, 3 vols., New Haven: Paul Mellon Center for British Art.
  • Nicholas Thomas  1995,  `Kiss the Baby Goodbye: Kowhaiwhai and Aesthetics in Aotearoa New Zealand,’ Critical Inquiry 22 (Autumn 1995), 90-121.
  •  Nicholas Thomas, Anna Cole, and Bronwen Douglas eds.  2005,  Tattoo:  Bodies, Art and Exchange in the Pacific and the West, London: Reaktion.
  •  Thomas Willis  1683,  Two Discourses concerning the Soul of Brutes, trans. Sam. Pordage, London:  Thomas Dring.

Pride & Prejudice at 200

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Pride and Prejudice, First Edition. Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University

Pride and Prejudice, First Edition. Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University.

Jane Austen scholars are currently marking the 200th anniversary of the publication of Pride and Prejudice.  Here are just a few of the many commemorations from around the web:

Megan Mulder, Special Collections Librarian at Z. Smith Reynolds Library, Wake Forest University, describes the novel’s long path to publication, its reception by critics, and the larger context of Austen’s publishing career in a post for the Z. Smith Reynolds Library Special Collections Blog.  Her informative post includes several photographs of Wake Forest’s first editions of Austen’s work, as well as those of her predecessor Frances Burney.

Devoney Looser, in an essay for the Los Angeles Review of Books, reviews two recent scholarly books that attempt to make sense of Austen’s enduring appeal:

The permeable boundaries between the popular and sometimes absurd Austen and the scholarly Austen surely matter in ways that will be long in unraveling. Recent Austen scholarship has capitalized on this high-low traffic, mirroring the marketing of “I [Heart] Darcy” bumper stickers more than we might like to admit — and I don’t exempt myself from the charge of opportunism. I am an English professor who has the good fortune to teach Jane Austen by day. By night, I skate on the local roller derby team as my alter ego, Stone Cold Jane Austen. As a result, I regularly field such farcical questions as “What would Jane Austen think of tattoos?” and, from my son, “Mommy, who is Jane Austen? Are you Jane Austen?” So I do not speak here from on high. The shrines to Jane Austen in my life involve sweat-stained wrist guards, not 19th-century editions of her works. But even I find myself asking on occasion, “What is the point of our sifting through and documenting all of today’s Austen-infused dreck?” It is especially heartening, then, to find emerging work on Austen and popular culture that moves beyond recounting how she has been mashed up with zombies, vampires, or porn. The best new work asks not only the multivalent, unanswerable question, “Why Austen? Why Now?” It also carefully charts “How did we get here?”

Both Claudia L. Johnson’s Jane Austen’s Cults and Cultures and Janine Barchas’s Matters of Fact in Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity are exemplars of this more sophisticated work on Austen and popular culture. Johnson’s book makes sense, directly and indirectly, of the factual-fiction impulse behind novels like Pattillo’s Jane Austen Ruined My Life, telling the fascinating story of how the mystique of Austen was gradually created, maintained, and spun out in unpredictable ways in the years after her death in 1817. Johnson unearths both the many-sided truths and the wide-ranging implications of our false fantasies of Austen, drawing conclusions from evidence ranging from portraits and memorials to fairy tales and relics. By contrast, Barchas makes a compelling case for our acknowledging some of the real-life 18th- and 19th-century people who may stand behind Austen’s fictional characters, in order to reveal long occluded ways of seeing Austen’s relationship with history and celebrity culture.

Elsewhere in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Susan Greenfield and Audrey Bilger offer an engaging account of the fate of Pride and Prejudice over the past 200 years, and Ted Scheinman reviews a new biography of Austen.

In 2006 Linda V. Troost published an analysis of three film interpretations of Elizabeth’s visit to Pemberley in Eighteenth-Century Fiction.  You can read the entire article without charge here.

Want to celebrate?  Pride & Prejudice 200 collects listings of commemorative events worldwide.

An 18th-Century Argument Against the Death Penalty

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Murder in the Carriage (Probably a Design for The Tyburn Chronicle) by Samuel Wale, 1721-1786, British

Murder in the Carriage (Probably a Design for The Tyburn Chronicle) by Samuel Wale, 1721-1786, British. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), Enlightenment philosopher and Italian jurist, is back in the news. Lawyers for convicted murderer Jody Lee Miles in Maryland have used his argument against the death penalty.

Beccaria thought punishment was effective when it was certain and swift, but not necessarily when it was violent. “If I can demonstrate that it is neither necessary nor useful,” he wrote, “I shall have gained the cause of humanity.” The emotional appeal may be compelling, but it actually hinges on an important argument about rights and power: Beccaria didn’t think the state had the right to punish by death. No individual had the right to take another’s life, and if the state derived its authority from the people, capital punishment amounted to “a war of the whole nation against one citizen.” You can read the whole thing – along with his exception for treason, which provided the loophole in the Maryland constitution – in his Essay on Crimes and Punishments. (It’s interesting to note how his reasoning on the subject of government power also leads him to side with the gun rights lobby.)

Beccaria’s was very much an Enlightenment project – an attempt to remake corrupt institutions by explaining and justifying the limits of their power. It was Beccaria who first explored the concept of “utility,” later codified in Utilitarianism. He was a major influence on English philosopher and liberal Jeremy Bentham, who gave us the Panopticon. If you’re interested in exploring the eighteenth-century justice system first hand, at least in the English context, check out London Lives. It documents the crime and social policy that Beccaria and Bentham were concerned with.

Erasmus Darwin and the Threat of Materialism

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Henry Fuseli, Drawing for the Frontispiece of Erasmus Darwin’s “The Botanic Garden.” Alternate Title: Flora Attired by the Elements. Graphite on slightly textured, cream laid paper. Sheet (sight): 8 3/4 x 6 3/8 inches (22.2 x 16.2 cm). Inscribed on back in graphite: “Fuseli evidently drew this and A. Smith engraved it / The engraving being published June 1st 1791 by J. Johnson. / St. Pauls Churchyard.” Watermark: Britannia. Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Lowell Libson. B2007.2

A Digest of “‘Mere Matter’:  Causality, Subjectivity and Aesthetic Form in Erasmus Darwin.”  Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.  No. 56 (2009).  <http://www.erudit.org/revue/ravon/2009/v/n56/1001100ar.html>.

Allison Dushane, University of Arizona

 

In his two-part medical treatise Zoonomia (1794-1796), Erasmus Darwin—physician, scientist, and inventor—anticipates his grandson Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory by making a series of startling suggestions:

…would it be too bold to imagine, that in the great length of time, since the earth began to exist, perhaps millions of ages before the commencement of the history of mankind, would it be too bold to imagine, that all warm-blooded animals have arisen from one living filament, which The Great First Cause endued with animality, with the power of acquiring new parts, attended with new propensities, directed by irritations, sensations, volitions, and associations; and thus possessing the faculty of continuing to improve by its own inherent activity, and of delivering down those improvements by generation to its posterity, world without end!  (Zoonomia, Part I, Section XXXIX.IV.8)

In a single passage, Darwin undermines a creationist perspective on the earth’s history, links the development of all animal and human life to a single “living filament,” or speck of matter, and suggests that the ongoing activity of that matter itself, without the active guidance of an outside force, is responsible for the continued generation of the moral and physical universe.  He later incorporated these ideas into long epic poems that made him one of the most popular poets of the 1790s.

However, in the late-eighteenth century, particularly in the years surrounding the French Revolution, such evolutionary ideas were even more controversial than they are today.  The conservative publication British Critic condemned Darwin’s evolutionary theory, and the Anti-Jacobin or Weekly Examiner, established in 1797, singled out Zoonomia for censure and published two poems that attacked Darwin’s work in parody, labeling him as an atheist, a Jacobin, and a materialist.  His friend and collaborator Joseph Priestley, a scientist and dissenting minister best known for the description and naming of oxygen, also aroused controversy through his materialist ideas and faced much harsher treatment:  in 1791, a riotous mob burned his papers and scientific instruments, driving him to emigrate to America.

What did it mean to be labeled as a “materialist” in eighteenth century Britain?  Or, to put it another way, why was—and is—materialism perceived as threatening?  Why did Darwin’s poetry in particular draw such negative attention?  The answer is philosophical as well as political.  The public perception of materialism was shaped by the systems of several prominent philosophers of the French Enlightenment.  For example, LaMettrie, upon surveying the work of the emerging field of physiology, concludes his 1748 Man a Machine with the invitation to “conclude boldly that man is a machine, and that in the whole universe there is but a single substance differently modified.”  Likewise, the Baron D’Holbach begins his 1770 Systeme de la Nature with the declaration that “man is the work of nature:  he exists in Nature:  he is submitted to her laws:  he cannot deliver himself from them; nor can he step beyond them even in thought” (13).  These images of a man-machine imprisoned by natural laws haunted writers who otherwise embraced the potential they saw in the Enlightenment project for human progress through a scientific program based on reason, observation, and experiment.

Darwin’s ideas, however, were more dynamic, proposing that each individual is at once a product of the ongoing processes of nature on a microscopic level and a contributor to the ongoing development of nature on a macroscopic level.  In Zoonomia, he looks to the “improving excellence observable in every part of the creation” as evidence for the “idea of our present situation being a state of probation, which by our exertions we may improve, and are consequently responsible for our actions.”  His ideas were threatening, not because they suggest that the human is only a cog in a machine, but because they propose that the human self is neither given nor stable, but an ongoing work in progress.  Darwin’s version of materialism points to the limits of individual human agency and overturns a conception of human life as the center of the universe.

James Gillray, “New Morality; -or- the Promis’d Installment of the High-Priest of the Theophilanthropes, with the Homage of Leviathan and his Suite.” 1798. Paper. AN943289001 © The Trustees of the British Museum. Department: Prints & Drawings. Registration number: 1868,0808.6762 (Note:  At the center of the image, a man standing behind the cornucopia has a basket of plants on his head, and each plant sprouts a bonnet-rouge.  This is labeled ‘Zoonomia or Jacobin Plants’).

Darwin’s first major literary publication in 1789, The Loves of the Plants, was written to illustrate the Linnaean system of classification, using heroic couplets, the conventions of epic, and references to history and mythology to animate the adventures of a host of personified plants.  The Loves of the Plants became Part II of his longer project, The Botanic Garden, when an edition bound with Part I, The Economy of Vegetation, came out three years later.  His posthumously published The Temple of Nature more explicitly developed his evolutionary ideas.  What makes Darwin’s poetry fascinating isn’t necessarily the fact that the verse focuses on scientific subject matter.  Rather, it is the work’s extensive prose “Philosophical Notes” that link the images and actions in the poem to the work and writing of contemporary scientists, inventors, and artists through extensive citation and commentary.  His poetry, which aims to “enlist the Imagination under the banner of science,” is explicitly aimed at educating—and exciting—the poetry-reading public about scientific discoveries.  For example, consider this passage depicting the origins of the universe through something like a proto-big bang theory, for which Darwin came under attack for its early vision of an evolutionary and self-sustaining nature:

“LET THERE BE LIGHT!” proclaim’d the ALMIGHTY LORD,
Astonish’d Chaos heard the potent word;—
Through all his realms the kindling Ether runs,
And the mass starts into a million suns;
Earths round each sun with quick explosions burst,
And second planets issue from the first;
Bend, as they journey with projectile force,
In bright ellipses their reluctant course;
Orbs wheel in orbs, round centres centres roll,
And form, self-balanced, one revolving Whole.  (Economy, Canto I, lines 103-114)

In Darwin’s footnote to this passage, he muses:  “We can have no idea of a natural power, which could project a Sun out of Chaos…of the power of which under immeasurable degrees of heat, and compression, we are yet ignorant” (1.1.105n).  Despite that basic ignorance of nature’s power, which comprises a part of the threat of materialism, Darwin proceeds to narrate nature’s processes in tandem with an account of man’s efforts to understand and harness them for human ends.

In 1798, the Anti-Jacobin published James Gillray’s political cartoon, The New Morality, which features a group of radical politicians and literary figures marching to worship at a temple of French ideas.  It depicts Darwin in the mob along with Priestley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Thelwall, William Godwin, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and it also references The Botanic Garden with the image of a basket of anthropomorphized riotous plants.  The Anti-Jacobin also published a long poem, “The Progress of Man. A Didactic Poem,” which attacks dynamic matter theories like Darwin’s, aiming a parody squarely at the above passage:

Whether some great, supreme o’er-ruling Power
Stretched forth its arm at nature’s natal hour,
Composed this mighty whole with plastic skill,
Wielding the jarring elements at will?
Or whether sprung from Chaos’ mingling storm,
The mass of matter started into form?
Or Chance o’er earth’s green lab spontaneous fling
The fruits of autumn and the flowers of spring?
Whether material substance unrefined,
Owns the strong impulse of instinctive mind,
Which to one centre points diverging lines,
Confounds, refracts, invig’rates, and combines?
Whether the joys of earth, the hopes of heaven,
By Man to God, or God to Man, were given?
If virtue leads to bliss, or vice to woe?
Who rules above? or who reside below?
Vain Questions all—shall Man presume to know?  (1-17)

A footnote accompanying this passage urges the reader to see “Godwin’s Enquirer; Darwin’s Zoonomia; Paine; Priestley, &c.&c.&c.; also all the French Encyclopedists.”  The author of “The Progress of Man” conflates materialist thinking with radical political and religious thinkers while calling into question the validity of any intellectual enterprise that dares to question the origin and accepted order of the universe and the place of human life within it.   Specifically, he dismisses poetry as a fitting medium for such inquiries, insisting that not only does “Man” have no business dealing with such matters, but also that poetry is a particularly presumptuous medium for doing so.  Ironically, however, the Anti-Jacobin’s attack on materialist thinking, and the popularity of Darwin’s poetry more generally as a medium for disseminating scientific ideas to the public, only underscores the significance of literature for thinking through matters of “Chaos” and “Chance,” of “Matter” and “Man.”

Iceland and Eighteenth-Century Travel and Exploration

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William Daniell, “Sir Joseph Banks” (circa 1808-1814). Graphite and red chalk on medium, moderately textured, cream laid paper mounted on moderately thick, slightly textured, beige laid paper. Sheet: 9 7/8 x 7 1/4 inches (25.1 x 18.4 cm). Inscribed in graphite, lower center: “Sir Joseph Banks”, watermark on mount: lion within shield with initials D and M on either side; MDCCCXXVII below. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Prints and Drawings. B1975.4.1129

Iceland didn’t make much of an impact on eighteenth-century British literature.  Mount Hecla appears every now and then in poetic evocations of the far-flung edges of the world, and there is a well-known joke in The Life of Johnson about Johnson’s ability to quote verbatim an entire chapter of Niels Horrebow’s Natural History of Iceland (tr. 1758).  (It is the chapter on snakes, which runs simply, in James Boswell’s slightly misquoted version, “There are no snakes to be met with throughout the whole island.”)  When Sir Joseph Banks went to Iceland in 1772, leading the first major British expedition to the island, it was more or less by accident:  he had been planning to accompany James Cook on his second voyage to the South Pacific, but the Admiralty intervened because of what they saw as Banks’ excessive demands for space for his equipment and his companions.  Deciding not to waste the organizational efforts he had already made, he simply headed north instead of south.  Yet even if Iceland fell short of Tahiti and the other South Sea islands in terms of sheer distance and glamour, a small but significant body of English-language writing on the island started appearing in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the early years of the nineteenth, much which proclaims itself to be the product of exactly the sort of scientific and philosophical curiosity that ostensibly drove the more elaborate, glamorous, and high profile expeditions to the South Pacific.  Most of these accounts of Iceland are framed in more or less utilitarian terms, as a straightforward pursuit of scientific knowledge, but in fact they tend to slide more or less precipitously from dry records of height, distance, and other such measurements into the language of the magical and the fantastic, as writers attempt to convey the impact of what they suggest is the almost indescribable Icelandic landscape.  The result is an intriguing if relatively unfamiliar body of work that not only offers glimpses of a part of Europe that remained both literally and figuratively on the fringes of the known world in later eighteenth-century Britain, but also that demonstrates some of the complexities and challenges facing travel writers as they tried to merge their scientific and cultural observations with an evocation of what they present as the strange and wonderful world around them.

Given the novelty of Iceland as a destination at the time of Banks’ expedition, and even for decades afterwards, it is hardly surprising that the later eighteenth-century writers who took it as their subject tended to insist upon the value of the information they were offering rather than calling attention to the charms of their style.  The English translation of Uno von Troil’s Letters on Iceland–the only published account of Banks’ expedition–foregrounds the matter-of-fact rather than the literary, addressing matters ranging from volcanoes to Icelandic cuisine and to the varieties of whales to be found in Icelandic waters, among many other topics–according to the presumed interests of the person being addressed.  Yet that is not quite what one would expect if one judged by the book’s reviews.  The Monthly Review, for example, seemed to find von Troil’s picture of Iceland less a matter of facts and figures than it was a vision of the exotic, the mysterious, and the dangerous–in a word, of the sublime.  Describing Iceland as a fantastical place that “within a small and almost inconsiderable space freezes with the utmost rigour, and burns with all the violence of the most intense flame” (187-88), the reviewer presents a version of the country that might sound at least somewhat at odds with von Troil’s deprecating assessment of it as a “dreary” land “so little favoured by nature” that “one is tempted to believe it impossible to be inhabited by any human creature” (25).  Yet the reviewer’s rhapsodic evocation of a sublimely elemental world of fire and ice is not as unjustified by von Troil’s prose as one might be tempted to think if one looked simply at the headings of his letters or leafed through his accounts of matters such as Icelandic breeds of cattle or the economy of the in-shore fishery.  The language of science repeatedly slips into the poetic, the sublime, and the wonderful.  In von Troil’s hands, the landscape is not merely empty but actively hostile, made up of “vitrified cliffs, whose high and sharp points seem to vie with each other, to deprive you of the sight” of what little greenery there is.  Even as simple a matter as the absence of trees around the coastal villages becomes an occasion for an oddly plaintive moment of inverted pastoralism:  “a single tree,” von Troil writes, “does no where appear that may afford shelter to friendship and innocence” (25).  Indeed, von Troil himself suggests that the language of science might be inadequate to his needs.  A long letter to a Professor Bergmann of Stockholm about geysers that specifies the heat of the water, the mineralogical composition of the surrounding rocks, and other such matters concludes with a lamentation that “the best description will fall very short” of the “most uncommon phænomena” that he witnessed at Geysir, because it would require “the pen of a Thomson” to create an adequate idea of the scene (257).

The idea of Iceland as a land that demands a poetic imagination to convey scientific fact can be further illustrated by a quick glance at travelers’ accounts of what was perhaps the most famous of the island’s natural phenomena, Mount Hecla.  Understandably, given the late-eighteenth-century interest in earth sciences, it attracted the fascinated attention of British travelers and readers alike, and in one respect, accounts of Hecla from this period could be read as exemplifying the power of science to kill myth.  Supposedly the haunt of demons and the entrance to hell, Hecla seen up close was simply another mountain, according to Henry Holland, who climbed it in 1810, when, as a young medical student, he accompanied Sir George Mackenzie to Iceland.  Yet even so, Holland’s journal presents the snow-filled crater at the summit in terms that recall von Troil’s reactions to the geysers, as he moves from matter-of-fact observation to an evocation of magic and fantasy:  “The bottom of the crater,” Holland writes,

Is filled with a vast mass of congealed snow–which by the process of melting, gradually proceeding during the summer, has been hollowed beneath in several places, so as to form caverns of some extent.  Entering these caverns, we were surprized & gratified by the singular beauty of their appearance–the congealed snow had acquired a bluish transparency of colour, the effect of which in certain points of view, was at once extraordinary and pleasing–The magical palaces of an eastern tale, could not have been better illustrated to the eye.  (260)

This oscillation between the languages of science and romance is something that Holland maintains elsewhere in this journal.  “If a foresight of the infernal regions of mythological story were desired,” he writes of Krýsuvík, “this would be the spot where the wish might best be gratified” (128).  He then turns, matter-of-factly, to a detailed description of the sedimentation patterns of the clay and rocks.

Passages such as this underline the difficulty, in this writing, of sustaining any distinction between scientific and the more self-consciously literary travel writing of the Enlightenment.  The result, for Holland and others, are accounts that suggest the inadequacy of either scientific travel or the more conventionally belle lettristic type of travel writing to communicate fully what the traveler is seeing.  Of course, the attempt to represent in language the supposedly unrepresentable is something of a cliché by the end of the eighteenth century, but that does not make these journals by early travelers to Iceland any less innovative or intriguing.  As Holland attempted (in his words) both to add to “the interests & advancement of science” (273), and to give an adequate sense of his own pleasure in and wonder at a place that was remote, in all senses, from anything he had previously seen, he is demonstrating the flexibility rather than the limitations of the genre of the travel journal.  Just as importantly, he is also helping to shape the concept of Iceland, in the minds of British readers of the day, as a place that is not only a scientific curiosity but also, and even because of that, exceeds all they can imagine of the sublime.

Works Cited

Anon, “Rev. of Letters on Iceland.”  The Monthly Review.  Vol. 63 (1780):  187-98.

Holland, Henry.  The Iceland Journal of Henry Holland, 1810.  Ed. Andrew

Wawn.  London:  The Hakluyt Society, 1987.

Von Troil, Uno.  Letters on Iceland.  London:  J. Robson, 1780.

HASTAC Reviews The 18th-Century Common

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Elias Martin, “The Happy News” (1778). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Prints and Drawings. B1977.14.11918

In her recent piece for HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory), Kirstyn Leuner reviews our recently-launched website and provides a range of insights concerning the period-based public humanities project.  Leuner’s post, entitled “Touring The (Launched) 18th-Century Common,” is the third and final review of 18thcenturycommon.org for HASTAC and appears simultaneously on the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism’s Graduate Student Caucus Homepage.

Daniel Defoe Around the Web

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Twelve Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe

Twelve Illustrations of Robinson Crusoe by Carington Bowles, 1724-1793, British. Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Art Gallery Collection.

Here are some recent internet gleanings for enthusiasts of Daniel Defoe to explore:

Happy (Recent) Birthday, Jane Austen!

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Autograph note concerning the "Profits of my Novels, over and above the £600 in the Navy Fives" ca. March 1817

Detail of Jane Austen’s autograph note concerning the “Profits of my Novels, over and above the £600 in the Navy Fives” ca. March 1817. The Morgan Library and Museum.

Jane Austen was born on December 16, 1775, and we want to highlight a few items around the web marking the occasion:

  • At Ms. Magazine Audrey Bilger (Professor of Literature, Claremont McKenna College) notes that on the occasion of Austen’s birth “Most likely much of the attention will focus on Austen as a writer of romances. Each of the novels concludes in marriage, after all, and the marriage of Elizabeth to Mr. Darcy is a particularly happy ending. We should also pay tribute, however, to Austen’s early adoption of feminist ideals and her insistence that women’s voices and experiences be taken seriously.”  Read her account of “Five Feminist Footnotes” to Jane Austen’s work here.
  • At the British Newspaper Archive, Ed King highlights the advertisements and newspaper notices for some first editions of Austen’s novels in the early nineteenth century.  The post includes images of the original newspapers (which are normally available only to subscribers).
  • The Morgan Library maintains an online version of its 2010 exhibit “A Woman’s Wit: Jane Austen’s Life and Legacy” which includes images of Austen manuscripts owned by the Morgan, video of luminaries such as Cornel West, Fran Leibowitz, Colm Tóibín, and others describing what Austen means to them, and more.

Dogs of the 18th Century

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Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel Date, 1778. By George Stubbs (1724-1806, British). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection

Brown and White Norfolk or Water Spaniel Date, 1778. By George Stubbs (1724-1806, British). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Scholars date both the beginnings of modern pet-keeping and modern discourses of animal rights to the eighteenth century.  Here is just a small sampling of recent scholarly work on dogs in eighteenth-century life.

Laura Brown‘s book Homeless Dogs and Melancholy Apes (Cornell University Press, 2010) shows

how the literary works of the eighteenth century use animal-kind to bring abstract philosophical, ontological, and metaphysical questions into the realm of everyday experience, affording a uniquely flexible perspective on difference, hierarchy, intimacy, diversity, and transcendence. Writers of this first age of the rise of the animal in the modern literary imagination used their nonhuman characters—from the lapdogs of Alexander Pope and his contemporaries to the ill-mannered monkey of Frances Burney’s Evelina or the ape-like Yahoos of Jonathan Swift—to explore questions of human identity and self-definition, human love and the experience of intimacy, and human diversity and the boundaries of convention.

Lynn Festa‘s article on the English Dog Tax debate of 1796 was published in the journal Eighteenth-Century Life in 2009.  The abstract describes it thus (full text of the essay is available here):

Drawing on Parliamentary debates, print polemics, and satirical prints, this essay traces the rhetorical erosion of seemingly categorical distinctions between human and animal, animate and inanimate, person and thing, in the controversy that arose around the 1796 imposition of a tax on dogs. The passage of this seemingly slight piece of legislation created impassioned debates about the nature and welfare of animals, about the rights of individuals to possess or keep property, and about the way the kinship felt for animals tampers with the seemingly self-evident borders of kind. At a moment in which sentimental humanitarian concern with the rights and interests of animals had reached new heights, the taxation of dogs seemed to reclassify the animal as a thing and to draw into question the relation between humans and their ostensible best friends. Although proponents of the bill endeavor to proceed as if dogs can be considered on the same terms as other kinds of taxable luxuries (devouring resources that might better be devoted to humans), opponents of the tax focus on the bonds of mutual dependency and reciprocal obligation that tie humans and animals together, arguing that the right to keep a beloved entity such as a dog expresses a distinctively human need to keep something beyond mere, bare, necessity. Inasmuch as humanity is expressed and inheres in the relation people take to other creatures, the seeming superfluity of the dog embodies the essence of what allows, or enables, people to act as humans.

Chi-ming Yang, in “Culture in Miniature:  Toy Dogs and Object Life” in Eighteenth-Century Fiction examines porcelain dog figurines (particularly of the pug and King Charles spaniel, breeds imported from Asia and domesticated in England) produced in China and sold in England in the eighteenth century.  She argues:

The toy dog, a small but far from trivial commodity, mediated relations of racial, sexual, and species difference and helped establish a luxury market for the pet as a racialized fetish object that continues to this day.

The Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, published by the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, produced a Special Issue on “Animals in the Eighteenth Century” in December 2010.  While the full contents are only available to members and institutional subscribers, anyone can read abstracts of the articles at the link above.

Bernadette Paton of the Oxford English Dictionary charts the changing uses of dog-related vocabulary over time and notes that the eighteenth-century is an important turning point:

Until the eighteenth century small dogs kept as pets were regarded with some disdain (hence the negative connotations of lap-dog) but they enjoyed luxuries their outdoor counterparts could only dream of. But from the mid-1700s compounds attesting to the dog as a favoured and nurtured pet begin to appear, and they multiply and flourish throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. They include comforts like dog baskets (earliest in 1768 Catal. Household Furniture, ‘A dog-basket and cushion’), dog biscuits (specialized dog treats, from 1823), dog food, dog doctors (first recorded in 1771 Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker, ‘A famous dog-doctor was sent for’), dog hospitals (from 1829), and dog soap (first use 1869). The first reference to the dog as ‘man’s best friend’ appears in 1841, at a time when dogs began to be sentimentalized, and to be seen as having, if not souls, then at least personalities and feelings (perhaps because the industrialized city no longer needed them as outdoor working or guard animals, while the rabies vaccination developed in the 1880s reduced the threat they posed).

Two articles in the Colonial Williamsburg Journal describe the dog’s life in the eighteenth century for a non-academic readership: “The Eighteenth Century Goes to the Dogs” (including a quiz matching eighteenth-century dogs to their famous owners) and “Personable Pooches.”

And someone has collected a vast array of eighteenth-century portraits of pets (many of them dogs) and their owners on Pinterest.

Eric G. Wilson on Keats & Weirdness

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Benjamin Robert Haydon, “John Keats” (c. 1846). Pen and brown ink on wove paper. 9 1/8 x 7 3/8in. (23.2 x 18.7cm). Signed, dated and inscribed, in pen and brown ink, LC: John Keats 1816/ copied by B.R. Haydon from his/ original sketch. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. B1977.14.4160.

Friends and followers of The 18th-Century Common will likely want to read Professor Eric G. Wilson’s recent essay, entitled “Poetry Makes You Weird,” published earlier this week on the website of The Chronicle of Higher Education. 

Wilson’s piece reminds us of what happens with the convergence of poetry and nature and especially the “weird” but wonderful ways in which poetry (with all of its cherished oddities) possesses a unique ability to unlock the familiar and make it uncannily alive and rich and strange.