Exhibit 3. Mark Akenside’s Museum
We will have further opportunities to reflect on Milton’s importance to eighteenth-century theorizations of embedded cognition (see, for instance, Exhibit 14). For now, I want to remain quite local—tracing embeddedness in the word’s most mundane sense. Milton’s bed makes one more appearance in the historical register, before finally sinking from view. This is in the collection of Mark Akenside (1721–1770), a Newcastle-born physician with aspirations as a poet, who by dint of learning and hard work installed himself at the center of mid-century belles lettres.106 Collecting came naturally to Akenside. He had studied in Leiden in the high period of that city’s market for technical and scholarly books; it was possibly there that he began building his library in earnest.107 When he returned to London, he established himself as an important member of a circle of virtuosi and antiquaries who met at Tom’s coffeehouse in the Strand. He became well known to booksellers, by whom his “comments” were enough “cherished” that he was granted the privilege of reading “gratis all the modern books of any character”—and was given, according to this contemporary source, any book that “struck him with a powerful impression.”108 Partly through such gifts, Akenside became widely recognized as an important collector of antiquities and the typical objects of one sort of virtuoso collection.109 He was noted, for instance, for being a “curious collector” of prints, which he left, upon his death, to his “very intimate friend” Jeremiah Dyson.110 No catalogue of Akenside’s collection survives—it died with Dyson—so it is impossible to know how extensive his holdings might have been; he seems, however, freely to have shared it with acquaintances, one of whom remarked that it contained “capital prints from the most eminent Painters of Italy and Holland, which he illustrated [that is, described] with admirable taste.”111
Though little is known of Akenside’s sizable private museum, the interests and idiosyncrasy of his collection are suggested by a gift he received mid-career. Sometime in 1760, Thomas Hollis gave to Akenside the bed reputed formerly to have belonged to Milton, in which, if the account can be believed, Milton was visited by his Muse.112 Hollis admired Milton for his politics; he explicitly hoped that Akenside would pen a poem in the Miltonian tradition as compensation for the gift. It was a question of inspiration—and the bed was the critical mechanism. Hollis hoped that Akenside, “believing himself obliged, and having slept in that bed,” would be “inspired to compose a poem in Milton’s honor.” Unfortunately for Hollis, Akenside himself was just at that moment switching allegiances, blown by the winds of political change to the politics of the new ministry. Akenside, who reports say “seemed wonderfully delighted with the bed, and had it put up in his house,” seems therefore likely to have appreciated the bed as a legacy of a different sort.113 Certainly, speaking in a general way, the gift flattered Akenside into thinking of himself as a poet of the stature of Milton. But it also came to stand as a reminder of the formal similarities between poetry and dreaming. The terms of Hollis’s bequest make this much clear. It was a question not of politics but of poetics; Akenside dreamed of himself as the proper inheritor to Milton for sympathies between their practices as poets, not least because Akenside was working in a similar tradition of the imagination as an entangled form of memory work.
3. Title page of The Museum, ed. Mark Akenside (London: Robert Dodsley, 1746). Apollo, as a figure of poetry, is seated between his inspiration and his messenger. Courtesy University of Michigan Special Collections.
Akenside got his break in the world of literature roughly a decade before Hollis’s gift. This was when he was named editor of Robert Dodsley’s The Museum: Or, the Literary and Historical Register. Dodsley was a friend to the circles of collectors and writers that included Akenside; his own literary tastes likewise leaned toward descriptions of collections. As one of his first literary works, Dodsley penned a one-act farce on the contents of a toyshop; as one of his last, he compiled the first published set of remarks on the holdings of the British Museum.114 The Museum in many ways extended these tastes—which is why Akenside was such a natural editor for the project. Published from early 1746 to late 1747, the Museum was intended as a literary magazine, a “museum” as site of the muses. It generally declined simply to list rare things or curiosities, strange sights, and local exhibitions. There were other magazines that offered descriptions of strange and rare things in London, such as the long-running Gentleman’s Magazine.115 But the Museum was, right from the start, designed as an anthology of poetry, histories, literary reviews, and moral essays, intended from its inception as a compendium of concurrent tastes and a mirror of its age.116 It evinced a mainstream aesthetic, in which Dodsley’s implicit convictions about the parallel pursuits of poetry and collecting were repeatedly put on display. This is why it is called a “museum”—a collection that privileges literature and the arts. And, as the engraving on the title page suggests, it understands literature as the fruitful junction of inspiration and a messenger: Apollo, in his bower, is poised between Clio, the Muse of history, who will breathe her spirit into his ear, and the angel-like Hermes, ready to relay the poet’s song to Akenside’s list of subscribers.
After accepting Dodsley’s offer to manage the Museum, Akenside began calling himself its “Keeper,” modeling his task as specifically curatorial, perhaps even modeling himself after the Keepers of institutions like the Repository of the Royal Society. His own contributions to the magazine were addressed to a circle of like-minded collectors, not least in his numerous reviews of foreign and English books. He was, according to James Tierney, “consciously attempting to aid English collectors in the purchase of significant works for their libraries.”117 But editing a journal almost certainly suggested curating a collection because Akenside already thought of literary production and critical judgment as activities of his own deeply curatorial intellect. Akenside was in many ways defined by the powers of his memory. He was well known for “a memory of extraordinary power, and perfect readiness in the application of its stores.”118 Indeed, writes his first biographer, his memory “was at once discriminative and comprehensive.” He was said to have “retained all the riches of art, science, and history, legislation, poetry, and philosophy; and those he would draw out and embody to suit the occasion.”119 In this vein, Akenside was admired as a poet for his ability to return ideas to sense—drawing them out and “embodying” them; his memory was the source of his chief effects as a poet. Samuel Johnson, for instance, insisted that if “Akenside was a superiour poet both to Gray and Mason,” it is because of his “uncommon amplitude of acquisitions, [his] young mind stored with images, and much exercised in combining and comparing them.”120 Thomas Campbell admired Akenside’s “skill” in “delineating the processes of memory and association,” and the “animated view” he gives of “Genius collecting her stores for works of excellence.”121 “If little invention is exhibited,” Alexander Dyce would later aver of Akenside’s poetry, “the taste and skill with which the author has selected and combined his materials are everywhere conspicuous.”122 Akenside was less admired, in other words, as a poet of inspiration, though this has often been claimed by succeeding generations, than he was admitted to be an able conservator of his imaginative resources, effective at fleshing concepts out, “embodying” them in images.
Among Locke’s list of the metaphors which remind us that abstracts may be traced to embodied experiences (“imagine, apprehend, comprehend, conceive …”), “imagine” emerges as a special category. The organization