This ritual posturing strikingly realizes the function of the cabinet, clustered around the idealized and carefully organized projection of Woodward’s own public image; in composing his cabinet, Woodward composes himself, framing an ideological version of himself in a mineralogical history: Woodward’s judicious eye the end and center of his geological design.112 In this sense, Woodward was not eccentric at all. He was, on the contrary, characteristic of his age; this was a culture, Peter de Bolla writes, “suffused with the desire to see oneself and to exchange self-images as a form of social practice.” Much as (in Fréart’s words) “an Artist … paints Himselfe in his Tables,” representing himself “as in so many Mirrours and Glasses,” Woodward’s collection is ultimately, only more obviously than other cabinets, an extended experiment in self-fashioning. Any arrangement contains in this sense an element of self-portraiture.113 Or, put differently, Woodward intended his cabinet as a portrait of nature, but it captures, as though a fossil in strata, Woodward himself. As Sir John Clerk, the Scottish antiquary, said of Woodward, “some of his fossils were very curious, though indeed he himself was the greatest curiosity of the whole collection.”114
While Woodward was alive, the cabinet was a living ecology; he arranged nature according to his design. And, in the way of private collections, the cabinet’s function as a sort of Woodward machine extends after his death. It fossilizes him, as it were. Woodward left his cabinet to Cambridge, along with enough money to provide the first endowed professorship in the physical sciences in Great Britain (and, one scholar notes, perhaps the world).115 Woodward expected its occupant to curate and to expand his collection, to be physically present in it for the purposes of tours at least three days per week, and to give at least four lectures per year on “some one or other of the subjects treated of in my Natural History of the Earth.”116 Take this chair, Woodward commands; lecture on what I lectured on; inherit my ideas as you inherit my stones: this is the thrust of the terms of Woodward’s Will.
7. John Woodward, F.R.S., by an Unknown Hand. CAMSM.P.111. Courtesy Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Cambridge.
The “Chair of Woodwardian Studies” has a number of peculiar requirements, which, taken together, suggest that Woodward himself recognized the autogenetic function of his cabinet: the cabinet as a mirror reflecting himself. The Woodwardian Fellow was required not to marry, lest “the care of wife and children should take the Lecturer too much from Study.” This is remarkable for a couple of reasons; the first is that it tacitly assumes that all of the Woodwardian Fellows will be men—which a survey of the historical occupants of his chair confirms.117 And, of course, it insists that the person seated in the chair will prefer study to the many pleasures of family.118 These restrictions are, however, additionally remarkable in light of Woodward’s own lifelong bachelorhood, not least because Woodward himself seems to have preferred men.119 In part because he was generally irascible, he was the subject of numerous public satires. He was attacked in print for his controversial positions in natural philosophy and medicine, and for his unusually high-pitched voice.120 The Scriblerian play Three Days after Marriage is commonly supposed to have taken Woodward as its major satirical object, mocking him for his eccentric philosophical pursuits.121 But he was repeatedly, publicly, coarsely slandered for sexual preferences that became well known over his lifetime. Uffenbach is one of many who records that Woodward was criminis non facile nominandi suspectus; he was widely suspected, in other words, of the love that has no name.122 He was repeatedly accused of affairs with choirboys and attractive young protégés.123 One particularly abusive pamphlet, accusing him simultaneously of bad Latin and an inappropriate “love … of boys,” caricatured him as “not being able to decline Anus.”124 The point here is that Woodward’s collection seems by him designed to guarantee a legacy, in the absence of any heirs; it seems even, if it may be put this way, have been designed by Woodward autogenetically to reproduce himself in a series of mirror images.
The making of cabinets: it is a repeated pattern. Locke has custom crates built for his library (Exhibit 1); Pepys has custom book presses built for his books, and a very special little case built for a more personal specimen (Exhibit 15); Walpole builds a cabinet for a single book, putting that cabinet in a room custom-built to contain it (Exhibit 17); and so on. A pattern emerges: the building of cabinets happens late in life; it signals the beginning of the end of a living ecology. Make no mistake: Woodward’s cabinet long ago ceased to be a working collection of geology. No one visits it to learn about soil constitution or fossilized inclusions. It is visited, when it is visited at all, because it is the earliest intact geological collection, the largest such collection composed in the eighteenth century and maintained more-or-less in situ. It is visited because it captures a way of judging, a highly particular vision of nature. This hardening up, the conversion of a working ecology into a single-minded machine, is most strikingly figured by the oval portrait of Woodward, the only mature portrait of him in existence, which hangs amid his collection.125 The room housing the collection, as specified by his Will, is sectioned off in its own special space; it is in the Oak Wing of the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, but it is not a part of it. Kept here are the four fall-front cabinets, still with their original collection of stones; also here is arranged a desk, open books, and writing implements set up, as though the first Woodwardian Fellow had just left, or as though the chair were left warm for the next occupant to take his place in his turn. What you will not find here, however, are any mirrors; what would they reflect that belonged there? In their place is this portrait in an oval frame, which, like the collection itself, disdains the shifting image of the various occupants of the chair. It offers instead the same, timeless image of Woodward, gazing over his custom cabinets. His eye, enlarged by the natural magnification of the living man into a timeless image of himself, droops under a heavy lid; it sees the same nature coming into being, strata endlessly created out of disorder, that might have been seen by specimen no. c.226—which is in fact there, also trapped in witnessing the same frozen coming-into-being. Woodward’s cabinet, this dark room in Cambridge, is dark room as cabinet obscura. At one end of the contraption is a gritty brown pebble, the oculus to nature at its geologically critical moment. At the other is Woodward, his large eye surveying the work of his life. Caught between them, like a screen upon which are tangled the imperatives of the Enlightenment, are Woodward’s cabinets. Epitome of the world and summary of his understanding, engraved here are the outlines of Woodward’s design, a synopsis of the Judgment of Woodward.
Exhibit 8. A Stone from the Grotto of Egeria
Just as Woodward was drafting the codicil that offered his mixed gift to posterity, Alexander Pope (1688–1744) was dreaming up a natural history museum of his own. Viewed superficially, Pope and Woodward had little in common. Pope, among the leading poets of his age, was one of Woodward’s most biting satirists; Woodward turns up in Pope’s work—once in his early prose satire The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, and again in his multiply revised mock-epic The Dunciad—each of which offers a more explicit send-up of the Gresham College geologist than the last. But there is also a way in which satire gives way to something like sympathy. “The starving chemist in his golden views,” Pope remarked in 1734, is “Supremely blest,” just like “the poet in his muse.”126 A chemist gathers up the mineralogical world with the hope of unlocking the settled laws that organize it; this is what is implied in his “golden views.” What strikes his eye are rocks, sand, various liquids, and salts; what he has become habituated to see is their nature or secret quiddity. A poet collects visual objects as part of a project guided by his muse; this project, too, is oriented by the design he has trained himself to see. “Muse” here meets “golden views,” a chemist’s arrangement of stones answering a poet’s arrangement of object lessons. And Pope, perhaps more than any other of his contemporaries, was expert at what he called “design,” the arrangement of parts to satisfy an argument.