Printed topographical works were deeply marked by the scientific correspondence that was the context of their creation. Britons spread across Ireland, England, Wales, and Scotland came in contact with each other through correspondence. They created a shared forum for assembling and debating topographical knowledge, one that, though largely populated by English scholars, was by no means totally dominated by them. Neither was this a shared forum in which individuals were encouraged to abandon their locally rooted perspectives. In fact topography, which presented national visions amalgamated out of local particulars, demanded that individuals maintain their local and regional allegiances, their pride in knowing their land. The tensions in topographical writing—its dream of producing a whole “body and book,” a national vision of Britain, its production in reality of many different, though sometimes overlapping, visions—were present in its necessarily collaborative mode of construction.
Chapter 2
Putting Texts, Things, and People in Motion: Learned Correspondence in Action
The construction of Britain in printed topographical works went hand in hand with the rise of correspondence as the forum for creating knowledge about British nature and antiquities. In promoting new ways of thinking about national identity, topographers, naturalists, and antiquaries communicated habits of thought and being that they had learned by working together via correspondence. Through correspondence, each individual interwove his local knowledge with that possessed by others scattered across Britain. They debated shared questions, though they did not always arrive at shared answers. Travel and letters allowed naturalists to understand the national as the local: to echo Joshua Childrey, mutual correspondence made it possible for each scholar to feel that all of Britain was at his “own door.”
In practice, this correspondence was a complicated dance, the steps of which were the constant movement of letters, books, papers, and specimens by post and carrier and people by horse, foot, carriage, and boat. In a 1692 letter to Anthony à Wood, John Aubrey, describing his travel plans and the locations and destinations of various sets of his papers, summed up these exchanges: “I have here sent II of my volumnes which I intend to print: and desire your perusall, and castigation; as also Mr Collins of Magd{alene} Coll{ege}: to whom pray remember me. {manicule in margin} I desire to heare of your receipt of the my MSS. that they may not miscarry. Tomorrow I goe to Mr Ray {into?} Essex for a weeke. About the middle of Aug: I am for Chalke & Wilton: and thence to Oxford about the beginning of Septemb{er}./ My Surrey is now in Dr Gales hands, before it goes to Mr Ch{arles} Howard & Mr Jo{hn} Evelyn. Pray let me heare from you.”1 Aubrey’s letter illustrates different ways of transporting information, things, and people. First, there was his letter to Wood, probably enclosed with his manuscripts and sent to Oxford via carrier (though letters mailed alone usually traveled by post). Next were the manuscripts. One manuscript had been sent by carrier to Wood; another, Aubrey’s Perambulation of Surrey, went to Thomas Gale, the headmaster of St. Paul’s School in London, with whom Aubrey sometimes lodged. The latter manuscript would make its way, by either carrier or a personal messenger, to Howard and then Evelyn, both of whom had family connections to Surrey. Third, Aubrey himself traveled: first to John Ray, in Essex, and then on to Wiltshire, where he would stop at Broad Chalke, his brother’s farm, and Wilton, the estate of the Earl of Pembroke, until finally he would come to Oxford. At each stop along their paths, letters, manuscripts, and man would be drawn into conversations with both old and new friends and readers. These conversations, in turn, would be reinscribed into new letters as Aubrey and others drew on them as sources for new observations to communicate to correspondents. Through personal travel and the circulation of letters and books, knowledge was collected and inscribed into the books of nature, old friendships maintained, and new ones forged.
The material goods of early modern knowledge making—which included plant and animal specimens as well as letters and papers such as Aubrey’s—were fragile and difficult to transport. Indeed in the days before well-developed systems of regular mail coaches and sound roads, people could be difficult to transport. The travel diaries of Celia Fiennes (1662–1741), for example, testify to the muddy, often impassible roads and draughty, pestilence-ridden inns that greeted travelers across Britain, and it was only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that a truly national road system was built.2 Yet naturalists (and their materials) were scattered across Britain from Dublin to Aberdeen; from the high mountains of northern Wales to the basement of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford; from estates in Wiltshire to villages in Essex; from the naval yards at Deptford to the Royal Society’s meeting rooms in Gresham College. To make natural history and antiquarian studies, people and things had to travel. The threading of correspondence across Britain was necessary to the realization naturalists’ and antiquaries’ intellectual ambition, the construction of “the whole body and book” of British natural history and antiquities.
This chapter reconstructs the ways in which naturalists moved books, papers, specimens, and themselves, creating an image of a seventeenthcentury British scientific correspondence. I consider naturalists’ and antiquaries’ communications with each other from both material (how and why did things and people move around?) and social (how and why did naturalists maintain relationships across great distances?) perspectives. I show how naturalists and antiquaries circulated not just information but also material goods, estimates of each other, and “service” (favors and promises of favors).
While some of the social and intellectual aspects of the diffusion of knowledge in early modern Europe have been elaborated by historians of science, they have rarely been coupled to the material realities of communication.3 In particular, this chapter grounds the “diffusion” of ideas and information in the movement of letters, books, packages, and people between towns, cities, and countries by horseback, horse- or ox-drawn carts, and riverboats and sailing ships.4 The main sources for this reconstruction are naturalists’ letters, which eloquently express their frustrations and anxieties regarding long-distance communication and travel but also (by their very being) demonstrate the successes of their efforts. Their letters offer a wealth of information on the social links—no less vital than the material ones—along which information, goods, and favors traveled.
These links spanned England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, connecting naturalists in city, town, and country. Indeed, though the wider world defined by burgeoning British imperial and commercial ties is not the focus of this book, correspondence extended wherever British merchants and colonists traveled. Naturalists built their correspondences within the context of a wider world of British communication and information exchange, a world in which polite correspondents kept each other up to date on the latest news as a way of maintaining social ties and circumventing purveyors of printed news, which they regarded with some suspicion.5 Naturalists sought long-distance contacts as a way of stitching together their individual patches of local topographical knowledge. The quilt they formed was necessarily incomplete and partial, with some of the pieces quite loosely joined together. Each individual, with his own particular interests within the larger field and his own collection of correspondents, held a different section of it. But each section overlapped with others, in terms of the connections between their interests and the connections between their sets of correspondents. As we saw in Chapter 1, these connections did not, of course, prevent dissension about exactly what constituted “Britain” as a topographical object of study. However, these connections were the medium through which naturalists and antiquaries articulated their visions of Britain