A longitude party?

16 Nov 2011

It’s always interesting to find longitude cropping up in spheres where you wouldn’t expect it, so I’ve been excited this week to find it mentioned in some unlikely correspondence. Horace Walpole, was one of the most prolific eighteenth-century correspondents. An antiquarian, art historian, man of letters, Whig politician and general bon viveur, he is probably best known for his extraordinary house, Strawberry Hill, in Twickenham. The majority of his correspondence is now held in the Lewis Walpole Library at Yale, which has made the published Yale edition of these available and searchable online. Looking for other material in the Lewis Walpole catalogue, I idly typed ‘longitude’ into the search field, thinking that it would be interesting to see how a man like Walpole, always discussed by historians of art and literature rather than of science, responded to the longitude problem. In a letter to Sir Horace Mann on 14^th February 1753, he discussed his new role as a trustee of Sir Hans Sloane’s collections which would eventually become the British Museum: ‘We are a charming wise set, all philosophers, botanists, antiquarians and mathematicians; and adjourned our first meeting, because Lord Macclesfield, our chairman, was engaged to a party for finding out the longitude.’[1] Macclesfield was, of course, President of the Royal Society, and therefore an ex officio Commissioner of Longitude. However, the Board minutes only show a meeting on 17^th July 1753. Perhaps it is significant that Walpole describes ‘a party for finding out the longitude’? He may be giving us a glimpse of the un-minuted, more social, discussions that went on outside of the official meetings. But Walpole doesn’t only give us institutional interest. The following year on 20^th November he wrote to Richard Bentley a ‘scolding letter’ about the fanciful schemes in which Bentley kept trying to get Walpole financially involved, commenting, ‘whenever you send me mighty cheap schemes for finding out longitudes and philosophers’ stones, you will excuse me if I only smile, and don’t order them to be examined by my council.’[2] What strikes me here is that Walpole is using a common throwaway reference to longitude as an impossible scheme, despite clearly being aware of the work of the Board of Longitude through his interactions with Macclesfield. By 1753 the Board had already met four times and had funded John Harrison to the tune of £1,500 to work on his time-keepers. So, we have the institutional considerations of the Board continuing to run alongside wider disparaging attitudes to the problem of longitude. These are the kind of tantalising tit-bits of information that it’s such a joy to find in the most unlikely sources.

[1] W.S. Lewis, The Yale Edition of Walpole’s Correspondence Vol. 20, p.359 [2] Ibid. Vol.35, pp.190-1