A Short Epistle to the Longitudinarians

27 Feb 2012

Today is the 277^th anniversary of the death of John Arbuthnot, Tory physician and Augustan satirist. He might not seem an obvious subject for a post on this blog, but he is, in fact, a perfect example of the ways in which the longitude problem linked in and out of all different areas of eighteenth-century society. Arbuthnot was a well-respected mathematician and society physician in the reign of Queen Anne; a member of the Royal Society, an intimate of the Tory ministry of Robert Harley and Henry St. John Bolingbroke, and resident at Court until the ministry’s fall and the death of Anne in 1714; the year, of course, that the longitude act was passed. In 1701, he published the influential Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, in which, among many other points, he argued for the importance of mathematics in astronomy and navigation. The former included the use of Jupiter’s satellites to find longitude, and the latter the recent important voyages by Edmund Halley on HMS Paramore to establish magnetic variation as a means of measuring longitude. Arbuthnot commented of Halley’s voyages that ‘those who sent him have, by this Mission secured to themselves more true Honour and lasting Fame, than by Actions, that at first View appear more Magnificent.’[1] This, his respected position in Court and government, and his Fellowship Royal Society, led to Arbuthnot’s appointment in 1705 to the committee set up to oversee the publication of the star charts made by the Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed, the Historia Coelestis, which eventually appeared in 1712. The arguments between Flamsteed and Newton over this publication are well known, as is the bitter outcome, in much of which Arbuthnot served as the go-between, placating Flamsteed and checking some of the charts and calculations himself. Alongside these roles, Arbuthnot was also a popular and accomplished satirist. He met the Tory pamphleteer and novelist Jonathan Swift in 1710-11, commencing a deep and life-long friendship between the two. By 1713 they had formed the famous ‘Scriblerus Club’ with other satirists Alexander Pope and John Gay, along with essayist Thomas Parnell, and the Lord Treasurer Robert Harley, by now elevated to the peerage as Earl of Oxford. This group spawned the formative texts of the age including Swift’s Gulliver's Travels, Pope’s Dunciad and their combined work The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus. It is clear that Arbuthnot was the ‘science man’ of the group contributing the natural philosophical jokes and satires. The role of Martin Scriblerus was a perfect foil for these friends, allowing them both to write their own satires on contemporary literature and life, and to claim others’ works which they thought ridiculous as products of Martin’s pen. It was in this context that Arbuthnot first satirised longitude as an impossible scheme, soon after the 1714 Act. He wrote to Swift regarding Whiston and Ditton’s project for using bomb vessels, that ‘Whetstone has at last publish’d his project of the longitude, the most ridiculous thing that ever was thought on; but a pox on him, he has spoild one of my papers of Scriblerus, which was a proposal to this purpose, not very unlike his,’[2] and Swift clearly took great glee in replying that ‘It was a malicious Satyr of yours upon Whiston, that what you intended as a Ridicule, should be any way struck upon him for a Reality.’[3] Accordingly, Whiston and Ditton’s project went on to feature as one of Martin’s absurd projects in the Memoirs.[4] It seems probable, however, that Arbuthnot also entered the longitude debate more directly. In 2008, Pat Rogers suggested that a pamphlet long thought genuinely to come from the pen of its named author Jeremy Thacker, The Longitudes examin’d, was in fact a satire on the over-inflated longitude projects then proliferating in pamphlet form thanks to the Act, and that it was written, in fact, by Arbuthnot.[5] The pamphlet proposed a scheme for keeping time accurately at sea by placing a clock in a vacuum. Jonathan Betts and Andrew King pointed out in reply to Rogers that the scheme did make some technically complicated and important improvements to contemporary ideas on clock making.[6] Yet, it is also heavily satirical in tone. Thacker opened by addressing his competitors in ‘A Short Epistle to the Longitudinarians’ in which he criticised their schemes and their writing style in exactly the manner which Swift had critiqued hack literature in A Tale of A Tub in 1704, and Pope would later in The Dunciad in 1728. Thacker commented how ‘without Animadversions upon the Attempts of others, I could not swell this to a Six-penny Book, unless I had embellish’d the Recommendation of my new Device with fine Metaphors, and clever Comparisons … I might indeed, with the Printer’s good Management, have made four Pages of the Commissioners Names in Capitals, and then have humbly submitted my Essay.’[7] The whole pamphlet is then made up of digressions and over-inflated statements, taking pages to get to the invention itself. It ends with the comment that ‘I am satisfy’d that my Reader begins to think that the Phonometers, Pyrometers, Selenometers, Heliometers, Barometers, and all the Meters are not worthy to be compar’d with my Chronometer.’[8] Interestingly, he makes one of the first uses of the word chronometer. I think that Arbuthnot probably created ‘Thacker’ in partnership with another author (as the Scriblerians did with other more specialist satires), possibly the clockmaker William Derham who was also an FRS, shared many views with Arbuthnot, and also started to use the term chronometer at this time. But, that is a subject for another blog post.

[1] John Arbuthnot, An Essay on the Usefulness of Mathematical Learning, p.49 [2] The Correspondence of Dr John Arbuthnot (ed.) Angus Ross (Munich, 2006); Arbuthnot to Jonathan Swift, London (17 July 1714) pp.191-2 [3] Ibid., Jonathan Swift to Arbuthnot, Letcombe (25 Jul 1714) pp.195 [4] Memoirs of the Extraordinary Life, Works and Discoveries of Martinus Scriblerus (ed.) Charles Kirby-Miller (Oxford, 1988), p.167 [5] Pat Rogers, ‘Longitude forged: How an eighteenth-century hoax has taken in Dava Sobel and other historians,’ in Times Literary Supplement (12 November 2008) [6] Jonathan Betts and Andrew King, ‘Jeremy Thacker: Longitude imposter? in Times Literary Supplement Letters (18 March 2009) [7] Jeremy Thacker, The Longitudes Examin’d (London, 1714), p.11 [8] Ibid., p.23