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Micrographia Narrating a New World How Microscopic Experience was Communicated through the Words and Images of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. By Jacob Orrje Magister Essay Autumn 2007 / Spring 2008 Supervisor: Otto Sibum Department of History of Science and Ideas Uppsala University Abstract Narrating a New World: How Microscopic Experience was Communicated through the Words and Images of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. Uppsala University: Department of History of Science and Ideas, Magister Essay, autumn 2007 / spring 2008. This essay revolves around Micrographia written by the English 17th century experimental philosopher Robert Hooke and the way it mediated microscopic experience. The focus of this study is on one hand the strategies Hooke used to communicate experience and on the other the responses by some of Hooke’s contemporary readers. By comparing Micrographia to Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy, we see that Micrographia uses images where the author is invisible and textual narrations with an explicit authorial voice to mediate experimental experience to his contemporaries. Samuel Pepys uses the mediated experiences to learn how to see through the microscope and to become more like the author in Micrographia, Margaret Cavendish does not trust the representational techniques of Hooke and the playwright Thomas Shadwell satirizes the gentleman virtuoso that constitutes the narrative voice in Micrographia. By the study of these three readers, I build on Peter Dears definition of a scientific text as having an inherent reference to an experimental situation. By seeing Micrographia as defined through the interactions between the author and the readers, we see that this reference, and therefore a text’s scientific status, is defined by a relation between author and reader based on trust. The reader has to trust both the author and the representational techniques used in the text. The appropriation of Micrographia by readers who do not possess this trust, results in the redefinition of Micrographia into other kinds of texts that fill different purposes defined by the readers. Keywords: Micrographia, Robert Hooke (1635-1703), experimental experience, communicating science, English restoration, scientific text. Contents Introduction .............................................................................................1 Purpose................................................................................................................ 2 The Microscope and the Experience .....................................................3 Communicating Experimental Experience ......................................................... 5 Setting the Stage: Characters and Context.........................................13 Micrographia Enters the Stage......................................................................... 17 Micrographia: Letters and Strokes ......................................................18 Images and Words in Micrographia................................................................. 22 Micrographia and Henry Power’s Experimental Philosophy........................... 25 Comparing the Images and Words of Hooke and Power.................................. 28 Samuel Pepys: “What to expect from my glasse” ..............................31 Margaret Cavendish: Observing Micrographia .................................36 Cavendish’s View of Instruments and of Reading ........................................... 38 Pictorial Representations – Experience or Fantasy?......................................... 41 Thomas Shadwell: Observing the Experimentalists..........................43 Ridiculing Hooke’s view of the Small as Great ............................................... 46 Conclusions: Whole Sentences and Large Pictures ...........................51 Finale: Further Research and Final Thoughts................................................... 57 Image on title page: Hooke’s drawing of his compound microscope from Micrographia, plate facing page 1. 1 Introduction To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour. William Blake - Auguries of Innocence The world is not what it seems. If the contents of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia were to be condensed into one sentence, that may be the one. The world is not what it seems because our senses do not reveal it as it really is. As I type these sentences on my computer, black words form on my screen. But if I was to examine them closer I would only find dots creating an intricate pattern of various colours. Then I would view the world in the way Hooke does in Micrographia. In 1665 the experimentalist Robert Hooke (1635-1703) published Micrographia, a book that described and displayed the world as seen by Hooke through his microscope. During the 17th century, microscopy was in fashion among experimentalists and wealthy amateurs. Through their lenses, the observers saw a new world that was often compared to, and considered as new and exiting as the new lands discovered by explorers at sea. What was seen through the microscope was perceived as a discovery that changed the way one viewed the old world: microscopic experiences of everyday objects like food, fleas or printed text, rendered these objects strangely different. Micrographia can be seen as the culmination of this interest in microscopy. Microscopists could compare what they had seen in their microscopes to the book’s detailed full page pictures. But Hooke’s bestselling and repeatedly reprinted book was not only read by microscopists. Through the book, readers without access to expensive microscopes could experience the new microscopic world too. The last few decades have seen a substantial increase of interest in the experimental philosophy of the English Royal Society among historians of science. The Royal Society, founded in 1660, was a society that championed a natural philosophy based on an experimental ground. In other words: knowledge based on experimental experience. New social constructivist studies have viewed the collective organisation of the Royal Society as a typical example of how knowledge is constructed in a social context. These studies have discussed how individual experiences could be augmented into collective credible knowledge and how this was done by communicating experience in a social context. With the third 2 centennial of Hooke’s death, the focus of these historians of science has increasingly turned to Robert Hooke. Micrographia can be and has been studied as a part of this process of knowledge production, but to see it only as a part of this process is, I believe, too narrow a way to view Hooke’s book. Hooke does not only seek to produce knowledge of the microscopic. He also, seeks to mediate experience for its own sake, in the same way that travellers returning from foreign lands narrated their experiences to an anticipating public. But what attitude did the readers have to the experiences narrated in Micrographia? As it was a well circulated book, there are many texts that in some way relate to Micrographia. Both contemporary readers and later ones read, commented, discussed and satirized the contents of Hooke’s book. In this essay I will pick up some of the texts that enter into dialogue with Micrographia. The choice of readers should not be seen as representational of readers of Micrographia in general, but as especially interesting in answering the central question of this essay: how experience was mediated through Hooke’s book. My study is focused on the responses to Micrographia by readers that are Hooke’s contemporaries. Even though Micrographia was read well into the 18th century, I will only study the 1660s and the 1670s. The texts are chosen on basis of the diversity of their stances towards Micrographia, as I by their help want to show how readers could relate to Hooke’s text rather than to give a representational description of how reader in general did react to Micrographia. Through the canonical diary of Samuel Pepys, we get an example of how a reader with a microscope of his own related to prose narrating experimental experience. From the Duchess of Newcastle, Margaret Cavendish, a philosopher excluded from the contemporary philosophical discussion, we can read Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. The Duchess’s book enters into a critical and interesting philosophical discussion on among other books Hooke’s Micrographia. Finally, we will turn to the satirist and playwright Thomas Shadwell and his comedy The Virtuoso. In The Virtuoso we get an example of how the experimental experience mediated in Micrographia is used to criticize the social structure of the Royal Society itself. Purpose In my study I take a broad approach to Robert Hooke’s Micrographia. The purpose of this essay is not primarily to show how the knowledge of the 17th century experimentalists was created through experience, as shown by many earlier studies on the Royal Society. Rather, the focus is the mediation of experience itself. How did Hooke describe and relate to his own 3 and others’ microscopic experiences? How did Hooke attempt to convey experimental experience through Micrographia and how was this experience treated and related to by readers of the book? By relating the texts to each other, to the authors and to a contemporary social context, we can reveal the social aspects inherent in the mediation of Hooke’s microscopic experiences. Through studying the interactions between Micrographia and these texts we can seek to grasp
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