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. This is more than an accidental binding between poet and geologist; Pope’s poetics were all along the poetics of a curator, even more so than among his contemporaries. As Pat Rogers puts it, “Pope indeed could have been an antiquarian, as Swift or Gay could not.”127
8. A fragment of marble, now in Twickenham, fastened in a grotto with “invisible clamps.” Image used with kind permission of Radnor House School.
But this does not go far enough. Pope was a collector, of many of the same sorts of things as Woodward. He was, for instance, interested in old coins, a habit he picked up when he inherited a small collection of miniatures and ancient medals from his maternal aunt.128 And Pope, like Woodward, collected geological specimens; his collection, considered in sheer numbers of stones and weight of rock, outweighs even Woodward’s at the Sedgwick Museum. Likewise, Pope crafted for himself a cabinet—which, again like Woodward’s, survives mostly as Pope designed it. Pope’s five acres of Twickenham land, leased in 1719 with profits from his wildly successful translation of the Iliad, were marred by a curious circumstance; they were bisected by the London highway, which separated his neo-Palladian villa from his small plot of plantable ground. A tunnel solved this problem. At one end of the tunnel, which runs completely under highway and house alike, is Pope’s garden; at the other, fronting the house, is a short lawn sloping down toward a bend in the Thames. This tunnel was destined to become a site of use.129 Contemporary sketches, including a rough sketch by William Kent, the architect responsible for at least some of the house and grounds, suggest that the tunnel was fitted with a desk and enough furniture that it could function as a place of retreat and poetic composition. Built over the last twenty years of his life, Pope’s tunnel realized (in Samuel Johnson’s words) “ornament from inconvenience,” offering a retreat from civilization, a site of intellectual labor, and a meeting place for Pope and his friends in the Tory opposition.130 Finally, it came to house Pope’s mineralogical collection, which remains today where it was originally placed.
Pope named this tunnel his “grotto,” and its design multiply registers Pope’s understanding of the relationship between ideas and the senses—enough so that it makes sense to trace out its genesis in some detail. To begin with, Pope’s grotto represents a paradigmatic example of what Diana Balmori calls an “intermediate structure.” These structures historically included things like grottoes, hermitages, artificial ruins; they stand halfway between “architecture and landscape,” thereby “articulat[ing] the relationship between art and nature.”131 The grotto after all links neo-Palladian house to semi-informal garden, art put manifestly on display alongside a delicately sculpted natural scene. These are the sort of tensions with which Pope was at home; passing from a pastoral landscape to the house’s formal symmetry, Pope’s grotto displays manifold resemblances with his poetic craft, which delights in staging nature in the rigorous symmetry of the heroic couplet. He was a figure of paradox, who waded into public life by retreating from public centers. Set free from the demands of the marketplace, Pope, like the Roman poet Horace, took up a site outside the immediate orbit of City politics—a place from which he could launch his satires, free of the
