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 as a scientific object. They may have sometimes differed on how they defined the nation, but they shared the goal of uniting local particulars under a national vision of the land. Furthermore a naturalist’s or antiquary’s correspondence as a material and social formation was at the heart of the vision of the nation that he projected in his printed works.
“An Active and Large Correspondence”
Rich material, social, and intellectual links made up a scientific correspondence. Naturalists identified a correspondence as the sum of these links. More than just an exchange of one or two letters, a correspondence was a fruitful relationship that persisted over time. As early as 1643 Samuel Hartlib, in a pamphlet addressed to Parliament, called for a “Correspondencie for the advancement of the Protestant Cause.”6 In the late 1690s Edward Lhuyd’s star had risen high enough that he received an offer of “correspondence” from August Quirinus Rivinus in Leipzig, who offered to give him news of German fossil discoveries.7 Their exchange was to be founded on material, not just intellectual, exchange: the Leipzig naturalist opened his offer with a gift of “3 or 4 books and some Formd Stones.”8 Though he was concerned that Rivinus had not behaved well by John Ray, Lhuyd accepted the offer; given the opportunities opened by such an exchange, it was worth navigating potential social difficulties, including the possibility that a correspondent would not deal frankly or fairly with one. Like this one, a correspondence could be between two people, but more often it referred to the sum of interactions between many people linked to one another through the exchange of letters. Elsewhere, Lhuyd referred to John Woodward’s “boast” of a “correspondence with five hundred persons … beyond the seas.”9
An “active and large correspondence” was a necessity, both for the gathering and production of knowledge that went into books and for selling those books. Martin Lister, for example, relied heavily on a broad correspondence to send him material—specimens as well as information—for his landmark Historiae conchyliorum, a multivolume natural history of shelled animals (including mollusks and gastropods) published between 1685 and 1692. Correspondents, including Hans Sloane, Edward Lhuyd, John Ray, Samuel Dale, and Thomas Townes, the latter a physician posted in the Caribbean, sent him species from across Britain and the British Atlantic world.10 Success in print too required an extensive correspondence. Henry Oldenburg ran into trouble when he contracted to print the Philosophical Transactions with an Oxford printer who had an insufficient correspondence. Richard Davies took over the job from Royal Society printers John Martyn and James Allestrey when plague closed London printing shops in 1665. But in his first go, Davies sold only three hundred of one thousand copies printed. Oldenburg’s profit was based on sales, so a failure to sell seven hundred issues represented a serious loss.11 A chastened Oldenburg wrote, “If he not be a man of an active and large correspondence, I had done much better, never to have committed it to him.”12 The possession of an “active and large correspondence” was crucial for booksellers and others seeking to move books because print was distributed through the social links of correspondence.
In some ways, as Lhuyd, Oldenburg, and Lister’s experiences demonstrate, the correspondence was akin to our “social network.” But it was not identical to it. Neither can “correspondence” or “the correspondence” be simplified down to one thing (of course neither can the social network; the term has many different valences). There was “a correspondence,” in the sense of letters passed back and forth primarily between two persons; there was a bookseller’s commercial correspondence, the “active and large correspondence” described by Oldenburg; and there was the naturalist’s correspondence, the connections from which he collected information. The correspondence could encompass both weak and strong ties, as described by David S. Lux and Harold J. Cook.13 Weaker ties might predominate more with international correspondence or with commercial correspondence.
However, the connections that made up the British correspondence were tighter and more personal, differentiating it from some (though not all) modern-day social networking and the broader early modern international scientific correspondence, of which it was, in some sense, a subset. It depended more on face-to-face interaction and the frequent exchange of long letters. The elite class was smaller and more compressed, and naturalists and antiquaries played multiple roles within it. In addition they were gentry, clergy, nobility, and advisers to the monarch and his ministers. For example, John Aubrey, Samuel Pepys, and John Evelyn had intimate audiences with Charles II and his advisers; Pepys, as a naval administrator, met with them regularly. Others played leading
