Geographia's pen: writing, geography and the arts of commerce, 1660-1760

摘要

This paper contributes to the understanding of geography and geographical knowledge in 18th-century Britain by exploring its affiliations with the craft of 'penmanship'. The connections between geography and writing are demonstrated by exploring the words and images used by the engraver George Bickham in a series of works which were both geographical descriptions and manuals (or copy-books) which instructed their readers in particular forms of script. To understand these affiliations, the works of Bickham and other writing masters such as John Ayres, Charles Snell and Joseph Champion are explored in detail. This demonstrates the implication of the teaching of writing in the world of commerce in terms of the practice of the writing masters themselves, the audience for their work and the legitimation that they sought. The anxieties that writing for money raised — over honour, credit and gender — are shown to have been negotiated through notions of politeness which reconciled commerce and virtue through the ideals and norms of polite conversation, bodily deportment and improvement. These are argued to have shaped both the image of Geographia used by Bickham and his political deployment of geographical knowledge in the 1740s. More broadly, the paper argues for attention to the techniques and technologies of writing in the making of geographical knowledge.