Longitude in London

In April, I was proud to announce the publication of the first part of an article that I've worked on with the Paul Mellon Centre's new digital journal British Art Studies. I introduced my 'Look First' piece entitled 'Looking for the Longitude' in which I set the scene for a series of images which would explore how 18th-century people understood the longitude problem.

This was particularly in relation to an image by William Hogarth - the final plate of his Rake's Progress - in which the action takes place in Bethlehem Hospital, Bedlam, the contemporary madhouse. Among his madmen, Hogarth included a figure trying to solve longitude on the wall of his cell, and I wanted to explore the other imagery circulating in the period that would have shaped how people saw Hogarth's reference. A particularly intriguing angle is given by a pirate version of the Bedlam scene, which hack engravers produced from memorising Hogarth's painting. Their variations help us to uncover what they saw and understood in the image. 

The second part of my article therefore outlined a series of 12 images that were circulating in the 1730s when Hogarth and his copyists were working, showing what influenced their representations of longitude. These appeared daily over 2 weeks in June, finishing on 25th, the anniversary of a copyright act, often known as the Hogarth Act. Thanks to lobbying from Hogarth and his fellow engravers, this was the first act to grant copyright in engraved images, so would have rendered the pirate copies of the Rake's Progress illegal, had they not been published before the act was passed. 

My cumulative series of images sought to capture the sense of that period of busy artistic production, but also to locate it clearly within London and the range of locations and contexts that also shaped understanding of longitude. Each image was therefore linked on an interactive map to a London space, and featured additional commentary and images by a series of experts who kindly agreed to collaborate with me. Over the 12 days, others also got involved in comments and on Twitter, all of which I've captured for posterity. 

My hope is that this series of texts, images and conversations captured, in a 21st-century digital form, the sense of frenzied production and discussion that characterised the longitude debate in the 18th century. I'm fascinated by how this new digital platform might allow different modes of publication that are interdisciplinary and collaborative, but also evocative of the subject they discuss. The next step for me is to think about how this will become a book, and I hope to think more on here about what digital formats might bring to the project as it develops.