Writing up my doctoral research on Samuel Richardson in the 1980s I was lucky enough to have a series of conversations with my friend and younger contemporary, Simon Schaffer, polymathic expert in the history and philosophy of science of the period. I remember him talking about the genius astronomer, Edmond Halley, who paid for the publication of Newton’s Principia in 1687, and wrote “a fulsome poem for the front of the book”, exclaiming about his fellow natural philosopher, “No closer to the gods can any mortal rise”.
Simon was full of anecdotes about the intertwined groups and real relations between the thinkers of that time, ranging far beyond the Royal Society and all over the civilised world. But I remember he was also particularly interested in who lived and worked and talked together in coffee houses in various districts of London, in the half century preceding the production of Samuel Richardson’s great novels. He and his students had been mapping particular areas of the city, an exercise that prompted me to look into the novelist’s own extraordinary circle of intimates in the 1740s, including among others his friend and physician, George Cheyne, his doctor John Freke, author of a Treatise on the Nature of Fire, and the ‘English mystic’ William Law.
The Fire Scene, from Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Estate, a Reverie, 2015. All rights reserved.These are the moments in years of research that take one in a quite different direction, and for my part led me to a particular re-reading of Clarissa centred on its ‘Fire-Scene’, in which the villain-hero Lovelace deploys a fake fire to drive Clarissa Harlowe into his arms, a ruse that fails but nevertheless sends him another step closer to destroying everything he loves in this life.
