Materialist hermeneutics, textuality and the history of geography: print spaces in British geography, c.1500–1900

Journal of Historical Geography 33 (2007) 466e488 www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg

Materialist hermeneutics, textuality and the history of geography: print spaces in British geography, c.1500e1900 Robert J. Mayhew School of Geographical Sciences, University Road, Bristol BS8 1SS, UK

Abstract This essay canvasses a range of recent work in literary studies and the history of science advocating a ‘materialist hermeneutic’, an approach to the study of texts which takes seriously their printed format as a bearer of expressive meaning. The essay goes on to show the role of such a hermeneutic in revising our narratives of the history of geographical thought by looking at the print format of British geography books in the era 1500e1900. It is argued that the age of discovery created a ‘problem situation’ for geographical knowledge which was solved by the geographical grammar, this solution only collapsing with the closing of the world in the late-nineteenth century. It is further shown that the so-called ‘new’ geography of the late-nineteenth century developed a radically different print space for geography. The print spaces of early modern and new geography are shown to have been key determinants of the social and intellectual positioning of geography as a scholarly enterprise. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: History of geography; Early modern; Hermeneutics; History of the book; Print culture

There has been a profound turn towards the linkage of issues of spatiality and textuality in the past 20 years, this being fostered both in literary studies and geography. On the literary side, there has been a move to consider issues of spatial representation in literature, the spaces of literary production and the like, whilst human geographers have focussed on the idea that their subject matter is a ‘text’, open to reading, an idea which wavers between being a ‘fact’ and being a simile

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depending on the practitioner.1 Most of this work in both disciplinary contexts seems to gain much of its inspiration from post-structuralism in its several varieties. Furthermore, the fusion of text and space has drawn more on Derridean than Foucauldian post-structuralism, leading it away from any investigation of the historical construction of these categories. As Jerome McGann has pointed out, post-structural criticism of the deconstructive variety has shared with New Criticism and Structuralist criticism an ahistorical approach to texts, all being ‘formalistically grounded operations’ working by a critical method which tends to favour the indeterminacies of textual reception and to ignore the material contexts (geographical and historical) in which texts were produced.2 In this essay, I wish to tie geography, textuality and space together in a rather different and more historical way. Rather than taking ‘text’ as a suggestive metaphor I wish to look at actual books (in my case geography books). Rather than take ‘space’ as an allusive metaphor, I wish to take it literally. My conception of textual space, then, is the physical space of the printed page. This essay looks at the physical space of the book as a key part of its ability to express meaning, and suggests that the history of geography cannot afford to ignore the printed space of geography books as a bearer of meaning. As such, I take the insights of what can be termed ‘materialist hermeneutics’ (the content of which is discussed below) and apply them to a factual genre of spatial texts as yet unexamined in this perspective, namely geography books. More specifically, I concentrate on British geography books in the era 1500e1900 which, cutting against the more general historian’s usage of the term for reasons I explain below, I propose to call the ‘early-modern’ era in the history of geographical writing. Furthermore, the essay concentrates exclusively on what might be termed ‘didactic’ geography books aimed at an audience seeking geographical education. There were, of course, many other types of geographical writings (and drawings) in the early-modern era, which may well follow different trajectories, thereby limiting the general applicability of the argument developed here. Yet the materialist hermeneutic approach outlined here can be applied to other modes of geographical writing and drawing to develop comparative analyses of the inscription of geography in other times, spaces and modes of communication. Within the remit set for this essay, I wish to suggest that a distinct ‘problem situation’ for an inquiry called geography was generated by the ‘age of discovery’ in the era of Columbus, and that the solution to this problem was a textual one which revolved around generating a new physical format for e or space of e the geography book, with a distinct set of paratextual devices. The success of this new space was central to giving early-modern geography its cultural and intellectual

1

For examples see in literature B. McLeod, The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580e1745, Cambridge, 1999; F. Moretti, The Atlas of the European Novel, 1800e1900, London, 1999; B. Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland, London, 2001; A. Gordon and B. Klein (Eds), Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, Cambridge, 2001; R. Bauer, The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literature: Empire, Travel, Modernity, Cambridge, 2003. In geography, see for example J. Duncan, The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom, Cambridge, 1990; T. Barnes and J. Duncan (Eds), Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor in the Representation of Landscape, London, 1991; R. Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure, London, 1997; J. Duncan and D. Gregory (Eds), Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing, London, 1999. For a recent collaborative set of essays from members of both disciplinary communities, see R. Phillips and S. McCracken (Eds), The Spatial Imaginary, New Formations 57, London, 2005e2006. 2 J.J. McGann, The Textual Condition, Princeton, 1991, 32.

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authority. I will also suggest that the breakdown of early-modern geography which was effected by the self-styled ‘new’ geographers of the late-nineteenth century was centrally concerned with debunking the authority which had accumulated around one spatial format for the printed geography page and its replacement with a new print space for geography. Materialist hermeneutics and the power of textual space The present essay echoes an interdisciplinary concern with the expressive functions of print and the page, which, bundled together, can be called a ‘materialist hermeneutics’, and extends that interest by considering its interpretative purchase on understanding the history of geography as a textual tradition. As Jerome McGann, himself one of the doyens of this movement, puts it, this is an area of study that dominates much of the interesting debate and conversation now occurring in humanities scholarship. History of the book; theory of textuality; methods of knowledge representation; digital scholarship; even bibliography and theory of editing: all of these subject areas are now centres of the liveliest interest. The interest is heavily interdisciplinary. It is also focussed on foundational matters.3 As McGann’s comment makes clear, this is a diffuse and multifaceted movement. For our purposes, it is useful to organise this cornucopia into two components. First, there has been a deep interest in those textual features of books which lie beyond the boundaries of standard literary and scholarly concern. Thus, attention has focussed on matters such as title pages, prefatory material, dedications, notes and even punctuation. This interest has been given its most influential and most theoretically-sophisticated treatment in Ge´rard Genette’s Seuils (1987; translated as Paratexts in 1997), a work which sprang from the Derridean concern with the margins of the text. For Genette, a text cannot become a book, which is received and read as such by an audience, without these paratextual accoutrements, and as such they are key components in the creation of meaning through print. Furthermore, and interestingly from our perspective, Genette is concerned with the spatial arrangement of paratextual devices: A paratextual element . necessarily has a location that can be situated in relation to the location of the text itself: around the text and either within the same volume or at a more respectful (or more prudent) distance. This he terms ‘the spatial field of the paratext’.4 Furthermore, he suggests that paratexts are flexible features which change over the life of a text’s publication, thereby facilitating the translation of the text over time and space.5 Paratexts, then, create the meaning of the text rather than just allowing it to occur, and these features use the spatiality of the printed page as part of their modus operandi. 3

J. McGann, Endnote: what is text?, in: J. Bray et al. (Eds), Mar(k)ing the Text: The Presentation of Meaning on the Literary Page, Aldershot, 2000, 329e333 at p. 329. 4 G. Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. J. Lewin, Cambridge, 1997, 4, 5. 5 Genette, Paratexts (note 4), 408.

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The second and more historically orientated level of interest in the materiality of the printed page has moved beyond the concern for text to a concern for the raw materials from which that page is made: a number of scholars have thus started to look to the expressive functions of paper and ink, of typeface and binding, thereby revitalising the traditional fare of bibliography in the service of new histories of the book.6 Once more, those who have expressed an interest in these matters have been drawn to the spatiality of the page e taking this literally as well as metaphorically e as a key part in the creation of meaning in print. Thus, and on the metaphorical level, McGann has argued that ‘to historicize meaning in this way is to locate it, to materialize it e to give it a local habitation and a name’. But McGann has also commented that the instability of interpretation which the encounter of text and reader generates is not just due to the reader’s ‘class, gender, social, and geographical circumstances’, but also to the material production of texts in time and space, which creates inevitable variability due to new settings, printings and the like.7 Taken together, these two levels of concern with the materiality of the text and its spatial element can lead to a demand for what McGann calls ‘a materialist hermeneutics’,8 one which does not exclusively look at the reader and their ‘ways of worldmaking’9 as sovereign in the creation of meaning, but which also attends to the physical production of the book and the spatial forms which result as intrinsic to that making of meaning. We can see the power and nature of such a materialist hermeneutics in action first by looking at the work of Donald McKenzie and then by canvassing briefly how such ideas have started to permeate thinking about texts of interest to historical geographers in the work of historians of science and literary historians. McKenzie argued for a form of inquiry which fused literary criticism with bibliography, both seen in historical context. This inquiry he tended to term ‘the sociology of texts’, and basic to this project was the belief that ‘all signs have meaning, that every element of the structure to which they contribute e I mean the book e is a proper concern of textual criticism’.10 By every element, McKenzie meant that the typeface in a book, the size of a book, the quality of its binding and so forth were all contributors to the message conveyed by that book. Most interestingly from our perspective, he argued that ‘the very disposition of space itself’ in a book was crucial evidence as to its meaning and purpose.11 True to this spirit, in a late lecture McKenzie recalled how he would get students to work out the expressive meaning of a book devoid of all printed marks, the point being that even the physical space of a bound book does intellectual work at some level.12 It should also be added that this concern with the spatiality of the text as central to its meaning is by no means confined to print and, by consequence, to the post-Guttenberg world.

6

See McGann, Textual Condition (note 2), 13e14 for this and its relation to Genette’s work. A useful general collection reflecting these concerns is Bray et al. (Eds), Mar(k)ing the Text (note 3). 7 McGann, Textual Condition (note 2), 10, 15. 8 McGann, Textual Condition (note 2), 15. 9 I take this phrase from N. Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, 1985, which is itself an analyticale philosophical defence of a position of ‘readerly’ sovereignty. 10 D. McKenzie, Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Congreve, reprinted in his Making Meaning: ‘Printers of the Mind’ and Other Essays, Amherst, 2002, 206. 11 D. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, 2nd Edition, Cambridge, 1999, 17. 12 D. McKenzie, What’s past is prologue: the Bibliographical Society and the history of the book, reprinted in Making Meaning (note 10), anecdote at pp. 259e262.

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On the contrary, as Saenger has shown, perhaps the greatest shift in the spatiality of the book in European history occurred in the middle ages, when scribal culture created spaces between words, jettisoning the classical preference for scriptura continua, thereby creating the preconditions for silent as opposed to oral reading: in Western scripts, spatial organization is a determinative element in the effect of different transcription systems on the cognitive processes required for lexical access. The reintroduction of word separation by Irish and Anglo-Saxon scribes . constitutes the great divide in the history of reading between antique cultures and those of the modern Occident.13 McKenzie’s most famous application of this belief in the centrality of space to the creation of the expressive meaning of print came in an analysis of William Congreve’s 1710 edition of his Works. This edition was an octavo, which used different print techniques from previous editions of Congreve’s works in order to generate a new sense of the dignity and authority of his oeuvre. Congreve, in conjunction with his publisher (Tonson) and his printer (Watts), sought to elevate his works above the criticism of being both ephemeral and vulgar. This was not simply achieved by a process of textual bowdlerisation (although this was part of the process). On the contrary, Congreve used neo-classical scene divisions, varied type faces and printed ornaments, used, in other words, the formatting and spatial disposition of the printed page, to create the persona of the elevated dramatist through creating the right ‘look’ for his pages. Congreve used letter-spaced roman capitals and small capitals for headlines and character groupings, the centred italic capitals for speakers’ names . the engraved headpieces and ornamental drop initials for each act, and the use of ornaments to separate the scenes.14 As McKenzie concludes, ‘the design of the book was intended to give a fuller sense of Congreve’s art’.15 What we learn from McKenzie is that the physical form of a book, the actual space of the text, has an important bearing on the expressive message which a book conveys. It is interesting that, despite the multiple lines through which recent work in the humanities has looked to the materiality and spatiality of the text, until recently there had been no real interest from such scholars in ‘spatial texts’, such as travel accounts or geography books. Metaphorical evocations of spatiality abounded, as did detailed analyses of the role of spatial form in the creation of meaning in various books, yet spatial texts remained untouched. Perhaps the main reason for this lack of interest was that practitioners of a ‘materialist hermeneutics’ were overwhelmingly literary critics interested in poetry and novels. Furthermore in the highly influential work of Jerome McGann they have drawn on a critic who has persistently insisted on the conceptual separation of ‘imaginative’

13 14 15

P. Saenger, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading, Stanford, 1997, 5, 12. McKenzie, Typography and Meaning (note 10), 227. McKenzie, Typography and Meaning (note 10), 233, emphasis in original.

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from ‘factual’ prose. Thus McGann has tended to argue that it is only in imaginative literature that meaning is created by spatial devices, textual or otherwise: The object of poetry is to display the textual condition. Poetry is language that calls attention to itself, that takes its own textual activities as its ground subject.16 But surely if meaning is created by both paratextual apparatuses and the material components of the text e ink, paper and their spatial organisation e as Genette, McGann and McKenzie assert, this must also hold good for ‘factual’ genres such as spatial texts? If textual message cannot be separated from print medium for poetry and novels, the same must apply to all printed books, and as such the form of materialist hermeneutics which McGann advocates should have a far wider applicability than he suggests. That this is true has become clear from a number of pioneering analyses of scientific and factual texts in the light of the approaches of materialist historians of the book such as McKenzie. Here I shall focus specifically on a few important works which treat what I have termed ‘spatial texts’, i.e. texts with a geographical angle. Amongst literary historians, high-profile work addressing travel literature and chorography has attended to the material features of the text as important to its meaning. Perhaps best known to historical geographers in this regard is Richard Helgerson’s analysis of Saxton’s county maps in Forms of Nationhood (1992), which is particularly concerned with the evolving history of the print ornaments to Saxton’s maps as a commentary on the emergent disjunction between loyalty to nation and loyalty to crown. By focusing on paratexts to the map, Helgerson develops a powerful argument about the intersection between geography and identity.17 At the other end of the chronological spectrum addressed in this essay, Nigel Leask has pointed to the tangled relations with print exhibited in the work of Alexander von Humboldt. As we will see later, Humboldt was a keen advocate of the reformulation of the print format of geography books, but his own attempts to forge a form of travel writing suitable to his ambitions were thwarted by the generic expectations of the travel account. As Leask shows, Humboldt’s Personal Narrative diverged increasingly from being either personal or narrative as it unfolded, becoming overwhelmed by footnotes, referencing and the conventions of science instead. Generic expectations, print conventions and polymathic ambitions left Humboldt struggling to produce his Personal Narrative, which stopped abruptly before half of his journey had been narrated.18 Historians of science have also looked at the material form of their texts, including spatial texts, as productive of meaning. Whilst Adrian Johns’ Nature of the Book (1998) has been the template here, of more immediate interest in the present context is the work of Ann Blair and James Secord. In a sequence of articles, Blair has looked at the ways in which ‘information overload’ in the early-modern age led to the generation of an array of finding aids for books including indexes and commonplace books, reference books and note-taking aids. She notably draws examples of these processes from geography books such as Renaissance editions of

16

McGann, Textual Condition (note 2), 10. R. Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England, Chicago, 1992, esp. 108e124. 18 N. Leask, Curiosity and the Aesthetics of Travel Writing 1770e1840: ‘From an Antique Land’, Oxford, 2002, esp. 296. 17

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Ptolemy’s Geography and Mu¨nster’s Cosmographia.19 At the other end of the timeframe for this article, Secord has looked at the geography of reading for Chambers’ Vestiges of Creation and has shown a keen awareness that the print formats of Vestiges were key to its reception, this helping to explain the delay in publishing a ‘popular’ format edition. As Secord argues, ‘the text of the first inexpensive edition and that of the second gentlemanly edition were identical; but the differences between the volumes were immensely significant’, those differences in bindings, font size, margin and gutter sizes and the like meaning ‘the intended audiences for the two books were very dissimilar’.20 In this essay, I seek to build on this burgeoning interest in material hermeneutics and its applicability to spatial texts by turning the focus onto didactic geography books and asking what the history of the material forms of geography books can tell us of the social and intellectual status of geography c.1500e1900.

Two moments in type: the rise and fall of early-modern geography The rise of early-modern geography It is something of a historical cliche´ that the age of print and the age of discovery combined to form a central plank of the Renaissance. Yet if we take this formulation seriously and look at it in more detail, what is overwhelmingly clear is that the relationship between print and discovery was vexed and ambiguous. Above all, the century following the alleged shattering of the medieval world view through the exploits of da Gama and Columbus saw printed geography books which were startlingly unaffected by the revisions which their discoveries demanded in the Christianclassical view of global geography. As John Elliott puts it, in the context of the discovery of the Americas: It is as if, at a certain point, the mental shutters come down; as if, with so much to see and absorb and understand, the effort suddenly becomes too much for them, and Europeans retreat into the half-light of their traditional mental world.21 The other solution which printed geography books offered was not to reject the new information which the age of discovery was producing, but simply to juxtapose it with the Christian-classical world view it challenged. As such, geography books such as Sebastian Mu¨nster’s Cosmographia (1550) saw a situation where, in Anthony Grafton’s words:

19

A. Blair, Reading strategies for coping with information overload, ca. 1550e1700, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003) 11e28; A. Blair, Note taking as an art of transmission, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004) 85e107; A. Blair, Annotating and indexing natural philosophy, in: M. Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine (Eds), Books and the Sciences in History, Cambridge, 2000, 69e89. 20 J. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Chicago, 2000, 147, 149. 21 J.H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492e1650, Cambridge, 1992 reprint, 14.

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New information did not modify or cancel the old, but piled up alongside it like fresh coal beside clinkers. New facts about the world e such as the existence of western continents e did not modify the old structure.22 Interestingly, the same situation held good for maps of the period, which tended to happily juxtapose unaltered medieval descriptions of the world with maps which made a nonsense of them.23 Indeed, it has even been suggested that, for the first two generations after Columbus, the discovery of the Americas could reinforce classical geography: ‘the Ptolemaic system was not jarred by the addition of new land masses, and organizationally the western land masses helped fill a presentational gap’.24 Furthermore, as Johnson points out, this solution was enshrined in European thought ‘not through long voyages to distant lands, but through the pages of a book and the sheets of a map’.25 In general, we can say that the age of discovery posed a twofold ‘problem situation’ for geography in general and for geography books in particular, which neither rolling down the shutters nor juxtaposing mutually contradictory views addressed, and which Johnson’s positive synthesis of print, Ptolemy and new lands only contained for the first few generations after the age of discovery. Discovery was bringing to light vast quantities of new information about the world, about what was where. Furthermore, discovery was also generating vast numbers of claims about the world, some of which were soon refuted, others of which came to be supported by subsequent travellers.26 These two elements meant that geography as an inquiry and the geography book as a text needed a way in which new knowledge could rapidly be taken on board and arguments no longer deemed trustworthy could be jettisoned without destroying the texture of geography as a creditworthy enterprise. This demand did not become pressing for a long time, but in due course the discovery of new global spaces started to make the development of a new spatial format for geographical texts essential. I would suggest that, true to McKenzie’s formulations, the solution to this problem situation for early-modern geography came in the form of a distinctive space for the printed page of the geography book, a space which was pioneered across Europe in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Of course, this ‘problem situation’ should not be seen as a merely epistemic one; on the contrary, technological and political contexts were also key to the reformulation of geography as a textual genre. Whilst these contexts are not the focus of the present essay, we can at least note that in the technological sphere it was the development of the handpress which allowed for the retention of pages of bloc type or ‘formes’, into which minor changes could be made

22

A. Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, Cambridge, MA, 1992, 106e107. 23 M. Hoogvliet, The medieval texts of the 1486 Ptolemy edition by Johann Reger of Ulm, Imago Mundi 54 (2002) 7e18. 24 C.R. Johnson, Renaissance German cosmographers and the naming of America, Past and Present 191 (2006) 3e43 at p. 24. 25 Johnson, Renaissance German cosmographers (note 24), 43. 26 The centrality of the problem of trustworthy knowledge in early-modern science is emphasized by S. Shapin, The Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England, Chicago, 1995. For trust as an epistemological issue in the history of geography, see C.W.J. Withers, Reporting, mapping, trusting: making geographical knowledge in the late seventeenth century, Isis 90 (1999) 497e521.

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with ease during the printing process. Once such formes had been broken down to use the type in other books, however, publishers were reluctant to add further changes until new texts were made. The same situation held good for plates such as maps, the result often being disjunctions between the information contained in texts and illustrations according to when they were made. Essentially, printers could embrace changes in geographical information whilst a forme was still extant in the print house, but would be reluctant to do so after that time. As such, the handpress enabled the encoding of vast quantities of new information in the age of discovery, but likewise was a conservative force once capital had been expended on setting the formes for a book and especially once those formes had been broken up.27 In political terms, the age of discovery was, of course, also the age of empire and this led to a burgeoning demand for global geographical information in the European metropolises. In short, the audience for geographical information expanded in terms of numbers and interests; an epistemic need and a technological capacity to produce new forms of geography would not, in and of themselves, have led to new geography books without an interested audience, which empire and its rivalries produced, as Lesley Cormack has shown in the case of English geographical interest.28 Moving from contexts to print texts, if we look at the evidence of English geography books, there was a transformation in their textual format which was introduced from the 1590s and which was to dominate the textual space of the geography book well into the nineteenth century. Whilst a world in which geographical knowledge was both rapidly expanding and radically uncertain could be catered for by vast paratextual apparatuses of footnotes, appendices and the like, this would form a confused page space, and a more elegant solution, the solution which was developed in the later sixteenth century, was to develop the geography book as a series of ‘boxes’, whose contents could be changed and extended in subsequent editions, this allowing for the endless accumulation and correction of information. In short, geography books developed a standard sequence of continents, nations and regions by which they described the world, and for each region or nation, they developed a standard sequence of topics which would be discussed. The use of a spatial sequence was hardly novel, Renaissance scholars in this particular following the precedent of Strabo’s Geography, which was rediscovered and printed in this era. Yet the use of a standard set of topics e the boundaries of a nation, its physical nature, its history, religion and so forth29 e was an innovation with no obvious precedent in ancient geographical writing. This standard set of topics was treated in discrete paragraphs which allowed for the addition and replacement of information over time in a way which did not disrupt the discussions of other topics. As such, a space of print was created which was endlessly expandable and revisable, a space suitable to the age of discovery had been provided by a new print space for geography. As McKenzie has pointed out in another context, ‘space is one of the strongest weapons in a printer’s arsenal . printing is far superior to speech in the spaced presentation of forms that cannot be read aloud (lists, tables, branching and other graphic configurations)’.30 It was just 27 J. Brotton, Printing the world, in: Frasca-Spada and Jardine (Eds), Books and the Sciences in History (note 19), 35e48; J. Brotton, Printing the map, making a difference: mapping the Cape of Good Hope, 1488e1652, in: D. Livingstone and C. Withers (Eds), Geography and Revolution, Chicago, 2005, 137e159. 28 L. Cormack, Charting an Empire: Geography at the English Universities, 1580e1620, Chicago, 1997. 29 See Johnson, Renaissance German cosmographers (note 24), 25. 30 McKenzie, Speech-Manuscript-Print, reprinted in Making Meaning (note 10), 237e258 at p. 254.

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such a ‘spaced presentation’ which was developed in early-modern geography books. They frequently deployed branching diagrams derived from late-Renaissance pedagogy as a way of structuring their content,31 and on each printed page deployed a rigid logic of presentation which necessitated a clear spatial format. In this, geography books were part of a far broader trend in the printing of factual treatises in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Known as ‘typographic books’, such works used the space of the printed page and the whole paratextual arsenal of the print house to structure meaning through the control of the shape of print on the page: The tally of parts is complete, in due hierarchical order, from title pages and contents to synoptic trees and indexes. In the differentiation of headings, paragraphs and words these books take the typographic expression of intellectual structure to the limit which is set by the number of ways of differentiating and arranging words a reader can be expected to keep in mind.32 We can exemplify the space which the typographic book developed for a factual account of the world by looking at the space of the printed page in one of the earliest English-language geography books, Peter Heylyn’s Microcosmus (1621). Microcosmus was published by Oxford University Press, and was aimed at a student audience. What is noticeable is the way in which its theoretical opening deploys simple branching structures, which develop an ordered and easily-comprehended space for the young reader (Fig. 1). This theoretical preamble lays out what the subject matter of geography is taken to be, and the ensuing pages which describe the world take up on this, each national description canvassing a common sequence of topics about the natural and cultural world. Each national description, then, has a resemblance to all the others, and the reader soon learns where to look for specific types of geographical information. A uniform ‘grid’ of geographical description is created, which can be expanded, contracted or adjusted with ease, as Heylyn showed with his later geographical work, Cosmographie (1652), which was a massive expansion of Microcosmus, including new information and expanding each description whilst still deploying the same basic structure. It is also worth noting the print features which Microcosmus deployed to achieve its effect. The book has a fairly extensive set of paratextual devices, aping those one would expect in a humanist treatise. Thus we see a title page, adorned with both the imprimatur of Oxford University Press and an epigram from Martial to create scholarly authority for the work. Scholarly authority is then buttressed by social cachet in the ‘The Epistle Dedicatorie’ (as the headnote has it) which follows the title page, addressed as it is to Charles, Prince of Wales, the future king Charles I. After a ‘Preface’ studded with references to the ancients, Microcosmus’ prefatory material includes a poem about the author (by his brother) and an alphabetised ‘Table’ for easy reference before the descriptive text commences. The other important paratextual feature in Microcosmus was its use of marginal references to scholarly authorities, a device which both displayed the learning of its

31

The intellectual origins of this space of the printed page are beyond my scope here but are discussed in R. Mayhew, Geography, print culture and the renaissance: ‘The Road Less Travelled By’, History of European Ideas 27 (2001) 349e369. 32 P. Campbell, The typography of Hobbes’s Leviathan, in: J. Barnard et al. (Eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Vol. 4, 1557e1695, Cambridge, 2002, 645e647 at p. 645.

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Fig. 1. P. Heylyn, Microcosmus, 1621.

author and gave the text a visual coding as a work of reference and acting as a finding aid in an age of information overload. This use of notes in the margins rather than at the foot or end of the text created, of course, a print space with large blank spaces, something which gave large amounts of free paper on which students could write annotations, amendments and comments, this being highly suitable, given the intended audience for this essentially pedagogic text and the unstable and expansive nature of geographical knowledge in this era. Beyond these paratextual features, Microcosmus also boasts the use of ornamental drop initials to the dedication and text, ornate colophons and the use of roman and italic script, the preface, for example, being in italics

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Fig. 2. W. Guthrie, A New Geographical, Historical and Commercial Grammar, 3rd Edition, 1771.

throughout (with roman for quotations). In each of these ways typographical format showed this to be a book which had been carefully printed (a list of errata was printed on the final page, framed by ornate print forms), and one where print was designed to both entertain the eye and aid instruction. Taken together, the structure, paratext and printing of Microcosmus were designed to create a work of humanist pedagogy, and one wherein subsequent editions could respond to changing knowledge with minimal disturbance to surrounding segments of text. Furthermore, the blank spaces created by the system of marginal annotations allowed the student to respond to such changing knowledge claims before or instead of waiting for a new print edition, this being an era when scribal habits still interacted with print culture in the creation of textual meaning.33 Where the prefatory apparatus of Microcosmus, then, created scholarly and social authority, the margins of the text and its structured typography responded to the realities of an age wherein geographical authority was subject to repeated subversion.

33 Classic studies of this are H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England, Oxford, 1993; H.R. Woudhuysen, Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558e1640: The Procreative Pen, Oxford, 1996.

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Once developed, this printed space of the early-modern geography book ossified to become the standard format. Over time, in fact, the printed space of the geography book became even more precisely defined, geographical grammars or systems (as they were called) tending by the eighteenth century to break down the sense of a continuous narrative which was still present in the early efforts of Heylyn and others. We can see this by looking at the printed space of the most popular geographical grammar of all time, that of 1770 by William Guthrie, which was to run through some 46 editions over the next 70 years (Fig. 2).34 Compared with his seventeenth-century predecessors, it is clear that Guthrie deploys the same basic print format: the space of the page is compartmentalised into a series of paragraphs divided by theme, and the whole is in continental and then national units. Yet we can see that Guthrie’s page is even more subdivided and looks even less like a piece of continuous prose than did that by Heylyn due to the use of headings for each paragraph. By this time, such geographical grammars could be vast treatises: James Bell’s System of Geography (1832), for example, was perhaps the greatest such work in English, and was a massive six-volume work set in a tight typeface which is hard to read for any continuous length of time, packing in as it does some 53 lines of print to the octavo page and having the print format, in Secord’s binary, of a ‘popular’ edition rather than a gentlemanly one. This ever more dense printing of the page was in good part driven by commercial dictates of profitability, minimising as it did the amount of paper needed in any book, and reducing the number of formes (print blocs) needed in this age of hand printing, thereby saving on labour costs and reducing the amount of time which it would take to produce any given book. Similar commercial pressures perhaps also explain the ways in which the paratextual and typographical conventions of the geography book evolved in the era between Heylyn and Guthrie. In terms of paratexts, Guthrie’s title page is comparatively simple and contains far more prose, outlining as it does the contents of the volume. More importantly, the whole humanist prefatory apparatus we saw in Microcosmus is dispensed with: whilst a basic preface remains, elaborate dedications and poetical praise of the author were a thing of the past for geography books by the time Guthrie wrote. There is also a noticeable shift in the typographical conventions of geography books. Certain print conventions remained intact, notably the use of branching structures deploying features such as large curled brackets and thematic paragraphing, these features being placed under a framing organisational structure by a set of headnotes. Yet the decorative print ornamentation which Microcosmus displayed had been dispensed with, making the printed page far more filled with letters and far less broken up by other print features. Furthermore, there is far less use of variations in font, the page tending to be overwhelmingly set in roman script, with far less use of italics or bold type, let alone black letter, Greek or Arabic typefaces. This, together with the tendency to use type of the same size throughout also created a far more uniform printed page filled with text of unvaried style. Moreover, notes had in general moved from the margin to the foot of the text, thereby cutting down on the amount of blank space on any given page, and once more enhancing the sense of a ‘full’ page of print. In all of this, geography books were merely part of a broader pattern in the history of European printing, continuing

34 For more details on print history, see O.F.G. Sitwell, Four Centuries of Special Geography, Vancouver, 1988, 273e286.

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the trend which began when humanism was at its height: each page presents a closely identical appearance, a bloc of text, without notes or marginalia, formally broken only by paragraph and chapter divisions.35 Yet there was also a reverse typographical trend, in that geography books by the eighteenth century routinely included maps of continents and nations, and also saw the proliferation of statistical tables and boxes, these amounting to an important increase in the typographical complexity of the genre and acting to counter the sense of unrelieved dense prose. As we saw in the introduction, McKenzie has suggested that the print space of any text has an expressive function that it contributes to the meaning of the piece and its social reception by the audience. This raises the question of what the print space of early-modern geography did in terms of the construction of geography as a type of inquiry. How did the printed format which geographers developed in response to the proliferation of information of uncertain worth determine the social and intellectual status of geography? At one level, the development of an agreed format for the geography book did for geography as a discourse what Congreve’s Works did for him as a dramatist: it created a sense of authority. Where earlier geographers prior to the sixteenth century had used a variety of print formats, geography books from the 1590s start to take on a certain method within themselves and a certain family resemblance between themselves. As Alastair Fowler has pointed out, genres are forged where a certain commonality of structure and mood emerges between a significant group of texts, and where those texts start to show a self-consciousness about their interconnectedness.36 The shared print space of early-modern geography books was a key part of their claim to be embarked on the same project of earth description. As such, the space of print was an element in the development of a genre (or more accurately, a cluster of genres) which was recognised as distinguishing geography as a mode of inquiry. This means, of course, that the creation of the sense of geography as an inquiry with a clear, distinct and coherent identity and thereby as an inquiry with some authority in the scholarly world was in good part due to the development of a print space which was agreed upon and which answered the twin needs of expansibility and replacability which the age of discovery had generated. We might venture to suggest that the space of print created the early-modern definition of geography as much as vice versa. The print space of early-modern geography creates its identity at a more specific level as well. Because geography books developed a print space of sequential paragraphs not designed to be ready as a continuous narrative, geography as an inquiry came to be seen as basic, pedagogic and propaedeutic. By this I mean that geography was seen as an inquiry essentially targeted at those with the status of a pupil, in whatever educative context. The printed page of the geography book was expressive of its function as a work of reference. If mature scholars engaged in the production, reception and exchange of works of continuous prose, the printed format of geography books meant that they were merely the ‘raw material’ for such exchanges. As such, those who wrote geography books were at the margins of major scholarly debate. If the print space of early-modern geography created its identity and authority, then, it was one which was fairly 35

J. Lennard, Mark, space, axis, function: towards a (new) theory of punctuation on historical principles, in: Bray et al. (Eds), Mar(k)ing the text (note 3), 1e11 at p. 7. 36 A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Modes, Oxford, 1982.

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mundane and lowly. Geography is repeatedly described as a basic and simple body of knowledge by early-modern educational theorists such as John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.37 In good part, the very print space of geography determined that it could not but be so. In sum, to the extent that geography had an identity at this time, it was not created by the apparatus of formal school qualifications or university degrees, because no such ‘disciplinary’ apparatus existed. Instead, geography’s identity was constructed around the printed page: geography was in good measure defined and authorised by the print space it developed. As I have shown, this print space was designed to cope with a context of expanding and uncertain knowledge about the globe in an age of European exploration and empire. Furthermore, this print space did not only respond to a problem situation, but also was an active contributor to the identity and status of geography as a discourse at this time. The fall of early-modern geography Accepting that a particular print space was central to the construction, definition and status of early-modern geography, when did this conceptualisation of geography break down and how was the space of the text implicated in and altered by this? It is a commonplace in the historiography of geography that the later nineteenth century saw the birth of a ‘new’ form of geography characterised by the construction of the disciplinary format which we are accustomed to in the present day.38 What has been less remarked upon is that part of the project of creating a new geography lay not only in the creation of formal geographical curricula for schools and universities, but also in the creation of a new print format for geography, one which would replace that which the late Renaissance had created for the age of discovery. At least part of the reason for this attack on the print culture of early-modern geography lay in a change in the ‘problem situation’ for geography. If geographical grammars were a response to the radical expansion and high turnover of geographical knowledge generated by the age of discovery, the later nineteenth century saw increasingly persistent discussions of the end of that age, of the ‘closing of the world’ as Mackinder was to term the situation where the entire surface of the globe had been explored, mapped and described.39 It was in this context that a number of European geographers sought to generate a new form of geography for a closed world, one element of which was a revolution in the print culture of geography. As space was annihilated by time, so they demanded the annihilation of geography’s entrenched print spaces, as we shall

37

J. Locke, in: J.W. Yolton and J.S. Yolton (Eds), Some Thoughts Concerning Education, Oxford, 1989, 178ff.; J.-J. Rousseau, Emile: Or, On Education, trans. A. Bloom, Harmondsworth, 1979, esp. 170e171. 38 The nineteenth-century emergence of a ‘new’ and ‘modern’ form of geography is the structural predicate of G. Martin and P. James, All Possible Worlds: A History of Geographical Ideas, 3rd Edition, London, 1993; and informs the chronological scope of G. Dunbar (Ed.), Geography: Discipline, Profession and Subject since 1870, Dordrecht, 2001; R. Johnston and M. Williams (Eds), A Century of British Geography, Oxford, 2003, although both collections see contributions by scholars who would refute this chronology. 39 See G. Kearns, Closed space and political practice: Frederick Jackson Turner and Halford Mackinder, Society and Space 1 (1984) 23e34; S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880e1918, Cambridge, MA, 1983, chapter 8; N. Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Berkeley, 2003, esp. chapter 1 for this language.

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see through an examination of the work of Alexander von Humboldt, Halford Mackinder, C. Raymond Beazley and George Grundy. Once more, it is important to emphasize that this was not merely an ‘epistemic’ issue about the state of geographical knowledge. On the contrary, as with the birth of the early-modern age in geographical knowledge and texts, so the end was facilitated by changing technological and political factors whose details are beyond my remit here. Technologically, the widespread use of the steam press dramatically reduced the cost of printing, thereby allowing for longer and cheaper print runs, the impact of which was felt with the breaking of the monopoly of the Stationers’ Company.40 Lithography and later developments such as cheap photography also made the production of maps, graphs and other images both far cheaper and far more easily integrated into blocs of text.41 Politically, the closing of the early-modern geographical era saw widespread demands in Britain and other European nations for new forms of education suitable to the situation of global empire achieved rather than sought, wherein the competition for scarce resources between nations would intensify and geographical knowledge would be of enormous utility. As many studies have shown, this was the context in which calls for a ‘new’ geography emerged, a geography to educate global and imperial citizens.42 This was also part of the drive to educate a far broader spectrum of people in nineteenth-century schools and universities, something which encouraged new modes of pedagogy eschewing rote learning.43 It was only when epistemic, technological and political factors came together that a new format for printed geographies emerged in the British context and that came in the late-nineteenth century. This explains why this essay uses the term ‘early modern’ to apply to an era stretching roughly from 1500 to 1900, where standard historiographical parlance would apply the term early modern to 1450e1789 or thereabouts. Simply put, this period represents a coherent era in geography’s print history, though it is one which does not map neatly onto the standard usage of the term ‘early modern’, driven as the latter is by watersheds in intellectual history (the era from the Renaissance to the end of Enlightenment) and/or political history (from the Reformation to the French Revolution).44 Alexander von Humboldt has been championed as the creator of a new and relevant form of geographical inquiry by a number of disciplinary historians on the basis of his strictures in his unfinished magnum opus, Cosmos.45 Whilst the details of his project of creating a new ‘total’ form of earth consciousness and inquiry are beyond my remit here, what is relevant is his

40

See W. St Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, Cambridge, 2004. See J.R. Ryan, Photography, visual revolutions and Victorian geography, in: Livingstone and Withers (Eds), Geography and Revolution (note 27), 199e238. 42 See for example C.W.J. Withers, A partial biography: the formalization and institutionalization of geography in Britain since 1887, in: Dunbar (Ed.), Geography (note 38), 79e119; R. Johnston, The institutionalisation of geography as an academic discpline, in: Johnston and Williams (Eds), A Century of British Geography (note 38), 45e90. 43 T. Ploszajska, Geographical education, empire and citizenship: geographical teaching and learning in English schools, 1870e1944, Historical Geography Research Series 35 (1999); R. Walford, Geography in British Schools, 1850e2000, London, 2001, esp. 49e71. 44 For historians’ conventional definitions of the early-modern age, see M. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450e1789, Cambridge, 2006, esp. 1e5. 45 See most notably M. Bowen, Empiricism and Geographical Thought: From Francis Bacon to Alexander von Humboldt, Cambridge, 1981; A. Godlewska, Geography Unbound: French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt, Chicago, 1999. 41

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discussion of the inadequacies of the print format of early-modern geography. In volume one of Cosmos, Humboldt argued that ‘it is desirable to deviate as widely as possible from the imperfect compilations designated, till the close of the eighteenth century, by the inappropriate term of popular knowledge’.46 This leaves it unclear whether Humboldt had a particular disagreement with the geographical compilations of popular knowledge known as grammars or systems, but a later comment leaves us in no doubt. Discussing the need to create a form of language capable of conveying nature’s sublimity, Humboldt argues that the old geographical formats were too mechanistic to achieve this, where the new ‘comparative’ geography of Carl Ritter has done so: It was only when the study of the earth’s surface acquired profoundness and diversity of character, and the natural sciences were no longer limited to a tabular enumeration of marvellous productions, but were elevated to a higher and more comprehensive view of comparative geography, that this finished development of language could be employed for the purpose of giving animated pictures of distant regions.47 In Cosmos, then, Humboldt clearly states that geography’s old print form was stultifying to the scientific imagination he wished to advocate. A more discursive, scientific and narrative form of geography is implicitly favoured through his admiration for Ritter’s work. Yet Humboldt never explicitly says what type of new print format geography needs, for the simple reason that the aim of Cosmos was not to rework the inquiry known as geography, but to generate a new form of inquiry, the study of the cosmos, which would draw on but be tangential to geography, and which, as Leask shows, he never fully realised even if he found expressive power in certain genres such as the tableau, the scientific paper and the isogram. It was really in the generation after Humboldt that his programmatic call for a new type of geography book was taken up and operationalized as the combination of political, pedagogic, technological and epistemological demands came together. Whilst hagiography of Halford Mackinder is to be avoided, in his work we do see a well-articulated attempt firstly to argue that the print space of early-modern geography needs to be reformulated, and secondly to articulate the type of new print space suitable for the closed world after the age of discovery. On the first topic, throughout his 50-year writing career, Mackinder was consistently hostile to the print culture of grammars. He castigated these formats as ‘irrational’, ‘that is, [their] main function is not to trace causal relations . [but to provide] a body of isolated data to be committed to memory’.48 Now this criticism was in a sense misplaced: the aim, as I have suggested, of early-modern geography was precisely to generate a print format by which material could be located, used and memorised, because in a world of such geographical uncertainty, that was seen as valuable in and of itself. Mackinder, writing in an era of far greater geographical certainty simply fails to see the function such formats had performed in previous centuries. But the core of Mackinder’s complaint, as implied here, lay in an antithesis between a conception of geography as a storehouse

46

A. von Humboldt, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe, trans. E.C. Otte´, Baltimore, 1997, 1, 51e52. 47 Humboldt, Cosmos (note 46), 2, 77e78. For Humboldt’s particular praise of Ritter, see 1, 48. 48 H. Mackinder, On the scope and methods of geography, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society NS 9 (1887) 141e174 at p. 143.

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of data and his conception of geography as a causal inquiry about human relations with the land. For Mackinder, from the ancient Greeks until his own generation ‘there piled up a chaos of miscellaneous information . referred to as ‘‘descriptive geography’’’.49 This was, as we have seen, a considerable historical exaggeration, for it was only a culture of print from the late Renaissance which had functioned thus, albeit drawing inspiration from Strabo’s model of a descriptive geography, Ptolemaic map construction and Plinean encyclopaedism. On the second question, what print format was the ‘new’ geography to adopt in order to give geography a function in the era of a closed world system? Unlike Humboldt, Mackinder was clear and explicit about the new print space geography should adopt, developing his thoughts in a number of essays. Contrary to the structured paragraphing of geographical grammars, geography books should be written in ‘ordinary literary form’, that is, as continuous prose, preferably with a strong narrative line to engage the reader.50 Also, true to Mackinder’s desire to rework geography to be causal rather than descriptive, he wanted to revise the argumentation of geography books to make them ‘progressive in method’. Where old geographical grammars led students to ‘learn of successive regions by precisely the same methods at all stages of mental development’, the new geography would expand outwards from the home to broader regions and would gradually increase the amount of theoretical material the pupil was expected to absorb from the narrative.51 Mackinder certainly deployed this progressive method in constructing his six-volume series, Elementary Studies in Geography (1906e1914).52 Furthermore, for Mackinder geography texts needed pictures to make their arguments. As we have already seen, the early printed geography books tended to have no illustrative materials, their only use of graphic as opposed to textual typefaces being in print ornaments to frame certain pages. Whilst eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century geography books did routinely include maps, these maps were rarely if ever actually referred to in the texts which they accompanied. Furthermore, the maps were often hopelessly outdated and frequently did not depict all the places referred to in the text, for the simple reason that the economics of the handpress meant they tended to be copied from other sources and from edition to edition, such that their construction was unrelated to the prose text with which they were bound.53 As such, image and text in early-modern geography books tended to be juxtaposed, rather than mutually reinforcing. It was against this print history of geography books that Mackinder sought to integrate text and image. Given that Mackinder argued that ‘the very essence of geographical power’ as instilled by the ‘new’ geography was the ability ‘to visualise . until it becomes possible to think of the whole World’s surface at once in all its complexities’,54 it is unsurprising that he advocated and personally deployed maps, diagrams and pictures as integral to

49

H. Mackinder, Geography, an art and a philosophy, Geography 27 (1942) 122e130 at p. 126. H. Mackinder, The Teaching of Geography and History: A Study in Method, London, 1914, 44. 51 H. Mackinder, Geography in education, Geographical Teacher 2 (1903) 95e101 at p. 96. 52 See A. Maddrell, Discourses of race and gender and the comparative method in geography school texts, 1830e1918, Society and Space 16 (1998) 81e103. 53 A problem which beset geography books throughout the age of the handpress: see Brotton, Printing the world (note 27). 54 H. Mackinder, The development of geographical teaching out of nature study, The Geographical Teacher 2 (1904) 191e197 at p. 192. On Mackinder and visualisation see J. Ryan, Visualising imperial geography: Halford Mackinder and the Colonial Office Visual Instruction Committee, 1902e11, Ecumene 1 (1994) 157e176. 50

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Fig. 3. H. Mackinder, Britain and the British Seas, 2nd Edition, 1930.

the print space of the geography book. If we look at Britain and the British Seas for example, the second edition of 1930 contained some six coloured fold-out maps and another 132 maps and diagrams in a 375 page book, all of which were referred to in the text and were integral to his argument (Fig. 3). Whilst my discussion has focussed on Mackinder, it should be made clear that he was not a lone seer, a mighty pioneer, but is more adequately depicted as one of a generation of scholars who moved geography and its print format in a similar direction. Whilst numerous examples could be adduced to make good this statement, I will merely linger on two examples from realms of human geographical inquiry at some intellectual distance from Mackinder’s but generated in Oxford at the same time as he was advocating a ‘new’ geography. First, if we look to the great history of medieval geographical culture produced by C. Raymond Beazley, Mackinder’s colleague in the School of Geography in Oxford from 1902 to 1909,55 we see a similar print space emerging for the writing of the history of geographical thought. Beazley’s Dawn of Modern Geography (1897e1906) remains a benchmark in its field, and in terms of its print format it is notable for its use of maps, diagrams and photographic images to enliven and visualise the text. It is also notable that it is an historical narrative, using the rhetorical arts of persuasion to make its subject interesting to students of both history and geography. Furthermore, whilst Beazley’s

55

See I. Scargill, The Oxford School of geography, 1899e1999, School of Geography Research Papers 55 (1999) 7e8.

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subject matter might initially seem to place him at some distance from Mackinder’s calls for geography to be a useful imperial subject, Beazley saw matters differently, arguing that medieval European geographers had to be considered in the light of what their countrymen afterwards became e masters of the world . the creeping ventures of the pilgrims are the first movements of an ultimately invincible raceexpansion.56 The same drives can be discerned in the historical geographies of the turn of the century and resulted in very similar print formats. George Grundy was appointed to teach ancient geography when the School of Geography was founded with Mackinder as its head in 1899 and taught there until 1912.57 During that time he produced his great historical-cum-military geography, The Great Persian War (1901). This work included colour maps, photographs of the scenes discussed and sketch maps by Grundy (after Edward Lear) to bolster his narrative, which attempts to provide precise locations for the events so famously narrated by Herodotus. Grundy traded on his first hand experience of the locations in question rather than an ‘armchair’ conception of historical geography as a process of textual collation and comparison. He was also keen to play his views off against those of other commentators, seeing historical geography thereby as a realm of criticism, debate and dialogue. Mackinder, then, argued for a new print space for geography which contemporaries such as Beazley and Grundy were enacting quite as successfully as himself in diverse spheres of geographical writing. For all three, geography books should be continuous narratives, not an indefinitely expandable grid of information. This meant, of course, that geographers were advocating a profound change in the reading experience of geography as an inquiry: rather than the early-modern print space, which was designed to be ransacked and referred to, they sought a print space which was designed to be read for an argument. In a sense, we could say that a shared conception of geography as a causal inquiry, an inquiry prosecuting an argument rather than presenting facts, necessitated a new print format for geography. Because Mackinder et al. now wanted people to read geography books through from cover to cover for their argument, three corollaries about print format followed. First, the print space of geography books had to be attractive and easy on the eye: as such, the dense, even impenetrable, typefaces and cluttered pages which had been suitable to the reference function and commercial publishing milieu of early-modern geography books had to give way to larger, more legible typefaces, interspersed with maps, diagrams and illustrations. Mackinder’s printed page was far easier to read than, say, Guthrie’s, containing 39 lines of printed text on a page compared with Guthrie’s 54, and seeing almost every page of text interspersed with illustrations to which the reader’s attention was drawn by their interrelation with the prose argument. Mackinder, Beazley and Grundy also all deployed a far simpler printed page, which continued the trend towards the uniform use of paragraphed roman type and few other typographical features, section divides and the like being dispensed with. Second, because there was a demand for geography to prosecute complex causal arguments about human relations with the land, geographers saw the need for a gradation from simple to complex texts, suitable to

56 57

C.R. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography, Vol. 1, London, 1897, 18. Scargill, Oxford School (note 55), 7.

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those at all levels of geographical sophistication, where the early-modern conception of geography books as a storehouse had led to far less differentiation of geography books for different audiences. Geography was no longer to be a basic inquiry, but instead a mode of argumentation or way of thinking which could be followed in graded steps from the simple to the complex, thereby allowing geography to develop a disciplinary identity as a self-contained subject which trained students at all stages of educational development. Third, taking these points together, the print format of the ‘new’ geography was creating an authorial persona for the geographer. Where in the early-modern period, as we have seen, geography as a pedagogic and reference type of work had been a lowly genre, and writers had not spent their life writing such books,58 Mackinder et al., working to entrench geography in the school and university system, envisioned authors spending their life in the prosecution of arguments about the relation of humans to the land and thereby labelling themselves as and writing as ‘geographers’. Furthermore, because geography was now seen as a realm of hypothesis, critique and debate, different geographers would adopt different positions, thereby creating a sense of authorial personality in their texts. The printed page, then, was a reflection of authorial intention and intellect; the persona of the geographer qua author was reflected in the texts they produced, something which simply did not hold for early-modern geography books, whose print space advertised itself as a factual digest (even though we can easily discern polemic and personal positions being adopted in those texts).59 The new geography, then, deployed the print space of romantic hermeneutics, the author as creator being accorded a reverential status, whilst the mechanical processes which created that print space (and over which authors rarely had or indeed wanted any control) were assumed and ignored.60 In sum, it has gone all but unremarked that the much-discussed ‘new’ geography of the later nineteenth century was in good part a change in print space for geography as a form of inquiry. A print space of description and reference was replaced by one of explanation and narrative. Just as early-modern print spaces suited the age of discovery, so the ‘problem situation’ for geography as that age ended, namely how to justify its continued existence, was in part addressed through giving geography a new look in terms of print format. The reworking of geography’s disciplinary space was in part effected by the reworking of geography’s print spaces. Whilst there is a need to be cautious about the historiography which locates with Mackinder et al. the formation of a modern form of geography, one which we have inherited, in the realm of print spaces such an argument does seem to hold considerable weight. Early-modern print spaces are most definitely a ‘world we have lost’.61 Of course, the idea of a geographical reference work remains, with dictionaries, companions and readers abounding, but these are works which tend to summarise theories, arguments and analyses, not discrete descriptive facts. We also tend to adopt a different set of paratextual and typographical conventions for such 58

For more on this, see R. Mayhew, The character of English geography, c.1660e1800: a textual approach, Journal of Historical Geography 24 (1998) 385e412 at pp. 402e406. 59 For which, see R. Mayhew, Enlightenment Geography: The Political Languages of British Geography, c.1650e1850, London, 2000. 60 For this more generally, see J.J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation, Chicago, 1983. 61 I take this phrase, of course, from P. Laslett, The World We have Lost: England before the Industrial Age, London, 1965.

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teaching texts and reference works e deploying as they do boxes, illustrations, colour and shading e from those adopted in the print space of research texts, these latter texts still tending to adopt many of the print conventions that Mackinder, Grundy and Beazley deployed a century ago.

Conclusions: space, text and history In conclusion, my brief example from the history of geographical thought hopefully reinforces three important points about the connection between textuality and spatiality, and also acts as a prolegomena to an approach to intellectual history which engages with the material realities of print culture. First, and drawing on the broad sweep of work which moves in the direction of what McGann has called materialist hermeneutics, I would contend that to ally meaningfully the categories of ‘text’ and ‘space’, the mediating power of historical consciousness is needed, something which tends to adjust how we think about these terms in the direction of ‘print’ and ‘page’. In fact, of course, any serious consideration of space as a category has had to take history into account, something about which, for example, Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish and Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space are clear, even if many of their acolytes have chosen to ignore this. By the same token, new historicist critics led by Greenblatt and others have forcefully reasserted the role of history in textual analysis, something which was perhaps eclipsed by the formal modes of criticism prevalent after World War Two. Yet in the realm of the conjoined analysis of spatiality and textuality, history tends to have dropped out of the picture. This in itself is (paradoxically enough) largely the product of a historical contingency: the intellectual genealogy of those who have looked to the spatiality of texts and the textuality of space, emanating as they have from a broadly post-structuralist ambit, has tended to encourage the neglect of historicity as a meaningful explanatory category. Post-structural criticism has been engaged in a formalist mode of analysis which focuses on the reading experience rather than the materialities by which that which the works they are reading are actually produced. Second, and moving against McGann’s argument, the present essay also shows that the basic categories around which materialist hermeneutics revolves e paratext, typography and the historicity of the processes which produce the page e need not be reserved for the analysis of ‘imaginative’ literature. In a sense, McGann’s insistence on this seems to be an odd residue of the romantic ideology of authorial divinity against which so much of his work is pitched. If paratextual and typographic conventions have an expressive function, this will apply to all texts, be they factual or imaginative. If we take the book to be a social product, we have an angle on the conjunction of text and space which refuses to acknowledge the sanctity of a binary of imaginative and factual literature. Hopefully the present argument has at least given a prolegomena to the meaningful application of materialist hermeneutics to the study of geographical texts, at the very least showing that its categories give us new ways of approaching those texts. Finally, if history needs to be integrated into analyses fusing text and space, likewise historians need to be aware of the material spatiality of texts. In the realm this essay has canvassed for example, it is noticeable how much attention historians of geography have paid to the contexts and

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contents of geography books, but how little they have paid to the printed forms and spatial formats of their subject matter. There has been a tendency to focus on the ‘message’ of historical texts, as if this can be meaningfully divided from the print medium in which it is expressed, and as if that medium is not in and of itself performing expressive functions. We are beginning to see historians of geography look to the materialities of geographical writing,62 and we could profit from this becoming a more thorough-going critical trend.

62

See M. Ogborn, Geographia’s Pen: writing, geography, and the arts of commerce, c.1660e1760, Journal of Historical Geography 30 (2004) 294e315; C.W.J. Withers, Writing in geography’s history: Caledonia, networks of correspondence and geographical knowledge in the late enlightenment, Scottish Geographical Journal 120 (2004) 33e45; M. Bru¨ckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy and National Identity, Chapel Hill, 2006.