Poor Robin’s prophecies : a curious almanac, and the everyday mathematics of Georgian Britain

257 Pages·2012·2.59 MB·English

by  Wardhaugh

poor robin’s prophecies
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P O OR R O B I N 's
PROPHECIES
A curious Almanac,
and the
everyday mathematics of
Georgian Britain
Benjamin Wardhaugh
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
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© Benjamin Wardhaugh 2012
Th e moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2012
Impression: 1
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
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ISBN 978–0–19–960542–2
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
For Jessica
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CONTENTS

List of illustrations viii
Chapter 1 ‘Doctor Faustus’ day’: Making it fun 1
Chapter 2 ‘Th e dismal and long expected morning’:
Gett ing it wrong 31
Chapter 3 ‘Fitt ed to the meanest capacity’: Learning it 63
Chapter 4 ‘My Scarbrough expenses’: Using it 91
Chapter 5 ‘Close and demonstrative reasoning’:
Beautifying the mind 119
Chapter 6 ‘An u niversal Mathesis ’: Ordering the world 147
Chapter 7 ‘A compleat Offi cer of Artillery’:
Gett ing it right 178
Chapter 8 ‘Th e terrible p ons asinorum ’: Playing with it 202
Acknowledgements 237
Notes on sources 238
Index 245
vii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1 Th e title page of Poor Robin’s almanac, for 1664 5
Figure 2 A page spread from Poor Robin’s almanac
for 1664, showing the two versions of the
calendar, serious and comic 15
Figure 3 Frontispiece from News fr om Bedlam , 1674 26
Figure 4 Th e sun eclipsed, from ‘Th e true fi gure
of that great eclipse of the sun’, a pamphlet of 1699 33
Figure 5 A ‘South Sea Bubble’ playing card 47
Figure 6 A page from Isaac Hatch’s arithmetic
exercise book, 1726 65
Figure 7 A page from Ann Mohun’s exercise book, 1808 87
Figure 8 Pages from John Smart’s T ables of Interest , 1726 97
Figure 9 John Th ompson’s plane table, by George
Adams, 1756–60 107
Figure 10 Th e fi nal page of Th omas Porcher’s
geometry book, c . 1770 120
Figure 11 Geometry meets reality, in Th omas
Porcher’s geometry book 122
Figure 12 Samuel Davis’ supplements to P roblems in
Practical Geometry , c . 1753 1 25
Figure 13 One of William Playfair’s graphs, in
his Lineal Arithmetic , 1798 162
Figure 14 A gunner’s perpendicular, c . 1790 191
Figure 15 Rowlandson, ‘Cooper’s Hall, Lott ery
Drawing’, 1808 204
Figure 16 Urizen, William Blake, 1794 224
viii
Chapter 1
‘Doctor Faustus’ day’
MAKING IT FUN
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If thou do any knowledge gain thereby,
Reader, thou art more wiser far than I.
—Poor Robin’s Almanac
F
riar Tuck’s Day: 23 June. Robin Goodfellow’s: 31 October.
Doctor Faustus’: 14 April. As well as many more unlikely ‘saints’,
the almanac for 1669 suggested that the reader commemorate the
day—24 October—when the maid fell off the hen-roost, enjoy new
cider in September, and celebrate forty-six years since the invention
of beard-brushes. It advised that it would be dangerous to kiss a
‘handsome wife’ in front of her jealous husband.
Th is was P oor Robin’s Almanac , writt en ‘Aft er a New Fashion’
(evidently). If you had strolled into a bookshop in Restoration
London, in the late autumn—say into Francis Kirkman’s on Bish-
opsgate Street, conveniently close to the Royal Society’s premises—
you could have found a copy, and bought it for a few pennies.
Kirkman had worked with Poor Robin, and although the almanac
was small—a litt le over fi ve inches by four, with just forty-eight
pages—it was one of the bestsellers of the day, and must have clut-
tered his shop and many like it.
‘If you like it’, wrote the author, well and good; if not, ‘do not prate
of it’, on pain of fi nding your name in next year’s edition. At its peak in
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