The Cost of Sympathy: Towards a Visual Economics of John Webber’s ‘Atlas’

Bh Pollitt

doi:10.14324/111.2396-9008.024

Abstract

This paper examines John Webber’s illustrations for 'A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean' (1784) in relation to contemporary discussions around moral sentiment, specifically theories of sympathy. Adam Smith’s concept of ‘the impartial spectator’ is fundamental to my argument, which explores the visual mechanics of sympathy in Webber’s work. The focus of discussion draws on the sequence of engravings produced after Webber’s images, which were published as a separate ‘Atlas,’ the fourth of the four volumes that made up the official account. As a self-contained account of the voyage, the ‘Atlas’ forms its own coherent narrative cycle, one which employs many techniques to engage an eighteenth-century viewer’s sympathies on the visual level. If, according to Smith, we can only relate to others sympathetically through the mediation of ‘the impartial spectator,’ a contained centre within the self, which observes and regulates it, then the question this paper seeks to address is how Webber’s representational practices as exhibited in the ‘Atlas’ serve to construct visually the existence of this self-regulating self, externalizing what is essentially an internal process? And if and where this fails to be the case, then what pressures do the works place on Smith’s understanding of sympathy?

Highlights

Carlo Ginzburg’s essay ‘To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’ explores eighteenth-century concerns surrounding natural law.[1]
A conversation ensues between the father and his children who heard the confession in which it is agreed that distance in place and time ‘weaken[s] feelings and awareness of all kinds, even the consciousness of crime.’[2]. David Hume comes to a similar conclusion to Diderot, ‘sympathy . . . is much fainter than our concern for ourselves, and sympathy with persons remote from us much fainter than that with persons near and contiguous.’[3]. For Hume, man’s solipsistic preoccupation with his immediate concerns means that he has as little thought to the future as to what is happening far away
Adam Smith too explores this problem with sympathy, hypothesising that if an earthquake swallowed up everyone in China it might provoke some ‘humane sentiments’ from ‘a man of humanity in Europe,’ but after these were expressed, ‘he would pursue his business or his pleasure . . . with the same ease and tranquility, as if no such accident had happened.’[4]

Summary

Introduction

Carlo Ginzburg’s essay ‘To Kill a Chinese Mandarin: The Moral Implications of Distance’ explores eighteenth-century concerns surrounding natural law.[1].

Results

Conclusion