Thomas Hobbes, Charles Cotton and the ‘wonders’ of the Derbyshire Peak

Abstract

This essay deals with two seventeenth-century writers who describe, from personal experience, the ‘wonders’ of the Derbyshire Peak district, one of the first destinations for English domestic tourism. Both Thomas Hobbes and Charles Cotton describe the Peak in poems usually associated, in the rare instances where they have attracted any critical attention at all, with the country house or estate tradition of Jonson and Marvell. I argue that Hobbes's De Mirabilibus Pecci, first published in 1636, is best understood as a ‘journey poem’, a largely neglected early modern genre, and that it finds in the Peak a space on which to project those authoritarian theories of science and politics for which Hobbes would later become notorious. I suggest that Charles Cotton's Wonders of the Peake makes explicit the science and the politics in Hobbes's poetic topography, confronting and revising them in response to the new political circumstances of 1681.