‘Tis not, what once it was, the world’ Andrew Marvel's Re-Mapping of Old and New in Bermudas and Upon Appleton House

Abstract

Seventeenth-century England was a country newly rooted in geography. Ortelius's Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, the first of the great sixteenth-century atlases, was translated into English in 1606, and Mercator's Atlas followed it thirty years later. Christopher Saxton's wall maps and his atlas of the counties of England and Wales had introduced a new level of cartographic precision to the late sixteenth century, and by the 1650s these new technologies, and the rising expectations of cartographic accuracy and precision which they embodied, had become all but ingrained in the wider culture. Voyages to Guiana, Virginia, and Bermuda had laid the groundwork for English colonies in the Americas so that by mid-century even the most exotic lands had become imaginatively accessible and cartographically familiar. As these outposts of the New World grew more settled, the older sense of 'the strangeness of the boundaries'1 was overlaid with a new domestication. These foreign lands were described and imagined as little extensions of England, still lost in the distance, but now largely wrapped in the comfort of familiar customs, products, and agricultural goods.But if the New World's sense of the foreign and exotic was markedly diminished, it did not simply disappear. It was instead incorporated into a new and changing balance of Old World and New. For while the faith in mapped accuracy and representational power of the cartographic imagination allowed even the world's exotic edges to be folded back into the familiarity of the centre, it also brought a countering pressure in which the very familiarity of the domestic landscape came to be seen through the lens of the exotic. The centre became de-centred, and the aura of mystery and instability linked to distant lands was transmuted, internalized, and brought home to the most domestic of spaces.By the middle of the seventeenth century, the precision and certainty of England's mapped representations stood in sharp contrast to other perceptions in and of the country. The political and social instability of the English Revolution filled the historical moment until even that most ancient and solid of foundations - the enduring nature of kingship, itself - was overthrown. The ability of maps to represent a fixed and orderly country now exceeded the nation's ability to embody it. New levels of political anxiety and instability created an altered relationship between the map and the territory, so that the orderly delineation of geographical outline and landscape would have seemed all but illusory in the face of so much fundamental disruption. In such a revolutionary period, the possibilities of cartography altered to reflect a new relationship of map and nation, signifier and signified. Mapping became an expression of political and poetic licence - a way, not just to represent an ordered country, but to limit and confine the extent of its disorder.In such a period the political and poetic become fundamentally interleaved, and for no one was this more true than Andrew Marvell. As a poet he strove for a unique kind of linguistic refinement, an almost alchemical distillation of order and precision in the face of pervading anxiety. And of the various scientific and cultural discourses he incorporated into his poetry, the cultural power of maps and geography were of particular, and surprising, value. In his hands the discourse of cartographic precision became an unexpected tool for addressing the unsettling ambiguities of historical action. He focused his particular blend of lapidary precision and interrogative intelligence on to the cartographic expectations of his time, and bent them to his use. By inserting a new and lurking instability into the epistemology of precision, he turned the cultural assumptions of cartographic accuracy and objectivity back on themselves as a means of highlighting, not the familiar expectations of fixity and control, but a new and widespread anxiety about political unravelling. …