Christopher Smart and the Cartographic Imagination

Abstract

This essay identifies within Smart's mid-century writings those places where he is seized by what D. K. Smith called the 'cartographical imagination'; new ways of delineating and describing terrestrial space find expression in his religious poetry. This topographical borrowing is not simply on the level of concept or imagination, however: I find several striking examples where he describes a specific map or cartouche, and reveal a 'mapminded' Smart who enjoyed and knew well the visual colour and life of Enlightenment cartography, but who was disquieted by some of its silent rhetorical arrogation of divine power. I turn later in the essay to his secular writings in the Midwife magazine, and identify how in 1750 Smart used a specific sixteenth-century anthropomorphic map (devised at the time to symbolize a united Christian Europe) as a vehicle for political satire and bad jokes. This satirical prose description of the map of Europe transformed into an 'Old Woman' is also a more explicit articulation of Smart's distrust of cartographic representation and its all-too-human concerns. Ultimately, amidst the banter and the play, Smart's idiosyncratic presentation demonstrates his early grasp of twenty-first-century cultural geography's insight: that the claim of maps to transparent authenticity is a matter of deception.