The Romantic Rhetoric of Accumulation by Lenora Hanson;

Author:Lenora Hanson;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Priestley’s New Chart of History was first published in 1769 and went through as many as twenty editions.14 As Priestley tells us, it is meant to prevent “error[s] being impressed upon the mind more forcibly by means of sensible images in the brain” caused by maps “crowded with figures and explanations” and “different scales of time.” Here Priestley makes clear that our understanding of history hinges upon the proportionality of an impression, which, when once made, takes an immense amount of time and labor to undo if, as he says, it imposes too much upon the imagination. What one is after in the production of images and external stimuli is not representational accuracy but rather a feeling in which human history corresponds with the regulatory laws of nature, which Priestley understands to be happily and habitually leading toward “the extremely favourable . . . progress of knowledge, virtue, and happiness.” Earlier charts of history had been unable to produce sufficient affective balance on account of the mass of data they presented, leading to an imbalance between external stimulation and sense-based understanding and thus an unnecessarily disfigured face of history.15 In Priestley’s chart, by contrast, “time here flows uniformly from the beginning to the end of the tablet. It is also represented as flowing laterally, like a river, and not as falling in a perpendicular stream.” According to Daniel Rosenberg, Priestley’s chronography is part of the first Western attempts to organize time and events using the figure of the line.16 Approaching the representation of time and the inclusion of text on the chart with an understanding that “we have no distinct idea of length of time, till we have conceived it in the form of some sensible thing that has length, as of a line,” Priestley emphasizes the linearity of time and uniformity of space over the mass of information that would accrue from histories organized through multiple different chronologies or that dictate historical significance through subjectively determined events.17 By means of the linearity of time and the uniformity of space Priestley generates the conditions for sensing history as an economic affair of “conveniences that could not have been had without the inconveniences [and] the pleasures and advantages of society that could not have been had without the disadvantages.”18

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