Wardhaugh - Poor Robins prophecies: a curious Almanac, and the everyday mathematics of Georgian Britain

A curious Almanac,
and the
everyday mathematics of
Georgian Britain

Benjamin Wardhaugh

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom

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Benjamin Wardhaugh 2012

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First Edition published in 2012

Impression: 1

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ISBN 9780199605422

Printed in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

For Jessica

MAKING IT FUN

If thou do any knowledge gain thereby,

Reader, thou art more wiser far than I.

Poor Robins Almanac

Friar Tucks Day: 23 June. Robin Goodfellows: 31 October. Doctor Faustus: 14 April. As well as many more unlikely saints, the almanac for 1669 suggested that the reader commemorate the day24 Octoberwhen the maid fell off the hen-roost, enjoy new cider in September, and celebrate forty-six years since the invention of beard-brushes. It advised that it would be dangerous to kiss a handsome wife in front of her jealous husband.

This was Poor Robins Almanac, written After a New Fashion (evidently). If you had strolled into a bookshop in Restoration London, in the late autumnsay into Francis Kirkmans on Bishopsgate Street, conveniently close to the Royal Societys premisesyou could have found a copy, and bought it for a few pennies. Kirkman had worked with Poor Robin, and although the almanac was smalla little over five inches by four, with just forty-eight pagesit was one of the bestsellers of the day, and must have cluttered his shop and many like it.

If you like it, wrote the author, well and good; if not, do not prate of it, on pain of finding your name in next years edition. At its peak in the 1670s, up to twenty thousand people liked it enough to buy a copy each year, ranging from Elias Ashmole, Fellow of the Royal Society and founder of the Ashmolean museum in Oxford, to forgotten working men and women for whom an almanac wasapart from the Biblepractically the only thing they would ever read. For them, an almanac might also be their only contact with the world of numbers and calculation, of astronomical language and astrological diagrams. This book tells their story: the story of ordinary people and the mathematics they knew, learned, used, read, and thought about, the books and teachers that brought it to them, and the things it didand failed to dofor them. It is a story for which Poor Robin, who lived from the reign of Charles II to that of George IV, more than a hundred and fifty years later, is an ideal guide.

In this book we will see something of the very different ways mathematics could be used, of how mathematical calculations could go wrong and what the consequences could be, of where and how mathematics was learned, and of the beneficial effects that it was supposed to have on the mind and on the world. Well also return to the theme of mathematics as a way to have fun, and to the tension which recurred throughout the eighteenth century between optimism and pessimism about what mathematics could or should do.

First, though, lets learn some more about Poor Robin and his world.

Poor Robins world was the almanac. Small, convenient, and cheap, almanacs crowded the bookshops for a few weeks in the autumn and were bought, written in, used to destruction, and thrown away in huge numbers every year. In total, as many as four hundred thousand almanacs were printed each year in the England of Charles II and James II. One family in three bought one, and the almanac business was worth perhaps 2,000 per annum, a sum that would have employed (for example) rather more than a hundred able seamen.

Twenty or thirty or more different almanacs went on sale each year, and there seemed no limit to the information they could contain: not just a calendar of saints days and new moons but a great deal more besides, catering to every imaginable shade of interest. If self-improvement was on the agenda, there were almanacs containing, say, a short course in solid geometry or a summary of classical mythology. For readers with specialized political or religious preferences there were almanacs giving historical and contemporary information of particular interest: lists of Royalist victories in the Civil War or discussions of the development of the English church.

Some almanacs specialized in medicine, and gave recipes for cures or for general-purpose tonics. Heres a remarkable prescription for a summer tonic given by Ferdinando Beridge in his almanac in 1654:

Two gallons of morning-milk whey, one handfull of the herb Mercury, one of Mallowes, one of Violet Leaves, one of Cynck-foile being all well boyled together (with some Licorish to relish it) and then clarified.

The hardy reader was supposed to drink halfe a Pinte at once, and promised that It will cleanse the body pretty titely, and save the purse. We dont know whether anyone tried it.

Beridge worked in Leicester, and calculated the astronomical information in his almanacsunrise, sunset, and the exact positions of the planetsso as to be correct for that location. While many English almanacs were calculated for London, and some came with the rather ambitious claim that they would indifferently serve for the whole country, others, like Beridges, were unabashedly regional. John Vaux, parson and astrologer, produced a Durham almanac for over forty years, and included in it not just astronomical but historical information tailored to that location. Accounts of the bishops of Durham and of Lindisfarne took the place of the more usual English worthies, and Vauxs table of historical dates was at least as concerned with The great fire in