EARLY MODERN SCRIBBLING

What they did have were printed pamphlets — short, cheap booklets which exploded in popularity towards the end of the sixteenth century. Many of these were forms of self-help literature, offering advice on how a reader might best maintain the good health of their body or nurture a Christian soul fit for entry into Heaven. The medical texts and rousing sermons which flew off the printing presses in their thousands could transform the most obscure provincial physicians and parish preachers into literary celebrities.

There were also books on fishing and swimming, cooking and general housewifery, and grammatical texts tailored for schoolchildren. The learned of London’s reading public could get their hands on various scientific treatises, works of legal theory, and tomes of political philosophy. By the half-way mark of the seventeenth century, Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) had pioneered an early version of what we today take for granted as the “scientific method” and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) had upended many of the long-standing assumptions about the way state and subjects ought to interact.

In the same year that Hobbes articulated the theory of social contract, readers of John White’s A Rich Cabinet With Variety of Inventions (1651) could learn how to play with cats, perform magic tricks, and write secret love letters.

What was John White’s A Rich Cabinet (1651)

John White’s A Rich Cabinet (1651) was a compendium of information about experiments and recreational amusements, such as telling the time at night and keeping meat fresh for longer. There were a whopping 116 entries, some of which were accompanied by crude illustrations for reference, and its final section was dedicated to “The Schoole of Artificiall Fire-works”, with instructions on how to create fire-breathing mechanical dragons and pyrotechnic naval displays.

White makes no claim to being the pamphlet’s author, but rather styles himself “a lover of Artificall Conclusions” who has collected the information of others. His book is principally informed (to the point of near-plagiarism) by John Bate’s scientific work The Mysteryes of Nature and Art (1634), John Babington’s seminal treatise Pyrotechnia, Or A Discourse of Artificiall Fireworks (1635), and Thomas Hill’s Naturall and Artificiall Conclusions (1581).

White presents A Rich Cabinet (1651) as a work intended “for the recreation of ingenious spirits at their vacant houres” rather than any kind of serious scientific text, but even this overstates the intellectual rigour of its contents, which include the following entry on “how to make dainty sport with a cat”:

If you will have some sport with a Cat, then get a little Bell … and tye the Bell something hard at the end of the Cats tayle, & let her goe; the feeling of her tayle smart, and hearing the bell to jingle, she will run up and downe as if she were mad, flying against the wals and windowes …

Anyone who thinks that behaviour verges on animal cruelty will be unhappy to learn that an immediately following piece of advice recommends forcing the feline’s paws into walnut halves filled with resin and watching it desperately struggle to get them off.

A more wholesome piece of guidance in White’s book told readers how to write secret love letters (or just cryptic correspondence to a friend). This was remarkably simple: folding a piece of paper in half and cutting numerous holes into it meant that you and your interlocutor both had two identical half-pieces of paper filled with gaps. Put that on top of some writing paper and jot down the secret message, spread out across the many different holes. Then remove the hole-riddled paper and write “some other idle words” on the writing paper — this was your verbal camouflage. When your friend receives the note and puts their special paper on top of it, only the secret message will be visible.

Some of the other entries were simple demonstrations of scientific principles, which could be used to make your life a little bit easier or play tricks on your friends. It was the refraction of light through a bulb-shaped suspended glass filled with water which meant a single candle could light up an entire room (see above-left illustration). Meanwhile the reflection of candlelight in a water droplet allowed you to accurately predict the suit and rank of a card held above your head (see above-right illustration).

One of the most interesting tricks White relays is “how one may put his finger, or wash his hands in molten Lead, without danger or burning”. This could be achieved by grinding quicksilver, clay, and some plant dye in a mortar and pestle, and then covering your hands in the resulting ointment. This apparently rendered you immune from the scalding effects of molten lead, though surely only for a brief time.

There were instructions for a glass thermometer filled with water and air which could also “certainly foretell the alteration and change of the weather a good many hours before it commeth to passe” and a floating contraption in which a burning candle could illuminate the surrounding water, allowing you to fish in the dark.

Other entries concerned teaching your children the alphabet, engraving images onto eggshells, keeping food and drink fresher for longer, increasing your reading speed, and catching pickpockets red-handed by booby-trapping your coat pockets with fishhooks.

John White’s A Rich History (1651) was a best-seller, re-issued in no fewer than seven further editions over the next seventy years. It was an immensely convenient handbook because it was typically printed in octavo, meaning a single sheet of paper put into the printing press could yield sixteen pages of text. This made it cheap to produce, extremely affordable, and easy to put in one’s pocket.

Fireworks brought to life fire-breathing mechanical dragons and explosive naval battles

Many of these subsequent editions’ title pages featured a grid of select illustrations from the pamphlet — and these were dominated by images of fireworks and pyrotechnic contraptions, including dragons and warships.

Fireworks were by no means uncommon at this time. Special effects and pyrotechnics were a regular feature of early modern theatre, which had long been a space of technological experimentation and innovation. The Globe Theatre, which Shakespeare and his troupe built and acted in from 1599, famously burned down in June 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII (known then as All Is True), when the firing of a set of stage cannons marking the entrance of the play’s titular monarch set the venue’s thatch roof alight.

The bloodiest tragedies, like the Bard’s Hamlet or John Webster’s The Dutchess of Malfi, relied on pig bladders filled with paint or animal blood to establish a sufficiently convincing corpse-ridden stage by their conclusion. Performances which involved storms depended on the pounding of drums or rolling a cannon ball inside a wooden box for thunder, while flashes of lightning could be simulated by throwing handfuls of resin powder into a candle flame.

But spectators crowded in the pits of playhouses (open areas without seats where those with the cheapest tickets stood) must have been most amazed at the sight of a dragon flying overhead, roaring and spewing flames from its mouth.

These were probably pulled along cables by hand, and so are a step down from White’s guidance to have the flying monster propelled by a firework. A few more rigged to detonate from inside its mouth and stomach gave the appearance of a fire-breathing beast. A digital reconstruction of what the dragon flights probably looked like during plays such as Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1590) can be seen here.

John White had taken this idea from earlier models, most notably those included in writings by John Babington and John Bate. The former was a mathematician and royal gunner whose Pyrotechnia (1635) was the first English book dedicated to the study of fireworks — which had important military functions but were also used in civic entertainment. Bate was a writer whose pamphlet The Mysteryes of Nature and Art (1634) is said to have encouraged a young Isaac Newton to pursue science himself.

Alongside mechanical fire-breathing dragons, White (again excerpting from the work of others) includes guidance on how to construct an elaborate system of mechanisms by which a mechanical Saint George can be seen fighting and vanquishing the dragon. Ordinary readers would not remotely have been able to afford to build this apparatus, which was intended for ornate gardens kept by the wealthy, but it would nonetheless have been a captivating mental image.

White also collected entries on a mechanical mermaid which could move in the water and — most incredibly — a replica warship rigged with fireworks and an automaton crew which would look as if it were engaging in naval combat, firing its cannons as the sailors aboard hurried about its deck and rigging.

This spectacle would not have been altogether unheard of for ordinary readers; a mock naval battle had unfolded on the River Thames in 1613 to celebrate the marriage between Princess Elizabeth (daughter of King James I) and Frederick V of the Palatinate. Here, the Christian forces of England and its allies, Spain and Venice, engaged a Turkish fleet. All the fighting was fictitious, of course, but it brought to life the deadly sea battles which Londoners had been reading about in news pamphlets for years.

The legacy of John White’s A Rich Cabinet (1651)

White’s pamphlet was not to go down in history as a serious scientific text but rather a quaint collection of trivial amusements. By the time of its publication in 1716, it had been re-titled Hocus Pocus: Or A Rich Cabinet of Legerdemain Curiosities. Both “hocus pocus” and “legerdemain” refer to deceptive tricks and sleights of hand. The title-page illustrations of pyrotechnic devices were replaced by those showing frivolous tricks; clearly fireworks had lost their appeal.

John White might not really have cared. In his introduction to the reader, he describes his work as a “Garden composed of sundry varieties”, not a laboratory. He had predicted “some envious Criticks” would “snarle” at his work but did not care. Surely it’s no wonder that a country still reeling from a bloody civil war would lap up his pamphlet? In the same year that Hobbes had spoken of life’s potential to be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”, White offered a collection of curious and fanciful conceits which were altogether more upbeat.