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Devising a practical method to determine longitude at sea was the culturally predominant scientific and technical problem of the eighteenth century. Its solution had been raised as a direct concern of the state in other countries previously, but it became the focus of considerable British investment in July 1714, when the Longitude Act appointed Commissioners to judge all related projects and award up to £2000 to experimenters, and pay up to £20000 if a method gave a correct result to within half a degree of longitude, equivalent to 30 geographical miles. The precise reasons for establishing the British reward are still unknown, but the Act is claimed as “testimony of the utilitarianism of those active in the propagation of Newtonian natural philosophy” (Stewart, The Rise of Public Science 202). Its ramifications, however, were not only scientific, technological, and navigational, but also cultural; and it had human, as well as economic, costs. Many “projectors” would soon respond to the reward, and almost immediately a group of intellectuals (including a renowned mathematician and Royal Society council member, and the Tories’ chief ministerial writer) gathered in London to scrutinise the most prominent proposal. This was not the Board of Commissioners assembling at the Admiralty (they would not do so officially until 1737) (Dunn and Higgitt 82), but an alternative band of the brightest thinkers, including Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, John Gay, John Arbuthnot and Thomas Parnell. This unofficial club of satirists has become known as the “Scriblerians,” after their collaborative Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741), a mock-biography of a foolish virtuoso and occasional projector, whose name would become a byword for intellectual vapidity and pedantry. Arguably, a “Scriblerian mode” of mock-learned satire was particularly developed by, and remains associated with this group, although they did not always write in this vein (see: Hammond 118; Marshall). In analysing these writings, scholars have traditionally characterised the Scriblerians as “Ancients” who poured scorn upon “Modern” learning of all kinds (see: Kerby-Miller; Levine). More recently, however, critics have challenged this view, acknowledging that the Scriblerian satires on science were often profoundly personal and political in their satirical motivations, and simultaneously revelled in the creative potency of new ideas associated with natural knowledge (see: Shuttleton; Lynall, Swift and Science). Continuing this approach, and in the context of new work in the history of science coinciding with the tercentenary of the Longitude Act, 1 it is timely to re-assess Scriblerian responses to the longitude endeavour, especially in order to position them within early eighteenth-century cultures of satire and longitude-projecting more broadly, and not just in relation to the (albeit hugely prominent) Whiston-Ditton rocket scheme. In contrast to the AddisonSteele circle associated with Button’s coffee-house, the Scriblerians have been viewed traditionally as at a distance, both socially and ideologically, from the networks of natural knowledge that facilitated the longitude endeavour (see: Nicolson and Rousseau; Worth). Looking closely at Scriblerian ‘projections’ of longitude within their wider context gives us a new appreciation of what these satirists (especially Arbuthnot and Swift) 2 saw as the purpose and agency of their writings, reveals the close proximity of their satiric work to the expertise of the scientific community, and

‘Scriblerian Projections of Longitude: Arbuthnot, Swift, and the Agency of Satire in a Culture of Invention