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REIMAGINING COMMUNICATION:
MEDIATION

Reimagining Communication: Mediation explores information and media technologies

across a variety of contemporary platforms, uses, content variations, audiences, and
professional roles.
A diverse body of contributions in this unique interdisciplinary resource offers
perspectives on digital games, social media, photography, and more. The volume is
organized to reflect a pedagogical approach of carefully laddered and sequenced
topics, which supports experiential, project-based learning in addition to a course’s
traditional writing requirements. As the field of Communication Studies has been
continuously growing and reaching new horizons, this volume synthesizes the com­
plex relationship of communication to media technologies and its forms in
a uniquely accessible and engaging way.
This is an essential introductory text for advanced undergraduate and graduate
students and scholars of communication, broadcast media, and interactive technolo­
gies, with an interdisciplinary focus and an emphasis on the integration of new
technologies.

Michael Filimowicz, PhD, is Senior Lecturer in the School of Interactive

Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University. His research is in the area of
computer mediated communication, with a focus on new media poetics
applied in the development of new immersive audiovisual displays for simula­
tions, exhibition, games, and telepresence as well as research creation.

Veronika Tzankova is a PhD candidate in the School of Interactive Arts and

Technology, Simon Fraser University and a Communications Instructor at
Columbia College – both in Vancouver, Canada. Her background is in
human–computer interaction and communication. Sport shapes the essence of
her research which explores the potential of interactive technologies to
enhance bodily awareness in high-risk sports activities.
REIMAGINING
COMMUNICATION:
MEDIATION

Edited by Michael Filimowicz and Veronika

Tzankova
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Michael Filimowicz and Veronika
Tzankova; individual chapters, the contributors.
The right of Michael Filimowicz and Veronika Tzankova to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual
chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without
intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Filimowicz, Michael, editor. | Tzankova, Veronika, editor.
Title: Reimagining communication : mediation / edited by Michael
Filimowicz and Veronika Tzankova.
Other titles: Mediation
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Summary: “Reimagining Communication: Mediation explores information
and media technologies across a variety of contemporary platforms, uses,
content variations, audiences, and professional roles”– Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019051300 (print) | LCCN 2019051301 (ebook) |
ISBN 9781138498907 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138498914 (paperback) |
ISBN 9781351015431 (ebook) | ISBN 9781351015424 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9781351015417 (epub) | ISBN 9781351015400 (mobi)
Subjects: LCSH: Communication and technology. | Communication–
Technological innovations. | Digital media.
Classification: LCC P96.T42 R45 2020 (print) |
LCC P96.T42 (ebook) | DDC 302.23–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051300
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019051301

ISBN: 978-1-138-49890-7 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-49891-4 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-351-01543-1 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Swales & Willis, Exeter, Devon, UK
CONTENTS

Series Introduction viii

Introduction xvii

1 Media Archaeology and Mediation: The Magic Lantern as an

Object of Theoretical Reflection 1
Francisco Javier Frutos-Esteban and Carmen López-San Segundo

2 Intangible Photography 22
Grant Rivers and Chris Ingraham

3 Cinema Studies 40
Sean Maher

4 Video: Aesthetics/Agonism/Anti-Dialectics 55
Timothy Barker

5 Uneasy Intimacies: Acoustic Space and Machines of Presence 70

Adam Hulbert

6 Ante-Narrative and the Animated Time Image 88

Hotessa Laurence
vi Contents

7 The Medium of Comics; or the Art of Co-Presence 103

Neal Curtis

8 Visualizing the News: Conceptual Foundations and Emerging

Technology 122
Russell Chun

9 Facilitating Communicative Environments: An Exploration of

Game Modalities as Facilitators of Prosocial Change 141
Jessica Wendorf Muhamad, Karen Schrier and Laura-Kate Huse

10 Augmented Reality 163

Aarón Rodríguez Serrano, Marta Martín Núñez and Shaila García
Catalán

11 Social Media 177

Tanner Mirrlees

12 The Rise of Consumer Generated Content and Its

Transformative Effect on Advertising 193
Naim Çınar

13 Music in Streams: Communicating Music in the Streaming

Paradigm 210
Anja Nylund Hagen

14 Digital Copyright 225

Steve Collins and Sherman Young

15 Reimagining Copies in Digital Networks 239

Margie Borschke

16 Questioning Algorithms and Agency: Facial Biometrics in

Algorithmic Contexts 252
Michele Willson

17 Digital Privacy and Interdisciplinarity: Tendencies, Problems,

and Possibilities 267
Thomas N. Cooke
 Contents vii

18 Reimagining Communication with Conversational User

Interfaces: Anthropomorphic Design and Conversational User
Experience 287
Sergio Sayago and Josep Blat

19 Brain–Computer Interface 303

David J. Gunkel

List of Contributors 321

Index 328
SERIES INTRODUCTION

In an age of information overflow, the word “communication” seems to have

reached a buzz-status. From persuasive communication, to the importance of
good communication, to communication skills for bridging gaps, the term and
domain of “communication” has become increasingly obscure and even con­
fusing. We see this confusion reflected in students on introductory communi­
cation courses. Their initial understanding of communication often tends to
focus on linguistic exchanges between individuals, not accounting for the wide
range of personal, social, and contextual dynamics that influence not only the
transfer of information, but also the complex processes of meaning-making at
individual and collective levels. Where initial conceptualizations of communi­
cation have focused on information-transfers between senders and receivers,
contemporary scholarship seems to apply a much broader, and to an extent,
a pragmatically-informed approach looking not only at how communication
practices work, but also how these shape the ways in which we make sense of
the reality that surrounds us.
Partially due to the wide range of perspectives and approaches, the field of
communication studies still lacks distinctive disciplinary boundaries. When we
think of traditional academic fields—such as biology, sociology, philosophy,
and mathematics, for example—we know with some degree of certainty what
the object of study is. When it comes to the field of communication however,
we realize that establishing a definitive scholastic focus is not easy, if not
impossible. This is to an extent related to the challenges associated with
answering a fundamental, and seemingly simple question: “What is communi­
cation?” As an all-encompassing answer to this question we should be able to
account for all of the situations, exchanges, contexts, interpretations, channels
and any possible mix of these, we can see that this can easily become
 Series Introduction ix

a hopeless task. In an attempt to resolve this complexity, scholars have empha­

sized different sides of communication processes which have influenced the
development of a multiplicity of material, functional, and experiential defin­
itions. Most definitions revolve around one of the following categorical char­
acteristics of communication: (1) transfer of information, (2) symbolic culture,
and (3) a ritual which facilitates the inherent social essence of humanity (see
Carey, 2009). These varying types of exegesis pose fundamental challenges in
defining and delimiting the concept and disciplinary boundaries of communi­
cation. Within such expanding views, the purpose of the Reimagining Commu­
nication series is to capture the existing and prospective trends and perspectives
on and within communications studies as a whole. To systematize our
approach, we have provided a specific theme for each of our volumes: Mean­
ing, Experience, Action, and Mediation. Each of these volumes extends on the
existing notions and scholarship within the field of communication, in order
to capture—as much as possible—the main contexts, communication tech­
nologies, institutions, and social practices.
These volumes construct a new information architecture which reima­
gines a new organization for traditional and emerging themes in communi­
cation studies. To describe our editorial project, we appropriate the
concept of “information architecture” (hereafter IA) from the domain of
human-information interaction. The notion of IA—as opposed to the com­
monly used “map” or “framework”—highlights the constructed character
of the series as a work of design, and as one design solution out of many
possible others. We have decided to redesign and reimagine the “field of
fields and disciplines” of communication through a forward-looking multi­
disciplinary lens which has its grounding in both established academic
scholarship and developing domains focusing on the latest technological
developments.

[A]s much as architects are expected to create structure and order in the
world through planning and building, information architects were
expected to draw lines and derive some kind of order in dataspace, their
primary task being to make this information simpler, more direct, and
ultimately more comprehensible.
(Resmini & Rosati, 2012, p. 4)

Similarly, the purpose of this series is to try to capture the “dataspace” of com­
munication studies today directly and as a comprehensible whole grounded in
where it has been and inferring where it seems to be going. The chapter
topics also facilitate “crosstalk” across the volumes—a desired aspect of our
schema. Thus, while eschewing maps and frameworks, we are not offering “an
intellectual patchwork” for a field that “[f]rom the beginning … was critiqued
for having no core” (Zelizer, 2016, p. 223).
x Series Introduction

The institutional origins of communications in the academy—(1) whether one

locates it in post WW2 interests in journalism, mass media, and propaganda studies
(Jensen & Neuman, 2013, p. 231), or in the development of speech programs
c. 1915 (Wilson, 2015), and (2) regardless of professional, liberal arts, or mixed
orientation (Troester & Wertheimer, 2015, p. 2)—seem very distant from the
kinds of questions explored by many contemporary communications scholars.
When we think of the early days of communication studies, the associations that
often come to mind are the printing press and broadcast towers for radio and tele­
vision. But when we think of the future of communication, we tend to drift to
the new territories of brain computer interfaces and the hybrid arrays of virtual-
augmented-mixed-crossed realities, where our living environments become
increasingly networked and informatic in character. We may even say that the
future of communication reaches the nano-level of neurons.
The space between neurons and socio-cultural spaces—populated by the tech­
nologies of mediation and social practices of meaning-making humans—is what
gives shape to our IA across the series’ four volumes—Meaning, Experience,
Action, and Mediation. These themes carry an empirical core as they relate
directly to the animal level of sensorimotor interactions (Experience, Action)
taking place within the affordances of the environment (Mediation), where all of
these are understood as a source of information (Meaning). As humanity becomes
increasingly more cyborg, we hope that such theoretical trace-back to primordial
animal conditions will future-proof these volumes in a way that other volumes
have not been able to.
While our IA approach is empirically motivated, it is neither an ontology, nor
periodization of communication studies. Much communication scholarship has
traditionally relied on a “grand-narrative” modus operandi based on essential
dichotomies. Some of these dichotomies are implicit, such as the oppositions
underlying the modalities of the one-to-one (interpersonal communication), one­
to-many (broadcast technologies), or even many-to-many (social media) commu­
nication practices. Other dichotomies are explicit, formally expressed and have
become canonical in communication studies:

By now, several generations of scholars have relied on such dichotomies,

grounding their grand historical interpretations on the ways in which media
interact with social life. The work of Harold Innis (1951) is commonly asso­
ciated with the contrasting influences of time-biased and space-biased
media; McLuhan (1964) classified media as hot and cold; Ong (1982) traced
social evolution through the prism of orality or literacy; Carey (1969) in
one of his earliest works classified media as centripetal and centrifugal; and
Turow (1997) talked about society-making and segment-making media.

The dichotomies on which they rely frequently lead to periodization, or the

attempt to locate pivotal moments in which some new essential aspects of
 Series Introduction xi

social development suddenly emerge while others vanish. The ultimate pur­
pose of periodization is to establish compelling, often teleological or cyclically
structured narratives relying on a sequence of communication eras defined
through different technological paradigms (Balbi & Kittler, 2016, p. 1972).
With respect to conceptual temptations toward periodization, cycles, and
telos, our IA looks forward as much as backward, considering the animal plane
of sensorimotor interactions with affordances as ontologically flat with the
plane of the cybernetic meaning-maker. Our claim is that this distinctive IA
approach is somewhat different from those grand dichotomous periodizations
of the field that have come before. As our IA cuts across disciplinary boundar­
ies, it is difficult not to acknowledge “that the politics of interdisciplinarity is
always a politics of the moment” (Shome, 2006, p. 2). So, the image of the brain
computer interface, strategically placed as the final chapter in the Mediation
volume, is of our present time. But in parallel, we have also chosen the most
primordial and earliest human moment—sensorimotor interactions with affor­
dances in an environment—if only to give our best wishes to the historical
chances at the bio-cybernetic frontier of communication media technologies
today.
The reconsideration of binaries becomes complex when it comes to institution­
alized dichotomies in the historical record—such as the debates related to the cat­
egorization of communications in the academy as a field or a discipline (Phillips,
2016, p. 691), where such categorizations are often suspended between institu­
tional forces of “cohesion and fragmentation” (Nordenstreng, 2007, p. 212). In an
attempt to escape the limits of institutionalized dualities, our IA tries to acknow­
ledge and accommodate a multiplicity of perspectives within an egalitarian treat­
ment of both the phenomena studied and the methodologies by which these are
studied. In this series, we have placed a strong emphasis on technologies as the
recent convergence of media, content, industries, and audiences have presented
“significant difficulty separating our ideas about communication from the techno­
logical advance of media” (Herbst, 2008, p. 604). These difficulties are still far
from being overcome and are at the core of the problematics studied by commu­
nication researchers. Debates around disciplinarity often relate to issues regarding
the status of communications in the academy, such as “the desires for monopoliza­
tion, legitimization, and recognition” (Stalker, 2014, p. 172), “expansion, monop­
olization and protection” (p.173), and “professional identity” (First & Adoni,
2007, p. 252). Such debates are somewhat removed from our IA since we
presume the relevance of communication to all disciplines and indeed all fields, as
well as its essence as a permanently open form of inquiry capable of utilizing the
full array of methods including those that are increasingly computational in
nature. Communication studies have always been defined by its undefinability
because what does not count as communication? It has always been “poly” in its
methodologies and scope of interests since the founding of its first units in the
academy.
xii Series Introduction

[T]he field consolidated as the result of the aggregation of academic

interests in communication broadly defined—interpersonal, organiza­
tional, mediated, media industries, cultural studies, information studies,
language, rhetoric, intercultural, journalism, and media and information
policies, among others.
(Waisbord, 2016, p. 869)

In addition to this broad disciplinary integration (and fragmentation), communica­

tion is somewhat unique amongst the academic disciplines in the way it has historic­
ally bridged professionally applied and theoretically inclined orientations.

The so-called “field” of communication is, of course, not a field by any aca­
demic definition. It has no boundaries. It is equally hospitable to the advertis­
ing agency seeking evidence to support the slogan “it pays to advertise,” and
to the semanticist seeking closer definitions of “meaning.”
(Karin, 2003, p. 4)

Some academic fields such as history and philosophy, are more central in the pursuit
of liberal arts, while others such as business administration and engineering, are
more related to career development. The discipline of communication in fairly
unique as it crosses these boundaries (Morreale, Osborn, & Pearson, 2000, p. 1).
It is in this spirit of crossing the boundaries between theory and practice, or pro­
fessional practice and liberal arts, that we have conceived our editorial project as an
IA, as IA is a form of communication design. Our research backgrounds are
grounded in computer mediated communication (multimodal display and inter­
active sports technologies, for Filimowicz and Tzankova respectively). In our lines
of research, there are no real institutional, practical or conceptual barriers that pre­
vent easy crossover between poetic hermeneutic mullings and concrete systems
design—to name just two ends of the many fluid spectrums of transdisciplinary
inquiry in our work. For more than a decade now, the field of Human-Computer
Interaction has initiated an increased interest in so-called “third wave HCI,” where
meaning-making has become exponentially central to the design of computational
artefacts. The material character of interactive artefacts is far from being foreign to
communication as its origin—the Latin word communicatio—refers to social func­
tions organized around tangibles.

“Communication” is a word with a rich history[, f]rom the Latin commu­

nicare, meaning to impart, share, or make common … The key root is
mun- (not uni-), related to such words as “munificent,” “community,”
“meaning” … The Latin munus has to do with gifts or duties offered
publicly—including gladiatorial shows, tributes, and rites to honor the
dead. In Latin, communicatio did not signify the general arts of human
connection vis symbols, nor did it suggest the hope for some kind of
 Series Introduction xiii

mutual recognition. Its sense was not in the least mentalistic: commuicatio
generally involved tangibles.
(Peters, 2001, p. 7)

The notion of communication in ancient Rome, as well as the previous

notion of rhetoric from ancient Greece, did not refer to transfer, transmission,
interaction or dialogue, but rather pointed to acknowledging and performing
specific social functions and group memberships, or to knowing and utilizing
concrete technical devices for conveying specific social functions and group
memberships (Nastasia, D. and Rakow, L., 2005, p. 4).
Such a broad conception of communication—which becomes even more
extended when we put into consideration its social and ritualistic aspects—
does run some risks of definition and scope, but these are familiar risks
that have always been associated with the discipline’s “ontological deficit
and epistemological pitfalls” (Kane, 2016, p. 88). Communications in its
academic origins “was stunningly interdisciplinary from the start” (Herbst,
2008, p. 604).

[T]he short tradition as an academic discipline, the external influences

coming from meda industry and the state, the legitimacy deficit, the dif­
fuse research topic “communication,” the scattering across the university
and the heterogeneous scientific origins of its scholars … these character­
istics lead to a “lack of consensus” within the field concerning its subject
matters and to difficulties to shape a self-conception.
(Löblich & Scheu, 2011, pp. 2–3)

The concept and practice of Information Architecture originates from domains

of human-computer interaction, defined early on as “the conceptual structure
and functional behavior, as distinct from the organization of data flows and
controls, logical design, and physical implementation” (Amdahl, Blaauw, &
Brooks, 1964, p. 21). We discussed our rationale for the conceptual structure of
these volumes—the desire to avoid dichotomies, ontologies, periodizations,
and grand narratives through our strategic use of guiding analogies that allow
a simultaneous look forward to new cyborg variations of humanity but also
backward to complex organisms and their sensorimotor engagements within
informational environments.
We now want to emphasize the functional aspect of our IA by linking it to
our professional context and the connection to pedagogy. As teaching faculty,
we have encountered difficulties finding adequate texts that cover the gamut
of interdisciplinary and international considerations about and within commu­
nication studies in a way that interests those who are the basis of our
employment.
xiv Series Introduction

Those of us who teach communication theory face unique challenges.

Undergraduates … come for something comprehensible and we offer them
fragments of a subject no one can comprehend, up to 249 theories and still
counting.
(Craig, 1999, p. 153)

Craig’s mapping of the traditions of communication contains eight main domains,

all of which find representation in this collection: social psychological, cybernetic,
rhetorical, semiotic, critical, sociocultural, phenomenological, and pragmatic
(Phillips, 2016, p. 701). The functional aspect of our IA is to “cultivate a sense of
the ‘whole’ of communication studies, not a ‘unified,’ stable entity but
a polyphonic, unstable whole that can be developed as a theory-rich body of
work through dialogue across difference” (p.700). This cultivation of a sense for
the whole is not only for the benefit of our students, but also for us as researchers
and communication designers—as by definition we ourselves are lifelong learners.
We are particularly pleased to be able to offer such an international assem­
blage of authors in these volumes hailing from 19 countries, literally from A to
Z: Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece,
Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, UK,
UAE, USA, and Zimbabwe. There is a somewhat contrarian transnational
impulse at work in bringing these global voices together, as many communica­
tion books used in classroom environments tend to overemphasize the national
(e.g. the various communication books with country names in their title).
Our aim is to foster the connectivity of ideas, which can be as national,
transnational, international, or cosmopolitan as one wishes to make of this
gathering of voices from across the globe.

If internationalism means exchanging knowledge and understanding across

borders, then we would probably all sign up to it, confident that national
approaches or concerns could find their place within this larger forum.
(Livingstone, 2007, p. 274)

Where in the past, communication’s scholarly traditions have been characterized

as “isolated frog ponds—with no friendly croaking between the ponds, very
little productive intercourse at all, few cases of successful cross-fertilization”
(Rosengren, 1993, p. 6), this IA-inspired collection aims to bring the frog ponds
closer together (to strain the metaphor perhaps!). While these books cannot
promise cross-continental cross-fertilization, they get the international croaking
underway. Maybe for the moment the chapters will be read by its audiences sans
brain implants, but as we continue to undergo the “mediation of everything”
(Livingstone, 2009), surely not for long.
Michael Filimowicz
Veronika Tzankova
 Series Introduction xv

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INTRODUCTION

From popular texts and public discourses to scholarship and research, the use
of the word ‘communication’ has been on the rise in academic, professional,
and everyday contexts. But what exactly is ‘communication’? Is it possible to
not communicate? How does communication work? What are the disciplinary
boundaries of communication studies and what is its object of investigation?
Reimagining Communication: Mediation addresses these questions by presenting
a survey of the foundational theoretical and methodological approaches in commu­
nication studies. As the field has been continuously growing and reaching new
horizons, this volume specifically synthesizes major trends within the trajectory of
fundamental ideas that have served as its base and continue shaping its sub-branches,
covering topics related to the technologies of communication. By presenting
perspectives illustrated by concrete examples on the topics of Media Archaeology,
Photography, Cinema, Video, Sound, Animation, Comics, Visualizations, Games,
Augmented Environments, Social Media, Consumer Generated Content, Stream­
ing, Copyright, Digital Copies, Algorithms, Digital Privacy, Embodied Conversa­
tional Agents, and Brain–Computer Interfaces, this volume synthesizes the complex
relationship of communication to media technologies and its forms in a uniquely
accessible and engaging way.
Chapter 1 – Francisco Javier Frutos and Carmen López San Segundo’s
‘Media Archaeology and Mediation: the Magic Lantern as an Object of
Theoretical Reflection’ – applies media archaeology methods to explicate
the magic lantern shows at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. These
events featured media devices such as the fantascope, megascope, solar
microscope, and projection lantern that have been understudied in commu­
nication studies.
xviii Introduction

Chapter 2 – Grant Rivers and Chris Ingraham’s ‘Intangible Photography’ –

situates contemporary digital photography practices against the deep background
of light-capturing technologies dating from the 1820s. The authors focus on
debates around preserving intangible cultural heritage, and its implications for
visual rhetoric.
Chapter 3 – Sean Maher’s ‘Cinema Studies’ – details the history of cinema
studies since the 1970s, and considers how past debates emanating from theor­
etical contexts such as semiotics, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and Marx­
ism led to theoretical impasses in the 1990s. These ‘grand theory’ approaches
contributed to bifurcations in the respective scholarly camps, and set the state
for a reinvigoration of cinema studies in the digital age.
Chapter 4 – Timothy Barker’s ‘Video: Aesthetics/Agonism/Anti-Dialectics’ –
discusses the history and technology of video media. Also taking a media archaeo­
logical approach, the chapter explores the application of communication models
in video’s cultural imperatives. Important concepts from Vilém Flusser’s writings
are integrated to describe a politics and dialectics of video on the basis of agonism.
Chapter 5 – Adam Hulbert’s ‘Uneasy Intimacies: Acoustic Space and Machines
of Presence’ – discusses the role of acoustic spaces and their significance for com­
munication theory. The idea of a listening subject is both supported and chal­
lenged by the ubiquity of sonic data and new technologies such as conversational
interfaces, which add new layers to previous concepts related to schizophonic
subjectivity.
Chapter 6 – Hotessa Laurence’s ‘Ante-Narrative and the Animated Time
Image’ – considers late 20th and early 21st-century animation films through the
concepts of ‘ante-narrative’ (David Boje) and ‘time image’ (Gilles Deleuze). The
chapter analyzes short films that are episodic and circulative in which narrative
tendencies are resisted rather than furthered. In these films, narrative diegesis is
fragmented as the expression of play and particular ontological positions.
Chapter 7 – Neil Curtis’s ‘The Medium of Comics; or the Art of Co-
Presence’ – examines how new affordances in digital technologies change the
ways that comics are created and read. The scrolling function of browsers in par­
ticular has led to experimentations in form and accentuated sequential flows of
images. This medium is distinct from many others in its unique presentation of
simultaneous or ‘co-present’ channels of information.
Chapter 8 – Russell Chun’s ‘Visualizing the News: Conceptual Foundations
and Emerging Technology’ – focuses on what has been called the ‘second golden
age’ of information visualization, fueled by the rise of big data and the affordances
of the visual web. Covering the background of Tufte’s insistence on statistical
rigor and Holmes’s aesthetic considerations, Chun looks ahead to the possible
roles of virtual reality for creating immersive data visualization spaces.
Chapter 9 – Jessica Wendorf Muhamad, Karen Schrier, and Laura-Kate
Huse’s ‘Facilitating Communicative Environments: An Exploration of Game
Modalities as Facilitators of Prosocial Change’ – looks at the ways that games
 Introduction xix

can facilitate the understanding of complex social issues by enabling individuals

to enact attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors while having the consequences of
these mitigated by role playing. Serious games are reviewed through design
practices, theoretical frameworks, and strategies of application.
Chapter 10 – Aarón Rodríguez Serrano, Marta Martín Núñez, and Shaila
García Catalán’s ‘Augmented Reality’ – develops a theoretical perspective on
the origins, development, and current state of augmented reality technologies.
The authors apply a phenomenological frame to explicate the key metaphors
of the magic mirror and magic lens to describe the political ramifications in the
relationship of augmented reality technologies to embodied and social realities.
Chapter 11 – Tanner Mirrlees’s ‘Social Media’ – presents a comprehensive
account of key issues related to social media. The chapter investigates social media
with regards to its main uses and affordances, and goes on to frame these tech­
nologies as systems, tools, and agents. The relationship of social media to political,
economic, and cultural spheres of social activity is highlighted.
Chapter 12 – Naim Çınar’s ‘The Rise of Consumer Generated Content and
Its Transformative Effect on Advertising’ – analyzes the connection between
advertising and online consumer generated content. This type of mediation
has been understudied in communication studies, and the chapter provides an
outline of its main dynamics and features, while looking ahead to its future
impacts on advertising practices.
Chapter 13 – Anja Nylund Hagen’s ‘Music in Streams: Communicating
Music in the Streaming Paradigm’ – looks at how streaming services have
come to play such a major role in the culture industry, reaching vast audiences
via a relatively new channel of information flows. The chapter focuses on
music streaming and how streaming platforms are reshaping music industry
practices and audience engagement.
Chapter 14 – Steve Collins and Sherman Young’s ‘Digital Copyright’ –
connects recent developments in digital copyright management to the long
history of copyright, dating back to the book trades in 18th-century England.
Copyright laws have evolved as technologies have changed, revealing changing
dynamics of contestation. Case studies are utilized to draw out varying posi­
tions related to copyright as an enabler of business models or incentive for cul­
tural production.
Chapter 15 – Margie Borschke’s ‘Reimagining Copies in Digital Net-
works’ – reviews the concept of the ‘copy’ and how its meaning has shifted as
media practices that were once based on hoarding, unauthorized copying and
collecting have changed in relation to cloud-based storage and streaming.
Attention is drawn to the rhetoric around the cloud and stream, disentangling
debates around ontology, mimesis, and authenticity, and revealing the central­
ity of the copy for communication studies today.
Chapter 16 – Michele Willson’s ‘Questioning Algorithms and Agency: Facial
Biometrics in Algorithmic Contexts’ – considers the notion of the algorithm as
xx Introduction

part of the everyday imaginary around new digital technologies. Anxieties and
desires around algorithms center on questions related to agency and control, and
whether these are to be situated in human or technological domains. The concept
of delegating human agency is suggested as a productive strategy for dealing with
these questions.
Chapter 17 – Thomas N. Cooke’s ‘Digital Privacy and Interdisciplinarity: Ten­
dencies, Problems, and Possibilities’ – discusses historical and contemporary debates
around digital privacy in communication studies. The interdisciplinarity of scholarly
treatment in particular has revealed many of the tensions faced by researchers in this
area. The chapter also considers normalizing tendencies amongst scholars and
emphasizes the need for new theoretical approaches in this area of inquiry.
Chapter 18 – Sergio Sayago and Josep Blat’s ‘Reimagining Communication
with Conversational User Interfaces: Anthropomorphic Design and Conversa­
tional User Experience’ – consider the new interfaces that are allowing us to
talk to our technologies. Two important issues in the design of conversational
user interfaces are explored – anthropomorphism and conversational dialogue.
The authors review current and seminal works in the field, and how they
have applied these issues in their recent research.
Chapter 19 – David J. Gunkel’s ‘Brain–Computer Interface’ – relates the
new interfaces between neurons and computational devices to the larger
encompassing area of human–computer interaction. These new technologies
allow for data input and output between the central and peripheral nervous
systems, and the nearby informatic environment. The chapter also considers
brain–computer interfaces in relation to science fiction in order to obtain an
outlook on future applications and design developments.
Michael Filimowicz
Veronika Tzankova

Other Volumes in the Series

Reimagining Communication: Meaning
Reimagining Communication: Experience
Reimagining Communication: Action

Note
The chapter summaries here have in places drawn from the authors’ chapter
abstracts, the full versions of which can be found in Routledge’s online reference
for the volume.
1
MEDIA ARCHAEOLOGY AND
MEDIATION
The Magic Lantern as an Object of
Theoretical Reflection

Francisco Javier Frutos-Esteban and Carmen

López-San Segundo

Introduction
The public or private sessions of magic lantern that combined the projection of
images, the recitation of texts and the interpretation of musical melodies reached
an important sociocultural relevance at the international level in different con­
texts related to science, education and popular culture between the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. In order to reach their objectives, these sessions used
a new device. This device adopted different names such as ‘phantoscope’,
‘megascope’, ‘solar microscope’ or ‘projection lantern’, and it was recognized as
a very popular means of social communication under the generic term of ‘magic
lantern’. It was a means that Charles Dickens himself compared, for its versatility
and variety of content, to no less than the city of London. In 1846, in Lausanne
(Switzerland), the British author when he started working on Dombey and Son
confessed to his biographer and friend John Forster that he felt nostalgia for the
London urban bustle with the following words:

It seems as if they supplied something to my brain, which it cannot bear,

when busy, to lose. For a week or a fortnight, I can write prodigiously in
a retired place (as at Broadstairs), and a day in London sets me up again and
starts me. But the toil and labour of writing, day after day, without that
magic lantern is immense!!
(Forster, 1873, p. 382)

If Dickens, who captured as much as anyone the social changes of Victorian

England, was inspired by London to create his works, the city that was his muse
and which he called his ‘magic lantern’, the French writer Henri Beyle – better
2 Frutos-Esteban and López-San Segundo

known under the pseudonym Stendhal – also did so and compared the magic
lantern with his own head. He did this in Rome, Naples and Florence in 1818,
a book that is a declaration of his love for Italy and which has now passed into
history to describe so-called ‘Stendhal syndrome’, the kind of ecstasy that occurs
when contemplating an accumulation of art and beauty over very little space
and time: ‘My head is a magic lantern; I am having fun with the crazy or tender
images that my imagination presents to me’ (Collignon, 1868, p. 188).
The magic lantern sessions, which caught the attention of such illustrious
celebrities, had as their central element the projection slides. Habitually they
were made of transparent glass, the slides were the basis of any session – public
or private, educational or playful – and they illustrated fables, tales, allegories,
comedies, dissemination subjects or current events. One of them inspired
Arthur Rimbaud to write in Roche, in 1873, part of his famous poem ‘A
Season in Hell’. In the only work published by the French poet, one of the
most popular religious magic lantern images is referenced; and he described
himself as a ‘master of phantasmagoria’ (Rimbaud, 1970, p. 25).
By the end of the nineteenth century, after being a part of all areas of the
social sphere, the magic lantern was an extremely versatile device. Therefore,
it is not surprising that it was a very heterogeneous market, competitive and
with a diversified demand articulated around it. A market consequence of
a highly fertile industrial and commercial activity that was oriented to both
dissemination and entertainment, it was aimed at two well-defined sectors: the
professional, with products and services for institutions and public shows; and
the domestic sector, for the amateur and children’s market. They were wit­
nesses in both the public and in the private spheres, as the first pages of the
famous novel By the Way of Swann showed, the first volume, published in
1913, of the seven that compose In Search of Lost Time. A text in which
Marcel Proust evokes a typical domestic session of the magic lantern gives rise
to the French author to introduce the conflicts of the protagonist of the work:
‘Someone had had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings
when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern, which used to be set
on top of my lamp while we waited for dinner-time to come’ (Proust, 2017,
p. 37).
Although the magic lantern developed a successful equipment industry and
satisfied a varied demand for consumer practices, from the development of
various expressive forms, its interest as a scientific object unfortunately has
been outside of the academic research focus until the late twentieth century.
Frutos and López (2008) indicate the dispersion of its collections and its con­
ceptual lack of definition as an object of study – both due to the chronological
breadth of their history, which runs between the seventeenth and nineteenth
centuries, as well as the controversial interpretation which linked the magic
lantern with the term ‘precinema’ – these would be two of the reasons that
explain why the magic lantern was for decades a media in the shade.
 Media Archaeology and Mediation 3

Fortunately, there has been a change of trend over the last two decades which
has shed light on the magic lantern and has resulted in the redoubled editorial
efforts of the prestigious English association The Magic Lantern Society, in the
works of ‘Media Archaeology’ – Zielinski (2008), Hutahmo and Parikka
(2011) – or in the development of international multidisciplinary research pro­
jects such as ‘A Million Pictures: Magic Lantern Slide Heritage as Artefacts in
the Common European History of Learning’; ‘Dynamics of Educational and
Scientific Renovation in Secondary School Classrooms (1900–1936): An Iber­
ian Perspective’; ‘B-magic or The Magic Lantern and its Cultural Impact as
Visual Mass Medium in Belgium (1830–1940)’; or ‘Educational and Scientific
Challenges of the Second Spanish Republic: Internalization, Popularization
and Innovation in Universities and Schools’.
To follow the previous trend the present text conceives the magic lantern
as an archaeological object of study and for this reason it relies on current
theory from media archaeology and the genetic-cultural approach. The pre­
sent text has tried to provide a vision of ‘Media History’ – in which the
magic lantern is inscribed as an object of study – it is closer to what would
be a hypothetical ‘natural history of the sign’ in the terms Vygotsky formu­
lated (1991). This approach would contribute to make an appropriate ana­
lysis of the role played by the mediated communication – mediation social
and instrumental – in the formation and development of the human being
as a historical-cultural being.

The Magic Lantern and Media Archaeology

In light of Frutos’s (2008) recent comprehensive review of magic lantern
audiovisual projections, this second part of the text will only seek to update
and expand that review via contributions that see magic lanterns as archaeo­
logical remains, and, therefore, as items that may be studied within the scope
of media archaeology. In his study, Frutos (2008) attributes great value to the
editorial work undertaken by The Magic Lantern Society in safeguarding
memory related to magic lanterns. As for other contemporary monographs on
magic lanterns, Frutos (2008) is more critical and claims that they have fallen
victim to excessive isolation and statism as a consequence of decades in which
they were constructed as a dependent object of study and understood as mere
technical, expressive or industrial forerunners to other social communication
media. For example, given the continuity that can be established between
magic lantern audiovisual projections and cinematographic ones, among those
who study cinema the idea took hold from the outset that the study of magic
lanterns should be part of the history of cinema, and more specifically, the
‘archaeology of cinema’ (Ceram, 1965) or ‘precinema’, a period that has been
so well established that it even constructs the archives and museums related to
the history and heritage of the seventh art.
4 Frutos-Esteban and López-San Segundo

It is not only the history of cinema that has turned the magic lantern into
a mere antecedent of its object of study. Historia de la Fotografía (Sougez, 1991)
reproduces the same blueprint of estrangement proposed by cinematic histori­
ography and places magic lanterns in a phase labelled ‘prephotography’:
‘Another kind of theoretical limbo that equally seeks to legitimize archaeo­
logically the sectoral history of photography’ (Frutos, 2008, p. 168). Some
accounts from the history of performing arts have also included magic lantern
audiovisual projections within so-called ‘paratheatrical’ techniques, and other
sectoral histories associated with the broad spectrum of the narrative tradition
have placed them in fields such as ‘paraliterary’ and ‘intertextual’ studies (Fer­
nández, 2006).
That said, it is true that Gombrich (1987), an art historian, was one of the
first to raise the need to reflect on how art and aesthetics might relate to the
visual technologies that arose from the fifteenth century onward. Gombrich’s
reflections were continued by authors such as Bryson (1988) or Crary (1990)
who openly suggested that the gaze is a cultural construct whose history may
be related to the history of the arts, technology, the media and, by extension,
all social practices involving the creation and reception of cultural content. For
example, Bryson further explored the hypothesis of the gaze as a social con­
struction and as a system of codes interposed between the perceived world and
our conscience:

Inserted between the subject and the world is the total sum of discourses
that manufacture visuality, that cultural construct, and make visuality differ­
ent from vision, the notion of immediate visual experience. Inserted
between the retina and the world is the screen of signs, a screen that consists
of all of the many discourses on vision that are embodied in the social arena.
(Bryson, 1988, pp. 91–92)

In fact, Bryson went a step further and said that visual culture could not be
accommodated in the definition of its object of study as the result of the
‘social construction of the visual field’ and that emphasis should be placed on
exploring the reverse of this proposition, namely ‘the visual construction of
the social field’:

Postmodernism has supposed that we are moving beyond this episteme

and that we recognize that the visual field that we inhabit is a field of
meanings and not only of forms and is penetrated by verbal and visual
discourses, by signs; and these signs are socially constructed, just as we
are … Visuality [is] something that is constructed cooperatively; we are
therefore responsible for it.
(Bryson, 1988, p. 107)
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were caused by the existence of renal calculus—the “gravel of the
kidneys” of his day. He knew of it when he wrote the letter to Hartlib
(a fellow sufferer) in which he gratefully thanks good Mrs. Hartlib for
a “receipt” or “sanative remedy,” which she had sent him in one of
her husband’s letters, against a disease that Robyn calls “so cruel in
its tortures and so fatal in its catastrophe.”[148]
Stalbridge, with this fact realised, was no longer the home of glad
possibilities it may at first have promised to be; which the old Earl, in
leaving it to his Benjamin, had certainly intended it to be. But Robert
Boyle was making the best of it. “As for me,” he wrote to Hartlib
—“during my confinement to this melancholy solitude, I often divert
myself at leisure moments in trying such experiments as the
unfurnishedness of the place and the present distractedness of my
mind will permit me.” Friends and neighbours came about him; these
were certain “young knights” and young Churchmen and “travellers
out of France,” who appear under fancy names in his Reflections:
Eusebius, “a Dr. of Divinity,” Eugenius and Genorio, “Travellers and
fine Gentlemen,” and Lindamor, “a learned youth, both well born and
well bred.” If they were not actually his guests at Stalbridge, Robyn
“took pleasure to imagine” them to “be present with me at the
occasion”; and poetic licence has suggested that Lindamor may
have been Robyn himself, in some of his moods, though he still
figures in some of them as Philaretus and speaks in others of them
of “Mr. Boyle”—even while he is using also the first personal
pronoun. The Earl of Bristol’s family at Sherborne Castle were
pleasant neighbours, and the family of Sir Thomas Mallet, at
Poynington—Sir Thomas and his Lady, and Mr. John Mallet their
son, and the young lady whom John Mallet was to marry—“the fair
young lady you are happy in,” as Robert Boyle called her.
Robyn’s own family—scattered and busy as they were—came to
see him sometimes. He says himself that his sister, Lady Ranelagh,
was “almost always with him during his sickness”;[149] and his
brother Frank seems to have been a welcome and cheerful guest at
Stalbridge; while Robyn himself rode over now and then to Marston
Bigot, when “dear Broghill” and Lady Pegg were there. But his
laboratory and his “standish” and books, and especially his
correspondence with Hartlib in London, were a great resource. It was
at this time that he was writing the little essays he spoke of to
Marcombes. Among them was his Free Discourse against
Customary Swearing, which in manuscript pleased his relations, and
was dedicated to his sister Kildare.[150] And it was then also that he
was writing his Occasional Reflections upon Several Subjects, which
so delighted Lady Ranelagh.[151] They afford many glimpses into
Robert Boyle’s life during the years spent at Stalbridge. He is to be
seen in them as the young Squire of gentle, studious tastes and
simple habits, sitting, book in hand, over the slow-burning wood fire
in the parlour with the carved stone chimney-piece “fair and graceful
in all respects”; or riding his horse along the up-and-down-hill Dorset
lanes; angling by the side of a stream, or walking in his own
meadows, with his spaniel at his heels: philosophising as he goes;
observing all things always; dreaming, perhaps, a little too—within
bounds. The very titles of his Reflections are an epitome of the life of
those Stalbridge days. The spaniel is a constant companion, in weal
and woe:—
Upon my Spaniel’s carefulness not to lose me in a Strange place,
and Upon his manner of giving Meat to his Dogg, are two of these
Reflections.[152]
There is nothing very original in Robert Boyle’s method of feeding
a dog, except that it carries with it his inevitable moral conclusions;
but the youthful essay hands down the picture of master and dog to
posterity:—
“For but observe this Dogg. I hold him out meat, and my inviting
Voice loudly encourages and invites him to take it. ’Tis held indeed
higher than he can leap, and yet, if he leap not at it, I do not give it
him; but if he do, I let it fall half-way into his mouth.”
Spaniels have fetched their masters’ gloves from time immemorial;
but none quite so graphically as Robert Boyle’s:—[153]
“How importunate is he to be imployed about bringing me this
glove! And with what Clamours and how many fawnings does he
court me to fling it him! I never saw him so eager for a piece of Meat
as I find him for a Glove. And yet he knows it is no Food for him, nor
is it Hunger that creates his Longings for it; for now I have cast it
him, he does nothing else with it but (with a kind of Pride to be sent
for it, and a satisfaction which his glad gestures make appear so
great, that the very use of Speech would not enable him to express it
better) brings it me back again....”
In the mere names of these Reflections may be traced the manner
in which he spent his days: Upon distilling the Spirit of Roses in a
Limbick: Upon two very miserable Beggars begging together by the
Highway: Upon the Sight of a Windmill standing still: Upon his
Coaches being stopt in a narrow Lane: Upon the Sight of a fair
Milkmaid Singing to her Cow:[154] Upon Talking to an Echo: Upon a
Child that Cri’d for the Stars;—in which last are quoted Waller’s lines
—

“Thus in a starry night fond children cry

For the rich spangles which adorn the sky.”

One of the Reflections, Upon the Eating of Oysters, possesses a

secondary interest: it is supposed to have suggested to Swift his
Gulliver’s Travels. Like others of the Reflections, it is written in the
form of conversation between Eugenius and Lindamor.[155]
“Eug.—You put me in mind of a fancy of your Friend Mr. Boyle,
who was saying, that he had thoughts of making a short Romantick
story, where the Scene should be laid in some Island of the Southern
Ocean, govern’d by some such rational Laws and Customs as those
of Utopia or the New Atlantis, and in the Country he would introduce
an Observing Native, that upon his return home from his Travels
made in Europe should give an account of our Countries and
manners under feign’d Names, and frequently intimate in his
Relations (or in his Answers to Questions that should be made him)
the reasons of his wondring to find our Customs so extravagant, and
differing from those of his Country....”
The Reflections show Robert Boyle as he lived and thought and
felt; as he rose early on a “fair morning,” and looked up at the
“variously coloured clouds,” and listened to the lark’s song overhead;
as he picked up a horse-shoe, watched boys at their games, or tried
a prismatical or triangular glass; as he fished with a “counterfeit fly”
along the river-banks, or let the fish run away with the more homely
bait; as he looked at his own shadow cast in the face of a pool, or his
own face in a looking-glass with a rich frame. What an opportunity
was the magnetical needle of a sundial, or the use of a burning-
glass, or the drinking of water out of the brims of one’s own hat!
What food for reflection was a syrup made of violets, or a glow-worm
included in a crystal viol! What thoughts fluttered about the tail of a
paper kite flown on a windy day, or about a lanthorn and candle
carried by on a dark and windy night! And Robert Boyle did once
shoot something, as may be seen from the title of one particular
Reflection:
“Killing a Crow (out of a window) in a Hog’s trough, and
immediately tracing the ensuing Reflection with a Pen made of one
of his Quills....”
Very early in his life there was, alas! the least touch of the
valetudinary about the “deare Squire.” It was not all fair mornings
and larks and roses. One section of his little book of essays is
devoted to “the accidents of an ague,” and deals with the invasion,
the hot and cold fits, the letting of blood, the taking of physick, the
syrups and other sweet things sent by the doctor, the want of sleep,
the telling of the strokes of an ill-going clock in the night, the thief in
the candle, the danger of death, the fear of relapse; and at the end,
when Robyn is his own man again—the “reviewing and tacking
together the several bills filed up in the Apothecary’s Shop.”
In the summer of 1647, Robert Boyle had been ill; but in the
autumn he paid some visits among his relations, and early in 1648
he went to Holland, “partly to visit the country,” and partly to help his
brother Frank conduct his brilliant wife home from The Hague—a
mission that must have required all Frank’s sweetness of spirit and
all Robyn’s philosophy. In the summer of 1648, Robert Boyle was
again in London;—this time, Lady Ranelagh had taken rooms for him
in St. James’s.
 CHAPTER X
A KIND OF ELYSIUM
“This blessed plot, this Earth, this Realme, this England,
This Nurse, this teeming wombe of Royall Kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous for their birth,
Renowned for their deeds, as farre from home,
For Christian seruice, and true Chiualrie,
As is the sepulcher in stubborne Iury
Of the World’s ransome, blessed Marie’s Sonne.
This Land of such deere soules, this deere-deere Land,
Deere for her reputation through the world....”

Shakespeare’s Richard the Second (First Folio, 1623).

Shakespeare was a little out of date in the summer of 1648, when

Robert Boyle came to town from Stalbridge to the lodging in St.
James’s taken for him by his sister Ranelagh. “This England” was
then still in the throes of civil war; was, in fact, at the moment
plunged in what is known as the Second Civil War.[156] When Robert
Boyle arrived in town, everybody was talking of the risings in the
English counties (Dorsetshire itself among them), and the revolt of
the fleet off the Kentish coast. The King was in the Isle of Wight:
since Robert Boyle had written his letter to Marcombes in October
1646, the King had been bandied about from the Scots to the
English, from the Parliament to the Army, from Holmby House to
Hampton Court; and now, having escaped into the Isle of Wight only
to find himself virtually a prisoner in Carisbrooke Castle, he was yet
in secret negotiation with Ormonde in France, and with Hamilton and
the Royalists in Scotland. Just at this time, “in spite of Argyle and the
Scottish Clergy”, a Royalist army was marching into England. The
Queen and Prince and the Royalist Court at St. Germains were on
tip-toe of expectation; while the young Duke of York had escaped
from London abroad, disguised in girl’s clothes.[157] Ormonde was
with the Court in France, and Inchiquin in Ireland had declared
himself a Royalist. There had been also successive Royalist risings
in Wales and in the English counties. Of the Parliamentary Party,
Lambert was in the north, Cromwell in Wales; and Fairfax and Ireton
—the Kentish rising crushed—were now besieging Colchester.
And what was Robert Boyle doing during this London visit? After
all, London was in the circumstances the most civilised place to be
in. Robert Boyle was listening to the Earl of Warwick’s very full
account “from his own mouth” of his recent negotiations with the
rebellious fleet;—the Earl of Warwick, who was Mary Boyle’s father-
in-law. And then, when the Earl of Warwick himself was hurrying off
to Portsmouth to deal with the “disobedient ships” there, Robert
Boyle was supping quietly with the ladies of the Warwick family at
Warwick House in Holborn, and hearing from them all the latest
gossip about the Essex rising, and the behaviour of his brother-in-
law Charles Rich. By their account, Charles Rich had been the
“grand agitator in this Essex business.” And the young Squire was
much amused to hear also that the newly chosen Admiral of the
revolting ships was none other than one Kemb, a minister,—“a mad,
witty fellow,” Robert Boyle calls him, “whom I have often been very
merry with, his wife being sister to the honest red-nosed blade that
waits now on me.”[158]
Times had changed, indeed, since England was the royal throne
of Kings, another Eden, and a demi-paradise. No doubt the Invisibles
met as usual in Wood Street, and Robert Boyle was often in
congenial company with Hartlib and the others there or at Gresham
College. Young Lord Barrymore was no longer with Milton in the
Barbican. Milton had given up his school, and he and his wife and
their one little girl were living in High Holborn—very near to Warwick
House—and Milton was now leading a literary life, but keenly
watching the doings of Parliament and Army; it was some months
before he was made Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Council of
State. The young philosopher in St. James’s, who had his own
ideals, was watching them too, as keenly; though exactly how Robert
Boyle felt about the trend of events it is very difficult to guess. His
“exact evenness of carriage” never deserted him: to use his own
words, “The point of a mariner’s needle shows its inclination to the
Pole both by its wavering and rest.” Royalists, Parliament-men,
Army-men, Churchmen, Presbyterians, and Independents,—he was
in the midst of them all, bound to many of them by ties of friendship
and kinship, but steadfastly going his own way. If he was in the
company of Mary’s father-in-law, the Earl of Warwick, he was also in
Archbishop Usher’s study, listening to a very different kind of
exposition, and he was writing affectionately to “dear Broghill” in his
difficult position in Munster. If he spoke of “Our Masters” at
Westminster, he spoke also of “Our Brethren” across the Borders.
On the whole, like Milton in Holborn, but from quite another
standpoint, Robert Boyle seems to have fixed, if not his faith, his
expectations, upon the New Model. “Victory,” he wrote, “is as
obedient as the very Parliament to the Army.”[159]
And meantime Lady Ranelagh was doing her best to push her
young brother’s literary interests, and make his London visit a
pleasant one. She had been showing one of his manuscripts to her
friend the Countess of Monmouth. The Countess was the daughter
of an old acquaintance of the Earl of Cork, Lionel Cranfield, the
clever merchant-adventurer, Lord Mayor of London, High Treasurer,
and first, Earl of Middlesex. It may be remembered that Marcombes
had been tutor in the Middlesex family before he took Kynalmeaky
and Broghill abroad. The Countess had read and liked the
manuscript, and had sent the young Squire a flattering message and
invitation in a note to his sister Ranelagh. And it was with more than
ordinary pleasure that Robert Boyle sat down to indite his little letter
of reply, a model of seventeenth-century epistolary homage, to the
Countess of Monmouth at Moore Park—
“Madam,” so runs the letter: “in your ladyship’s (imparted to me by
my sister Ranelagh) I find myself so confounded with civilities, that if
she that blessed me with the sight of your letter had not (for her own
discharge) exacted of me this acknowledgment of my having seen it,
I must confess I should scarce have ventured to return a verbal
answer, deterred by the impossibility of writing without wronging a
resentment[160] which I can express as little as I deserved the
praises and the favours that have produced it.”
 And so on. The Countess had suggested the publication of his
pamphlet. But she did more: she had invited the young Squire to pay
a visit to Moore Park, and to bring his manuscript in his pocket—
“As for my pamphlet, Madam, had it expected the glory of
entertaining you, it should certainly have appeared in a less careless
dress ... yet my just sense of the smallness of the accession the
Press can be to the honour of your ladyship’s perusal makes me
decline its publication. And as that paper cannot have either a higher
applause or nobler end than the being liked and practised at Moore
Park, so if it have either anyway diverted your ladyship, or had the
least influence upon my lord, I have reached my desires and gone
beyond my hopes. However, Madam, I am richly rewarded for writing
such a book by being enjoyned to fetch it where you are. So
welcome a command is very unlikely to be disobeyed; but my
obedience, Madam, must be paid to the order, not the motive. The
fetching of my book may be one effect of my remove, but not the
errand of it; for sure, Madam, your modesty cannot be so injurious,
both to yourself and me, as to persuade you that any inferior (that is,
other) motive can be looked upon by me as an invitation to a journey
which will bless me with so great a happiness as that of your
ladyship’s conversation, and give me the opportunity of assuring
you, better than my present haste and my disorder will now permit
me, in how transcendent a degree I am, Madam, your Ladyship’s
humble and obliged servant, Robert Boyle.”
It was a particularly cold, wet July[161]; the confusions of the
country seemed to have infected the very air; and those people who
were “wont to make fires, not against winter but against cold,” had
“generally displac’d the florid and the verdant Ornaments in their
chimneys,” where “Vulcan” was more proper than “Flora.”[162]
But it must be taken for granted that the sun shone out one day,
not long after the folding and dispatching of this letter to the
Countess; and that Robert Boyle and his horse did find their way by
the old coach-road from London into Hertfordshire. And when they
came to the little town of Rickmansworth, lying sleepily in the valley,
clustered about the huge Church in its midst, horse and rider must
have turned upwards to the left, under spreading oak-trees. The
“common way” still runs upwards through the Park.
For Moore Park, that once belonged to Shakespeare’s Earl of
Pembroke, “stands on the side of a hill; but not very steep.” Sir
William Temple has described it, as it was in that day, when the
Monmouth family owned it, “the sweetest place, I think, that I have
ever seen in my life, either before or since, at home or abroad.” The
length of the house lay upon the breadth of the garden. The great
parlour, where the Countess would receive her guest, opened on the
middle of a terraced gravel-walk, set with standard laurels, which
looked like orange-trees out of bloom. There were fountains and
statues and summer-houses in that garden—“the perfectest figure of
a garden”—and shady cloisters, upon arches of stone, clustered
over with vines. And beyond lay a wilderness, which was always in
the shade. Robert Boyle must have been a happy man that day, as
he alighted before those portals with his manuscript in his pocket.
Henry Cary, second Earl of Monmouth, was a Royalist peer: his
younger brother, Thomas Cary, was the faithful groom of the
bedchamber to Charles I. They were sons of the old Robert—the
man who, the moment Queen Elizabeth was dead, had started on
his record ride from London to Edinburgh to be the first to tell James
VI that he was King of England. The first Earl and his Countess—a
Trevanion—lay buried in Rickmansworth Church; and the second
Earl and his Countess were, at the time of Robert Boyle’s visit, living
quietly at Moore Park, the Earl having of late withdrawn into
retirement among his books and manuscripts.[163] For he was a
scholar, skilled in modern languages, and a writer—though not one
of his manuscripts remains. And he and the Countess were still
passionately mourning the death of Lionel, their elder son and heir,
who had fallen in the battle of Marston Moor. The second son was
married, in London[164]; and the family at Moore Park must have
consisted entirely of daughters, though the eldest daughter had been
married for some years to Mary Boyle’s rejected suitor, Mr. James
Hamilton.[165] Mr. Hamilton had married the Lady Anne Cary a few
weeks after the Lady Mary Boyle’s runaway marriage with Charles
Rich. But not any of the other daughters at Moore Park—and there
was a bevy of them—were married, or to be married, for many years
to come; which, in those days of early marriages, is a matter for
some wonder, especially as it is known, on Evelyn’s authority, that
one at least of these daughters was “beautifull and ingenious.”[166]
However pleasant the visit to Moore Park may have been, it was
soon over. Early in August Robert Boyle was staying with his sister
Mary at the Earl of Warwick’s house of Leeze, in Essex, and there
finishing his treatise on “Seraphick Love.” It purported to be written
“by one young gentleman to another”—to that Lindamor, in fact, the
“learned youth both well-born and well-bred,” who makes the fourth
of the little quartet in the Reflections. The manuscript was handed,
“almost sheet by sheet,” as it was written, to the enthusiastic Mary;
and then, having been, after the fashion of the day, circulated among
a favoured few, it was laid carefully by, among the young Squire’s
other papers. And in September he was back again at Stalbridge.
The last months of that fateful year must have been, in many a
quiet English manor, the most dismal and depressing ever lived
through. In his seclusion, with pen and ink, limbecks and recipients,
Robert Boyle was to employ the months as best he could. To his
Manor, set among its autumn orchards, reached by its stone-paved
way between rows of elm-trees, there must have come from week to
week, by friend or messenger or weekly news-sheet, the straggling
tidings of those events that one after the other were hurrying the
Sovereign to his doom. The second civil war had been trampled out;
Cromwell’s great battle of Preston had been fought and Hamilton
taken prisoner, while Robert Boyle was still at “delicious Leeze,”
perfecting his treatise on “Seraphick Love.” And before he left Leeze
there had come the news of the surrender of Colchester to Fairfax,
and the shooting of the two Royalist leaders. In September the
Parliamentary Commissioners were in the Isle of Wight; and through
the shortening days of October and November even Dorsetshire and
its “bye-paths of intelligence” must have been stirred by the doings of
Parliament, the “high and fierce” debate that followed the Army
Remonstrance, and the coup d’état of the King’s abduction from the
Isle of Wight to the melancholy Hurst Castle on the Hampshire
mainland. And then—Fairfax was at Whitehall; the Army was in
possession of London.
December came, and with it the last grim struggle of Parliament
and Army for the disposition of the person of the Sovereign. The
King was brought to Windsor; and, Christmas over, Lords and
Commons were in the last hand-grips. The King’s trial had begun:
the trial of “Charles Stuart, King of England,” in Westminster Hall,
where Strafford had been tried and sentenced seven years before.
How soon did the news of the King’s sentence reach the Manor of
Stalbridge? “This Court doth adjudge that the said Charles Stuart, as
a Tyrant, Traitor, Murderer and Public Enemy, shall be put to death
by the severing of his head from his body.”
How soon did Robert Boyle hear the details of those last weeks
and days and hours, with all the little traits, so kingly and so human,
as the unhappy royal delinquent blindly approached his doom? How
soon did some pale-faced horseman bring the news to Stalbridge of
that last scene of all?—the King walking in procession through the
Park, from St. James’s to Whitehall; his stepping out of that
Whitehall window on to the scaffold hung with black; the block and
axe, and men in black masks; the companies of horse and foot
below in the street; and from Charing Cross on the one side to
Westminster Abbey on the other, the close-packed crowds of the
populace, waiting....
“The axe descended, severing the head from the body at one
blow. There was a vast shudder through the mob, and then a
universal groan.”[167]

Lord Broghill had given up his post in Munster under the

Parliament; and he and Lady Broghill and their young children were
living quietly at Marston Bigot. There Broghill amused himself by
writing his Parthenissa; and there, in the spring of 1649, Robert
Boyle paid a visit to his brother and Lady Pegg. He, too, was busy
with his manuscripts, and in pleasant enough correspondence with
the Invisibles in London. But in August he was at Bath. A letter to
Lady Ranelagh, dated from Bath, August 2, “late at night,” was
written in by no means a light-hearted vein. His “native disposition”
had made him shy, he said, of disclosing his afflictions where he
could not expect their redress. He was “too proud to seek a relief in
the being thought to need it.” Moreover, he had been ill again, of “a
quotidian ague.” His manuscript on “Public Spiritedness” had been
laid aside, and his “vulcanian feats” abandoned.
“The melancholy which some have been pleased to misrepresent
to you as the cause of my distempers is certainly much more the
effect of them.” He had only just arrived at Bath, having been carried
there on a litter; and there he was intending to stay till he could leave
it on horseback. The physicians had led him to hope he might be
able to crawl to London before very long.
But the end of August found him back in his laboratory among the
orchards—not very pleasantly occupied in “drawing,” for his own
use, “a quintessence of wormwood.” He had been too much
occupied of late even to write to his sister Ranelagh. There is in his
letter the least little suggestion that the events of this last year—
personal, it may be, as well as political—had kept even this brother
and sister apart; but it was for the time only.
“For Vulcan,” he wrote, “has so transported and bewitched me,
that, as the delights I taste in it make me fancy my laboratory a kind
of Elysium, so as if the threshold of it possessed the quality the
poets ascribed to that Lethe their fictions made men taste of before
their entrance into those seats of bliss, I there forget my standish
and my books, and almost all things, but the unchangeable
resolution I have made of continuing till death, Sister, your
“R. B.”[168]
 CHAPTER XI
HERMETIC THOUGHTS
“A Monarch may command my Life or Fortune but not my opinion: I cannot
command this myself; it arises only from the Nature of the Thing I judge of.”—
Robert Boyle.

“... A general chemical council, not far from Charing Cross, sits often, and hath
so behaved itself hitherto, that things seem now to hasten towards some
settlement.... They are about an universal laboratory, to be erected after such a
manner as may redound, not only to the good of this island, but also to the health
and wealth of all mankind.”—Samuel Hartlib to Robert Boyle, May 1654.

Lord Broghill had laid aside his Parthenissa. The story goes that in
the autumn of 1649 he was meditating, under cover of a course of
treatment for the gout, a visit to Spa, which would take him into the
neighbourhood of the “royal orphan”; and one account, at least, of
how Cromwell intercepted Broghill in London is too picturesque to be
discarded.
Nobody—so runs the story—was in the secret of Broghill’s little
plan except his wife, Lady Pegg, and perhaps his sister Ranelagh, at
whose house, in the Old Mall, Broghill arrived on a certain day in the
dusk, with only four servants in attendance, to take leave of her
before setting out on his journey to Spa.
“My Lord came, and was no sooner housed but heard a voice ask
for my Lord Broghill: he thereupon charged his faithful sister with
treachery; but her protestation of being innocent tempered him.” The
messenger proved to be a “sightly Lieutenant,” sent by the Lord
General to know when and where he might interview Broghill; and,
after a good deal of parleying, a meeting was arranged for early next
morning in St. James’s Garden. Cromwell was there first, with a
group of his officers about him, and Broghill soon learnt that his
correspondence with the “royal orphan” was discovered, and that he
must make his choice. “The dilemma is short,” Cromwell is reported
to have said; “if you go with me in this expedition to reduce the Irish
rebels, you may live, otherwise you certainly die.”[169]
Whatever the details, the fact remains that Broghill accepted
Cromwell’s offer, and returned to Ireland with some sort of
understanding that, while he would serve Cromwell and the cause of
Protestantism under the Parliament, he was not to be required to
fight against any but the Irish.[170] Accordingly, in December 1649,
“dear Broghill” was in Ireland again, and Robert Boyle was writing to
congratulate him on a brilliant series of successes at Kinsale, Cork,
Bandon and Youghal. “And truly that which most endears your
acquisitions to me is that they have cost you so little blood.”[171]
Cromwell had known his man; a veritable son of the old soldier-
statesman, whose name was alive yet in Munster. There could have
been no Rebellion in Ireland, said Cromwell, if every county had
contained an Earl of Cork.
Other members of the Boyle family were back in Ireland. The
eldest brother, Dungarvan, now Earl of Cork, the good-natured head
of the family, and his no less good-natured Countess were living at
Lismore or in Dublin. Frank and “black Betty,” as Robert Boyle had
dubbed the little sister-in-law, were living near Castle Lyons; and
there also was Lady Barrymore, whose “wild boy,” so lately Milton’s
pupil in the Barbican, was now a very young married man. To his
mother’s discomfiture, and sorely against her wishes, young
Barrymore had married another of the fascinating Killigrews; and the
same batch of Irish letters that carried Robert Boyle’s
congratulations to Broghill took also a very wise letter, written from
London, to his eldest sister, Lady Barrymore.[172] He had known
nothing about the marriage till it was over.
“Without pretending to excuse or extenuate what is past, having
minded you that there is a difference betwixt seasonable and just, I
shall venture only to represent to you that the question is not now
whether or no the marriage be a thing fit to be done, but how it is to
be suffered; and that as the best gamesters have not the privilege of
choosing their own cards, but their skill consists in well playing the
game that is dealt them, so the discreetest persons are not allowed
the choice of conditions and events, but their wisdom consists in
making the best of those accidents that Providence is pleased to
dispense them.” And he reminds his sister that, as she has declared
openly for the Royalist party, the mediation of a “crowned
intercessor” in this matter is not to be disregarded. Moreover, some
of her nearest friends, “though they think the match very unhappy,
think it unfit the married pair should be so.”[173]
The letter heralds Robert Boyle’s own arrival in Ireland on a visit to
his sister at Castle Lyons, and to the various family homes in
Munster. His Irish estates were certainly calling for his attention; but
the visit was to be postponed. Broghill’s diplomatic victories were but
the beginning of bloody warfare. Broghill was to serve Cromwell
through the whole of the war with Ireland, in a series of brilliant
engagements. “A’ Broghill! A’ Broghill!” was the battle-cry that led on
his men; and he narrowly escaped with his life in the last
engagement of all—his victory at Knockbrack. Broghill was the man
aimed at. “Kill the fellow in the gold-laced coat!” the Irish soldiers
shouted to each other. But Broghill was not killed, though “my
boldest horse,” he wrote, “being twice wounded, became so fearful
that he was turned to the coach.”[174]
In the summer of 1650 Robert Boyle was still at Stalbridge, writing
on May Day to thank Hartlib for his gossip about Utopia and Breda:
[175] “my inclinations as much concerning me in Republicâ Literariâ
as my fortune can do in Republicâ Anglicanâ. Nor am I idle, though
my thoughts only are not at present useless to the advancement of
learning; for I can sometimes make shift to snatch from the
importunity of my affairs leisure to trace such plans and frame such
models, etc., as, if my Irish fortune will afford me quarries and woods
to draw competent materials from to construct after them, will fit me
to build a pretty house in Athens, where I may live to philosophy and
Mr. Hartlib.”
At this time, Ireland and Athens were equally remote. Was there
an attraction, other than the Invisibles, that still kept Robert Boyle
within reach of London? Many years afterwards—after Robert Boyle
was dead—his old friend John Evelyn, writing about him to Dr.
Wotton said: “Tho’ amongst all his experiments he never made that
of the maried life, yet I have been told he courted a beautifull and
ingenious daughter of Carew,[176] Earl of Monmouth, to which is
owing the birth of his Seraphick Love.”
Was this, indeed, the love-story of Robert Boyle’s life? If so, it was
lived through between the years 1648 and 1650. As early as the cold
January of 1648, at Stalbridge, on the very day he came of age, in
some moment of depression or decision, the boy had made a little
sacrifice to Vulcan: he had resolutely burned most of the verses,
“amorous, merry and devout” that he had written in idle moments,
and laid away “uncommunicated.”[177] Then, when spring came, and
the Stalbridge orchards were white with blossom, he had set off on
his visit to London, and taken up his abode in those rooms in St.
James’s that had been engaged for him by his sister Ranelagh. Early
in June, he was writing to his friend Mrs. Hussey—presumably a
Dorsetshire friend and neighbour—a letter full of political gossip,
written the very day after he had supped with the ladies at Warwick
House. But how does the letter end?
“But, Madam, since I began to write this letter, I had unexpectedly
the happiness of a long conversation with the fair lady, that people
are pleased to think my mistress; and truly, Madam, though I am as
far from being in love as most that are so are from being wise, yet
my haste makes me gladly embrace the old excuse of

‘Then to speak sense

Were an offence’

to extenuate my having hitherto written so dully, and my concluding

so abruptly; for whilst this amorous rapture does possess, I neither
could write sense without being injurious to my passion, nor can any
longer continue to write nonsense, without some violation of that
profound respect which is due to you from, and vowed you by,
Madam, your ladyship’s most faithful and most humble servant.”
 If the fair lady who talked so delightfully, were indeed a “beautifull
and ingenious daughter” of the Earl of Monmouth, Robert Boyle’s
love-story goes into a nutshell. For just a month later came the
Countess of Monmouth’s letter to Lady Ranelagh, which so
confounded the young squire with its civilities, and contained the
invitation to Moore Park. The two young people had already met,
and been attracted to one another: the lady’s name had been
already spoken of among their mutual friends as that of a possible
bride for the young Squire; Lady Ranelagh, at whose house, it is
probable, they had first met, and who was certainly anxious to see
Robyn with a wife of his own at Stalbridge, had been in private
conclave with Lady Monmouth; and the Countess herself, the mother
of a bevy of daughters, was disposed to look kindly on the young
Squire, in spite of his Geneva-bred philosophy, and his not very
robust health. For he was the youngest son of a very great family;
cultured, amiable, virtuous—and likely to be a moderately rich man,
when once his Irish affairs could be put in order. But there was the
Earl of Monmouth to deal with; a Churchman, and passionately
Royalist. There is a sentence in Robyn’s letter to the Countess which
carries with it a suggestion that she, rather than the Earl, was
interested in the young suitor: “If,” he says, of his precious
manuscript, which she had asked him to bring to Moore Park, “it
have either any way diverted your Ladyship, or had the least
influence upon my Lord, I have reached my desires and gone
beyond my hopes.” Did the Earl of Monmouth look unfavourably
upon the young Puritan, or desire to extract from him promises—a
statement about his religious and political convictions—which Robert
Boyle was unwilling to make? And the fair lady herself—what
amount of say had she in the matter? If Robyn had joined the King’s
Army would he have won his Hermione?[178] In his Seraphick Love,
he speaks of Hermione’s “cold usage.” It is quite possible that this
beautiful and ingenious daughter of the Monmouth family may have
merely looked shyly on Robert Boyle, his manuscript treatises and
his little valetudinary ways; but it is also possible that, young as she
was—she can scarcely have been more than seventeen—she was a
girl not only of strong hereditary feelings, brought up a strict
Churchwoman and Royalist, but of spirit and conviction—a character
as firm as Robert Boyle’s itself. The Martyrdom of Theodora and of
Didymus, Robert Boyle’s quaint and powerful prose romance—of
which only the second part was ever published, and that not until
1687—was written in his early youth, and even more than his
Seraphick Love seems as if it may hold the internal evidence of his
own love-story. If Seraphick Love speaks of a woman’s “cold usage”
the story of Theodora and Didymus explains it. The character of
Theodora is worth studying, if this is indeed Robert Boyle’s ideal of
womanhood. It is the character of a woman young and beautiful, who
is not only an uncommonly good talker, but “declares her aversion
for marriage.” Her reasons are given to her friend Irene, who has
“solicited favour for Didymus.”
“Marriage,” says Theodora, “is one of the most important Things of
Life; and though I esteem it a mean Notion of Happiness to think that
one Person can make either of them the Portion of another, yet
Discretion, as well as Sincerity and Chastity, oblige a woman to have
a great deal of Care of that which concerns the Term of her Life; and
a Woman that designs to behave herself like a Wife, ought to take
care in a Choice she can make but once, and not carelessly to enter
on a Voyage where Shipwracks are so frequent, though she be
offered a fine ship to make it in. But since my dear Irene takes this
opportunity to know more of my Thoughts than I should disclose to
any other Person, I must tell her that were I at my own disposal, and
should be willing to make such a Change as I have always been
averse to, Didymus’s Virtues and Services would influence me more
than the Advantages of Titles, Riches or Dignities of his Rivals could.
But dear Irene, the times are such, and my Circumstances too, that it
would be very extravagant for me to engage myself further in the
World. For a Christian cannot think to be happy, whilst the Church is
miserable, and perplexed with outward Calamities.... When I think,”
proceeds Theodora, “of the Church’s Desolation, and that I should
not only be content to be a Spectator, but an Actor in the Tragedy, I
cannot relish the Complements of a Lover, nor hope for
Contentment, except from a Place above the reach of Persecution.
And these Sentiments,” says she, “are warranted by the Apostle,
who Discouraged Women that were free, in much less troublesome
times, from entering into a Marriage State....”
 And which of the bevy of Monmouth daughters was it that would
not marry Robert Boyle?—“a beautifull and ingenious daughter,”
says Evelyn; that is all that is known of her. Anne, the eldest, had in
1648 been some years married to James Hamilton, Earl of
Clanbrassil; and of the six other daughters born to the Earl and
Countess of Monmouth, only three seemed to have reached maturity
—Elizabeth, Mary and Martha—of whom Elizabeth must have been
seventeen in 1648. These three, with the Countess, his widow, were
left in the Earl’s will—dated July 1659—his co-heirs. They were then
all three unmarried; the Earl their father left some of the property
under certain conditions relating to their being, as he quaintly
expressed it, “in my life preferred in marriage or otherwise dead.” It
was not till some years after the Earl of Monmouth’s death that Mary
and Martha married—Mary becoming the second wife of the Earl of
Desmond and Martha the second wife of the Earl of Middleton.
Elizabeth died in December 1676, and was buried a few months
before the Countess of Monmouth, her mother, in Rickmansworth
Church. The inscription on the stone over her grave is not an
ordinary one—
Sacred to the Memory
of yᵉ Right Honᵇˡᵉ yᵉ Lady Elizabeth
Cary one of yᵉ Davghters & Co-heirs
of the Right Honᵇˡᵉ Henry
Lord Cary Baron of Leppington
and Earle of Monmovth. Shee
dyed the 14ᵗʰ day of December in
the year of ovr Lord 1676 & in
the 46ᵗʰ year of her age having
livd all her time vnmarried bvt
now expecting A joyfvll Resvrrecᵗⁱᵒⁿ
and to be joynd to her onely
Spouse and Saviour Jesvs Christ,
lies here interd near the said
Earle her Father.
 Was this the heroine of Boyle’s love story—the Hermione whose
“cold usage” sent him to write his Seraphick Love at Leeze?—the
woman whose views on a Marriage State found their way into his
Martyrdom of Theodora and of Didymus? It will probably never be
known. Whoever the lady, whatever the reason, the affair seems to
have been, in modern parlance, “off” before the end of 1648. And
yet, a whole year later, in December 1649, Robert Boyle was in
London again, scorching his wings at the flame.
“I know Frank will endeavour to persuade you,” he wrote to his
sister Barrymore, “that it is the thing called Love that keeps me
here”; and to Lord Broghill, at the same date, “My next shall give you
an account of my transactions, my studies, and my amours; of the
latter of which black Betty will tell you as many lies as
circumstances; but hope you know too well what she is and whence
she comes not to take all her stories for fictions....”
Some strong attraction, then, in or near London, there undoubtedly
was, and Robert Boyle’s family knew of it; but all their thrusts were
successfully parried in what Sir Henry Wotton had called Robyn’s
“pretty conceits.” In company Robert Boyle was to “prate” with “pure
raillery” of “matrimony and amours.” He was to pity those who “dote
on red and white.” He never could deplore the lover who “by losing
his mistress recovers himself.” He was to declare that he had “never
known the infelicities of love except by others’ sufferings”; to write
exultantly about “this untamed heart.” He had, he said, so seldom
seen a happy marriage, that he did not wonder “our Lawgivers
should make marriage indesolvable to make it lasting.” Marriage was
“a Lottery, in which there are many blanks to one prize.” And yet
Robyn was as sensitive as he was proud. Not in company which
prated of “matrimony and amours,” he had his own ideal. Love to him
remained “the Noblest Passion of the Mind”; and at twenty-one he
acknowledged the existence of “a peculiar unrivaled sort of Love,
which constitutes the Conjugal Affections.” Lady Ranelagh,
frustrated in one attempt, might go on hoping. “If you are in the
west,” she wrote at a later date to this incorrigible brother, “let me
beseech you to present my humble service to my two Lady Bristols,
and wish you would disappoint Frank[179] by bringing a wife of your