![]() I lose my anchor my main-sail is rent into shreds I kill a shark, and by signs converse with a Patagonian, and all this without moving from the fire-side. My imagination is so captivated upon these occasions, that I seem to partake with the navigators in all the dangers they encountered. After reading John Hawkesworth’s edition of James Cook’s Voyages, gifted to him by John Newton (erstwhile slaver, born-again abolitionist, hymnist of “Amazing Grace”), Cowper wrote a thank-you note: In correspondence, Cowper kills the swashbuckling vibe, reveals the Kurtz in Keats’s Cortez. His speaker feels like “stout Cortez when with eagle eyes / He stared at the Pacific.” In both poems, books become uplinks to eyes trained on the edges of empire. His speaker treads the decks of colliers and climbs their topmasts, muddying the moat between experience and recollection: “through his peering eyes / Discover countries, with a kindred heart.” John Keats uses the same sort of image in his 1816 “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” where opening an Elizabethan translation makes one party to colonial conquest. “He travels and I too”, wrote William Cowper in his 1785 poem The Task, in reference to the experience of reading nautical travelogues. The rest will come from an awareness of our own engagements, the curve of the cushioned seat that lets me make these words, or whatever takes the weight off as you proceed to read. If chairs answer back, only part of their reply can be heard through history. These things have an indwelling spirit, to those who care to question them confiding in response.” We should ask the question, try to understand the states of mind produced by variations in the spinal column: a presence or lack of lumbar support, the thoracic angle of repose. ![]() “If ‘a landscape is a state of mind,’” the artist Bowyer Nichols once declared, “so too is a paneled room, a chair, or a table. ![]() Toward the century’s turn, readers piloted mahogany spaceships, upholstered time machines with tufted buttons: the seat base jounced and rocked its occupant into journeys of the mind: adventurous, erotic, or devout. While armchair traveler refers to gapers of stereographs or travel-lit enthusiasts, consumers of colonial memoirs and explorers’ journals, my sights are on a more obscure tradition: those who use furniture and other props to trick the mind into ambulation. I ask this last question with two tangled senses of imagination in mind: both the horizon of seated cognition (what kind of things it was possible to imagine at rest) and the representation of lounging bodies in literature and popular culture. But what about the chair itself in the 19th century? Its changing styles and technologies - the advent of rockers, say, or upholstery springs? And how do techniques of the reading body, the physical regimens of leisure and reverie, feed what we might call the sedentary imagination? Discussions of armchair travel tend to focus on the travelogue. With enough literacy and time, you could walk the world from an easy chair or roam Constantinople on an ottoman. ![]() ![]() These bookish men and women (in their proto La-Z-Boys) followed Emerson’s advice: the wise stay at home. Elbowed seats date back millennia, but the expression “armchair traveler” did not appear until the early 1800s. When is an armchair something more? When it becomes a mode of imaginary locomotion. This article: “Postures of Transport” was originally published in The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. ![]()
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