ABSTRACT

This chapter brings together two fields of inquiry, landscape representation and the geographies of knowledge. It is focused on the representation of a particular event, a brilliant meteor which passed over Britain one evening in the summer of 1783, an event which lasted less than a minute but which had, through its depiction and description in a range of published work, a more longer-lasting and wider-ranging, reverberative, effect on the many people who didn’t witness the event. This chapter is concerned with the framing of the event in terms of both contemporary scientific theory and of landscape aesthetics, and how the recording of the event in two views from different places in Britain involved composite forms of image making, including diagrams and verbal recollections as well as poetic and cartographic codes of landscape taste. In contrast to the traumatized views of some ordinary people who experienced the sight of the meteor at the time, the pictures examined in this chapter represented the meteor as an uplifting spectacle, and an opportunity to display a culturally enlightened view of a physically luminous event.