ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Sirius Business: Infidel Astronomy and the Dog-Days King

• In Event: Models, Concepts and Boundaries in the 19th and Early 20th Century

English Abstract

The life of Jørgen Jørgensen (1780–1841) would make for an implausible novel. The son of the Danish royal watchmaker, coming of age in the Napoleonic wars he served variously as a Danish privateer, a British spy, and most notoriously as the self-proclaimed liberator and lord protector of an independent Iceland in 1809, his summer reign so brief the islanders dubbed him the 'Dog-Days King'. This talk explores a later period of Jørgensen's life in the mid-1820s when, having run out of money and friends in high places, he found himself in London's Newgate prison awaiting transportation to Australia for stealing bed linen. His internment coincided with the lengthy sentences for blasphemy doled out to several supporters of Richard Carlile, Britain's arch-infidel and most notorious political prisoner. The Carlileans were at this time exploring several systems of anti-Newtonian astronomy, especially that of Sir Richard Phillips, whose celestial mechanics posited an Earth not only much older than Biblical timescales, but subject to endless cyclical oceanic inundations caused by inversions of Earth's axis. Jørgensen, horrified by the implication that the Creator had ordained mass death as an inevitability, published his own lengthy rebuttal, The Religion of Christ is the Religion of Nature (1827). Exploring the politics and theology of astrogeology, this talk traces the collision between Jørgensen's cosmology and the infidels', as a singular episode in its own right and as a quixotic forerunner of later anxieties over Darwinian natural selection.

Author

• Eoin Carter, Independent Scholar