Metering Mineral Resources

Abstract

Shortly after the calendrical but well within the long eighteenth century, John Scafe, a poet of unknown qualifications who sought the favour of the Geological Society of London, unveiled his King Coal’s Levee, Or Geological Etiquette (1819). It is an unprecedented and apparently inimitable attempt to combine Miltonizing mock-heroic ribaldry with deep mineralogical knowledge in a sometimes comical, always ploddingly didactic portrayal of the treasures within the earth. Simple in conception but long in execution, Scafe’s attempt to update The Splendid Shilling (1701) into The Splendid Schist juxtaposes 1200 lines of mineral-ogical banter against a 20,000 word critical apparatus — an apparatus in which the scientific basis of Scafe’s every quip, turn or witticism is colloquially explained. The economically attuned Scafe pens a compendium of a drama in which King Coal, the personification of the most energetic and profitable of underground materials, summons his courtiers, earth’s assorted courtier gems, stones, substances and rocks, to his castle:

King Coal, the mighty hero of the mine,

— Sprung from a dingy, but a far-fam’d line,

Who, fathoms deep, in peace our earth possest,

Curb’d but in sway by ocean’s billowy breast, —

Would hold a Levee.¹