Jupiter may be imagined to be at Hampton Court, or Dartford in Kent; and Saturn at Cliefden,* or near Chelmsford: the first represented by a globe 15 feet 4 inches diameter, the latter by one of 11 feet ¾ and his ring four feet broad: these would all naturally represent the planetary bodies of our system in their proper orbits and proportional magnitudes, as moving round the cupola of St Paul’s as their common centre the Sun.*
And preserving the same natural scale, the aphelion* of the first Comet would be about Bury,* the second at Bristol, and the third near the city of Edinburgh. But if you will take into your idea one of the nearest Stars; instead of the dome of St Paul’s, you must suppose the Sun to be represented by the gilt ball upon the top of it, and then will another such upon the top of St Peter’s at Rome represent one of the nearest Stars.*
* An obsolete spelling of Cliveden, pronounced cliv-den, in Buckinghamshire.
* Uranus was not mentioned because William Herschel would not discover it until 1781. See The Music of the Spheres.
* The point in the orbit of a planet, comet, or other body that is most distant from the Sun.
* That is, Bury St Edmonds in Suffolk, not Bury in Lancashire.
* Wright’s astronomical measurements start to break down once he leaves the solar system behind. If a ball representing our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, were placed at Rome 1134 miles away, then the orb above St Paul’s, representing the sun, would have to be no bigger than a tennis ball (approximately 2½ inches in diameter). In fact, the orb has a diameter of six feet. On that scale, Earth would be a small marble barely 215 yards away in Ludgate Hill, and Proxima Centauri would be a ten-inch diameter ball not at Rome, nor Sydney, but about one seventh of the way (or half a day’s rocket ride) to the moon. Moreover, whichever star Wright believed was our nearest was certainly further away, for Proxima Centauri would not be discovered until Robert Innes spotted it in 1915.