Pocket globes "in the wild"

I have been flat out, and distracted by anxiety, so I have not posted recently. For which I apologize.

Last night I went with my wife to a student production of a musical play, Unlock’d, that was first performed off-Broadway in 2012. The book and lyrics are by Sam Carner (USM alum!) with music by Derek Gregor. The play is loosely modeled on Alexander Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. (1712, rev. 1714), itself a mocking depiction of court life. The modern reimagination is perhaps let down by being insufficiently surreal.

Anyway, there’s a moment or two of map-awareness. In one, two very place-bound characters are wooing each other: Belinda is the airhead beauty around which the action revolves, who in a moment revealing that her airheadedness is the result of her beauty and how people have treated her, confides that she is as trapped as any upper-class English woman ca. 1710 and is confined by social mores to the limits of domesticity; Edwin is a nerd, unclear how society functions, so is self-confined to libraries. But both pine to see the world. They bond over this mutual desire while examining Edwin’s pocket globe.

It’s also the occasion of a joke: “See, it’s not that far away, at least not on this globe”! (paraphrase)

It is all a nice touch … but were pocket globes common so early in the eighteenth century?