Peter the Great
The text opens with a perhaps obscure description of the “Dominions of the Czar of Muscovy” who introduced “manners and customs” and studied the great artists and scientists of Europe to transform the Russian population from “Unpolite People” into, well, symbolic reflections of the best that the European nations he visited could be if only they would take a moment to stop territorial disputes with each other. The Czar in question is Peter the Great and he becomes the symbolic template upon which the travels of the narrator are written.
The Chariot
The Engine is described thusly early in the text:
“a certain Engine formed in the shape of a Chariot, on the Backs of two vast Bodies with extended Wings.”
The Engine itself is an ever-changing symbol which becomes suitable for the context around its description at any certain time. In the case of the Chariot, the engine’s two vast bodies are symbols of the British Parliament which comes under exceedingly sharp and corrosive satirical commentary by the author.
The Sociate
The Sociate is a writer with whom the narrator feels an especially close affection. This is a joke that the knowing audience of publication would have immediately recognized. The Sociate is an author who whose satirical writing eventually gets him into trouble with the end resulting being imprisonment and domestic ruin. This was exactly a fate which the creator of the Narrator—Defoe—actually had suffered as a result of his own satirical works.
The Cogitator
Daniel Defoe was a Dissenter: a non-conformist Protestant dissenting from the Anglican Church. The Cogitator is a chair described thus by Defoe’s ironic narrator:
“The Person that is seated here feels some pain in passing some Negative Springs, that are wound up, effectually to shut out all Injecting, Disturbing Thoughts.”
The Cogitator almost certainly must have influenced Anthony Burgess when writing A Clockwork Orange and developing its Ludivico Technique of behavioral therapy. Like that life-sucking exhibition, the Cogitator stands as a symbol for crushing non-conformist thought and keeping everyone in line with the prevailing ideology. It is weaponized control of impulses and desires.
The Elevator
The elevator is another of the book’s “Engines” and one that acts satirically upon Defoe’s reasoning that imaginative thought is what makes it possible for people to experience and communicate outside the earthly realm. This should not necessarily be taken to mean the Elevator is a symbol like a Ouija Board, for instance. The concrete description gives the underlying use of the Elevator its abstract definition:
“The Mechanick Operations of these are wonderful, and helpt by Fire; by which the Sences are raised to all the strange Extreames we can imagine, and whereby the Intelligent Soul is made to converse with its own Species, whether embody’d or not.”
While certainly speaking of “spirits” the real intent of the satire is that only those with an elevator that rises outside their mind are capable are narratives which depend entirely upon the theoretical.
