This is a good place to begin – the chart we are going to build was first drawn in 1786 by William Playfair (“The Commercial and Political Atlas”, London), and was among the first recorded examples of statistical graphics. See Tufte “The Graphical Presentation of Quantitative Information” (page 65) for a splendid reproduction of the original chart.

In this first attempt to use a computer to reproduce this finely designed graphic, we will simply enter the data and let Rain take most of its default settings, with the addition of some simple headings and axis labels. Later on, we must re-visit the chart, and use some rather more sophisticated commands to get remarkably close to the spirit of the original.

Here are the charting commands which just plot the data:

 r„Playfair1;yrs;debt
© First cut at classic Playfair chart from 1786
 yrs„1688 1701 1714 1727 1739 1748 1755 1762 1775 1784
 debt„0.2 1.3 3.2 2.4 2.1 3 2.2 4.8 4.4 9.2
 chSet'XYPLOT,BOXED'
 chSet'HEAD' 'First attempt at classic Playfair graphic'
 chPlot yrs,[1.5]debt
 PG„chClose

Note that all the setting up is done first. The graph is then drawn by chPlot, and the result recovered by chClose. PG is a simple text vector.

Here is the graph it draws ...

We hardly need to caption the time axis, but it might be sensible to explain the vertical dimension:

chSet 'ycaption' 'Millions of Pounds'

.... and possibly it would look better with the markers turned off and a lightly drawn horizontal grid:

chSet('style' 'nomarkers')('ystyle' 'grid')

which leaves the finished graph looking like this: