Unto the Ends of the Earth

At last, a chance for some intensive cataloguing. Long overdue, and it stirs the blood more than somewhat when the provenance is as much fun as this. Here’s my brief description:

Wolff, Joseph: Narrative of a Mission to Bokhara, in the Years 1843-1845, to ascertain the Fate of Colonel Stoddart and Captain Conolly […] London: Published for the Author by John W. Parker 1846.

Fourth edition. 8vo. pp. xxvii, [i], 515, [i] + portrait frontis. Modern quarter calf over marbled boards. Effusive full-page inscription on half title, to John Browne (of Chiseldon House, Wiltshire), with blessings in English, Arabic and Hebrew, possibly written on separate occasions as the first is addressed to John Browne Esq and the second (in a slightly freer hand, after dinner?) is addressed to ‘my [or Mrs?] John Browne’ and dated 1 May 1847; it’s entirely possible that Wolff gallantly offered to add a further inscription to Brown’s wife after they met. 

Stoddart, a soldier rather than a diplomat, was sent to Bokhara in 1838 - chiefly to curtail any Russian influence. His imprisonment seems to have arisen from a series of gaffes and the Emir’s natural suspicion of foreign ‘spies’. Conolly, who was well versed in the ways of central Asian diplomacy (and is credited with coining the phrase ‘the great game’) attempted to negotiate his release but instead shared Stoddart’s fate. They were executed when British prestige plumbed new depths in the aftermath of the First Afghan War.  News reached Britain by way of one of Conolly’s Persian servants, but Wolff volunteered to journey to Bokhara himself to confirm their fate. Peter Hopkirk (‘The Great Game’) describes him as “a brave but highly eccentric clergyman” and recounts how he “was lucky to escape with his own life, only doing so, it is said, because his bizarre appearance in full canonicals, made the unpredictable Emir ‘shake with uncontrollable laughter’”.

I won’t say more about Conolly and Stoddart - their story is well known. Mind you, if you’ve never read Hopkirk’s Great Game which I mentioned above, navigate away from this page now, read it cover to cover, and come back when you’ve finished. Fat but unputdownable, and after all these years still the gateway to the subject: now that’s a rare book. Joseph Wolff, though, deserves a wider audience. In the circumstances, with both officers almost certainly dead, he must have been a bit cracked to volunteer his services to the Stoddart and Conolly Committee. It was the culmination of twenty years of missionary travels in the east (see Travels and Adventures of the Rev. Joseph Wolff, 1860) after which he retired to a quiet Somerset parish, which is presumably where he met John Browne.

Chiseldon House is now a hotel, and the Browne family sold up in 1901. John Browne’s death at the age of 61 is recorded in the Gent’s Mag in 1853, there are a couple of references to him in the Farmer’s Magazine and he was a member of the Wiltshire Topographical Society; he seems to have been a typical gentleman-farmer. I was trying to work out what he and the well-travelled clergyman might have had in common, and other than being of an age I couldn’t come up with much, but they seem to have become friends.

Wolff was presented to his Somerset living in 1845, in the year that the Narrative first appeared, when Wolff was firmly in the public eye (four English editions plus a US edition within two years); presumably he met Browne somewhere in the English countryside, and they simply got on. The first inscription, as I noted above, has an air of formality, as if the book was sent in the post or presented at a first meeting. The second is much freer, and without any real justification I imagine it being penned over the post-prandial port. I’d wondered if Browne was a scholar, versed in Arabic and Hebrew, but I think it more likely that he simply asked Wolff to write something in those languages. Although Wolff’s father was a German rabbi and Wolff was himself brought up in the Jewish faith, it’s noticeable that his Arabic script is much more fluent, although that may also be the hypothetical port talking. Here’s a full transcript of the page:

John Browne Esq from his humble servant Joseph Wolff

[in Arabic:] “I commit thee to God, who rules the world: under His gaze, good-health and well-being, to the end of the world.”

To desire both together, God & the world, is incompatible & folly.

To Mrs John Browne 1 May 1847

[in Hebrew:] “May you be blessed and may the Lord light up your face, and peace be upon you” [also signed in Hebrew by Wolff].

The Lord bless thee & keep thee & let the light of His countenance shine upon thee & give thee peace. Jo. Wolff

[The handwriting isn’t clear, but the second part of the inscription appears to be addressed to Browne’s wife: a verse in Arabic for him, Hebrew for her; very even handed.]

Just time for a quick, tangentially related map-fix: this is Edward Stanford’s historical map showing the expansion of the Russian Empire, from the first trade edition of his London Atlas, 1887. This is one of the finest Victorian Atlases, for my money. Edward Stanford (senior) acquired John Arrowsmith’s stock in 1874, including the plates for Arrowsmith’s London Atlas. Stanford’s version, published in Jubilee year and dedicated to Queen Victoria, is considered to be his last significant work before his retirement, although later editions were revised by his heirs, in keeping with the latest information. Francis Herbert’s article on the development of the atlas (Imago Mundi, Vol. 41, 1989) is the standard work here. There’s only one historical map in the whole atlas, and this is it. It’s not a map of London in Queen Elizabeth’s day (actually, there isn’t a detailed map of central London at all in the first edition) or a map of the growth of British Empire, but a map of the rapidly expanding Russian Empire, and that’s a very a good indicator of how Russia was bogey-man-in-chief in mid/late Victorian popular culture until the Germans took over the role at the turn of the twentieth century (think also of Fred Rose’s Russian octopus, also reaching east, which made its debut at the time of the Great Eastern Crisis a decade earlier). Independent Tartary as Wolff had known it was under Russian control within twenty years, and later editions of Stanford’s map dutifully recorded futher boundary changes: by 1895 the Russians were just a few miles short of Afghanistan.

 I’ve just spent an agreeable couple of days at the annual ABA bookfair in Chelsea Old Town Hall. I’ve wriggled out of exhibiting at fairs for more than a decade (with the honourable exception of the London Map Fair on the grounds that a). it’s the largest specialist fair of it’s kind in Europe and b). I’m one of the organisers). My main reasons for fair avoidance are that I’m already in my shop for six days a week, and keeping the shop open with a minimum of disruption always has to take priority. However, Leo Cadogan took over the running of the Chelsea fair this year (with tremendous aplomb) and he came up with a suggestion for a shared Cecil Court stand which it would have been churlish to refuse, so I was part of a much enhanced Cecil Court contingent which exhibited at this year’s fair.

Catching up with friends and colleagues is always congenial, but there were one or two real discoveries to be made. I was absolutely delighted with this unusual 1863 chart of light houses and light vessels around the coasts of Great Britain and north western Europe:

Prepared by A.G. Findlay, it was published under the imprint of map and chartmaker R.H. Laurie (of Laurie & Whittle fame; Findlay became manager, and took over the business on Laurie’s death in 1858) for Trinity House, and it’s the Trinity House arms which are engraved above the title and blocked in gilt on the covers. It’s a splendid example of a chart which is both bel et utile: precise, subtle engraving and delicate hand-shading showing the nature (type of beam and frequency of light pulses) and reach of each light -which is highly complex as they often overlap. Brilliant engraving.

On that score, the actual coverage of the coast strikes me as remarkably impressive, but then, I suppose that most lights had been established in one form or another well before this time (we’re well into the classic period of modern lighthouses). The first edition was published in 1833, although that was an entirely different animal (somewhat smaller, compensating with large-scale insets of the Firths of Forth and Tay, Liverpool Bay and the mouth of the Thames).

It’s such a specialist field that no edition will have been printed in large numbers, and as using an obsolete chart would have been positively dangerous I suspect that the survival rate is pretty poor. On the other hand, this is a substantial piece (as befits the subject matter), printed with great care and handsomely and solidly bound. The gothic brass clasps are a lovely touch - most superior! This example bears the armorial bookplate of liberal politician W.E. Baxter, so it came from a good home.

I had actually begun packing up when I spotted a guide to Wyld’s Great Globe propped up on a neighbouring stand. It wasn’t there earlier … proof that not everything good goes in the first five minutes of a fair! Guides to panoramas and exhibitions like this are extremely scarce ephemeral items, and I have a particular soft spot for James Wyld the younger and his monster globe in Leicester Square. For anyone in Cecil Court this is local history and for anyone who likes maps, well, I can only say that it’s something I would dearly love to have seen myself. If only plans for a permanent ‘Cosmos Institute’ had worked out! As it is, Wyld’s guide is as close as I can get: written by Wyld himself it’s a testament to the man’s passion for geography and history, as well as his entrepreneurial flair.

You might wonder what the largest globe ever made was doing parked in the middle of Leicester Square in the first place, but the square’s association with popular entertainment is nothing new. After Frederick, George III’s son and heir, died prematurely (possibly after being hit by a cricket ball) at his home in Leicester House, Leicester Square became rather shabby. Jerry White (London in the Nineteenth Century) describes how it became a semi-permanent indoor fair for London’s middle classes, and it was also the birth place of the panorama (Burford’s rotunda). It was also first choice for the site of the Great Exhibition itself. So the derelict garden at it’s heart was the natural location for Wyld’s globe: 60 feet in diameter, the earth’s surface modelled in plaster relief around the interior, perfectly to scale and accessible for close inspection via four viewing platforms, gas-lit and ferociously hot, but still a marvel. The doors opened in 1851, one month after the Crystal Palace. Wyld includes the building among other London landmarks in the border of his New Map of London, but this is not mere self aggrandisement - it was indeed the most popular attraction in London outside the Great Exhibition itself.

Detail from the border of Wyld’s 1851 New Map of London

As the decade wore on Wyld introduced other elements to maintain interest: waxworks, stuffed beasts, topical exhibitions including one on the Crimean War which featured a relief map of Sebastopol … but the buildings were torn down in 1862. There’s an occasional whiff of scandal and skulduggery attached to Wyld’s business dealings, and there’s a discernable sniffiness in some accounts of his turf wars with the Ordnance Survey, and even in discussions regarding his indisputable flair for self promotion. Educational as the Great Globe was, it’s true that samples of Wyld’s own maps were displayed in the gallery surrounding it, and this guide itself was also an excellent advertisement for his stock. But Wyld was a rare beast: he inherited a flourishing business and actually grew it; he elected to follow his passion (this little book wasn’t written by someone who could have earned a living selling peas just as easily), brought the joys of cartography to a wider public, and still contrived to earn a decent living. Definitely on my list of map-trade heroes.

First page of Wyld’s 12 page catalogue at the end of the guide - I’ll have as much fun with this as with the rest of it!