Visions of Britain … 1914-1915

I don’t want to repeat too much I’ve just said in my previous post (and probably a good idea to read that first), but I thought it might be fun to compare the different depictions of the British Isles. One tends to encounter the plucky bulldog of Walter Emanuel’s “Hark! hark! the dogs do bark!” or the ruddy John Bull of Amschewitz’s “European Revue. Kill that Eagle!”, but these depictions range from mildly pro to downright hostile. Given the current state of the EU, satirists take note! That aside, I found it interesting to compare and contrast how the different artists had made use of the same geographical space.

Louis Raemaekers, 1914. Britain as clean-cut, claymore wielding Scotsman, with Ireland as his shield (a clever use of the cartography which could also be interpreted as making Ireland the first line of defence).

Walter Trier, 1914. A Scotsman again, but from another, hostile perspective … concealing the Grand Fleet under his kilt.

Karl Lehmann-Dumont, 1914. I described this one pretty fully in the previous post - apologies for the repetition: Bees issuing from the German hive are accompanied by zeppelins, one of which is jabbing Britain (this time an Englishman in a pillbox hat) in the guts, while a mailed fist emerging from the North Sea, smashing a devastating blow into his face, presumably represents the Imperial Navy’s High Seas Fleet. Ireland and India are both presented as liabilities: Ireland, a bottle in one hand, attempts to cut the chain which ties him to England with scissors held in the other, while an Indian snake is constricting the bulldog (all rather wishful thinking on the cartoonist’s part - the contribution of both nations to the Allied war effort was enormous, but this is propaganda … ) Note the sacks of money which the figure of the Englishman is standing on, supporting his weight. That’s a very old complaint indeed, going back to the Napoleonic Wars at least, that Britain could afford to bankroll others to fight her wars for her, stirring up trouble without risking British lives by intervening on the continent in a major way herself.  

Karl Lehmann-Dumont 2, also 1914. On this second map tensions between Ireland and England are not apparent. Ireland has become the bulldog featured in the map above, and England a crocodile, it’s jaws restricted by a band labelled India. 

E. Zimmermann, 1914. England is being shot in the backside, attempting to drag in a reluctant Ireland with a claw-like left hand, while holding a bulldog like a lap-dog under his right arm. Fleet/money are safely stowed where they shouldn’t come to harm. The snake is a reference to British propaganda - claims of ‘false victories’. 

Fritz Elsner, 1914. A rather weedy, unthreatening Englishman in a pillbox cap.

Anonymous, c. 1914. Pretty ropey cartographically, even by the standards of these maps, but it makes the point! A German battleship threatens London and peppers the behinds of the scrawny, cowering British bulldogs while Ireland looks on in pleased amusement. 

Vladislav Levinsky, 1915. As I wrote in my previous post, not the most flattering depiction of Britannia by an ally, but she looks capable! A reference to Britain’s naval might, with Erin keeping close company in an altogether simpler vessel.

The Indies Must be Free! Japan is cast as an especially sinister octopus, 1944.

In this context “Indie Moet Vrij” means that the Dutch East Indies should be Dutch again. Pat Keely’s poster, printed in London c. 1944, was presumably aimed at those Free Dutch troops still in England and, as the war progressed, the population of the partially liberated Netherlands. The end of the war in the Dutch East Indies was particularly messy; like the Netherlands itself, it was largely bypassed by Allied forces, which in this case were driving towards the Japanese homeland. During the Japanese occupation millions died from starvation or through forced labour, but the confused months after VJ Day saw the continued internment of European nationals and fighting between Indonesian nationalists and Japanese soldiers still under arms (here, as elsewhere in the region, the Allies made widespread use of Japanese Surrendered Personnel; JSPs - PoWs by another name - were employed on reconstruction projects and, with even more dubious legality, participated in direct military action. The transition from war to peace created some strange bedfellows). Dutch authority was eventually restored, but within five years had been superseded by freedom of a kind not envisaged by the makers of this poster: in 1949 Indonesia was recognised as an independent nation.    

Pat Keely’s octopus is squarely in the tradition of cartographic cephalopods established by Fred Rose in the 1870s. Rose’s octopus is squat, almost slug-like, with sunken eyes and fat but powerful tentacles. Keely’s octopus is lithe, with pinprick demoniacal eyes, the slender tips of its tentacles curling with whiplike precision around the principal islands of the archipelago. The principle remains the same: one’s enemy is less than human. Keely wasn’t the only artist to have brought Rose’s concept into the mid twentieth century. A Vichy French poster featured in the British Library’s Magnificent Maps exhibition last year cast Churchill in the role.

Patrick Cokayne Keely (?-1970) was a well known poster artist, who designed posters for London Transport and the GPO among other clients. His posters were characterised by simplicity of design and strong use of colour, highly effective in conveying a simple message, as here. To see a couple of other examples of his work click here: http://archiveshub.ac.uk/features/postofficeposters-nightmail.shtml Nightmail is immensely atmospheric and another smart use of cartography. The track becomes the spine of the country, with signal lamps picking out the principal cities on the route north. 

Just by way of contrast, here’s Rose’s original octopus:

I have to confess that this is not a photograph of an original example from the 1870s. I normally like to show original material which I have with me in the shop, but I simply don’t have one of these at the moment. But it is an original hand-printed lithograph. This is one of a number which the excellent Colin and Megan of Artichoke printers made for me, using traditional techniques, after we had worked together on the Tern Television series ‘The Beauty of Maps’ for BBC 4. I still have one or two, and I think they have some too: http://www.artichokeprintmaking.com/?octopus-map-88 The originals have become so expensive, and so difficult to locate, that I can recommend this as a way of enjoying the map. And it is a proper lithograph, not a laser copy!

Bukhara & back: the good fortune of Joseph Wolff

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.

British lighthouses charted and a rare peek inside Wyld’s Monster Globe: Chelsea 2011

 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!

A Splash of Colour

Few things in my corner of the rare booktrade seem to cause as much confusion and consternation as the colouring of maps: when, by whom and why? Commercially viable colour-printing didn’t really take off until the mid nineteenth-century, and there’s a transitional period of at least thirty years or so when hand-colouring of maps was still the norm rather than the exception. Even at the turn of the twentieth-century, it was sometimes more economical (especially for specialist publications) to use a stencil technique such as pochoir (see, for example, Booth’s famous poverty maps).

Detail of 1900 edition of Charles Booth’s Poverty Map of West Central London, centred on Cecil Court (coloured red for “well-to-do”; how times change!)

Prior to that, when a map was printed -whether from a woodblock or an engraved metal plate - it came off the press black and white. The question is then whether it was hand-coloured for the publisher at the time of printing, for which the purchaser generally paid a premium, or has been hand-coloured later, which usually means within the last 100 years (with very little in between: it would be unusual for someone with a black and white seventeenth-century Dutch atlas to reach for a paintbrush in, say, the 1820s). Maps described as having original/early/contemporary colour generally belong in the first category; maps with later/recent/modern handcolour (or ‘hand-coloured’ without qualification) in the second. It’s not the end of the world either way, as long as the map is accurately described and you know exactly what you are buying. You can then make an informed choice about what works for your collection.

There are some maps (eg Coronelli’s) which were generally never intended to receive colour and others (such as maps by Seutter or Homann) which were almost always coloured. There are maps where provision was made for colouring (or at least for determining colour, eg the colour-code key on Speed’s county maps) which were hardly ever coloured at the time (and which therefore attract a significant premium when they are found with original hand-colour). And there are also maps, such as Blaeu’s, which are found with original hand-colour as often as not. It’s a complex issue.

Recently, though, I’ve begun to hear people say that they want black and white maps because they want maps in ‘original’ condition, and it’s worth bearing in mind that many maps were coloured ‘originally’. There are very good reasons for colouring maps, as I’ll go on to show, and at various times in history skilled artists could earn a good living as colourists, for example colouring the great Dutch atlases of Golden Age Amsterdam.

Original colour can be a curse as well as a blessing. I’ve just seen a Janssonius heptarchy (Anglo-Saxon England) which ordinarily is a highly decorative and desirable map, but in this instance it was folded too soon after it was coloured (in the seventeenth-century) resulting in adhesion damage (the surface of the paper has adhered to the facing page and torn away in strips. Ouch.) One can also have problems with offsetting and oxidisation (worst case scenario: the parts painted with copper-based green pigments turn brown and the weakened paper cracks or falls out of the map altogther). On the other hand, modern colour by a skilled colourist can enhance a map. In general terms, though, one pays a premium for fine original colour.

As for how to tell original colour from modern colour, the best advice I can give is to buy from people who know what they are talking about - that is, until you have handled enough pieces to be sure yourself. There are no absolutely hard and fast rules: it’s a case of staring at too many old bits of paper for too long, until it becomes obvious. There are things to look for, eg show-through, particularly from the green pigments, onto the verso, but that doesn’t take into account paper-quality, storage or the composition of the pigment itself. The absence of ‘show through’ doesn’t necessarily mean that the colour is modern (and it’s presence doesn’t always make it old …) This isn’t an attempt to create an air of mystery where there shouldn’t be one, it’s just that experience is the best guide and I have no wish to steer anyone in the wrong direction.

Time to look at some maps with original hand-colour. Firstly, here’s a map of Cumbria by Blaeu, printed in Amsterdam in 1646 and hand-coloured at the time. It hasn’t been messed about with or augmented in any way since (original colour is rarely muted):

The simple outline colour heightens the county boundaries, making the map easier to read at a glance. The colouring of the elaborate cartouche is more indulgent - making the map a luxury item. Don’t get me wrong, the decorative elements are not superfluous: they there to be read, as much as any aspect of the cartography. The royal and English coats of arms had been a feature of county cartography (perhaps a symbol of royal authority and control) ever since Elizabeth I sponsored the engraving of Christopher Saxton’s county maps (the first national atlas) in the 1570s. The armorial bearings of notable local figures could be considered a legacy of John Speed’s antiquarianism (his county maps were engraved to accompany his history of Britain, with historical notes of all kinds, and the coats of arms used by Blaeu and Janssonius were copied directly) but they also represent the established order of things. Colour certainly makes them more impressive, more instantly recognisable (and it had to be accurate, so it couldn’t be done on the cheap), but it’s altogether less functional. The cartouche is a distillation of Cumbria, as seen from Amsterdam:

Rugged fells, with hardy fell sheep and a somewhat less hardy looking shepherd in the foreground, and general plowing and sowing going on in the middle distance. It’s a delightful pastoral scene, brought vividly to life through the skilful use of colour. But contrast this with a map of the Tirol  by Homann, printed in Nuremberg c. 1730:

The use of full-body colour is simple but effective. It does the job, but without any of the subtlety of its predecessor (and probably for a fraction of the cost!) The cartouche is equally elaborate (equally mountainous, even …) but the impact is down to the strength of the engraving rather than deployment of colour. It’s absolutely typical of its time and place. Here’s a second map by Homann, a map of Europe, but here the colour has been applied to show religious rather than political boundaries:

A printed key has been pasted into the lower margin to explain the use of colour (from ‘reformed Catholics’ in Britain, to Muslims within the Ottoman Empire) and where distinctions are far from clear, for example in Hungary and Transilvania, bright dabs of colour (independent of any engraving) indicate the mix of religions:

Here’s a final, effective, use of colour; it’s an early example of physical geography (and an unusual projection) by Dezauche, showing the watersheds of the world, printed in Paris c. 1780:

Dezauche purchased plates by Guillaume de l’Isle and his brother-in-law Philippe Buache in 1780, adding his own imprint (this plate was first issued in 1756) but what is important in this context is how elegantly and simply the colour emphasises how mountain ranges act as continental divides, with the waters on either side flowing into different oceans. Not impossible by any means, but so much harder to achieve in black and white …

Dawn of the Folding World

The presentation of maps - how they were bought and sold and how they were first used - is something I think about rather a lot (far too much?) It’s important to recall that virtually all early map-makers were businessmen first, artists and scientists second. There was little state-sponsored map-making, no requirement to map stuff just because it was there. And however much they may have delighted in their chosen profession (and there have always been easier ways of earning a living) staying afloat was an ever-present worry for most of them. As I mentioned in a previous post, there’s hardly a page of the new dictionary of British Map Engravers without at least one bankruptcy on it!

Much of the scholarly discussion concerning the output of early map-makers revolves around the atlases and travel books they produced. Separately issued maps have a long history, but the survival rate is tiny - almost all of the early maps still in circulation today owe their existence to being bound between a couple of protective covers from the time they they were first purchased as useful objects, until the moment a couple of centuries or so later when someone else decided they had now become of antiquarian interest and were worth looking after. That includes maps which were initially intended for separate sale, but which were pressed into service to fill gaps elsewhere.

One could certainly buy, separately, maps which were printed from the same engraved metal plates as those published in the great atlases, but those which have survived tend to have been preserved in books. For example, one sometimes encounters Ortelius ‘atlas’ maps with blank versos, which were probably bound in when supplies of the sheet with text in the appropriate language (Dutch, French, Latin etc) printed on the back had run out. A few years ago I handled a lovely first edition of Speed’s Theatre where a couple of county maps were of the rare broadsheet issue (Warwickshire and Cheshire, printed by Thomas Snodham for Sudbury and Humble c. 1615). The descriptive text was printed in the form of side panels, but these had been trimmed off and pasted to the verso of the maps; it’s not hard to imagine a harassed bookseller, lacking a couple of counties with pre-printed versos, reaching for his pile of broadsheets so that he could complete an order for a whole atlas. Four centuries before ‘print on demand’, when setting up pages of letterpress was both costly and time consuming, getting the numbers right first time (and every time) was the key to survival. Having piles of unsold expensively printed paper could be as ruinous as not having enough …

My commercial instincts tell me it’s likely that more maps were sold separately than were sold in atlases. It makes sense to me that more people could afford individual maps of where they lived, where they had travelled or had commercial interests, or where events of significant interest were unfolding, than could afford the serious outlay involved in a buying a complete atlas. However, I suspect that survival rates are so low that it won’t be possible to prove it conclusively.

At a certain juncture someone had a bright idea: cut a printed map into panels and paste it onto some hard-wearing cloth such as linen or even hessian, and one instantly has a map which is both portable and durable; if the map is simply pasted to a piece of cloth there will be wear at the folds (if folded to make it ‘fit for the pocket’), but if the map is dissected and the panels are spaced apart slightly, that can be avoided. By the nineteenth century the range of options had become increasingly sophisticated, increasingly hierarchical one might say. One finds maps with carefully graded scales of charges printed on the covers or in the margins detailing the price for what is essentially the same basic map, but plain or hand-coloured, sold as a flimsy sheet of paper, or dissected, mounted on cloth, and folded into covers or a slipcase. Unsurprisingly it’s the durable, ‘deluxe’, coloured and mounted maps which, if any, have come down to us (and even here survival rates aren’t amazing; just try looking for a specific edition of a folding map!) 

Grubby but illustrative, the cover of Philips’ Reduced Ordnance Map of London c. 1887: Roads &c. Coloured in Case 1/-, Mounted on Cloth in Case 3/6 [as here], Full Coloured, Folded in Case 2/-, Mounted on Cloth in Case 4/6, On Roller, Varnished, 5/6.

But when did all this start? Most survivors date from the mid eighteenth-century or later and it’s tempting to say, when earlier maps turn up which have been given the full dissection/mounting treatment, that it must have been done later. I can only counter that with a one-word question: why? A map I discovered recently is a case in point. It’s a Henry Overton issue of Speed’s county map of Buckinghamshire, c. 1730, and it has been trimmed to the neatline and dissected:

Henry’s father, John Overton, bought the well-worn copper plates for Speed’s county maps shortly before 1700, when they were already almost a century old. They are among the most famous British maps of the seventeenth century, published in numerous editions, and by the time Overton senior got in on the act the plates had passed through many hands and the impressions had become rather light. His son Henry altered the imprint and updated them by adding the roads - following the example set by John Ogilby in the 1670s. Although the plates survived for another half century or more, Henry Overton was the last to market them as functional ‘modern’ maps. The outline colour we see here is typical, and to some extent served to disguise the weakness of the impression. The cloth the map is mounted on is also interesting:

The quality of the backing, which is quite coarse, is certainly consistent with a mid-eighteenth century date, or earlier. Overton is known to have offered Speed’s maps for sale separately, and although the handwritten paper label is later (probably early ninteenth-century) the map itself seems to be as Overton sold it. I can’t think of a convincing reason why someone would have taken the trouble to dissect an obsolete map a century later.

A friend of mine has a set of Morden counties which he believes were dissected and mounted c. 1700, close to the time of their original issue in Camden’s Britannia. In time, I’m sure, evidence will come to light to push this way of selling maps back by half a century or more.

Mapping the Great Binge

I threatened to come back to thematic and statistical cartography in an earlier post. It does sound like a threat – dry as dust – but actually the development of this sort of map-making in the second half of the nineteenth-century is a real eye-opener. I’ve been leafing though a copy of Bartholomew’s Atlas of the World’s Commerce (London: Newnes, 1907 … Oh, my heart, my beating heart!) which supplies a wonderful snapshot of the Edwardian world. There are maps showing the world trade in every conceivable commodity - from pearls to tobacco, via beer, asphalt and wax - and of course recording the open trade in commodities such as ivory, feathers and opium.

This was towards the end of the era known as the ‘great binge’, roughly 1870-1914. Britain was a major player in the opium trade, having won two ‘opium wars’ which kept the Chinese market open (it more than balanced out the market in tea and ensured that Chinese silver was flowing in the right direction; one of my tutors at university, playing devil’s advocate, described British India as the world’s first narco-military state). There were plenty of objections even in mid nineteenth-century Britain, but in this Edwardian atlas opium is still described as ‘a pleasant narcotic’. India still dominated the market overall, but almost half of British opium was imported from Turkey.

The first Chinese opium dens opened in London slightly after the second opium war, in the 1860s. This illustration from Doré’s controversial work (London: a pilgrimage. 1872; he was only supposed to show the nice bits, but went wandering in the docks and rookeries) is captioned as being the model for the opium den in Dickens’s ‘Edwin Drood’, and given the date and Jerry White’s appraisal in London in the Nineteenth-Century that’s not unreasonable – there were very few possible contenders in this period.

Class A drugs have never been so widely (and legally) available as they were for the next half century: morphine, heroin, opiates of all kinds (baby kicking up at night? Try a spoonful of laudanum …) In mainstream contemporary fiction, the most obvious example of a functioning junkie is Sherlock Holmes; an occasional user of morphine, Holmes famously preferred to inject a seven per cent solution of cocaine, facing only the occasional remonstrance from the medical professional he shared rooms with. In the latest BBC adaptation Sherlock, updated to the present day, the detective does nothing worse than nicotine patches. Even tobacco is out of bounds (mind you, ‘three patch problem’ was genuinely funny). A sign of the times. In our Edwardian atlas it’s all legal and above board.

Some of the other commodities seem outlandish until one stops and thinks for a moment. Ornamental feathers, for example, which were chiefly imported from Cape Colony, with France coming a close second. But such was the demand for feathers in this period (think of all those hats …) that some species were driven to the brink of extinction. Here’s the map:

And just for fun here’s the cover - very much of its time (with a nod to earlier eras: an Elizabethan galleon which appears to be flying the White Ensign, sailing into the rising sun and leaving behind all sorts of representations of successful trade and commerce on the quay, including a cornucopia brimming with good things and two allegorical figures: the great port of London, perhaps, wearing the crown of a walled city and brandishing - no other word - a laurel wreath; flanked by Peace: prosperous and peaceful trade. The Pax Britannica in fact.)

From Great Rebellion to Great Game: Playing for India

Cartographic games – often using a map as the board (like Risk) - are a genre in their own right, and one which has attracted ever increasing amounts of scholarly interest. Take Jill Shefrin’s detailed study of a particular publisher of juvenilia, published last year: The Dartons. Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1787-1876 (Graaf, 2010). But it would be a mistake to assume that all games were aimed at children, and every now and again something comes along which throws a light on that. So I was delighted to be offered a previously unknown board game of the Great Rebellion, or Mutiny, complete with its fragile lithographed rule sheet, and published at the time. It was brought in by a proper old-school runner I know (not an easy thing to be in this internet age), and it’s already found an excellent home. My wife still wants to play it - wish I’d kept a scan!   

It’s a controversial subject for a game - difficult enough to write about dispassionately even now. The Indian Mutiny or Rebellion of 1857-58 rocked the comfortable assumptions of the mid Victorian world; it probably had a more profound impact on the Victorian psyche than any other comparable event of the era, including the Crimean War. Politically speaking it was the final nail in the coffin of the East India Company - which had long been in a ludicrously anomalous position for a trading company - and it ushered in direct rule by the British Crown: the Raj. In more general terms the atrocities committed by individuals on both sides soured Anglo-Indian relations. Most of the policies of the Raj (often fundamentally and bizarrely contradictory) can be traced to this period – and to the desire to prevent anything like it from happening again.You’ll have gathered that I find it extraordinary that a game was devised so close to events! As it’s a very rare thing – no copies were recorded in institutional holdings when I acquired it – perhaps contemporaries thought as I do, and the game never caught on. But given the general rarity of ephemeral material of this nature, it’s impossible to say with certainty.   

The game is simply titled “The Game of Empire”, printed by F.J. Whiteman for an individual identified only as “Cochrane”. The board is a diagrammatic folding map, representing India - dissected into 16 sheets and laid on linen for durability - which folds into cloth covers; there is a printed paper label on the upper cover, repeating an extract from the verso of the rules sheet, and showing how counters should be set up to commence the game. The rules sheet, printed on both sides, describes Victoria as “Queen of India, Empress of Hindostan”. Disraeli created the strikingly similar title “Empress of India” for her in 1876 – Cochrane was slightly ahead of the times. We don’t have a printed date though, so some detective work was in order.

The printer, F.J. Whiteman of 19 Little Queen Street, was established by 1851 when he published a poem by one Thomas Colsey, “A Record of the Great Exhibition”. I haven’t read it, but at a guess the firm was no stranger to “vanity” publishing. We have the following information from the rules, which links us specifically to the events of the Indian Mutiny of 1857-58: “the Pink represent the Queen’s Troops, the Blue the Troops of the late East India Company, and Orange the Rebel Sepoys.” ‘Late’ gives us a clue - we can deduce that the game was printed after the Government of India Act of August 1858.

And what of Mr Cochrane, whose name crops up repeatedly? “The author and publisher, Cochrane, 283, Strand, gives instructions gratis, and offers a Guinea Board to any person beating him two games”. Unfortunately, apart from this delightful image (a nineteenth century version of Lord Monckton’s Eternity game!) there isn’t much to go on. No initials or anything handy like that. 283 The Strand was something of a black hole in this period, used as offices by a number of small agencies. At one time it was the address of a Newspaper Advertising Agency and it is the address given for a number of publications such as The Age. A number of other offices were based there, including that of ‘Le Grand of the Strand’, the private detective hired by the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee in the wake of the Ripper murders. By the 1880s, certainly, the address was rather run down.

One can only speculate as to whether anyone ever won a ‘Guinea Board’, or if Cochrane’s hypothetical Sepoys drove the British from India as often as not in the course of play. What is clear from the details of Cochrane’s arrangements at the Strand office - and his offer of prize money – is that this game was intended for an adult market (an aspect of cartographic games which still needs to be explored further), and not for children, but even so it’s remarkable that the game was made at the time, and more remarkable still that one could take the part of either side. It’s difficult to convey the level of public horror (hysteria, even) which greeted the publication of documented events such as the Cawnpore massacre (and bear in mind that these could not immediately be disentangled from numerous atrocity stories which had sprung from the fevered imaginations of unreliable authorities). I’m going to try, but putting it into a modern context is tricky. I’m not a gamer myself (I’m stepping onto thin ice when I only know what I read in the papers) but in the last decade several games have caused outrage by allowing players to hijack airliners or fight alongside the Taliban. Might one be coming close to understanding the reaction of the average reader of ‘the Thunderer’ c. 1858? Did Mr Cochrane even recoup the printing costs? This seems to be his only foray into the world of games manufacture …

Europe as a Lady; England as George & the Dragon: Satirical Maps

I’m often asked about satirical maps (really! but I do spend all day in a map shop) and it’s a fascinating field: the maps are decorative and entertainingly inventive, and by their nature they are highly revealing about the societies which produced them. Unfortunately, from a collector’s point of view (not to mention mine) one now needs patience and deep pockets to build a collection, but material does still turn up. The temptation to anthropomorphise (and of course some of the maps are zoomorphic too …) just about everything from clouds to shadows is almost irresistible. Although the earliest map of this kind I know of is an early fourteenth-century map by the disturbed/visionary cleric Opicinus de Canistris which represents the shores of the Mediterranean as a king and queen, I can’t believe that he was the first.   

Caricature or picture maps, political or playful, certainly go right back to the earliest days of printed map making. There is a whole series of maps showing ‘Europe as a lady’ or ‘Europe as a Queen’. Perhaps the most well known version is this one, from Sebastian Munster’s Cosmographia   

Munster’s Cosmographia, a hugely popular compendium of topographical information, folklore and travels, was first published with a modest 26 maps in 1544, mostly borrowed from his Ptolemy of 1540. By the last edition of 1628 the work had swollen to include over 260 maps and views, including, from c. 1588 onwards, this one. However, the idea is considerably earlier:  it was first drawn by Johannes Putsch (Bucius) in 1537, and developed by theologian Heinrich Buenting in his Itinerarium Sacrae Scriptura of 1581 and Mathias Quad in 1587. There are other less well known variants on the theme – for example a similar map was engraved for a German newsbook, the Relatione Universalis, c. 1598. That’s also worth illustrating as I’ve only seen it once:

Europe is a depicted as a Queen: Spain is the crowned head, England and Wales the arm wielding the sword, the orb is gripped by Italy (an arm, not a boot this time!) and the skirts reach Scandinavia. The Relatione Universalis or the Continuatio, in which it appeared was an early newsbook, a precursor of the newspaper and periodical, which related contemporary historical events. It was published twice a year to coincide with the Frankfurt book fair in spring and autumn and therefore is generically known as a ‘Messrelation’. The most famous were written by Conrad Lautenbach (1534-95) under the pseudonynm Jacobus Francus and the series was continued in the same name after Lautenbach’s death. It’s finely engraved, much more subtle than the Munster woodcut, and I’d quite like another copy!

Europe is personified as a Queen on the early editions of the title-page of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas and again, with the other continents paying tribute, as a vignette within Henricus Hondius’s double-hemisphere world-map of 1630. (It’s worth noting the relationship between these purely satirical creations and political iconography contained within the decorative elements of maps in general). Over a period of a century the concept had become a familiar one, perhaps suggestive to contemporary readers of Europe’s proper place in the order of things, of her place set above the other continents. There is a suggestion that the figure is not a woman, but represents Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (1519-56) and King of Spain (1516-56), the argument being that Spain was the crowned head of Europe. Just possibly this was Bucius’ original idea, but if so it took on a life of its own.

I think I’d better skim quickly over the next century or so, skating over Buenting’s other maps (Asia as Pegasus and the world as a clover leaf on the basic TO pattern) and, beginning with Aitzinger’s map of 1583, the whole series of fantastically beautiful Leo Belgicus (later Leo Hollandicus) maps, which chart the phases of the bloody and brutal Dutch struggle for independence from Spain – the Eighty Years’ War. Other noteworthy creations include Balbinus’ Bohemia as a rose, centred on Prague (1677), and Gillray’s more earthy response to the threat of Napoleonic invasion in 1793: a hearty (if hardly deferential) caricature of George III contained within the coastline of England and Wales, defecating explosively on the French bumboats. I’m also going to pass over assorted whimsical maps inspired by subjects such as matrimony and gastronomy, and general caricature maps of countries. Another time.

Revolutions, political upheavals and sparring between the great powers characterise the Victorian age, fertile ground for satire, and the second part of the nineteenth-century saw a flowering of this kind of map. The obvious candidate for discussion is Fred Rose but I’d like to stray off the beaten track a little way and illustrate the subject with a map by William Mecham, who drew under the pen name Tom Merry. Here it is: ‘A Map of England: A Modern St. George and the Dragon !!!’

It’s a satirical map of England and Wales illustrating the 1886 Irish Home Rule crisis, published in  the Conservative periodical (and therefore taking the Tory view of things) St Stephen’s Review, in 1888. The Tory leader (Lord Salisbury as St George), successfully spears the dragon Gladstone (who in 1886 was the Liberal Prime Minister), shown with the forked tongue of Home Rule lolling from his mouth; other key figures in the crisis such as Parnell have been worked into his scaly flanks.

Although Gladstone himself was converted to the cause of Irish Home Rule he split his own party; the bill was defeated and Conservatives and Liberal Unionists swept to power in the ensuing general election. Mecham’s skills were not confined to printed periodicals: his ‘lightning cartoons’ were part of a popular music hall stage act - he was the first performer to appear in a British film. His use of cartographic features is ingenious (for example the isle of Wight becomes a pool of dragon’s blood) and the composition recalls earlier caricature maps, such as the late eighteenth century maps by Gillray and Dighton which show figures astride a whale or dolphin. However, Mecham specifically acknowledges Lillie Tennant. As a schoolgirl Tennant designed a series of cartoon maps published under the name ‘Aleph’ in 1869 (Rod Barron has done pioneering work on this); like Mecham she became a popular stage performer, known for her comic songs, and cartoon maps were clearly part of her act. Although the earliest printed depiction by Tennant of England and Wales as George and the Dragon dates from 1912, it was well known to Mecham and his audience 25 years earlier – so well known that Mecham felt honour bound to credit her. Here’s her 1912 map:

I find this cross-referencing absolutely fascinating, as an indication that makers of cartoon and satirical maps were as aware of each other and the tradition within which they worked as the ‘straight’ cartographers who often credited one another as a matter of course.

A Cadger’s Map of Kent

Keeping on with the theme of Victorian social history, in a recent house-call I picked up a latish edition of John Camden Hotton’s Slang Dictionary, 1885. Not of great commercial value, but irresistible. Hotton himself is fun - a bookseller, publisher (and pornographer) who founded Chatto & Windus. There’s a peculiar English fascination with slang and cant which stretches back over four centuries, at least, and I’m as susceptible as the next person! (Julie Coleman covers the entire subject in four highly entertaining volumes: A History of Cant and Slang Dictionaries, 1567-1984; OUP, 2004-2010)

And of course there’s a map - a woodcut frontispiece which is repeated on the front cover (where it is blocked in gilt). The title simply describes it as ‘a cadger’s map of a begging district’ but the according to the text it is a ‘correct facsimile’ of an actual map of a locality near Maidstone in Kent. Hence the inclusion of various extraneous doodles, interpreted by Hotton as sketches of ‘a favourite or noted female’ (Three Quarter Sarah) a cadger, and as the reckoning of a day’s earnings for three tramps (13 shillings: not bad at all if one is thinking in terms of average earnings but less satisfactory using the retail price index. This site is a great place to play around with relative worth: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukcompare).

The hieroglyphs are a coded way of sharing information: no good (too poor, and know too much); bone (good, but cheese your patter); cooper’d (spoilt by too many tramps calling there); gammy (unfavourable … mind the dog); flummoxed (dangerous, sure of a month in “quod”).  Hotton suggested a Romany origin for the hieroglyphs, not entirely unreasonable in itself (there are links with cant), but he then runs riot with the possibility that they were therefore of great antiquity: “How strange it would be if some modern Belzoni or Champollion …discovered in these beggars’ marks traces of ancient Egyptian or Hindoo sign-writing!” It hasn’t happened yet …