LITMIR.BIZ

      This peculiarly British habit of drawing elaborate maps of fantasy landscapes is perhaps one element of our colonial hangover, for it’s not dissimilar to the way in which we first mapped the real world. Almost all advances in cartography in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries came as a result of our imperial adventures, when British ships plied the four oceans and brought back news—and beautiful new maps—of far-off lands to a wide-eyed population. Although many of the voyages were for trade or for battle, the public interest was more sensationally stoked by the expeditions that set out to fill in the blank parts of the globe, a globe over which Britons were becoming ever more confident of their supremacy. So much of the world was known by now, and it was the bits that remained a mystery—particularly the polar regions and the ‘dark heart’ of Africa—that inspired most fervour, among the public as much as the participants.

      It was all done in a joyously British way: with bags of enthusiasm, a smattering of snobbery, a conviction that we knew best and a healthy dose of hit-and-hope optimism. There were many notable victories, but rather more ignoble defeats, to punishing climates, unheard-of diseases and locals who were not as pleased to see the explorers as the latter rather thought they should be. Along the way, the explorers would draw their charts and maps, loyally naming rivers, mountains, creeks and even delirious optical illusions after minor royalty and government officials back home. It wasn’t so far in spirit from those of us who mapped and named our imaginary towns a century and a half later.

      Public hunger for news of these expeditions was nigh-on insatiable, and newspaper and periodical editors swiftly realised that an accompanying map of distant conquests was worth a thousand words and produced a sizeable hike in sales. Although the Ordnance Survey had been in existence since 1791, it was run solely as a military arm of the government—quite literally, a Survey for the Board of Ordnance, forerunner of the Ministry of Defence. Their starchy approach was of little interest to the general public and the press, who far preferred the maps of commercial cartographers. The finest ever seen in Britain were by John Bartholomew & Son of Edinburgh.

      There’s always a tendency to conflate British and English achievements, though it should be even more stridently avoided than usual in terms of mapping, for both Wales and, to a far greater extent, Scotland had cartographic ambition of their own. Edinburgh, especially, became one of the great centres of map-making during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Bartholomew’s, with its distinctive, blue-covered maps, was the ultimate traditional Edinburgh family firm. Founded by the first John Bartholomew in 1826, the baton was passed down from father to son, each one also called John, until the death of the fifth John in 2008 finally ended the distinguished line. Although the Bartholomew name continues in the mapping division of Collins Bartholomew, it is not as a company that any of the Johns would much recognise. In the 1970s, John the Fifth, together with his brothers Peter and Robert, had, for the first time in a century and a half, brought new blood from outside the family into the company’s management structure. The new blood rather turned on them, forcing the sale of the company to Reader’s Digest in 1985, and thence to News International. It was a terminal move. In truth, though, the end had been steaming towards Bartholomew’s at great speed, for it had slightly lost its path and was in no state to survive the tidal waves of the Thatcher revolution.

      It was a long way from the glory years. John the First (1805-61), like his father a jobbing engraver of exceptional ability, had begun to specialise in maps. His were quite gorgeous: the precision of his engraving on the copper sheets created maps of unprecedented accuracy and detail, far better than anything the Ordnance Survey were producing at the time. His first published map, the 1826 Directory Plan of Edinburgh, was lavish and lovely. Looking at it now, what is most remarkable is how little this monumental city has changed in nearly two centuries; aside from the markets and narrow closes cleared for the building of Waverley station, you could easily use it to steer yourself around today.

      John the First’s Edinburgh was a cauldron of high artistic and scientific specialism, producing the best reference materials in the world. Out of it came not just Bartholomew’s, but the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, The Scotsman and the publishing houses of Constable and A. & C. Black. Just around the corner from John’s first works was the printing shop of brothers William and Robert (W. & R.) Chambers, later to become mighty publishers of dictionaries and other reference works. Edinburgh was a hotbed of all kinds: the Chambers brothers habitually slept under the counter of the shop, in order to fight off the regular nocturnal raiders.

      The firm grew in a typically modest, rather Scottish way; steadily nonetheless. In his first year of business, John earned a total of £78 16s 6d, and by the time of his death in 1861, when John Junior took over the reins, they had about twenty employees and an annual wage bill of over a thousand pounds. John Junior, and his son, John George, combined cartographic excellence with canny business acumen; Bartholomew’s boomed. In that, it had considerable assistance from the mood of the times: maps were the hottest new property and the public had a seemingly insatiable appetite for them. The explosion of the railways was chiefly responsible, from the need for lavish plans and prospectuses to be presented to government and as an incentive for investors, right through to their completion, and the public’s desire to see where these new steam beasts could take them. Each copper sheet would have to have the appropriate parts beaten out on an anvil and reengraved with the new railway, but it was worth every bit of trouble to the map-makers, for the results flew off the shelf.

      Then there was the steam revolution on the seas too, necessitating maps of the growing number of commercial and military liners ploughing the oceans, as well as maps of the mystery lands now reachable from the ports of Southampton and Liverpool. The growing Empire needed mapping, while in Britain itself there was the rapidly changing electoral map of a country that was grudgingly allowing more and more people to participate, and, before long, the first leisure maps for those who wanted to pedal into the countryside of a Sunday on their trusty boneshaker. Bart’s also created new markets, particularly of world atlases, for both adults and children. As Rudyard Kipling commented in an address to the Royal Geographical Society in 1928, ‘as soon as men begin to talk about anything that really matters, someone has to go and get the Atlas’. Bartholomew’s reacted to each opportunity with relish and speed, and considerable aesthetic élan.

      For the firm’s trump card was not its tight-knit family fortress and sensitive ear to the ground, but the sheer poetic beauty of the maps. Simple, yet packed with information but never too crowded: everything just so (in a Morningside accent). Its most famous original feature was the use of colour shading between contours, through a spectrum of greens for the lower ground, browns for the middle, purple and finally white for the snowy peaks. Bartholomew’s did the same in the areas of sea, with bathymetric contours of ever-darker shades of blue to indicate the deepening

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