- 'Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey’ by Rachel Hewitt is published by Granta
I am told there are people who do not care for maps,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in 1894. “And I find it hard to believe.” Stevenson’s fascination with charts, surveys and maps led to the creation of one of the world’s best-loved adventure stories: he recalled how, “as I pored upon my map of Treasure Island, the future characters of the book began to appear there visibly among imaginary woods”.
The capacity of maps to inspire deep affection in their users and stir the imagination spurred me to write a book about them. It is also still clearly visible in the work of modern writers. Paul Auster’s metaphysical detective novel City of Glass uses maps of New York as a complex code, and Nigel Forde’s poem “Conventional Signs” laments the gap between a map’s image of the world and the real landscape. But if there was a golden age of “literary mapping” in Britain, then it occurred over two centuries earlier, as the 18th century was giving way to the 19th.
Prior to the 1700s in Britain, measuring instruments and techniques were deeply imperfect, and maps were frequently associated with inaccuracy and dishonesty. A map of London from the 1680s bears a motto that sheepishly warns its reader to “expect not truth in all” and an early surveyor damningly condemned fellow mapmakers as “intruders” who “employ simple people as understand little, either of Arts or Reason”.
Prior to the 1700s in Britain, measuring instruments and techniques were deeply imperfect, and maps were frequently associated with inaccuracy and dishonesty. A map of London from the 1680s bears a motto that sheepishly warns its reader to “expect not truth in all” and an early surveyor damningly condemned fellow mapmakers as “intruders” who “employ simple people as understand little, either of Arts or Reason”.
Maps were often symbolic expressions of power rather than precise depictions of land. But 18th-century Britons were gripped by a “quantifying spirit” that sparked dramatic advances in mapmaking instruments and methods, and led to the creation of unprecedentedly accurate maps. Enlightenment thinkers seized on maps as emblems of the celebrated faculty of reason and hoped that through careful measurement, mapmakers might piece together a perfect image of the world.
A century of innovation and excitement followed, in which numerous new surveying endeavours were undertaken. Between 1747 and 1755, a young Lanarkshire man called William Roy oversaw the making, from scratch, of a military survey of the entire Scottish mainland, to help stamp out rebellion in the Highlands.
In the 1760s, the British astronomer Charles Mason and surveyor Jeremiah Dixon mapped the boundary between Maryland and Pennsylvania, unwittingly creating an icon of the cultural divide between the northern and southern United States: the Mason-Dixon Line. But the culmination of Enlightenment advances in mapmaking came in the last decade of the 18th century after the outbreak of the French Revolution and war.
In 1791, Britain’s national mapping agency, the Ordnance Survey, was established to make military maps of the south coast in case of French invasion. Many onlookers were entranced by the Ordnance Surveyors’ undertaking to make the first complete and accurate map of the British Isles, and readers hung avidly on accounts of their adventures in newspapers, scientific journals, guide books, works of local and natural history, and hardback volumes composed by the mapmakers themselves.
The London Evening Post described in 1797 how, “the unknown and supposed magical powers of the surveying instruments” cannot “fail of attracting the wonder of the surrounding multitude, whose curiosity leads them thither by hundreds at a time”.
And when the Ordnance Survey published its first map, of Kent, on January 1 1801 – a year and a day into a new century – it received a rapturous response. One Austrian general pronounced it “the finest piece of topography in Europe”.
The British public became enthralled by maps in the early years of the Ordnance Survey. Embroiderers worked diligently on map-samplers and children moved counters around board-games in the shape of charts of Britain. Novelists and poets were particularly susceptible to the new maps that showed the nation’s landscape in finer detail and with greater accuracy than ever before.
After reading an Ordnance Surveyor’s statement of the need for better maps of Britain, Jane Austen declared him to be “the first soldier I ever sighed for”. But it was the poet William Wordsworth whose encounters with the Ordnance Survey’s endeavour showed how profoundly maps could inspire the literary imagination.
In the summer of 1811, Wordsworth took an initially disappointing holiday in the Cumbrian village of Bootle. It rained almost ceaselessly and a dark black cloud hunkered over the nearby mountain of Black Combe. He was only cheered by an impromptu visit from Bootle’s rector, who thought that Wordsworth might be interested in the rarely visible view from Black Combe.
That phenomenal panorama encompasses the Isle of Man, Scotland’s Mull of Galloway, the Lake District’s magnificent summits, Lancashire, the beaches and peaks of North Wales, and, on a remarkably clear day, even Ireland. The rector also told Wordsworth about the Ordnance Surveyors who had visited Bootle three years previously to exploit that vista for their map.
Wordsworth was already cursorily acquainted with the OS’s director, a polymath named William Mudge, who he had named as an “experienced surveyor” in his guide to the Lakes. But the rector’s stories inspired Wordsworth to engage more imaginatively with the Ordnance Survey and so he set about composing two poems about Mudge’s ascent of Black Combe.
The poet recognised that the panorama from the mountain’s summit was not just a breathtakingly sublime experience, but encompassed the entire United Kingdom – Scotland, England, Wales and Ireland – all at once. For Wordsworth, that “grand terraqueous spectacle” was a “revelation infinite” of the unity of the British Isles and Mudge’s task was to materialise “Britain’s calm felicity and power!” in the “colours, [and] lines” of his innovative map. Wordsworth’s poems turned the Ordnance Survey into an icon of nationalism.
Admittedly, not every writer was in thrall to maps. As the 18th century turned into the 19th, the Enlightenment’s obsession with reason no longer seemed so uncomplicatedly attractive, and many writers began to urge instead the importance of emotions and imagination.
The radical poet, painter and printmaker William Blake detested what he saw as the Enlightenment’s enslavement of the human mind to reason, and focused some of his hatred on maps and geometry. Blake’s poetry and engravings featured the malevolent character of Urizen, who he repeatedly described and drew clutching surveying instruments in his hands. Even Wordsworth was sometimes critical of the “rational education” that was forced on children of the Enlightenment, which idolised “telescopes, and crucibles, and maps”.
Despite these gripes, the Ordnance Survey’s progress continued unhindered until on January 1 1870, the last remaining sheet of the First Series of maps of England and Wales was finally published. Whether it had realised the ambition of creating a perfect image of the landscape is debatable, but in the 79 years since its birth, the Ordnance Survey had undeniably captured the affections, imagination and admiration of many British map-readers.
In the first pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, Jonathan Harker laments that “there are no maps” of Transylvania “to compare with our own Ordnance Survey maps”: for Bram Stoker, the OS was emblematic of Britain’s state of civilisation.
Today, thanks to the Ordnance Survey, Britain possesses more accurate and extensive geographical information than most countries in the world, and maps retain their capacity to inspire love and poetry.
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