Introduction

County mapping

The history of county map production before 1837 can be seen as a series of phases. From 1575, with the production of the first printed map of Devon by Christopher Saxton, until 1645 and the publication of Joan Blaeu’s county map, one has what might be termed the Romantic Age of map production. This period is marked by the production of four of the most attractive and ornamental county maps. The work of Christopher Saxton was not surpassed by any later surveyor until Benjamin Donn in 1765, John Cary at the end of the eighteenth century and the Ordnance Survey at the beginning of the nineteenth. Saxton’s surveys were not bettered but his work was copied, and in some artistic respects improved, by John Speed, Jan Jansson and Joan Blaeu.¹ The quality of these maps, their artistic flourishes and popular appeal made them the forerunners for over a hundred years. During the next seventy-five years only twelve printed maps were produced and all were based on Saxton’s survey.

The Age of Reason lasted from 1650 until 1780 with the rise of a Middle Class. News sheets, part works and magazine publications brought new ideas and information to a rising class of affluent well-educated people eager to find out about the world at large. Over this period of a hundred and thirty years a little more than forty new maps of the county were printed. In 1765 the famous large-scale map of Benjamin Donn appeared. Produced on twelve sheets it was the first surveyed and detailed map of the county to appear since Saxton and would remain the best depiction of Devnshire until the Ordnance Survey in 1809.

The next major period covers the years from 1787 to 1837 and the advent of Victoria. This Age of Variety was the busiest period of county mapping. In fifty years a total of seventy-one different printed maps of Devon were published. The variety is awesome. We see simple maps such as that produced by William Cobbett - a map of Devon that looks more like a representation of a kidney - to the highly detailed and superbly crafted engravings of John Cary. It was Cary’s efforts at depicting a true representation of the county, in the same manner as Benjamin Donn before him, that led to the clear and correct mapping of the county.  During this period we also see some of the most decorative of county maps. J & C Walker, Dix & Darton, Langley & Belch, Schmollinger and Moule introduced colourful scenes to complement the map detail. But of paramount importance was the advent of the Ordnance Survey. As Saxton had been the benchmark for the preceding three hundred years so the Ordnance Survey would become the benchmark for the future and would often be copied, though seldom if ever improved.

The Victorian era could be called the Age of Precision. It marked the end of romantic mapping and the adoption of the precision of John Cary and the accuracy of the Ordnance Survey. Between 1837, when Victoria ascended to the throne of the United Kingdom and 1901 when she died, a total of sixty-five different printed maps of the county were produced. In comparison with the previous years it might seem that fewer maps were printed. In reality the new techniques of lithography and chromolithography made it much easier to change a plate to meet new demands and to allow the production of many more maps per print run, as well as many more print runs per plate. It was also the era of the railway and the advance of the lines led to more and more revisions to the plates.

Of the many printing and publishing companies that had produced maps before the accession of Victoria, only two would be of importance in the following seventy years. These were the companies established by John Cary and the two Walker brothers, John and Charles. John Cary died in 1835 leaving the company to two relatives, George and John, who continued to publish maps for a number of years. However, they do not appear to have produced any new work and seem to have discontinued and sold their business c.1844. But the map plates they still held at the end were important throughout the century and into the twentieth century. The plates passed to G F Cruchley who exploited them as much as possible. He printed and published a vast amount of atlases and folding maps from plates that were already over half a century old. The plates were then bought by Gall & Inglis who continued to print from them until the end of the nineteenth century. The Walker brothers printed and published their Royal Atlas in 1836 when Victoria was still a princess (the atlas was dedicated to their Royal Highnesses the Duchess of Kent and the Princess Victoria). The maps were printed almost up to the end of the century. They were included in guide books and directories² and became the famous fox hunting maps of Hobson and later of the Walkers themselves. But it was a handful of new firms that would dominate the market for maps and atlases in the nineteenth century. The Victorian age was strongly influenced by the efforts of the family firms of A & C Black, the Philips and the Bartholomews, sometimes independently and sometimes cooperating. Together with the companies of G W Bacon, W & A K Johnston, Cassells and Collins they printed and published by far the greatest share of the growing atlas market in Great Britain.

This was an age of education and new technology and these companies used both to produce vast numbers of maps, wall-maps, folding maps, guide book maps as well as the thousands of assorted atlases covering every part of the world and every feature in the new science of thematic mapping. The history of many of these companies during this time is one of ever-increasing production and most had to move premises several times. The Blacks took over a two-acre site for printing and production in the 1870s to meet the growing educational market's demands. The Philips established their company in Paradise Street, Liverpool in 1834 but before long had added a factory to manufacture stationery and carry out letter-press printing concentrating on educational works. By 1859 they had opened their Caxton Works; a purpose-built, multi-storied, spacious, integrated, technologically-advanced printing works. The latest state-of-the-art equipment. At one time they employed over eighty colourists.³

W & A K Johnston moved to new premises in 1855 and began to exploit lithography and chromo-lithography. The Bartholomews, who had begun as engravers, were not slow to follow suit and in 1859 they embarked on a programme of expansion, establishing their own printing works. They moved to new premises and trebled the number of steam presses at their disposal. They were able to compete in every stage of map production from first draft to final printing.⁴ By the outbreak of the First World War Bartholomews was one of the leading map companies even challenging the Ordnance Survey’s position. Such was their output that an edition of their successful Citizen’s Atlas could sell one hundred and forty one thousand copies.

When William Collins, son of the Scottish firm's founder, visited London he took time to visit the publishing offices of Clowes on 13th July 1837 and reported ‘This forenoon we visited Messrs. Clowes' printing office, which is the largest in London - indeed I should suppose the largest in the world. We were first conducted through the machine-rooms, in which were about 20 machines, throwing off at the rate of 750 sheets, printed on both sides, per hour. These machines were driven by a steam engine’. By the middle 'fifties the Collins firm was operating ten single-cylinder steam printing machines, five older style printing presses and several litho presses in their works. However, expansion came so quickly that in 1869 the book-printing plant consisted of sixteen single and double cylinder printing machines, seven litho presses and a number of smaller presses. In the same year the records show an output of over a million printed and bound works. By 1895 one thousand nine hundred workers printed and bound two and a half million works using a printing plant of forty cylinder machines, twenty five commercial jobbing machines, and twenty cylinder litho presses.⁵

This mammoth rise in production, spurred on by increasing demand and sated by cheaper means of production, meant that Gall and Inglis, the heirs to the Cruchley and Cary plates, could be regarded as one of the most important suppliers of the mass map market towards the end of the century and were mentioned in committees investigating sales of OS maps.⁶ And this even though they were churning out reprints of maps 100 years old!

One of the factors in the growth of all of these companies was that during the eighteen-seventies, the Education Acts of 1870 (England) and 1872 (Scotland) were passed and publishers were not slow to see the potential. Demand was so large that already in 1875 there were nine hundred and twenty schoolbooks in the Collins' catalogue, and the number of employees had risen to more than twelve hundred.⁷

Another factor that undoubtedly led to increased demand was the steady decrease in the number of hours being worked. The Bank Holidays Act was first passed in 1871. Before then, although some seasonal workers might migrate looking for work, the working classes rarely travelled much further than to the nearest market town. Employers were not known for being generous in providing leisure for their employees: Sunday was still very much a day of rest, and Christmas and Good Friday were both legal holidays. However, Boxing Day, Easter Monday and Whit Monday were only holidays according to the whim of the employer. Sir John Lubbock promoted the Act of 1871, hence they were sometimes known as St Lubbock's Days, but the immediate impact was slight. The Act was extended by the Holidays Extension Act of 1875. Lubbock's activities led to the Shops Hours Regulation Act in 1886, which restricted the working hours to seventy four a week for shop assistants under eighteen.⁸ All these measures led to increased leisure hours for all, and not just for the working classes.

Here again, William Collins seems to have been something of a leader in the field: having already reduced the weekly working hours of his printers from sixty-six to sixty hours a week - an example quickly followed by the other master printers of Glasgow. Already by the end of 1870 he had reduced them again to fifty-seven - an announcement which his workers greeted, said a contemporary report, with ‘immense applause’. By 1895 his workers were working fifty two and a half hours a week.⁹

With reduced working hours came more leisure time.The end of the nineteenth century saw a tremendous rise in the popularity of cycling and with it an enormous output of mapping material associated with the new sport. Many maps that had originally been produced for guide books or for information purposes were adapted to show information vital to the cyclist such as repair stations and accommodation or the gradients of hills, e.g. Bartholomew's map for Pattisons (174), or Gall & Inglis' Contour Road Maps (181). So popular was the sport that printing runs of 60,000 cycling maps were not uncommon.¹⁰

Printing

Although the first printed maps had used the woodcut, a relief process where the back is cut away leaving the design raised, this technique was quickly superseded by copper plate engraving. The only county maps where wood was used were for Joshua Archer’s plates in Pinnock’s Guide to Knowledge series and Seeley, Jackson & Halliday’s and J P’s children‘s puzzles. The former maps were engravings and the result was white on black (108, 1833). The latter were small county maps embedded in a children’s rebus (146 and 157). Wood would remain an important medium for illustrations and early guides sometimes included attractive woodcuts.

Copper plate engraving dominated the production of maps for some three hundred years until the middle of the 19th century. The design was cut into the metal in reverse, the plate was then inked and wiped clean leaving the ink within the incised lines. Passing the plate through rollers under pressure ‘lifted’ the lines onto the paper, so that they stood proud of the surface. This technique had many advantages over the woodcut; the engraver could work much faster and could use many other techniques, dots, pecked lines, stipples and lettering of greater fluency. Changes were also fairly easy to carry out; lines could be burred or hammered out and re-engraved. Copper engraving had the major disadvantage of eventually wearing down so that strengthening of incised lines was needed or even a new plate, as can be seen with some of John Cary’s maps. Cary’s New and Correct English Atlas of 1787 (51),was re-engraved in 1809 (73), and his Traveller’s Companion of 1789 (55) was re-engraved twice in 1806 and 1822 (69 and 92).

It was not until the 1800s that it was possible to engrave on steel. The use of steel allowed a longer print run, hence maps engraved on steel are more common. James Pigot’s series for his Directories from the mid-1820s were the first to employ this technique in 1829 (98) and Henry Fisher’s maps were Engraved on Steel by the Omnigraph, F P Becker in the early 1840s (120).

Acid etching was also introduced in the 1800s. In this technique the design is cut through a wax coating applied to the plate; the plate is then immersed in acid which eats into the exposed copper, creating the etched image. A simple difference in the technique is that etched lines tend to end square or blunt, whereas engraved lines taper to a point. Although giving the artist much greater flexibility, the technique was not used for any county map series.

However, the biggest breakthrough was the invention of lithography. This was invented in 1798 and patented a year later. Alois Senefelder, a German playwright (1771-1834) who published his own plays, found that by drawing with special greasy ink or crayon on a flat limestone slab the grease was absorbed and the image would then accept printer’s ink which was repelled by the rest of the stone, provided the surface was kept moistened. Senefelder went on to experiment with colour and constructed various printing machines. The technique was already being used by the 1820s but was not adopted by the map trade until much later, although some maps were produced at this time. It is surprising how open Alois Senefelder and his brother, Karl Friedrich Matthias Senefelder, were about publicising the new development and encouraging students to come to Munich to learn about the new system. However, their reasons were not completely altruistic: Carlos Gimbernat, Deputy Director of the Real Gabinete de Historia Natural, was the first Spaniard to practise the process of lithography. He made contact with Karl Senefelder and for the princely sum of a thousand florins signed a contract on 24 March 1806, whereby the German undertook to teach him everything about lithography but he was not to communicate its secrets to anyone for three months afterwards. As early as 1807 Gimbernat drew on stone the illustrations for Manual del Soldado español en Alemania (Munich, 1807), which was printed by F Hubschman. This book included a map of the North Sea coast engraved on stone by Alois Senefelder which, according to Gimbernat, was the first example of lithography for geographical work.¹¹

Other early examples of maps are those of Capri and the Pianta del Real Orto Botanicodi Napoli, both from 1818¹² , and possibly the first American lithographed map was published in October 1821.¹³ The development of lithography revolutionised the map world enabling quick and accurate reproduction, changes and ultimately cheap and numerous copies. The Germans were quicker to spot the potential of lithography in connection with maps: Senefelder supervised cadastral surveys undertaken by the Steuer Kataster Commission in Munich between 1809 and 1827. In Complete Course of Lithography (London, 1819) Senefelder wrote of the benefits of lithographic engraving for map production This Manner [engraving on stone] is one of the most useful in Lithography, and is nearly equal to the best copper-plate engraving.¹⁴ Manuals describing the techniques sometimes added maps as examples.¹⁵ Other German agencies were quick to adopt Senefelder's methods.¹⁶

Charles Joseph Hullmandel (1789-1850) was London's first successful lithographer and he, too, had learnt the technique from Alois Senefelder. Hullmandel made his own improvements and did more than any man to foster lithography in England and particularly the topographical lithograph.¹⁷ Examples of his work can be found in some early guide books such as W T Moncrieff's The Visitor's New Guide to the Spa of Leamington Priors (3rd ed, 1824) or Mary Southall's A Description of Malvern, 2nd ed (1825). The first real competition to Hullmandel came from the firm of Day & Haghe, successively lithographers to William IV and Queen Victoria.¹⁸

One of the major problems facing the lithographer at the time was the quality of stone available. At first only certain stones could be used but gradually the heavy limestone blocks that were originally used gave way to thin metal plates. These were usually made of zinc (first used in 1824) or aluminium specially prepared with a finely grained porous surface which enabled them to function like the porous limestone. They were lighter and easier to use as well as being cheaper and easier to produce. When a drawing was finished it was covered with a solution of water and gum arabic. When the gum was washed away sufficient remained in the non-printing area to maintain a clean water-attractive ink-repellant surface. Also the grease penetrated the stone so well that when the design was apparently washed off sufficient remained to attract a new application of ink. A succession of prints could be made by alternately dampening the ‘stone’ and inking the design and rolling the applied paper.

It was further discovered that drawings could be made on paper having a special coating and sufficiently smooth for pens to be used. The drawing could now be transferred to the ‘stone’. Fresh impressions from lithographs or from engravings printed in greasy ink onto litho-transfer paper could be transferred. This technique enabled many of the earlier copper engravings to be transferred and subsequently modified. The whole cartographic technique was revolutionised enabling large numbers of maps and variations to be produced. This transfer system was the beginning of off-set printing as we know it today. As mentioned, a number of maps originally engraved were later reproduced as lithographs. Some of Cary’s maps first appearing in 1809 and 1822 (73 and 92) were later republished by G F Cruchley and later still G W Bacon and Gall & Inglis both obtained copper plates from auctions of Cary’s property and proceeded to produce lithographic copies. Chromolithography followed, enabling maps to be reproduced in colour. Each colour had a separate plate transferred from the same base plate, with only the colour area being treated. The map would be overprinted taking care for alignment and using the black plate last. In 1859 a successful method was evolved to enable the reproduction of line drawings by photolithography. Paper coated in gelatine was sensitized by being immersed in a bichromate solution and then dried. The paper was then exposed under a photographic negative until an image appeared. The surface was covered with a film of greasy ink and the paper soaked. Unexposed gelatine areas absorbed the water and were wiped off. The retained inked design was then transferred in the usual way enabling great accuracy. This technique combined with zincography was popular with the Ordnance Survey, and many later copies of the Mudge survey of 1809 (74), as well as new maps prepared 1885-1891 (162, 164 and 169), were noted as Zincographed or Photozincographed at the Ordnance Survey Office.

Fig. 1: Ordnance Survey label on boxed sets

 At first printing was done by hand. The paper was laid on to the prepared and inked surface and pressed by a boxwood ‘scraper’. In 1860 self-acting presses were introduced. The ‘stone’ moved to and fro beneath a cylinder and two sets of rollers, one for dampening and the other for inking. The paper rotated with the cylinder pressing it into contact with the plate. This technique was used until c.1895 to be gradually replaced by the ‘direct’ and then the ‘offset’ rotary presses. The lithograph is the right way round on the first roller, to be reversed on the second and printed from the third or ‘impression’ roller.                                        

Although at first sight similar, the lithograph can be distinguished from an engraving by the absence of raised ink lines and the plate block depression in the paper, as less force was needed to transfer the image. The Reynolds series (123) was one of the last to be engraved first and later lithographed. Larger paper copies of the pre-1860 maps sometimes have traces of the impression in the paper near the edges, whereas all later copies are smooth and flat over the whole surface.

Topography

A map is a topographical drawing and, while being drawn to an accurate horizontal scale, should still show those features which cannot be seen from the vertical viewpoint. From the first the map-maker introduced or copied conventional signs, pictures and symbols and by the nineteenth century these had become firmly established.

While not all maps had the detailed geographical information of Henry De la Beche’s work (118), later to be included in Ordnance Survey maps, most had the sort of reference material included by Joshua Archer in his series of maps for James Dugdale’s Curiosities of Great Britain. This included different styles of lettering for various sizes of localities, roads, railways and canals as well as including Polling Places and Parliamentary representation.

Hill shading was, however, still a problem. Saxton’s 1575 (1) sugar-loaves, shaded on the east side, gave way to alpine mountains for Jansson in 1644 (11), clefts for Blome in 1673 (14) and joined-in lines for Thomas Kitchin in 1750 (34). Benjamin Donn, who probably - and correctly - did not like the idea of the multi-molehills omitted them entirely in 1765 (44, 45). In 1801 Charles Smith’s New English Atlas (61) introduced hachuring which, then used for larger-scale maps, would become fully conventionalised and improved by the Ordnance Survey. Even so, De la Beche, who worked for the OS before becoming its Director of the Geological Survey, ignored hills while Archer’s hills were carefully hachured. Unfortunately, hachuring meant that other information at a hill point would not show up. It was the advent of colour printing that would ultimately lead to the inclusion of hills on most, but certainly not all, maps used for travelling.

Colouring was originally only undertaken at the purchaser’s request. For shields standard conventions were used, either letters or hatching or both. For example 0 stood for Gold or Yellow and the engraver would ensure the appropriate area was dotted and the colourist would proceed to colour them correctly. For the map itself there were also standards: boundary lines were shown in different colours on each side, sometimes with areas colour-washed; woods and seats were green; rivers and the sea, or just the sea-coast blue; towns were red. All else was left to the colourist’s imagination. These conventions were still being employed until the middle of the nineteenth century. The Archer maps from early editions of Curiosities show outline colouring on the engraved issues.

One of the earliest pioneers of lithography also experimented with colouring. Lt. Franz von Hauslab, an instructor at the Engineers Academy in Vienna (from 1819), taught the use of heighted contours as the basis for plan drawing, especially of fortifications drawn at large scales. By 1825 he had developed more elaborate ideas for presenting terrain details at the smaller scales used for topographic maps. His ideas were implemented in a collection of plates reproduced lithographically, some of which are in colour, with the title Versuche über die Anwendung der Lithographie für die Situations-Zeichnung. It is not known whether this printed work was intended for publication or whether it was simply a class demonstration of his methods.¹⁹

It was a very successful early example of the innovative use of colour in lithographic printing, but it went unnoticed and others strove to find a way of printing in colour and of representing heights effectively. One early system for colour printing was patented by George Baxter (1804-1867). He patented his method in 1835, using oil colours and several blocks, and licensed others to use the technique. Although W Dickes, illustrator and publisher who prepared some county maps, used this technique for landscapes, it was never used for mapping. Charles Knight, an influential printer and publisher, attempted to produce the first series of printed books with coloured county maps but only succeeded in producing three in 1840 (Berks, Derby and Hants). The fourth in the series (Kent) was coloured by hand in the time-honoured tradition and no more were produced.

It was the efforts of the family firms such as A & C Black, Philips, W & A K Johnston and the Bartholomews, who dominated the Victorian map market that led to colour printing in Britain. The Johnston brothers were keen innovators and early exploiters of lithography and chromolithography. Great supporters of thematic maps, they exploited the new technology to produce various maps from one plate. Their National Atlas of Historical, Commercial and Political Geography published in 1843 included maps by Heinrich Berghaus (1797-1884) and the work on isotherms of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). It used tonal progression and shading to show the geographical distribution of food plants.²⁰ The 1849 edition of the National Atlas was the first general atlas to be colour printed by lithography and in 1852 Blackwoods published Johnston’s Atlas of General and Descriptive Geography. This was notable for the use of chromolithography and the twenty two maps were printed from five plates. The firm is also credited with the first London map with contours (1851).²¹

One of the first county atlases to be produced with machine applied colour was George Philips’ County Atlas which first appeared in 1865, exploiting maps engraved up to three years earlier. This firm led the field in pioneering the mechanical colouring of maps and its huge staff was replaced by the latest Senefelder machines.²²

The senior Bartholomew was sceptical of the technique of lithography and it was John junior who introduced it to the firm, which subsequently advertised itself as the Edinburgh Engraving & Lithographic Establishment, in the 1860s²³, and when the Encyclopaedia Britannica county maps first started to appear in 1877 these were produced lithographically with colour printing, first from Bartholomew’s presses, later from Johnston’s. John not only overcame family resistance to introduce lithography but he also invented layer colouring, first exhibited in his maps at the Paris Exhibition in 1878. John Bartholomew had not been satisfied with the system of hachuring then being used as it either obscured, or left less room for, other details. Consequently he attempted to improve height representation, first through experimenting with hill shading in brown rather than black and later by a system of layer colouring. The 1 inch Ordnance Survey had introduced contours in 1846²⁴ but John George Bartholomew’s contribution was the refinement of layer colouring and contours as used for the first time in the Thorough Guides published by Dulau and Co. and largely written by Baddeley and Ward²⁵ (157): Baddeley’s guide to the English Lake District (1880) being the first in the series.²⁶ Consequently, it was not long before Bartholomew was claiming to use ‘revolutionary production methods’. Layer colouring²⁷ was first used for county maps c.1895 as seen in Bartholomew's large sheet Devon maps (174) and the sectional maps for the Dulau and Murray guides (157 and 150.16).

Colour printing could always be added to maps from plates produced much earlier. Hence, G W Bacon took over the Edward Weller Dispatch Atlas plates in 1869 and although these had been used fairly frequently since 1858 it was Bacon who added overprinted colour and successfully exploited the plates until well into the twentieth century. Gall and Inglis carried out similar updating to their stock of Cruchley maps and plates, substituting printed colour for the hand-colouring originally employed and introducing coloured road classification to denote quality of road for cycling or motoring.

Other machines for automation were also invented during this period. F P Becker’s famous Omnigraph (a versatile ruling machine) was designed to apply commonly occuring symbols onto maps automatically, saving the engraver time and effort. ‘The ultimate application of this development was undoubtedly Francis Paul's Omnigraph, invented in the early 1840s as a means of speeding-up engraving. The copper plate was passed through a machine comprising a series of punches for each character - which could be impressed into the plate surface using an automatic hammer. Becker sold his 'Omnigraph'  to the Ordnance Survey, claiming that it would save £5000 a year on the staff of forty five engravers. It was used until 1875 when the survey decided that it was actually more costly than hand production because of the great amount of manual retouching required by 'Omnigraph'-produced signs’.²⁸

Cassell, Petter and Galpin, better known for their publishing were also innovators. They not only printed but also manufactured their own paper and produced printing machinery. One of their Belle Sauvage staff, Samuel Bremner, designed a horizontal, single-cylinder gripper, one-and-two-colour, two-feeder printing machine. This won honourable mention at the 1862 exhibition and was popular for some time after. It claimed to print eight hundred sheets an hour by hand or two thousand by steam if it could be fed fast enough.²⁹

By the end of the nineteenth century most of the printing techniques still in use in the year 2000 were already in place. The next great advances would not appear until the end of the twentieth century and the coming of the digital age. And mapping may never be the same again!