Oceans Apart: Contrasting Approaches to National Mapping

On the face of it these two books should make a valuable cross-national comparison of mapping in Britain and America. Both come from the pens of female academics, both focus on the nineteenth century, both start their accounts in the aftermath of battles and wars that affected cartography (in the British case, Culloden; in the American, independence). Yet the two could not be more different. Hewitt tells the story of topographical mapping and the early history of the Ordnance Survey; Schulten consciously eschews topography and looks instead at thematic mapping. Hewitt wears her scholarship very lightly; Schulten’s writing could not be mistaken for anything other than from the pen of a modern academic – perhaps their contrasting choices of an indefinite versus a definite article in their book titles are a giveaway!

Much has been written about the history of the Ordnance Survey (OS) and one wonders whether there is much more to say, but Hewitt’s book confounds any such scepticism. This is a really splendid read, beautifully written, full of passionate enthusiasm, and with a gripping chronological storyline that starts with the post-Culloden hunt for the Young Pretender in the unmapped wastes of the Scottish Highlands and the consequent appointment of William Roy to direct the Scottish military survey and ultimately to argue the case for a national map of Britain. Indeed, much of Hewitt’s saga is led through her focus on those whom she sees as significant (and heroic) individuals: Roy; Charles Lennox, who became master general of the OS; William Mudge and Thomas Colby, the two surveyors who played such key roles in the early decades of the survey; and Jesse Ramsden, whose instruments were fundamental to the triangulation process. Her story of the early years of the survey up to the long-delayed completion of the English 1-inch coverage in 1870 is set against a background, on one hand, of Enlightenment thought with its admiration for science and accuracy and on the other of a Romanticism that lauded feeling and perception in contrast to the “facts” of topographical science. “The connection between cartography and reason was undeniably powerful, but so too was the capacity of maps to give shape to dreams” (p. 212). The Enlightenment quest for accuracy is brilliantly illustrated by her account of the fastidious measurement of the baseline on Hounslow Heath and the recurrent jousting between the French and English over approaches to cartographic calculation. The Romanticism gives her ample scope to link the evolution of mapping to many of the notable literary characters of the age – not least to Wordsworth in the Lake District, to William Gilpin’s notion of the picturesque in his journeys down the Wye, to the paintings of Joshua Reynolds, and to William Blake’s hostility to the rational – even Jane Austen gets a mention. One of Hewitt’s most gripping accounts is of Wordsworth’s two poems that were prompted by Mudge’s ascent of Black Combe in southwest Cumberland and the triangulation from its summit – with a panoramic vista that was “not just a breathtaking and sublime experience; it provided a revelation of the entire United Kingdom” (p. 202).

But it is the sequence of the Ordnance Survey’s work that is the thread giving shape to her book. The “interlude” of the Irish survey in the 1820s and 1830s is covered especially fully. She traces the role of Thomas Larcom and his venture with Colby to produce not merely surveyed maps of Ireland but regional memoirs to accompany them; she also covers their preoccupation with toponymy and their attempt to identify the most appropriate historical Irish place names that should appear on the maps – a nuanced version of which...