Misreading Maps: Maps and the British Novel in the Age of the Ordnance Survey

Abstract

Misreading Maps: Maps and the British Novel in the Age of the Ordnance Survey contributes to a new account of what happened to the British novel in the years spanning from the inspiration of Britain’s first comprehensive national mapping project in 1747, to the production of the “First Series” maps between 1791 and 1870, to its immediate aftermath in the late nineteenth century. The project unsettles and recalibrates claims for the similarities between novels and maps that emerged during the spatial turn in the humanities and the critical cartography movement in map studies, uncovering instead how maps and novels were both in dialogue and trending in different directions. Part One examines two approaches to topography by nineteenth-century British mapmakers and novelists. Chapter One turns away from the achievements of the much-celebrated Trigonometrical Survey and toward the downstream consequences that trigonometry produced in the latter stages of the mapmaking process; it argues that mapmakers considered topographical work to be more difficult, and less important, than trigonometrical work. Chapter Two shifts from map production by the Ordnance Survey to map consumption by literary characters who treat maps as inadequate for representing place. Characters in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and George Eliot’s Middlemarch do not understand maps as systems because they are preoccupied with the presence of individual bodies. Though they are ridiculed and underestimated for their inability to read maps, these characters tap into an affective sense of place that grasps locality without relying on borders, abstractions, or data points. Part Two turns to the treatment of islands on maps and in novels. Chapter Three theorizes islands as terraqueous spaces, combining land and sea, where the water at an island’s edge is part of the island’s identity. Drawing upon Ordnance Survey practices, William Wordsworth’s poetry, and Daniel Defoe’s map of Robinson Crusoe, it shows that terraqueous space is an obstacle to mapmaking. In contrast, the island’s geology shapes the novel’s sociality, allowing the novel to deftly navigate the porous boundary between being alone and being social. Chapter Four transitions from the fictional islands of Robinson Crusoe’s female successors to representations of the Isle of Wight produced by mapmakers like Isaac Dalby (1744-1824), homeowners like Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and Poet Laureate Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892), and novelists like Fanny Burney (1752-1840) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865). Whereas mapmakers and homeowners erase some of the messiness of lived experience, novels representing the Isle of Wight capture the feeling of being out of place that is the antithesis of mapping but also, and paradoxically, the way that we experience place when reading novels. Part Three, which contains Chapter Five, turns to the late nineteenth-century maps made by Anthony Trollope (1815-1882), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), and Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). The chapter focuses on co-construction and collaboration between readers and authors, readers and characters, and characters with other characters. When embedded in a social context instead of a vacuum, map misreading becomes a valuable way of knowing and an avenue toward building social connection. Focusing on the ways that maps circulate in and around novels, this chapter offers a guide to readers for negotiating the insides and outsides of books.