The Dabbler Book Club Review: Map of A Nation by Rachel Hewitt

September’s Dabbler Book Club choice was Rachel Hewitt’s Map Of A Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey, courtesy of Granta. Here, Dabbler Hey Skipper lets you know his thoughts, but what do you think? Please do let us know in the comments. Meantime, you can solve any christmas present conundrums by buying this great book for a paltry five pounds here.

We take maps for granted.  For most people, they are quotidian things used to link points A and B, one or both of which are unfamiliar, with a sequence of names creating a continuous strip of tarmac between the two.  Roadmaps are a hypotrophied representative of the genre; they convey visually what could be represented as a list of intersections and road names.

For those who wish to gain a sense of the entire landscape, however, road maps simply will not do.  The British are the lucky beneficiaries of the Ordnance Survey’s maps, the Landranger series (where one inch on the chart corresponds 50,000 inches on the ground, approximately 1.5 nautical miles) being most familiar.  As someone who uses maps professionally, and, in a previous life, frequently used the OS “one-to-fifties”, I have come to appreciate the amount of effort that must have gone into obtaining the information required, and the graphic artistry that conveys that information visually.

Appreciation, though, is not understanding.

Rachel Hewitt’s history covers the century from when maps did not, except as caricature, exist to the mid-1800s, when Great Britain became the first nation to be graphically described in accurate and fine detail.

Unsurprisingly, the genesis was military.  Jacobite uprisings in the Scottish Highlands had left King George II’s army chasing its tail through terrain both unforgiving and uncharted, losing the tactical advantage at every turn to the locals superior knowledge of their own backyard.   Eventually, of course, the redcoats prevailed.  But that outcome came at much greater cost because, without reliable maps, Highland geography was essentially terra incognita.   Even after seeing off the pretender, English soldiers were continually hampered in their pursuit of the remaining forces.

This, then, was the impetus for measuring and depicting Great Britain’s landscape.  “Map of a Nation” reveals the personalities and circumstances that led to establishing the Ordnance Survey, so named because it was organizationally attached to the Office of Ordnance, responsible for the King’s fortified castles and armaments.

Dr. Hewitt also describes how the Enlightenment provided the intellectual basis and additional sociological impetus for such an undertaking.  As well, she relates how the French through intermittently threatening England’s southern coast in the late 1700 and early 1800s, incited the English to shift their surveying south.  Interspersed with the periodic invasion threats were periods of cooperation between English and French mapmakers in establishing accurate baselines.  As with life, Dr. Hewitt also ties in the other great imperative besides death:  taxes.  The taxman’s desire to know what was where to be had ultimately replaced any military threat in ensuring a detailed survey of the United Kingdom at a scale far finer than one-to-fifty

Of course, mapmaking is more than just about people, it also about equipment and process.  “Map of a Nation” also describes the methods and difficulties of creating the triangular mesh of “trig points” upon which detailed surveys are based.  She leaves no doubt as to why it took a century of work both continuous and arduous to complete the task.  Major Thomas Colby, the director of the Ordnance Survey in the early 1800s, walked nearly 600 miles in 22 days establishing trig points.

While the book does an admirable job in relating the who, why, and when, it is not without its flaws.

At times, Dr. Hewitt infers rather more than history can bear. Too often phrases such as “it may have been”, or “we can imagine”, or frequent surmises of thoughts and feelings amount to pure conjecture.

Also, an editor more willing to wield a sharp blue pencil could have tightened the writing.  At times word choice is a problem.  More subjectively, descriptions tend to the elaborate and ornate.

Perhaps inevitably in a biography, the focus is on people and their circumstances.  However, I would have welcomed less space devoted to conjecture and description, and more, perhaps a chapter, discussing the technical, mathematical intricacies of geodesy and surveying.  Dr. Hewitt vividly captures the physical challenges of the task imposed by the environment and technology, but goes into much less detail as to why things that seem easy in principle are exceedingly difficult in practice.

In my own not inconsiderable experience, the Ordnance Survey maps are in a class by themselves.  They are beautiful to look at — despite being American, I have several of the Landranger sheets at home — and any careful viewing of them cannot fail to fill one with wonder at the incredible effort that went into every square inch.  Dr. Hewitt’s book humanizes the task, and in so doing leaves the reader understanding why it took a century to complete.


 

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About Author Profile: Worm

In between dealing with all things technological in the Dabbler engine room, Worm writes the weekly Wikiworm column every Saturday and our monthly Book Club newsletters.

8 thoughts on “The Dabbler Book Club Review: Map of A Nation by Rachel Hewitt

  1. wormstir@gmail.com'
    October 25, 2011 at 10:34

    thanks for the review Hey Skipper!

    Having also read the book I should point out that Map of a Nation is fixed firmly in the late 18th and early 19th century Age of Enlightenment, there’s nothing about the current state of the Ordnance Survey, it’s relevance in the face of electronic options and what the future holds for physical mapping, or bearded hikers looking for the nearest pint of real ale…

    As a literary work, Map of A Nation is a little dry, being primarily written as a PhD, and then ‘upgraded’ into book form by the shoeing-in of some scene-setting prose. And unfortunately for Hewitt, whereas the enlightenment scientists featured in books like Jenny Uglow’s Lunar Men or Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder are all enviable geniuses with titanic personalities, the antagonists of Map of a Nation are men who have a capacity for spending 20 years of their lives slowly walking back and forth across a field. However, whilst the people involved in the creation of the Ordnance Survey don’t seem to be particularly interesting in themselves, their endeavour most certainly is.

    What I found fascinating was how parts of the mapping process had such close parallels to today – apparently the first Ordnance surveyors were feared as agents of the government and suspected as being spies for the taxman, recording exactly what people had behind their garden hedges. Almost EXACTLY the same problems faced by Google street view these days, who stirred up tremendous ire with people who felt that the process of having their property mapped by those car-mounted cameras would lead to something nasty further down the line.

    I must say that especially as the Ordnance Survey was origianlly devised for military purposes, I would have liked a deeper exploration of the map as an agent of power, and it’s ability to subjugate and alter entire nations and cultures in one stroke of the pen – Hewitt only just touches on the map as a way of claiming enlightened superiority over feral tribes, and that to be mapped is an act of aggression and condescension.

    Overall a good book for someone who seriously likes their popular science and history, to be read at leisure.

    Favourite quote was this old one describing the 18thC vision of Ultima Thule:
    “those regions in which there was no longer any proper land nor sea nor air, but a sort of mixture of all three, of the consistancy of a jellyfish, in which one can neither walk nor sail, holding everything together.”
    -Which sounds to me suspiciously like Cornwall in february…

  2. jameshamilton1968@googlemail.com'
    James Hamilton
    October 25, 2011 at 11:02

    “At times, Dr. Hewitt infers rather more than history can bear. Too often phrases such as “it may have been”, or “we can imagine”, or frequent surmises of thoughts and feelings amount to pure conjecture.”

    One of the more disturbing experiences that my wife had when pitching her first proposal was that, pitching under her full name (and thus obviously as a woman) it was demanded of her that she provide such conjectures, that she inject “imaginative” ideas about what her subjects “must have been feeling”. Pitching under her initials, she was invariably taken to be male, and no such demands were made.

    I do hope that nothing like that happened to Dr. Hewitt, whom I had the privilege of seeing lecture on this subject in Edinburgh, excellently, last year.

    • alasguinns@me.com'
      Hey Skipper
      October 25, 2011 at 21:27

      That was the impression I got.

      I jumped into the book without noting the author’s name. Two pages into it, I knew the writer was a she, four pages later figured the publisher had told her to “jump up” the emotional and relational aspects in order to broaden the book’s appeal.

      Which must have been quite the task, because I’ll bet most of those cartographers were obsessives going through life as self-propelled personality free zones.

  3. jgslang@gmail.com'
    October 25, 2011 at 12:49

    My favourite, if tragic cartographical story is retailed by Graham Robb in The Discovery of France (2007). It tells how a young geometer, employed in surveying a country that was still highly localised and almost wholly unmapped, arrived in the village of Les Estables, some forty miles (and about 400 years) away from Lyons. The villagers, simple peasant folk with their simple peasant ways and beliefs, assumed that this outsider, never seen in their village, must therefore be a herald of Satan. They hacked him to pieces.

  4. andrewnixon@blueyonder.co.uk'
    October 25, 2011 at 13:10

    Interesting that Skipper keeps some British OS maps in Alaska – an indication of their aesthetic value.

    Brit the Elder has hundreds of them and will use any excuse to dig one out – he regards satnavs as a terrible form of cheating that robs us of the joys of map use.

  5. johngjobling@googlemail.com'
    malty
    October 25, 2011 at 16:21

    An absolute necessity Worm, maps, we would be lost without them. I still have some of those linen based OS maps, as fragile as the Turin shroud.

    The later series of OS were very accurate and could be relied upon when navigating ‘blind’ as in a white out, the ability to read them a must for survival. Unlike the early electronic jobbies, my climbing partner scrounged a Magellan from an army friend when satellite navigation was in its infancy, the gizmo weighing about the same as a two door Aga. Using it in a storm, in conjunction with the excellent IGN Carte Topographique maps we were promptly dispatched down an alpine gully. Returning the implement to its owner some weeks later my heavily bandaged partner muttered about its effectiveness. “Oh, its only accurate within 10 meters” said the soldier.

    The worlds most essential map? the old peripherique street map, without it you were dead.

  6. Gaw
    October 26, 2011 at 07:22

    Great review Skipper.

    I’ve recently had the pleasure of having a good look at the Admiralty’s books of hydrographic maps of British coastal waters. They’re beautifully clear, even for a layman like me. I think, as an institution, they’re at least as old as the OS.

    Updates are implemented across every copy through the distribution of marked-up tracing paper. If you’re a subscriber you’ll receive a sheet every so often and be expected to use it to mark up your book. Funny how everything is now printed digitally but they still use something as old-fashioned as tracing. Of course, it also sounds like great fun!

    • wormstir@gmail.com'
      October 26, 2011 at 08:34

      …the sad thing is that naval charts are very definately going the way of the dodo thanks to sat navs these days – I’m sure sat navs are brilliantly accurate and wonderful – but what happens if you capsize or the batteries go flat? There’s no replacing proper charts and chart reading skills in a survival situation

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