The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain
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The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain

Janet C. Myers, Deirdre H. McMahon, Janet C. Myers, Deirdre H. McMahon

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The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain

Janet C. Myers, Deirdre H. McMahon, Janet C. Myers, Deirdre H. McMahon

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Focusing on everyday life in nineteenth-century Britain and its imperial possessions"from preparing tea to cleaning the kitchen, from packing for imperial adventures to arranging home décor"the essays in this collection share a common focus on materiality, the nitty-gritty elements that helped give shape and meaning to British self-definition during the period. Each essay demonstrates how preoccupations with common household goods and habits fueled contemporary debates about cultural institutions ranging from personal matters of marriage and family to more overtly political issues of empire building. While existing scholarship on material culture in the nineteenth century has centered on artifacts in museums and galleries, this collection brings together disparate fields"history of design, landscape history, childhood studies, and feminist and postcolonial literary studies"to focus on ordinary objects and practices, with specific attention to how Britons of all classes established the tenets of domesticity as central to individual happiness, national security, and imperial hegemony.

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PART I:
Mapping Domestic Territories

Chapter 1
The Tangible Shape of the Nation: The State, the Cheap Printed Map, and the Manufacture of British Identity, 1784-1855

Jo Guldi
In 1775, James Boswell had just heard that parts of the East Indies were better mapped than the Highlands, a fact he found outrageous. As Boswell and Samuel Johnson both knew, no single authority was to blame for the white spaces on available maps of the Highlands, but there were important consequences to follow from those lacunae. The production of maps functioned as a rough gauge of commercial interest, and consequently the hopes for development and enrichment that a region could expect. Johnson only observed coolly, “That a country may be mapped, it must be travelled over” (2: 363). As a native Scot, Boswell resented what he discerned in the tides of history. A lack of travel in Scotland and a lack of maps ordained a continued dearth of interest and investment in the region moving forward. It implied the continuation of poverty by a structured pessimism about Scotland’s susceptibility to improvement, and that very attitude, as soon as it became evident in a lack of maps, determined the failure of investment to follow. Wasn’t the implication of England’s mapping preferences, objected Boswell to Johnson, that Scotland “is not worth mapping?” (2: 363). His question belied both puzzlement and resentment. Who had determined that Scotland wasn’t worth mapping? Was it the fault of many generations of travelers, or of anonymous investors, or mappers commercial or governmental, or something murkier like cultural opinion, as Johnson seemed to imply? All that Boswell could tell was that the values bound up with that lack of maps would have profound economic consequences for disparities that would impact generations to come.
We tend to think of enlightenment initiatives like surveying, travel, and mapping as coherent and unilateral processes of state control and exploitation, intended by European elites as the predecessor to a program of economic assimilation and inclusion, envisioned from the beginning through desires for control and dominance over other peoples.1 In histories since Francis Bacon, the technology of mapmaking has played the role of accomplice to enlightenment, and since T.B. Macaulay, British historians have depended upon such a thrust of history to explain how modern Britons came to understand themselves as members of a nation united by their experience of modern materiality. More recent historians such as Roy Porter and Matthew Edney have followed Macaulay directly into a privileging of the printing press and paper as tools of assimilative enlightenment.2 In their histories, material objects like books and maps are represented as the vehicles of power, capable of playing a single role in history, that is, bending the collective psychology of their readership inevitably towards the ideological unity of peoples and nations. In the case of nationalist historians like Linda Colley, the circulation of maps and travelers suggests how objects reproduced enlightenment ideas and helped to create a unified, egalitarian nation with a modern idea of citizenship. In the case of historians of empire like Matthew Edney, the circulation of maps among the elites suggests how European elites reproduced their own hierarchical view of society into the objects they used, which came to embody differentials in power rather than an age of access to all promised by defenders of enlightenment. In both stories, the map as object appears as a mere reflection of elite intent, reproducing and extending the reach of power to assimilate and to exploit.
Yet the maps have a story of their own to tell, one less about reproducing the strategies and ideas of elites than about the efficacy of objects themselves and the law of unintended consequences. Boswell’s confusion, as an eighteenth-century map reader wondering at the intentions of map designers, points us to a rift in the life of the object. Was the printed map really the mute vehicle for the transmission of power that recent historians have claimed? Or was it a technology invested with the eerie power to shape mass psychology in directions unanticipated by its designers, a role ascribed to technology by now forgotten theorists like historian of technology, Lewis Mumford?
The distorted borders on Boswell’s map were the result of a process of state power as translated through the competing discourses of rival institutions within the state, a process that political historians have conceptualized as “governmentality,” after Michel Foucault. Such a process occurs as compounded institutional decisions create unforeseen consequences in the institutionalization of information flow, giving rise to profound after effects in access to power and the market.3 In Britain, government map making stretched backwards to the nautical maps of the seventeenth century and the military maps of the 1720s before being extended to the nationwide collection of data on roads with the launch of the Ordnance Survey. Between 1784 and 1855, as mapmakers directly translated the state’s activities for a consuming public, a new industry of stationers and printers benefited from access to the Post and Ordnance Survey data, causing a flourishing tide of maps to be disseminated to commercial travelers and tourists, gradually trickling down into the classroom itself.
In fact, the eighteenth-century map was very much the product of multiple and conflicting intentions, part of a larger chain involving institutional actors such as the military, the state, commercial surveyors and publishers, and readers themselves. In 1784, when government activity with the Post prompted the first modern road maps, government data had become the primary source upon which the printing of maps depended. Commercial cartographers engraved and published maps relying entirely for their data upon government-directed surveys conducted by the military and Post, whose activities were structured according to the hierarchical divisions of the early eighteenth century. The military survey of Scotland conducted between 1747 and 1755 remained the last use of the most advanced surveying methods and technology in Scotland, even while new military surveys were conducted of England and Ireland, creating a far more accurate representation of these territories. By 1800, the original Scottish survey was hopelessly out of date; yet the military’s other obligations meant postponing Scottish surveying until the 1860s.
In the transmission of maps down a chain of actors with conflicting aims and readerships, linear intentions were frustrated. Despite complaints from London publishers, initiatives by Edinburgh cartographers, and indeed even the assimilation-bent policies of the government itself after 1790, none of these factors reversed the pattern of exclusion set by eighteenth-century government surveying. As a result, London publishers proved unwilling to incorporate their haphazard knowledge of Scotland in their new, scientific representations of Britain as a whole. Thus the common traveler’s map of Britain represented an icon of the nation jarring to modern eyes: through the 1850s, publishers routinely depicted Scotland as a white corner on the map, lopping off everything above Edinburgh with the parchment’s edge.
Governmental borders and omissions were converted to general experience through the materiality of the modern road map: the lightweight, folded, mass-produced, bird’s-eye view of the roads that appeared only with government subsidies after 1784. Until 1855, when the repeal of the Stamp Acts created a truly national press, the cheap printed map formed the primary point of access by which most Britons grasped how their nation had been connected by the state building of roads and expansion of commerce. This visible shape of the nation, in tangible and portable form, offered Britons a ticket for exploration and a tool for belonging. The new roadmaps immediately began reshaping both the abstract national imaginary of the nation and the daily experience of navigation across territory. Cheap maps, instruments of national imaginary and distortion both, meanwhile spread into every fissure of British life from property speculation and commercial travel to basic education, as children learned to understand the historical necessity of the nation by reading maps. Maps offered one of the primary tools for molding the meaning of British citizenship before 1850.
Contemporaries like Boswell were capable of a critical reading of these objects, wondering how the absence of information would shape decisions down the line. Many eighteenth-century people must have felt similarly frustrated in tracing the ordering of knowledge, power, and investment in the new objects of information acquisition (such as maps) that surrounded them. Their objects were the product of conflicting desires for the nation, a contingent chain of information handing down maps in sometimes arbitrary formats. New actors were playing a role in shaping the flow of investment in ways less rational or consensus-driven than theorists of sentimental economics like Bernard Mandeville and Adam Smith might have predicted.
What they were less able to articulate was how the contingent chain of state and commercial surveyors, as well as the objects that passed between them, structured the flow of events down the line, or how the processes of governmentality continuously thwart the intentions of designers and reformers alike. Just so, the decisions of eighteenth-century investors were being shaped by a new world of information and maps, a world where small choices at the institutional level had potentially disproportionate consequences in the shape of standardized, mass-produced objects of information, like the map and the guidebook, and their potential to influence economic choices.
Yet even though they were the product of contingent and arbitrary inclusions and exclusions of information, maps nevertheless reshaped the way Britons thought about the borders of their world. New maps designed for pedagogy, mineral extraction, and land speculation recopied the fissures in the nation enshrined by the state, enforcing a rule of exclusion and ignorance of the nation’s peripheries. Students memorizing the names of every British hamlet and cove so that they could trade there as adults, for example, had no knowledge of the nuances of Scotland or Ireland. As Boswell understood, maps governed imagination, and imagination governed investment. The maps, contingent and arbitrary as they were, nevertheless continued to shape experiences of wealth and poverty for generations to come.
These facts produce a story with subtle but important differences from the established history of how mute objects encouraged the rest of the world to desire both rule by and participation in the European elite. Eighteenth-century maps, the product of mixed intentions and elite confusions, were never intended as the harbingers of English identity inflicted onto Scotland. Rather, the slippages and oversights created by the contradictory impulses of the military, the state, and the investor produced haphazard objects misaligned with their intention, at the very same moment when markets conspired to give these objects a disproportionate power over the imagination of their readers. Far from being the mute vehicle of power, the map was an agent with a mind of its own, capable of diverging from the desires of its designers and reconceptualizing British identity in unintended ways.

The State as Patron of the Public Map

Modern maps were bound up with nation-building and the nation-state. Cheapness and accuracy depended upon the expensive surveys behind the maps having been conducted, for the first time, not by private firms or individual entrepreneurs, but rather by the state itself. Surveys of England, Scotland, and Ireland, initially conducted by the military for reconnaissance purposes, were eventually offered to the public through the instrumentation of the Post Office with its mandate to further national security by another route, the improvement of communications. The coming of the cheap map was thus linked to other means of exploring the nation: military conquest, a national road network, a national coach network, and a national mail, each of them the direct enterprise of the state.
Specifically, the quantitative, standardized practices of eighteenth-century mapmaking and publication were wholly dependent upon the military. Military schools brought England the best of trigonometric research from the continent.4 Military surveyors themselves became the first serial map publishers. Daniel Paterson, originally surveyor and Assistant Quarter-Master-General of His Majesty’s Forces, while on the Board of Ordnance forged the first link between the government and the public road map. During his travels for the Ordnance, Paterson had carefully documented situations when his own estimates of road length differed from the figures in Ogilby’s seventeenth-century strip-maps, the contemporary standard for road distances (“Carnan against Bowles”). Paterson’s New and Accurate Description of All the Direct and Cross Roads of England appeared in 1772, offering the first new survey of Britain’s roads in a century, its data the direct reflection of individual travels sponsored by the military on the nation’s roads.
But it was the Post Office, rather than the military, that was responsible for the graphic layout and physical shape of the single-sheet, folded road map as we know it. The Post Office had been engaged since 1711 in periodically resurveying the distances of England’s roads so as to accurately rate postage (Lewins 67). In 1784, that practice received a new stimulus when Britain’s Post Office received a mandate to oversee expanding communications in the form of roads and coaches.5 John Cary, a London printer, had befriended John Palmer, the organizer of the new mail coaches. In 1784, the year when the first mail coaches left the General Post Office in Lombard Street, Palmer commissioned Cary to produce a new kind of map, synthesizing the data that Postal Surveyors had been collecting in the course of appointing new coach routes to carry the mail. Palmer’s commission launched two of the most important names in nineteenth-century cartography: both Cary and his surveyor, Aaron Arrowsmith, would set up map shops of their own. Cary’s was along the Strand and Arrowsmith’s was in Long Acre (Baigent). At Palmer’s behest, Cary was granted a monopoly on the Post Office survey data and the power to reproduce it.
The maps of both Cary and Arrowsmith were marked by the stamp of the Post. Both depicted the road system that carried the post coaches as their subject. The General Post Office, Lombard Street, served as the center for all distances, being the point from which all mail coaches departed. The Post coach routes meant that the maps’ most important feature was a direct relationship to the details of topography and connection that determined whether a coach would be on time. As a result of these official requirements, Cary’s maps broke with the seventeenth-century tradition of the strip-map and distance table, oriented to the tra...

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