ABSTRACT
Plate 1 shows a world map drawn by a young woman at the Leeds Ladies College, Yorkshire, in 1880. It has been painstakingly copied from an atlas into a notebook at a size of about 11cm×16cm. Although the watercolour has faded, the pink wash of the British Empire is still just visible, its extent emphasised by use of a Mercator projection, which enlarges land areas towards the poles. The map has been fastidiously labelled: land masses and oceans are in sloping capitals; other place names are executed in a tiny, noncursive script. We don’t know how long it took her to copy this map. Ten hours? Perhaps more. The task’s function as a learning activity was, presumably, straightforward: simply to show where places are in relation to each other. As the notebook is hard-backed and quarter bound in leather, we can assume it was intended to last for many years: an authoritative and unchanging inventory of the world.
