Month 7 (January 2012)
This month I have been mostly... Exploring charted territories
Pocket map of Brighton and the Sussex Coast
There’s nothing like an idiosyncratic map collection to kick-start the new year, so I began the second quarter-phase of the project by cataloguing section VI – ‘Atlases and maps, formerly the property of Samuel Butler’. It provides a fascinating insight into his life and interests: there are Canterbury Land District area plans with accompanying descriptions of sheep stations available at auction; British Admiralty Charts depicting the waters around Greece, which Butler used to conceptualise the ‘real’ geography of the Odyssey; and numerous Ordnance Survey maps covering parts of London and the South East, many of which are swarming with the red crayon lines Butler drew to record the hundreds of miles he travelled, mainly on foot. His passion for walking can also be traced on his maps of Northern Italy and the Southern Alps, which highlight pedestrian routes that incorporate many of the locations featured in his sketches and paintings.
Map of Canton Ticino, 1874
With the first ‘Butler Day’ on the horizon, I’ve also started planning the exhibition, ‘Evolution: The Race to Understanding’. My aim is to show Butler’s works on evolution in the context of the alternative and better-known works published throughout the nineteenth century. The display will contain mainly printed books (including some lovely editions of Erasmus and Charles Darwin’s works), and will highlight some of the profound expressions of early evolutionary thinking, which inspired Darwin to formulate the Origin of Species and which fuelled debates about the mechanisms of evolution well into the twentieth century. It promises to be a thought-provoking day.
'Fusio', painted by Samuel Butler in 1900