‘Intelligent Strangers as well as Members’: Enlightening Maps and Social and Political Spaces for Cartographic Conversations

On 28th May 1855, the council of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) reported that the Society’s Map Room was ‘daily visited by intelligent strangers as well as by members [of the Society]’ and that its premises ‘afford[ed] facilities not before possessed for the collection and diffusion of geographical information’. There were two things going on here. First, professional geographers – members of the society – were meeting to consult maps and to contribute and share geographical information orally, and second, discerning members of the public – intelligent strangers – were seeking geographical information in the maps and in the persons of the geographers with whom they mixed. Both processes were making geography as a discipline. Although the RGS was 25 years old at this point, there were 32 years to go before an enduring university position in the discipline was established (Clout, 2003 and 2020 discounts a brief earlier personal position at University College London in that department’s centenary volume), and the subject’s place in the school curriculum was patchy at best. Establishing geography in the minds of a discerning public as a discipline with specialist practitioners and expertise was an important step in its professional maturation, and personal encounter and conversation had important parts to play in the process. It was, after all, non-geographers’ presence in the RGS and their chance to secure geographical information there from maps and people which substantiated the RGS’s claim to be the ‘Map Office of the Nation’ and it was to secure non-geographers’ access that the map room received an annual government grant (Anon, 1855: v–vi; Crone and Day, 1960: 12; Baigent, 2006; Herbert, 2018: 150). This report prompts the two themes for the introduction to this Special Issue of The Cartographic Journal on Enlightening Maps, an editorial which marks 25 years of The Oxford Seminars in Cartography (TOSCA), and introduces papers given at TOSCA’s 25th anniversary conference. The themes are first, the social spaces for conversation which circulates knowledge, and second, the political, particularly national, quality of that conversation. We discuss these primarily in connection with spaces for conversation in the history of cartography in Britain, and primarily since 1990, but we note earlier map exhibitions – also spaces for cartographic conversations – and finally and briefly mention cartographic conversations in the Enlightenment which are considered in detail in the papers which follow. Conversations in closed, dedicated, professionalized cartographic spaces, such as offices of government mapmaking organizations, are not our concern. Rather we consider conversations in spaces which are liminal in institutional terms, since historians of cartography in modern Britain are institutionally rather rootless, and liminal because they occur on the boundary between amateur and professional worlds: in the open map room of a learned society otherwise reserved for members; in contemporaneous map seminars in scholarly institutions generally closed to the public; and, during the Enlightenment, in the letters pages of periodicals otherwise written by professional writers. Recent research interest in the circulation of knowledge in modern societies with mass print culture has attempted to get beyond print to elucidate the role of other media: letters in correspondence networks (e.g. Hotson, 2016; and Withers, 2004 for an example from Scottish Enlightenment geography), for example, or the continued importance of ‘talk’ (Hewitt, 2019). Though the writing of this editorial has involved much correspondence, its focus is on ‘talk’ in circulating knowledge in the history of cartography: the interlocutors and the sites for and contexts of their conversations. Lectures, speeches, heckling, formal question-and-answer sessions, conversazione and salons, sermons, door-to-door canvassing or enquiries, informal conversations, chat, and gossip have all come under scrutiny recently for their role in forging ‘ecologies of knowledge’ and creating cultures of knowing, as well as for their role in making performers of practitioners and communities