This wallchart springs from a confluence stretching back toWilliam Darton, master printer, who in 1791 published The visible world – one of several English editions of the first picture dictionary for children, Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus(1658). In 1804 his son, also William, set up as an engraver and printer on Holborn Hill, and by 1827 was advertising ‘the most approved maps, plans, and charts, of every description, from the best authorities, constantly on sale, at William Darton’s map, print, and chart warehouse’. On William junior’s retirement in 1836 his son John joined with Samuel Clark; their partnership dissolved in 1843 but its imprint, Darton and Clark, continued to be used until 1845 and for some time afterwards. From that year the business, Darton & Co., was also known as the ‘Original infant school depot and juvenile library’. In 1849 Clark, who had a special interest in geography, published to some acclaim a portfolio of twelve Maps illustrative of the physical and political history of the British empire. So although this chart appears above the Darton and Clark imprint, it is not clear that it was printed in Darton’s workshop, or indeed who was responsible for its publication. (Darton the younger appears in Todd’s directory of London printers 1800–40, though not as a lithographer; he is absent from Twyman’s directory of London lithographic printers 1800–1850.)
Whatever the chart’s provenance we may see in the Darton and Clark enterprise a cluster of interest in, and suggestions of a market for, visual methods in geographic education. But even if the chart’s intended audience – ‘infants and nursery’ – is interpreted liberally, its contents may appear advanced for such tender years. And geographers would be disappointed by the slapdash relationships between land and sea, and size and position of continents relative to poles, displayed in the two globes at top left. The two proportional diagrams at left (land and water) and right (principal islands) are equally unconvincing. However the eight topographic scenes – variants on a ‘wet and dry’ theme – are more persuasive: relatively accurate as to detail and reflecting a well-established picturesque tradition.
School geography doubtless involved children in much rote work, like listing the world’s longest rivers, or reciting the names of stations on the Great Western Railway’s line from London to Bristol. Does this document hint at a more progressive didactic principle (explicit two decades later in J. M. D. Meiklejohn’s On the best and worst methods of teaching geography, 1869): that teaching children to think about relationships between facts, about facts as evidence, is more important than their simply learning facts? This is speculative, as must be any attempt to reconstruct the many different ways in which this chart could have been used in classrooms by teachers: how it was explained, how pupils responded, how reading aloud was shared. What kinds of reading act were encouraged in the classroom of 1845:browsing, scanning, searching? Were pupils asked to point, speak, and memorize? Where did their attention fix, then waver, and then drift from schoolroom dust into an afternoon reverie of imagined faraway shores?
Meiklejohn’s comparative method survived well into the following century: this diagram of ‘Physical relief’ is from John Bartholomew, Meiklejohn’s intermediate school atlas ... designed to teach geography by Meiklejohn’s comparative method for middle and lower forms, London, 1942: Meiklejohn and Son, p. 7. It can usefully be compared with our visual aid of the 1840s and also with the example of the same topic, shown below, fromOdham’s encyclopaedia for children (first edn 1948; this is 1967, but barely different from the pages which I pored over in 1958).
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