Information
COLOURED MANUSCRIPT ATLAS BY 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL
EARLY & SKILFUL STUDENT GEOGRAPHICAL EXERCISE
GILLETT, Sophia. [Manuscript School Atlas].
(Nuneaton), Hartshill School, March 1818. 4to (23 x 19 cm). Manuscript School Atlas, drawn in ink and watercolour on 12 leaves. With a calligraphic "title-page" without title, reading "Sophia Gillett, 3rd mo: 1818 Hartshill School." Contemporary brown paper wrappers.
| Orders and Information | € 2750 |
A delightful manuscript atlas drawn and coloured by Sophia Gillett of Harthill School (Nuneaton, Warwickshire) as an exercise for a geography class in March 1818. The atlas is an early example of a tried and tested nineteenth-century teaching method for acquiring an exact knowledge of the geography of countries, provinces and counties, namely to copy or trace existing maps meticulously. The technical skill of the drawing is impressive for a school student, with even the lettering of the "title-page" (which could not have been exactly copied or traced) showing her excellent command of hand. After the title-page comes a characteristic sheet with a key to the conventions for rendering land, water, borders and rivers, followed by a seemingly random selection of maps, mostly two to a page, copied from the available material (and curiously omitting her and the school's own country and the surrounding counties). It covers the English counties of Durham and Dorset, Somerset and Sussex, Kent and Devon, Lincolnshire, and Yorkshire, as well as North Wales, South Wales, Hungary and the Iberian peninsula, the British Isles and Denmark, and Italy and European Russia. She does not indicate her sources but must have made use of two miniature atlases by John Gibson, an engraver and publisher active in London from 1752 to 1790. The county maps follow his New and Accurate Maps of the Counties of England and Wales (1759, 1770 or 1779), while the national maps follow his Atlas Minimus (1758, 1779 or 1792). We have not identified the models for North and South Wales. The preface to the Atlas Minimus notes that it was intended "to give young gentlemen & ladies a general idea of geography, as well as to be of service to those of more years & experience."
Although Hartshill School in Nuneaton is mentioned as a charity school as early as 1730, the surviving school records go back only to 1887. The present school building was built in 1852 and enlarged in 1885. It became the Hartshill North Council School in 1903, later North County School and finally Hartshill County Secondary School in 1952. What little documentation is known from the relevant period makes no mention of Sophia Gillett. The International Genealogical Index records only one possibly relevant person in Warwickshire or the surrounding counties, a Sophia Gillitt, daughter of William Gillitt and Hannah, born in Brailes (Warwickshire), about fifty kilometres south of Nuneaton, on 26 October 1803. She would therfore have been fourteen years old when she drew the atlas.
The atlas collates [A]12 = 12 leaves, plus a bifolium of the same paper stock pasted down to the wrappers. It is executed on wove paper watermarked in two quarters of each sheet (centred in the lower righthand quarter as the mark reads): three feathers (Prince of Wales)|"M & J"|"1813," with the foot of the mark toward the long edge. The papermakers were Joseph Molineux and Thomas Johnston in Lewes (Sussex): see Paul Dawson, ed., The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts, pp. 100-101 (items D81, 83 & 85: see also A19 and C47), recording this mark in letters written in London in November 1814.
With two leaves detached, but otherwise in very good condition, with only a couple small marginal chips. An early example of a manuscript school atlas, skilfully executed by a fourteen-year-old student.
