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C1855
Map of India, Contructed with great care and research FROM ALL THE LATESTS AUTHORITIES and intended more particularly to facilitate a reference to the Civil Authorities and intended more particularly to facilitate a reference to THE CIVIL AND MILITARY STA
Mapmaker:
An imposing large scale and up-to-date map of India made at the height of the British Empire’s ‘imperial century’ by the Royal Geographer to the Queen, James Wyld. The map was made under the direction of Captain R.M. Grindlay and … Read Full Description
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Full Title:
Map of India, Contructed with great care and research FROM ALL THE LATESTS AUTHORITIES and intended more particularly to facilitate a reference to the Civil Authorities and intended more particularly to facilitate a reference to THE CIVIL AND MILITARY STA
Date:
C1855
Mapmaker:
Condition:
In good condition, folds as issued.
Technique:
AUTHENTICITY
Genuine antique
dated:
1855
Description:
An imposing large scale and up-to-date map of India made at the height of the British Empire’s ‘imperial century’ by the Royal Geographer to the Queen, James Wyld. The map was made under the direction of Captain R.M. Grindlay and is dedicated to Sir James Rivett-Carnac, Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company and Governor of the Presidency of Bombay, 1839-42. Captain Robert Melville Grindlay was an artist who went to India in 1803, aged 17. He served with the East India Company’s military service from 1804-20, producing a large number of sketches and drawings on Indian subjects and gathering information on uncharted territories. This map, published just two years before the Indian Mutiny of 1857, is one of the last significant maps to depict India under East India Company rule. The Government of India Act 1858 liquidated the British East India Company and transferred its functions and powers to the British Crown. An extensive table in the top right gives distances between all major towns and cities and in the lower right there is a table with a colour key which lists places, mainly on the coast, where various armies were situated. The Bengal, Bombay and Madras armies are respectively underlined in red, green and dark grey. Military Stations, Zillas & Collectorates, and populations for each province are shown, in line with the published intent of the map to ‘facilitate a reference to the Civil and Military Stations’.
James Hope Wyld (1812 - 1887)
Wyld the younger was born in 1812 and was a highly-regarded British mapmaker known for producing maps with the most recently-acquired information. He was educated at Woolwich, in preparation for joining the army, but at 18 he joined his father, James Wyld the elder, in the map publishing business. Like his father, he was held in high esteem and would come to hold 17 European orders of merit during his life. He showed a flare for business and when his father died in 1836, he became the sole proprietor. In 1839, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and appointed Royal Geographer to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1839, a post his father had held prior to his death. He was famous for his prolific and up-to-date mapmaking, so much so that the satirical newspaper Punch wrote in 1849 that Wyld ‘makes it his business to see further than anyone else’ and that if a new country were to be found in the centre of the earth, Wyld’s skills were such that he would in no time create a ‘Grand Map of that delightful spot, the Centre of the Earth, published for the use of Emigrants’, allowing travel from Sydney to London, not by land but through. This view was no doubt spurred by the construction of ‘Wyld’s Great Globe’, a spherical hall in the shape of a globe some 18 metres in diameter in which visitors could ‘see’ the world from the inside out. The attraction at London’s Leicester Square was second only to the Great Exhibition in visitor numbers. He ran the attraction while concurrently serving as a Whig Member of Parliament for the seat of Bodmin (1847-1852 and 1857-1868). He died in 1887 in Kensington after which his son James John Cooper Wyld, took over the business.
