Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
If other maps in this chapter focus on a particular place, this railway poster-map is more
about a railway company's ability to whisk the late-Victorian traveller from place to place all
over the United Kingdom - or at least, to those places where the company had stations and
hotels. On a closer look, the map offers enticements to these specific places, tailored to dif-
ferent types of passenger. The businessman or emigrant might be impressed by the huge ho-
tels and ferries at Liverpool and Holyhead. For those wanting a seaside holiday, Morecambe
and Llandudno beckon, while Lichfield Cathedral offers culture and the Menai and Britannia
Bridges are engineering spectacles. There is much to appeal to connoisseurs of the pictur-
esque at Windermere and Killarney.
The line diagram laid out over the outline map shows far more than the London and North
Western Railway Company's own lines. Its coverage extends to other lines over which they
had negotiated the right to run their carriages. This allowed them to offer services to the West
Country, Wales, East Anglia and Scotland, which were outside the remit of the Company
name. It even extends across the Irish Sea by means of the Company's steamships, which
delivered passengers to rail services in Ireland. The Company's hotels are listed at the lower
edge.
This poster is found among advertisements for ladies' underwear, an opera house, canned
tomatoes, pig powders and Christmas crackers, each representing a claim to copyright in
the artwork shown. They are each attached to a form giving details of the person or com-
pany claiming the rights and, where different, the artist. The form for this map is dated 21
March 1899 and gives the copyright owners as McCorquodale & Co Ltd of London, makers
of posters and postcards. This registered poster had the Company's logo trimmed away from
the top, in order to fit the form. Complete, it must certainly have attracted attention when dis-
played on station platforms and in waiting rooms and railway carriages.
The artist is named as Alfred Pernet of 43 Arvon Road, Islington, North London. Little is
known of him except that he also painted a Dorset landscape, and that the 1901 census re-
cords him as a 'lithographic artist'. It seems likely that he contributed the original watercol-
our vignettes around the edge of a route map generated by the Company itself. These views
are arranged artistically, although places shown in them are nowhere near their actual posi-
tion on the map. This could be misleading for someone who did not know the country, who
might think that Liverpool lay roughly in the position of Dover, for instance.
Land ownership was a major reason for mapping of the countryside, whether for individu-
als or nations' colonies. The railway companies were major landowners, but of linear rather
than consolidated holdings. For them, acquiring land was not an aim in itself, but rather a
