Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Most maps, even those that are not beautiful or colourful, are designed to be used and ap-
preciated visually. Tactile maps made for the use of blind people are inevitably an exception
because they are intended not to be seen but to be touched.
In 1839, the Glasgow Asylum for the Blind commissioned what is thought to be the first
tactile map created in the United Kingdom. The National Archives holds two copies of this
map, each made from a sheet of thick, white paper, embossed so that the lines of the map
are raised above the rest of the surface. By tracing the surface with his or her fingertips, the
reader can 'see' the outline of the British Isles. Although the Braille system of representing
letters with patterns of raised dots had been developed in France in the 1820s, it had not yet
come into common use in the United Kingdom, so the text is rendered with raised versions
of ordinary Roman letters and Arabic numerals.
John Alston, the director of the asylum, sent these two copies of the map to Lord John
Russell, the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on 15 August 1839. In drawing the
government's attention to the value - and also the difficulty and expense - of making topics
and other education material accessible to blind people, Alston hoped to secure a small gov-
ernment grant to support the asylum's work. He described the new map as 'very superior'
to the tactile maps previously produced at the New England Institute for the Education of
the Blind in Boston, Massachusetts, although, as the New England Institute had published an
entire atlas of the United States of America a few years earlier, this claim must be treated
sceptically. The map has a deliberately simple design, an impression heightened for a sighted
person by its complete lack of colour. It shows little more than the outline of the coasts and
selected place names, with no sign of the industrial towns, agricultural land, canals, or new
railways that formed such prominent features of the early Victorian landscape. The careful
marking of latitude and longitude in the margins suggests an attempt at mathematical accur-
acy.
Although Alston's map is an impressive object for its time, some aspects of it seem rather
puzzling from a 21st century perspective. The selection of place names seems arbitrary: for
instance, Bristol is marked but Liverpool is not. Although the dashed lines might easily be in-
terpreted as boundaries, only those separating England from Wales and Scotland correspond
closely to any actual administrative divisions. Instead, these lines merely group the names
of towns and cities with the dots marking their positions. The lack of any clear distinction
between individual places and larger areas, unwittingly implying that Scotland, Glasgow and
Dumfries are all roughly equal in size and importance, must have left the map's original users
with a rather distorted impression of the geography of the British Isles.
