Gardiner’s calico works seems to have prospered for quite some time: According to one source it was “a business of considerable extent” which employed “250 hands,” by far the biggest local business in this period. Workers would then walk between the drying cloths, scooping water from the channels to drench them, the process of wetting and drying by direct sunlight causing the calico to gradually whiten.
CARTOGRAPHICA MAP MAN SERIES
A riverside location was necessary, as the bleaching process for calico involved laying out the material on the river bank between a series of parallel water channels. The 10 mile-stretch of the river between Croydon and its confluence with the Thames at Wandsworth was at the time one of the hardest-worked rivers of its size in the world, its waters providing the steam power and resources for numerous factories and mills, including at least four calico works in Wandsworth itself.
The Map of Man was produced at Henry Gardiner’s calico works in Wandsworth, which he had opened on the banks of the River Wandle some time around 1780. ” The path passes through the many “Attributes of Vice” before entering a second, smaller gateway to the “Attributes of Virtue.” These one to a still-smaller “Gate of Happiness,” through which one reaches a central mountain-top temple bearing the inscription “Virtue and Fame conducts each prudent Youth / who steadily pursues the Paths of Truth.” Within this is a spiral path, with an impressive gate entitled the “ Grand Entrance of the Passions. The central area is bounded by a cordiform “Line of Life,” which runs like a river through both the lands of Folly and Virtue. The map’s design features much further complexity. Those who have the benefit of a rigorous education and upbringing choose-inevitably, it would seem-the path of virtue, which takes them through the “Land of Promise” and the “Land of Honour,” culminating of course in the “Land of Immortality.” For those not so fortunate the way leads through youthful folly, the “Land of Desolation,” and ultimately to the “Land of Punishment.”
“Ah Cruel, they, the Cruelest of their Kind / Who Innocence mislead in Folly’s Maze / No kind Paternal Hand to Guide their steps / Thro’ Storms and Tempests of a Giddy World/ But Send them Floating down the Streams of Vice.”
CARTOGRAPHICA MAP MAN HOW TO
“Delightful task to rear the tender thought / And teach the young Idea how to Shoot / To pour the fresh Instruction o’er the mind / To breath the enlivening Spirit and to Fix / The generous purpose in the glowing Breast.”Ĭonversely, at lower right a figure the “Genius of Folly” (wearing a fool’s cap, of course) introduces two children to the path of vice. Thus, at lower right, near the beginning of the path of virtue, two youngsters are shown receiving guidance from figures representing “human aid” and “experience,” accompanied by the following verse: The choice, it suggests, is determined by the quality of education and guidance received at an early age. The map depicts in detail the alternative paths of virtue and vice, providing the viewer with a didactic allegory of the journey from cradle to grave. Even more unusual for being printed in madder (a purplish red) on a fine calico. The ” Map of Man,” an extraordinarily rare example of allegorical cartography offering moral guidance on personal conduct and lifestyle, typifying a distinctive genre of persuasive map making that became especially popular in late 18 th-century Britain.
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