- 5/17/2025
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00:00The British Library in London is home to a staggering four and a half million maps.
00:15Mysterious and beautiful, these rarely seen treasures are much more than just two-dimensional
00:21depictions of a physical world.
00:23Among its most quixotic, strange and colourful treasures are the world's first mass-produced
00:33satirical maps, maps that used country boundaries to reinforce national stereotypes.
00:40The form of a country, the map of a country, can have an enormous emotive force.
00:48Visually striking, poking fun at the high and mighty, at countries and their leaders,
00:55these maps came from a time when nations were still working out who they were.
01:00People were asking, well, what does it mean to be British?
01:05What does it mean to be French?
01:07What does it mean to be German or Italian?
01:11These extraordinary maps did more than just poke fun.
01:16They made politics visual.
01:19They helped create national identity.
01:22And they ushered in a modern world where mass media and political spin went hand in hand.
01:29Europe, in the 1870s, was a place of political tension.
01:53Countries vied with one another for territory and influence.
01:58Nationalism was on the rise.
02:02Nationalism was a movement which grew out of the Napoleonic Wars.
02:07The countries which had laboured under Napoleonic rule emerged from this period with a definite desire,
02:18with a distinct desire, to have an identity of their own and to defend that identity.
02:25For Britain, it was the great era of maps.
02:34The Ordnance Survey was mapping the nation in almost microscopic detail,
02:39while the empire and wars in Europe made maps indispensable for understanding Britain and its place in the world.
02:46By that time, the shapes of Europe, in particular, were pretty well known.
02:51I mean, the 19th century had seen a huge explosion in map availability.
02:56Papers were full of maps, books were full of maps, atlases were getting published.
03:02The base of knowledge about the shape of our lands and all the rest of it was already there.
03:10One British mapmaker, Frederick Rose, was determined to give that knowledge a whole new twist.
03:17In 1877, he made the first of the world's mass-produced satire maps.
03:24They impart opinion and information all at the same time,
03:30in a way that is visually very striking and, you know, quite beautiful.
03:34They are very much a product of their age.
03:36I mean, Rose was doing these maps at the zenith of the British Empire.
03:41And it just shored up the Victorian sense of who we are and our place in the world.
03:50Entitled Assyrio-Comic Map of Europe for the year 1877,
03:55Rose's map captures a moment of anxiety for Europe.
04:00The so-called Eastern Question, the fear of Russia, pictured as a giant octopus.
04:06The map was meant to inform, to entertain, and to shock.
04:13And it still does.
04:15We know exactly how people responded to it visually,
04:18because people are continuing to respond to it visually.
04:21There's the case of the Russian academic recently,
04:23who was incandescent with rage at the fact that it had been reproduced,
04:27because he felt that the use of an octopus to portray his country
04:33was a monstrous distortion of the true nature of his country.
04:39This map has been insulting people and amusing people in equal measure
04:44for the last 130 years.
04:46The tentacles of the Russian octopus stretch out over much of the continent
04:54with an alarming and malign reach.
04:59So all of it links together in some way,
05:01and really what you have are a series of interlinked narratives
05:05linking up with each other right the way across the map.
05:07But looming over the whole is the Russian octopus
05:09with tentacles going out in every direction.
05:11The idea of the octopus does seem to be Rose's own, as far as I know.
05:16I mean, I've seen earlier depictions of Russia as a bear
05:19or as a ravening wolf in caricature maps like this,
05:22going right back to the Crimean War.
05:26But as soon as you're looking at the detail and Rose's opinion
05:29of what's going on in the various countries around Europe at the time,
05:34you're sucked right in.
05:36Rose uses the physical shape of each nation to create a cartoon stereotype.
05:47Here's a grumpy-looking Ireland with home rule on her mind.
05:53Italy is a young woman,
05:55because the nation had only been in existence for a few years.
06:00Germany is a fierce-looking Prussian armed to the teeth.
06:03Spain, indifferent to events in Europe, is asleep.
06:08But it's that grey menace of the octopus that dominates.
06:14This image gave, if you like, the opponents of Russia a focus.
06:20For instance, it's strangling Poland.
06:22Poland then formed part of Russia.
06:24It's in the process of strangling Bulgaria,
06:27and it was, in fact, the Russian invasion of Bulgaria
06:32that provoked the great crisis,
06:34which very, very nearly led to a First World War,
06:38something like 30 years before it actually occurred.
06:40It is such a convenient thing, because people do recognise their own country.
06:50And the form of a country, the map of a country,
06:54can have an enormous emotive force.
06:59And it resonates.
07:01It's a time of great sort of political upheaval and uncertainty.
07:07And I suppose a slight lightness of touch
07:12is a good way of bringing that home to people.
07:14But it's not only the octopus that's important.
07:20You've got other little side scenes.
07:23For instance, one very small touch
07:25is that the Turkish Empire is shown as a Turk
07:29who lies prostrate beneath the octopus.
07:32And the golden watch of the Turk is Constantinople,
07:36which everybody thought was the main objective of Russia's expansion.
07:40If you look, even a small detail, at Belgium,
07:44you've got the King of Belgium, Leopold II,
07:47who was making a fortune out of running the Congo as his private fief,
07:52and here he's there counting his money.
07:55So wherever you look at the map,
07:57you've got references to the current situation,
07:59even if, thanks to the mastery of the design,
08:02the eye is at first drawn to the main conflict, which is Russia.
08:06It's really clearly seen in the map itself
08:11that tension was building up in Europe.
08:14For example, France is checking its weapons,
08:17getting ready for something.
08:19Austria-Hungary, the big empire.
08:22Actually, you can see that Hungary is depicted as a man
08:26who's really getting angry and wants to get at Russia,
08:29who is held back by a young woman, Austria.
08:33You can actually see that everybody's getting ready for something,
08:37but they're not quite sure what will come next.
08:41For Rose's audience,
08:43this was map and news bulletin rolled into one.
08:47And the British viewer could gain comfort
08:50from the stalwart figure of John Bull.
08:53Resolute, solid and reliable.
08:56Often when all the other characters representing all the other countries
08:59are scrapping and fighting or keeping on the job,
09:03John Bull up there in the top left corner is always looking remarkable
09:07and, you know, in full control of everything.
09:10On all his maps, we're always looking terribly smug
09:14and gazing sort of benignly on the rest of the unfortunates in the world
09:20who haven't had the good grace to be born British.
09:30Rose's work was revolutionary.
09:33He made politics visual through maps.
09:37He defined national stereotypes.
09:40And for the first time in Britain's history,
09:43he brought the world of political satire to a mass audience.
09:47It was a breakthrough in printing technology that made it all possible.
09:53We could almost call this the first map for the masses
09:56because it's produced using chromolithography,
09:58which had two important features.
10:00First of all, it was produced en masse.
10:03Almost infinite numbers of copies could be produced.
10:05Secondly, it could be produced in colour.
10:08It cost virtually nothing.
10:10It quite literally spread like wildfire.
10:13And it had an enormous impact.
10:21In the 1870s, there were 250 lithographic printers in London alone.
10:26Today, this Victorian warehouse in South London
10:30is home to one of the last remaining traditional printers
10:33in the whole of Britain.
10:35Using the same lithography process that was used to make the Rose original,
10:40Megan Fishpool and Colin Gale are printing the octopus map,
10:45probably the first to be printed in over a century.
10:51In the years before Rose,
10:53each colour element had to be laboriously drawn out and printed
10:57from cumbersome stone plates.
11:00But photography had transformed the process.
11:04Historically, this is right at the crossover point
11:06where they started moving from stone lithography to plate lithography.
11:10The plates have got the advantage, obviously,
11:12they're cheaper, the lighter, more portable and faster to print.
11:18And so what we've got here, this is the modern-day equivalent.
11:21It's photosensitive aluminium.
11:23The plate's been exposed using ultraviolet light
11:26to a drawing which is made on clear acetate.
11:29And I'm pouring on liquid developer
11:31and literally developing out the image.
11:42While the plates are being prepared to be printed,
11:45you mix colour.
11:50And there are four colours and a black in this particular image.
11:54And all of the colours are actually made by hand from scratch.
12:02To our 21st century eyes, the process may look laborious.
12:07But in 1877, this was right at the cutting edge of new technology.
12:11Basically, it sort of evolved the concept of quantity.
12:17And so a couple of printers working together
12:20could print a phenomenal amount of imagery
12:26in a very short period of time.
12:27This is a plate for the main body of the octopus,
12:32which is going to be printed in a transparent grey.
12:35We need a separate plate for each image
12:37and each colour is printed separately.
12:39All the pinks are printed and all the yellows are printed
12:42and all the blues are printed.
12:43And that's the way the image is built up.
12:45Five plates in total for this particular picture.
12:47The new process took advantage of two burgeoning technologies.
12:59One was photography, allowing plates to be made without drawing.
13:04The other was chemistry.
13:06Lithography is very simple chemistry.
13:09It's the fact that oil and water don't mix.
13:11The image is greasy and attracts ink,
13:14and the non-image area is kept damp and repels the greasy ink.
13:23Colour printing would have been very, very expensive
13:26and only open to rich people.
13:30This is a way of reaching the mass market very, very cheaply,
13:33very, very quickly.
13:34High volume and low cost brought maps like roses to a new audience.
14:00It also revolutionized the map business.
14:04Previously, map makers took huge financial risks,
14:08producing their costly product, and often went bust.
14:11Rose's maps proved hugely popular
14:15and highly profitable for his publisher, G.W. Bacon.
14:21And George W. Bacon was actually known for making maps of London
14:25and surroundings, for example, for biking trips.
14:30But then at the site he decided to start publishing these cartoon maps.
14:36And I think he was a rather witty businessman
14:38because after the first map of Frederick Rose in 1877 was published,
14:43fairly quickly after that there was a second edition of the map
14:48already in the same year.
14:50It sort of gives us a clue that there was business in these kinds of maps.
14:53But I can imagine Bacon taking the most immense pleasure
14:59in putting these cartoon maps in the window of his shop
15:02because, you know, he liked eye-catching, and those certainly are.
15:07And I think that is what Bacon is about.
15:11It is about mass appeal.
15:13You know, selling maps to people who didn't even know they wanted maps.
15:16Satire maps were sold on street corners, they appeared in newspapers, in schools, in offices, in ordinary homes.
15:26What had once been costly luxury items were now throw-away objects in a mass market.
15:33The modern world of map publishing had begun.
15:35Well, it's always quite exciting as a printmaker.
15:40We've got all the colour layers down now and until you put the final black layer on,
15:45you don't actually know what it's going to look like.
15:47So it's always kind of a magic moment just peeling it off and seeing the final result for the first time.
15:52There you go. Beautiful. Spot on register.
16:05Perfect.
16:06In the spring of 1880, Rose turned his sharp-edged, satirical lens on British politics.
16:22It was general election time, with the Liberals seeking to topple a Tory government
16:28that many saw as corrupt, warmongering, and dishonest.
16:36Uniquely, Rose produced two satire maps, one for each party.
16:42The maps have lain in the British Library's basement for well over a century,
16:47and were only recently rediscovered by Peter Barber.
16:52Part of the fun of being a curator is that you do have almost unrestricted access to your collections.
16:59I mean, there is nothing that I think is more exciting than going through a file of maps
17:03and seeing something that you've never seen before and you're pretty sure that nobody else has seen before.
17:11It really is great to find something that is really new
17:15and to look at the expressions of surprise on the faces of people who equally have never seen them.
17:20And sometimes the things can be really, really important because they can change perceptions,
17:24they can provide evidence which previously had been lacking.
17:33Rose's octopus maps are very familiar and, as you can see, he's signed his name down here as, well, under his signature, Fred W. Rose.
17:41We've got the author of the octopus maps of Europe.
17:42But it's absolutely lovely to see something which is completely fresh and completely new.
17:48And I know it's been lying in the vaults of the British Library for the last 130 years or so,
17:53but I'd never seen them before.
17:55I've never even seen these reproduced in any publications.
17:59In the pro-conservative image, Disraeli, the Prime Minister, is a heroic figure,
18:08stabbing his enemies with the sword of patriotism.
18:13In the pro-liberal map, Rose turns it all around.
18:17This time, Gladstone is the hero, while Disraeli is depicted as a corrupt despot,
18:23his subservient cabinet kneeling at his feet.
18:27Here you've got King Jingo, Benjamin Disraeli, being unseated,
18:32but it's interesting to see what he's being unseated by,
18:35and it's something which echoes right the way down to the present time.
18:38You've got here broken promises.
18:40You've got there harassed interests.
18:43And finally, most important, you've got public opinion, which is unseating him,
18:48and if you notice carefully, he's sitting on top of the ballot box.
18:51It's a marvellous sort of allegory of the electoral process, very, very well portrayed.
18:57The burning issues of the election have an eerily contemporary ring to them.
19:02Britain was fighting a prolonged war in Afghanistan,
19:06and the national debt was at its highest in living memory.
19:11You have the comment that Gladstone, who's depicted as a Highlander,
19:15has taken on some clothes and some arms, which he has taken from the stiffening corpses of English soldiers in Afghanistan.
19:23We have the references to public expenditure, and also to the general economic state of the country,
19:30because you do get this mention of public debt de profundis, and if at the moment that isn't a key question, nothing is.
19:37It's a marvellous way of dramatising issues which are matters of debate, and dramatising them in a way with a clarity,
19:47which the verbal debate or written debate can't really bring to the fore.
19:52Rose's legacy lives on today in the work of graphic artists like Peter Brooks, political cartoonist at the Times.
20:07Political cartoons are odd things anyway, to be honest.
20:13I mean, a political cartoon to me, a definition of it is kneeing somebody in the groin with a smile, if you like.
20:21There are so many sort of instances of things that other people have done that lodge in your subconscious.
20:32You know you're aware of them, you like them, you know, you like what Rose does,
20:36because it's within your professional, you know, territory, so to speak.
20:41It's the same sort of thing as you do.
20:43You have to be able to recognise symbols which your general reader can be familiar with,
21:00and maps, if anything, are symbols.
21:04Of course, before Rose, there were people producing maps, political commentary through maps like Gilray,
21:12and a particular one I love, actually, which is George III and the bomb boats,
21:18where George III is defecating the fleet against the French.
21:22It's a wonderful image.
21:24It's so wonderfully scatological and so, you know, so vulgar.
21:28And it makes you laugh just because it is, you know.
21:32It appeals to my sort of ribald sense of humour, if you like.
21:35And you laugh, but the point behind it, you know, when you're fighting France, is obviously serious as well.
21:46Peter Brook's own work owes much to Gilray and Rose, a mark of the abiding political power of the satire map.
21:54Yes, this spectator cover, again, uses that familiar shape of Britain.
22:02And the article was about, well, as you can read there, Jobland, our Jobland.
22:10The idea of Wales being the two hands.
22:12And you've got, well, Norfolk's his bum, obviously, and his trainers managed to sort of make the outline of the West Country.
22:22The only thing that I think is kind of wrong about it is that Ireland really hasn't got a great deal to do with that.
22:31But to make it work as a job kicking an old lady, I'm afraid Ireland was used for that purpose.
22:39Well, I drew this for the Times immediately after the Continuity IRA murdered a policeman,
22:49having previously murdered two British soldiers a short while before that.
22:55And the idea was to show the Good Friday Agreement being shot to ribbons, basically, the outline of Ireland.
23:05It's a familiar image to people, you hope, and the shape is what does it.
23:12And then putting bullet holes in with it as well and the burn marks around it make up the idea.
23:19You may think, well, you know, because they've been around for a long time, then, you know, what possible sort of enjoyment can come out of, you know, just trotting out the same old stuff.
23:34But it's not the same old stuff. First of all, the political situation is always different by definition.
23:39And you're using the constant shape of something which people are familiar with, and that makes it a different challenge, I think.
23:52Political crisis is also the subject of Rosa's last satire map.
23:56Made in 1899, angling in troubled waters depicts growing tensions in Europe.
24:04In 1914, those tensions erupted into the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen.
24:11With war, satire maps took a more savage tone than Rose had ever used.
24:16But his legacy shines through.
24:21Here's the octopus, his great creation, at the heart of a brooding anti-German French map of 1917.
24:31This vicious Russian satire map used the hunger spider to show the invidious influence of Russia's churches on the flagging revolution.
24:40And this map brings the story full circle.
24:47Made in 1941, the fascists of Vichy France savagely turn Rosa's octopus idea against Britain itself.
24:55Well, this is an Axis cartoon attacking British policy throughout the world during the Second World War.
25:10And it does so by resurrecting the octopus that had been first seen nearly 70 years earlier.
25:17And in this particular case, the octopus has been turned into Winston Churchill.
25:22The tentacles of the British octopus are shown being cut in places which have had resonances for the French.
25:35There was an Allied attempt to seize Dakar in West Africa. It didn't succeed.
25:39There's a cut tentacle.
25:41There was an attempt by the British to seize a French fleet at Moselle-Kébir.
25:46There's another tentacle that's cut.
25:47There's another tentacle that's cut.
25:48The French caption reads,
25:50Confiance.
25:51It says,
25:52Amputation se poursuive methodiquement.
25:56Which means, have confidence.
25:58The amputations of its tentacles are being pursued in a methodical manner.
26:04In other words, you don't need to worry.
26:06Soon there'll be no tentacles left.
26:08And the octopus will be reduced to a dying mass of fish in Great Britain.
26:17The image is crude and vicious.
26:20All the subtlety and humour of Rose is gone.
26:24This is the ultimate satire map, from a time when politics had become a matter of life and death.
26:30We're used to regarding Churchill as a positively good thing.
26:37And I think it'll come as a shock to many people to be reminded of the time when, in many parts of the world,
26:45Churchill was regarded as the embodiment of everything that was evil.
26:49And because the incidental detail has been omitted, you also omit a lot of the humour.
27:02This is a very, very stark, unwitty attack on Winston Churchill, which is not intended to provoke any happy chuckles.
27:14It does show just how powerful a map image can be.
27:21And in a way, which I think nowadays people will understand, because the rendering of the map is modern.
27:27And it represents the Rose idea, reduced to its most negative essence.
27:36The satire map has made an extraordinary journey over a tumultuous century and a half.
27:48Rose's world of Victorian technology, of John Bull and empire, may seem far distant.
27:56But by combining maps, mass media and political spin for the first time,
28:01he left an enduring legacy, one that testifies both to his own genius,
28:08and to the extraordinary power, depth and beauty of maps themselves.
28:20To explore the new world of digital mapping, and to find out more about the British Library Map Exhibition,
28:25go to bbc.co.uk slash beauty of maps.
28:55To explore the new world of digital mapping, and to find out more about the British Library Map Exhibition
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