Pearsall was responsible for the creation of the London A-Z map.
Of course, there are other tales as well – how she had the idea when looking for houses of the people she’d been asked to paint and so on. Pearsall’s self-published memoirs hold most of what people know about the A-Z’s origins. Her half-brother claims that he and his father had more to do with the creation of the map than Pearsall admits, but regardless – Pearsall headed a formidable mapping business for the majority of her life, having a wide and lasting impact on the navigation scene.
In order to create the map, Pearsall walked all throughout London, writing notes and surveying the area. The process allegedly took a year, and when Pearsall found her map was rejected by the Geographer’s Map Company, she took it upon herself to publish it on her own. In 1936 she began selling the maps, which were immediately popular. As the story goes, she was so determined for her maps to be sold that she delivered one batch of them to a bookseller in a wheelbarrow, as she didn’t have the backing of an established publisher to help her with distribution.
Pearsall also played an important role during WW2: she was made head of a section in the Home Intelligence Division in the Ministry of Information, due to her detailed knowledge of mapping and the London area. Her company, despite taking a break during the war, continued to grow, with A-Z maps popping up for every major city in the world. She remained head of her company for many years, with the A-Z books remaining a staple for many people, tourists and locals alike.
Florence Kelley and Agnes Sinclair Holbrook
A notable abolitionist, Kelley also investigated working and social conditions. During the Hull House Maps and Papers project, Kelley collected data from inhabitants residing in the slums of Chicago. She ended up creating a series of maps, which were modelled after Charles Booth’s poverty maps of London. Comprised of two sets of maps, four sections of Chicago were covered. One map displayed the nationality of the people living in the buildings, and the other one showed the weekly household income. The result produced a striking visual representation of the link between people’s nationality and how financially successful they had been since emigrating to America.
However, it was Agnes Sinclair Holbrook, a recent science graduate working at Hull House, who did the majority of the designing and constructing of the physical maps. Her approach to the data that Kelley collected was an important example of statistical graphics, with Holbrook committed to displaying the data in the most accurate way possible.
The maps represented a groundbreaking new way of mapping the social and demographic characteristics of a certain area; his visualization helped to demonstrate the importance of a discipline such as social science. The joint effort of Holbrook and Kelley’s work was part of important research and charity, and helped to influence sociology and modern geographic information system (GIS) mapping.
The Ebstorf Nuns
The Ebstorf Map is one of the most well-known ‘mappa-mundi’, which is basically a medieval European map. Created around 1234, it’s a valuable historical artefact that reveals how the medieval population viewed their world. Although it was destroyed during the bombing of Hanover during World War II, black and white photographs of the map survive. An important piece of history, it was long thought to be created by Gervase of Tilbury, an English priest. However, the period in which the map was made saw the cloister where the map was found experiencing an economic revival of sorts, with the nuns there producing various forms of art, from assisting the decoration of Gothic churches, to making large carpets. The Ebstorf nuns also came from noble origins, and were allowed to travel, making it more likely that the creation of the map could be attributed to them. Despite there being no clear answer amongst scholars as to who really produced the map, there are additions to the map that are not found in Tilbury’s works, and the creation of the map aligns with what was occurring at the nunnery of the time.
The map was painted on 30 goatskins and depicted the world as it was thought to look at the time. Centered on Jerusalem, the map contained images of Christ and Rome, as well as descriptions of animals. There was also text which described the creation of the world, definition of certain words and an explanation as to why the world was divided into three parts, as was the belief at the time. Both pagan and biblical history was incorporated into the map. It was a clear representation of the zeitgeist of the time.