Comic map of Scotland designed by Victorian teenager, Lilian Lancaster for “Geographical Fun”, London, 1868

[ Geographical Fun ] Scotland

Colour-printed lithograph. Two short clean tears in top margin, one just dissecting the upper corner of the “O” of title, Scotland. Very slightly toned at sheet edges with bumping and rounding at sheet corners through fingering & use, as almost invariably the case with these maps. With all a nice example.

Increasingly scarce and hard-to-find comic map of Scotland from Geographical Fun: Being Humorous Outlines of Various Countries with Introduction and Descriptive Lines by “Aleph.”, first published by the London firm of Hodder & Stoughton in December 1868. The twelve map designs were the work of the talented teenage artist, Eliza Jane Lancaster [1852-1939], whom the Introduction claims came up with the idea when seeking to amuse a brother confined to his bed by illness.

Eliza Jane would subsequently become a successful Victorian actress adopting the stage name Lilian Lancaster. Initially trained under the auspices of the Haymarket Theatre’s stage manager, Thomas Coe [c1820?-1886], well-known for his schooling of juvenile Victorian actors and actresses during this period, her stage debut took place at the Haymarket in April 1871 in Tom Noddy’s Secret. She rapidly became a popular provincial actress, comedienne and pantomime artiste, working mainly in the North of England, especially for the companies of theatrical impresarios Sefton Parry and Wilson Barrett. She became particularly closely associated with Barrett’s Theatre Royal in Hull. She toured New York and the Eastern United States in 1880-81, initially with English actor George Conquest’s Grim Goblin Theatre Company. Her renditions of the comic song, Lardy Dah, at New York’s Wallack’s Theatre during performances of the ill-fated Grim Goblin in the summer of 1880 brought further US fame & popularity. In late 1883 she toured the British Isles & Ireland in the Company of famous Shakespearean actor, Barry Sullivan. Her stage career effectively ended following her marriage to William Edward Tennant in August 1884. Even in her later years, she continued to remain active as an artist and map designer, working with female author, E L Hoskyn, to produce a series of 12 attractive map designs to illustrate her book of popular fables & fairy tales, Stories of Old [London, 1912].

The map itself is a fine depiction of a kilted Scotsman, who appears to be chiselling away at a large rock filling the whole of the Grampian region. The accompanying text describes a gallant piper, a fitting emblem for Scotland, land of heroes and of cakes, struggling through the Scottish bogs, carrying a set of broken bagpipes & wearing clay clogs. The text in fact bears little relation to the pictorial details of the map depicted by Lancaster. The descriptive lines are by London journalist and antiquarian, Dr. William Harvey [1796-1873], who worked under the pen name “Aleph”. It is probable that Harvey and Lancaster had become acquainted in North London’s Islington area, where both Harvey and Lancaster’s mother’s family appear to have been close neighbours in the 1860’s.

The twelve comic maps that comprise Geographical Fun were in fact published primarily a self-improving mnemonic aid for young Victorian students, as Harvey himself highlights in the book’s Introduction:

It is believed that these illustrations of Geography may be rendered educational, and prove of service to young scholars, who commonly think Globes and Maps but wearisome aids to knowledge, by enabling them to retain the outline of various countries so humorously caricatured in the work, by associating them in their mind’s eye with odd fancy figures. The bluffs and headlands of Scotland would be identified with the struggling Piper….If these geographical puzzles excite the mirth of children; the amusement of a moment may lead to the profitable curiosity of youthful students, and embue the mind with a healthful taste for an acquaintance with foreign lands. No history, no journal can be understood without a knowledge of maps, and good service is done when we make such information more easy and agreeable. 

Scotland was a country to which Lancaster returned with some regularity in several map designs through a long & successful artistic career. She subsequently produced an extremely rare series of Comic Geographical Sketches of England & Wales, Scotland & Ireland in 1878, published by the Scottish firm of Ormiston & Glass, later reproduced in postcard form. For the latter series she returned again to the theme of the kilted Scottish piper, however she is also known to have designed two further manuscript maps of Scotland in the form of a North-eastern fisher-woman and pantomime character Dick Whittington (with his cat).

Indeed a collection of Lancaster’s original manuscript maps are now held in the British Library and it is evident that much of the content for these remarkable maps draws directly upon her first-hand experiences on the Victorian stage and particularly from the fabulous magical world of late 19th Century pantomime.

Refs: Lilian Lancaster