Thomas pennant's map of Scotland, 1777: A study in sources, and an introduction to George Paton's role in the history of Scottish cartography

Abstract

Thomas Pennant's map of Scotland, published on i May I777 by Benjamin White, and generally found in subsequent editions of his Tour in Scotland MDCCLXIX and Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides; I772, occupies a rather innocuous place in The Royal Scottish Geographical Society's Early Maps of Scotland.' It is properly entitled 'A Map of Scotland, the Hebrides and part of England adapted to Mr. Pennant's Tours', and the scale of about I: I,140,480 does little to excite the imagination (Fig. i). The map has, nevertheless, considerable virtues. It was largely assembled by Pennant himself, so that the entry credit to the engraver, 'J. Bayly', in the third edition of the Society's checklist, is perhaps less than just. The principal source of information for the analysis of the map's composition is to be found in the correspondence of Pennant with the Scottish antiquary and bibliographer George Paton2 (I72I-I807). Paton, at one time a partner in his father's bookshop in Edinburgh3 was, at the commencement of his correspondence with Pennant in I77I, a clerk at The Custom House, Edinburgh. Despite this lowly office, a consequence of the bankruptcy of the book business, he was to prove a leading informant on the cartography and topography of Scotland. Moreover, the investigation of the Pennant correspondence prompts a study of Paton's equally valuable correspondence with Richard Gough and with other antiquaries and men of letters.4 Notably for the decade of the I770's Paton emerges as the guiding intelligence for the dissemination of cartographical information. There is a certain irony in the fact that although Paton is the subject of a distinguished volume in the modern critical series of The Percy letters,5 yet the very field in which he was more accomplished has scarcely attracted the attention of modern historians of cartography.6

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 5 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.