Thomas Dugdale

Author / Editor of Curiosities of Great Britain (1835) which became England and Wales Delineated when republished in the 1840s.

During the late 1700s and 1800s there were many gazetteer guides which attempted to describe the British Isles and many of these included maps and / or illustrations. Two good examples of this genre are the books published as monthly instalments by Fisher – Devonshire and Cornwall Illustrated – and by Jennings – Moore´s History of Devonshire – which both included a wealth of written material on the county/counties and included maps and, more importantly, engravings. See my blog, Jennings vs. Fisher for full details and all the illustrations.

Thomas Dugdale was possibly an amateur historian, genealogist, geographer and antiquarian and was mostly responsible for compiling the Curiosities of Great Britain. This work was first published in 1835 and included maps produced by the team of George Cole, artist and cartographer, and John Roper, an engraver. These maps first appeared in the work The Beauties of England and Wales which was published 1803-1805. Later the maps were collected into an atlas, The British Atlas, published just once in 1810.

In 1816 the Rev. J Nightingale´s English Topography exploited the maps to illustrate his gazetteer guide to England. The book seems to have been printed at least twice and issued by two different publishers (with changes to some maps) and one of these publishers reissued the work circa 1827 with the same title.

Curiosities of Great Britain was first published in 1835 and again circa 1840 with text by Thomas Dugdale, numerous engravings and the original maps by Cole and Roper. He was assisted in the compilation by William Burnett, a civil engineer. About this time the company of Tallis had taken over the remaining Cole and Roper maps and used them until their stock was exhausted. Missing maps were steadily replaced by maps by Joshua Archer. Archer was a prolific map engraver at this time producing work for a variety of different publishers.

The Tallis company, first John Tallis (d.1842), later Lucinda Tallis published Dugdale´s work from c. 1835 until at least 1860 while simultaneously publishing a similar work by the Rev. J Barclay (Barclay´s Universal Dictionary) and a Topographical Atlas of England and Wales, all exploiting the maps engraved by Archer. Consequently, neither the Curiosities nor the Archer maps are particularly rare.

The maps are fine examples of Victorian mapmaking: approximately A4 size with county boundaries, market towns, fine detail and roads, rivers and canals. The railways are shown, but in an attempt to be up-to-date they often show rail lines that were never built. The work was richly illustrated with over 200 views showing monuments, historical buildings and towns including many birth places of famous artists and writers.

The complete work when finished was published in various numbers of volumes but the complete work included an 11^th volume, An Alphabetical Chronology of Remarkable Events, by Leonard Townsend. Dugdale´s text runs to over 1500 pages and can be viewed as part of the Gutenberg Project on-line at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/37519/37519-h/37519-h.htm. The maps and views are also present but the latter are not very good quality. The following illustrations are from an 11-volume set in my collection. I have set them out as they appear in the eleven volume set. I will add the maps at a later date.

This set is for sale and a description and photos can be found here.

A separate list consisting of the Devon and Cornwall views is included here.

If you require a better copy, contact me (e.g. book restoration, blog, research).

The 11 volumes: click the word Volume to access all the views.

Volume I - see below.

Volume II.

Volume III.

Volume IV.

Volume V.

Volume VI.

Volume VII.

Volume VIII.