The Mapmaker recreates the remarkable life and work of William Smith (1769-1839), nicknamed William ‘Strata’ Smith for having developed the science of stratigraphy. It initially traces the hardships of an impoverished, orphaned village boy brought up by an uncle, who continues to nourish a passion for rocks and fossils, surveying and measurement. Without any university degrees but a rare instinct nurtured by deep reading, observation and apprenticeship as a surveyor, Smith had prepared the first geologic maps and table of rock layers across England, Wales and parts of Scotland in 1815. He made copious notes during his work in collieries and mines, and thereafter on the proposed Somersetshire canal project from 1793 to 1799. The excavations extended his knowledge and understanding of soil topography and groundwater, enabling his reclamation projects in Norfolk and Wales as well as the restoration of the hot springs at Bath.
Biographical details of the mapmaker are foregrounded by a narrative that moves across the ironies and dark spaces of ‘Enlightenment’ England—the conflict between religion and the empirical sciences, divisive class structures empowering the aristocracy and gentry, and elite public institutions that claimed a monopoly over knowledge. Chronologically, the story moves backwards and forwards from 1819, the year when William Smith, released from King’s Bench debtor’s prison in South London, walked down to find himself locked out of his own home. He was clueless about where his wife and nephew were, or the fate of the invaluable maps that he had drawn. His decision to leave London and remain ‘missing’ was perhaps the only sensible choice for a man ignored for being an eccentric and short-changed by professional societies and organizations as he lacked social clout or the power that comes with wealth.
William Smith, the ‘living legend’, did have a few sympathetic friends like cartographer and publisher John Cary and Dr Fitton, aristocrat, Member of Parliament, the Royal Society and the Geological Society of London. Yet, Smith was entirely alone in upholding independent research in the fast-changing scenario of industrialization and mechanization of rural Britain.
A lifetime of personal suffering and professional humiliation was partially compensated with the award in 1832 of the first Wollaston Gold Medal, for Smith’s contribution to the emerging science of geology. The ceremony, held in Oxford’s historic Sheldonian Theatre Hall, begins with an eloquent address by a young man, recently enlisted as Professor in the geology department of the university. In the inaugural speech, he refers to jealousy and revenge interfering with sharing of knowledge, of class and lineage determining intellectual worth, of publishers unable to distinguish between original and fake maps. This brave critique of the existing ‘standard of measuring good work in the world of science’ ushers in a wave of much-needed change. This young man, John Phillips, was an intellectual successor of his uncle William Smith, trained by him in identifying sedimentary layers containing different and distinctive fossils, enabling beds with similar fossils to be correlated over large distances. This revolutionary concept had challenged Biblical stories about the creation of the earth and life on it, pushing the chronology of creation millions of years back.
The bio-narrative comes full circle with the untraceable William Smith, now an infirm, old man who shuffles up on stage to have the heavy gold medal, tied up with a blue ribbon, put around his neck by Dr Roderick, the President of the Geological Society. The author captures the factual details of the life and career of ‘the father of geology’ while she introduces personal details of his life imaginatively. His relationship to Mrs Kitten, Smith’s secretary of many years, reveals her fondness for her employer. It is her loyalty and courage that preserved the maps he had drawn, which she was able to smuggle out of the London house that had to be abandoned. Similarly, the compassion from family and society that eluded Smith most of his life, he amply gave back in later life, in the Scarborough years, to his mentally unstable wife, Mary Anne. The 1808 Oxfordshire chapter exposes his regret when, by sheer chance, he only arrives at his beloved sister Liz’s funeral service, months after he had initially intended to look her up. ‘Strata Smith’ seemed an apt name given to him, ‘sandwiched between layers of rock, a life full of rocks, that is all’. Circumstances compel him to adopt his nephew John, who would go on to become the first geologist to correlate fossils in rock strata to calculate a geologic time scale. The narrative ferrets out another side of Smith’s personality that is embedded in memories, more tragic ones, than ones from happier times.
The author’s reconstruction of the social and intellectual environment brings alive an ethos undergoing several shifts from rural to urbanized industrial conditions including setting up of factories. The intellectual ferment is projected in the 1780 Birmingham chapter that focuses on the members, discourses and activities of the Lunar Circle Club, a learned society that met on full moon nights on the sprawling estate of Matthew Boulton, entrepreneur, engineer and manufacturer. Not historically documented, but imaginary conversations among inventors like James Watt, Richard Arkwright and Humphry Davy, nature scientists like Joseph Priestley, Joseph Banks, physicians like Erasmus Darwin, pioneering cast-iron manufacturers like John Wilkinson, several of them members of the Royal Society, expose the exciting possibilities of the modern age of empirical sciences.
The generic requirements of biographical fiction allow drawing on selective facts—formative experiences and achievements, dramatic controversies and emotional memories to etch the contours of a public figure. The narrative strategy in the book, instead of following a linear chronology, draws on places like Churchill and Marden, York and Somerset, Norfolk and Bath, London and Scarborough, concentrating on specific years that map the life and career of this remarkable eighteenth-century mapmaker. The original book and the translation stand by each other—precise and engaging in telling the story of a man placed in his milieu.
Jayati Gupta is former Professor of English, West Bengal State University, Barasat, and Fellow, Cultural Research, Ministry of Culture, Government of India, National Library, Kolkata,
2015-17. She is the author of Travel Culture, Travel Writing and Bengali Women, 1870-1940 (Routledge, UK, 2020). She translates non-fiction from Bengali into English.