Styles of Cartographic Vision: Science, Art, and Labor in Thomas Hornor’s Surveys

Abstract

ABSTRACT In a shift from the heterogeneous, pictorial practices that characterized early modern mapmaking, the emergence of the Ordnance Survey in eighteenth-century Britain, according to historians and critics, inaugurated an era of modern scientific cartography. This essay examines a number of works—two surveys, a prospectus describing engravings of London, and the Great Panorama—by Thomas Hornor, an early nineteenth-century surveyor based in London. Through the innovative use of older cartographic conventions, such as vignettes and cartouches, he insisted on the temporal and physical conditions of his own cartographic labor. By situating himself as the survey’s viewer and maker, he revealed an unease within the modern map’s claims to objectivity.