The Maps in "Gulliver's Travels"

Abstract

HE most popular books during the reign of Queen Anne, exc eluding theological and religious works, were accounts of voyages and travels, geographical works, and atlases. Arber1 attributes the vogue for this kind of book to the huge success of James Knapton's publication of Dampier's A New Voyage Round the World in I697, which led other publishers to follow suit; and W. H. Bonner,2 following up this hint, has shown in detail the growth and extent of voyage-literature after Dampier. It was during this Silver Age of Travel that such standard collections as those of Harris3 and the Churchills4 were published, and the popular interest in such works was exploited by Defoe in a number of books and later satirized by Swift in Gulliver's Travels. Along with the interest in voyages went a demand for maps. Moll, probably the best, and certainly the best known, of the cartographers working in England during the first quarter of the eighteenth century, rose, on the wave of popular interest in maps and atlases, from the humble obscurity of a Dutch immigrant engraver to the comfortable dignity indicated by his later signatures, Herman Moll, Geographer, and to fellowship with Sir Samuel Stukeley and the antiquaries, scientists, and artists of his club. Moll published a number of atlases, ran a successful periodical, the Atlas Geographus, from I708 to I7I7, and engraved hundreds of maps, some as illustrations to travel books and some to be sold at his shop over against Devereux-Court, between