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Margaret Drabble's latest memoir focuses on early dissected maps
September 20.
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/17/AR2009091704237.html >
'One Thing Leads to Another: An English novelist starts in on a jigsaw
puzzle and ends up with a memoir' (by Margaret Drabble in the Washington
Post).
Margaret Drabble's current book, The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal
History with Jigsaws, takes as its central theme the jigsaw puzzle, both
those from her childhood and the mid-18th century maps that formed the
subject of the earliest dissections. This introduction to her book is
accompanied by a video version of the interview
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/video/2009/09/18/VI2009091802512.html
>.
'Searching around for a manageable subject, I thought a little
nonfiction topic would suit me nicely, and hit on what seemed at the time a
clever notion: I decided to write a history of the jigsaw puzzle ... The
pattern of "The Pattern in the Carpet" thus reveals itself to involve a
deliberate avoidance of pain, a motive that may not play well to those who
seek from memoir a confessional outpouring. From this aspect, it may present
itself -- like the jigsaw puzzle -- as a very English undertaking. I had
hazarded, before I embarked on my research, that the jigsaw was an English
invention, and so it proved to be.
The earliest jigsaws (not then known by this name) are attributed to a
cartographer, John Spilsbury, who in 1766 began to produce dissected maps
for use in the upper class schoolroom. These elegant, hand-tinted, thin
mahogany maps were educational aids to teach children geography: One of the
earliest literary references to them is in Jane Austen's "Mansfield Park,"
where Julia and Maria Bertram make fun of their cousin Fanny Price because
she does not know how to assemble a dissected map of Europe. What could be
more English than the schoolroom at Mansfield Park, complete as it was with
fine distinctions of rank and of class? '
I am assured by Jill Shefrin that the novelist has made good use of
her own 2003 study, Such Constant Affectionate Care. Lady Charlotte Finch:
Royal Governess to the Children of George III, in which she makes the claim
that Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont should be considered the inventor of
the dissected map. The publisher John Spilsbury was certainly responsible
for producing the first commercial examples.
Tony Campbell
i...@tonycampbell.info
** extract from: 'Latest News' - for the full story see the link above
http://www.maphistory.info/newslatest.html
[Note. Most news entries are NOT posted to MapHist]
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