There is no information or educational content in that brightly coloured, demotic, multicultural, RSC jigsaw, and its connection with the Spilsbury maps in the Map Room is almost as remote as its connection with Shakespeare. One could gain little virtue or knowledge from its assembling: it is 'just a game', a pastime. The jigsaw has come a long way from its schoolroom origins, both in appearance and in function. Its instantly recognizable, interlocking pieces, with their familiar, standardized, die-cut shapes, bear little resemblance to the pale, thin, smooth, sliding, aristocratic, wooden slices in Lady Cecilia's mahogany box, with its swelling pink imperial theme. Yet these devices have a common ancestor, a common descent.
The innovative concept of dissection caught on rapidly, spreading throughout England and beyond, as the British Empire spread. Imitations of the early Spilsbury geography puzzles soon became familiar objects in upper-middle- and upper-class schoolrooms. John Wallis, the Darton family, James Izzard, Robert Sayer, Elizabeth Newbery and other members of the growing army of publishers of children's books began to produce a wide variety of tempting designs, and as they became more widely disseminated, they became cheaper. Scholars have recently been searching assiduously for references to these puzzles in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century correspondence, educational literature, fiction, and art, and I have trawled, less assiduously, in their wake, following their markers. I enjoyed the quest, and have made some discoveries of my own.
The most widely known mention, and one that I must have read many times, is to be found near the beginning of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), where we discover Maria and Julia Bertram looking down on their poor little cousin Fanny Price because she is not acquainted with the dissected map of Europe. In the first weeks of Fanny's residence at Mansfield Park, evidence of her prodigious ignorance is brought regularly in fresh reports to Lady Bertram in the drawing room: 'Dear mamma, only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together – or my cousin cannot tell the principal rivers in Russia – or she never heard of Asia Minor – or she does not know the difference between water-colours and crayons! – How strange! – Did you ever hear of any thing so stupid?'
It is not surprising that there were no dissected maps in Fanny's simple Portsmouth home; they were not cheap, though models could be bought more cheaply without the sea. Spilsbury's prices ranged from 9s to £1 1s, making these objects more expensive than the vast numbers of children's books that were now pouring into a rapidly expanding market. Like du Val's Le Jeu de France pour les Dames and the playing cards designed for Louis XIV a century earlier, they were playthings for the privileged, educational aids for the advantaged. The poet William Cowper, writing to his friend William Unwin in September 1780 with advice about Unwin's son's education, invokes an aristocratic precedent, in the form of Lord Spencer (the first Earl Spencer) and his son's geography lessons:
I should recommend it to you therefore ... to allot the next two years of little John's Scholarship, to Writing and Arithmetic, together with which for Variety's sake and because it is capable of being formed into Amusement, I would mingle Geography. A Science which if not attended to betimes, is seldom made an Object of much Consideration. Lord Spencer's Son when he was 4 years of Age, knew the situation of every Kingdom, Country, City, River & remarkable Mountain in the World. For this Attainment, which I suppose his Father had never made, he was indebted to a Plaything; having been accustomed to amuse himself with those Maps which are cut into several Compartments, so as to be thrown into a Heap of confusion, that they may be put together again with an exact Coincidence of all their Angles and Bearings so as to form a perfect Whole.
'A Heap of confusion' is a good phrase.
The second Earl Spencer, incidentally, remained a credit to his enlightened education; although born into a fast-living family where card games and gambling were far more popular than books, he became a dedicated bibliophile and collected one of the greatest private libraries in Europe.
Geography, as Cowper here notes, was often an overlooked or despised element in the school curriculum and not taken very seriously. My father thought geography 'a soft option' and teased my son Joe for pursuing it at school, but I enjoyed trying to answer Joe's O-level questions with him. ( Joe Swift's solution to global population control was appropriately Swiftian: shoot the babies.) But many have equally plausibly maintained that maps are more fun for little children than algebra, Greek and Latin. Thomas Fuller dedicated the first book of his popular A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650) to 'The Right Honourable Esme Stuart, Earl of March and Darnley, Lord Leighton, etc' whose 'tender months' at that point had not yet completed a year, but who, Fuller trusts, might in due course grow into the book, as he would grow into his clothes. And meanwhile, Fuller hoped, he might 'take pleasure in the maps which are here presented'.
The fifth book of A Pisgah-Sight is dedicated to another titled infant, the Right Honourable John Lord Burghley, and Fuller again fondly mentions his maps, explaining that he is hoping to plant a ripening nursery of patrons. And his maps of the Holy Land are indeed quaint and wonderful, full of whales, ships, mountains, camels, ravens, angels, cities and soldiers, with a splendid depiction of the dark Dead Sea (MARE MORTUUM, MARE SALSUM, MARE ASPHALTITIS) and the blazing towers of Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboim and Admah. Mount Pisgah itself is proudly shown, with Moses, aged 120 years, standing aloft upon it and surveying the whole land of Canaan. (Fuller slyly remarks that Moses could see Palestine so well because he had a clear view from the top and enjoyed miraculous eyesight for his age.)
These maps are far more friendly and entertaining than the notorious illustrations in that other staple of children's pre-Enlightenment Sabbath reading, Foxe's Book of Martyrs. John Day's woodcuts for the Book of Martyrs, which were recut and recopied and reprinted for three hundred years, terrified generations with their graphic portrayals of tortures, whereas seventeenth-century pictorial maps of the counties of England, decorated with heraldry and scenery, offered harmless, peaceable and instructive visual pleasure. Fuller's Palestine was a playful and entertaining land, full of miniature wonders and, although Biblical, happily free from religious gloom and exhortation.
Children used to enjoy inventing imaginary countries, before they had virtual worlds to play with. Fanny Burney's nephew created a land called Protocol, and she entertained the daughters of George III with stories of this place. Thomas Malkin, a child prodigy who died in 1802 at the age of six, also invented an imaginary kingdom, of which we have a fuller record: he created a detailed map of the island of Allestone, together with an account of its history, treaties, kings, customs and folklore. We know about Thomas through a memoir written by his father, Benjamin Heath Malkin, schoolmaster, antiquarian and topographer, which records the brief life and death of this remarkable infant. A Father's Memoirs of his Child is distinguished by a frontispiece designed by Malkin's friend William Blake, and includes a memoir of Blake as well as a generous selection of his poems, made available to a wider public for the first time – another signpost in the dawning recognition of the singular state of infancy. Malkin describes his son's precocious achievements and quotes at length from his letters. The child, he writes, has a 'most happy art in copying maps' and 'a remarkable habit of inventing little landscapes ... cutting up waste paper into squares and drawings.'
Like the young Brontës and, many years later, the adult J. R. R. Tolkien, Tom created a well-charted realm. He also played with ready-made, dissected maps in the Spilsbury fashion. In one of his letters, dated 18 January 1799, little Thomas writes: 'I have a new map. Thomas can put it together and when Mama takes some counties out Tom can tell what they are.' His father assures the reader that 'His dissected maps, from which he had very early acquired his knowledge of geography, afforded him pleasure and interest to the last. He had some Counties of England in his hands, reading the names of the towns in them, within half an hour of his dissolution.' However, he also, interestingly, tells us that 'he ceased to talk of the imaginary country' during his illness. The father was relieved that the child's brain, dissected after his death, showed no sign of abnormality. He had feared that his son had died of some form of brain fever, and clearly worried that he had been subjected to excessive mental stimulation.
This is a very sad story. The death of children was commonplace at this period, but it is still a sad story. And, sadly, we don't have a picture of little Thomas Malkin playing with a dissected map, although we can witness him being borne up to heaven by one of Blake's angels. But we can more happily see Masters Thomas and John Quicke at work on a map of Europe in a pastel portrait by William Hoare, dated c.1770, which may be the earliest image of a jigsaw in art. In this newly post-Locke, family-oriented age, portraits of children engaged in natural activities were popular. Hoare, a Bath-based artist, specialized in portraits of young people, and drew his own daughter in many informal poses. In this portrait of the Quicke children, he portrays the younger boy holding the stubby shape of Italy in his hand and looking up to his brother for approval or affirmation. Family groups of this period often show educational scenes, with parents reading to children, or children holding books or sketching, with books strewn casually (but not carelessly) upon the nursery or drawing room floor. Little dogs remained the most favoured accessory (Hoare painted a fluffy little girl in a fluffy white dress holding a fluffy little white dog, where the substance of animal and child merge in a worrying manner) but the portrayal of pursuits that illustrated parental concern and interaction also became popular. Some of these ostentatiously affectionate groupings may protest a little too much, but the Quicke children playing quietly with their map, without visible adult interference, seem to me to be happy with their task.
(Can it be possible that little Miss Hoare was the artist who later drew the obscene cartoon of 'A modern Venus', which survives in Horace Walpole's collection? This is reproduced in Diana Donald's The Age of Caricature (New Haven, 1996) where she describes it as 'a playful visualisation of the physique suggested by the "pouter pigeon" fashion of the 1780s, with its puffed out bosom and rump.' I disagree. I find it more repulsive than playful.)
Maria Edgeworth, one of the most influential of educational theorists after Locke, endorses the use of the jigsaw, manifesting as she does so her characteristic attention to closely observed details of child behaviour, worthy of a Tavistock-trained child psychotherapist. In Practical Education (1798), written with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, she observes:
Whoever has watched children putting together a dissected map, must have been amused by the trial between Wit and Judgement. The child who quickly perceives resemblances catches instantly at the first bit of the wooden map, that has a single hook or hollow that seems likely to answer his purpose; he makes perhaps twenty different trials before he hits upon the right; whilst the wary youth, who has been accustomed to observe differences, cautiously examines with his eye the whole outline before his hand begins to move; and, having exactly compared the two indentures, he joins them with sober confidence, more proud of never disgracing his judgement by a fruitless attempt, than ambitious of rapid success. He is slow, but sure, and wins the day.
Auntie Phyl and I were much given to fruitless attempts, and not inclined to sober confidence; it was more fun that way. We were keener on resemblances than differences.
Maria Edgeworth also introduces puzzle maps into her Early Lessons (1801), where she provides a lively description of young Frank's struggle to reassemble his older brother Henry's dissected maps, and his loss of the 'little crooked country of Middlesex', for which he searches everywhere: 'under the tables – under the chairs – upon the sofa – under the cushions of the sofa – under the carpet – everywhere he could think of'. He is happy when at last he finds it, on a table where it had been concealed by a large book of prints, and the next morning he succeeds in hooking every county into its right place: 'He was much pleased to see the whole map fitted together – "Look at it, dear mama," said he, "you cannot see the joining, it fits so nicely."
Not to see the joining – that is satisfying.
The 'lost county' is a recurrent motif in jigsaw lore. It is the little land of lost content.