52 John Lodge 1788

John Lodge (fl.1754-96) a geographer and engraver at 45 Shoe Lane, London, produced many maps of the Americas and maps of canals for The Gentleman's Magazine and also engraved a series of county maps for The Political Magazine and Parliamentary, Naval, Military, and Literary Journal between the years 1782 and 1790. This magazine was issued monthly with occasional supplements, Volume I being published in 1780 with a Preliminary Number. From 1783 each bound volume typically included 6 months.

The county maps appeared in atlas form five years later. Devon is very similar to Thomas Kitchin’s map for England Illustrated (43) which was probably also the source of Joseph Ellis’s map (46) and of Hatchett’s map for Walpoole (50). The compass, scale, remarks, longitude and latitude are the same in each of the four maps but the lettering of towns is different, with slightly different alignment etc. The maps are different sizes with Lodge’s map approximately twice as large as the other versions.

All four maps distinctively include tin, lead and copper mines; the same five mines as listed by Herman Moll in his map of 1724 (25). Moll had listed the mines partly because of their antiquarian importance. By 1788 most mines were in decline. However, the Great Consols mine near Tavistock was producing large quantities of copper well into the nineteenth century: indeed Devon and Cornwall produced half the world’s copper in the mid-nineteenth century. The three towns Ashburton, Tavistock and Chagford had owed their early growth to the fact that they were Stannary towns but by this time tin-mining was on a very small scale.

The early maps are all easily identified by the imprint. When the maps appeared in the atlas (8vo, 54 maps) in 1795 these were removed - the atlas has no title page but some copies have a title on the cover. One map has a watermark of 1795, others have a medallion with Britannia.

Size 260 x 320 mm. British Statute Miles 69 to a degree (24 = 68 mm).

A NEW MAP OF DEVONSHIRE FROM THE LATEST AUTHORITIES. Imprints: Political Mag. April 1788 (CaOS) and London. Published as the Act directs. April 30. 1788. by J. Murray, No. 32 Fleet Street. (CeOS). Signature: J Lodge Sculp. (EeOS). Full degrees of latitude and longitude are drawn on the map.