A shared bent for self-sacrifice leads Lionel and Adrian to a very unexpected showdown in Parliament.
More beautiful maps for a geography-minded installment. The first, from 1815, and properly known as A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland; exhibiting the collieries and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names, could almost be read as one of Mary Shelley’s inspirations for writing The Last Man. The actual meaning of the startling colors are explained here by the Geological Society of London.
The second, also British and simply so handsome, is almost contemporaneous with the novel: W.R. Gardner’s New and Improved Map of England and Wales from 1823. Note how cleverly the lower left hand corner fits in the Isles of Scilly, off Cornwall.
1823 was quite a year for W.R. Gardner. His New and Improved View of the Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains and Lengths of the Principal Rivers In The World, The whole Judiciously arranged from the various Authorities Extant, which you can explore here at the David Rumsey Map Collection, is another one Mary Shelley would have loved. The key puzzled me until I figured out the Ditto; a nice little symbol whose replacement (“” or “” “”) just doesn’t say it as well. Time for a revival!
