OK. Thank you very much. I'm going to tell the story of Selena Hald illustrated with some maps from the Borderlands collections.
Selena Home was a map engraver working in London from the eighteen thirties to the 1850.
She did some beautiful work.
And she also illustrates one of the problems of researching early women mapmakers, which is the ways in which they can be unrecorded or concealed.
And that's the reason for my title, where wearable women. So to start with this.
As you can see, it's a beautiful double hemisphere world map. This is one that she engraved.
And it's got her name at the bottom here. I'm pointing and great bye at home.
And this is from Black's General Atlas of the World, which was first published in the early 1850.
So it's from fairly late in her career.
Now, at the time this was made, most printed maps were made by engraving onto a metal plate in reverse and then printing from the plate.
This was highly skilled work, obviously. And Selena's husband, Sidney Home, was a very highly regarded map engraver who was also very innovative.
He was one of the first to use Steel Walters and Copper Plate. He was working in London from the late eighteen tens and he engraved a lot of maps.
And we know quite a lot about his early career. But we know a lot less about sunniness.
What we do know about Selena, we know that she was born Selena Price in Ratnam here in Wales in the early 70s, 80s.
On this map of Wales, we've got Ratnam just shown here in blue. It's quite interesting that it's important because this is from an atlas,
which has this colour scheme of pink and green and blue and yellow, all sort of it's hand coloured.
And on this map, Ratnam shows the only county shown in blue.
So it really stands out. And of course, it was her home county.
Now, I don't know how much she had to do with that if she did any of the colouring or influence the colourist.
But it's quite nice to think that that might have been done on purpose. So Selena married Sydney home in London in 1821 at that time.
He was 32 and she was a few years older. And she'd already been in London and associated with map makers for some years before.
We know that she was known to the matchmaker Michael Thompson, who mentioned time in his will.
He had worked with Sidney whole. And then when Thompson died, Sidney Holt took over his business.
So it is plausible that they'd been acquainted for some time before they were married.
Ten years later, Sidney Hall died at the age of only 42. And at the time of his death, he was working on a new British atlas, which this is from.
And it was published the following year. The title page says that the maps aren't engraved by Cygne Hall, but that's not the whole story.
The maps were of individual counties arranged alphabetically, and those early on in the alphabetical sequence are signed by Sydney Hall.
So this is Dorset and you can see it says engraved by City Hall.
That was how we always abbreviated his name and his signature, almost always.
But most of the later ones are just signed at home. So this is Norfolk from the second half of the alphabet engraved by arsehole.
So it's been suggested that Sydney may have died in the middle of the project and his wife simply continued to work and signed herself as.
Now, obviously, this is very technical work. You could not have learnt to engrave a map overnight.
Antolini can't have learnt it immediately on her husband's death, so she must have been doing some engraving for sometime beforehand.
There's no obvious difference in standard looking through the Atlas. All the engraving looks very competent in his well.
Sydney, amongst other things, left his engraving tools to his wife.
And it's quite probable that he trained her.
These two extracts are taken from the map of Cumberland, signed by Sydney Hall on the left and Westmoreland signed by Selina on the right.
And I think there's really very little difference in style.
Possibly the engraving of the hilt is a little bit bolder on one of them on the combinat than on Westmoreland.
But really, there's there's very little difference. It all looks pretty seamless.
This is just a very detailed zoomin on part of Somerset to show Paul not by really just to demonstrate,
especially to anyone who is looking at this on a smallish screen. How very much work there is in the engraving of a map of this sort.
You can see every family final, those tiny little lines at the hashes and the effect of shading of the sea and so on.
So it's it's a pretty impressive job. Now, after this, according to the official record, maps engraved by Sydney Hall continue to appear for years.
Signed at whole, Celina conveniently shared a first initial with her husband and she just presumably continue to engrave maps and sign them at all.
And this slight difference in signature as well as the date can be used to distinguish them from her husband's work.
She didn't get any credit for her work. Of course, this means.
But then, on the other hand, she did benefit from having the using the name of an established and well regarded matchmaker,
Selina, and great many more maps for the next 20 years until not long before her death.
This is our Ptolemaic map with world from my right, Encyclopaedia of Geography.
The title page mentions that there are 82 maps by Sydney Hall.
They're not individually signed, but it first appeared in 1834. So three years after he died.
So I think it's quite likely that Celina was responsible, at least in part for the maps and this this work.
This one is from the Dictionary of Commerce and Commercial Navigation. First appeared in 1832.
The map of Europea is signed at home. It's not a very good copy.
So I'm going to move on and show you the detail. The original book is a great big fat volume about the size and shape of a small loaf of bread.
So it's quite hard to photograph. But in this detail, you can see the Yum.
The very fine, detailed policy, the insert that she's done moving on in her career.
This is a plan of Bristol from Chilcot history of Bristol 1846.
And again, I will show you a smaller detail so that you can really appreciate the work.
So you can see here where that Brandon Hill, where there's the young, the writing superimposed on the Hill.
And here you've got the very fine hushes going up and stopping abruptly to walk or where there's writing on top of them, other features.
It's all been done very, very well.
This was further on in her career and she was obviously very skilled by this time, as well as maps in books and Atlas's.
She also produced a few individually accomplished things like this map of India from the mid eighteen forties.
So this was an independently published sheet map and you can see it's dissected and mounted on linen, so it could be folded in a case.
And here you can see her signature still engraved by Essl Berry Street.
Linda Bray. She kept the same premises all through her life. And then I've got two more from Black General Atlas as well.
Finally, this first one of Sweden and Norway is one of my favourites.
I just think it's really beautiful. I love the way the mountains are done. And then.
This one of the West Indies. I think the shading of the sea is really lovely.
And again, you can see the S4 signature down here.
This edition of Black's Atlas was published in 1879, although it was first published in the eighteen fifties.
So Nina died in 1853. So it probably in grief towards the end of her life in great capes, up slow and expensive to produce and last a long time.
And they were often reused for many years, which is one of the things that makes engraving.
Researching a grave is complicated in any case. The title page mentioned Sydney Hall and one or two other famous male engravers.
It doesn't mention Selena, though. I think there are some maps actually by Signeul in the same atlas.
When Selena died, her nephew, Edward Weller continued the business and she left him her books and maps and some of her household goods in her well.
And he went on to have a very successful matchmaking career. Selena's longer term legacy maps engraved by it will continue to be attributed
to Sydney by libraries and map dealers and bibliographies until quite recently.
Selena didn't have an entry in the Library of Congress name authority file,
which we use when cataloguing to get the standardised form of a person's name.
Until just a few weeks ago, much of the information about Selena comes from the records relating to the men around her.
So their entries in standard reference works like the DMV or Tolis Dictionary of Mapmaker's Records relating to her husband and her nephew and so on.
The dictionary British Mac engravers violence worms.
Natalie Benton Williams, which came out 10 years ago, though, does have some specific information about Selena.
So I'd say within the last 10 years or so, she's begun to be a bit more recognised.
But the main thing that really strikes me about her work is that it could so easily have been completely on record.
It poor Sydney had died young.
If it had been the other way round and Celine had died before her, we would have simply no idea at all of her work and perhaps no existence.
And that does make me wonder who else was missing. Thank you very much, Debbie,
for drawing attention to the invisibility of women and the sort of perennial problem of
wives and daughters who get roped into their husbands and fathers endeavour endeavours.
But but get no credit for it. So thank you very much indeed for starting to put us on the right trail with Selena Homel.
Thank you.