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OK. Thank you very much. I'm going to tell the story of Selena Hald illustrated with some maps from the Borderlands collections.

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Selena Home was a map engraver working in London from the eighteen thirties to the 1850.

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She did some beautiful work.

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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.

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And that's the reason for my title, where wearable women. So to start with this.

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As you can see, it's a beautiful double hemisphere world map. This is one that she engraved.

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And it's got her name at the bottom here. I'm pointing and great bye at home.

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And this is from Black's General Atlas of the World, which was first published in the early 1850.

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So it's from fairly late in her career.

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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.

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This was highly skilled work, obviously. And Selena's husband, Sidney Home, was a very highly regarded map engraver who was also very innovative.

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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.

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And we know quite a lot about his early career. But we know a lot less about sunniness.

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What we do know about Selena, we know that she was born Selena Price in Ratnam here in Wales in the early 70s, 80s.

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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,

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which has this colour scheme of pink and green and blue and yellow, all sort of it's hand coloured.

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And on this map, Ratnam shows the only county shown in blue.

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So it really stands out. And of course, it was her home county.

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Now, I don't know how much she had to do with that if she did any of the colouring or influence the colourist.

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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.

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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.

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We know that she was known to the matchmaker Michael Thompson, who mentioned time in his will.

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He had worked with Sidney whole. And then when Thompson died, Sidney Holt took over his business.

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So it is plausible that they'd been acquainted for some time before they were married.

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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.

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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.

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The maps were of individual counties arranged alphabetically, and those early on in the alphabetical sequence are signed by Sydney Hall.

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So this is Dorset and you can see it says engraved by City Hall.

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That was how we always abbreviated his name and his signature, almost always.

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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.

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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.

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Now, obviously, this is very technical work. You could not have learnt to engrave a map overnight.

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Antolini can't have learnt it immediately on her husband's death, so she must have been doing some engraving for sometime beforehand.

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There's no obvious difference in standard looking through the Atlas. All the engraving looks very competent in his well.

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Sydney, amongst other things, left his engraving tools to his wife.

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And it's quite probable that he trained her.

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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.

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And I think there's really very little difference in style.

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Possibly the engraving of the hilt is a little bit bolder on one of them on the combinat than on Westmoreland.

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But really, there's there's very little difference. It all looks pretty seamless.

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This is just a very detailed zoomin on part of Somerset to show Paul not by really just to demonstrate,

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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.

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You can see every family final, those tiny little lines at the hashes and the effect of shading of the sea and so on.

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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.

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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.

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And this slight difference in signature as well as the date can be used to distinguish them from her husband's work.

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She didn't get any credit for her work. Of course, this means.

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But then, on the other hand, she did benefit from having the using the name of an established and well regarded matchmaker,

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Selina, and great many more maps for the next 20 years until not long before her death.

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This is our Ptolemaic map with world from my right, Encyclopaedia of Geography.

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The title page mentions that there are 82 maps by Sydney Hall.

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They're not individually signed, but it first appeared in 1834. So three years after he died.

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So I think it's quite likely that Celina was responsible, at least in part for the maps and this this work.

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This one is from the Dictionary of Commerce and Commercial Navigation. First appeared in 1832.

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The map of Europea is signed at home. It's not a very good copy.

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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.

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So it's quite hard to photograph. But in this detail, you can see the Yum.

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The very fine, detailed policy, the insert that she's done moving on in her career.

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This is a plan of Bristol from Chilcot history of Bristol 1846.

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And again, I will show you a smaller detail so that you can really appreciate the work.

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So you can see here where that Brandon Hill, where there's the young, the writing superimposed on the Hill.

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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.

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It's all been done very, very well.

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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.

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She also produced a few individually accomplished things like this map of India from the mid eighteen forties.

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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.

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And here you can see her signature still engraved by Essl Berry Street.

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Linda Bray. She kept the same premises all through her life. And then I've got two more from Black General Atlas as well.

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Finally, this first one of Sweden and Norway is one of my favourites.

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I just think it's really beautiful. I love the way the mountains are done. And then.

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This one of the West Indies. I think the shading of the sea is really lovely.

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And again, you can see the S4 signature down here.

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This edition of Black's Atlas was published in 1879, although it was first published in the eighteen fifties.

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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.

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And they were often reused for many years, which is one of the things that makes engraving.

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Researching a grave is complicated in any case. The title page mentioned Sydney Hall and one or two other famous male engravers.

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It doesn't mention Selena, though. I think there are some maps actually by Signeul in the same atlas.

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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.

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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

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to Sydney by libraries and map dealers and bibliographies until quite recently.

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Selena didn't have an entry in the Library of Congress name authority file,

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which we use when cataloguing to get the standardised form of a person's name.

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Until just a few weeks ago, much of the information about Selena comes from the records relating to the men around her.

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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.

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The dictionary British Mac engravers violence worms.

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Natalie Benton Williams, which came out 10 years ago, though, does have some specific information about Selena.

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So I'd say within the last 10 years or so, she's begun to be a bit more recognised.

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But the main thing that really strikes me about her work is that it could so easily have been completely on record.

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It poor Sydney had died young.

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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.

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And that does make me wonder who else was missing. Thank you very much, Debbie,

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for drawing attention to the invisibility of women and the sort of perennial problem of

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wives and daughters who get roped into their husbands and fathers endeavour endeavours.

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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.

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Thank you.