Maps of Hamlet, Moles, Hair, Hobolands, and Nothing

JF Ptak Science Books  Post 2252

There are a number of posts on this blog relating to maps of unusual, odd, and non-existent places (see for example Maps of Imaginary Places III, here,  and On Missing Antique Atlases of Imaginary Places and the Sameness of Alien Math and Music: Huygens' 1698 ETs, here) so this lovely map of the action in Hamlet came as an unexpected and welcome addition.  

["Autograph diagram: Hamlet Prince of Denmark, 30x47cm, stage sets and scenery." Source: http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/]

It makes sense of course to chart the action in a play, but I think that I've never seen one that was of some age...and to see this plotting the advances and retreats of Gertrude, Hamlet, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Fortinbras, Claudius, King of Denmark, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern and to see them all at once made everything more comfortable, and confusing.  Perhaps that is the great quieter of maps and diagrams of imaginary places, adding another layer of mystery by making the nonexistent more complex.  

The greatest map of nothing must be from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, an Agony in Eight Fits, and occurs in the Bellman’s tale, starting the second fit. It begins:

The Bellman himself they all praised to the skies-
Such a carriage, such ease and such grace!
Such solemnity too! One could see he was wise,
The moment one look in his face!

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when the found it to be
A map they could all understand.

"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?"
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply,
"They are merely conventional signs!

"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank"
(So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!"

Sometimes there is nothing so fine as something that beautifully illustrates the nothing that isn’t there, and this lovely map, unencumbered of all of the elements and details that define the mapness of something,  perfectly explains the origin of its need.

Another great and perhaps probably not-imaginary map is the wonderful hair growth/directional map that was the creation of Dr. Walter Kidd (Fellow of the Zoological Society, London) and his attempt to reconcile the the influences of gravity, inheritance, genetics, Weismannianism, and other assorted biological bits via his study of hair growth patterns.  The article appears in the (many) pages of the Scientific American Supplement for 13 September 1902, on page 22, 328. 

 

 

And as much as Kidd's map was one of tracing impossible connections of hope in a hairy back, the "Cadger's Map" from the land of Hobos hopes to thread out a decent pass-through experience for the People With Nothing to try and get a little something.  

 

 

[Source:  John Hotten, The Slang Dictionary, Etymological, Historical, and Anecdotal, 1874; full text available here.]

The symbols are explained in the book on page 38:  

"Another use is also made of hieroglyphs. Charts of successful begging neighbourhoods are rudely drawn, and symbolical signs attached to each house to show whether benevolent or adverse“In many cases there is over the kitchen mantelpiece”[30] of a tramps’ lodging-house “a map of the district, dotted here and there with memorandums of failure or success.” A correct facsimile of one of these singular maps is given in this book. It was obtained from the patterers and tramps who supplied a great many words for this work, and who were employed by the original publisher in collecting Old Ballads, Christmas Carols, Dying Speeches, and Last Lamentations, as materials for a History of Popular Literature. The reader will, no doubt, be amused with the drawing. The locality depicted is near Maidstone, in Kent; and it was probably sketched by a wandering Screever in payment for a night’s lodging. The English practice of marking everything, and scratching names on public property, extends itself to the tribe of vagabonds. On the map, as may be seen in the left-hand corner, some Traveller has drawn a favourite or noted female, singularly nicknamed Three-quarter Sarah. What were the peculiar accomplishments of this lady to demand so uncommon a name, the reader will be at a loss to discover; but a patterer says it probably refers to a shuffling dance of that name, common in tramps’ lodging-houses, and in which “¾ Sarah” may have been a proficient. Above her, three beggars or hawkers have reckoned their day’s earnings, amounting to 13s., and on the right a tolerably correct sketch of a low hawker, or cadger, is drawn. “To Dover, the nigh way,” is the exact phraseology; and “hup here,” a fair specimen of the self-acquired education of the draughtsman. No key or explanation to the hieroglyphs was given in the original, because it would have been superfluous, when every inmate of the lodging-house knew the marks from his cradle—or rather his mother’s back."

 This all leads somehow to this impossible quest of Richard Saunders, who sought spiritual/biblical/cosmo-comographical spiritualness connecting the dots and creating lined matrices in human mole placement: 

I've written a bit about this in 2009 in this blog, here. It seems to me that in all the maps of something-that-is-nothing, Saunders' efforts may be at teh top or bottom of that heap.