Digital Review of Romantic London: A Research Project Exploring Life and Culture in London in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

In her 2014 book Graphesis, Johanna Drucker imagines the “book of the future” having “data trails as guidebooks for the experience of reading, pointing to milestones and portals for in-depth exploration of stories, inventories, and the rich combination of cultural heritage and social life in a global world” (63). Based on this prognostication, Matthew Sangster, might be said to have created such a “book of the future” in Romantic London, his site that plots Romantic-era books onto interchangeable base maps of the English metropolis. In some respects, Sangster’s project shares research and methodological characteristics with several recent spatial visualization projects, including Map of Early Modern London, Locating London’s Past, and Layers of London. The unique value of Romantic London, however, comes in how, by mapping key books on the city, it “curates” London into distinct metropolitan exhibits, making this still-expanding resource particularly relevant to an issue on “Romantic Museums.” In this review essay, I will introduce the site’s interface, describe its book-historical and digital features, and offer a case study of how it might inform and enable new work in our field. Romantic London is intuitive to navigate once one understands its structure and goals. The heart of the project is an interactive digital edition of Richard Horwood’s Plan of the Cities of London and Westminster, the Borough of Southwark, and Parts Adjoining, Shewing Every House, a map published in 1792 and regularly updated through 1799 (Fig. 1). Sangster’s main menu steers users first to a page introducing Horwood, his map, and the multi-layered project that rests upon it. Additional menu links point to individual pages for the nine books Sangster has thus far mapped onto Horwood’s Plan and a blog describing recent updates. All nine books are guides of sorts to London, ranging from picturesque tours, to a directory for prostitutes, to Book 7 of Wordsworth’s 1850 Prelude. For each title, Sangster provides an introductory essay as well as a subpage mapping the book onto an interactive digital edition of the Plan. For each pin marking a location from one of these books, he includes a note situating the site within its source text. For some books, he offers additional image galleries or slideshows, and all nine books can be simultaneously mapped using the “All Curations” feature. Conceived and launched in 2014, Romantic London began to experience significant traffic in 2015. In the year that followed, approximately 20,000 unique visitors spent a total of 4,000 hours on the site. In 2017, those numbers jumped to 53,500 visitors spending 7,500 hours. Sangster’s maps and images are now being used not only by scholars at such universities as Simon Fraser, York, and Queen Mary, but also by non-academics, many of whom reportedly visit simply to plot their current home on Horwood’s eighteenth-century map. In his introduction to Horwood’s map, Sangster details the bibliographic methods informing his project and describes how the Plan ranks among the most remarkable achievements of eighteenth-century cartography and publishing. Horwood’s surpassed other London maps in showing individual properties by house number, an endeavor so daunting that more than a century had passed since a mapmaker had attempted this feat. Initially self-published on 32 separate printed sheets, the Plan attracted 883 subscribers, who either paid the full price up front or upon delivery of individual sheets. When pieced together like a puzzle, the sheets created a master map measuring over thirteen feet by seven feet. Gratefully, Romantic London allows modern users to view the entire map at once on a screen, neatly aligning the …