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The British Library in London is home to a staggering 4.5 million maps.
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Mysterious and beautiful, these rarely seen treasures are much
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more than just two dimensional depictions of a physical world.
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Among its most quixotic, strange and colourful treasures
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are the world's first mass produced satirical maps,
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maps that used country boundaries to reinforce national stereotypes.
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The form of a country, the map of a country,
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can have an enormous emotive force.
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Visually striking, poking fun at the high and mighty,
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at countries and their leaders, these maps came from a time
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when nations were still working out who they were.
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People were asking, what does it mean to be British?
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What does it mean to be French?
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What does it mean to be German or Italian?
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These extraordinary maps did more than just poke fun.
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They made politics visual.
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They helped create national identity.
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And they ushered in a modern world
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where mass media and political spin went hand in hand.
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Europe in the 1870's was a place of political tension.
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Countries vied with one another for territory and influence.
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Nationalism was on the rise.
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Nationalism was a movement which grew out of the Napoleonic wars.
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The countries which had laboured
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under Napoleonic rule emerged from this period
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with a distinct desire to have an identity of their own.
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And to defend that identity.
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For Britain, it was the great era of maps.
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The Ordnance Survey was mapping the nation in almost microscopic detail.
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While the Empire and wars in Europe made maps indispensable
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for understanding Britain and its place in the world.
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By that time the shapes of Europe, in particular,
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were pretty well known.
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The 19th century had seen a huge explosion in map availability.
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Papers were full of maps, books were full of maps,
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atlases were getting published.
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The base of knowledge about the shape of our lands,
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and all the rest of it, was already there.
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One British Map maker, Frederick Rose,
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was determined to give that knowledge a whole new twist.
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In 1877, he made the first of the world's mass-produced satire maps.
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They impart opinion and information all at the same time,
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in a way that is visually very striking and quite beautiful.
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They are very much a product of their age.
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Rose was doing these maps at the zenith of the British Empire.
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And it shored up the Victorian sense
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of who we are and our place in the world.
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Entitled, A Serio-Comic Map Of Europe For The Year 1877,
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Rose's map captures a moment of anxiety for Europe.
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The so-called Eastern question,
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the fear of Russia, pictured as a giant octopus.
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The map was meant to inform, to entertain, and to shock.
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And it still does.
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We know exactly how people responded to it visually
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because people are continuing to respond to it visually.
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There's the case of the Russian academic recently,
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who was incandescent with rage at the fact that it had been reproduced
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because he felt that the use of an octopus to portray his country
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was a monstrous distortion of the true nature of his country.
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This map has been insulting people, and amusing people in equal measure,
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for the last 130 years.
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The tentacles of the Russian octopus stretch out
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over the much of the continent with an alarming and malign reach.
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So all of it links together in some way and, really,
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what you have are a series of interlinked narratives,
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linking up with each other right the way across.
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Moving over the whole is the Russian octopus,
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with tentacles going out in every direction.
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The idea of the octopus does seem to be Rose's own, as far as I know.
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I've seen earlier depictions of Russia as a bear
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or as a ravening wolf in caricature maps like this
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going back to the Crimean War.
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But as soon as you're looking at the detail and Rose's opinion
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of what's going on in various countries in Europe at the time,
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you're sucked right in.
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Rose uses the physical shape of each nation
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to create a cartoon stereotype.
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Here's a grumpy looking Ireland with 'home rule' on her mind.
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Italy is a young woman,
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because the nation had only been in existence for a few years.
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Germany is a fierce looking Prussian, armed to the teeth.
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Spain, indifferent to events in Europe, is asleep.
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But it's that grey menace of the octopus that dominates.
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This image gave, if you like, the opponents of Russia a focus.
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For instance, it's strangling Poland.
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Poland then formed part of Russia.
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It's in the process of strangling Bulgaria.
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And it was, in fact, the Russian invasion of Bulgaria
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that provoked the great crisis which very nearly led to a First World War
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something like 30 years before it actually occurred.
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It is such a convenient thing because people do recognise their own country.
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The form of a country, the map of a country,
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can have an enormous emotive force.
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It resonates.
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It's a time of great political upheaval and uncertainty,
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and I suppose a slight lightness of touch
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is a good way of bringing that home to people.
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It's not only the octopus that's important.
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You've got other little side scenes.
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For instance, one very small touch is that the Turkish Empire
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is shown as a Turk who lies prostrate beneath the octopus,
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and the golden watch of the Turk is Constantinople
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which everybody thought was the main objective of Russia's expansion.
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If you look, even in small detail at Belgium,
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you've got the King of Belgium, Leopold II,
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who was making a fortune out of running the Congo as its private fief.
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And he's there, counting his money.
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So, wherever you look at the map,
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you have references to the current situation.
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Even if, thanks to the mastery of the design,
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the eye is at first drawn to the main conflict, which is Russia.
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It's really clearly seen in the map itself that tension was building up in Europe.
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For example, France is checking its weapons,
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getting ready for something.
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Austria-Hungary, the big empire,
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actually you can see that Hungary
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is depicted as a man who is really getting angry,
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he wants to get at Russia.
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Who is held back by a young woman, Austria.
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You can actually see that everybody is getting ready for something
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but they are not quite sure what will come next.
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For Rose's audience, this was map and news bulletin rolled into one.
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And the British viewer could gain comfort
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from the stalwart figure of John Bull.
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Resolute, solid and reliable.
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Often, when all the other characters representing all the other countries
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are scrapping and fighting, or kipping on the job, John Bull,
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up there in the top left corner,
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is always looking remarkable and in full control of everything.
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On all his maps, we're always looking terribly smug and...
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gazing benignly on the rest of the unfortunates
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in the world, who haven't have the good grace to be born British.
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Rose's work was revolutionary.
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He made politics visual through maps.
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He defined national stereotypes.
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And for the first time in Britain's history,
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he brought the world of political satire to a mass audience.
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It was a breakthrough in printing technology
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that made it all possible.
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We could almost call this the first map for the masses,
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because its produced using chroma-lithography
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which had two important features.
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First of all, it was produced en masse, almost infinite copies could be produced.
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Secondly, it could be produced in colour.
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It cost virtually nothing.
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It quite literally spread like wildfire
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and it had an enormous impact.
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In the 1870's,
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there were 250 lithographic printers in London alone.
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Today, this Victorian warehouse in south London
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is home to one of the last remaining traditional printers
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in the whole of Britain.
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Using the same lithography process
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that was used to make the Rose original,
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Megan Fishpool and Colin Gale are printing the octopus map,
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probably the first to be printed in over a century.
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In the years before Rose, each colour element had to be
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laboriously drawn out and printed from cumbersome stone plates.
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But photography had transformed the process.
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Historically, this is right at the cross over point
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where they started moving from stone lithography to plate lithography.
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Plates have got the advantage.
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Obviously, they're cheaper, lighter,
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more portable and faster to print.
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What we've got here, it's the modern day equivalent, it's photo sensitive aluminium.
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The plate's been exposed using ultraviolet light
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to a drawing which is made on clear acetate.
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I'm pouring on liquid developer and literally developing out the image.
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While the plates are being prepared
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to be printed, you mix the colour.
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There are four colours and a black in this particular image.
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And all of the colours are actually made by hand from scratch.
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To our 21st century eyes, the process may look laborious,
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but in 1877 this was right at the cutting edge of new technology.
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Basically, it evolved the concept of quantity.
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And so, a couple of printers working together could print
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a phenomenal amount of imagery in very short period of time.
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This is the plate for the main body of the octopus.
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Which is going to be printed in a transparent grey.
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We need a separate plate for each image, and each colour is printed separately.
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All the pinks are printed and all the yellows are printed,
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all the blues are printed,
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and that's the way the image is built up.
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Five plates in total for this particular picture.
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The new process took advantage of two burgeoning technologies.
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One was photography, allowing plates to be made without drawing.
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The other was chemistry.
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Lithography is very simple chemistry.
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It's the fact that oil and water don't mix.
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The image is greasy and attracts ink.
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And the non-image area is kept damp and repels the greasy ink.
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Colour printing would've been very, very expensive,
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only open to rich people.
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This is a way of reaching the mass market very, very cheaply, very, very quickly.
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High volume and low cost brought maps like Rose's to a new audience.
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It also revolutionised the map business.
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Previously, mapmakers took huge financial risks
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producing their costly product, and often went bust.
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Rose's maps proved hugely popular, and highly profitable for his publisher G. W. Bacon.
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George W. Bacon was actually known
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for making maps of London and the surroundings,
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for example, for biking trips.
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But then, on the side, he decides to start publishing these cartoon maps.
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I think he was a rather wily businessman
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because after the first map of Frederick Rose in 1877 was published,
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fairly quickly after that there was a second edition of the map already in the same year.
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It sort of gives us a clue that there was business in these kinds of maps.
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I can imagine Bacon taking the most immense pleasure
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in putting these cartoon maps in the window of his shop
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because he liked eye-catching, and those certainly are.
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And I think that is what Bacon is about.
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It is about mass appeal,
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selling maps to people who didn't even know they wanted maps.
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Satire maps were sold on street corners,
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they appeared in newspapers, in schools, in offices,
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in ordinary homes.
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What had once been costly, luxury items were now throwaway objects in a mass market.
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The modern world of map publishing had begun.
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It's always quite exciting as a printmaker.
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We've got all the colour layers down now
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and until you put the final black layer on, you don't know what it's going to look like.
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It's always kind of a magic moment, just peeling it off and seeing the final result for the first time.
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There you go. Beautiful. Spot-on register.
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Perfect.
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In the spring of 1880,
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Rose turned his sharp-edged, satirical lens on British politics.
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It was general election time, with the Liberals
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seeking to topple a Tory government that many saw as corrupt,
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warmongering and dishonest.
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Uniquely, Rose produced two satire maps, one for each party.
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The maps have lain in the British Library's basement for well over a century
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and were only recently rediscovered by Peter Barber.
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Part of the fun of being a curator is that you do have almost unrestricted access to your collections.
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I mean, there is nothing more exciting than going through a file of maps
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and seeing something you've never seen before and you're pretty sure that nobody else has seen before.
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It really is great to find something that is really new,
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and to look at the expressions of surprise on faces of people who equally have never seen them.
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And, sometimes, the things can be really, really important because they can change perceptions.
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They can provide evidence which previously had been lacking.
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Rose's octopus maps are very familiar and, as you can see,
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he's signed his name down here,
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well, under his signature, Fred W. Rose,
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we've got the "Author of the Octopus Map of Europe".
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It's absolutely lovely to see something completely fresh and completely new.
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And I know it's been lying in the vaults of the British Library
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for the last 130 years or so, but I'd never seen them before.
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I had never even seen these reproduced
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in any publications.
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In the pro-Conservative image, Disraeli, the Prime Minister,
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is a heroic figure,
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stabbing his enemies with the sword of patriotism.
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In the pro-Liberal map, Rose turns it all around.
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This time, Gladstone is the hero,
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while Disraeli is depicted as a corrupt despot,
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his subservient cabinet kneeling at his feet.
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Here you've got King Jingo,
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Benjamin Disraeli, being unseated, but it's interesting to see what he's being unseated by.
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And it's something which echoes right the way down to the present time.
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You've got here "broken promises".
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You've got there "harassed interests",
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and finally, and most important,
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"public opinion", which is unseating him.
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If you notice carefully, he's sitting on top of the ballot box.
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It's a marvellous allegory of the electoral process,
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very, very well portrayed.
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The burning issues of the election have an eerily contemporary ring to them.
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Britain was fighting a prolonged war in Afghanistan.
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And the national debt was at its highest in living memory.
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You have the comment that Gladstone, who's depicted as a Highlander,
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has taken on some clothes and some arms,
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which he has taken from the stiffening corpses
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of English soldiers in Afghanistan.
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We have the references to public expenditure.
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And also to the general economic state of the country
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because you do get this mention of public debt de profundis.
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And at the moment, if that isn't a key question, nothing is.
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It's a marvellous way of dramatising issues
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which are matters of debate, and dramatising them in a way,
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with a clarity which a verbal debate or a written debate
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can't really bring to the fore.
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Rose's legacy lives on today,
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in the work of graphic artists like Peter Brookes,
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political cartoonist at The Times.
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Political cartoons are odd things anyway, to be honest.
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A political cartoon to me,
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a definition of it,
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is kneeing somebody in the groin with a smile, if you like.
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There are so many instances of things that other people have done
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that lodge in your subconscious. You're aware of them.
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You like them. You like what Rose does because it's within your professional territory, so to speak.
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It's the same sort of thing as you do.
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You have to be able to recognise symbols,
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which your general reader can be familiar with.
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And maps, if anything, are symbols.
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Before Rose, there were people producing maps,
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political commentary through maps, like Gillray.
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And a particular one I love which is George III and the Bum-Boats,
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where George III is defecating the fleet against the French.
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A wonderful image. So wonderfully scatological, so vulgar,
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it makes you laugh just because it is, you know!
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It appeals to my ribald sense of humour, if you like.
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And you laugh, but the point behind it, when you're fighting France,
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is obviously serious as well.
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Peter Brookes' own work owes much to Gillray and Rose,
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a mark of the abiding political power of the satire map.
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This Spectator cover, again uses that familiar shape of Britain.
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And the article was about, as you can read there,
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"Yobland, Our Yobland."
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The idea of Wales being the 2 hands,
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Norfolk's his bum, obviously, and his trainers,
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you can manage to make the outline of the West Country.
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The only thing I think is wrong about it
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is that Ireland really doesn't have a great deal to do with that.
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But to make it work, as a yob kicking an old lady,
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I'm afraid Ireland was used for that purpose.
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Well, I drew this for The Times immediately after
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the Continuity IRA murdered a policeman,
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having previously murdered two British soldiers
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a short while before that.
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And the idea was to show the Good Friday Agreement
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being shot to ribbons, basically.
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The outline of Ireland, it's a familiar image to people, you hope.
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And the shape is what does it.
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And then putting bullet-holes in with it as well,
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and the burn marks round it.
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To make up the idea.
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You may think, "Well, because they've been around for a long time,
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"what possible sort of...
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"enjoyment can come out of trotting out the same old stuff?"
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But it's not the same old stuff.
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First of all, the political situation is always different, by definition.
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And you're using the constant shape of something
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which people are familiar with.
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That makes it a different challenge, I think.
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Political crisis is also the subject of Rose's last satire map.
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Made in 1899,
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Angling In Troubled Waters depicts growing tensions in Europe.
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In 1914, those tensions erupted
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into the bloodiest conflict the world had ever seen.
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With war, satire maps took on a more savage tone than Rose had ever used.
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But his legacy shines through.
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Here's the octopus, his great creation,
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at the heart of a brooding anti-German French map of 1917.
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This vicious Russian satire map used the "hunger spider"
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to show the invidious influence of Russia's churches
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on the flagging revolution.
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And this map brings the story full circle.
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Made in 1941,
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the fascists of Vichy France savagely turned Rose's octopus idea
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against Britain itself.
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Well, this is an Axis cartoon
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attacking British policy throughout the world
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during the Second World War.
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And it does so by resurrecting the octopus
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that had been first seen nearly 70 years earlier.
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And in this particular case,
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the octopus has been turned into Winston Churchill.
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The tentacles of the British octopus
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are shown being cut in places which have had resonances for the French.
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There was an allied attempt to seize Dakar in west Africa,
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it didn't succeed.
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There's a cut tentacle.
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There's an attempt by the British to seize a French fleet
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at Mers El-Kebir.
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There's another tentacle that's cut.
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The French caption reads,
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"Confiance ses amputations se poursuivent methodiquement,"
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which means,
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"Have confidence, the amputations of its tentacles
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"are being pursued in a methodical manner."
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In other words, "You don't need to worry,
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"soon there'll be no tentacles left
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"and the octopus will be reduced
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"to a dying mass of fish in Great Britain."
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The image is crude and vicious.
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All the subtlety and humour of Rose is gone.
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This is the ultimate satire map,
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from a time when politics had become a matter of life and death.
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We're used to regarding Churchill
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as a positively good thing
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and I think it'll come as a shock to many people
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to be reminded of the time when,
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in many parts of the world, Churchill was regarded
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as the embodiment of everything that was evil.
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Because the incidental detail has been omitted,
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you also omit a lot of the humour.
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This is a very, very stark, unwitty,
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attack on Winston Churchill
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which is not intended to provoke any happy chuckles.
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It does show just how powerful a map image can be.
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And in a way which, I think, nowadays, people will understand
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because the rendering of the map is modern,
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it represents the Rose idea
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reduced to its most negative essence.
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The satire map has made an extraordinary journey
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over a tumultuous century-and-a-half.
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Rose's world of Victorian technology,
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of John Bull and Empire, may seem far-distant.
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But by combining maps,
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mass media and political spin for the first time,
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he left an enduring legacy.
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One that testifies both to his own genius,
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and to the extraordinary power, depth and beauty of maps themselves.
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To explore the new world of digital mapping
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and to find out more about the British Library Map Exhibition,
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go to..
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Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
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