Routes from London to Europe in 1913
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This network graph has as its nodes points at which passengers would embark or disembark trains or boats on long journeys from London to various European destinations, as advised by the table of quickest routes in the index of <em>Cook's Continental Time Table.</em> One can trace the quickest journey back to London by clicking on any destination and following the arrows. This graph shows how British travellers to Europe did so overwhelmingly via a small number of places -- most notably Paris but also Cologne and Basel ("Bale" in the time table). Thus we can see that France, and the French state as encountered in Paris, was very familiar to British travellers. And while the Rhineland was familiar, Prussia and Berlin were distant and passed through relatively seldom.
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This map shows most of the data points on the network graph on a modern map of Europe, with the size and colour of the dots indicating distance in hours from London as indicated in Cook's Time Table. Regrettably, to allow Google's geotagging feature to work, it uses modern place names and country names. Those points with more than one dot represent multiple routes taking longer or shorter amounts of time. This kind of scale gives one a more meaningful sense of how far different places in Europe were from London, and thus perhaps how distant and foreign they seemed to British people before the First World War.
Compiled from data in <a href="https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015021229151;view=1up;seq=1"><em>Cook's Continental Time Table, Steamship and Air Services, </em>1913.</a>
2016
Data Visualization
Continental (but neither of these are historical maps)
John Bull and his friends: a serio-comic map of Europe
This British cartoon map of Europe paints a belligerently nationalistic view of diplomatic relations in 1900. John Bull, Britain personified, is swatting away two cats -- Boer troops resisting British rule in South Africa -- while the rest of Europe condemns or conspires against him. What is significant about this map is the way that France is portrayed as less sinister than Germany, which is less sinister than Russia. While Marianne is shown looking glumly at broken toys labelled with the names of political and diplomatic incidents, Germany is represented by the Kaiser in uniform stockpiling battleships and exports, and Russia is an octopus with the Czar at its centre. One could argue that proximity is the defining factor: France is close to England and had perhaps been visited by the artist and his expected reader. Russia on the other hand is a very long way away, and thus understandably more sinister. Germany is between the two.
Frederick W. Rose
G.W. Bacon & Co., Ltd., London
1900
English
Historical Cartoon Map
Continental