Complete with the fine large scale plan of London. An atlas with an interesting history. ‘The Weekly Dispatch’ was published between the years 1856 and 1862 and included in each edition was a map of a part of the world. During this period a total of 118 maps were issued, those of England were derived from the Ordnance Survey. The engravers varied but included John Dower and Edward Weller. In 1863 ‘The Dispatch Atlas’ was published which contained the complete series of maps published to date including the set of English county maps.

In 1864 the stones passed to the publishers Cassell, Petter and Galpin who re-issued them as ‘Cassell’s Complete Atlas’ in c.1865 with 260 maps. John Cassell came from abject poverty in the north of England and soon became a supporter of the teetotal movement. The publishing firm founded in 1848 is still a going concern as Cassell & Co. An advertisement of the verso of the Index to this copy records the number of ways in which the maps were grouped to offer differing publications, eleven in all. Another variant title was ‘Cassell’s County Atlas’ with just 50 maps, believed to have been published just prior to this enlarged ‘Cassell’s British Atlas’. The title goes on to state ‘With … Separate Maps of the Cities, Towns, and Places of Importance; The Great Map of London, (on a scale of nine inches to the mile,) with the Suburbs and Environs, and also a fac-simile of Ralph Agas’s Map of Old London, as it was in the Time of Queen Elizabeth.’

The atlas contains many double sheet maps of larger counties or regions. Most notable however are the town plans of several cities and several strip maps of the main railways. Provenance: private collection of Donald Hodson (1933-2016), carto-bibliographer, acquired 1970. Beresiner (1983) pp. 85-7; Carroll (1996) 120.