1854 Pharoah Map or Plan of the City of Madras or Chennai, India

Scarce city plan of Madras or Chennai, India during British rule.

This is a scarce 1854 map or plan of the city of Madras or Chennai in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It covers the city located on the Coromandel Coast and extends from the Adyar River north to the Captain Cotton Canal and Tondiarpet. The map is incredible detailed and notes streets, individual buildings, palaces, forts, canals, tanks, neighborhoods, fields, and several other important landmarks. Fort St. George is identified near the Cooum River.

Fort St. George was the first major English settlement in India built by the English East India Company in 1640. The city of Madras (now named Chennai) grew around the fort, becoming a naval base and the administrative center for the British in Southern India. Today the city of Chennai is the fourth largest city in India.

This map was engraved by J. and C. Walker and issued as plate no. 47 by Pharoah and Company in their 1854 Atlas of Southern India.

Cartographers

J. B. Pharoah (fl. c. 1838 – 1869) was a Madras, India, based bookseller and publisher of educational books and maps active in the middle of the 19th century. He maintained a bookshop on Mount Road. The form of which was a general emporium for European published work. They also published a weekly English language newspaper called The Athenaeum and Statesman (in 1864 renamed, The Athenaeum and Daily News). They also published the The Madras Quarterly Medical Journal and The Madras Journal of Literature and Science.   Further Details...

John Walker (1787 - April 19, 1873) was a British map seller, engraver, lithographer, hydrographer, geographer, draughtsman, and publisher active in London during the 19th century. Walker published both nautical charts and geographical maps. His nautical work is particularly distinguished as he was an official hydrographer for the British East India Company, a position, incidentally, also held by his father of the same name. Walker's maps, mostly published after 1827, were primarily produced with his brothers Charles Walker and Alexander Walker under the imprint J. and C. Walker. Among their joint projects are more than 200 maps for the influential Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge Atlas (SDUK). In addition they published numerous charts for James Horsburgh and the British Admiralty Hydrographic Office, including Belcher's important map of Hong Kong and Carless' exploratory map of Karachi. The J. and C. Walker firm continued to publish after both Walkers died in the 1870s.   Further Details...

Source

Pharoah and Company, An Atlas of the Southern Part of India including Plans of all the Principal Towns and Cantonments, reduced from the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India shewing also The Tenasserim Provinces, (Madras) 1854.    

The Pharoah and Company Atlas of Southern India was published around 1854. The medium format 4to atlas contained some 70 maps focusing on the southern part of Indian and the Tanasserium Province, or Burma. The atlas was engraved an printed in London by J. and C. Walker, but seems to have been issued only in Madras, India, by J. B. Pharoah and Company. The atlas claims to have been "reduced from the Grand Trigonometrical Survey of India," and, in fact the survey did provide a framework for the atlas, but little of the actual cartographic detail. The atlas is rather novel in that it has universal scale of 16 miles to the inch (1 : 1013760) for most of its regional maps. In addition to its regional maps, the atlas also contained 21city plans. These plans are some of the only obtainable mid-195h century maps of many South Indian cities. It also contained a rare map of Singapore.

Condition

Very good. Minor foxing. Minor wear along original fold line.

References

OCLC: 711966875.