19.     Mutlow (Daniel Lysons)                                                                      1822 


H Mutlow engraved maps for Cadell and Davies to illustrate Magna Britannia by the Reverend Daniel Lysons and Samuel Lysons. This work was very ambitious and planned as an updated improvement on William Camden’s Britannia (originally published in 1586 this was the classic volume on British history) and was produced in parts beginning with Beds, Berks and Bucks in the first volume dated 1806.

Mutlow engraved many illustrations for Lysons volume on Devon (Volume VI)[1] including a copy of Braun and Hogenberg (3), a county map of Devon (B&B 89) and three maps of ports/rivers. He also engraved some maps, including one of Devon for Marshall (B&B 60). Apart from this not much is known about him.

The Magna Britannia proved harder work than the historians planned and, with the death of Samuel in 1819, Daniel was only persuaded to complete Devon before the project was abandoned. In all only six volumes covering ten counties were produced.

Henry VIII’s engineers produced many maps and charts as a preliminary to improving coastal defences including a detailed panoramic map showing the whole coast from Land’s End to Exeter: a ‘proposed’ defence map of the coast, nearly 3 metres long showing inlets, rivers, defensive towers and castles and the principal towns.[2] The Lysons must have discovered the plan in the British Museum and made 3 plans for their volume on Devon. The part covering the Exe is described below: Mutlow’s other two maps covered the sections of the Dart and Plymouth shown on this huge plan. Mutlow’s Exe map was copied by later authors including Edwards in his History of Exmouth (published by W M Bounsall, 1868, see below) and the Plymouth section reappears in works by R N Worth and M W S Hawkins at the end of the nineteenth century. 

Title: EXMOUTH HAVEN, &c. From a Chart drawn in the reign of K. Hen. VIII. preserved in the British Museum.

Size: 390 x 270 mm with no scale, signature or imprint. 

Copy of a section of a larger manuscript map of the western coast but only showing the Exe estuary as far as Exeter. Printed for inclusion in Lyson’s Magna Britannia Vol. VI.

Chronologically, this is actually the second drawing of the city (as opposed to the castle, see previous entry and 35, 36 and 46) and, though only a sketch, shows the bridge, the Westgate, the Bishop’s Palace, the Castle and the two Cathedral towers, both with spires, yet it does not show Topsham. 

 

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[1] Volume VI was published in LONDON: Printed for Thomas Cadell, in the Strand, 1822.

[2] BL: Cotton.Aug.I.i.35-39, it was part of an exhibition on Henry VIII presented at the British Library in the summer of 2009.

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