Wild skins and Mapping the Landscape

When Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the leading Victorian poets, compared the defining pattern of an Alpine glacier to the skin of flayed tiger, he was using the metaphor of a wild skin to map the landscape. This presentation is about the practice in the Victorian period of "mapping" the landscape by using the metaphor of skin. This presentation explores that metaphor. In addition, this presentation considers the use of animals in mapping (based upon maps I will have looked at in the Royal Geogrpahical Society as well as on the disciplines of zoogeogrpahy), and the idea of skin as a map of memory and identity (tattooing, scars, color, wounds, lines).