“Many a chill and lonely vigil”: George McCulloch’s View of Glasgow in 1853 (Online Talk)

Eleven years before Thomas Sulman’s famous bird’s-eye view of Glasgow appeared in the Illustrated London News, a young local artist named George McCulloch produced his own. It gives a vivid glimpse of the industrial city that had sprung up over the past two generations, smeared with smoke and crowded with activity. I’ll describe what I’ve been able to find out about the creation of McCulloch’s View, take you on a tour of some of my favourite details and the human stories they hint at, and think a little about the View in relation to other images of Glasgow, from Thomas Sulman to Will Knight.

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David Pritchard is an adoptive Glaswegian, an occasional mathematician, an enthusiastic but uninformed wanderer of the city’s interesting corners, and a map nerd who spends far too much time in the nineteenth century.