Urania’s Mirror is a boxed set of 32 constellation cards first
published by Samuel Leigh of the Strand, London, in or shortly
before 1825. The engraver was Sidney Hall but authorship was
coyly attributed to “a lady”. Peter Hingley,
librarian of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, has
established that the true author was almost certainly the
Reverend Richard Rouse Bloxam of Rugby (Journal of the British
Astronomical Association, vol. 104, p. 238, 1994).
There seems little doubt that Urania’s Mirror
was directly inspired by Alexander Jamieson’s Celestial Atlas
published in London three years earlier. A comparison of the
two shows that the constellation figures have been copied
almost exactly from Jamieson’s atlas. Urania’s Mirror even
adopted two figures newly introduced by Jamieson –
Noctua, the owl (Card 32, a replacement for the existing Turdus
Solitarius), and Norma Nilotica
(Card 26, held by
Aquarius, apparently intended as a gauge to measure the annual
flooding of the Nile). Perhaps the real reason the author chose
to remain nameless was to avoid accusations of plagiarism.
There are two versions of the cards. In the
first edition, only the stars in those constellations named on
each card’s heading were included. In the second edition,
which followed soon after the appearance of the first, stars
were added in the surrounding constellations. It is the second
edition that is illustrated here. One attractive feature of the
cards is that they were perforated with small holes for each
star, to give an impression of the constellation’s
appearance when the cards were held up to the light. Doubtless
many cards met an untimely end through being held too close to
a candle flame.
The cards were hand-coloured in water
colours. While the colourists followed a general style,
presumably laid down by the publishers, every set is slightly
different.
A book called A
Familiar Treatise on Astronomy by
Jehoshaphat Aspin was produced in 1825 specifically to
accompany the cards. This book went through at least four
editions, the fourth being published in 1834. In 1832 the cards
and book were also published in the United States; a facsimile
of the American edition was produced in 2004 by Barnes & Noble. Facsimiles of the cards alone appeared in The Box of Stars published
in 1993.
Urania’s Mirror features 80 constellations, not all of them still
recognized by astronomers, plus two sub-constellations: Caput
Medusae (the head of Medusa the Gorgon), seen on Card 6 with Perseus, and Anser (the goose), seen on Card
14 with Vulpecula. The
constellation names given in the captions below are as written
on the cards themselves. For more about the background to these
constellations, both current and obsolete, see my Star Tales pages.
The idea of constellation cards with
transparent stars was adopted by at least three other authors:
Franz Niklaus König’s Atlas
céleste of 1826; Himmels-Atlas in transparenten Karten by Friedrich Braun in 1850; and Otto
Möllinger’s Himmelsatlas of 1851, although all these lack the artistic
style of Urania’s Mirror.
Copyright notice: The scans on this page, and the larger versions to
which they link, are © Ian Ridpath. You may use them for
non-commercial and educational purposes provided appropriate
credit is given. Please contact me for high-resolution scans
for commercial reproduction. I can also supply an uncoloured
version which you might like to colour yourself.
