Quebec City Map 1798 City Plan - Quebec City, Upper Town, Cape Diamond

John Stockdale published this plan of the city of Quebec in London in 1798, part of Isaac Weld's widely read Travels Through the States of North America, an account that introduced many British readers to the continent's geography and cities firsthand. By the time of this printing, Quebec had already passed through more than a century of dramatic change: founded in 1608, captured by the British following the 1759 Battle of the Plains of Abraham, made capital of the British Province of Quebec in 1763, and briefly besieged by American Revolutionary forces in 1775. The plan's twenty-eight-site reference key, identifying gates along the old fortified walls, convents, churches and military installations, reflects a city whose identity by 1798 was still built as much around its fortifications as around its role as the seat of British colonial government in Canada. It remains, to this day, the only walled city in the Americas north of Mexico, a distinction already well established by the time Stockdale's engraving was printed.

Quebec City sits on a peninsula at the confluence of the St. Lawrence and St. Charles rivers, its position exploited for defence since the earliest French settlement. Upper Town, the main part of the city, occupies the high ground atop Cape Diamond, the great precipice that made Quebec's fortifications so formidable to any attacking force. Lower Town spreads along the narrow riverbanks below, the older, more commercial district clustered close to the water. The plan's key identifies twenty-eight distinct sites across both districts, gates, convents, churches and military installations, capturing a city administered by a new colonial power but still built on the bones of its French fortified past.

This plan suits a collector of British colonial-era Quebec specifically, or anyone drawn to the layered history the twenty-eight-site key makes tangible, gates and convents and military works stacked one on top of another. The store also carries Quebec City mapped earlier in 1757 by Bellin, while the city was still the fortified capital of New France, and later around 1899 by Cram in a plain commercial street plan; this 1798 Stockdale edition sits between them, the only one in the collection to record Quebec squarely under British rule, its walls intact but its government and character already reshaped by conquest. It's offered unframed and available across a full range of sizes, from a compact print to a large-format statement piece.