THE NEW NATURALIST LIBRARY

BOOKS AND

NATURALISTS

DAVID ELLISTON ALLEN

Collins

To the memory of Gavin Bridson (1936–2008) and Richard Freeman (1915–1986) to whose decades of meticulous groundwork this book owes so much

Contents

Cover

TitlePage

Editors’ Preface

CHAPTER 1 Books and Naturalists

CHAPTER 2 The Earliest Authors

CHAPTER 3 Disguise Discarded

CHAPTER 4 Intermission

CHAPTER 5 The Linnaean Spring

CHAPTER 6 Zoology Catches Up

CHAPTER 7 The Linnaean Autumn

CHAPTER 8 Self-Help

CHAPTER 9 The Popularisation Explosion

CHAPTER 10 The Nineteenth-Century Publishers

CHAPTER 11 Contingent Damage

CHAPTER 12 Victorian High Tide

CHAPTER 13 Wider And Deeper SUI

CHAPTER 14 Local Floras and Faunas

CHAPTER 15 Shifting Ground

CHAPTER 16 A Jubilee of Monographs

CHAPTER 17 Edwardian Makeover

CHAPTER 18 Wanderings

CHAPTER 19 Direction Recovered

CHAPTER 20 New Naturalists

CHAPTER 21 Field Guides Aplenty

CHAPTER 22 New Uncertainties

Appendix

Principal Sources

References

Index

The New Naturalist Library

EDITORS

Author’s Foreword and Acknowledgements

About the author

Picture Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Editors’ Preface

ANY SERIES OF books on British natural history cannot fail to acknowledge its debt to the long tradition of naturalists and their writings for which Britain is almost unique. It was inevitable, therefore, that from the birth of the series the New Naturalist authors have been particularly conscious of this inheritance. Indeed, the first chapter of the first volume in the Series, E. B. Ford’s Butterflies, is devoted to a history of British entomology. Similarly, the second chapter of Wild Flowers is a scholarly history of British botany by John Gilmour. It has long been an ambition of the Editors to produce a volume celebrating the ‘old naturalists’ and their contribution to the scientific, social and literary culture of the British islands.

David Elliston Allen is uniquely qualified to contribute this important addition to the series. Historian and botanist, he studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge whilst a long interest in field botany led to the presidency of the Botanical Society of the British Isles and his election as an honorary member. He is also a past president of the Society for the History of Natural History by whom he was awarded the Founder’s Medal for outstanding contributions to the study of the history of natural history.

Anyone who has read his The Naturalist in Britain (Princeton University Press, 1994) will not be surprised to find that Books and Naturalists is as much a social history of natural history publishing as it is the story of British natural history. Indeed, for the first time, the critical role of the publishers, and their not always harmonious relations with the naturalist authors, is explored and revealed. Given the size of the literature, it was inevitable that difficult decisions have had to be taken relating to scope and about what to retain and what to omit. David Elliston Allen discusses these thorny issues in his Foreword. The prime focus of the book has had to be those naturalists who have made major contributions to the discovery and description of Britain’s natural history and on our islands’ fauna and flora. One omission that may strike the reader is any major reference to Charles Darwin. Notwithstanding the importance of Darwin’s prodigious output, the evidence base for his ideas was drawn worldwide and was not exclusively British. Furthermore, the recent 200th anniversary of his birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species has resulted in the appearance of several new works that cover a similar theme. Rather than duplicating this, it was felt that the space that would have been needed to do justice to a review of Darwin’s contribution to British natural history would be better used on less familiar material.

We are delighted to welcome this fascinating, but at the same time scholarly, addition to the series.

CHAPTER 1
Books and Naturalists

OF ALL THE MANY pursuits and studies that have the outdoors as their principal focus, natural history must surely be without rival in the extent to which it depends on books—and always has done. Unless the different kinds of plants and animals encountered in the wild can be told apart, and, for preference, mentally pigeonholed with a name, the subject could not exist. Without the identifying of its particulars nature remains a purely sensuous experience. Wherever a fauna or flora has been investigated with reasonable thoroughness, there must be a good chance that every one of these particulars has been distinguished, described and dubbed with at least one lasting and widely used designation. Ideally, that will consist of a genus and a species, enabling the plant or animal concerned to be located, if wished, in the unique slot assigned to it in the overall scientific scheme of things; in many cases, though, there will also be a name or names acquired by it over the years in the vernacular, which can serve instead or as an additional label. The natural world presents itself in such a speedily overwhelming diversity that the limit to the number of recognisable entities and their names that the mind can accommodate is reached all too soon. In order to go beyond that limit, or to have one’s memory jogged at will, it is consequently essential to have works of reference, some filled with descriptions of a greater or lesser degree of completeness and with or without accompanying illustrations, others lists of what has been recorded from particular areas and of the parts or places within those that appear to be richest in potential.

Not quite all naturalists regard such basic working tools as an altogether unmixed blessing. One of Ireland’s greatest all-rounders, A. W. Stelfox, came to deplore the existence of popular guides and handbooks as a class, convinced that they did more harm than good, with their commonly all-too-brief descriptions, poor figures and selective coverage giving rise to far too many misidentifications on the part of the inexperienced. A one-time librarian at the American Museum of Natural History even made a practice of hiding such works from the members of its staff, contending that those who ‘know their stuff’ should have no need to look things up. But extreme views like these are the privilege of perfectionists, who can hardly expect most others to share them.

Those who do have recourse to books to identify what they find do not necessarily have to be able to read them, let alone understand the technical terms of which they often consist so very largely. Some of the artisan naturalists who were such a well-known feature of England’s northwest in the eighteenth century’s later years were so barely literate that, in order to put names to wild flowers they came across, they were all-dependent on a book with good illustrations—and, in some cases, for want of anything more recent, that was a battered copy of an antique herbal. There was one naturalist at that period, a certain John Gough of Kendal, who was not only unable to read, but could not even see: completely blind since the age of three, he developed a remarkable flair for identifying plants by using his tongue and his fingers.

If there have always been the rare one or two in the ranks of natural history for whom reference books serve no useful purpose, at the opposite extreme there are some for whom they have made all the difference. ‘In my younger days,’ recalled Worcestershire’s Edwin Lees of the nineteenth century’s earliest years, ‘it was difficult to obtain instruction in any department of Natural History, for illustrated books were rare or inaccessible … But when at last knowledge was attainable, it was like the discovery of a treasure that required years to count. With that first knowledge, dating from the first determined plant and insect, came a flood of enthusiasm, leading to unnumbered rambles and explorations.’ Arthur Patterson, the self-taught naturalist of Norfolk’s Broadland, experienced a similar light-bulb moment. At the age of eight he expended his total savings of just twopence on a copy of Edward Jesse’s Gleanings in Natural History, and was so taken with it that he proceeded to learn all of the lines of it by heart. They ‘ate into me like a fever: it gave me a passion for nature’—a passion which was to stay with him for life.

In the reminiscences of other early naturalists sudden conversions of that kind feature much less usually than a more purely intellectual yearning that finds the acquisition of one book in particular as its focus. If that involves a struggle against adversity, financial or physical, the acquisition is all the more momentous. The story that Thomas Horsefield, a Lancashire weaver, had to tell is typical. After coming across the classes of the Linnaean system for the first time in a book borrowed by his father from a library (James Lee’s Introduction to Botany, as it chanced), ‘I distinctly recollect the determination that actuated me, to overcome the difficulties that lay in the way of learning them.’ In response, he wrote the 24 names on a sheet of paper and fixed that to his loom-post, ‘so that when seated at my work, I could always have opportunities of looking it over.’ In similar fashion a future Curator of the Royal Gardens at Kew, John Smith, while sharing a bothy with fellow apprentices took the first step on the way to a career in scientific horticulture by saving enough out of his meagre wages to become the owner of a copy of his namesake’s dauntingly titled Compendium florae Britannicae. His near-contemporary, George Caley, later to be a valued collector in New South Wales, won the heart of the great Sir Joseph Banks and thereby his patronage by telling him of a seven-mile walk he had made one dark winter’s night purely in order to secure for himself a book on botany at an auction. Those seven miles, though, were as nothing compared to the 16 that William Proctor, subsequently Curator of Durham University Museum, regularly trudged into the city of Newcastle for the single purpose of gazing longingly at a copy of Thomas Bewick’s History of

British Birds displayed in a bird-stuffer’s window, each time forgoing his supper and returning home penniless. Eventually the day came when one of those trips chanced to coincide with a visit to the shop by Bewick himself, who was so touched on learning that the work had such a dedicated admirer that he persuaded the shopkeeper to present the boy with the copy (no doubt promising him a replacement from his own personal stock).

Presents from friends or relations are a more usual way in which books have often touched off an interest in natural history. Thomas Pennant in his autobiography dates his interest in birds to having been given Willughby’s Ornithology at the age of about twelve. It was on his eighth birthday that H. G. Alexander, in much more recent times, received Charles Roberts’ The Naturalist’s Diary, with one page devoted to each day and sections reserved for entries on birds, flowers and insects; he was to use it for 40 years (till eventually it disappeared in Bombay). Eight seems to be about the average age, when children so often start reading on their own, that an interest in the subject is first aroused and permanently takes hold. A lately deceased Hampshire lepidopterist, Dougie Sterling, was seven, for example, when an aunt gave him Butterflies and Moths Shown to Children by J. G. Wood’s son Theodore. He was to cherish it all through boyhood.

Receiving books as presents, though, has the snag that the donors, even if they are one’s parents, may misjudge the recipient’s taste. Conversion to natural history by that means must therefore always be a hit-or-miss affair. A poor book, or even one of those moralising ones that the Victorians turned out in such quantities for inflicting on children, may strike the lucky spark no less effectively than a good one. In a home in which books are rare or even non-existent just about any title may work the trick—and give rise to an unjustifiably firm attachment for many a year afterwards.

A more reliable course is exposure at a particularly receptive age or time to the library of an enthusiast. The spy, explorer and big-game hunter Richard Meinertzhagen never forgot the enormous stimulus he and his brother gained from a copy of Gould’s Birds of Great Britain (Fig. 2) that had once been given to their father: ‘It became our Bible and we never tired of poring over its pages. It was later followed by Lilford’s Birds of the British Islands and we soon knew both these books by heart.’ Leonard Jenyns similarly had the run of the natural history library of a great-uncle godfather, and in later life he was to identify that as the probable source of his passion for the subject. Even so he must have been a late starter, for it was not until he was a teenager at boarding school that he chanced upon The Natural History of Selborne on the shelf of a friend, ‘a book I had never seen before nor even heard of.’ Thereafter he in his turn performed the standard convert’s rite of copying most of the pages out and committing to memory much of the contents.

Better still is when a budding naturalist is the specially chosen recipient of a highly welcome book from a hero-like member of an earlier generation. George Longstaff had the signal honour as a young boy of being presented with a copy of J. W. Douglas’s The World of Insects by no less a person than William Spence, charmingly inscribed on the fly-leaf ‘To a young Entomologist from an old one.’ George Johnston also had the inspired idea of offering a complimentary copy of his newly published Flora of Berwick-on-Tweed to any young botanist sending him specimens of 20 plants not recorded in that. The Edinburgh boy who successfully rose to that challenge was invited by Johnston to stay at his home—and in due course became his son-in-law.

But it is possible to be converted by a book even without reading a single word, provided it has fine illustrations and the peruser is artistically inclined. The great natural history artist James Sowerby was captivated as a small child by the colour plates in (what he thought in old age must have been) one or other of the superb series of volumes on birds that George Edwards put out in the mid-eighteenth century. And such was the precocity of F. W. Frohawk’s talent in this direction that he was the owner of a copy of W. S. Coleman’s British Butterflies even at the age of five (Fig. 3).

Naturalists who write their autobiographies tend to have been devoted to the subject since childhood, and this sprinkling of fond recollections of ‘my earliest book’ may well be untypical of the majority. Many become attracted at later ages, when well into their teens, or in early adulthood or, increasingly today,in retirement. But at any age lasting enlightenment may come about through the reading of one book in particular. One of Ireland’s leading nineteenth-century figures, Alexander Goodman More, on taking up field botany in earnest at the age of 22 treated himself to the first two volumes of H. C. Watson’s pioneering treatise on the factors determining plant distribution, the curiously titled Cybele Britannica. ‘No other book so completely dominated his whole line of thought,’ his posthumous memoirist was to recall, ‘and throughout life, both as botanist and zoologist, he was the most ardent of “Cybelizers”.’ There must be numerous similar stories.

However specialised his or her interests have become, the average naturalist’s library is likely to consist of books of a variety of types and levels. Most of them are likely to be for reference—and here it is worth recalling a dictum of R. F. Scharff, a former head of the natural history division of Dublin’s premier museum, as recounted by Robert Lloyd Praeger: ‘for every specimen that a zoologist or botanist may require in his work, he needs five books.’ Those books do not necessarily have to be purchased, at any rate in these days of plentiful public, society and academic libraries, but too often they can only be consulted, not borrowed, or not borrowed for long enough. Assuming they are affordable, it is infinitely better to have them at one’s elbow, ready to hand as occasion demands even if not in use continually. Alongside that working nucleus other volumes gradually accumulate: gifts from family and friends, the products of reviewing, irresistible finds in second-hand shops … And so libraries grow and expand, to the point in extreme cases where book collecting turns into a specialised activity in itself. ‘Not only have I with my books invaded every closet in every room in my home,’ bewailed the Norfolk banker-botanist, Dawson Turner, to a correspondent of his in 1831, but, in his library ‘all the chairs but three are covered with books: the same is the case with the sofa, the same with the four tables & window seats, & then on the floor I have 60 volumes which have been there for months … Thus situated, you will not wonder if I refuse to buy any whatever except such as I actually want.’ Nevertheless he continued to buy books unrelentingly for the remaining three decades of his life.

Natural history has long been particularly prone to this process of accretion, not only because the subject requires such a range of information in order to operate effectively, but also because naturalists have for centuries now been writing so many books themselves. This partly reflects the fact that so much of the basic work consists of making observations and records, which tend to be worthless if not made public at some point. Periodicals can accommodate a certain proportion of those, in some cases as special supplements should the material be particularly extensive, but the main mass must find its outlet in book form if it is to appear in print. Hence the ever-growing stream of local Floras and Faunas. In addition,though, there are books for beginners, books recalling experiences, belles-lettres, biographies, bibliographies, histories, conference reports, dictionaries of terms, directories … The literature is dazzling in its diversity and its extent overwhelming if the publications of the past are taken into account as well.

The long period of years over which this great outpouring of books on natural history in all its conceivable aspects has been continuously taking place is impressive in itself, stretching back as it does now for well over two centuries. It is all the more impressive considering how formidable an undertaking it was till well into Victorian times to have one’s work published at all; for in addition to the usual hard grind and staying-power inseparable from producing something of book length there was a relatively far higher cost of printing than in later years that had to be overcome. In the case of any book unassured of an extensive sale from the very outset authors needed either to be affluent enough to bear the entire cost themselves or to enjoy the patronage of someone willing to meet much or all of it on their behalf, or else they had to go through the laborious process of soliciting the necessary number of subscribers in advance. Given those deterrents, it can only be considered remarkable that so many books on natural history did arrive in print—testimony to the strength of the hungering on the part of the naturalists of that era to have the fruits of their work given wider circulation and lasting embodiment. For as far as they were aware, books were the sole means of achieving those much-to-be-desired ends. Until periodicals that could also serve those purposes arrived on the scene, there was apparently no alternative. What they could not know, of course, and probably would not even have dared to guess, was that the lengthy letters in which they shared their speculation and discoveries with distant correspondents would be found of such value and interest by their successors that print would eventually be conferred on many of those posthumously.

Quite apart from that formidable financial barrier that most pre-Victorian authors were presented with, some of the works that did manage to appear were written under conditions of great personal stress, so well concealed from their readers that they have remained largely unappreciated down to this day. Thanks to Canon Raven, many do now recognise the heroism of John Ray in his struggle to complete his final work, the Historia insectorum, in the face of incessant pain from ulcerated legs and the insomnia that resulted (Fig. 4). But the hardly less fearful birth throes of John Latham’s General History of Birds are less well known. A once-wealthy physician who had fallen into near-destitution after honourably helping to meet the debts of a bankrupt son (who had shot himself, unable to bear the disgrace), Latham had gone to live with his daughter and son-in-law and their 11 doubtless often noisy children. In the hope that resuming his earlier book-writing would help distract him from his state of distress, his friends encouraged him to embark on what would turn out to be a massive 11-volume work. At the start he was already in his early eighties, a far more advanced age than it would be today, and the task confronting him involved the retouching of about 140 hand-coloured copper plates, much meticulous proofreading and the complexities attendant upon publishing under his own auspices an edition of a few hundred copies. Amazingly, given all that, he not only finished the job, to his own still exacting standards, but lived on in reasonable health and good spirits till only three years short of a century.

The story of Sarah Bowdich and her beautiful The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain is no less heroic. Returning from Africa widowed and penniless, she set about hand-colouring over 3,000 plates for the 12 fascicules that that publication was to prove to run to. Each fish, first specially caught by her, she carefully drew and painted fresh on the bank before the colours had faded, writing as well the accompanying authoritative text, which included original observations of her own. ‘I begin to feel very much like a machine,’ she wrote, very understandably, soon after starting—and it was to be 10 years before the work was completed. During that time she was bringing up three teenage children, devoted a year or more to nursing her mother through a last illness and, whenever there was a spare moment, earning what extra she could as a freelance journalist.

Other authors have written their books while more or less crippled, like Ray. Towards the close of his stunningly prolific career J. G. Wood had the misfortune to trip over a heap of manure when dashing for a train in the dark. Despite breaking three fingers of his writing hand, with characteristic Victorian grit he took a church service the next day, almost fainting in the middle of it from the pain. It was months before he could hold a pen, and for the rest of his days he could write only by steadying his right hand with the left one. After failing to write with the latter, or to master dictating, he eventually won through by taking to a typewriter. Luckily, the almost equally prolific Philip Henry Gosse had more success with dictating when an outbreak of violent headaches forced him to resort to that for the first draft of Tenby, the third most profitable of his seaside books. For another marine researcher of an earlier vintage, Dugald Carmichael, a retired army captain who worked on the seaweeds of the Appin district of Argyllshire, it was rheumatism that was the assailant, of a type so severe that he was unable to hold a pen. Though his treatise never in the end made it into print, ironically the cause was not that affliction, however: he could not find a publisher willing to entertain it as a commercial proposition and he could not contemplate bringing it out at his own expense.

A perhaps more usual source of anguish for authors is having to produce a large and complex work by an agonisingly tight deadline. Those who write for newspapers or magazines are well accustomed to producing copy under pressure, but the timescale in their case is short: a book which presents the culmination of many years of research is quite a different matter, and those prepared to take on such inevitably long-term tasks expect to be treated with latitude by publishers, not unreasonably. But trouble arises when a book is needed for a commemorative occasion or when the accumulating of ever more material, or the acquisition of too many competing commitments, results in the delivery of a manuscript being repeatedly deferred. For all their tolerance, there has to be a limit to the number of times publishers can revise their schedules. Eventually, a book has to be completed by a firm date or the contract has to be cancelled.

Natural history, predictably, has had its share of frantic finales, and there is a distinctive type of correspondence, punctuated by moans and groans, that those have given rise to. Here, for example, is Henry Denny, Leeds Literary and Philosophical Society’s long-time curator, complaining to his friend Leonard Jenyns in 1841 of the angst he was undergoing in the effort to come up at last with his monograph on British lice for his publisher, Henry Bohn (after the award of a generous grant to that end by the British Association for the Advancement of Science): ‘I am working until 4 and ½ past 4 every morning, which makes me feel quite unwell, but … the evening (and that not always) is my only time which I can take to do my own work in … It is only by strong coffee that I can keep up at night.’

The lichenologist James Crombie was similarly kept ‘extremely busy all day and often all night,’ he grumbled to his mentor, William Nylander, in 1880, by the chivvying he was getting from the British Museum to complete his long-overdue catalogue for it. In his case there was the further problem that he subsisted on sporadic earnings from a diversity of sources. The museum’s commission, to make matters worse, was ‘very unremunerative, and for many years I have had to earn my “daily bread” by occasional preaching … and by ephemeral literary work.’

The Leicester botanist A. R. Horwood seems to have faced up to the same predicament with better grace (if the fact that he later described it coolly in print is anything to go by). In his case it was a local society that applied the pressure. He had been counting on that body to underwrite the cost of the eventual publication of a new Flora of Leicestershire and Rutland on which he had been engaged for many years with the unhurriedness conventional for projects of that type. While the fieldwork was still far from complete, as he saw it, the society learned that the British Association had chosen Leicester as the venue for one of its multitudinously attended, week-long annual meetings in two years’ time. Seeing this as an ideal context in which to launch an authoritative and comprehensive account of the local plants, it ruled that the volume must be out by then or its sponsorship would be forfeited. Horwood alone realised what a gigantic task this ultimatum presented him with, but he had always been tirelessly industrious and he buckled down to the challenge without hesitation. Single-handedly and, what is more, in the interstices of a full-time job, he first had to transfer the records contained in his field notebooks onto 40,000 index cards that the exercise proved to require. In the process each record had to be assigned to one of 15 ‘botanical districts’ into which he had divided the counties for easier assessment of how widely and uniformly each species occurred. That preliminary work took him six months, leaving the text—which included several lengthy introductory sections—still to be written. Despite then losing a third of the time available for that to illness, he succeeded in the end in meeting the deadline. Even so, it must have been a close-run thing.

While the amount of effort that lies behind many another natural history book is in no way inferior to Horwood’s, it must be virtually unexampled for so much of it to be compressed within such a very short time frame. On the other hand the physical demands involved in combing slowly and methodically on foot an extensive stretch of lowland countryside, none of it all that distant from home, as he had to do in the first instance, is hardly comparable with the feats of endurance that some authors have found it necessary to perform in areas that are both faraway and rugged. For example, to procure specimens of two endemic species of whitebeam that grow in a remote part of the Isle of Arran, for his artist, Florence Strudwick, to draw for their Further Illustrations of British Plants, R. W. Butcher made the 400-mile journey from London in a third-class railway carriage overnight and made it back again the following night, in his anxiety to keep the cost to a minimum and sacrifice no more of his annual leave allowance than absolutely necessary. But that was nothing to the rigours undertaken by some of the pioneer bird photographers, whose cumbersome equipment added an extra layer of arduousness. One of those, Cherry Kearton, made a train journey of more than 400 miles preparatory to lugging his camera up and down a mountain for over a dozen miles further—only for a thick mist to descend just as the apparatus was being erected and completely obscure the nest that he had travelled all that way just to capture a shot of.

In common with other pursuits, natural history seems always to have had its share of individuals endowed with such superabundant energy that discharging some in hectic bursts acts as a kind of release. The botanist John Lindley was famously one of those. For the first three-quarters of his life he never knew what it was to feel fatigue, he credibly asserted, and he was proud of never having taken a holiday till he reached the age of fifty-two. As a young man, avid for books but without the money to buy more than a very few, he once had a rare French volume on short loan from a trusting friend and immediately on its receipt worked on it non-stop for three days without going to bed. His English translation of it, Observations on the Structure of Fruits and Seeds, published the next year, included six new plates from drawings of his own that he had made in the meantime.

In the earliest days of natural history the borrowing of books by one naturalist from another was often essential, particularly by authors of monographs, which could require the extensive consulting of earlier works in maybe several languages, and particularly if they lived in remote country areas (as so many in that era did). Most of the works needed were only to be had from the fine libraries of the wealthy, who could have been rightly wary of letting valuable volumes out of their sight and entrusting them to individuals with less than impeccable credentials or exposing them to the risk of damage or loss in the mail. Sending any books by post, moreover, was an expensive matter in itself. On the other hand helping a needy, proven scholar by this means, as Sir Hans Sloane helped John Ray on frequent occasions, was just another way of acting as a patron of learning and provided justification for the fortunes spent on acquiring great collections of books of which so relatively few were probably ever made use of for personal study by their owners. Such considerations presumably came into play far less when the lending was by one wealthy owner to another, especially if the two were collaborators on some project. We know that when William Borrer and Dawson Turner were preparing their Lichenographica Britannica, foreign monographs passed between Sussex and Norfolk repeatedly. Yet lending even to an enthusiast of the same social standing and reputability as oneself was not invariably free from risk, as William Withering discovered to his cost when a fellow physician in a neighbouring town, Jonathan Stokes, failed to return a sizeable portion of his botanical library and he had to go to law to retrieve it.

Learned tomes formed the prevailing reading matter of naturalists as long as books of all kinds continued to be luxury objects, by virtue of having to be produced by onerous craft methods and with a costly imported material, paper. In the near-absence of the specialist periodicals that would later emerge there was little else indeed with a bearing on the subject that naturalists could buy and read, for there were still far too few of them to make works with a lighter character viable commercially. These scholarly works themselves appeared only because, along with reference collections, they were the basic tools without which this group of studies could not be entered and pursued at a serious level, and those who could afford to do so had no option but to stump up for the high prices that obtained. Although the middle years of the eighteenth century saw a surge in demand for illustrated works on the flora and fauna of exotic lands, as part of a wider vogue for travel literature, books with the natural history of the British Isles as their focus could not compete with those in glamour, and they stolidly remained one of the market’s obscurer sections, sustained only by an adequacy of devotees with the necessary long purses.

As we shall see, that pattern changed radically in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Through a combination of factors the reading public greatly expanded and the market for natural history books assumed the much more diverse character that it has sustained ever since. There continued to be a solid substratum of scholarly works underlying the several new layers that were now brought into being, but despite being assisted by cross-subsidy on the part of certain publishers its commercial viability was as much a matter for concern then as it has been ever since. Books which represent the outcome of a heavy investment of time and money extending over many years tend of necessity to be of more than average dimensions even if they are not also inescapably technical. Costlier to produce for these reasons alone, their usual minority appeal dictates a high cover price too. Yet it is the bottom layer that matters most for the continuing vitality of the subject, for, together with the learned journals, it constitutes the critical filter through which new findings pass before becoming absorbed into the general store of knowledge.

Once this layering of the market took place, authors began to turn out shorter, less technical, more readable books with a new realistic prospect of making significant amounts of money from them. Many wrote out of high-mindedness, with a religious or educational motive that was uppermost, but the financial one was probably in all cases not as unimportant as it was and had been for those whose overriding concern was to see the outcome of their studies converted into the security and prominence of print. Many active naturalists who failed ever to put any of their works into print may have sheltered behind the pretext that they could not afford the expense involved when the real reason was simply inertia. Others compromised by writing anonymously or using a pseudonym. Women in particular were reluctant to publish without some veiling of this kind, perhaps because they feared to be considered ‘forward’, perhaps out of general diffidence. Some of them, indeed, like the renowned Amelia Griffiths of Torquay, who became one of the leading experts on seaweeds, were seemingly content to leave it to others to bring their efforts to wider notice, in effect publishing by proxy. At least one instance is known of a married woman even expressing guilt about engaging in natural history at all. Anna Maria Hussey, a busy parson’s wife and mother of three children, produced paintings of fungi that grew around her home in Kent that were numerous and good enough to make up two successive series of her eventual Illustrations of British Mycology (Fig. 5). Yet in a letter to her mentor, the great Miles Berkeley, she once confided, ‘I am always under the uncomfortable impression that the thing I am doing is not the right thing to be doing.’

A few of those who turned out ‘popular’ books did so out of financial desperation, we now know. One was the first occupant of the Chair of Botany at Cambridge University, the unfairly maligned Richard Bradley, whose prodigious output—which descended into plagiarism—on a great range of topics, of which natural history was only one, was occasioned by his need to climb out of debt. How that debt came about is unknown, though one researcher has plausibly suggested the South Sea Bubble as the cause, on grounds of chronology. Certainly, sudden financial disaster seems to have been the commonest reason why naturalists took to the pen. Captain Thomas Brown, another prolific author, was forced to earn a living by that means when his flax-spinning mill burnt down uninsured. Priscilla Wakefield did so, in her mid-forties, when her husband was experiencing business difficulties. Edward Forbes, on the other hand, was careful not to injure his reputation as a scientist when his father’s bankruptcy suddenly whisked away his generous allowance: his hectic life as a freelance journalist for a period thereafter was confined to the respectable end of the periodical press and combined with part-time work exploiting his natural history expertise as a lecturer and a curator. His contemporaries fortunate enough to be ensconced in one of the very few permanent posts in the subject were scarcely better off financially, though, if they had little or no private means to supplement the miserable stipend that tended to be the norm; their job security, however, meant that they could afford to be less high-minded about the kind of literary work they undertook as a remunerative sideline. Dr George Shaw, who was notably active on this front in the years 1780–1825, spent so much of his official time ‘writing for the booksellers’ that he totally neglected the British Museum’s natural history collections (according to William Swainson, a not altogether trustworthy witness, for he fancied that job for himself).

But some naturalists have turned to authorship simply because they found it a more congenial alternative profession. J. G. Wood is the outstanding example of that: he tried pastoral work for a year or two before finding books a more satisfying form of preaching. James Duncan, the pioneer of Scottish entomology, after following his father into the ministry soon came to recognise that he was too shy ever to be successful in that and turned instead to earning a living as a writer and editor.

In rare cases books have arisen out of more esoteric motives. A Bristol physician, E. H. Swete, is said to have published his early Flora of that district with the aim of winning patients for his practice by presenting himself as a man of science (in days when doctors still listed botanical publications in their entries in the Medical Directory). The £80 he paid to have the book printed and distributed he clearly regarded as a worthwhile investment. Such indeed was the faith that he had in it as a reputation-builder that he carefully concealed the fact that the first half had been written by someone else with greater local knowledge.

At least two other books of a similar kind published around that same period had senior medical men as their nominal authors but are now known to have been largely based, with only slight acknowledgement, on data supplied to them by obscure individuals in humble circumstances. Thus did the young Edwin Lees ‘devil’ for Charles Hastings in Worcestershire and the poverty-stricken Richard Buxton for J. B. Wood in Manchester. It rather looks as if there was a tacit convention in those days whereby those who had a rich store of records but who could not afford to have them published otherwise were prepared, as a quid pro quo, to allow a professional man of high local standing to make free use of their work and receive such credit as might result from his nominal authorship. The brokers of these arranged marriages were no doubt printers, who felt able to take the risk of publishing a learned book on a purely local topic only if it was ‘carried’ by a name of some distinction—and reasonably convincingly.

A better-known instance of ghosting—because of the far-reaching repercussions this proved to have—is the two volume A Natural Arrangement of British Plants, the first work in English to expound and champion the superior virtues of the natural system of classification (as opposed to the artificial Linnaean one that still dominated the field at the time of the book’s appearance in 1821). The nominal author in this case was Samuel Frederick Gray, a pharmacist who made his living as a medical writer, an eccentric figure well-known for hair that came down to his knees and as the last man in London to continue to wear a tricorn hat. After completing the preface, and half of the first volume, however, his persistently precarious health gave way and he was forced to entrust the rest to his more than capable 21-year-old son, John Edward, a future head of the Natural History Department of the British Museum and already with much experience of lecturing on the natural system to medical students. The son indeed seems to have been the initiator of the book in the first place, but he was happy for his father to receive the credit. That he was really the main author, though, quickly became an open secret and led to his being fingered by the increasingly embattled Linnaeans as their arch-enemy, culminating in his being humiliatingly blackballed when he stood for election to the Linnean Society not long afterwards. Though eventually a zoologist of immense productivity and international renown, he never forgave the society for that snub till the end of his days, and he went on to lend his prestige, as its permanent president, to the body that most noisily identified itself with the incoming rival system, the later-founded Botanical Society of London. The schism within the natural history community in the metropolis that John Edward Gray by that time personified arguably did the subject lasting harm, by undermining the previously unifying role of the Linnean Society and by hastening the breaking-up into a series of new bodies which acted thereafter more autonomously than might otherwise have been the case. All in all, no mean achievement for one rather obscure textbook, even if brought about unintentionally.

Ghosted books are by no means the only deceit that has been played from time to time on the naturalist reading public. Worse by far, surely, are cases where the unauthorised use of someone else’s data has been concealed or given at best minimal acknowledgement. A mere student, like T. H. Cooper, who published a plant list for Sussex without making it clear that it was made up very largely of two other botanists’ records, can perhaps have that form of plagiarism put down to naivety and more or less excused. But Arthur Hassall, the author of A History of the British Freshwater Algae, cannot be let off so lightly. Wishing to include the desmids, a group with which he had scant acquaintance himself, he tried to persuade John Ralfs, the recognised national expert on those, to pass on to him all that he had accumulated on the subject over the years. When Ralfs understandably demurred, in the absence of any assurance that his effective authorship of that section would be made fully evident, Hassall responded by making no reference at all to Ralfs’ work and even had the effrontery to append his own name to certain figures that were patently poor copies of ones by Ralfs that had already appeared in print. Hassall no doubt persuaded himself that Ralfs had behaved selfishly by leaving him in the lurch. Ralfs, for his part, spoke of the affair with bitterness ever after.

Until the nineteenth century plagiarism and piracy were risks so inseparable from exposing one’s work to the rough-and-tumble of a still poorly regulated publishing trade that authors had necessarily to become inured to them. But by the time that people like Cooper and Hassall were appearing on the scene the situation had altered markedly for the better, and it had become reasonable to expect that one’s words or illustrations would not be reproduced without express permission. The landmark in this respect so far as natural history was concerned was a lawsuit in 1832. This was brought by a leading entomologist, J. F. Stephens, against a freelance populariser of zoology, James Rennie, accusing the latter of having plagiarised some of his ongoing part-work, Illustrations of British Entomology, for a similar work of his own. Stephens was the son and nephew of naval officers and had been employed for some years in the Admiralty Office, so he was perhaps more than ordinarily a stickler for correctness in behaviour; Rennie, by contrast, was no doubt accustomed to the lighter conventions of the world of business. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the case went against Stephens, who was only saved from bankruptcy as a result by a special fund raised among his entomological sympathisers. The publicity did him no good in the eyes of the Admiralty, and contributed to ending his career there; but for the world of learning it may have served as a salutary jolt, reminding authors that copying, even if inadvertent, was now liable to be taken very seriously by the high-principled, even to potentially sacrificial lengths.

Yet another form of deceit is the publishing of a book under a misleading title. No naturalist who saw it advertised or came across it on a bookseller’s shelf is likely to have guessed that Eleazar Albin’s A Natural History of Songbirds was in the main about cage-birds (with a special section on canaries and their diseases); or that Sir John Dalyell’s Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland covered only zoophytes; or that Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire contained mostly topography. ‘Natural history’ has also repeatedly been used over the years for works whose contents are exclusively zoological.

Sometimes, though, a title can mislead to the reader’s advantage, providing an unexpected bonus. Anyone who pulled down a copy of Thomas Bell’s A History of British Quadrupeds was in for a pleasant surprise if they had failed to spot ‘including the Cetacea’ appended to those words. Alexander Irvine’s The London Flora includes records from all over the southeast of England in the first part and from all over Britain in the second, while George Dickie’s A Flora of Ulster, if less extreme in its expansionism, embraces not only that province but the counties of Leitrim and Sligo too. Going to the other extreme, E. T. Booth—hardly in a fit of modesty, surely?—chose to disguise as Rough Notes … three folio volumes and over a hundred colour plates … on the Birds Observed … in the British Islands.

The ultimate deception of all, though, must be the inventing of non-existent works. Two of those have found their way at different times into Britain’s natural history literature, in the one case in furtherance of fraud, in the other simply as a joke. The first, entitled A List of the Birds that have been Observed to Breed in the Island of Arran, Scotland, since the year 1835, bore the appearance of a privately printed catalogue of a kind that nineteenth-century collectors sometimes drew up. The author was named as ‘Dr Martin Barry, MD, FRS’, but there were no other details, not even the printer. It subsequently transpired that Dr Barry was the only item of information that was other than fictitious. A physician and embryologist of some renown, he had gone to live in Arran in the 1840s after a breakdown in health and there began forming what eventually grew into a superb collection of birds’ eggs from all over Britain. By the time the fraud was exposed (in Ibis, the journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union, in 1863) he had been safely dead for eight years. That was not an unlikely lapse of time before a deceased person’s collection was put up for sale, and the dealer, by the name of Calvert, who sent to auction in London several lots purporting to have come from this added further verisimilitude by claiming (falsely) to be acting for the executors. His purpose in concocting the printed list was to provide a false provenance for bogus specimens of negligible value that he had substituted for genuine ones in the Barry collection. Unwisely, though, to allay suspicion, he mixed the fraudulent ones with choice eggs lifted from another well-known collection that had come into his possession—but, alas for him, so choice and so well-known that their true identity was spotted by people familiar with them. Fraudulent provenances were nothing new for natural history salerooms in that era, the penalty for the dazzlingly large sums that wealthy collectors showed themselves ready to pay for prize rarities, but Calvert’s fraud was seemingly unique in its elaborateness, to the extent of being dressed up in printed clothes.

The other curiosity came to light at a more recent period. In 1935 a well-known author of sporting verse published a very readable, widely reviewed book entitled Birds Ashore and A-foreshore, in which numerous records were credited to a work quite unknown to the then foremost authority on the bibliography of Scottish natural history, Sir Hugh Gladstone. This was Birds of Angus and The Mearns by a certain Alexander Moniepennie, allegedly printed in that county a hundred years earlier. Deeply intrigued, Gladstone pressed the author for more details—only to flush out an airy confession: the publication was entirely fanciful, inserted just to tease fellow bird-lovers who went in for what he saw as pompous displays of recondite learning.

But there are enough bibliographical booby traps in the natural history literature already, put there unwittingly by authors themselves, without any need to invent some. By their very nature, multi-volume works are particularly liable to contain them, but J. W. Tutt’s A Natural History of the British Lepidottera is perhaps the most extreme example. In theory, this was made up of 11 volumes, but only the first five and the last four ever appeared, leaving a gaping hole in the middle of the set. To heighten the complexity, those final four—final only in the numbered sequence: in fact their appearance overlapped with that of the initial five—were issued under a slightly altered title, ‘butterflies’ replacing the more learned-looking ‘Lepidoptera’ (at the behest of the publisher, in the hope of broadening the sale?), and renumbered to give the appearance that they were the start of another series entirely. This impression was strengthened by their being brought out in parts instead of as whole volumes at a time, as previously. What is more, the numbering of the plates is fully in keeping: there were clearly meant to be 41 of those, but three in the sequence never materialised. An innocent purchaser of a set today could hardly fail to think the copy in question was multiply defective, unless apprised of the peculiar character of this work beforehand.

Authors have done even stranger things, surreptitiously. The pioneer of the study of plant geography in Britain, the intellectually fastidious H. C. Watson, is said to have made a regular practice of taking his books off the market well before each had exhausted its print, buying up the remaining stock and disposing of it to hucksters. In one case the number of copies involved was as many as 150. As the majority of his books were self-published, the practice can hardly be put down to anxiety to release capital tied up in warehousing costs. Rather, according to one of his friends, maybe echoing Watson himself, the purpose was ‘to make his books scarce’, for which the only logical explanation would seem to be that, as his store of data steadily grew and his understanding altered accordingly, Watson wished to prevent premature inferences drawn in his earlier work being mistaken for his latest thinking. What does seem unlikely, though, is that he followed this ‘scorched earth’ policy for the reason attributed to the coauthor of a work on the butterflies of India, who burnt all the unsold stock of that, it is related, because he was ‘so despondent … at his labours not being appreciated.’ Watson could be as brutally honest with himself as he was all too often with everyone else, but he never gave any sign of losing confidence in the value of the project on which he was engaged for the greater part of his life.

All the same, authors must be forgiven their muddles and their quirks in view of the stress and strain so many of them undergo in not only creating a book, but, sometimes even more, in seeking to have it published. Many valuable works have been written over the years but for one reason or another have failed to complete the arduous journey and end up in print. The luckier of those have survived, half-forgotten, in libraries or archives or the cupboards of museums, waiting for the day when some benefactor will deem them worth the cost and effort involved in at last laying them before the world—for though the information they contain is likely to be long out of date by then, some may have value as benchmarks against which changes in the fauna or flora can be measured.

Yet even the works that succeed in being published do not necessarily arrive in print as their authors envisaged. Some prove too long to be a viable proposition commercially without the aid of a sizeable subsidy, or with a larger one than the funds already raised to that end permit, and have to be cut with a greater or lesser degree of severity. Others are so poorly written or so insufficiently researched that they have to be overhauled by someone else, to the extent that they lose their original identity in substantial part. Still others require editing if the original author is no longer available to bring up to date a work that has proved too lastingly profitable to be lightly allowed to vanish; in such cases, though, the amount of textual change desirable may be vetoed by the author’s family or executors, anxious for the character of the work to be faithfully preserved, as a monument to its creator.

Of all the gauntlets that a book has to run, however, none has more punishment potential than the publishing trade’s eternally fragile economics. A whole range of factors over which that trade has no control is always liable to intervene and wreck plans and good intentions. In addition to those, the individual firms have their own particular set of vicissitudes to contend with: undercapitalisation, dissension between partners, loss of key staff, the luring away of long-lucrative authors. Worse still, subjects and genres are prey to publishing fashion. Though stability is prized and a solid backlist of long-term steady sellers is the recognised key to financial survival, every so often a title achieves enormous, quite unpredicted success and jolts the trade out of its settled opinions. Over the years natural history has shown a particular capacity for springing such surprises, from White’s Selborne at the start of the nineteenth century to Keble Martin’s Concise British Flora two-thirds of the way through the twentieth. This reflects the fact that for the general run of publishers it has always been a subject variously interpreted and but vaguely understood. Of manifestly wide popular appeal in some of its guises, it is open to penetration by purveyors of broadly conceived educational or hobbyist series or of books on country life or travel; in other guises, however, it is dauntingly technical, a minority market made up of knowledgeable enthusiasts and seen as best left to specialist firms with the necessary in-house expertise and experience.

All things considered, British naturalists have been well served by the publishing trade, at any rate for the past two and a half centuries. But some sections have inevitably been better served than others. The works that the subject has all along most needed have tended to be those with the least tempting prospects commercially, with the result that the market has continually had a distorting effect on its development, ‘swamping’ it at periods with lightweight and even seriously inaccurate reading matter while depriving it of worthy products of scholarship—or at least rendering those far harder and costlier to see into print than might otherwise have been the case. The relationship between naturalists and the world of publishing has always possessed a certain tension as a result. It is this relationship, in its various forms, and the shifts it has undergone at different periods over the years, that could be said to be the dominant theme in the pages that follow.

CHAPTER 2
The Earliest Authors

THE FAUNA AND FLORA of these islands were being studied in the field at least a full century before the advent in Europe of printing in movable type. While we know that for certain, we unfortunately know all too little about the individuals responsible, and which of them deserves to be acclaimed as our first genuine naturalist of all is, not unexpectedly, a matter of debate.

Claims for that title have been made for various early Christian monks, on the strength of individual mentions of identifiable birds and mammals in such of their nature poetry that has come down to us, in particular. The Irish have championed one called Augustin, whose Liber de mirabilibus sanctae scripturae of AD 655 survived (and eventually saw print in 1837) in the mistaken belief that it was a work by the great Saint Augustine of Hippo; however, the seven kinds of quadrupeds listed in one of its sentences as then known to exist in that country could well have been second-hand information. Discriminating one kind of bird from another called for greater acumen on the whole, and seven different ones have been found in The Seafarer, an anonymous, possibly far earlier poem reproduced in the Exeter Book, a work in the West Saxon script dating from perhaps around the year 1000. The names of as many as 75 bird species have been identified in the Anglo-Saxon literature as a whole, but many of those must have formed part of the common knowledge of country people of the time, and in any case acquaintance with names is hardly solid evidence of original knowledge gained by personal observation in the wild. It also has to be borne in mind that much copying and re-copying of early manuscripts took place, and a miscellany of individuals and sources could consequently have been involved, by no means all of them inhabitants of these islands.

For more convincing evidence that systematic observers of wildlife were around in the era before printing we have to retreat to rather more recent periods. Two sources, widely separate in time, provide us with that.

The first is one of the several works written, under the name of Giraldus Cambrensis, by Gerald de Barri, through his mother both the great-grandson of a South Wales prince and a member of one of the leading Norman families to have settled in Ireland, the Fitzgeralds. It was a dual lineage that would have been bound to stand him in good stead when he came to discover a taste for fact-finding travel. Brought up in a castle whose remains still stand, in a peaceful bay in the southeast of Pembrokeshire, Gerald matured into one of the most dynamic churchmen of twelfth-century Britain, though he was to be disappointed in the hope he long entertained of becoming Archbishop of Wales. Supremely well placed to glean information of interest wherever he went, unfortunately he allowed his eagerness for that to impair its value for posterity by being blatantly over-credulous. His information, moreover, was seldom as specific as one is entitled to expect from someone venturing into the sphere of natural history. Thus the two books that resulted from his travels in Ireland in the 1180s, in his capacity as secretary to Prince John, the son of Henry II (who had appointed him court chaplain), disappointingly go little further than providing lists of a few of the fishes and the birds to be found, without revealing how far, if at all, those were on his own authority. His later Journey through Wales, of which he penned three versions in the course of some 15 years, is similarly written at a frustrating level of generality as far as natural history is concerned—but with one important exception: a remarkably detailed account of the habits of beavers in the River Teifi, the only stretch of water in Wales or in England south of the Humber, according to him, in which these animals then still survived. This constitutes one of a number of additions worked by him into the third version of the book, which scholars think was probably in 1214. The account is manifestly the product of extended study in the field, but by whom? Gerald himself seems too slapdash a person to have been capable of that, even supposing he had the necessary time, and the best guess is that he was indebted for it, perhaps in a somewhat garbled form, to one or more local informants, professional trappers maybe, whose identities are forever lost to history.

In default of any other identifiable individual, the title of first genuine naturalist must go therefore to a Dominican friar, Henry Daniel, a contemporary of Chaucer’s in the middle years of the fourteenth century. A close student of wild plants to the extent of drawing up descriptions of them and noting where he came across them in parts of England as widely separated as Somerset, Kent and Lincolnshire, Daniel and his manuscripts, scattered today between several libraries, have been known to historians of botany since the eighteenth century. It is only in recent years, however, thanks to the late John Harvey, that the astonishingly early date of these localised records has come to be properly appreciated. It may be no accident that part of his life came within the reign of Richard II; for during those years England’s artistic culture is recognised now as having undergone a marked revival, achieving a level of excellence not reached again till two centuries later. In the aftermath of the Black Death feudal authority was in general on the wane and, reflecting that, the English language itself began to enjoy the recrudescence that would gradually oust Norman French. It was a suitable time for a man of learning to be roaming the countryside and making a serious start at cataloguing its wild resources.

Significantly, it was by no means only plants of alleged medicinal value that Father Daniel was concerned to identify. Searching for healing herbs doubtless provided him with a useful cover story, but it is clear that his motivation was in essence that of a field botanist. What is even more impressive is that there was no portable herbal available to him at that date with illustrations that were sufficiently true to nature to serve as much of a guide—and to be worth humping around on his back in one of the black bags that early herbalists wore for the purpose. On the other hand, as a member of an order whose preaching journeys were only interruptions in a quasi-monastic life of study, he would have had ready access to libraries with a copy of the standard pharmacopoeia of the period. An amalgam of several pre-existing Latin treatises, this had been produced, and in the process translated into Old English, probably shortly before the Norman Conquest and presumably in some centre with rich holdings of such works, perhaps Canterbury or Winchester. Thus it can be credibly postulated that our earliest field botanist drew on a body of knowledge that stemmed from the Anglo-Saxons.

It has been traditional to scoff at the crudeness of the illustrations in early manuscript herbals, and to assume that it was the frequent copying by ignorant scribes that led to loss of much resemblance to the Graeco-Roman plants that were the presumptive originals. There is a new school of thought, however, that the process of stylisation was deliberate: instead of producing realistic reproductions (of which at least one artist was fully capable, on the evidence of a herbal of around 1300 that has survived), it was decided that herb collectors were sufficiently expert to need nothing more elaborate than figures that served merely to remind them of a plant’s general appearance, with the key characters highlighted. This might have been rendered necessary in any case by a shortage of scribes with any better artistic skill, and certainly it offered a convenient short cut in attempting to meet what was no doubt a continually strong demand for identification aids. On this view, herbals of that crude type were the equivalent of today’s field guides.

Considering that for thousands of years already the ability to recognise plants with proven or supposed powers to cure had been generally acknowledged as of pressing importance, it is not surprising that botany had a long head start over all other branches of natural history. Distinguishing the different kinds of birds was a by-product of falconry, while fishermen had the same economic imperative to develop a primitive taxonomy as herb collectors had in the case of plants, but collecting herbs was far easier and could be practised by a much greater range of people; moreover, healing with herbs had an urgency that eating fish ordinarily had not. As an integral part of the wider body of specialised empirical lore that went by the name of medicine, the distinguishing of plants enjoyed immediate respect as an obviously useful study. As an activity it was in no way eccentric; better still, it was one that was followed, even if as a sideline, by many men of the Church.

It is nevertheless important to remember that until the seventeenth century herbals were strictly medical works, devised expressly to meet the practical requirements of a group of incipient professions: they were not produced to satisfy the curiosity of those drawn to study plants for their own sake, and it was only gradually and incidentally that they took on a recognisably botanical character. Their usefulness for students of the British flora was in any case seriously limited by the strongly Mediterranean bias in the range of plants included. Deeply ingrained reverence for Classical learning dictated slavish adherence to the herbal tradition of the Greeks and Romans, leaving other traditions, many of them no less ancient and rich in remedies of their own, disregarded as of no account. It would not be till a much later period that the extent to which the floras of the northern and western parts of Europe differ from those of the regions to the south came to be appreciated and the geographical bias corrected.

This ‘floristic error’ was nevertheless convenient for the producers and distributors of works on herbs, and even more so when the production and distribution were carried out for commercial profit, for it allowed the continent as a whole to be treated as a single, undifferentiated entity to which every herbal could be assumed to be equally relevant. The displacement of the monasteries and of their traffic in hand-copied manuscripts by printing houses able to turn out copies on a much wider front made no difference in this respect: England continued to be supplied with the same herbal fare as everywhere else in Europe in blithe unawareness that its needs were in any way special.

Printing technology took 20 years to spread from Germany to England, where the first book was belatedly produced by that method in 1477, and nearly half a century more elapsed before one devoted exclusively to herbs came from an English press. This was a hardly appetising quarto volume, which lacked not only illustrations but even an author’s name (and is known faute de mieux as ‘Banckes’s herbal’, after its printer). Like most early printed books, this was probably derived from a work already long popular in manuscript; and certainly it continued to be popular, for there are known to have been numerous editions from a variety of presses, to say nothing of several imitators. The fact that it was written in English evidently made up for its unillustrated character. Shortly afterwards, in 1526, came the first of two printed editions of The Grete Herball, an English translation of a French work with 200 small illustrations lifted from a German one—depressingly indicative of how heavily dependent on Continental initiatives English publishing would long continue to be.

With the irruption onto the scene of William Turner in 1538, however, the situation altered markedly for the better. At last an author who was himself a naturalist, with a demonstrably wide first-hand acquaintance with both plants and birds, Turner was a man of great energy and vehement opinions combined with manifold abilities, wit and a handsome presence that carried him to social no less than intellectual prominence, both in England and in Europe more generally. He was to act as physician to the man who for two years was the effective head of state, he conversed in Latin with Queen Elizabeth when she was a princess, and he rose within the Church to become Dean of Wells. Brought up in Northumberland, he received a university education at Cambridge that culminated in a college fellowship, after which he embarked on a medical career, initially as a ship’s surgeon before prospering in practice in London—while supervising three gardens simultaneously on the side. A leading champion of the incoming Protestantism, he suffered for his convictions two periods of Continental exile and the banning of his prolific writings on theology as he moved in and out of favour under the alternating doctrinal regimes of successive Tudor monarchs. Natural history was singularly fortunate to receive a share of the attention of such an exceptional, multi-talented figure.

Of the books that Turner produced as a naturalist (he produced purely medical treatises as well), the first two can be seen as skirmishes in a broader campaign he waged to topple Latin from its throne, symbolising as that did to those of his persuasion the stifling hold of papism. Libellus de re herbaria novus, a mere booklet (as the title carefully announced), just 20 pages in length, was a product of his early Cambridge years and was no doubt printed at his own personal expense. Only two copies are known to have survived, suggesting that its circulation was very limited (though some may have perished in the bonfires that were made of his theological writings). ‘The first printed work relating to British plants with any claim to originality’, in the words of the late Professor Stearn, it was essentially a first go at rendering the English names of plants as usable alternatives to their Latin equivalents. To this end, Turner brought his scholarship to bear on the various ambiguities that existed, deciding which vernacular names most properly belonged to which species and, where necessary, filling the gaps with ones translated from widely used French works or with coinages of his own. Of the 255 that resulted, nearly half have remained in use ever since. There was predictably criticism in conservative quarters of this seemingly retrograde move, but Turner vigorously defended it with his customary combativeness. Ten years later, in 1548, he consolidated his position with The Names of Herbes a much lengthier small octavo renowned for including the first-ever localised records of English plants to be privileged with print. Both publications have been accorded the fitting honour of twice being published in facsimile in more recent years.

Meanwhile, in 1544, Turner had also produced the first-ever bird book to appear in print. Entitled Avium praecipuarum … brevis et succincta historia, this was basically a list of the kinds mentioned by Pliny and Aristotle to which he added comments and descriptions based on field observations of his own. His use of Latin this time (an English translation had to wait till 1903), like the printing of the book in Cologne, was presumably a price he had to pay for his first Continental exile and removal from sources at home. This exile, however, proved a boon in other ways, enabling him to travel extensively, meet Europe’s leading naturalists and familiarise himself with its fauna and flora to a degree without parallel for an Englishman in that era.

Exile again interfered with his last and easily most substantial work, A New Herball, though in this case an additional price was paid for that in bibliographical complexity. Published in three instalments between 1551 and 1568, with intermissions in each case of several years, one instalment printed in London and two then in Cologne, it ended up with a structure baffling to any novice reader and with page numbering that renders citation awkward and tricky. As the masterpiece of a dedicated puritan, it was appropriately in essence a work of purification: the Classical texts were meticulously purged of the noisome accretions acquired through centuries of bad translating while, at the same time, in the light of his Continental experience their highly misleading geographical imbalance was rectified by the insertion of well over 200 species that Turner had personally established as found in the wild in Britain. Not the least important feature of the book was its introduction to an English readership of the close faithfulness to nature now being attained in Germany by artists such as Albrecht Meyer, reduced copies of some 400 of whose superb woodcuts were reproduced from the finest of the latest generation of Continental herbals, the De historia stirpium of Leonhart Fuchs. In so far as the plants depicted were ones not exclusive to the Continent, these illustrations considerably increased the chances of arriving at correct identifications of English wild flowers—provided a copy of the book was accessible, that is. Unfortunately, its publication mainly in Germany seems to have told against a wide sale, while Turner’s insistence on writing it in English is thought to have seriously damaged its long-term impact in the scholarly community.

At the time of his death in 1568, two years short of sixty, Turner had still to realise his plans for an illustrated edition of his bird book and a more extended account of English fishes than the one he had contributed to the Historia animalium of his Swiss friend, Conrad Gesner, by general agreement the most knowledgeable naturalist of the age. The publication of those two further books could have gone some way to redressing the disproportionate lack of attention the fauna of these islands had so far received for lack of works of reference at all comparable with the herbals in scope and breadth of ownership.

The nearest equivalents to herbals that zoology could boast were the medieval illuminated manuscripts known as bestiaries. Probably mainly used as teaching manuals in the monasteries, these have long been dismissed as worthless ‘ragbags of myths and marvels’ (to quote the late Wilma George), but recent research has shown that much sound natural history, including unlikely stories that have been confirmed in modern times (such as the habit foxes have of shamming death in order to catch birds that come to examine their body), can be won from them by careful study. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed a great surge in their popularity in England, accompanied by a marked switch to European animals and birds in the range of creatures depicted, which suggests that these were what the illustrators had reason to believe had now become the main subjects of interest. There are 36 of these works in British libraries containing pictures of birds, and more than half of the 30 kinds of those that have proved identifiable are wild ones. Some of the pictures betray evidence that they were done from life. All in all, though, the potential of bestiaries as indicators of the extent of contemporary knowledge of wildlife is very limited.

The start made by Turner at remedying the excessive under-representation of the animal kingdom in the early printed literature was taken a step further, but a disappointingly far smaller one than it could have been, in the generation that followed. Thanks to a loose chain of individuals, the material on insects that Gesner had amassed for his great Historia animalium but failed to work into that before his sudden death was brought from Switzerland to England, where it was augmented and eventually published to a greater or lesser extent, in both Latin and English. How that came about, and why it took just short of a hundred years from start to finish, constitutes a story of extraordinary complexity that still awaits its definitive historian, and only a bare outline of the various twists and turns involved can be related here.

The person responsible for that initiative in the first place, and to whom the greatest share of the credit belongs, was a man in very much the same mould as Turner, if milder and less colourful: similarly a Cambridge graduate and a hotheaded Protestant who jeopardised a clerical career with tactless preaching, he too had to take refuge on the Continent, where he likewise travelled widely and then became a prosperous London physician; Turner’s son was even a long-time friend of his. This was Thomas Penny (Fig. 7). The first-ever English lepidopterist that we know of, as well as a field botanist proficient enough to add several species to the national list, Penny may have owed his broad enthusiasm for natural history to his upbringing in the countryside outside Lancaster. During his Continental wanderings he called on Gesner in 1565 and impressed him sufficiently with his informed interest in entomology to be chosen as the recipient of some of Gesner’s unutilised manuscripts on that. Returning to England, he then spent the next 15 years using those as the basis for an intended major work on the subject, supplementing it with information obtained from numerous correspondents.

Unfortunately, Penny in his turn died without bringing the task to completion. After his manuscript narrowly escaped being destroyed, having been mistaken for rubbish, it was taken in hand by a younger friend and medical colleague who had been assisting him with it, Thomas Moffet (or Mouffet) (Fig. 8). Moffet was entomologist enough to have caused him to be credibly identified as the stepfather of the ‘little Miss Muffet’ of the well-known nursery rhyme, spiders being then classed as insects and so within the orbit of such a man. Unfortunately, though, he reckoned he could improve Penny’s work not only by polishing the language but also by cutting out much that he considered merely trivial matter. The latter is suspected to have included many valuable first-hand observations of Penny’s. The entire absence of species names may also have been a further casualty of Moffet’s ruthlessness, though in all but two cases the descriptions in combination with the woodcuts have enabled modern lepidopterists to recognise just short of 20 different butterflies that are known to be British. Nevertheless, that is a sorry relic of what Penny could have been expected to pass on for the benefit of his successors had his death not intervened.

By the spring of 1589 the much-doctored manuscript, extending to 1,200 folio pages, was ready for publication, bearing a title, Insectorum, sive minimorum animalium theatrum, that left the nature of the contents unambiguous (Figs 9–11). Most accounts have it that Moffet then sat on it, inexplicably, till his death in 1604, having meanwhile become a man of some wealth and outdone Turner in the heights he contrived to scale socially. Against that, however, is the awkward mention by the Oxford antiquary Anthony à Wood (who had the run of some of the greatest libraries of the day) that he had seen imperfect copies of a Frankfurt impression of the work dated 1598. Though none of those appear to have survived, their existence could explain how a book was published in 1608 containing a number of passages that are considered to be blatant plagiarising of the Insectorum … theatrum. The book in question is The Historie of Serpents, part of an ambitious attempt by a peripatetic clergyman, Edward Topsell, to produce an English translation of Gesner’s great work, with the lack of its section on insects made good by one provided by a certain Dr Banham. Most accounts take note only of a pirated edition of Topsell’s works that appeared much later, in 1658, which had what was explicitly a translation of the Insectorum … theatrum appended to it. The basis of that 1658 translation may or may not have been Moffet’s manuscript, which is supposed to have been sold after his death to another scholarly physician who, after several attempts, at long last saw it into print in 1634. Yet that published version differs in important respects from what is undoubtedly the original version (which survives among the Sloane manuscripts in the British Library): Moffet’s name appears as the sole author, and the engravings that Penny had had produced at great expense are replaced with 580 inferior woodcuts.

Moffet seems to have come out of this saga in a worse light than his apparently high-handed editing of what Penny left behind deserves. The eventual attribution of the work to him alone was almost certainly not of his doing, nor does it seem safe to assume, as most have done, that he was guilty of indolence in failing to ensure its publication. A more likely scenario is that at some point he submitted the manuscript, or a filleted version of it, to one or more prospective publishers, in the course of which a printed version was surreptitiously produced. The appearance of that may have been sufficient to salve his conscience that he had done his duty to his old friend.

For all its many defects, Topsell’s version of Gesner’s Historia animalium was not only the first substantial book of a zoological character to be published on these shores, but the only one for many years to come. Indeed, its very existence, it has been suggested, may have blocked the way for worthier competitors. However extensive a following botany’s sister field of study may have succeeded in attracting by that period, it was evidently not seen by publishers as large enough to make books on the subject appear tantalising propositions. For the time being, the best hope it had of reaching print was either through generous subsidies provided by well-wishers, if any such there were as yet, or by obtaining passage as a stowaway on board some volume concerned in the main with some other, more lucratively publishable area of interest, of which topography suggested itself as the most obvious. In just such a way, by being prefixed to Raphael Holinshed’s widely read compilation, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, were the evidently first-hand observations of bird and animal habits by William Harrison, a canon of Windsor, able to be placed before the public in 1577 and again, more expansively, 10 years later.

***

Herbals meanwhile had been growing in both number and elaborateness, increasingly likely to be bought for their beauty as for the instructional value of their text. Increasingly, too, printers who doubled up as publishers were becoming the initiators of these, as a mounting international stockpile of woodcuts of the different medicinal plants ended the need to commission illustrations de novo for every book, thereby permitting substantial gains in the speed and cost of producing these works.

First among the authors to benefit from this change in the publishing economics was Mathias de l’Obel (Fig. 12), a Flemish immigrant forced to take refuge abroad, at least in part for his Protestant beliefs, even more often than Turner—but in the reverse direction. Like Turner, trained as a physician and with wide experience of the flora of the Continent acquired through extensive travel, de l’Obel had studied in turn at the two universities, Bologna and Montpellier, that led the way at that period in taking medical students out into the countryside to familiarise them with herbs in the wild. Fired with enthusiasm for field botany as a result, he was consequently as keen to investigate the flora as he was to practise medicine when he moved on to England in or around 1567 and settled in Bristol, the outbreak of the Dutch revolt having made a return to Flanders temporarily unwise. Presumably he was a good enough linguist to manage without much difficulty the considerable cultural adjustment that must have been required.

In that first period of residence over here, of about four years, he appears to have travelled more widely in search of plants than anyone else until John Ray. The more interesting finds were included in a general European herbal that he had set about compiling with his Provençal friend, Pierre Pena, which was published in London in 1571 under the title Stirpium adversaria nova. Poorly illustrated and with few novelties among the species covered, this sold disappointingly; the remaining stock, however, was bought by the enterprising Antwerp publisher Christophe Plantin, who after some revision of the text and the introduction of a large number of excellent woodcuts, reissued it as an ostensibly new work, best known by the title of its first part as Stirpium observationes, and turned it into a commercial success.

By that time back in Flanders, despite continuing disorders there, de l’Obel’s rising reputation presently led to his being appointed court physician to the Prince of Orange, William the Silent, only for that high point in his career to be ended abruptly after just a few years by the prince’s assassination. Retreating to his wife’s home town on the island of Walcheren, he seems to have soon become dissatisfied with the relatively humdrum life of a country practitioner and, seeing better prospects in England, returned there for at least one further lengthy sojourn before finally settling for good, this time in London, around 1604. Elderly by then but still robust, he resumed practice (with evident success) as well as his former botanical wanderings, which are known to have taken him as far as North Wales when he was over seventy. He was hard at work on a further herbal incorporating the final wave of finds that those produced when his death occurred in 1616.

The manuscript of that thereafter suffered a fate all too similar to that of Penny’s, left in limbo for almost 40 years before eventually being put into print. In this case, the custodian, de l’Obel’s son-in-law James Cole, a prosperous London silk merchant, was sufficiently well informed botanically to appreciate the work’s importance and make it available to another major herbal writer, John Parkinson, to draw on for his Theatrum botanicum of 1640 (Fig. 13). Parkinson made no secret of the fact that his Theatrum was essentially a compilation from other authors, and his use of de l’Obel’s data was not done in such a manner or on such a scale that William How, the manuscript’s eventual rescuer, was justified in later accusing him of plagiarism in no uncertain terms. How in his turn was allowed free use of it too and, thanks to him, in 1655 it was published at last, in de l’Obel’s name, under the title Stirpium illustrationes. From that and other sources it has been calculated that the first records of 80 wild British plants stand to the credit of this industrious immigrant, whose importance has always been underrated as a result of his tangled, bi-national career and his insistence on publishing only in Latin.

Ever since de l’Obel’s first return to Flanders, after his Bristol period, the English had come to expect even such a classic genre as herbals to be offered to them in their own language, even if that required the huge expenditure of time and effort involved in translating one. This radical change was brought about by a Somerset landowner, Henry Lyte, whose interests really lay in esoteric antiquarian pursuits (in particular, seeking to show that the British were descended from the Trojans), interests which he shared with his better-known nephew, the perennially entertaining scandal-monger, John Aubrey. Thanks to Lyte’s scholarly energy, in 1578 the country benefited from a second infusion of Flemish learning in the shape of a translation from the French of the Histoire des Plantes of Charles de l’Écluse (otherwise Clusius), which was itself a translation from the Dutch of the Cruijdeboek of Rembert Dodoens, published in 1554 with the Antwerp publisher Plantin again as the godfather. Lyte’s contribution spilled slightly beyond his basic task to adding notes of his own and Somerset records for some of the plants, which were distinguished from the translated text by the use of a different typeface. The printing of the work had to be done in Antwerp as a condition of being able to reuse the woodcuts of the Dodoens original.

In the absence of any competitor, Lyte’s Nieuue Herball (as it was called) became the standard work in its field during the later years of the century until the advent, officially in 1597 (though in fact probably the year after that), of an irresistibly more winsome, if less scholarly rival: the far better-known herbal of John Gerard (Figs 14 & 15).

Conflicting accounts of how far The Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes – to give Gerard’s massive volume of 1,392 pages its full title—was original have held sway at different times ever since Thomas Johnson’s uncomplimentary revised edition appeared 35 years later. There is general agreement that Gerard probably did draw at least to some extent on an unpublished existing work, but the prevailing view now seems to be that Johnson was wildly exaggerating in asserting that large-scale plagiarising had taken place. The manuscript in question was an English translation of Dodoens’ collected works, published in 1583 as Stirpium historiae pemptades sex. Encouraged by the reception of Lyte’s translation of Dodoens’ herbal some six years earlier, a leading London publisher, John Norton, had commissioned a youngish physician, Robert Priest, to carry out that task; after about 13 years’ work, however, Priest had died, leaving the book still uncompleted. Instead of seeking out someone else to see that into print, perhaps regarding the result as too stilted and learned, Norton evidently preferred to ask Gerard to fill the gap with a work based on data of his own that he is believed to have been putting together already, with the help of de l’Obel, with a similar end in view.

Gerard must have seemed a risky choice, as he was untried as an author and certainly no scholar, his education having gone no further than what a village school in his native Cheshire had been capable of supplying. Offsetting that, he presumably had a reputation as knowing the native flora well, while his long experience of running a famously well-stocked physic garden of his own as well as superintending two others implied hands-on expertise that few others could match with regard to the range of herbs at that time in cultivation in England. A subsidiary consideration may have been that as a barber-surgeon he belonged to the medical profession’s lower decks and was thus likely to be free of the high-flown terminology and condescending tone for which physicians were notorious. Even so, Norton doubtless had no inkling of the captivating style Gerard would prove to possess once he started writing, a style to which above all the book was to owe its evergreen appeal (even if his contemporaries were blind to what the passing of the years has given the added attraction of quaintness). The ingredients of that were a refreshing unpretentiousness, allusions to places familiar to many readers, and sometimes a pinch of rather ponderous humour—a combination unheard of in learned works up to that time. Indeed a herbal, with its standardised formal structure and minimal scope for narrative diversions, was clearly a waste of Gerard’s true talent. He would surely have been more at home writing a chatty kind of Flora, in which he recounted his rambles in search of the prize rarities that he was so evidently proud of having turned up in the countryside that then girdled much more closely a very much smaller London. Alas, though, such a book would almost certainly have been unmarketable at that period, so convinced were publishers that solemn, weighty guides to which herbs were reckoned good for what all that anyone wanted.

As it was, Gerard coped with the huge undertaking only with some difficulty, and it was probably no coincidence that its preparation coincided with a severe attack of fever that he had trouble throwing off. It was not so much the text as the 2,000 illustrations that caused him problems. Most of the wood blocks for those had been used already (as was now normal practice) for a recent German herbal, not all the plants depicted were ones familiar to him and, not at all surprisingly, a few consequently ended up with erroneous captions. Those errors should have been among the allegedly innumerable ones caught by de l’Obel, who was brought in to do the checking, but Gerard (or his publisher) lost patience with his friend’s pernicketiness and insisted on going to press before he had finished. As far as the text was concerned, most of the library work necessary had been done by Gerard’s predecessors (including de l’Obel), and copying the fruits of that was more or less straightforward, so his own original contribution was probably limited in the main to adding an English dimension. That was a bigger challenge than it may sound, for almost exactly half of the plants included are ones that occur wild in England, and more than 180 of those had not featured in any work previously, almost all of them the products of his personal fieldwork. He may also have been responsible for some additions to the lists of ailments for which various herbs were recommended, but that aspect can hardly have been his forte, in view of his mainly horticultural experience, and the only novelties that are clearly his are the rare mentions of remedies peculiar to those referred to as ‘the common people’ or ‘the country people’—all of which received the customary, implicitly contemptuous sniff that the entire medical profession reserved for everything not endorsed by the Classical tradition.

Touchingly, Gerard said that one of his purposes in producing his work was ‘to make my labours common, and to free them from the danger whereunto a garden is subject’—in other words, to capture for the benefit of others and those who came after, in the less ephemeral medium of print, the rich diversity he had brought about through his horticultural efforts.

To judge from the large number of copies that have survived to this day, the book sold gratifyingly well. There is solid evidence, too, that it had the valuable secondary effect of stimulating some of its purchasers to give closer attention to their local wild flowers and start putting names to them. One such convert was a country gentleman in North Wales, Sir John Salusbury, whose copy, inscribed with his name identifying him as its owner, now at the University of Oxford in the library of Christ Church, contains notes in the margins with dated Welsh localities for some 20 kinds. His son, Sir Henry, later added several more. It was not just Gerard’s herbal, though, that was prompting such practices: there is also a copy of Lyte’s one at Oxford, in this case in the Bodleian Library, in which a large number of plant records from that district have been entered in an unidentified hand, probably that of William Browne, one of the dons who at that period was locally renowned for his botanical zeal and erudition. There must have been others that made use of their copies similarly, in some cases leaving them to pass on down as family treasures.

At last, the received idea that the study of plants was no more and no less than a branch of medicine was beginning to be shown up as an oversimplification. Numbers of people were appearing who strove to identify not only what grew but also what flew, and who found that a pleasurable pastime in itself, in some cases as a way of mentally ingesting that particular tiny portion of the natural environment in which they lived or which they maybe even owned, and thereby placing their personal stamp on it. An area of enquiry that was of undeniably distinct character was gradually emerging from the shadows, and publishers were going to need to acknowledge that separateness and cater for it accordingly.

CHAPTER 3
Disguise Discarded

THE YEARS ON EITHER side of 1600, which saw the end of the Tudor monarchy and the start of the Jacobean one, were also watershed ones for natural history in England and Wales (if not yet in Scotland and Ireland as well). From around that time the investigation of the flora and fauna begins to become noticeably more systematic and more incisive, the investigators more obviously dissatisfied with the state in which their predecessors had left the legacy of knowledge. Increasing numbers of naturalists bring the start of fieldwork in pairs or even in groups. Hitherto neglected areas of the plant and animal kingdoms receive the first significant amounts of attention, which finds increasing reflection in the body of published work. A national forum for discussion emerges, provides some central fostering of initiatives and helps noteworthy discoveries to become widely known.

The new century had not proceeded very far before throwing up two energetic, determined and rigorously scholarly young men whose joint efforts would soon greatly improve knowledge of plant distributions, filling in some of the huge blanks that had previously existed even in the more populous parts of southern England, while also setting a markedly higher standard in both accuracy of identification and adequacy of description. These were Thomas Johnson and John Goodyer, respectively a London apothecary and a Hampshire manorial steward.

Of the two, Goodyer is much the less well known, mainly because he left it to Johnson to publish the more important results of his very assiduous fieldwork; indeed, he was scarcely more than just a name till a mass of manuscript material that had passed with his library to the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College at last came to be studied early in the twentieth century. From what in many cases were mere scraps of paper that had survived by mere chance it then proved possible to reconstruct his life in considerable detail. The documents unfortunately date from too late a period to reveal how the son of a yeoman farmer came by his excellent command of Greek and Latin, but it was probably at the local grammar school at Alton, where like many a village boy in that era his abilities might have been spotted by the local clergy and propelled him via a university education on to a career in the Church—as happened to Thomas Penny, for example, and later to John Ray. Instead, thanks to an elder sister to whom he was particularly close it is presumed he was taken under the wing of her well-off husband and given a training in the neighbouring town of Petersfield in the latter’s profession (which roughly approximated to that of a present-day land agent). As that training would have been primarily legal in character, Goodyer is thus the earliest-known British naturalist of any substantial achievement who did not owe his involvement in the subject to the practice of medicine. That unambiguously amateur status in itself makes him a historically significant figure. In common with everyone else who interested themselves in plants at that period, though, he could hardly avoid arming himself with knowledge of their supposed medicinal properties, if only to meet the average person’s expectations; doing so in any case would have provided a protective cover to save him from being ridiculed for ‘wasting’ his leisure on an activity devoid of obvious usefulness.

The surviving notes begin in 1616, when Goodyer was twenty-four. Gerard had died four years earlier, but his name would still have been on most people’s lips whenever talk turned to plants, and a copy of his Herball would have been Goodyer’s obvious initial purchase. As a still single man in a secure and comparatively well-paid form of employment he could clearly afford the sizeable sum that involved, for his accounts for that opening year show that he had already begun buying costly works on plants by a selection of Continental authors, the start of what would eventually grow into a specialist library of impressive dimensions. Those early acquisitions, however, quickly proved of frustratingly little assistance for naming many of his wildflower finds during those first five summers of roaming over much of southeast Hampshire, and he saw no alternative but to draw up a lengthy, detailed (and dated) description every time he came across one new to him. The terminology he used was basically Gerard’s, but sometimes he came up with a colourful analogy of his own, likening the flower of the yellow bird’s-nest, for instance, to ‘ye suck-bottle which children use to suck their drinke out of’.

Goodyer was in touch with Johnson at least by 1618, having maybe looked him up on one of his surprisingly frequent trips to London (mostly on business for his employer, it seems). There is no evidence that the two ever went into the field together, though it is likely that they did. The extrovert, probably rather overbearing Johnson would have served as a foil to the unsophisticated country youth, who was clearly conscientious, disciplined and precise, with perhaps a certain aloofness as a result of early separation from his family, a separation made up for by a developing deep attachment to that of his employer (as revealed by his will).

In 1622 Johnson received 27 sheets of notes from his enthusiastic collaborator. This has encouraged a supposition that the revised version of Gerard’s book that Johnson later produced was originally to have been written by the two together. Goodyer seems to have become caught up in other things, however, and tired of his laborious descriptions, in the end contenting himself with passing over 120 of those for Johnson to make use of as he saw fit—as indeed he did, on an extensive scale. Goodyer was ‘the onely assistant I had in this worke’, Johnson made a point of informing the readers of the eventual book in his preface, but the full extent of that assistance became apparent only from Goodyer’s papers three centuries later. Even though not great enough to warrant his featuring as coauthor, his contribution to that milestone of a book was nevertheless sufficiently substantial for his name to deserve honouring in its connection by all who consult it today.

Johnson is thought to have been Goodyer’s junior by about five years, but apart from the fact that he was born in the north of England (as such an intriguingly disproportionate number of the earliest English naturalists were) nothing is known of his upbringing or parentage. We do know, however, that he shared with Goodyer the lack of a university education—in contrast to most other naturalist authors at this period—and instead went straight into an apprenticeship, in his case in London, from which he emerged in 1628 as a qualified apothecary. Though he was to have his own physic garden in the city and continued to display a keen interest in the medicinal properties of plants, field botany was plainly his overriding passion thereafter. This he presumably owed to the guided excursions into the neighbouring countryside known as ‘herborisings’ that his livery company, the Society of Apothecaries, had then recently instituted to introduce its apprentices to what the future raw material of their trade looked like when growing. Some found these occasions so stimulating that a group of them kept them up after completing their training, dubbing themselves the ‘socii itinerantes’ – though the word ‘society’ that one contemporary used of them in a letter denotes a more formal entity than was almost certainly the case.

Several of the outings of this group proved so rewarding botanically that Johnson, the prime mover, subsequently produced accounts of them in print. The first of these little booklets to appear, in 1629, known to connoisseurs as the Iter (from the first word of its mouthful of a Latin title), has been claimed as Britain’s earliest local Flora, but is more correctly identified as the start of a parallel genre: the field meeting report. The Iter is actually three reports in one:two on successive explorations of Hampstead Heath and the third on a five-day journey into Kent. Three years later, repeat visits had so expanded the lists of plants recorded that a supplementary booklet was called for: the Descriptio, as it is similarly known for short. Surviving copies of both are very rare but they have been twice reprinted in facsimile, in 1847 and 1972, in the latter case as part of a handsome volume that includes translations and commentaries by an impressive team of specialists—such is the special veneration in which these little works have long been held by the field botanists of Britain.

Johnson’s botanising trips are known to have ranged as far north as Durham, but only two others in which he took part were singled out for similar treatment. One was a wide tour of the West Country in 1634 made in the company of 10 fellow apothecaries, some of them senior enough to have servants in attendance, culminating in a hurried inspection of the Isle of Wight (which Goodyer, despite its proximity to him, surprisingly never brought himself to visit). This was equally promptly the subject of a report, but this time not a free-standing one but tucked into a volume of wider content, the first part of what Johnson chose to call his Mercurius botanicus. The second part of that volume, published in 1641, accommodated his report on an even more productive exploration of North Wales, in the footsteps of de l’Obel and Salusbury.

Johnson is rightly best known, though, for his greatly improved edition of Gerard’s Herball of 1633. Informally referred to as ‘Gerard emaculatus’ by his contemporaries and successors, as a way of emphasising what a drastically different work this was, it ought in fairness to him to have been retitled, for the amount of corrected and additional material—carefully indicated in a different typeface—was so great that it was essentially a new work and deserved to be proclaimed as such. Not only were 800 extra species included, but there was an entirely new set of illustrations as well. Instead of making play with that novelty, however, the publishers (who had inherited the copyright in Gerard’s books on John Norton’s death) evidently decided, as so many other publishers have done in similar circumstances, that the sales of the newcomer would benefit more, or at any rate more certainly, by its being associated directly with the well-known predecessor and thereby inheriting its halo. That strategy, though, carries the risk that the word ‘edition’ too often implies no more than a reprint with a minimum of changes, discouraging those who bought the original version from incurring the expense a second time to no sufficient advantage. Admittedly, in this particular case the use of the different typeface made the extent of the difference immediately apparent to any prospective purchaser who examined a copy, but how many such people were there at that period who were able to enjoy that privilege by living close to a bookshop? Had the advancement of knowledge been the sole consideration, the best course would have been for Johnson’s version to be promoted as an outright replacement, so that its misleading predecessor was consigned to oblivion as early as possible. But for a publisher that no doubt presented too great a risk: the new version, the handiwork of England’s then unquestionably ablest field botanist, for all its greater informativeness and accuracy might gain in appeal for the more scholarly but lose in appeal for everyone else. From the commercial point of view the choice of strategy could have been less clear-cut, the decision more finely balanced. A conflict between the demands of the market and the best interests of the study itself, apparently inseparable from the publishing of books on a subject like natural history, was in evidence already.

A special circumstance attending the publication of Johnson’s version that has never been widely known is that the book had to be completed and printed inside 12 months, a very tight schedule for so large and complex a work. This undue haste is assumed to have been impelled by evidence that another major British herbal was in the offing. This was John Parkinson’s no less massive Theatrum botanicum. Fortunately in the event that did not materialise till seven years later, by which time Johnson’s book had sold sufficiently well to justify a reissue, with a very few minor changes. So lastingly useful was the latter to be found, indeed, that plants were still being identified from its pages more than two and a half centuries later, such was to be the lack of illustrated works of comparable reliability and comprehensiveness in the years in between.

The prominence of that work must nevertheless not be allowed to obscure the historic importance of Johnson’s little Mercurius, the first of the two parts of which appeared immediately in the wake of the great herbal. For in addition to its two excursion reports the Mercurius included an alphabetical catalogue of nearly 900 different plants claimed up to that time as occurring in the wild in Britain. This was the first in what would turn out to be a whole series of attempts at producing a definitive national list. Undisguisedly intended just for fellow field botanists, not for the medical community, the Mercurius is also noteworthy for its necessarily austere and slender character compared with its herbal predecessors. Just as an animal that has had its heavy, commercially crucial outer coat clipped away emerges looking sorry in its slightness, so the shedding of the dense encumbrance of dubious classical and medieval nostrums henceforward had publications of a shockingly abrupt diminutiveness as the unavoidable outcome.

In this, the last of his works, Johnson made known his intention of producing, again with Goodyer’s help, a much more elaborate version, with full descriptions and a generous accompaniment of illustrations—a Flora in the true sense, in other words. Alas, though, that was not to be. The year after the second of those parts appeared the Civil War broke out. Johnson, a proven leader of men, rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the Royalist army and became caught up in one of the most ferocious of the many sieges, those of the Hampshire stronghold of Basing House. Shot in the shoulder, he died from a resulting fever a fortnight later. His place of burial remains unknown to this day.

Goodyer was luckier, so far as we know entirely escaping the fighting. In 1907 a document bearing the signature of the local Royalist general, with instructions that neither he nor anyone else in his household were to be molested, came to light beneath a floorboard in his one-time Petersfield home, and maybe that proved effective. He lived on to spend his final years toiling away at a monster translation from the Greek of the Materia medica of Dioscorides. His favourite nephew, who shared his scholarly tastes and inherited his books, carried on the family line in that same corner of Hampshire, with the eventual happy ending that great-grandchildren of his would marry, with singular appropriateness, a brother and a sister of none other than Gilbert White.

***

After the Civil War it fell to another Royalist officer who, unlike Johnson, had emerged unscathed, to take up the baton in what now assumed the character of a relay race to produce a national Flora worthy of that term. This was William How(e), another London medical man but in this case a physician, already mentioned as the eventual rescuer and editor for publication of the manuscript herbal of de I’Obel’s last years. How meanwhile had taken it upon himself to collect together from various correspondents a number of records supplementary to Johnson’s Mercurius and bring out in 1650 what was in effect just a slightly updated version of the latter, as a tiny volume of 133 pages, under the title Phytologia Britannica … Probably because this was so largely a verbatim copy of Johnson’s book, he shrank from revealing more than his initials as evidence of its authorship; probably, too, he had been hustled by the publisher, Octavian Pulleyn, into allowing it to leave his hands prematurely. Its chief value is that it included the first-ever set of Irish plant records to appear in print. These came from a Cambridge-educated Protestant cleric named Richard Heaton, who had held livings in the centre of that country during the decade up to 1641, before returning to his native Yorkshire. His chief discovery had been the exceptional richness in botanical rarities of that large expanse in County Clare known as the Burren.

Among Goodyer’s papers at Oxford has survived a long list of records in How’s hand accumulated by him in an interleaved copy of the Phytologia over the following six years and intended for a further edition. How’s untimely death, however, at only thirty-six, put paid to that, leaving many of the records to be incorporated instead in a work of much wider scope at the instance of the son of the Phytologia’s publisher, Cave Pulleyn, who conceived it as a replacement. This was Christopher Merret(t)’s Pinax rerum naturalium Britannicarum. Merret was the keeper of the library and museum of the Royal College of Physicians but hardly an appropriate choice as the next holder of the national Flora baton, for his interests lay largely in applied science and geology. Though he came up with an impressively detailed section on this last, the coverage of the fauna proved sketchy and inaccurate. The section on the flora was delegated at first to a fellow physician, John Dale, but he died almost at once, whereupon, instead of turning to Ray (the obvious person), Merret ill-advisedly took on that subject as well himself, with predictably dire results. He did at least recognise the need to supplement the large pile of additional records that How had left with some original fieldwork, employing a retired soldier, Thomas Willisel, for that purpose and enlisting some additional help from his own two sons. For illustrations he was fortunate to be able to procure 800 engravings that had been made for Johnson but never used. The very ill-balanced volume that in due course emerged then had the bad luck to appear on the eve of the Great Fire, which seemingly consumed most of the first impression, for which reason most surviving copies are of a re-set second one that bear the following year, 1667, as their date. Disowning that edition, Merret announced he had a revised one in preparation, but a prolonged and bitter feud with the college thereafter monopolised his attention and nothing more appeared.

Merret’s Pinax was to be the last time a physician was entrusted with any publication of significance on the flora or fauna of these islands for little better reason than the possession of that medical qualification. From then onwards it would be generally accepted that was no longer a guarantee of adequate botanical or zoological knowledge, and that only those with proven expertise in the relevant branch or branches of natural history were appropriate choices for authors of books on the subject that aspired to be regarded as authoritative.

***

That recognition at last of the subject’s autonomy was now given added emphasis by the establishment of an overarching system of classification based on natural affinities, a notable improvement in the standard of description and the obtaining of a much wider picture of species distribution over Britain as a whole. For these major advances one man was responsible almost entirely: John Ray (or Wray) (Fig. 16). The blacksmith’s son in a village in Essex conveniently just outside a town with a grammar school—that same geographical luck that Penny had had in Lancashire and Goodyer in Hampshire—Ray had reached university by the traditional escalator for poor boys of promise then operated by the Church, acquiring in the process an exceptional facility in the best Latin, which would be crucial to the spread of his influence in learned quarters. Though his mother had a good knowledge of medicinal herbs, she failed to translate that into an appetite for nature’s particulars on the part of her son, and it was not until he had reached the age of about twenty-three that his interest in those was first awakened, thanks to a regime of country strolls while recovering from a bout of illness. By that time he had been at Cambridge for six years, had recently been elected to a college fellowship and had every prospect of spending the rest of his life there, engaged in scholarship and teaching.

His first book, an alphabetical catalogue of the wild flora of the neighbourhood, small enough to slip into a pocket, published in 1660, the year of the Restoration, can have given no one, least of all himself, any reason to suppose that his future would turn out otherwise. Written in Latin, like all his works, the Catalogas, plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium, popularly known as ‘the Cambridge Catalogue’, was explicitly modelled on a similar compilation that a Swiss botanist,Caspar Bauhin, had produced some 40 years earlier for the medical students that he made a practice of taking out into the countryside around Basle. Medical students, indeed, would long be seen by publishers as a sufficiently large and steady market to render a guide to the local flora a viable proposition commercially in any town or city with a major university. Oxford as well as Cambridge thus became the proving-grounds, as far as Britain was concerned, for this genre that was destined to give rise to hundreds of imitators in later years. Students aiming to become physicians tended to be drawn from well-to-do gentry backgrounds and could afford to buy books not directly related to their studies, provided these were modestly priced—a proviso that restricted their size, however, irrespective of the quantity of data accumulated and desirable to have in print. It seems reasonably certain that the Cambridge Catalogue, the first of its kind to appear, was accepted without a demand for a subsidy and rewarded the gamble of its publisher by making a profit, for nine years later Ray was asked, unsuccessfully, to produce an updated edition. That the Catalogue embodied the results of several years of fieldwork by considerably more than one individual (for which reason Ray refused to allow himself to be named as the author) may well have been one of the attractions it held for a publisher, for it opened up a prospect of a continuing series of similar collective undertakings as one generation of students gave way to another.

Even before the Catalogue went to press, however, Ray was having doubts about whether he could in all conscience subscribe to the Act of Uniformity, a requirement now being imposed as a condition of holding posts in the English universities. Those doubts continued despite his subsequent ordination as a minister of the Church of England (with which in fact he was never to break), and in 1662 he felt obliged to resign his fellowship and leave the university. For a scholar with no private means that must have appeared at first sight tantamount to economic as well as career suicide. Fortunately, though, he had won the friendship of a wealthy student eight years his junior, who shared his enthusiasm for natural history and at whose expense the two had already begun a series of lengthy journeys that in the course of 14 years would take them to many parts of both Britain and the Continent. The partnership between John Ray and Francis Willughby (Fig. 17) has no close parallel in the annals of natural history. For although there would be other wealthy patrons whose generosity went to the extreme length of having an indigent fellow naturalist share their home for an indefinite period—as Simon Wilkin would take in the young John Curtis—there was no comparable level of mutual intellectual stimulation in those other cases. What is more, Ray was primarily a botanist, Willughby a zoologist in the main: their areas of interest overlapped but were largely complementary. They complemented each other in their personalities too: Ray’s cautious thoroughness Willughby leavened with a highly strung vitality and aristocratic dash. Most important of all, the younger man’s ample financial resources imparted an expansiveness of ambition that the other would have hardly dared even to contemplate otherwise, leading them to conceive as their ultimate goal a Systema naturae of a grand comprehensiveness, the various volumes comprising that to be written by them either singly or jointly, as appropriate. It was a partnership that ‘gave Ray his life’s work and Willughby his title to fame’, in the words of Canon Raven, Ray’s incomparable, superbly well-matched biographer.

Much of Ray’s eventual massive body of published writings has little or no bearing on the flora and fauna of Britain, at any rate directly, and it is necessary to do no more here than acknowledge the existence of so much else that all the time was competing for his energies. Apart from the Cambridge Catalogue, the principal works that merit notice in the present connection in effect number only four—and even of those, two can be considered but stages in the same single line of research.

First of the four to appear was the Catalogus plantarum Angliae, the ‘English Catalogue’. Brought out in 1670 by John Martyn (not to be confused with the later Cambridge botany professor of that name), the official publisher to the Royal Society, of which Ray had been elected a fellow three years before, that work had been 11 years in gestation and embodied the results of Ray’s continued crisscrossing of Britain during that long period. Similar to the Cambridge Catalogue except in its greatly extended geographical coverage, this was the first national Flora truly worthy of that description, a handy guide to all the plants so far confirmed as occurring in the wild, the long-needed one that the succession of inadequate and inaccurate lists published previously had provoked Ray into at last providing. Though written in Latin and without illustrations, but unlike a herbal pocket-sized and eminently affordable, it was what the average person of scholarly leanings required for ready reference on country walks. Just such a one was Thomas Lawson, a fellow Cambridge-educated recusant in the remoteness of the Lake District, whose copy was soon being put to heavy use, as his surviving record-book copiously attests; another was Lawson’s friend and neighbour, William Nicolson, the Archdeacon of Carlisle. One can almost hear the book being recommended around and converting hitherto unfocused curiosity into a lasting enthusiasm for field botany, perhaps especially in out-of-the-way areas where intellectual outlets and instructional manuals were alike in short supply. Certainly, sales must have proved not ungratifying, for within six years the publisher was planning a reprint. Ray was allowed to turn this into an updated edition by including some additional records and further medicinal uses; his hopes of a repeat of that 10 years later on, however, were frustrated by the new owner of the copyright, and instead the intended substantial supplement had to be published as a separate booklet, under the title Fasciculus stirpium Britannicarum.

Long before that, Ray’s personal circumstances had changed profoundly. In 1672, having fatally overtaxed his always fragile physique, Willughby had died, at the age of only thirty-six, bequeathing his friend and collaborator a measure of financial independence in the form of a modest annuity. This enabled Ray to marry, but in place of the peace and security of Willughby’s Warwickshire estate several years of disruption followed, years of uncertainty and repeated moves. After turning down the secretaryship that the Royal Society paid him the honour of inviting him to accept, eventually he achieved again a settled existence on returning to his childhood home. There he was to spend the final 26 years remaining to him in unremitting intellectual toil, extensive correspondence, serious poverty and, from 1686, almost incessant pain.

His priority task after Willughby’s death had been to turn into publishable form the mass of raw notes that his friend had bequeathed to him for that express purpose. The ones on birds were in the most advanced state, but the amount of work that Ray put in on those was so extensive that it became an open secret that he was really the coauthor of the resulting book, even though at his insistence it was publicly attributed to Willughby alone. This, the Ornithologia, published in 1676, with an enlarged edition in English quickly following, not only included newly detailed descriptions, especially of the plumage, of about 190 British bird species that the two of them had personally observed, but also made a stab at classifying them in terms of anatomy and habitat. The first zoological treatise to be published in Britain that was truly scientific, it would reign for many years as the standard handbook on the subject. Also a novelty, as far as zoology was concerned, was the use of engravings in place of the much cheaper woodcuts for illustrations. Ray could not afford the heavy expense those involved, so Willughby’s widow agreed to meet the cost; the results, however, were very disappointing, for (as Ray pointed out in his preface, for the benefit of successors) the engravers were not naturalists and for all their mastery of that craft they could not capture the subtler features that most crucially render such subjects lifelike. At the same time, providing illustrations at all for any of his works was to give Ray continual worries. Most people regarded a work of natural history without figures ‘as a book of geography without maps,’ he once grumbled to a correspondent; yet he did not have the requisite skill himself, did not have the means to employ others in his place, and disliked publicly appealing for subscribers, which, even if successful, seemed to him a dubious practice when it was impossible to be sure a book would be finished by the specified time—or even at all.

Ray’s third major botanical work, his Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum, appeared 14 years after the Ornithologia, in 1690. This was the product of a wholesale overhaul of the English Catalogue of two decades earlier, incorporating many additional records but, more importantly, with the often traditional alphabetical order of that and its predecessors replaced with the classification of his devising that he had introduced and expounded in another book produced in the interim, the Methodus plantarum nova.

The Synopsis evidently justified the hopes invested in it by its London publisher, Samuel Smith, for it had been on sale for scarcely four years before he was calling for a second edition. Ray had had that eventuality very much in mind from the first and in between had been soliciting further records from correspondents—being no longer capable of travel himself—as well as having taken up the study of mosses; he was thus in a position to oblige with a minimum of delay. The finished result, which appeared in 1696, was to be acclaimed more than a century later by no less a judge than Sir James Edward Smith as ‘of all the systematised and practical Floras of any country … the most perfect that ever came under our observation’. This was despite its having been superseded in the meantime by a third edition, which had served as the standard field handbook for at least two more generations (and of which one battered copy was still being put to use, by a beginner in Dundee, even after Smith had penned those words).

Ray’s fourth and final work of major importance for British natural history appeared posthumously in 1710, still incomplete and published by the Royal Society just as he had left it. This, the Historia insectorum (Fig. 4), was in many ways the most impressive of all, for at the time Ray began to turn his attention to entomology, around 1690, there was scarcely any previous information about the country’s insect fauna available to him on which to build. Though it had been a particular interest of Willughby’s, it was not until the last year of Ray’s life that he eventually had sight of the notes that his friend had made on the subject. His lack of any magnifying glass of the requisite strength denied him access to the minute characters that tend to be so crucial for distinguishing one insect species from another. And, even worse, he was virtually bedridden by then and dependent on his three young daughters for any chasing that was necessary and for bringing home caterpillars for rearing to maturity in his breeding-cages. In the face of those multiple handicaps he nevertheless succeeded in discriminating no fewer than 47 species of butterfly—well over twice Penny’s score—a large number of moths and a range of Hymenoptera. He would undoubtedly have added many more descriptions had his fast-failing powers not given out. The planned book was to have had plates, but nothing came of his notion of asking subscribers to contribute an extra 10 shillings each to that end and, sadly, it had to appear unillustrated.

***

Ray is such a giant presence on the later seventeenth-century scene that it is not always easy to remember that he had at least one other naturalist contemporary who published pioneering works of importance as well. This was Martin Lister, whose researches on spiders and Mollusca filled two of the still-glaring gaps on the zoological front that Willughby had left unoccupied (Fig. 18).

The two could hardly have been more different, both in background and in temperament. In sharp contrast to Ray’s humble origin and lifelong poverty, Lister was born and raised in the purple: grander than Willughby in his family connections and with more pull in Court circles than Turner or Moffet, he had a father in Parliament, his mother and great-uncle had been respectively a maid of honour and Physician-in-Ordinary to James I’s queen, while his step-niece, Sarah Jennings, became the wife of the Duke of Marlborough. In temperament, on the other hand, he sounds like a throwback to Johnson: energetic, assertive, perhaps rather humourless—a fellow Yorkshireman at least by stock and 15 years of residence, even though of Buckinghamshire upbringing.

Medicine was a traditional career choice for younger sons in Lister’s family and, like Turner and Penny before him, it was to Cambridge that he accordingly went to be trained as a physician. Though he and Ray just overlapped there, no evidence has been uncovered that the long and close friendship that grew up between the two had its origin then; rather, it seems to have begun soon afterwards, in France, as a result of their respective itineraries there intersecting. By that time, if not before, Lister had developed a passion for zoology which early found the collecting and study of spiders as its more particular focus. So wholehearted was his searching after those once back in England that by 1670 he began to believe he had found most of the different kinds that the country held—an assumption, however, which Willughby was reluctant to accept, for the number the latter’s own far from intensive collecting had produced convinced him that the true total was more than double the mere 31 that Lister claimed to have distinguished. In actual fact Lister had done rather better than he supposed, for the descriptions and figures he provided in a subsequent monograph seven years later were sufficiently good for a succession of later specialists to make out 34 species of spider in addition to three different harvestmen and a solitary mite. That first British work on these neglected creatures, Tractatus … de araneis, appeared as one of three components (the other two devoted to Lister’s parallel enthusiasm, shells) of an omnibus volume to which he gave a title liable to be abbreviated into one suggestive of a much wider subject matter: Historiae animalium Angliae … Having been elected to the Royal Society in the meantime, he was fortunately able to look to that body to arrange for the publication of a work on so comparatively esoteric a subject; that sponsorship, however, inevitably required that it appeared in Latin, a language which fewer and fewer naturalists of later generations would be able to read without difficulty. As a result the remarkable, highly original observations on spider behaviour and life-histories that the monograph also contained became largely lost to sight over the years. Though a German translation was eventually produced in 1778, there would not be one in English till as recently as 1961.

Those youthful, carefree years available for little else but natural history fieldwork could not continue indefinitely for Lister, alas. In his family, unlike Willughby’s, there was a firm tradition that sons put themselves between the shafts of marriage and a doggedly pursued career once that permitted period of self-indulgent leisure was up. In 1670, accordingly, he had already exchanged country living for the city of York and there set about practising as a physician at last in earnest. Though he continued to correspond assiduously with fellow naturalists and even went so far as to invite Ray to make his home with him and his newly acquired wife after the death of Willughby (though nothing came of that), competing concerns increasingly crowded in and such time as there was now left over had to be earmarked for the realising of a mammoth undertaking in the field of conchology that he had embarked upon concurrently with his spider work.

Shells had become favourites for the cabinets of ‘curiosities’ that wealthy men of learning now vied with one another in filling and displaying, and an obvious need had arisen for an illustrated compendium of all the different kinds, fossil as well as recent, known by then, to enable these collections to be named and put in some attempt at a systematic order. The Historiae sive synopsis methodicae conchyliorum, Lister’s magnum opus, was the answer. Though never complete, sufficient of it appeared, in a series of instalments, to serve as a basic work of reference for the 150 years that followed. Unusually, it had no text as such but consisted entirely of engraved figures, each with a scanty description and, in many cases, a geographical provenance placed immediately below. The lack of an index made it difficult to use, but Lister subdivided it on an artificial system of his own devising, and that served to some extent as a substitute. Idiosyncrasies of this sort ran through the work more generally, for not least of its interest today is that it is the earliest known instance in natural history, at any rate in Britain, of self-publishing—and an extreme form of it at that. Quite possibly this solution was at the prompting of Lister’s wife, appalled at the prospect of so many years of devoted labour by her husband coming to nought in the end through the prohibitive cost of setting so huge a work in type. Certainly it was she, together with at least one of their daughters (researchers interpret the evidence differently as to how many of those were involved), who took upon themselves the immense task of producing the nearly 1,000 engravings, from their own preliminary sketches, a task to which they must have sacrificed considerably more than their leisure hours during the seven years that the first and main instalment was in production. ‘I doe not wonder your workw[omen] begin to be tired,’ a concerned Edward Llwyd wrote to Lister from Oxford as the work was nearing completion in 1692, ‘you have held them so long to it’—though the image of Lister as an ever-hovering taskmaster that those words conjure up is probably misleading: the others more probably took part contentedly, of their own volition. Though it has been far from unusual over the years for naturalists to enlist the services of their wives and children for searching and collecting (as Ray was doing in that very same period in connection with the Historia insectorum), instances of a family conveyor belt for producing illustrations must be very rare by comparison. In one respect, however, the Listers were to be outdone by the early nineteenth-century Baxters: many of the plates for British Phaenogamous Botany, a long-running part-work by their father, the curator of the University Botanic Garden at Oxford, were produced not only by his daughters but by a daughter-in-law as well.

Apart from the tremendous saving in cost, dispensing with a professional printer had two other advantages. It removed the uncertainties inseparable from dependence on someone at the mercy of fluctuations in the amount of work, forever prone to put on one side a non-urgent job of major dimensions in order to win or retain customers with short and more pressing requirements. It also conferred flexibility, allowing Lister to make amendments as and when he wished, though that had the offsetting snag that the continual inserting of further plates made it impossible to use consecutive numbering. That problem was fortunately avoided when the time came to produce the second instalment in 1692–7, for that consisted of only 75 additional shells. A third instalment was to materialise long after Lister’s death, in 1770, at the insistence of the Curator of the Ashmolean Museum, William Huddesford, to whom Lister had bequeathed all the copper originals of the plates; thanks to the generosity of that outstanding patroness of natural history, the Dowager Duchess of Portland, the printing this time was done in style—by no less than the University of Oxford’s Clarendon Press. Even that was not the end of the work’s life, however, for such was the continuing demand that a limited reprint was produced in 1823 by the Clarendon, with the crucial accompaniment at long last of an index, compiled by the leading conchologist of the day, Lewis Weston Dillwyn. All things considered, it was remarkable that the main first instalment appeared in the nearly complete state that it did, let alone that there was that long-drawn-out series of appendages in its wake, for just as work on the first instalment had been about to begin, in 1684, Lister moved from the provinces to the Metropolis. Thereafter his natural history interests were increasingly smothered by the professional and social demands of a life of considerable grandeur, culminating in his appointment as one of the two Physicians-in-Ordinary to Queen Anne.

***

Two physicians from backgrounds similar to Lister’s and with scholarly interests that embraced natural history emerged in Scotland at that same period. Their achievements, however, were very modest by comparison. Robert Sibbald (Fig. 19) and a distant cousin of his, Andrew Balfour, provided the seedbed for a future rich tradition of field botany there by establishing the first in a succession of physic gardens in Edinburgh and by making an inspired choice in James Sutherland as its curator (paying him out of Balfour’s ample purse). Subsequently taken into the employ of the town council, Sutherland so impressed with his energy and his apparently self-acquired herbal knowledge that eventually, in 1695, a teaching post in the town college was created for him. This had as one of its stipulated duties taking medical students out into the neighbouring countryside, a regular practice by that time not only in London but at almost every other leading centre in Europe where doctors received training. Although evidence is lacking that Sutherland’s excursions made lasting recruits to field botany, as their counterparts did for so long in London, the attention that he had drawn to the many-sided role a botanic garden could play would later win royal patronage for both it and the teaching of botany in Edinburgh’s university.

In neither case, however, did Sibbald’s or Balfour’s own personal contacts with the wild flora amount to much. For Sibbald the motive for studying Scotland’s native plants and animals was first and foremost to exploit economically its natural wealth, part of a wider programme of harnessing useful knowledge for improving the condition of that still backward, still independent kingdom. To that end, when appointed Geographer Royal by James VII with an express commission to carry out a rough stocktaking of the nation’s resources, Sibbald adopted the newly fashionable technique of conducting a broad topographical-cum-statistical survey through the medium of a standard questionnaire circulated to a goodly scatter of known men of education best-placed to put together the body of local information requested. The returns from this formed the basis of a folio volume published by him in 1683–4 under the title Scotia illustrata, sive prodromus historiae naturalis, in which natural history received a much more conscientious coverage than in the contemporary volumes on Oxfordshire and Staffordshire by Robert Plot that purported in their titles to be devoted to that subject exclusively (but which in reality dealt with topography almost wholly). As with other surveys of that type, some of the informants were sloppy and over-credulous, but Sibbald’s personal interest ensured that the section on the flora and fauna included the first descriptions and illustrations of many of the kinds of plants and animals of which those consisted.

There was no disguising the fact, though, that knowledge of Scotland’s natural history was a century or more behind that of England’s—and scarcely better than that of Ireland’s. The reasons for that state of affairs must have lain at least partly in the smaller number of highly educated individuals, in lower tolerance of impractical forms of learning on the part of the landed class, and in the inaccessibility still of so much more of Scotland, especially the Highlands and Islands. Even so, it was shaming that the first productive tour of even the southern Lowlands, in 1661, took place at the hands of two naturalists who were Sassenachs, John Ray and Philip Skippon. It was not long after that, moreover, that a native Hebridean, Martin Martin, showed that the remoteness of the Western Isles could be penetrated by a determined enquirer and a rich harvest of information secured.

As the century drew to its close, the prospect for natural history—in Scotland no less than in England—must have seemed unlikely to be other than more of the same: a thin scatter of very learned men carrying out field investigations in ones and twos, and then bringing out the results in Latin in tomes that were as often as not massive, very expensive and hard to come by. Things were to turn out not at all like that, however.

CHAPTER 4
Intermission

THE 50 YEARS AFTER the death of Ray in 1705 proved on the whole disappointingly barren as far as the further investigation of the flora and fauna of what was now the United Kingdom was concerned. A range of reasons can be offered for this, but probably none was more important than the temporary drying-up of the two main sources of recruits on which natural history had already begun to depend and would again depend in the future. These were the universities on the one hand and the ‘herbarisings’ of the London apothecaries on the other. From both, the supply gave out of individuals with the ability and drive to produce work of sufficient extent and value to end up as books or—now almost as important—with the strength of commitment to resist being diverted into alien areas of enquiry that were now competing vigorously for naturalists’ attention.

The English universities had fallen victim to the altered temper of the times and slumped into an ineffectiveness from which they would not rise again till another century had passed. In reaction to the years of religious fanaticism, hot-headedness had fallen out of fashion there; conviction had given way to apathy and apathy to languor; the dons had lost all appetite for earnestness, and scholarly endeavour had largely petered out. Any initiatives in that quarter of benefit to natural history would now have to come from outside.

Of these initiatives there were to be but two, one of them all too quickly abortive. The successful one was the crowning culmination of the dissimilar careers of a couple of botanist brothers, James and William Sherard. James, the younger, had made a fortune as an apothecary and retired to an estate on the outskirts of London. William, an Oxford don, had devoted his life to compiling a list with synonyms of all the plants in the world so far described, funding his visits to Europe’s leading botanic gardens by acting as tutor-cum-escort to a succession of young noblemen undertaking the Grand Tour. Eventually exhausting his college’s patience with his repeated lengthy absences, William had then spent several years as British consul at Smyrna before returning to England in 1718 with his immensely ambitious project still far from completion. The two then conceived the plan of recruiting a botanist of proven ability for the dual task of helping William with his list and producing a catalogue of the horticultural riches of James’s estate. Despairing of finding such a person in England’s universities, they turned to the German ones instead and succeeded in interesting Johann Dillen, a medical graduate renowned for the expertise he had acquired in lower plants. By that time Dillen (otherwise Dillenius, the Latinised form of his name that he preferred) was nearly forty, so a short-term appointment was not something to be entered upon lightly; but the opportunity to devote himself solely to botanical work was impossible to resist and in 1721 he came over—the first person in Britain to be employed expressly as a taxonomist on a full-time basis and thus, in effect, its first natural history professional (Fig. 20).

Though without the breadth and prolificness of Ray, Dillenius quickly proved himself a worthy successor. Within three years of arriving he had produced a much-enlarged third edition of Ray’s Synopsis (though anonymously, allegedly because the publisher, the firm of Innys still, feared the name of an unfamiliar foreigner might put potential purchasers off). With the benefit of his special knowledge of mosses and liverworts he had been able to extend the list of those by more than 60 species, building up to what would eventually emerge as his Historia muscorum. Concurrently, he strove as best he could to fulfil his dual commitments to the Sherards. Though ultimately baulked by William’s dilatoriness, and finally death, of ever seeing the great world list in print (which remains in manuscript at Oxford to this day), he nevertheless produced a thorough catalogue of James’s horticultural collection, which was subsequently published under the latter’s name.

Conscious of the career risk they had persuaded Dillenius to take, and concerned to forestall his finding himself marooned when he left their service, the brothers had meanwhile entered into what was to prove seven years of negotiating with the University of Oxford with a view to establishing him in a permanent position there. What still bears the name of the Sherardian Chair of Botany was the successful outcome, with an endowment carrying the provision that Dillenius was to be its occupant for life. That was a much greater coup than it sounds, for in the English universities at that period a subject like botany could not avoid being assigned to the largely ornamental frill that surrounded the core curriculum, in which alone students were examined; without the Sherards’ handsome endowment that chair would not have provided a livelihood and the professor would have needed to spend most of each year earning one elsewhere. As it was, Dillenius took up residence in Oxford in 1734 and was able to spend the next seven years bringing his Historia muscorum to a publishable state. Extending to 576 pages and containing descriptions of more than 600 mosses, together with 85 plates etched by himself, this was produced at the university’s expense in a limited edition of only 25 copies priced at a guinea each (a very high sum in contemporary terms). Subsequently the basis for the coverage of those plants in Linnaeus’ Species plantarum, the work was arguably the starting point of bryology as a scientific study. An edition in English without the main text followed in 1763, and the entire work was reissued in Edinburgh in 1811, so indispensable had it by then become.

Dillenius lived to enjoy his professorship for only 13 years before his death in 1747, at a comparatively early age. Even though his contributions were mainly confined to cryptogamic plants, an interest shared in Britain at that time by very few, he had been treated with obvious respect from the first by the country’s botanical community and seems to have mingled with it quite extensively, including as one of a trio who made a collecting tour that took in much of Wales.He also appears to have been the first person in Britain to make use of a tin collecting-box, for in providing the first mention of that long-enduring implement peculiar to botanists Linnaeus called it the ‘vasculum Dillenianum’. That was no doubt one of the early, diminutive versions of the vasculum that was particularly suitable for mosses.

The University of Oxford at that period was too deep in slumber for Dillenius to have made any converts or to have groomed a similarly active successor. Cambridge, by comparison, at least had the excuse that no comparable benefactors came forward to enable botany to be supported to the extent of a resident professor, but a parallel attempt there to establish a similar measure of continuity turned out to come to nothing, and there too a lengthy hiatus followed. Its own chair had an inauspicious start, in 1724, apparently as a result of the ambiguous connotation that ‘botany’ had come to acquire now that it was no longer inextricably identified with medicine. In landed circles, increasingly, it was thought of as the intellectual content of horticulture; and as the lecture courses on extracurricular studies were primarily seen by the universities as intended to prepare students for intelligent conversation on topics of general interest, it had presumably been thought more appropriate now for Cambridge students to be prepared for conversation with their gardeners rather than with their physicians. The first person appointed to the chair, Richard Bradley, was accordingly someone able to discourse on the botanical aspects of gardening, with what turned out to be considerable sophistication and originality. Unfortunately, it had been overlooked that a knowledge of quite other aspects of botany was required by the university of its students of medicine, for whose benefit others now saw the chair as having been primarily created. A London botanist who was already teaching a medically oriented course on a freelance basis was therefore hastily engaged, as an emergency measure, to repair that deficiency.

The man thus summoned to the rescue, John Martyn, was a refugee from the dreariness of his father’s counting-house in the City and trying to parlay a youthful passion for plant-hunting into a medical career, an ambition in which he looked like succeeding thanks to good contacts and entrepreneurial drive. He was now encouraged to think that the Cambridge chair lay within his grasp, if and when the ill-chosen Bradley vacated it. Ironically, though, when Bradley died in office in 1732 and Martyn at last achieved that aim—after much lobbying, preceded by a prolonged and disgraceful campaign of anonymous ridiculing of his predecessor in print—he was speedily disillusioned. When an expected botanic garden (such as Oxford had long had) failed to materialise, he insisted he could not teach effectively in the absence of one and returned to attend to his London medical practice in a huff, never to reappear. In typical eighteenth-century fashion he was never pressed to resign and the duties attached to the chair then remained unperformed for nearly 30 years—till his son Thomas had matured into a sufficiently strong candidate for Martyn to be confident of his being appointed in his stead.

Considering the verve he had displayed as a field botanist initially and the promise he had given of becoming a second Johnson—with a similarly invigorating presence on the ‘herbarisings’ of the Society of Apothecaries (on which outsiders like him were always welcome) and in even going one step better by forming an actual botanical society, complete with officers and minuted meetings—Martyn was doubly a disappointment. His sole publications bearing on the British flora consisted of a two-volume work published in 1732 that was little more than a translation by him of Tournefort’s Histoire des Plantes qui Naissent aux Environs de Paris with an added scatter of British records supplementary to Dillenius’ edition of Ray’s Synopsis, and of an adaptation of Ray’s Cambridge Catalogue of a mere 24 pages printed at his own expense and handed out free to the students attending that first, ad hoc course of his. What he is remembered for, rather, is his Historia plantarum rariorum, a part-work of individually dedicated colour plates (many by a Dutch artist) of choice horticultural exotics, an early example of a class of literature aimed at the pockets of wealthy owners of fine libraries and even finer gardens. Though that failed to pay and had to be discontinued abruptly, it was a foretaste of the major distraction that horticulture was now beginning to constitute for those who might otherwise have been directing all their energies to the study of the wild flora of Britain.

Horticulture was not the only serious new competitor for naturalists’ energies, moreover. The collecting of ‘curiosities’, for which Lister had been similarly sidetracked into performing such a major service, had undergone spectacular expansion as more and more men of great wealth, of whom Sir Hans Sloane was the most dazzling example, joined in reaping the growing harvest of novelties that poured in as more and more of the world was opened up to trade. Sloane, the one-time apothecary turned Maecenas, gave many a helping hand to fellow naturalists with surreptitious generosity and the use of his long-reaching influence, but his all-encompassing collecting set a bad example to lesser men with comparatively slender resources. Far and away the most conspicuous of those imitators, manic in his wholesale gathering-in of natural history specimens of every kind from all over the known world, was the egregious James Petiver (Fig. 21).

Having had the misfortune to lose his father in boyhood, Petiver had been equipped with only the beginnings of a good schooling by a prosperous maternal grandfather before being taken away prematurely to train as an apothecary. His resulting poor Latin was to prove a lasting handicap, making him look foolish in the learned circles that he aspired to. Showing promise as a field botanist, he was early taken up by the talent-spotting Sloane and inserted by him in the Royal Society as part of his drive to revitalise that with a sharp infusion of medical men and active naturalists. The elevation to that loftiness seems to have gone to Petiver’s head, however, firing him with the notion of winning respect in such circles by personally amassing as great a range as possible of the globe’s animal and plant diversity and by figuring and describing the many novelties that were sure to emerge as a result. A museum curator manqué, thereafter he devoted every moment he could spare from earning a living, as well as most of his money, to filling his bachelor residence in London with heap upon heap of randomly acquired, haphazardly documented specimens, all the while pouring out a stream of printed leaflets, in no particular sequence, with brief details and plates of whatever he supposed to be new. The main purpose of these inevitably ephemeral documents was to stimulate their recipients into further feeding his ravenous appetite for more and more of the same, but their main result has been a multitude of conundrums for later generations of taxonomists. All in all it was a pitiable example of misplaced energy.

Hardly any of Petiver’s unstoppable paper blizzard was of relevance to the flora or fauna of his own country. The one noteworthy exception was Papilionum Britanniae icones distributed in 1717, the year before his death (Fig. 22). Consisting just of two pages of text and six engraved plates, this made up for its slightness by being, surprisingly, the first-ever printed work devoted entirely to British butterflies, ‘all that have hitherto been observed’ to the best of his belief. Astonishingly, about two-thirds of all of the kinds known to occur in these islands today featured in it. In contrast to Lister’s claimed spider tally, however, it was some considerable way short of the total of more than 80 that Petiver supposed, for many were merely the different sexes of one and the same species (a general mistake at that period). Scarcely less impressive is that each kind distinguished had had an English name bestowed on it, in many cases the one which the species in question has borne ever since. Just as Turner had been at pains to produce non-Latin alternatives for our wild flowers nearly two centuries earlier, Petiver had realised that a set of those for butterflies as well could do much to encourage more people to collect and study them. Ever since insects had first caught his attention, therefore, like Turner he had been building on the basis of the few names already in popular use and coining some further ones himself.

Contrary to what the comparatively late date of Petiver’s pamphlet may suggest, both butterflies and moths had won enthusiastic pursuers among quite a number of people in England of different social levels by then. This awakening of interest can hardly be attributed to Ray’s Historia insectorum (which even so may have helped to make such a seemingly eccentric pursuit more reputable), for some of these enthusiasts had no Latin, nor is it likely that more than a few had access to the Theatrum of Moffet and Penny; rather it has the appearance of having been at least in part spontaneous, a response to the visual appeal and physical elusiveness over and above any urge to classify and study. Significantly, the most widely influential of these earliest collectors, Joseph Dandridge, was a designer on silk by occupation—some of his designs survive in the Victoria and Albert Museum—while all of the sets of coloured illustrations that managed to reach print were the work of professional artists, and more particularly painters of miniatures. On the other hand, the leading lady in this field around 1700, Eleanor Glanville, was a dedicated collector of caterpillars and beetles, by no means only of butterflies and the more attractive moths, paying maids of hers as well as the local village girls sixpence or a shilling for each specimen they brought in, enlisting their help in beating the hedges and bushes and even going to the length of renting a room up in London in which to store her collection. Some of her captures were of species new to Britain, including the fritillary whose English name deservedly commemorates her.

The first of those painters to produce enough work to make up a volume was Eleazar Albin, whose A Natural History of English Insects appeared in 1720 (when he was about forty) (Fig. 23). A Londoner, Albin seems to have started specialising in natural history subjects at least a decade earlier, soon deciding to concentrate on entomology on finding there was a demand for illustrations of insects in particular. In the preface to his book, for which the prospectus was issued as early as 1714, he paid tribute to Dandridge (as so many other authors were to do) for teaching him much of what he knew about the subject—for that he was no naturalist himself is confirmed by the lifelessness of his work in general, on which many have commented over the years. The 100 copperplates, ‘coloured for those who like it by the author’, were each individually dedicated, as in Martyn’s contemporaneous work on garden flowers (Figs 24 & 25). Some of the dedicatees were among the numerous advance subscribers whom his chief patron, the Dowager Duchess of Beaufort, herself a rearer of Lepidoptera of considerable renown, had given him invaluable assistance early on in securing; it was she indeed who had encouraged him to embark on the book in the first place. Thanks to the prospectus, we know that this first work on British natural history to be extensively illustrated in colour cost subscribers three guineas (or 30 shillings if they opted for the uncoloured alternative), ‘half paid down and the other half on delivery’, anyone procuring six subscriptions to have a copy free. ‘Those gentlemen that are willing to undertake so curious an undertaking’ were requested to send their money by late in the following month, in return for which they were promised that their name would be ‘honourably mention’d’ at the beginning of the eventual volume. Three booksellers, in London, Oxford and Cambridge, had undertaken to receive the subscriptions on the author’s behalf, and sample illustrations could be inspected at their addresses.

Many other natural history books with laboriously hand-coloured plates would be published on much that same pattern in the years to come. In that respect Albin was the pioneer of a publishing genre as well as the pioneer of producing illustrated works on natural history for an unlearned readership. In doing so, it is important to note, he was stepping out very much into the dark: there was no precedent to guide him, and it could only be a wild guess that enough people would be prepared to pay a highish sum in advance for a book on such an unfamiliar subject to enable him to cover the cost of the printing. That securing those proved no mean task is suggested by the six-year gap between the issuing of the prospectus and the eventual publication date. With ‘a great family to provide for’ (as he mentioned in the preface), he was in no position to bring the work out at a loss; so if the requisite number of subscribers had failed to materialise, the world would probably never have had the book—unless, that is, the firm of William and John Innys ‘at the West-end of St. Paul’s’, which had agreed to stock and distribute it, decided after all to assume the risk itself and pay for the printing as well. The subsequent history of the book suggests that the firm could indeed have done that without coming to financial harm, for only four years later it reissued it with a new text and 26 pages of notes by William Derham, a Royal Society fellow who was to do natural history further good turns by seeing into print those works of Ray that still remained in manuscript at his death. Further reissues followed in 1731, 1735 and 1749, so it would seem that the firm did quite well out of it before it was pirated three times more by competitors, who thereby prolonged its life almost to the end of the century.

Albin followed up that success by branching out in other zoological directions. First came a work on birds, for the most part British ones, divided into three volumes published at wide intervals in 1731–8. This had over three times as many colour plates as its predecessor, a lavishness probably only made possible by the involvement this time of his daughter Elizabeth (perhaps prior to her marriage in March 1730). As he candidly admitted, he drew on Ray and Willughby’s Ornithologia for what little he was able to provide about bird habits in the scanty accompanying text. The publisher was again the firm of Innys, now official printer to the Royal Society, and the sale must again have been gratifying enough to elicit the second edition that followed straight after in 1738–40, with again, as in the insect book, a comparable injection of more learned text by Derham (probably at the instance of the publisher, using its Royal Society connection).

A third book that appeared under Albin’s name—those words are used advisedly—had A Natural History of Spiders and Other Curious Insects as its much more daring subject. It looks a trifle suspicious that it came from a different publisher and was brought out in between the second and third volumes of the bird book, in 1736. Another new departure was that the 54 plates, a miserly number after the lavishness in that respect of the two previous books, featured only unnamed specimens, with numbers alongside (such as might be used in a collector’s cabinet, keyed to entries in a catalogue). About 150 spiders in all were illustrated, but so poorly that it is difficult to be sure of some of the species in the complete absence of descriptions. The sole purpose of the book seemed to be to evoke shudders from those averse to creepy-crawlies, for where was the ‘natural history’ promised in the title?

Many years later two sharp-eyed arachnologists, Adam White of the British Museum in the 1840s and the late R. W. Bristowe in the 1960s, spotted independently that the plates in this book are very inferior copies, at one or more removes, of a set of paintings that had originally been made by Albin’s mentor, the artistic Joseph Dandridge, of specimens in his personal cabinet. That this was the case was proved by the lucky survival of a manuscript that had come into Sloane’s all-engulfing possession (now in the British Library) in which there was an almost identical set with Dandridge’s name attached. The manuscript’s paintings, interestingly, did have descriptions of the creatures depicted accompanying them, presumably drawn up by Dandridge (for Albin would surely have been incapable of them): they must have been deliberately omitted from the book for fear of putting off the unlearned purchasers at whose eyes that was primarily aimed. Some of Albin’s contemporaries, however, could have noticed that a few years earlier, in 1721, Richard Bradley had already published in his Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature details of Dandridge’s spider collection that tallied with those in the ‘Albin’ book with a very suggestive closeness. Why there was no acknowledgement of Dandridge in the latter seems to have only two possible explanations: either it was a surprising piece of carelessness on the part of Albin or the publisher or—and this is surely the more probable—the copy that Albin is known to have made of Dandridge’s original somehow came into the hands of the publisher, a certain Montagu, and was put into print entirely without reference to Albin, who may not even have been consulted about the attributing of the book to him. In short, all the evidence points to this having been one of the sadly numerous cases at this period of publishing piracy. Nevertheless, it remains puzzling that no contemporary statement pointing out the erroneous attribution has ever been discovered. Dandridge did not die until 1747 (about five years after Albin), by which time he had become a person of some standing, as Master of the Merchant Taylors’ Company. Perhaps piracy by publishers was all too familiar, perhaps he knew that neither he nor Albin had any redress without a costly lawsuit and felt that the best course was simply to treat the matter with a shrug. Whatever the explanation, there was at least the pleasing windfall for posterity that it has, as a result, one precious relic in print of that otherwise totally silent headman of the earliest community of entomologists in Britain.

That community had begun meeting informally in a London tavern for probably several years before it cohered into a formal body, which called itself the Society of Aurelians, sometime between 1720 and 1742. Dandridge doubtless played a leading part in this, and certainly both he and that society were acknowledged as major stimuli by Benjamin Wilkes, author of the next three publications on Lepidoptera to appear. The first of those, published in 1741–2, had no text at all but consisted entirely of engraved plates depicting examples of some 300 different species arranged in intricate patterns (Fig. 26). Though entitled Twelve New Designs of British Buterflies, it did in fact include moths. It was initially offered for sale by Wilkes himself from what sounds like a stall in front of a tavern in Fleet Street; a later, undated version, however, was put out by the owner of a map and print warehouse further up the road. If Albin learned of the work (but his death may have occurred just before it began coming out), he may have been appalled that Wilkes was asking not all that much less for his mere 12 plates than Albin had charged his subscribers for 100—but admittedly Wilkes was much the better artist. Around the same time Wilkes also issued a folio broadsheet of instructions on how to set about collecting this group of insects, which notoriously present more than ordinary problems once removed from the net. Though only a single copy of that has come down to us, the instructions were fortunately repeated by Wilkes in his next and most important work, The English Moths and Butterflies, and have proved an invaluable source of information for historians on the already impressively elaborate methods then in use (Fig. 27).

Thanks to a trickle of documentary discoveries in recent years, much more is known about Wilkes and his main book than used to be the case. We now know that he brought it out in parts, starting perhaps in 1747 and continuing through the next year till the work was complete, and available for purchase in its entirety,in the summer of 1749. Tragically, only about a week before completion Wilkes died very suddenly, from a fever—to which perhaps the strain of such a major undertaking had rendered him prone, just as it appears to have weakened Gerard’s resistance to fever when labouring at his great herbal (though luckily in his case only temporarily). It was solely the preparing of the 120 engraved colour plates that can have caused that strain, for despite his ‘being indefatigable in his observations and faithful in minuting down every particular’ it has only lately emerged that ‘for want of learning’ he was incapable of writing the text. That was the anonymous work, we now know, of a fellow lepidopterist, Henry Baker, whose researches with the microscope had earned him election by then to the Royal Society. Baker, it also transpires, had been responsible for procuring at least a dozen of the more than 100 subscribers listed in the work (of whom a quarter were female).

Unlike Albin’s much less expensive even if artistically much inferior equivalent, The English Moths and Butterflies gave rise to no retinue of further editions, let alone pirated ones, in the years that more immediately followed, a fact that distinguishes it at once as belonging in a different publishing category. In was not indeed until 1773, a quarter of a century later, that anyone ventured to issue it afresh—but with the title at least altered to put the emphasis on the plates. A typographical facelift, however, that was deemed to be all that was necessary the next time it was offered to the public, in 1824, was insufficient to hide the fact that it was of merely antiquarian value by then, worth acquiring only for the illustrations. All along, in any case, connoisseurs were probably prepared to give shelf space to only one large and costly volume at a time, however beautiful the alternatives, on a subject as out-of-the-ordinary as this: they were ready to buy the first that was offered, but that was that. A very similar work with an unfortunately very similar title by another London lepidopterist, the much more obscure James Dutfield, by a singular mischance coincided almost exactly with Wilkes’s book and sold so poorly that it had to be discontinued after only six parts had appeared.

A re-scrutiny of Wilkes’s will in recent years has unexpectedly placed him and his work in an interesting additional context. Apparently unmarried, Wilkes died so suddenly that he was unable to get that document signed and witnessed, so a highly reputable acquaintance of long standing had to be brought in to attest that the handwriting was his. This was a barrister from nearby Lincoln’s Inn by the name of Taylor White, whose prominent role as a patron of natural history artists at that period has in later years become increasingly familiar to historians. Apart from Wilkes, the several he helped to sustain, probably not only by buying their work, included George Edwards and Peter Paillou in his favourite field of zoology, and in botany the superlative Ehret. A member of an old Midlands landed family (like Willughby), White was not only wealthy but also very well connected, to which he doubtless owed the special permission granted him by the trustees to borrow specimens from the British Museum for his protégés to draw. By the end of his life he owned nearly 1,000 examples of the work of those and others, filling 29 volumes. The scale and pervasiveness of this quiet background of private generosity was a special feature of the eighteenth century that is easily underrated.

In 1755 White announced in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (of which, predictably, he was a fellow) that he was ‘attempting to form a society for the carrying on a general Natural History, to try proper experiments, and to employ proper painters and engravers suitable to the importance of the subjects.’ Although these words are open to a variety of interpretations—and it is alarming that the writer of them later became a judge—probably what White had in mind was what today would be called a charitable trust, perhaps analogous to his friend Thomas Coram’s new Foundling Hospital (of which White was the long-serving treasurer). Through the medium of such a body, he seems to have been suggesting, funds might be more readily raised on the scale necessary to attract into this line of work more illustrators of ability and to support their efforts on a more systematic and more financially assured basis. The ‘experiments’ envisaged were presumably to be concerned with investigating the possibilities of other materials and techniques that had not been tried as yet.

Nothing appears to have come of this vague suggestion. At least, however, there was one person with the far-sightedness to realise how much more could be achieved by a pooling of resources instead of relying on the whims of individual patrons. In the time it had taken to raise the necessary subscriptions to enable The English Moths and Butterflies to be put into print several more works like it, on other aspects of natural history, could have been commissioned and published as well. Just how pressing was the need in particular for a comparable volume on wild flowers, with colour plates and an English text, is well shown by the number of incipient botanists in those mid-century years who necessarily had recourse to the cumbersome and by now antiquated herbals of Gerard and Parkinson for want of anything else with a comprehensive set of illustrations. It was his discovery of a copy of ‘Gerard’ in his mother’s boudoir that first awoke the identifying instincts of no less a person than Sir Joseph Banks in his schoolboy years; it was ‘Gerard’, too, that John Lettsom and William Curtis similarly recalled as an essential companion on their own respective faltering steps as beginners; while in the isolation of Guernsey the pioneer investigation of its flora by Joshua Gosselin as late as 1790 would have to be carried out with only the plates in Parkinson’s Theatrum to aid him. There can be little doubt that it was this lack of more suitable field manuals that was one further reason for the failure of naturalists other than entomologists to appear in any numbers at this period.

Providing such works, however, was not what Taylor White and others like him had in mind as potential outcomes of their patronage. Art connoisseurs first and foremost, not practising naturalists, they wanted for their money large volumes in handsome bindings full of attractive colour plates. The text was more or less irrelevant. The eighteenth century was an age of conspicuous consumption, and such books served that purpose well. In the oft-quoted words of a contemporary, the ‘no ordinary gardener’ Thomas Knowlton, all too many of those that now increasingly filled the bookshops were merely ‘maide for pompe to fill a library and more for outward show than reale use, … having very little within.’ Though Wilkes had proved that the British Lepidoptera were an acceptable subject for that purpose, on the whole the fauna and flora of these islands could hardly compete in colourfulness or strangeness with the counterparts of those that were now flooding in from all around the globe. In comparison with those, what the home country had to offer could not help but appear ordinary and drab.

In default of enough customers for their work among those whose gaze was fixed firmly on what nature had on offer at home, natural history artists understandably turned to where the main money was. One of those, George Edwards (Fig. 28), defended the absence of British species from his successive published series of bird paintings on the pretext that the likenesses of those were available in print already; a more persuasive answer, though, would have been that the wealthy collectors on whose patronage he necessarily depended preferred the unfamiliar and exotic. To his credit, he did hope to produce a revised edition of Ray and Willughby’s Ornithologia, continually annotating his own copy of that over the years, but economics dictated that painting foreign birds had to receive priority, and in the end he never realised that intention. His very success with those, indeed, acted in at least one instance as a counter-attraction for someone who might otherwise have been content with British birds: the father of the future pioneer of North American natural history, John Abbot, once went to an auction in London for the express purpose of buying a set of Albin’s volumes on those for his son, only to return with one of Edwards’s instead, ‘much pleased with the change’ after finding the illustrations in the latter ‘so much superior’—regardless of the fact that it was a quite different avifauna that they depicted. Most buyers of natural history books at that period would no doubt have behaved similarly: for them the quality of the plates was all that counted. No wonder that William Sherard was given to understand by booksellers that ‘Natural History of all sorts is much in demand’ (as he reported in a letter to a Yorkshire naturalist, Richard Richardson, in 1720), and that Peter Collinson surely made an astounded Linnaeus jealous in 1747 in assuring him that works on the subject ‘sell the best of any books in England’. These statements have been interpreted uncritically as evidence that Britain was teeming with naturalists at this period; in reality, they refer just to the vogue for exotica, which had no necessary connection at all with what those engaged in studying the fauna and flora of their own country were reading or buying—whose numbers, as we have seen, had by now dwindled to the point where that study was even in danger of dying out.

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Remarkably, even so, one or two books dealing with the natural history of at least some part of these islands in addition to those already mentioned did manage to be written and find their way into print at this period. What is more, each of those won through to publication without luring subscribers with a mass of colour plates.

The first, The Natural History of Northampton-shire by John Morton, was strictly speaking a leftover from the previous century, for the author had been collecting the material for nearly 20 years and trawling for subscribers for eight of those before the projected single folio, long mostly complete, appeared in 1712. As its title hinted, it was intended to be seen as the third in a sequence of topographical works on English shire counties initiated (by Robert Plot, with one on Oxfordshire) back in 1677, which relied for their publishability on the territorial pride of local families of prominence. Unlike its predecessors, however, its interpretation of ‘natural history’ was much closer to what those words would come to convey a century later, for the flora and fauna were evidently Morton’s primary interest. Just as Gilbert White was to, he lived in the same village for almost his entire clerical career after leaving university; however, his gaze was less narrowly parochial than White’s, for he systematically investigated the whole of that awkwardly long and narrow county while also eliciting ‘several persons of great curiosity and skill in botany’ resident in its different parts. More than 200 different plants find mention in the book’s pages, though many of those only by reason of exemplifying that obsession of the age with ‘curiosities’ in the literal, peep-show sense: abnormalities of growth or colour of one kind or another. Much more impressive by comparison is a list of land and freshwater molluscs, of which 42 species have been confidently identified in recent years among Morton’s archaic names, most of them taken from Lister’s Historiae animalium Angliae. Probably the first-ever list of those ‘elegant little creatures’ (in Morton’s words) to appear in a local work, this was clearly a group in which he had specialised, probably as a result of a fascination initially with fossil shells, prized by the virtuosi of that era as examples of lusus naturae, the supposed minor mistakes of the Creator.

Much more surprisingly, two other books that were published around the same time emanated from Ireland, from which up to then little but silence had come on natural history matters. The earlier of those, in 1714, had the luck to be able to steal a ride in the zoological equivalent of a herbal: The Experienc’d Huntsman did indeed largely live up to its title, with a mass of information about that decidedly more popular pursuit, but it also included the fruits of 35 years of impressively objective first-hand study of the habits of local mammals by its author, Arthur Stringer, the gamekeeper of an estate near the shores of Lough Neagh. Apparently entirely overlooked by the natural history world for two and a half centuries, its republication by the enterprising Blackstaff Press of Belfast in 1979 came as a jolting corrective to the perceived idea that patient, long-lasting studies of animal behaviour are a twentieth-century phenomenon only.

Also in Ireland, in 1726, appeared that country’s first-ever Flora. Entitled Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum – to suggest that it was the Irish counterpart of Ray’s similarly named handbook on the plants of Britain—this was the work of a Protestant dissenting minister-cum-physician, Caleb Threlkeld. Another keen naturalist produced by a North of England country upbringing, like Turner and Penny before him, in his case in Cumberland, Threlkeld had settled with his family in Dublin in 1713 after studying at Glasgow and Edinburgh universities. Finding botany ‘dormant in Ireland … no publick advance having been made towards its illustration’, he soon set about remedying that deficiency in the interstices of preaching and (latterly full-time) doctoring. How far his eventual small octavo, published at his own expense two years before his death, was based on original fieldwork of his own or plagiarised from other authors is a matter of some controversy, but the recent rediscovery at Trinity College Dublin of fragments of the herbarium that he is known to have formed encourages the belief that some if not most of the records for over 500 taxa listed in the book were the product of his personal forays around the city. The book would seem to have sold reasonably well, for it was reissued twice within two years (including, very unusually for the time, in London as well) and numerous copies of one of those issues have survived.

The best that England could rise to by way of a riposte were two successive tiny volumes by a young London apothecary, John Blackstone, the sole recruit to field botany in the century’s middle years through the traditional ‘herbarisings’ of his livery company who proved to have sufficient staying-power and ability to rise to authorship—after the example of Johnson a century earlier. The first of those books, a modest Fasciculus like Ray’s, was published by Blackstone when just out of his apprenticeship, in 1737. Written in the Latin that he owed to an education at the well-regarded Merchant Taylors’ School, it was mostly the fruit of a nearly four-month convalescence from a long illness the previous summer; this had been spent at Harefield, in the northwest corner of Middlesex, to which his mother had returned to live with her parents, members of the local lesser gentry, on being widowed. Blessed with varied soils and habitats, the parish had yielded him the very impressive total of 464 vascular plants, which seemed too good to keep just to himself. The estimate obtained from a local printer for publishing the resulting list with localities—England’s second local Flora—implied a cover price that ‘cannot exceed five shillings’ (he confided to a naturalist friend in a letter). Blackstone was probably no better placed financially when the time came to pay for his second book to be printed nine years later, for trade had recently been poor, we know from one of his letters. A mortgage he raised at that time on a three-acre mead inherited from his mother may indeed have been for that purpose. The last work to be published in England based on the natural classification of Ray, the Specimen botanicum … plantarum rariorum Angliae listed many fewer species than his Fasciculus but included records from many other parts of England, suggesting that an attempt at a full-scale national Flora might have been in his sights. Sadly, though, his health then began to deteriorate, ending in his death six years later when he was still not yet forty.

Any other students of British or Irish natural history that there may have been at that period who were no better placed financially than Blackstone or Threlkeld but lacked their extra degree of determination would have been unlikely to persevere with the idea of reporting their finds between two covers, as those two did. Unless they were members of the Royal Society and thus enjoyed the privilege of publishing in its journal, there was not yet any way open to them of putting their work in print other than publishing it as a book. But the cost and attendant complications that that notoriously involved acted as severe deterrents, robbing any but the rich of an important incentive. Even forming collections of specimens lost much of their point if no finds of interest could be placed on lasting public record, particularly at a time when there may have been no fellow enthusiasts within reach with whom to share that information or with whom to compete in finding more. This was surely one further reason why throughout that halfcentury natural history fieldwork within these islands so very largely languished.

Unfortunately, nothing could be done about printing’s fearful cost until and unless a radical improvement took place in technology—and that would not occur till well into the next century. For the time being, the printing-press stubbornly retained its cumbersome character, virtually unaltered since the days of Caxton.

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For the readers of books, on the other hand, matters were more promising. Printers had escaped from the mere handful of places—London, York, Cambridge and Oxford—to which the strict licensing laws of the years in the aftermath of the Restoration had confined them, and their wide dispersal elsewhere had been helpfully matched by a regional spread of paper mills, substantially cutting the cost of transporting that bulky material. In the meantime the provincial cities and market towns had been undergoing the very marked expansion that was one of the eighteenth century’s most striking features, an expansion without parallel in other European countries and perhaps the most conspicuous result of the sharp jump in national income that Britain was experiencing before the century was half over. Expanding towns and a rising tide of personal consumption and competitive display brought more shops, and among those were ones that specialised in the sale of books. That spread of bookshops was overdue in any case in response to a further leap in the spread of literacy, the trend towards less stilted language, which made for easier reading, and, not least, more interest in the wider world on the part of the provincial gentry at a time when trade and exploration were regularly bringing reports of startling new discoveries and a rapidly enlarging leisured class wished to keep informed of the latest thinking and fashions.

Books continued to be relatively expensive, in contrast to so much else in everyday life for which prices had noticeably fallen, thanks to economies of scale and a torrent of cheap imports. However, a vigorous second-hand market had grown up and there were cut-price pirated editions to be had as a result of the difficulty of protecting copyrights. Copyrights in successful books were the single greatest source of profit to be made from publishing, an activity that tended to become separate from bookselling during the century even though commonly carried out within one and the same firm. The expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695, which left copyright owners without the legal protection they had enjoyed up to then, was consequently a cause of great concern; after much petitioning of Parliament, however, a new Act was secured in 1710, which in theory restored protection to at least the extent of 21 years for titles already in print—though only 14 for new ones. In practice, though, that was only partly effective, for pirating could be so lucrative that offenders commonly preferred to run the risk of being sued and go ahead regardless. The greatest losers, however, were authors, very few of whom were in a strong enough bargaining position to resist the almost invariable requirement that the copyright be made over to the publisher.

Authors, indeed, were little more than lemons, squeezable in every way possible. Anxious to minimise any risk to themselves, publishers were liable to exaggerate the poorness of the prospects of any title whose profitability they felt at all unsure about, requiring the author to bear the liability for any losses or, alternatively, to pay for the entire cost of production. Such dangerous terms were to bring about the financial ruin of more than one naturalist author early in the following century. Publishers might even demand a commission as high as 50 per cent just for acting as a book’s distributor. Unlike printing, publishing and bookselling were occupations that could be entered without any training, and their suddenly much greater profitability made them a magnet for unscrupulous individuals whose very last concern was what was inside the covers of the commodities in which they dealt. It was a new jungle full of savage predators, which the inexperienced were ill-advised to penetrate without great wariness and all their wits about them. Many an author must have opted to pay for a book to be printed when that was not really necessary rather than enter into negotiation in such alien and treacherous territory.

Apart from the inflexibility of the printing process itself, once books were printed the cost of transporting them, which was by no means insignificant either, was for long rendered almost equally inflexible by the generally abominable condition of the roads. Though major steps to improve those began at last in the second half of the century, and the mail coaches were thereafter soon able to offer a noticeably speedier and more efficient service, for anyone who simply wished to lend a book to a friend living at any considerable distance it long persisted in being a matter of uncertainty, careful advance enquiries and sometimes very prolonged delays. The correspondence of contemporary naturalists, particularly needy long-distance borrowers, contains all too plentiful evidence of this perpetual bugbear. Here is Blackstone, for one, seeking the loan of a rare foreign book on fungi from a fellow enthusiast up in Yorkshire: ‘It would come very safe by the Uxbridge Coach,’ he is anxious to assure him, but he has to follow that up with very specific timetable instructions, to the effect that the coach in question ‘inns at the Black Bull in Holborn, and will till after Saturday set out at two o’clock in the afternoon.’ But it still had to be picked up by Blackstone from the inn in question, no doubt in return for a sizeable tip. Routes that parcels had to take were liable to be much less straightforward, however, if the sender or recipient lived somewhere more out of the way. William Borlase, for example, a savant marooned in the remoteness of Cornwall, found the fastest way for specimens or books to travel was on the coastal tin ships that regularly plied between there and London. The captain was ‘to be heard of at the King’s arms in Pudding Lane,’ he airily told one of his naturalist correspondents. That that was even so a somewhat uncertain line of communication was shown by the inordinate time it took for a complimentary copy from John Ellis of his treatise on the nature of corallines to reach him in the summer of 1755. The reason, he explained, was that the press gangs had obstructed the Thames navigation for a lengthy period. As late as 1808 Dawson Turner still found communicating with Stockholm less problematical than ‘with a portion of our own country,’ as he observed apologetically when writing to Ellen Hutchins, his fellow student of seaweeds in far-off County Kerry. ‘I only regret the distance between us which makes the conveyance of any small parcels a matter of so much difficulty and trouble,’ he added, feelingly.

Considering all these numerous impediments that there were to be surmounted, perhaps it is little wonder that active investigators were so little in evidence during that particular span of years, in the absence as well for most of that time of any unifying influence such as Ray had provided through his writings, or of any enduring amount of social cohesion to counter the sense of working in isolation, little appreciated and scarcely noticed.

CHAPTER 5
The Linnaean Spring

ALL OF A SUDDEN, around 1760, the situation completely changed. Interest in natural history noticeably revived, in different parts of Britain and at different social levels. Books on the subject began to pour forth, most of them in English and increasingly aimed at more than just scholarly specialists. It even became fashionable to go out into the countryside and try to put names to what one saw and found.

This remarkable transformation had two separate causes. The more fundamental was the widespread awakening to the attractions of natural scenery in the layer of society that could afford to indulge in the leisurely tours now at last made feasible by marked improvements in the road system. At first, people thought to do no more than seek out the ‘picturesque’—settings of particular beauty with the power to delight the senses after the manner of a painting—but gradually their courage grew and they learned to admire what hitherto they had spurned: the ‘horridness’ of the landscape’s further and wilder parts, the crags and cliffs, the storm-tossed sea, the threateningly unfamiliar and the enticingly perilous. In reaction to decades of formality and restriction there was a general turning with relief to simplicity and naturalness.

Superimposed on that new aesthetic was a struggle to make sense of nature’s almost overwhelming diversity, to work out the overarching plan on which it was assumed it must be ordered. This was an enterprise with high appeal for the beneficiaries of that parallel awakening that we have come to know as the Enlightenment: it was one more of nature’s mysteries that was surely waiting to be uncovered by the proper exercise of the intellect, another code to be deciphered. Ray had put forward already, back in 1682, an avowedly far-from-perfect ‘well-ordered arrangement into classes, primary and subordinate’, based on the perceived affinities of organisms. In response to criticism of that, he had come up with an improved version only for its publication to be delayed till only two years short of his death. This allowed a rival natural classification conceived by a leading French botanist, Tournefort, to prevail across the Channel, making France enduringly resistant to any subsequently proposed arrangement that was other than affinity-based. In Britain, however, though Ray’s classification continued in use for the botanists’ standard handbook, in the absence of any successor to him of comparable range and intellectual ambitiousness, the field lay wide open to challengers with alternatives to offer. Of those there was to prove no shortage, to such an extent that one naturalist was moved to complain of a ‘system madness’ that had become ‘epidemical’. There was endless room for argument about which groups of animals and plants were most closely related to which, but meanwhile the need for a system that worked efficiently enough to allow anything unfamiliar to be rapidly run down to its place in that and to its scientific name—if it already had one—was becoming more and more urgent, as European science faced becoming inextricably submerged by the cascade of novelty pouring in to be catalogued.

A temptingly simple system of such a kind, as it happened, had been on offer since early in the century, but it had the double drawback of being applicable only to botany and of largely bypassing natural affinities by classifying genera according to the number and positioning of the sex organs—which the more prim found distasteful and even abhorrent. In 1736, the year after publishing that (as Systema naturae), its deviser had interrupted a temporary residence in Holland to slip across to England for a visit, during which he had sought out Dillenius at Oxford. Afterwards the latter had reported to a correspondent: ‘A new botanist is arose in the north, the founder of a new method “a staminibus et pistillis”, whose name is Linnaeus … He is a Swede … hath a thorough insight and knowledge of botany; but I am afraid his method won’t hold.’

Dillenius would not be proved wrong for another 30 years as far as Britain and that method were concerned. In the meantime, however, a growing number of this country’s leading naturalists saw fit to enter into correspondence with Linnaeus, enormously impressed by his massive output of authoritative publications, some of which they bought and closely studied, by his further refining of the terminology and techniques of botany in the footsteps of Ray and, above all, by the unexampled comprehensiveness of his cataloguing. This last had culminated in mid-century with his two grand compendia, the Species plantarum and a 10th edition of the Systema naturae, in which his consistent use of binomials—apparently conceived by him almost as an afterthought—enabled those works to serve as the baselines eventually for botanical and zoological nomenclature respectively.

It was the irresistible attraction of binomials, liberating the scientific world from the cumbersome strings of descriptive epithets in use until then, that opened the way to the gradual ingestion in Britain of the rest of the items on the rich Linnaean menu. Of those, it was the largely artificial system of botanical classification that took the most swallowing. That was of course an item that could be safely ignored by zoologists, but there were influential botanists to whom it was quite unacceptable as well, even as a temporary stopgap pending the producing of some more perfect confection with ingredients that were natural (which was how Linnaeus himself wished his system to be regarded).

The most prominent of those objectors were an unlikely duo: John Hill and the third Earl of Bute, John Stuart (Fig. 29). Hill, an apothecary by training, had turned into a prolific hack writer and intemperate controversialist with numerous enemies and rough treatment from the wits; Bute, in sharp contrast, was an obscure Scottish aristocrat with a scholarly passion for botany who had just become chief mentor to the immature heir to the throne, a role in which he would presently find himself so clingingly idolised that he was required to become prime minister when that youth became George III. Though an admirer of Linnaeus’ work for some years already, Bute had come to believe that the goal of a natural system was ultimately unattainable. Like Hill, he nevertheless found Linnaeus’ substitute for that full of so many inconsistencies that he felt the only thing to do was to replace it in its entirety with an alternative in which those defects had been ruthlessly eliminated. After making each others’ acquaintance in 1757, the two had set to work planning a joint riposte on a scale that seemed to them as necessary as it was only fitting, a lavishness made possible by the windfall inheritance of a huge fortune by Bute’s wife soon after they had started. Perhaps surprisingly, given their very different characters, the enterprise throughout was very much a joint one: its assured long-term funding and the confining tautness of the conceptual framework imparted a stability to the blusteringly temperamental Hill, while Bute for his part carefully maintained a certain distance, refusing to discuss anything except the work in hand. A certain undercurrent of tension was inherent in every such patronage relationship, but luckily Hill was employed on an enterprise that he had previously been yearning to embark upon if only he could have afforded to do so unaided, and he could hardly have helped but feel a debt of gratitude for this once-in-a-lifetime chance to show up those who had doubted his ability. Though to outsiders he must have seemed a wild stallion, Bute was the rider he had been needing to dominate him and put him into harness.

The Vegetable System, the mammoth embodiment of the pair’s 18 years of toil, eventually filled 26 folio volumes on its completion in 1775. For all its heedless extravagance, it was undeniably an impressive feat intellectually. The only trouble was that, of those it was meant to convert, hardly any could have afforded to buy a copy, even supposing they could afford the time to study the contents. Not to be discouraged, however, and still in the grip of a weakness for dazzlingly expensive gestures—Lansdowne House in London and Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire were two parallel palatial indulgences—Bute soon followed that up with a no less ambitious sequel, of which this time he was the sole author, Hill by then having died. This, Botanical Tables demonstrating how the various families of British plants were arranged according to the system that Hill and he had devised, ran to nine volumes in royal quarto. That comparatively modest expanse, however, was more than made up for by 566 colour plates commissioned from a veteran German-born engraver of repute, John Miller, by then in his seventies. Everything else about that final venture, however, is uncertain. The work is believed to have appeared in or around 1785, but no more than 16 sets were apparently produced (though only 12 can be accounted for) and in at least one of those the majority of the plates are not by Miller; even the cost of printing has been put at figures that range from £1,000 to 12 times as much—though whatever the correct figure, it can hardly have been sizeable enough to have dictated so minuscule a print run for a person as affluent as Bute. Rather, it seems that all he ever intended was a stupendous exercise in ‘vanity’ publishing, all but the two copies he is known to have kept for himself having been for presentation to just a few select grandees (most of them titled ladies, the sex for which, if Bute is to be believed, the tables were solely composed).

Bute and Hill were not the only ones to be content with an artificial system but to want one that was other than that of Linnaeus. Even as late as 1822, in his two-volume Philosophy of Zoology, a Scots Presbyterian minister called John Fleming, who had attended the botany lectures of John Hope at Edinburgh University, put forward a dichotomous classification which he held to be more convenient. It appears to have attracted little notice, however; by then, in any case, the Linnaean system itself was struggling to retain its dominant position.

Despite its imperfections, that system had prevailed against its competitors thanks to the international prestige that Linnaeus had won more generally and to the energetic proselytising of his many able students, who transmitted his ideas to one country after another. So highly valued in England was the all-round classificatory expertise of his star pupil, Daniel Solander (Fig. 30), who had temporarily settled in London, that in 1763 he was helped into a post on the staff of the newly established British Museum. From that key position he was well placed to diffuse the Linnaean approach into circles ripe to be penetrated by it, initiating its incorporation into the literature of British palaeontology in particular.

Yet intercession from one who had personally sat at the foot of the Master, while helpful, was far from necessary by then: sufficient enthusiasm for these new ideas had already arisen in Britain spontaneously, at any rate among the botanists. It had been the publication of the Species plantarum in 1753 and a rave review of that in the widely read Gentleman’s Magazine a few months afterwards that had touched it off. The reviewer, William Watson, was a leading London physician (and a partner of Taylor White in his funding initiatives) who had retained a keenness for botany from his apprenticeship days; now influential in Royal Society circles, his endorsement was bound to carry weight. As a recognised authority on the works of the Swede he was also an obvious person to be turned to for assistance (for which he was expressly thanked in the preface) by the person who subsequently published a first, extremely lucid account of the sexual system in English, for the benefit of the general reader. This was in 1759 in a book with the unappealing title of Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Natural History, Husbandry, and Physich The author, Benjamin Stillingfleet (Fig. 31), had become a convert to botany only recently, through seeking to help friends of his among the Norfolk gentry by identifying for them the kinds of grasses most useful for improving their estates. For his London pied-à-terre he had deliberately chosen a garret, in a side-street off the Haymarket, in order to have money to spare with which to help support some relations who were dependent on him financially. Though far from well-off, he was nevertheless welcome in the fashionable salons by virtue of his social connections and especially his powers as a conversationalist (it was he indeed who gained the female habituées of those the nickname ‘bluestockings’, from his habit of wearing to the salons those then outlandish garments). To him, probably no less than to Bute—whose wife was the daughter of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, one of the leading salon hostesses—must belong much of the credit for causing the Linnaean system to be treated thenceforward as a topic for serious discussion in the loftiest circles, circles which overlapped with the Court and there made the grandest convert of all in Queen Charlotte herself.

Stillingfleet gained important converts in two other directions. When a second edition of his book proved to be called for, three years later, he used that as an opportunity to slip in an idea brought to his notice by a Norfolk squire with whom he had stayed in the meantime. This was the keeping of a natural history calendar, by noting through the year such matters as the first appearances of particular flowers and birds. The fact that the idea had been borrowed from a Swedish naturalist provided a justification for including it in the book. It so chanced that one of the people who bought a copy of that second edition, in 1765, was Gilbert White, whose own Garden Calendar was directly inspired by it. Scholars now see the punctilious habits that White developed in keeping his garden diary as the start of his careful observing and recording of natural phenomena more generally, and Stillingfleet thus has a reasonable claim to be regarded as the ultimate progenitor of The Natural History of Selborne.

The apothecary William Hudson was infected with Stillingfleet’s Linnaean fever very much more directly, for the two had found themselves near-neighbours. The younger by some 30 years, the son of a North Country innkeeper, Hudson had followed the path taken by Johnson and Petiver before him, come south to London for his training, been introduced to learned botany by the Society of Apothecaries and decided to stay on in the Metropolis to practise. To judge from his disastrous spell as the Society’s Demonstrator of Plants, when his failure to keep the apprentices in order on the ‘herbarisings’ necessitated his premature replacement, he was diffident and unassuming, better suited to a reclusive, scholarly career, of which he sadly had but a brief experience as a sub-librarian at the British Museum. He was consequently just the person to undertake the task that now beckoned but that was well beyond Stillingfleet’s ability: of producing an overdue replacement for Ray’s Synopsis as the standard handbook on British wild plants and basing that on the Linnaean system instead of on Ray’s natural one. The Flora Anglica, published in 1762, was the result, a single octavo volume printed at Hudson’s own expense, with an elegant preface contributed by Stillingfleet. Despite the fact that it provided no more in the way of descriptions than just the line or so of ‘essential characters’ to which Linnaeus had confined himself in the Species plantarum, and despite its being entirely in Latin even down to the habitat details, it clearly met a greater need than Hudson anticipated, for the limited stock of copies—no doubt all that he could afford—was soon nearly exhausted. There was luckily one still available in time for Gilbert White to compile his manuscript ‘Flora Selborniensis’ with its aid in the summer of 1765, but that same year the temporarily exiled Jean-Jacques Rousseau had to make do with a copy of the obsolete Raian Synopsis to allay his botanical curiosity (but on the evidence of his annotations of that, now in the library of Jesus College, Cambridge, he used it mainly if not wholly for identifying which kinds of fungi were reputedly good to eat). Two years later the poet Thomas Gray found the work unobtainable. Eventually, a copy changed hands for nearly 20 times the original price and the demands for a new edition became too great to be any longer resisted. Hudson predictably used that opportunity to make changes and additions, but regrettably these were so numerous that what emerged in 1778 was a much more cumbersome two-volume version, unsuitable for the field.

That first edition, however, had amply achieved its purpose of winning over the main mass of scientific botanists in Britain—and far more speedily than might have been expected. In part that was due to the remarkably fortunate accident that the chairs in the subject at both Cambridge and Edinburgh universities fell vacant at that juncture, and that in each case the new occupants proved to be convinced Linnaeans and lost no time in switching the teaching onto that track. Only one year after the Flora Anglica appeared, similarly, the author of an English imitation of Buffon’s immensely popular Histoire Naturelle, a certain Richard Brookes, saw it as expedient to insert in the fifth volume a section on ‘the method in which Linnaeus treated these subjects’.

Those botanists for whom Hudson’s book was too daunting and arid, or whom Stillingfleet had failed to reach with his Miscellaneous Tracts, had meanwhile come under bombardment from a horticultural quarter. A certain Lady Ann Monson, a keen collector of new garden exotics who moved in elevated circles and through those had learned of the intriguing new Linnaean methods, at once felt the need of a simple but comprehensive guide to them for people like herself with no Latin and scarcely more botany. On mentioning this to a leading nurseryman of her acquaintance, James Lee (Fig. 32), he had jumped at the idea. As a first step, he prevailed upon a trade colleague with a better command of Latin than his own, Samuel Gray, to translate the Philosophia botanica of Linnaeus, a kind of codification of botanical practice which the latter had taken time off from his list-making to dictate to one of his students while laid up in bed for months by gout. Lee then used that as the main substance of a volume that he was able to interest the long-established London publishing house of Tonson in trying out on the public. That duly appeared in 1760, as An Introduction to Botany – though appended to those words on the title page there was still an explanatory paragraph of traditional length and ponderousness: Containing an Explanation of the Theory of that Science, and an Interpretation of its Technical Terms. Extracted from the works of Dr. Linnaeus, and Calculated to Assist such as may be Desirous of Studying that Author’s Method and Improvements.

Ironically, Samuel Gray’s son and grandson would later be leading champions in print of the by no means dead-and-buried natural system of classification, bringing down on their heads a vindictive response from the Linnaeans, by then increasingly on the back foot and sensitive to criticism. In 1760, however, the artificial alternative had the great advantages of being both novel and amusingly, ever-so-slightly salacious, with every prospect of carrying all before it. Certainly, Lee’s faith in it was amply borne out by the commercial success of his book,which was to go through seven editions before the century was out. It was not just the fact that the subject matter was modish, however, that accounted for that: there was also book-trade expertise invested in and behind it, with an unpompous title calculated to appeal to that always largest potential market of all, the beginners and yet-to-be-converted, a relatively low price and even a few illustrations. Not surprisingly, it reached a lower stratum of the reading public than Stillingfleet’s counterpart was aimed at or than Hudson so much as contemplated.

In particular, Lee’s book penetrated to the artisan naturalists just then beginning to materialise in most impressive numbers, as if from nowhere, in some of the new industrial areas, especially in the south of Lancashire. One purpose of the numerous little clubs these formed themselves into—typically based on, and often taking their names from, a particular public house—was to put about half of the monthly subscriptions towards the building-up of a common fund out of which books could be bought that were otherwise beyond the means of any one individual, especially books that would enable names to be put to the specimens that all the members competed in collecting. In just that same way a small botanic club formed in 1711 in Boston, Lincolnshire by a group of local medical men had been able to treat itself to three of Ray’s folios (according to the antiquary William Stukeley, who belonged to it as a young physician)—it was evidently a time-honoured device, anticipating later, much larger-scale initiatives. A work which promised an easy entrée into the Linnaean classification, which held out the prospect of greatly simplifying that cardinal requirement of identifying what one found or caught, was bound to be welcome and a priority purchase. From various personal recollections that have survived we know that Lee’s Introduction was indeed a favourite and a powerful motivator. For 30 years the book seems to have enjoyed a virtual monopoly as a source of instruction on the sexual system, so unpardonably slow were other publishers to recognise the extent of the potential demand that existed.

Why was the book trade so curiously backward in catering for a vogue that became so conspicuous so fast at all levels of the reading public? The answer must be that it was quite unprepared for a class of publications so long typecast as too abstruse to be ever more than marginally profitable to be capable of transforming itself with such abruptness. Maybe it deceived itself into believing that it was no more than one of the many crazes that swept through that century’s fashionable salons and would be too short-lived to be worth the trouble and risk of trying to exploit it financially. Because ‘natural history’ had come to be over-identified by the booksellers with large expensive volumes with beautiful coloured illustrations, sellable only by subscription to wealthy connoisseurs, the possibility that large numbers of people might begin to become curious about what they came across in the local countryside and might want portable, inexpensive texts to allay that curiosity had presumably been overlooked. Admittedly, though, there had been little advance warning of such a change: so far, it had betrayed its existence by little more than a gentle breeze, leading few to suspect that that could quickly turn into something much more powerful.

***

The next work of any significance with a marked Linnaean orientation did not in the event appear until 1769—or rather, start appearing, for it came out in three separate volumes published at intervals over a period of four years. This was John Berkenhout’s Outlines of the Natural History of Great Britain and Ireland, ‘a systematic arrangement and concise description of all the animals, vegetables and fossils which have hitherto been discovered in these kingdoms’. As befitted an encyclopaedist, the author (Fig. 33) was not only a polymath intellectual who wrote prolifically on a wide range of other subjects, but also in the middle of a colourful career that included service in the Prussian army, practice in England as a physician and imprisonment in the American colonies as a suspected spy while on a high-level government mission. It was during his time at medical school, shortly after 1760, that he appears to have succumbed to the algebra-like appeal of Linnaeus’ sexual system. A pocket guide to its terminology that he was led to compile he subsequently published at his own expense. The Outlines may similarly have been the product of an attempt made primarily for his own intellectual satisfaction to bring the whole of the fauna and flora of these islands onto a Linnaean basis, the infilling with descriptive matter, probably all culled from secondary sources, no doubt a tedious chore compared with the exhilarating elaboration of the conceptual superstructure. Certainly, the chief value of the work scientifically has always been regarded as its pioneer role in exposing British zoologists, and especially entomologists, to the Linnaean nomenclature and leading to the increasingly general adoption of that as a result. It should not be overlooked, however, that it does seem to have found its way, sooner or later, into the possession of a notable sprinkling of individuals able to put it to more than ordinarily good use. In 1772, for instance, it led the young John Abbot to rearrange his insect collection on the new lines. In 1778, when James Edward Smith, the future high priest of the Linnaean cult, decided he ought to familiarise himself with the principles of botany preparatory to studying medicine at university, the relevant volume of the Outlines was the only one he could find in his home city of Norwich that met that purpose. Similarly, Edward Newman was to recall that in his salad days as an entomologist, around 1825, this was one of only two works from which his then slender knowledge of insects was derived. Purely by accident, it also provided the earliest national list of at least one order of those, the grasshoppers and crickets. Of the 52 species of those recognised as occurring in Britain today, Berkenhout admittedly managed to come up with a mere 11, but at least that was a start.

Nevertheless, despite those scraps of evidence suggesting that the Outlines was widely owned and appreciated, the fact that it was left to a different publisher, Thomas Cadell, in place of the wise and much-respected Peter Elmsley, to bring out a second edition—in 1795, with the three volumes telescoped into two and a slight change of title—may mean that the first one sold disappointingly. Perhaps its very comprehensiveness, surely its most tempting feature, rendered it unavoidably too bulky and so too highly priced to make it a financially rewarding venture at a time when the study of Britain’s own fauna and flora had yet to attract a following of anything approaching the size that it would have 20 years later. On the other hand Elmsley was then close to retirement and it may simply have been that he was shedding commitments.

Had not Berkenhout prepared the ground, it is hard to believe that the literature of British entomology would have acquired so markedly Linnaean an aspect so soon afterwards as it did. In the very year that the last volume of the Outlines came out William Curtis went to the considerable trouble of producing an English translation of Linnaeus’ Fundamenta entomologiae, while three years after that Moses Harris evidently felt bound to include in his little handbook, The English Lepidoptera: or, the Aurelian’s Pocket Companion, the Latin names of the latest edition of the Systema naturae alongside the English ones. That was the second of the three works to be produced by the man who, by general consent, took the incipient ‘school’ of insect portraiture in Britain to a level of achievement that remains unsurpassed. In his first and best-known one, The Aurelian (Fig. 34), there is no sign that he knew or cared about the Linnaean innovations at all. As the date of publication traditionally cited for that, 1766, was well after the botanists began bringing those to general notice, that used to be a matter for raised eyebrows; however, thanks to remorseless research by modern bibliographers, we now know that the work was issued in parts, the first of which appeared in 1758. That is a much more understandable date for British entomologists to have been still oblivious of the existence of even the Systema naturae.

That Harris was an artist by profession, was not well educated, had been collecting butterflies and moths since at least the age of twelve and served as honorary secretary of a short-lived replacement for the earlier Aurelian Society are almost all that is known about him as a person (Fig. 35). By contrast, an impressive amount has been pieced together about his publications. A surviving copy of the prospectus of The Aurelian shows that he planned to issue one plate a month, but after six years only 14 out of the eventual 44 had appeared (Fig. 36). As this threatened to give him a reputation for unreliability, he used the dedication to attribute the delay to ‘the unsteady and fallacious behaviour of a person, too nearly connected in my concerns’. Each plate could be bought separately for 2s 6d, but the completed volume cost five guineas (Albin had charged three guineas for his 100 much inferior ones). Both that and the third of Harris’s works, An Exposition of English Insects, were to be reissued on a number of occasions during the rest of the century, in editions in some cases with relatively large print runs, indicative of a continuing demand for both up to and beyond his death. The Aurelian has also been accorded the honour of a facsimile edition in recent years.

Meanwhile, in the English Midlands the sexual system had won a particularly energetic and persistent convert and promoter. This was William Withering (Fig. 37), who had settled in the town of Stafford to practise as a physician on completing his training at Edinburgh. Withering is far more celebrated today as the founding father of clinical pharmacology, on account of his lengthy series of experiments with the foxglove that produced for the medical profession that enduringly valuable remedy for heart trouble, digitalis. But that historic discovery would never have come about had he not had as one of his first patients the daughter of the town clerk, a keen sketcher of wild flowers. In collecting specimens of those for her to draw—in what would prove to be a successful courtship—Withering developed an enthusiasm for field botany on finding how greatly the new method of Linnaeus simplified identification. Eager to draw this advance to the attention of as many others as possible, he set about producing an introductory manual that improved on Lee’s one of 16 years earlier by providing descriptions of all the species listed by Linnaeus as occurring wild in Britain. What emerged in 1776 was thus a Flora in the fuller sense in which that ambiguous term has come to be used: a work designed expressly to enable the different kinds of plants to be identified, and therefore equipped with a recapitulation of the characters at a length deemed sufficient for that purpose (as opposed to a list just of plant names variously accompanied by frequency, habitat and, as appropriate, locality details, the eventual standard pattern of Floras of only regional or local scope). As Withering’s basic purpose was to encourage the reader to try to run down in the work the identity of any wild plant by examining the characters of the floral organs, the inclusion of illustrations of all or only a proportion of the species would have tempted people to take that short cut; they were therefore omitted—which was also convenient, as it greatly reduced the cost.

Withering’s Flora was the first of national scope to appear in Britain that was explicitly intended for the non-scholarly, for which reason it was written in English. This last feature was all the more necessary, as many of its purchasers and users were expected to be women, whose general lack of Latin had up to then excluded them from scientific botany. Mindful of this feminine readership, Withering went to the special length of replacing certain of the terms for parts of the flower that he thought to be too blatantly sexual with alternatives of his own devising that were safely unsuggestive. (Outraged at such prissiness, Erasmus Darwin was driven to produce his brilliant poem, The Loves of the Plants, as a contemptuous riposte.) On the other hand there could be no sidestepping the awkward fact that the British flora consisted of such a large number of species that to provide a description of even minimal adequacy of each one could not be managed in less than two volumes. As if that was not handicap enough, Withering had the misfortune to choose a title, A Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain, that was fated to become misleading all too soon—for the word ‘vegetable’ was just then in the process of acquiring its more familiar modern meaning of a plant grown specifically for food. In all the many subsequent editions ‘vegetables ‘was replaced with ‘British plants’ tout court.

During the years that immediately followed, Withering’s knowledge of British plants increased so greatly that he gradually came to realise that the work needed radically overhauling. By that time, however, his professional life had become extremely demanding and he had acquired several competing leisure interests as well, so he had to accept that he had no hope of accomplishing that task, on the much more demanding lines that he envisaged, without recruiting assistance. Besides employing two people to collect living examples of the additional species that needed describing, he delegated to another local physician of evident botanical ability, Jonathan Stokes, the very arduous task of compiling references to the names used for each species by earlier authors and to any published illustrations. Given free run of Withering’s by then extensive botanical library for that purpose, Stokes did that so meticulously and thoroughly that it introduced a major new dimension to the work, greatly enhancing its scientific usefulness. The amount of additional material incorporated had the consequence that what eventually emerged from the printer had twice as many pages and needed twice as many volumes to hold them.

Only the first two of the volumes, however, came out at the intended date in August 1787, and another five years elapsed before the third joined those, and a further one still before the set was complete. The long interruption was due to ‘an unsettled state of health’ on Withering’s part (and it apparently continued to be precarious, cutting short what had turned into a very successful career when he was barely fifty). Remarkably, some of the printers’ bills have survived, from which we know that 1,063 copies of this edition were produced and that by the time its third volume had appeared the cost to the author was already nearly £530, equivalent to well over £40,000 at present-day prices. It was lucky that he had prospered in his profession sufficiently by then to be able to afford to lease a mansion and extensive grounds on the outskirts of Birmingham, and so could presumably take in his stride such a formidable sum. When the bills for the subsequent third edition (of 1796) came in, some notes in his own hand show that he found cause to challenge the various sums involved, and the overall charge was reduced by a quarter as a result. That must have gratified him immensely, for (as he confided to a correspondent) he had spent between six and eight hours a day over a period of two years on that further bout of revision.

Despite its cumbersome size, which restricted it to library shelves, the enlarged version sold impressively well. The fact that the only other national Flora then available, Hudson’s Flora Anglica, was entirely in Latin and thus not a serious competitor must have helped. It must also have helped that Withering had included much out-of-the-way information on the possible real value to orthodox medicine of many of Britain’s wild plants, a topic of particular interest just at that time and one on which he had become a well-known authority in medical circles.

After three editions in Withering’s lifetime four more followed under the editorship of his (helpfully) identically named son. Up to that point, 1830, commercial publishers had presumably continued to refrain from offering to take the work off the family’s hands because its multi-volume character kept it beyond the means of all but the reasonably well-off. By 1830, however, the Apothecaries’ Act of 15 years earlier had had the unpredicted effect of causing the universities and the private medical schools to institute field classes in botany, thereby creating a sizeable student market for portable, inexpensive texts. The greatest number of those students were at the two leading Scottish universities, so it may have been no coincidence that it was the Edinburgh-based William MacGillivray who was now commissioned by a London publisher to boil down ‘Withering’ into a single, compact volume. This he managed to achieve only by dropping all the cryptogams apart from the ferns, on the argument that those were ‘too difficult for the student’—but as he was primarily a zoologist, they were doubtless beyond his capacity to cope with in any case. When a reprint proved to be called for, three years later, he made a change in the opposite direction by extending the geographical range at last to Ireland and including many extra species that the work had previously excluded on that account.

That pocket version of MacGillivray’s went through 14 editions in its turn (though also through a rapid succession of publishers, doubtless because of intensifying competition, which wrought havoc with small undercapitalised firms). As the last of those editions was in 1877, the title was thus to be continuously in print for just over a century. If the work was not British natural history’s first best-seller—Gerard’s Herball possibly has that distinction, though its content was mainly medical—it was surely its first centenarian. It undoubtedly became the standard text on the British flora as a whole (for from 1796 it included lower plants, not just the higher ones) for the main mass of botanists for at least a generation, not least among its attractions being the instructions it provided on how to go about forming a herbarium, including the first descriptions in print of the vasculum and the plant-press.

Among the innumerable people known to have bought and used ‘Withering’ were Wordsworth and Coleridge: it was by no means just the community of naturalists in the strict sense that the work pervaded. More predictably, it was also one of the titles most in evidence in the libraries of the North of England artisans’ clubs, though how far, if at all, that was the inferior first edition is unclear. Certainly, on date grounds it seems likely to have been the second edition that Priscilla Wakefield acknowledged as the basis of the exposition of the Linnaean system that constituted her very popular An Introduction to Botany in a Series of Letters. First published in 1796, the best-known of five books on natural history topics by that leading pioneer of the now-emerging market for juvenile reading matter, this was made up of a series of 27 imaginary letters between two sisters and their awesomely well-informed governess—a literary form that came into vogue at that period for conveying serious instruction in the less alienating guise of a family discussion. It was probably no accident that this initiator of the genre was a Quaker (Elizabeth Fry, the prison reformer, who currently features on the English five-pound note, was Mrs Wakefield’s niece), for that sect was for long exceptional in the importance it attached to including some teaching in science, and natural history in particular, in its schools, which for many generations from this time onwards were to turn out pupil after pupil who went on to distinguish themselves in adulthood as naturalists. Maria Jacson, on the other hand, whose Botanical Dialogues: Between Hortensia and Her Four Children, which was published the very next year, was the unmarried daughter of an Anglican rector. Though both had financial pressure as their primary reason for taking up the pen, a strong secondary motive was moral and religious. Indeed, Priscilla Wakefield was quite frank, in the preface to that first book of hers, that she had high hopes of botany as ‘a substitute for some of the trifling, not to say pernicious objects that too frequently occupy the leisure of young ladies of fashionable manners, and by employing their faculties rationally, act as an antidote to levity and idleness.’ If it was not exactly brimstone and treacle that schoolgirls were to be dosed with, Linnaean botany seemed a suitably feminine alternative. No wonder that book survived into the Victorian period, after 11 reprintings.

This surely unseen side-effect of the translating of the sexual system into a form accessible to just about anyone was to prove of long-lasting importance. The chance that it coincided with the appearance of this new literary outlet for women of education and intelligence, which offered them an avenue to an independent status hitherto denied to them, propelled botany into the forefront of a wider liberating tendency and thereby gave it a special measure of prestige in that quarter over and above its intrinsic utility and intellectual attraction. From then onwards it would be the branch of natural history to which women would tend to gravitate in preference to any other, its forbidding profusion of Latinate technical terms helpfully offset by methods of collecting that were particularly simple, in no way distasteful, and even domestically familiar.

***

Despite the very broad front on which the Linnaean tide was sweeping in, it nevertheless failed to submerge the natural classification entirely. In one and the same year, 1777, a new national Flora as well as a local one appeared, and in both it was the natural one that was still accorded preference. In the case of the local one, Edward Jacob’s Plantae Favershamienses, the reason for that was simply that the book was itself an antique: it had originated in a list compiled at least 30 years earlier by a local vicar, to which Jacob had added records during the intervening years, when Ray’s Synopsis had been the standard text. Keeping to the order and names in that came more easily to him when he finally put the combined result into print, but he compromised with modernity to the extent of placing the Linnaean names under each one’s Synopsis equivalent and providing a separate index to them.

The national Flora, on the other hand, was presented without excuse: its adherence to the natural system was ideologically deliberate. Baldly titled The British Flora, this was the work appropriately of a religious dissenter, a Quaker linen manufacturer and grocer of Darlington, Edward Robson. While willing to adopt the Linnaean innovations in other respects, he firmly rejected the sexual system, using a modified version of Ray’s natural one instead. In a further show of contrariness, he borrowed the descriptions of the Linnaean Flora Anglica but refused to follow that in its use of Latin. Though there was clearly much to be said for this compromise approach, it was probably put forward too late to stand much hope of shifting opinion by then; at any rate, its failure to go to a second edition suggests that it sold disappointingly and made few if any converts. It had one other feature, however, that may have been of lasting influence: in an attempt ‘to remedy the present confusion so justly complained of, Robson outdid even Turner by providing English names not only for the species but for the genera as well, restoring for the purpose some long in disuse and introducing a number of well-established vernacular ones (such as ‘sedge’) that had not previously found their way into botanical texts.

The wholesale jettisoning of Latin, though contemporaneous with the triumph of Linnaean methods, was by no means necessarily a result of that: the two were separate developments, as well exemplified by this work of Robson’s, though they were alike in both being responses to the emergence of a large and growing following for natural history at levels where traditional scholarly usages did not obtain and could not be expected to, and where the demand was for accessibility for the many in place of comprehensibility by just a select, highly educated few. Through the sheer fact of having spontaneously risen to wide popularity, the subject had done the book trade a service by turning itself into a worthwhile market, which that newly substantial ally could now try to deepen and widen further.

CHAPTER 6
Zoology Catches Up

THOUGH THE SECOND HALF of the eighteenth century saw botany holding the centre of the stage still—thanks to having become the prime beneficiary of the Linnaean innovations just as the benefits it had traditionally drawn from its association with medicine were beginning to fade—zoology was meanwhile acquiring a more substantial presence in the wings. While butterflies and shells consolidated their position as favourite fields for collectors—though most of the shells came from foreign seas and mainly passed into the cabinets of the very rich—it was only after mid-century that the other more conspicuous sections of the fauna of these islands, the birds and mammals in particular, began at last to receive a noticeable amount of attention, as evidenced in the amount written about them in letters and printed between two covers. Considering the overwhelming popularity of birds two centuries later, their comparative neglect until this point can only have been due to their inherent elusiveness, the still relative inefficiency of guns and the comparative backwardness in Britain of taxidermy. Had those ornithologists only resorted to spy-glasses, as some of their successors were to early in the following century, to apparently good effect, they could have made a useful start at studying behaviour; alas, though, the study was still as yet little more than an extension of field sports, heavily dependent on marksmanship and effectively inaccessible, repugnant even, to women.

The most pressing need had been for a new national Fauna: a set of descriptions of as many as feasible of the different kinds of birds and other creatures so far known to occur. By 1750 three-quarters of a century had elapsed since the publication of Ray and Willughby’s Ornithologia and in the meantime nothing had appeared by way of a replacement. The only person at that date who must have seemed most likely to provide one was George Edwards, in view of the marked success he was having in putting major works on birds (even though exotic ones) into print; friends of his may also have been aware that for some years he had been annotating his personal copy of Ornithologia with just such an end in mind, as we have seen. Whether he had made that intention widely known, however, is unclear. What does seem clear is that he fully expected to have the field to himself, and was consequently not a little put out when the first part of a work bearing the title British Zoology, presumably very similar to what he had in mind, appeared anonymously in or about 1761. As this had been printed in Chester and was published ostensibly by a Welsh learned society, however, it would not have been hard to surmise who its author was, for Thomas Pennant, a member of an ancient North Wales landed family, had already published numerous books on related subjects, even if not on natural history as such (Fig. 39).

Pennant was to reveal in his autobiography that birds had been an interest of his ever since boyhood, and certainly it was one that he had ample opportunities of keeping up during a leisured country upbringing followed by extensive travel and meeting and corresponding with men of learning. However, he was a person of almost limitless curiosity and had no shortage of other interests with which that early one would have had to compete. By mid-century, at any rate, it had evidently been pushed into the background by a passion for fossils, minerals and antiquities in general, a principal by-product of the 40 years he had devoted by then to fact-finding tours on horseback (he was ever disdainful of coach travel) to one region of Britain after another. What he could not see or ascertain at first hand he followed a practice, borrowed from his fellow Welshman Edward Llwyd, of supplementing with sets of questions in writing addressed to the local clergy and gentry, requesting details of what each parish held in the way of ‘curiosities’, natural or otherwise. The sequence of regional gazetteers that resulted was a kind of primitive geography. Yet despite the enormous amount of both mental and physical energy that he poured into that central undertaking of his life, he still had plenty left over for producing books on a bemusingly wide range of subjects. A skimmer across the surface of things, he was not the kind of person to study anything deeply for all that long: delineating the surface, rather, was his métier.

British Zoologywas the fruit of an enforced interruption in that life of almost non-stop investigatory touring. No sooner had he embarked on it than he inherited the family estate and set about improving that, a series of family deaths took place, and on top of those, public responsibilities accrued to him in his capacity as High Sheriff of his native county of Flintshire. Not surprisingly, the work took five years to complete as a result, even though in that first incarnation it amounted to no more than a single folio of 162 pages. These contained briefbut good descriptions of the birds and mammals only, together with 132 colour engravings from paintings by Peter Paillou, one of the better-regarded natural history illustrators of the day. The classification was obstinately non-Linnaean, for, in common with most of his fellow zoologists, Pennant saw no good reason to abandon the traditional system of Ray. Adopting binomials was the furthest he was prepared to go (Figs 40 & 41).

Of the handful of works on British natural history that Pennant was to produce, this was the most substantial and proved the most enduring (there was a posthumous edition in 1812—on internal evidence, the work of his son). Intriguingly, its publishing history was to have striking parallels with that of its botanical counterpart, Withering’s Arrangement. Similarly inexperienced at the start, Pennant soon came to recognise and regret various mistakes he had made with that first effort, particularly in not having chosen a quarto format, which he judged better suited for displaying illustrations adequately; unlike Withering, though, he had no need ever to change his title. Both were personally affluent enough to be able to afford to pay for their respective works to be printed and distributed without undue pressure on their finances, but both in the event made a loss on their initial ventures—though Withering’s was probably the greater, with one more volume and over five times as many pages, despite hardly any plates, to have to pay for.

Also in contrast to Withering, Pennant had the singular piece of luck to be rescued at that point by a publisher of great shrewdness, with a special interest in the natural history market: Gilbert White’s brother Benjamin (of whom more later). With a keen nose already for a book’s commercial potential, White offered to bring out a new and larger edition in return for the sale to him of the copyright for £100 (which Pennant promptly donated to a Welsh charity school in London of which he was a patron). Taking the view that the most important thing was to expand the coverage to the reptiles and fishes, so that the book lived up to its title more fully, White tried as an experiment to achieve that by sacrificing all but 34 of the original 132 plates and replacing the single folio with three octavo volumes. Once the work had appeared in that substantially different guise, in 1768–9 (with Pennant now identified as its author), and the market response had proved to be favourable, White decided that it was safe to proceed with some further enhancement. The resulting third edition a year later ran to one volume more and was furnished with 103 additional plates, several new descriptions and a list of European birds not so far recognised as British. A fourth edition followed after an interval of six years, this time with quarto and octavo formats as alternative options, 93 plates and the extension of the coverage still further to shells and other marine creatures, thereby making it possible to claim the work as a Fauna of Britain of a comprehensiveness unapproached by any competitor (Figs 42 & 43).

We know the publishing history of this work in more than ordinary detail thanks to the close interest Pennant’s endless curiosity led him to take in the workings of the book trade and the exceptional attention consequently given to such matters in his autobiography. At one point he even thought of buying a small printing-press for his personal use, only to give up the idea as impractical in view of his lack of the necessary leisure. It was just as well that that whim came to nothing, for the bibliography of his enormous printed output is complicated enough as it is.

Despite the fact that Pennant’s custom as a buyer of books from it must have been one of the mainstays of White’s firm in its earlier, shakier days—in one accounting period alone he ran up a bill for the then huge sum of nearly £70, some of the volumes having been cannily first sent to him on approval, by carrier—White was careful not to repeat that indulgence in their dealings as author and publisher. Though Pennant was always writing with complaints and constantly bickering over details, White refused to allow those to injure a relationship that was profitable to both parties, and treated the other invariably with courtesy and helpfulness whenever the two met in person.

British Zoology was not the only one of Pennant’s books concerned in at least some degree with the natural history of these islands that White took in hand once Pennant had arranged and paid for its printing. The Synopsis of Quadrupeds, a one-volume octavo when it first appeared in 1771, was similarly transformed 10 years later into the two quarto volumes of the History of Quadrupeds. Also a classic, this latter was ‘always a favourite of mine: I bestowed very true pains on it,’ the author was to recall at the end of his life.

Pennant saw himself essentially as a populariser, for which reason his books were all written and published in English. As some of them included descriptions of new species and were thus taxonomic works of some importance, this practice brought strong criticism from naturalists on the Continent, who expected scholarship of international relevance to appear in Latin, out of courtesy as much as for their convenience. To some of them at least, in countries without the large following outside the scholarly community that natural history had now acquired in Britain and consequently without experience of serious scientific works being published for general consumption and hoped-for commercial profit, just like novels, the practice even appeared to them eccentrically self-defeating: not only did it downgrade such works in the eyes of scholars, but it risked any new species which appeared in them being overlooked or, worse, being denied priority on account of not having been published in accordance with international convention. On this latter score Pennant’s fellow countryman, John Latham, was indeed to come to grief most seriously, for the first names he conferred on very many exotic birds subsequently had to give way to later ones conferred on them by a German naturalist just because the latter had published his in Latin.

When combined with his rejection of the Linnaean classification, that preference for English on Pennant’s part was to be a source of difficulty on the one and only occasion when he collaborated with a botanist. This was the Flora Scotica, the product of a very successful tour of the Highlands and the Inner Hebrides in 1772. Pennant had already toured Scotland twice before, the first time in his twenties, when that country was still, in his words, ‘almost as known to its southern brethren as Kamtschatka’. He now wanted to explore it more thoroughly, better prepared beforehand and with companions with expertise that complemented his. One of those needed to be a Gaelic scholar, he recognised, while the other had to have a good knowledge of plants, in which respective capacities he chose two clergymen, John Stuart and John Lightfoot (Fig. 44), both some years younger than himself and so perhaps more robust physically. Another possible reason for selecting them was the degree of protection from robbery or assault the general respect for men of the cloth could be expected to confer in lawless parts. A draughtsman, Moses Griffiths, whose talents Pennant regularly relied upon, completed the team. On their return after five months Pennant produced one of his customary book-length accounts of everything seen and learned about, necessarily delegating to Lightfoot the separate publication of a thoroughgoing Flora of Scotland incorporating the tour’s botanical discoveries.

The naturally diffident Lightfoot embarked on that major undertaking only with reluctance, confiding to a botanical friend that he did so ‘purely to oblige my good friend Mr Pennant, who would have it in English. It can be of no service to the learned in the science. It is written chiefly for the ignorant, and for tyros.’ As domestic chaplain to the Dowager Duchess of Portland, he was nevertheless alive to the obligation to defer to the wisdom of a patron and had duly given in to the popularist Pennant. That this was no light concession for one whose regular work of reference was Hudson’s reassuringly Latinised Flora Anglica (to which indeed he intended his own Flora to be viewed as a companion volume) is well shown by the severe dressing-down that a botanist contemporary, the poet George Crabbe, received from a senior Cambridge don on proposing to publish in English a botanical work he had written. It would be ‘degrading the science of botany by treating it in a modern language,’ the don thundered—and the browbeaten Crabbe responded by meekly consigning his manuscript to the fire. Lightfoot was still in slight fear and trembling at his own departure from that scholarly convention when his Flora Scotica was eventually about to appear, considering it necessary to counter the criticisms that he fully expected for putting the species descriptions in English by carefully explaining in print that the work was intended ‘for the use of my countrymen, who will understand it never the worse for being in their own tongue.’ As a compromise, however, he was allowed to follow the Linnaean classification. Pennant evidently felt less strongly about that, and doubtless accepted Lightfoot’s argument that in that respect at least the work must match the Flora Anglica if it was to stand any chance of being regarded as the complement of that. It was ultimately a marketing consideration that the commercially minded Pennant would have found persuasive.

That was not the only awkwardness that arose between the two as the work took shape. A fast writer himself, with his own book on the tour completed and already being sent in batches to his customary local printer, Pennant was impatient at the slow progress of the more meticulous Lightfoot, toiling away at his house in Middlesex, and hustled him to send material as fast as he could write it. ‘I most sincerely wish that I had let none of it escape [out] of my hands, till I had finished the whole,’ Lightfoot wrote despairingly to a sympathetic friend. ‘He prints it with all its imperfections as soon as he can get it from me, & I have no room left either to correct mistakes, nor interpolate new discoveries.’

As Pennant had most generously undertaken to meet the heavy cost of printing a work that was to turn out to be of a length requiring two stout octavo volumes to accommodate it, a work moreover that would not have come into being but for the tour that he had organised and (presumably) largely paid for, it was perhaps not unreasonable for him to have assumed proprietorial control. But it is obvious that he had no real understanding of the finicky checking of detail after detail that has to go into the compiling of a work of such a kind, so different from what he had experience of producing himself. The only explanation for the haste that he was so bent on instilling must be that he was eager to set off on yet another tour.

Nevertheless, when Flora Scotica eventually appeared, in 1777, the reviewers gave no evidence of having detected signs of haste. Nor, curiously, was exception taken to the incongruous insertion into a learned work on botany of a 66-page ‘Sketch of Caledonian Zoology’ by Pennant and the fact that five out of the ration of 37 plates (most of them drawings by Griffiths) depicted birds and not plants. What was criticised instead, either on publication or much later, was allegedly insufficient acknowledgement of how much the work had been built on the efforts of others, and Lightfoot’s recklessness in lifting entire descriptions from foreign authors of species he supposed—wrongly, as it turned out—identical with British ones. Those criticisms were hurtful and unduly harsh. The work was in fact a most valuable step forward in cataloguing the riches of that as yet little-known region and included the first descriptions of many of its mountain rarities. All the same, it sold disappointingly and Pennant almost certainly failed to recoup his investment. The considerable stock remaining was handed over to Benjamin White, perhaps in the hope that he could perform another of his lucrative conjuring tricks, but the so-called ‘second edition’ offered by him to the public in 1789 was merely that unsold stock in disguise with scarcely more than a lengthy posthumous memoir of the author added as a preface. Lightfoot had died very suddenly the previous year, at the early age of fifty-two. The reissue was probably no more than a pretext for Pennant to pay him a generous parting tribute, making amends for his tendency to high-handedness.

For all his invaluable role in widening the market for books on Britain’s natural history, and on its birds in particular, Pennant has had a mixed press over the years. By his becoming best known as Gilbert White’s principal correspondent, the extent of his contribution in other directions has become obscured and his stature inadvertently diminished. Some have found his works pretentious and superficial, and misinterpreted as pomposity the rather high-flown language normal for writers at that period. Like all too many popularisers, his knowledge was too limited to save him from perpetrating many an inaccuracy, but it was better to have had his books with those than not to have had them at all—at a time when hardly any other naturalist had both the energy and the financial resources necessary for putting such works into print. The one puzzle is that, given his deep interest in the whole publishing process and his entrepreneurial drive, he never bought into a firm of publishers and involved himself in that more directly, if only from a distance. If White’s business had turned out less successful, though, perhaps that may well have come about.

***

The emergence of a publisher of obvious flair, with a sufficient personal interest in natural history to consider it worth the risk of specialising in it, was undoubtedly one of the most important, if one of the most overlooked, fruits of the subject’s acquisition of a sizeable following among the book-buying public in the century’s second half. Though all six White brothers shared that interest to a greater or lesser degree, Benjamin—Ben, as he was known to his family and intimates—was the only one to choose that career. He began by learning the trade under a distant relation by marriage, John Whiston, the owner of a well-established London bookshop at the junction of Fleet Street and The Strand. Even before he became a partner, in 1756, the firm had given a possible hint of its future line of development by publishing one of John Hill’s many potboilers, Essays in Natural History and Philosophy. Perhaps that was at White’s insistance, for it is evident that he early won Whiston’s respect for his abilities. Those were to be severely tested sooner than either can have been expecting, however; for only three years into the partnership Whiston went down with a prolonged nervous illness, and White was left to cope as best he could on his own. He did so with such success that in 1765, when it was finally clear that the other was unlikely ever to be able to return yet unwilling to make the business over to him, he decided to cut loose and proceeded to open a bookshop of his own, right next door.

With a free hand thenceforward, White avoided the obvious temptation to follow the increasing trend for firms to specialise either in publishing books or in selling them from a shop. Publishing was inherently more speculative and volatile, in which large sums could be as easily lost as made, so a bookshop run in tandem with that could act as a steadying influence. It was probably the publishing side, though, that he particularly relished, because of the greater scope it offered for the exercise of personal judgement and for building up a relationship with prospective or existing authors. Whether that side now increasingly accounted for a greater share of the overall profit can only be guessed at, however, for the firm’s records have not survived. The bookshop nevertheless clearly continued to play an important role, whether or not that importance was still as much a financial one as before, over the years attracting to its doors not only all of London’s naturalists, but also a high proportion of those up in Town on visits. These came not just to scan, examine or acquire the latest books on the subject: they came too in the expectation of bumping into fellow spirits, of leaving books for friends to pick up or collecting ones that others had left for them in turn, even of availing themselves of the firm’s good offices in acting as a temporary repository for specimens. It was certainly the most likely place for Pennant and Gilbert White to have had their first encounter, which we know occurred in London in the summer of 1767 and which led to their long-standing correspondence; frustratingly, though, the evidence for that, though suggestive, is lacking in conclusive proof.

In 1792, three years short of seventy and reputedly a wealthy man by then, White decided to retire, pointedly removing himself back into the depths of his ancestral countryside on the east edge of Hampshire, well out of everyday reach by the two of his sons who had successively joined the firm and learned the business under him. For a time the reputation and wide range of contacts that their father had built up continued to keep the firm well afloat, and the pair commissioned books by such prominent figures as James Edward Smith, Thomas Martyn and George Montagu; it also became sales agent for the Linnaean Society’s Transactions for the first 20 years of that frustratingly infrequent (because fearsomely costly) periodical. After 1800, however, noticeably fewer and fewer new titles appeared under the firm’s imprint, as the trade as a whole hit bad times as a result of the horrific rises in costs, especially of paper, and so in book prices too, occasioned by the Napoleonic Wars. The elder of the two, also Benjamin, whose interest lay primarily in an antiquarian direction, dropped out after some years, leaving John to carry on alone. Eventually, around 1810, the firm became White Cochrane and the family’s name disappeared altogether not long after that, apparently gobbled up, no doubt for its valuable copyrights, by that newly emerging giant, the omnivorous Longman. Subsequently, John went to live at his Uncle Gilbert’s old home, The Wakes at Selborne, as if to compensate the family for that other loss of continuity.

One White or another thus ran the firm for roughly half a century altogether. For much of that time a significant proportion of the titles sold in its shop and either published by it or—and the distinction is an important one—for which it acted only as a distributor were on subjects other than natural history: it also dealt in travel and in expensive works with beautiful illustrations in a variety of subject categories. Within natural history, moreover, many of the titles it handled had a non-British focus largely or entirely; these were already indeed a strong market before the firm emerged as a publisher, and that pre-existing strength may well have been what gave it the confidence to move into natural history in the first place. In the 1760s, when Pennant appeared on the scene, it must still have looked extremely doubtful whether there would ever be enough people interested in buying other than densely scholarly books on the fauna and flora of Britain alone to warrant venturing into that sector of the market as well, at any rate as a publisher. White’s success at the end of that decade in turning British Zoology into a commercially worthwhile property was probably the turning point. Even then, though, it was not until 1776 that the first completely new titles were handled at what seems to have been wholly the firm’s own risk. One of these was an introduction to the long-fashionable hobby of shell collecting, just then being elevated into ‘conchology’ (a term taken over from the French), written by one of the country’s foremost collectors, Emanuel Mendes da Costa. The other, an equally safe-looking bet, Peter Brown’s New Illustrations in Zoology, had 50 colour plates mostly of birds and the letterpress (mostly provided by Pennant) in French as well as English—a frequent marketing ploy at that period. It was only in the next decade that policy in this respect gave signs of becoming less ultra-cautious. Both before and after that, the ominous words ‘for the author’ appear at the foot of the title page of no trivial proportion of the firm’s books on British natural history, indicating that the author had been required to bear the major part of the risk, typically by meeting the cost of the printing. Some scientifically valuable works like John Latham’s A General Synopsis of Birds and Thomas Marsham’s Entomologia Britannica were ruthlessly dropped after the first of several projected volumes had sold very poorly. And many others must have failed to get even that far, rejected as unconvincingly commercial. Among those was the volume on the fauna of Gibraltar compiled by White’s own brother, John: that never did find a publisher, alas, and almost all of the manuscript has since been lost.

As a result of this prolonged reluctance of the firm to hazard its own money, titles on British natural history that it published without a sizeable author subsidy numbered fewer than 30 throughout its existence. Ones wholly on botany or wholly on zoology shared that indulgence in equal measure, but that the firm was keener to publish the latter is rather suggested by a strongly zoological slant in its list as far as British natural history was concerned. But in view of the marked rise in demand for books on British birds in the century’s last two decades (to judge by the number of new titles that were produced on those), that preference was to be well justified by events.

It is ironic, therefore, that it should have been with a book on Britain’s natural history, a sector about which Benjamin White shows evidence of having all along been rather half-hearted, that the firm was to have its single greatest success. This was, of course, The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in the County of Southampton – to give it its full title—elicited from his brother Gilbert after much prodding and eventually laid before the world, in the shape of two quarto volumes, in the last month of 1788.

So much has been written about Selborne and its author over the years, culminating in three particularly penetrating studies since as recently as 1985, illuminating fresh aspects, that it is unnecessary to do more here than summarise what has been uncovered about the book’s conception, painfully drawn-out gestation and subsequent birth and life in print. Not only is there no work on the natural history of these islands that is better known or has been read over a longer period by a greater range of people, but there is probably no other for which we have such a complete publishing history, thanks to the reverential safeguarding and intensive scrutiny of so much of the relevant documentation. At the same time, it is important to bear in mind that Selborne was anything but a typical product of its period. It instituted a genre that was wholly novel: no one before had written a natural history work with an area as small as a parish as its focus; hardly anyone had concentrated on the behaviour of wild creatures as opposed to describing the different kinds; no one before had thought of portraying nature as a rhythmic sequence of numerous small events. Adopting the then-fashionable epistolary form for a work of natural history was novel too. It was even novel for a naturalist author to be able to look to members of his own family with wide experience of publishing books for advice and help throughout. In short, Selborne not only heralded and embodied a new way of studying nature: it was quite a new type of natural history book in itself.

It now seems generally accepted that it was one of his chief naturalist correspondents, Daines Barrington, who was responsible for putting the idea of writing a book into Gilbert’s head, in the spring of 1770. On the threshold of fifty by then and with many years of diligent record-keeping behind him, Gilbert automatically thought at first of something along the lines of a diary, perhaps the journal of a single year, on turning the idea over in his mind and pondering how his accumulated miscellany of observations might best be presented. A year then went by and he had an attack of diffidence, confiding to Pennant that he felt he had left matters much too late: he ought to have embarked on a book 20 years earlier, he felt. Two springs later, however, he was fired with the notion afresh, after leafing through the ‘half century of letters’ he had received in return for his own periodic bulletins on each season’s happenings and discoveries. Those would make a much better basis for a book, he now realised, and by May 1774 what eventually appeared in print was already mapped out in his mind.

Casting a book in the form of letters, real or imaginary, imparted a greater immediacy, other contemporary authors had discovered, from the novelist Samuel Richardson onwards. Whether that was why Gilbert decided on that mode we do not know: he may merely have done so because it promised to free him from the labour of putting together extensive tracts of original prose. If the latter was his motive, however, he must soon have found that he had badly deceived himself, for study of his surviving manuscript has revealed that a high proportion of the letters that appear in the book that were purportedly from him are in fact concoctions, of a greater or lesser elaborateness. Even if he had kept copies of the letters he did write—a common practice in those days before carbon paper or photocopying—and felt inclined to ask his correspondents to lend the originals back, they had presumably omitted much information that he thought worthy of inclusion in the book or contained passages that he deemed unsuitable for repeating in print. The upshot was that he had a great deal more work to put in than readers not privy to that ingenious amount of artifice will ever have appreciated. Revision and rearrangement can take much more time and effort than initial drafting, so that was surely one major reason why Gilbert’s work on the book was, to all appearances, so unduly protracted.

Another, much more obvious reason for the delay, though, was Gilbert’s early decision to extend the coverage to antiquities, evidently persuaded (by his ever-cautious, market-wise publisher brother?) that to do so would even widen its appeal substantially and so render it a hotter proposition commercially. The publication in 1769 of The Natural History and Antiquities of Northumberland (by a fellow curate, John Wallis), in which the two subjects were similarly treated in a single work but in separate volumes, perhaps gave him the idea. That antiquities were the particular enthusiasm of another of his brothers, Thomas, as well as of Gilbert’s budding publisher nephew, Benjamin junior, may well have been a factor too. Though local historians have ever since been grateful for that decision, naturalists have regretted the major distraction of effort entailed by the great amount of unfamiliar research that it required Gilbert to undertake—to say nothing of the additional volume that was needed to accommodate the results, which made the eventual publication that much more expensive. The dual character and the additional load of weighty matter must also have given the external impression of the work a misleading tilt, probably causing many prospective naturalist readers to give it a miss during the 30 years before the special appeal the contents held for them became at last widely known. Many of them must often have wished that Gilbert had heeded the advice of the frankest of his friends, John Mulso, not to ‘spoil the genuine elegance & neat simplicity of the original design, by a farrago of antiquities, routed out of the rusts & crusts & frusts of time.’

In the end, it was not until the autumn of 1787, seventeen and a half years since the book’s conception, that the first instalments at last went to the printer, and almost another twelvemonth before publication followed. By then its birth had become very much a family affair. Gilbert’s favourite niece, Molly, acted in effect as subeditor and did the proofreading, while his nephew, Benjamin junior, now also Molly’s husband, oversaw progress at the publisher’s. Gilbert himself meanwhile compiled the index, declaring that task ‘as entertaining as … darning stockings’.

Contrary to what was once supposed, the book was widely and favourably noticed on its first appearance. Despite that, for a long time it sold disappointingly, it seems (the sales figures, unfortunately, have not come down to us). Its paucity of illustrations, its deceptive guise as ‘a mere collection of letters’, the rather rambling, increasingly antiquated style—these have all been suggested as possible culprits; but the likeliest explanation is that the work was ahead of its time at any rate as far as natural history was concerned. It was not until the 1820s, as shown by the more frequent appearance of new editions, that a new generation of naturalists, with more interest in animal and especially bird behaviour, gradually began discovering it and raving about it to their friends. By 1831 a writer in Blackwood’s Magazine was describing it as ‘selling by thousands’, which, even if an enthusiast’s wild hyperbole, must have had some evident basis to carry at least some conviction. After that, further editions came out almost every year—as they have continued to ever since. In the jargon of the book trade, it had been a ‘sleeper’, of a classic kind.

***

One of the more immediate outcomes of the publication of Selborne was the receipt by the author of a congratulatory letter from an unknown country gentleman in the adjoining county of Wiltshire, a retired professional soldier whose prowess with the gun had led to his forming a collection of the different local birds. Though that was fast becoming a very usual hobby among the sporting gentry, George Montagu was a man out of the common run, for his military training had instilled in him rigorous standards of observation and record-keeping, which speedily turned him into an ornithologist of pioneering excellence (Fig. 45). In this he brings to mind another man of that same dual background, General Pitt-Rivers, whose exceptionally meticulous excavating on his Dorset estate was to set a revolutionary new standard in that central technique of archaeology. At the time of that letter to White, though, Montagu was as yet little more than a mere collector, a narrowness with which the other felt scant sympathy, and no friendship between the two developed. That was unfortunate, for Gilbert had five more years to live and the two had more in common than it seemed.

Montagu’s colourful life was seriously misunderstood until recent years, just as the fact that he was active on several different natural history fronts has caused his overall contribution to knowledge to be underrated. That life started out in style, with an elopement and a clandestine marriage—to a niece of that same Earl of Bute who has featured already in these pages as a botanist of distinction (as well as a prime minister). The young lieutenant was then sent out with his regiment to fight in the American War of Independence, but the rural seclusion in which he chose to settle when his army service ended after that was not to the taste of his sociable wife and the two presently separated. Luckily, in her place he found in the already-married Eliza D’Orville a woman who shared both his dislike of society and his increasingly studious leanings, and in 1798 he decamped with her to a new life on the south coast of Devon, where the opportunities that offered for unlimited shore work no doubt partly determined the choice.

For that second flouting of social convention Montagu paid a bitter double price: first a court-martial resulted in his expulsion from the county militia (in which he held the rank of lieutenant-colonel) and then a series of legal actions eventually deprived him of most of the family estates. Those two blows merely served to intensify the severance from his previous existence, however, and natural history was the gainer. Those gains quickly took concrete form in the two major works on which his reputation chiefly rests. The first, published in 1802, was his two-volume Ornithological Dictionary; or Alphabetical Synopsis of British Birds (Figs 46–48). This was a miniature encyclopaedia in which the unprecedently close study he had made of plumage enabled him to thin the British list quite considerably, by demonstrating that failure to recognise the existence of sexual dimorphism or mere seasonal phases had led to bogus species being created. In compensation, his acuteness added to the list the cirl bunting and the harrier that bears his name today.

Considering that Montagu wrote rather awkwardly and for a more scientifically sophisticated readership than Pennant, it is a little surprising that Benjamin White’s sons were prepared to publish the work with only a single colour plate and apparently without requiring the author to share any of the cost. However, in view of Montagu’s then very uncertain financial position, to have made that condition might well have lost the work for their list—and at that point it must have looked just what they were needing. The recent deaths of both Pennant and Gilbert White had left the firm without an author able to write on the British fauna with authority, at a time when interest in that was manifestly on the increase. Montagu’s Dictionary might even have been regarded by them as the first part of a potential replacement for that long-time mainstay in their list, British Zoology. Nevertheless, that possibility remained to be tested; and the solitary plate seems to indicate that they felt obliged to pare the production cost down to the barest minimum, as a precaution. Though in the event the sales were not great enough to warrant any further printings, they must have been sufficient even so to persuade the firm to bring out a very fat supplement to the work 11 years later, this time with an accompaniment of 24 colour plates, the pick of about three times that many watercolour drawings of birds by the self-taught Eliza that have survived in an unpublished album.

Whether Eliza’s drawings of marine creatures were simply better than her birds, or whether the Whites felt surer of Montagu as a member of their ‘stable’ when they followed up the Dictionary with his Testacea Britannica the very next year, the second work was treated noticeably more indulgently and allowed 16 colour plates straightaway. That that confidence turned out to be justified may account for the fact that the Testacea earned itself a supplement in its turn in less than half as many years as its predecessor. That evidently greater success could be said to have been deserved, for in contrast to the birds the native marine fauna had been little investigated up to then. Though shell collecting had long had a large following, that was more an aesthetic than a scientific pursuit and predominantly concerned with the far greater and more spectacular diversity to be met with in more distant seas. Montagu made a point of stressing that the creatures he was now describing were ‘home-grown’ and all collected by either himself or Eliza (or, in one case, his manservant Biggs). In all, 470 species of land, freshwater and marine molluscs were included, 100 of them new to the British list and 72 new to science. Particularly notable features were the first detailed descriptions and illustrations of Foraminifera, the product of Montagu’s dexterity with a microscope, which, though primitive by later standards, was adequate for that task. Unfortunately, for the Supplement in 1808 he lowered his standards and described further novelties based on other collectors’ specimens, the provenances of which were less trustworthy than those of his own specimens invariably were. It was a regrettable mistake.

Montagu deserved more than the sparse ration of a mere 17 years in which to spend that happy and productive second portion of his life. Not long after the supplement to his Ornithological Dictionary was published, however, he contracted tetanus from stepping on a rusty nail and died as a consequence, when not much over sixty. Eliza lived on for almost 30 years more.

Curiously, Montagu was not the only colonel in one of the county militias at that period who became a distinguished recruit to maritime natural history. Thomas Velley, a resident of Bath for most of his life, specialised instead in seaweeds, on more than one occasion stealing off to search for those while the troops under his command were encamped near the coast. Eight folios of exquisite specimens preserved by ironing and a very slim volume, of equally exquisite Coloured Figures of Marine Plants, Found on the Southern Coast of England, printed at his own expense in 1795, were the principal fruits. By a second coincidence, he too met with an unusual death, while trying to halt a bolting coach and horses, and even at much the same age.

This fondness for combing the shores for animals or plants was not as outré in those years as might be supposed. Seaweeds, in particular, had been popular with ‘cabinet’ collectors since the late seventeenth century: in the 1720s one of them even kept a boat at Greenwich for the purpose. Forty years after that,though, employing pieces of those plants for creating miniature seascapes, a form of handicraft that went by the name of ‘grotto-work’, became a passing vogue in the very best circles, percolating even to the Princess Dowager of Wales. The person accidentally responsible for touching that off was a prosperous London linen merchant of a scientific bent, John Ellis, who had been attracted to seaweeds as a field for investigation in 1751. In the course of examining some of the coral-like forms of those under his microscope Ellis found to his surprise that they were animal in nature, not plants as hitherto supposed. Unaware that this discovery had already been made and reported in a French publication, he commissioned from the immigrant German botanical artist, of fast-growing fame, Georg Ehret some predictably superb plates of these creatures to illustrate An Essay towards a Natural History of the Corallines a comprehensive monograph which he brought out in 1755 at his own expense (Fig. 49). He then went on to collaborate with Daniel Solander of the British Museum on a work of wider scope, The Natural History of Many Curious and Uncommon Zoophytes, which, sadly, neither of them lived to see in print. The manuscript was retrieved from Solander’s effects at the Swedish embassy in 1782 at the initiative of Ellis’s daughter and, after editing, eventually appeared in 1796, when publishing conditions had turned more favourable and the White brothers felt able to treat it as a viable speculation. Similarly furnished with some luscious plates, 63 in number, that has remained a standard work ever since, serving as a basis for much later research on the corals, polyps and coral-like seaweeds all at that period bundled together under that single vague collective name.

Yet for all these signs of an awakening interest in the plant and animal life of the beaches and inshore waters in the book-buying stratum of society, that still translated into too small a potential market to tempt any publishers to dip more than a rare, very tentative toe into it. The experience of William Turton, a Swansea physician and dedicated shell collector, is illuminating in this connection.

Apparently with a view to circumventing the forbiddingly large figures that local printers came up with when asked to quote for producing a seven-volume translation he had made of a German edition of Linnaeus’ Systema naturae, Turton decided to print it himself, buying a hand-press for the purpose. That self-printing a major scientific work is by no means beyond the capacity of a layman was to be demonstrated in the twentieth century by the author of an account of the geology of Nottinghamshire, but despite producing a 62-page pamphlet by that means in 1803 Turton found the Systema an impossibly ambitious undertaking and, with a heavy heart no doubt, handed it over to a commercial firm at around the halfway mark. He then felt obliged to do the same with his projected multi-volume British Fauna, but in the absence of illustrations that failed to survive beyond a first instalment in 1807. Badly bruised, Turton thereupon abandoned the struggle of bringing out works of general natural history entirely at his own expense, resolving to wait in the hope that market economics would change and the demand for books of the sort that he wanted to write would improve sufficiently for publishers to be prepared to bear the cost instead. The wait proved to be as long as 12 years. Then, at last, three firms in succession agreed to bring out titles of his on a normal commercial basis—and, what is more, in the narrower field of conchology, in which by then he had come to specialise. The third of those, A Manual of the Land and Fresh-water Shells of the British Islands, was even taken by the leading house of Longman, and after its first appearance in 1831 proved so lastingly profitable that it went through three more editions. But by then, as we shall see, technology had finally come to the rescue as well.

Books on birds or butterflies fared no better at that period in the eyes of publishers unless they had what was considered to be the standard minimum safety guarantee of an authoritative text combined with a reasonable number of colour plates. Even that, though, was not enough for some, who preferred to keep to the near-certainty of either reissuing a work that had proved itself profitable once already or bringing out minor ‘add-ons’ to what had appeared previously from an author of established reputation. James Robson, for example, with a well-entrenched business in New Bond Street, can hardly have appeared to naturalists a model of bold adventurousness when in 1770 he repackaged some of the past writings of George Edwards and put those out as Essays upon Natural History and Other Miscellaneous Subjects; or when in 1775, on the back of the wave of applause that Moses Harris had won with The Aurelian, he deigned to risk some of his firm’s ample money on that author’s subsequent 66-page Pocket Companion and on milking further Harris’s other two books with fresh editions and issues.

In contrast to botany, zoology was at a serious disadvantage in having no equivalent of the sexual system of classification, which large numbers of people saw as essential to become familiar with and which generated a prolonged demand for instructional manuals in response. Those had the additional attraction for publishers, moreover, that the most they required in the way of illustrations were small, uncoloured engraved figures, depicting the different shapes of leaves (for example) denoted by the various technical terms in use. Comprehensive works of identification, like those of Turton and Pennant, made up for that lack to some extent, but their drawback was that taxonomy was now growing in sophistication so fast, and so many additional species were continually being distinguished or discovered, that they became out of date more and more quickly, and new authors sufficiently well abreast of the latest state of affairs were not easy to find when the original author was no longer in a position to produce a satisfactory replacement as a result of age, illness or death. It needed a specialist firm, like that of the Whites, to think in generational terms and be prepared to invest in a newcomer like Montagu in the hope of owning the next long-term steady seller, a work sufficiently well-conceived and scientifically up-to-date to see off any rivals no matter what those might come up with in number or beauty of illustrations.

Beautiful illustrations were not normally enough on their own to make a book seem a commercially worthwhile project. As a good bird artist like William Hayes had presumably found to his dismay, unless a set of these was combined with a valuably informative text the only route to publication remained the laborious and uncertain one of soliciting a sufficient number of advance subscribers—and there were not necessarily enough of such affluent people around who were sufficiently taken as yet with Britain’s own faunal diversity to be lured away from putting their money into exotica. Hayes was successful in finding enough of these to sustain for five years (1771–5) a series of his vast hand-coloured etchings of the birds of his native Buckinghamshire, but the supply of patrons then gave out and he eventually died penniless.

***

The one way round the lasting difficulty was to excel at producing illustrations in some other artistic medium that enabled them to be reproduced altogether more cheaply. That was the solution happily hit upon by Thomas Bewick (Fig. 50). A jobbing engraver in Newcastle upon Tyne, the woodcuts in which he early decided to specialise were soon of a quality without equal in the world at that time. Not only were these much less expensive than engravings on copper, but they could also be slotted into the text of a book instead of standing apart or even rather loftily aloof from it. A once-favoured technique that had fallen into disuse, it could have earned Bewick equally high praise in many another field than natural history had it not been for his profound delight in his local countryside and in observing the creatures that populated it.

Bewick had the further advantage that much of his everyday work as an engraver was done for the book trade, in which he had made many contacts that were to come in useful once he had acquired the confidence to produce something of that length himself. That was just as well, for he was to prove a poor businessman, ill at ease in money matters and prone to lose his temper. Luckily, for his first 20 years in self-employment he was in partnership with a man whose qualities made up for some of these defects. This was the better-educated, socially more adept Ralph Beilby, who had previously been his apprentice master—a fact which neither could ever quite forget and which was to be an underlying source of tension in a relationship that largely worked because of their complementary strengths and preoccupations with different aspects, Beilby with selling specialised equipment to watchmakers, Bewick with running the engraving side.

The first of the two books they were to produce and publish—though not without prolonged misgivings—was nevertheless a joint undertaking from start to finish. Evidently inspired by the appearance in 1781 of Pennant’s similarly titled work, their General History of Quadrupeds – ‘Quads’, as Bewick playfully calls it in one of his letters—was nine years in the making and might well have been abandoned but for the encouragement of a printer friend, whose greater experience of book publishing they felt it advisable to secure by ceding him a third share in the copyright and proceeds. Though only marginally a work on British natural history, being concerned with exotic and domestic animals in the main, its immediate success was crucial in emboldening Bewick to go ahead with a companion volume that he had been talking about for four years already. In contrast to the mammals, there were enough different kinds of wild birds on record for Britain for a work restricted just to those to be feasible; on the other hand, there were too many to fit into a single volume of the scope that he envisaged, and two separate ones, devoted to the ‘land’ and ‘water’ birds respectively, were accordingly decided upon. In the event, the eight-year gap between their appearances, in 1797 and 1805, was considerably longer than anticipated. A major reason for that was Bewick’s determination from the start to draw from life as far as possible (the spy-glass he employed in the field has survived to this day), for his own eyes had taught him that the accuracy of illustrations in other works was by no means to be relied on. Many readers were later to compliment him on catching many of the species in characteristic postures, a legacy of his many years of first-hand observation. But that could take him only so far: fresh specimens had to be solicited from the sporting gentry of the region, and many more than he could have wished were drawn from stuffed examples in the extensive collection of a local grandee, Marmaduke Tunstall.

For the book on quadrupeds Beilby had taken the provision of the text as his share of the undertaking, and done his best to remedy his very scanty personal knowledge by putting together as much as he could from other authors, assisted by Bewick to some extent as well. Yet despite the fact that it was on the superlative woodcuts that the success of the book would stand or fall, he had tried—unsuccessfully—to insist that that contribution of his warranted his being named on the title page as the author, Bewick being merely identified (and thanked) as the illustrator. In the case of the History of British Birds, however, Bewick was much more in his element and found it necessary to revise Beilby’s draft of the text almost in its entirety, so he was outraged when the other pressed for that star treatment again (Fig. 51). At Bewick’s instance a panel of friends was brought together and the two argued their cases before it, the upshot of which was agreement on a form of words that allotted responsibility for the work to the two of them equally. The price of that compromise proved to be the dissolving of their partnership and a growing estrangement between the two that was to persist till Beilby’s death.

It consequently fell to Bewick to produce the second volume unaided, without the benefit of the notes the other had made on the many specimens sent in when the bird book had been embarked on. In the circumstances it was fortunate that the first volume had been received so rapturously, selling out its initial print run of 1,000 inside a year, that he could hardly opt out of coming up with its advertised successor, however much more that cost him in labour. The task was not made any lighter by his need to respond to a tidal wave of letters from admiring readers that the first volume had generated. George Montagu’s far more authoritative Ornithological Dictionary was still five years off when that volume made its appearance, and in the absence of any other text of a similar kind Bewick found himself assumed to be the prime source of knowledge on British birds and their behaviour, and flooded accordingly with queries and additional information. Gratifying though that was, it can only have heightened his awareness of his inadequacy scientifically. It was not, after all, a definitive manual on the subject that he and Beilby had set out to provide but a set of appealing illustrations furnished with a letterpress that, while largely derivative, was passably informative.

Unwished-for though that role was, however, it was not one that Bewick could sidestep entirely in all conscience. A sizeable number of enthusiasts had demonstrably come into existence who hungered to have their observations noted and appreciated, and the least he could do was to publish the additional data they were sending him. That he accordingly did, in 1821–2, in the form of two successive supplements to each volume, trusting those would appease that hunger and enable him to press ahead with an intended ‘History of British Fishes’.

Alas, though, the rain of records failed to cease and that further book was never completed. When a sixth edition of the bird book arrived in prospect, for publication in 1826 (there would be an eighth one eventually, in 1847), a great mass of notes descended on him from Shropshire from one of the most vocal praisers of his art, J. F. M. Dovaston, the fruit of many years of diligent watching of birds by both himself and several of his friends. When that edition then appeared with no sign that much or any of those notes had been made use of, no small pique was the understandable reaction. When Dovaston took him to task in a subsequent letter, Bewick’s response was a slightly hurt puzzlement: ‘I cannot see the defects of the letterpress you mention, or what I can do to make it more worthy of the engravings.’ The artist and the ornithologist were evidently talking past each other.

Bewick was not the grand collator of the observations of others that so many people by now were seemingly looking for, and he can hardly be blamed for the limited ambition he showed in that direction. He was content to capture in wood bird life as he himself perceived it, and one can surely only be grateful that he concentrated on that and did so with such perfection.

CHAPTER 7
The Linnaean Autumn

THE NAPOLEONIC WARS AND their immediate aftermath had two important adverse effects on the study of natural history in these islands, one intellectual and the other economic. The enforced isolation from the continent that Britain endured as a consequence for lengthy periods interrupted the normal two-way traffic in ideas, information and reading matter of all kinds—including personal correspondence. That isolation was never absolute so far as the world of learning was concerned, but it was sufficiently extreme to bring about a general failure in Britain to keep abreast of scientific developments across the Channel. In particular, the import and export of authentically named specimens largely came to a halt, with the result that interpretation of many species, as well as many of the scientific names in general use, fell seriously out of alignment with those on the Continent, a situation which would take many years to correct.

The economic effects were both general and specific. Waging the wars soon proved so costly that the government had to resort to supplementary means of raising revenue by imposing special taxes. Of those, the first-ever one on income significantly raised the cost of living for the better-off, who were additionally hit by steep rises in parish rates—the chosen avenue for alleviating the plight of the poor produced by the soaring cost of bread, the result in turn of the loss of the usual steadying influence of Continental imports on the price of corn. But there were more particular blows in addition for users of certain commodities onto which onerous excise duties were slapped. One of these was on glass, which was to have crippling long-term side-effects for natural history. Of more immediate seriousness for it, however, another was on paper, one of the two main ingredients in the cost of printing. To make matters worse, manpower shortages placed compositors in a strong position to demand higher pay, so the book trade was doubly squeezed, which inevitably fed through into shocking jumps in the prices charged to the public.

The exorbitant cost of paper resulting from that excise duty has traditionally been invoked to explain why books were so much more expensive in Britain than in its Continental counterparts at this period—exactly double the price of their French equivalents, according to William Swainson, complaining of the situation that still obtained in 1834. That explanation has recently been challenged, however, and a section of the book trade itself identified as the culprit instead. The root cause, it seems, was a House of Lords decision back in 1774. Up till then, the mainstream London publishers had been enjoying as one of their longstanding restrictive practices the confident belief that the common law empowered them to claim copyright in perpetuity in books. The Lords not only ruled otherwise, but fixed the time period for all books as the minimal one laid down in the Act of 1710, namely 14 years with the possibility of one renewal only—a 28-year horizon within which the trade would thenceforward have to operate for (as it turned out) the next two-thirds of a century. The Lords also confirmed that copyrights belonged to authors, not automatically to the publisher; authors were at liberty to sell them, though, in whole or in part, and most usually continued to be content to. These rulings opened the gates to an influx of minor firms, many of them newcomers, enabling them to prosper and establish themselves by issuing cheap reprints, many of those imported from the Continent as English-language translations. Under siege from this massive new competition, the mainstream firms made the best of their greatly weakened position by wresting as much profit as they could out of any new title they published during its period within copyright. As there was no restriction on the retail prices of books until 1820, that meant charging for them as much as they dared. It was not a state of affairs destined to last all that long, however, for the eventual collapse in the cost of printing, in the 1830s, so intensified competition that a policy of pricing needlessly high turned out to be no longer sustainable. The advent of stereotyping, which allowed lead casts of a book’s original type to be stored as plates for future use, also provided publishers with a major added means of extracting profit from their copyrights, by making the reprinting of existing titles a tempting alternative to the greater cost and risk of investing in new ones.

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Another major result of Britain’s lengthy intellectual isolation from the Continent was the exceptionally entrenched commitment of its naturalists to the artificial Linnaean system, sheltered as that isolation left it from competition from the natural one, which had meanwhile been recast in a more appealing form by a leading Parisian botanist, Antoine-Laurent de Jussieu, and publicly unveiled in his Genera plantarum in 1789 to very wide acclaim. Not quite all British systematists were so completely out of touch with developments across the Channel to be immune to French seduction—in 1810, for instance, the much-respected Robert Brown saw fit to employ the natural system for his pioneer monograph of the flora of Australia—but for a long time that counter-current remained very feeble. Not until the threshold of the Victorian era would it eventually grow sufficiently in strength to overwhelm the other.

Strongly reinforcing the original predilection for the Swedish alternative on the part of British botanists, and subsequently of British zoologists too, had been the founding of the Linnean Society of London in 1788. Six years before that, naturalists in the Metropolis had already become numerous enough to band together in a body that sought to embrace all aspects of the subject. That predecessor, however, the Society for Promoting Natural History, had begun to deteriorate into little more than a drinking club (to judge from contemporary letters) and a dissident group was led to break away and found an alternative. One of these dissidents, James Edward Smith (Fig. 52), had recently brought off the astonishing coup of purchasing the collections and library of Linnaeus, and the choice of name for this new body no doubt came from a wish to identify it with what appeared at that time to be natural history’s progressive stream and the way ahead for the future. Though it would be another 41 years before the society became the possessors of that all-important physical evidence of what Linnaeus intended by his species names, the almost ruinous cost of which plunged it into a prolonged ineffectiveness, its members meanwhile saw the propagation of the Linnaean gospel as its primary raison d’être and drew strength and cohesion from adhering to what they proceeded to turn into an aggressive ideology. One of the early recruits is even reported to have gone to the length of crushing with his shoe a shell of an undescribed mollusc, roundly declaring that things not in Linnaeus had no business to exist.

Even had Smith’s ownership of the Linnaean collections not placed him in a commanding position scientifically and brought him international renown at an unusually early age, his drive, social confidence and obvious ability would probably have been enough on their own to make him the pivotal figure in what now became tantamount to a cult. Even though recurrently fragile health turned out to prevent him from playing the active role in the society that both he and his admirers had expected, he at least served as a unifying figurehead in the background, as president of the society even if mainly in absentia, while justifying the faith placed in him by producing, step by solid step, a small staircase of works that culminated in the new national Flora that had become sorely needed.

Smith had had an unusual upbringing in a city that was itself unusual. A third of the population of Norwich at that period was made up of Dissenters, his own family among them. Amid a pervasive atmosphere of self-improvement and devotion to hard work an untypically wide and early following for natural history had also sprung up there. As the adored eldest child of a wealthy wool merchant, idolised and indulged by an extraordinarily besotted father (whose surviving letters to his son in his student years have to be read to be believed), Smith’s already delicate health kept him from being sent to school and he was tutored at home instead, apparently deriving a considerable precocity from being more than ordinarily in adult company as a result.

Though his father had envisaged a career for his son similar to his own, it increasingly became clear that a boyhood passion for botany that had matured into a serious scientific study made that unrealistic. For someone of that social level, attachment to botany at that period dictated a medical career, and accordingly Smith was required to train for that instead. As a Dissenter, the English universities were closed to him and the next-best alternative was Edinburgh. There he consequently went at the late age of nearly twenty-two—in an era when Scottish students typically went when still in their mid-teens—and lost little time in using the extra leverage those additional years gave him in forming a natural history society in which he was the deferred-to, dominant figure. When the time came to leave Edinburgh for London to complete his medical training, he had useful experience of how such a body could most effectively operate, and a repeat performance was almost second nature. It is almost certainly no coincidence that the Linnean Society began on very similar lines and adopted an identical induction ceremony for new members.

By then it had become clear that Smith was not up to a medical career constitutionally—not that he needed to follow a profession in any case, given an ample allowance from his ever-indulgent father and the comfortable income he could expect to inherit. So he settled down instead to devoting all his time and energy to consolidating his standing as a botanist.

Before long, some unsuccessful dabbling in horticultural part-works, unworthy of his talents, brought him to the notice of James Sowerby (Fig. 53), a professional painter turned botanical illustrator whose experience of working for William Curtis on his magnificent but unprofitable Flora Londinensis (of which more in the next chapter) had convinced him he could do better. Sowerby needed someone to provide the scientific text to accompany his own drawings for a similar lengthy part-work that he proposed to call English Botany – to emphasise its wider scope geographically. On being approached, in 1790, Smith was initially doubtful whether that would be, in his later words, ‘a fit vehicle for original information and criticism’, and began by supplying descriptions for it that on his own admission were ‘but lightly sketched’—for which he was paid at first the standard trade rate of half a guinea. He even carried that wariness to the point of forbidding his name to appear on the title page. However, after three volumes had appeared and the viability of the enterprise seemed assured, he withdrew that veto and settled down to enjoy the crescendo of acclaim that it was justifiably attracting.

English Botany was to run to the then unprecedented length for a natural history work of 36 volumes, appearing over an equally unprecedented time-span of 23 years. Nothing less than those proved to be needed to realise the aim at the outset of providing a description and colour plate of every species of wild plant then on the national list, the fungi alone excepted (for the reason that those had been insufficiently investigated—but, by accident, correctly, for we now know that they are not rightly classed as plants). Although the 2,592 colour plates so overshadowed Smith’s text that the work tended ever after to be referred to by almost everyone as ‘Sowerby’, it was to prove the most enduring of his publications, even if not the one that rated (in his own eyes as well) of greatest importance scientifically. It also brought him to a wider public notice than he can ever have expected. Even before the work had completed its first year, he found himself the next in a succession of prominent botanists to be called upon by Queen Charlotte to provide her and her daughters with instruction in that study; additionally, he was asked to arrange Lightfoot’s herbarium, which King George had purchased at auction for her as a gift. Alas, that dizzying elevation proved short-lived, for some incautious words he had written were interpreted as Jacobin sympathies and he was replaced forthwith. Luckily, word of that evidently failed to linger long enough at Court to reach the ears of the Prince Regent, for in 1814 he saw fit to confer a knighthood on Smith, the first person in Britain to be so honoured expressly for services to a branch of natural history (John Hill’s much-ridiculed knighthood of 1774 had been a foreign one).

Long before then, Smith had married and returned permanently to Norwich. His bride found London life unappealing, while he himself found its fogs injurious to his health. Freer there from social distractions, thenceforward he devoted six hours of every day to writing, with a break for dinner at half-past three and then usually two more hours of work in the evening. By Victorian standards that was hardly a regime of great rigour, but he was prone to nervous headaches, once confiding to an intimate that he needed only ‘a journey or a worry of any kind to make me ill’. That sounds so like Charles Darwin, toiling under a similar handicap half a century later, that comparing the two is unavoidable—even though their respective intellectual make-ups and achievements were altogether different. In both cases the relative seclusion and lack of disturbance enforced by long-lasting poor health made possible a productivity that might well have eluded them otherwise. In that, however, Smith could be said to have had a slight edge, for his marriage was childless, whereas Darwin’s home famously swarmed with offspring.

Becoming caught up in a project like English Botany, with its remorselessly regular calls on his time and energy extending over what threatened to be the greater part of a lifetime, was not what Smith had intended. All the time he was yearning to produce as well more solidly learned works, written with the more demanding requirements of an international scholarly readership in mind (and so, in his view, still of necessity very largely in Latin). Way back in 1784, at the time of his acquiring the Linnaean collections, one of his old Norfolk botanist friends had written urging him to come up with a ‘Flora Britannica, the most correct that can appear in the Linnaean dress’. The suggestion had taken root, but it was to be another 10 years before Smith felt ready to embark on a work that could match up in his estimation to just such a title—and six years more till it was in a state to start appearing in print. That lengthy period in preparation proved necessary because, on examining the Linnaean specimens, it quickly became apparent to him that many British plants had been assumed to be identical with Continental namesakes over-hastily. Nothing less than a thorough overhaul of the entire native flora seemed to him to be required, involving re-scrutiny of every generic and specific character and drawing up fresh descriptions based exclusively on wild British specimens. The eventual end-product was an enormous improvement on any previous national Flora as a consequence of this meticulous screening as far as taxonomy and nomenclature were concerned; sadly, though, knowledge of the geographical distribution of the species within Britain, let alone in Ireland too, was still very deficient. Smith did his best to bring together as much as he could on that aspect, but the very thinness of the outcome may well have acted as a spur to his friend and near-neighbour, Dawson Turner, in collaboration with a Swansea porcelain manufacturer, Lewis Weston Dillwyn, to send out shortly afterwards a four-page printed questionnaire soliciting localities for the rarer species. The results, published in 1805 in a form anticipating Baedeker, under the title The Botanist’s Guide through England and Wales, amounted to a useful holding operation; it would be another three-quarters of a century, however, before information on this score at last became sufficiently detailed to serve as a basis for individual species maps of a passable completeness.

Benjamin White’s two sons proved willing to take a chance on the Flora Britannica commercially, doubtless trusting that, as the authoritative replacement for Hudson’s Flora Anglica, its indispensability for every sophisticated student of the subject would offset the forfeiting of sales among those with little or no Latin. Its very thoroughness, however, dictated a size that only three octavo volumes could accommodate, which rendered it in any case an expensive work unavoidably restricted to libraries. Of those volumes, the first two were published together in 1800 and the third only after a four-year gap. The reason Smith initially gave for that gap was a twofold one: firstly, that three important new works on the cryptogams were known to be pending and it made sense to defer writing his sections on those till they were available for study; secondly, that he felt in need of two more seasons in order to master certain particularly testing groups of flowering plants. However, a further advantage in the delay that he foresaw, as he told Sir Joseph Banks, was that the price of paper might have fallen in the interim. In the event, though, the gap proved longer than planned, as for over a year he lost the use of his eyes. That seems to have served as a warning to him to do no more, with the consequence that the planned coverage of the non-vascular cryptogams never proceeded beyond the mosses.

It would appear to have been part of the deal with the Whites that Smith should also produce a shorter, handier version of the main work for the benefit of those deterred by its cost or size. Luckily, he had complied before his eyes gave out, and the result, the Compendium florae Britannicae, fully lived up to the Whites’ expectations right from its launch in 1800, with sales that proved to warrant nine editions, some of them in an English translation. W. H. Harvey, the future doyen of marine algology, on acquiring a copy many years later as a youth of eighteen, was to pronounce it ‘a delightful little book, and particularly useful in larger genera, as by its conciseness you have all the species under your eye at once.’ It was doubtless the model for Charles Babington’s later, even longer-running Manual of British Botany, produced for the pockets of the Victorian field-botany élite from 1843 onwards.

Once his eyes had recovered, Smith then tossed off not only an introductory textbook for Longman (which justified a then exceptionally long print run of 1,500 copies by going to 10 editions in its turn), but also the astounding total of 3,348 botanical articles plus 57 biographical entries for the same publisher’s 39-volume Cyclopaedia, edited by a fellow nonconformist, Abraham Rees. On the strength of those, and a great deal else besides, he not unreasonably felt that he had earned that other pinnacle of honour, the Cambridge chair. When that fell vacant in 1818, however, his candidacy was rejected, in part because he was as unacceptable as ever on denominational grounds.

As he had but 10 more years of life ahead of him, as it was to turn out, that rejection was perhaps just as well, for his entire energies were spared for pouring into his crowning work, The English Flora. Of that, even so, he lived only long enough to complete four volumes, which were brought out by Longman, his by then regular publisher, in 1824–8. In effect a greatly enlarged version of the Flora Britannica (but with the added attraction of not being in Latin), this would later be recognised as having ‘opened a new era in British botany’, thanks in large part to species descriptions of an unprecedented accuracy and fullness. A departure of historic importance, though, which was to prove as lastingly influential as it was controversial, was the willingness Smith demonstrated to defy the conclusions reached by Linnaeus in cases where his own first-hand study indicated different interpretations. The most startling of those was his listing of 141 different kinds of willows, based on a collection in the garden of a Norfolk friend (many if not most of which, as we now know, are merely hybrids of varying degrees of complexity, some of them selected and perpetuated for basket-making). Much less provocative was his acceptance that rather more kinds of bramble could confidently be distinguished in the wild than just the two of the Species plantarum – though one wonders what his reaction would have been had he known that the number of those on the British list would grow and grow in the years that followed, to reach the 340 or so recognised at the time these words are written. No botanists in that era suspected the existence of the abnormal reproductive mechanisms that we now know are responsible in many cases for such taxonomic complexities, and as long as a belief in the fixity of species prevailed, the commonest reaction was a stubborn refusal to accept that it was nature and not the classifiers who had erred. But at least Smith, and others like him, had the intellectual honesty to face up to and describe what their acuteness led them to discriminate.

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A measure of the importance of The English Flora is the number of further works that it generated directly, or in other cases indirectly made feasible by saving their authors the arduous labour of drawing up full descriptions of every species afresh. In particular, Smith’s untimely death had left a set of gaping holes in the work itself that very obviously needed filling; for just as his trouble with his eyesight had frustrated his intention of extending the Flora Britannica to the lichens, algae and fungi, so The English Flora had been left without the nonvascular cryptogams in their entirety. If only to be able to claim that the work lived up to its title in the completest sense, Longman accordingly turned to Britain’s most outstanding cryptogamist, William Jackson Hooker (Fig. 54), to remedy those omissions with a supplementary fifth volume. This necessarily had to be in two parts, one covering the mosses, hepatics and algae, the other the fungi, for the range of expertise required was greater than any one person possessed. While Hooker felt able to cope with the first three himself, albeit with help from others in certain cases, he recognised that the fungi lay quite outside his competence; in the absence of any other person, he therefore took a gamble in seeking to interest a comparative newcomer to their study, Miles Joseph Berkeley, to take them on—though not before assigning him just the agarics as a test and satisfying both of them that it was a task that was within Berkeley’s capacity. Even with the volume’s authorship shared, however, each part was a huge undertaking just in itself, and it is in no way surprising that the two rounded off Smith’s great work only after considerable time-lags, in 1833 and 1836 respectively. Sensibly, they were allowed to be purchased separately.

Hooker was a product of that same botanical circle round Norwich that had nurtured Smith a generation earlier (and was similarly nurturing Hooker’s future rival, the equally dynamic John Lindley). An all-round naturalist up to his teens, by twenty-one he had come to concentrate on botany and acquired a remarkably precocious mastery of the lower plants more particularly. That had early brought him into touch with the leading local expert on those, Dawson Turner, Smith’s banker friend in Great Yarmouth, who thereafter became his mentor and ultimately his father-in-law (Fig. 55). Worried by Hooker’s restlessness, with a view to anchoring him Turner persuaded him to buy a working partnership in a Suffolk brewery. It was an occupation, however, to which Hooker was quite unsuited, and despite his conscientious efforts the business went into decline and so damaged his finances, already strained by his extravagant expenditure on botany, that he was forced to cast around for a supplementary source of income in order to support his by then growing family.

Fortunately, Hooker had been publishing impressively on bryophytes in the meantime. His first substantial work on those, and the most beautiful book he was ever to produce, was a pioneer monograph of the hepatics, British Jungermanniae (1812–16); the fruit of some 10 years’ research, its 88 superb plates illustrated 197 species. Soon after, in 1818, came a companion on the mosses, Museologia Britannica, coauthored with a Dublin physician, Thomas Taylor. Both were published by Longman but probably on unfavourable terms, for they brought Hooker little if any money. In paying attention to the rich bryological flora of Ireland, Hooker had followed the lead of his father-in-law, whose collecting there had given rise in 1804 to the more modest Museologiae Hibernieae spieilegium, printed (in Latin) in a very limited edition at the author’s expense and mostly given away as presents. The copy that Hooker received has survived and is of special interest in containing delicate watercolours of over 200 mosses painted in the margins, presumably by himself, by way of supplementing the volume’s 16 colour plates (by the able James de Carle Sowerby, eldest son of the more famous James).

No sooner were those two monographs off Hooker’s hands than he allowed himself to become heavily involved for 12 years in the producing of a new edition of Flora Londinensis. Despite the grievous financial loss the original version of that wholly admirable work had ended up by bringing William Curtis, after his death in 1799 its set of superb, life-size illustrations remained a valuable source of potential further profit, a fact of which surviving relatives of his continued to be very much aware. One of those, George Graves, the naturalist husband of Curtis’s niece, eventually acquired part-ownership of the copyright in 1815 and promptly set about commissioning a major continuation of the original work, to be subscribed for either by existing owners of the latter or as part of an overall reissue. To this end, Hooker not only completely overhauled the text, but also supplied most of the required 123 additional colour engravings—an impressive double feat. Brought out in parts in 1817–28, to make up five folio volumes (instead of the original two), this no less deserving production unfortunately failed to attract enough subscribers and proved no more profitable than its predecessor. So disastrous indeed did it prove to Graves in his turn that latterly he was reduced to remunerating Hooker in specimens in place of money.

In 1820 a testimonial from the all-powerful Sir Joseph Banks was probably decisive in securing Hooker the vacant chair of botany at Glasgow University. Though he had had no academic training and had not given a lecture in his life, at that time it was still feasible to land such a post on the strength of a publication record alone. This was particularly true of botany professorships, for it was mostly amateurs who had the sufficient fieldwork expertise and enthusiasm to teach the wave of new courses that were being called into being by the Apothecaries’ Act. Although that applied only to England and Wales, many Scottish medical students traditionally went into general practice there and so also had to become proficient enough botanically to pass that section of the exam on which acquisition of a licence to practise depended.

Scottish professors, unlike English ones, were not paid stipends and had to depend instead on the fees paid to them in person by the students attending their classes. This was a powerful incentive to maximise attendances by making courses as appealing as possible. Botany courses had long had a reputation for dryness, so Hooker’s innovation of colourful visual aids speedily attracted sizeable numbers, even without the added lure of a lengthy camping trip into the Highlands for those students who proved keenest. Within a year of arriving he had also borrowed Lightfoot’s title of Flora Scotica for a new work he produced for their guidance, which quickly sold its 500 copies. That was but the beginning of a stunning profusion of books, papers and even journals that he poured out, with characteristic stamina, during his two Glasgow decades.

Of the further books, however, only one merits a mention here: The British Flora, a student text produced in 1830 for Longman that was effectively a compact version of Smith’s culminating work (with ‘British’ tactfully substituted for ‘English’ in the title). Pocket-sized yet unrelenting nevertheless in its accounts of difficult genera (some of those contributed by relevant specialists), this met the purpose for which it was designed sufficiently well for it to pass through eight so-called editions—two of them in reality straight reprints—in the course of 30 years, despite what must have been keen competition from the pocket ‘Withering’ edited by MacGillivray. A singular feature of The British Flora is that when the stock of the second edition (of 1831) was nearing exhaustion and there seemed every reason to keep the title in print, Longman’s ownership of both the copyrights made possible the economical ploy of tacking onto that bodily the late-appearing fifth volume of The English Flora, to constitute an additional, cryptogamic volume for this other work of Hooker’s as well.

Sadly for Glasgow—and, as it turned out, for the investigation of Britain’s cryptogamic flora as well—Hooker had so grown in scientific stature during his years there that it eventually became impossible for the university to hold him. His post in any case paid badly, and from the first he had viewed his time there as an exile, frustratingly remote from London, the hub of Britain’s scientific activity. The conferment of a Hanoverian knighthood in 1836, for services to botany in general, doubtless only strengthened his impatience to depart. Even then, though, five more years had to elapse before he managed to escape, to become Director of the seriously rundown Royal Botanic Garden at Kew. There he was to find full scope at last for his multiple abilities in turning that into a world-class scientific institute, but thenceforward with quite other, lesser-known parts of the world as his exclusive research focus.

***

Berkeley (Fig. 56), the author of the second part of The English Flora’s cryptogamic supplement, could hardly have been more different from Hooker, his senior by some 18 years. Before taking on the fungi he had been concentrating on seaweeds, particularly on the smaller kinds of those, which a four-year curacy at Margate following his ordination had allowed him to snatch a few opportunities of studying. A small part-work, Gleanings of British Algae, had been the outcome. Presented by its publisher, James Sowerby, as an appendix to his (and Smith’s) English Botany, this evidently attracted little notice when it appeared in 1832–3 but came into its own in mid-century, when seashore natural history rose into fashion. Though Berkeley never lost that interest, his subsequent transfer to a rural parish in the Midlands, a region in which he was destined to spend the remainder of his life, rendered marine work impracticable and mycology a welcome substitute for it.

Considering that he had been studying fungi for only three years by then, the comprehensive account, extending to 433 pages, that Berkeley managed to come up with for The English Flora was a remarkable achievement. Much of the information in it, moreover, was original, for those organisms had received little attention in eighteenth-century Britain, during which James Bolton’s three-volume An History of the Fungusses growing about Halifax of 1788–9, printed at his expense and distributed by Benjamin White, was so exceptional that, despite its merely local character, it earned itself a German edition. Its 138 colour plates were supplemented in 1791 by an appendix containing 44 more. The larger fungi were such attractive subjects for natural history artists that it is surprising that it was not until the turn of the century that the first major series of illustrations of many of those that had been found to occur in these islands were offered to the public. Bearing the rather eccentric title of Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms – the last two words seemingly added as an afterthought, in case ‘fungi’ gave some prospective purchasers a wrong impression—this took the form of another lengthy part-work by the inexhaustible, ever-enterprising James Sowerby. Running in tandem with his English Botany, from 1795 to 1815, on the back of his success with that and remedying the one great omission in its otherwise comprehensive coverage, this consisted of 440 hand-coloured engravings surpassing in beauty those of any comparable work that Britain’s mycologists have ever since had offered to them. Not only were the drawings all his own, but in this case he provided the accompanying text as well. As if that was not enough, he also made some 200 models of the larger species and put those on free public display in his home on two days each month. So good were those, the obvious answer to the disobliging uncooperativeness of fungi in the natural state as showcase items, that after his death the British Museum acquired them and later gave them a much-extended life as the basis of two successive handbooks.

Though would-be students of toadstools were thus well served in the matter of illustrations, classification and descriptions still remained very inadequate. Berkeley’s massive monograph consequently came as a godsend. But as if that was not enough for him either, and presumably because he regarded colour illustrations as a scientifically unsatisfactory substitute for specimens, he followed it up by distributing sets of dried examples of 350 of the species he had described.

With the extraordinary diligence characteristic of so many Victorian clerical naturalists, Berkeley proceeded to build on that solid foundation for the next 50 years, notably in the form of a series of over 2,000 ‘Notices of British Fungi’ published jointly with C. E. Broome, a gentleman of independent means in Bath, from 1837 till 1885. In all, he is estimated to have published, singly or jointly, over 600 papers in journals and described about the same number of new species (an increasingly high proportion of them exotic, for he was sent specimens for determination from many parts of the world). That non-stop output was achieved despite having two quite demanding parishes to run in succession, to say nothing of 15 children. What is more, to relieve the financial burden of so large a family, he ran a village school for a time with his wife, in addition to freelancing as a horticultural journalist and examining for various educational bodies. He was fortunate never to be troubled by anything worse than gout.

A more colourful figure who was scarcely less active on the cryptogamic front at this period than any of those mentioned already was the Edinburgh-based Robert Kaye Greville. Though his interests extended to several other areas of natural history, he came to concentrate on land and freshwater molluscs and some of the lower plants, including freshwater algae and diatoms in particular. Of those last he contributed an account to Hooker’s part of The English Flora’s supplementary volume, and later in life he was awarded the Neill Medal of the Royal Society of Edinburgh for his outstanding research on them. A self-taught botanist from boyhood, like Smith he had the good luck to inherit sufficient independent means in early manhood not to have to translate a medical training into practice.

Just before turning thirty, Greville launched a monthly part-work, Scottish Cryptogamic Flora, intended to be seen as a continuation of English Botany and making up for that work’s inadequate coverage of fungi more particularly. Considering its specialised appeal, it is impressive that this was taken on as a commercial venture (by a local publisher, Maclachlan & Stewart), probably largely on the strength of the 360 colour plates based on drawings by Greville himself, who combined high expertise as a naturalist with artistic work of so high a standard that in later years, after losing much of his private income, he took to drawing and painting Highland landscapes professionally. Although Scottish Crytogamic Flora lasted for as long as six years, 1823–8, halfway through subscribers dropped out in such numbers that the publisher was unwilling to continue without a further input of funds on Greville’s part, and by 1826 both parties were losing money on what had turned out to be a noble failure.

After his botanical achievements had brought him an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University at the unusually early age of thirty (presumably at the instigation of Hooker, his fellow cryptogamist there), Greville followed these up by coauthoring a new arrangement of the genera of mosses and then with a volume on seaweeds, Algae Britannicae, published by that same local firm in 1830. Subsequently, however, his energies became mainly diverted into social and political agitation, the causes he championed ranging from temperance and prison reform to Sabbatarianism and the abolition of slavery, culminating in his election to Parliament. All in all a life in its own way as quintessentially nineteenth-century in character as the static one of Berkeley, toiling away in rural seclusion.

In this fanning-out on the part of the growing botanical community to ensure the lower plants received a reasonable share of attention, the lichens alone failed to be the subject at this period of a pioneer monograph that could claim to be complete or adequately published. That was not for want of trying, though. Not content with his books on Irish mosses and two on seaweeds, the irrepressible Dawson Turner could not resist having a go as well at those still mysterious organisms. By that time a good knowledge of them had been built up by a man with a reputation as an exceptionally acute field botanist, the Sussex-based William Borrer (not to be confused with his identically named son, who much later produced an Avifauna of that county), yet another amply leisured beneficiary of the soaring prosperity of the commercial middle class (Fig. 57). Aware of his interest, Turner wrote to him, four days before the Battle of Trafalgar, to propose collaborating on a major work that would extend to descriptions of all the British species so far known.

Unfortunately, neither realised that the other was unlikely to be equal to so prolonged an undertaking. Turner was heavily committed in other directions and probably in any case envisaged a publication that was relatively cursory, whereas Borrer was one of those perfectionists who end up publishing next to nothing because their material is never complete enough to satisfy them. In the event nothing was written for two years and another five passed before much of what was meant to be just the first volume was in the hands of the printer. There then followed such a prolonged hiatus that Borrer despaired of the work ever being finished and the partnership effectively broke down.

In the end an incomplete version was salvaged for private circulation only, in 1839, 32 years after the start, bearing a candidly defeatist title: Specimen of a Lichenographia Britannica; or an attempt at a history of British lichens. Worse, most of the sheets had suffered damage while lying so long in the printer’s warehouse and there were only enough in a fit state to allow about 30 copies to be produced. Nevertheless, what did appear constituted a major advance in knowledge and was to serve as a valuable basis when interest in lichens revived in Britain half a century later. Shortsightedly, though, no further copies were ever printed to rectify the work’s great rarity until a facsimile edition was produced in 1978.

***

The great distance between Norfolk and Sussex, rendering communication between the authors slow and productive of suspicions, has been invoked as a possible contributory reason for that lichenological debacle, but surely not convincingly. For it was in that very same year of Trafalgar, 1805, that a businessman in Yorkshire, William Spence, entered into correspondence with William Kirby (Figs 58 & 59), a rector in far-off Suffolk, out of which came their collaboration, four years later, on that evergreen classic, An Introduction to Entomology, one of the most readable, most influential and most lastingly appreciated works for beginners in a branch of natural history that can ever have been written. Indeed, the geographical distance between this other pair was bridged successfully and amicably twice over, for after the first of the four planned volumes came out (in the spring of Waterloo year, 1815) Spence fell ill through exhaustion and was obliged to make his home instead in Devon, further away from Suffolk still. Just as in the case of Smith’s Flora Britannica, from a similar cause, there was a lengthy interruption to the work’s appearance as a result and, remarkably, the first volume had already raced into a fourth printing—so clamorous was the demand for it—before the third and fourth volumes eventually brought up the rear, in 1838. By then that first instalment had even come out in a German translation. This sequence of events was not as strange as it sounds, for the first two volumes had been cunningly packed with anecdotal material of a non-technical character, with the heavier scientific matter reserved for the later ones.

A major reason for the success of ‘Kirby and Spence’ (as this work has always been more familiarly known) was that it had been planned very carefully. It had been the idea of the much younger Spence, apparently soon after taking up entomology seriously and becoming convinced that the lack of such a book was ‘the greatest bar to the spread of the science amongst us’, after which, as he subsequently revealed to Kirby, he spent many a lone country ramble mapping it out in his head. Kirby, by contrast, was already a figure of some prominence, most notably as a hymenopterist, having published a pioneer monograph on British bees three years before their correspondence began. Much of the knowledge based on first-hand experience, which was one of the work’s particular strengths, no doubt came from him. Yet perhaps it would never have been written at all but for the bubbling enthusiasm of the neophyte Spence, so much better placed than the veteran Kirby to sense what the average beginner was likely to find helpful as well as appealing.

Imitators were not slow in responding—though Spence was to say many years later that George Johnston’s An Introduction to Conchology of 1850 was the only one of those that really pleased him. Quickest off the mark, in 1816, was Priscilla Wakefield with An Introduction to the Natural History and Classification of Insects, as a companion to the one on Linnaean botany which she had written for young people 10 years earlier and which the firm of Darton had published to great profit. In 1819 George Samouelle, then an assistant in Longman’s London bookshop, produced for the firm of Boys The Entomologist’s Useful Compendium, full of tips based on experience. This sold sufficiently well to generate a second edition in 1824, by which time its author had obtained a post in the British Museum through the good offices of W. E. Leach, the superintendent of its zoological collections, who had helped him with the book so extensively that at least one contemporary claimed that Leach was really its author. The Butterfly Collector’s Vade Mecum by Laetitia Jermyn was another product of 1824, from a publisher in Ipswich; this, too, earned itself a reissue, only three years later. And in the same category, from an obscure London house and seemingly even more successful, was Abel Ingpen’s Instructions for Collecting, Rearing and Preserving Insects in 1827, later to be retitled, and targeted more precisely, as a Manual for the Butterfly Collector. After a century in which books on entomology had been able to achieve print only by the onerous route of private subscription, chained inescapably to high prices by the need to tempt purchasers with many beautiful plates, Kirby and Spence had turned this all of a sudden into a lucrative new section of the trade in which previously unheard-of publishers were competing for footholds.

It was by no means only in this strong new demand for books that a great influx of recruits to this branch of natural history manifested itself. In 1818 the earliest-recorded auction in London of an insect collection—that of the silversmith, John Francillon—attracted so many keen bidders that it lasted nine days. At Cambridge, around the same time, according to the dipterist Leonard Jenyns, ‘so numerous were the Entomologists … that several persons among the lower classes derived a part of their livelihood during the summer months collecting insects for sale.’ Nor was this a phenomenon confined just to London and the southeast. Edwin Lees was to record in 1828 that as many as 12 or 15 different collectors were not uncommonly to be observed ‘beating’ the same one wood on the outskirts of Worcester on an average summer’s evening. By 1830, it has been estimated, there were several thousand people in England alone who collected butterflies and could put a name to most of the kinds they saw.

Though their beauty and their conspicuousness inevitably placed butterflies in the front line of attention, their very popularity with collectors and their limited number of species had the welcome result of driving some of the veterans into less crowded areas of entomology, in which the scope for discovering novelties was greater by far, even if searching for those was a less sociable activity and even a solitary one. Just as in botany an overspill from the higher plants on to the lower ones was taking place, so in this branch of natural history too a contraflow was starting to develop which would gradually produce colonists of even the most uninviting fringes. Kirby’s monograph of the bees could be interpreted as an early step in that direction, and a trickle of even braver spirits would be following his lead. Of those, none perhaps were braver in that generation than the Leeds museum curator, Henry Denny: not content with a monograph on some of the minuter beetles in 1825, he went on to excel himself in 1842 with one on the fleas.

The larger beetles, however, were the more immediate beneficiaries of this process—just as the mosses and hepatics were in botany. Much simpler than Lepidoptera to prepare for the cabinet (as well as to catch) and seemingly infinite in their diversity, the Coleoptera indeed became so great a secondary centre of attraction, and so quickly, that they began to look in danger of being over-popular in their turn. That popularity was apparently nowhere more marked than among undergraduates at Cambridge. One of those was famously Charles Darwin, whose passion for collecting these insects—caught from a cousin, W. Darwin Fox—was so intense at that period that he could still recall the precise details of some of his captures when he came to write his autobiography late in life. Another convert was the university’s future professor of botany, Babington, whose fervour as a collector temporarily earned him the nickname ‘Beetles’.

That fashionableness could never have come about had there not existed by then a handful of works that, when used in combination, made it possible to put a name to a high proportion of the species collected. The first of those to appear, in 1793, came from one of two naturalist contemporaries who, confusingly, shared the name Thomas Martyn: this one was not the professor but the book illustrator. Confusing matters further, the book’s title, The English Entomologist, concealed that it was actually a set of illustrations of ‘all the coleopterous insects found in England’ at that time known—and, as such, invaluable in the absence then of anything else. Another unusual feature was that the plates were the work of pupils at the school for natural history drawing and printing that Martyn was then running in London.

Nine years later Martyn’s book was complemented by a much fuller and more authoritative treatment of the group by the similarly named Thomas Marsham, the zoologist member of the triumvirate who had founded the Linnean Society, of which by then he was its chief pillar as honorary treasurer (after 10 years as the initial honorary secretary). In loyalty to that body, to which the book was dedicated, he adopted the generic names of Linnaeus for the 1,307 native species he described in it—a total, incidentally, which was to be nearly trebled before the nineteenth century was out. While that greatly advanced knowledge and must have been substantially responsible for the wave of enthusiastic beetle collecting that followed, as a publishing venture on the other hand it was the start of one of natural history’s worst horror stories, for it brought Marsham so enormous a loss that his personal finances never recovered. How that came about is not easy to understand. That the root cause, however, was wild over-optimism about the likely sales is suggested by the fact that the book was conceived and promoted as just the first volume in what was to be a more comprehensive work, entitled Entomologia Britannica. Although Benjamin White’s sons were then running the firm named as the publisher, in view of the subject matter they would surely have insisted on terms that protected them rather than the author in the event of a flop (for this was well before the boom in entomology touched off by Kirby and Spence). Yet Marsham had spent his career in the financial world and ought to have been a habitual scrutiniser of contracts. Was he careless in this instance, or simply reckless—blinded with a conviction that the reading public would be queuing up to buy a set of monographs of such unprecedented completeness on the insect fauna of Britain? A possible clue is the revelation by his wife that he was deeply preoccupied that year with his new duties as an officer in the Volunteer Corps (concerned with ‘the sticking of Frenchmen instead of the sticking of insects’ as one colleague quipped). Whatever the explanation, Marsham had no alternative but to borrow in order to pay that bill, one loan led to another and eventually he was suspected of drawing on Linnean Society funds and required to resign. By then he had been reduced to a pitiable state, and within three years he was dead.

Marsham’s specimens passed to James Francis Stephens, the author of a third and even more substantial publication on beetles, thereby providing an element of continuity. That began to appear in 1827, taking up the first five volumes of his uncompleted, long-running part-work, Illustrations of British Entomology (Fig. 60). A clerk in the Admiralty Office who had the good fortune to be released on protracted secondment to the British Museum to help catalogue its insect collections, Stephens had been a dedicated coleopterist since at least 1810, in which year Dawson Turner had commended him in a letter to a friend for ‘the ne plus ultra of Entomological ardor’ in having made a 400-mile journey just to obtain an example of one species.

Unfortunately, Stephens was by temperament the kind of person who relishes production lines for their own sake, self-measured by output: he did not have the patience to examine specimens with adequate minuteness, obstinately forswearing the use of a microscope. The defects in that approach became all too apparent when he took time off from his great part-work, once that had progressed beyond the beetles, to stamp his authority on that group further in luring even Longman into entering this specialised sector of the market in 1839 with A Manual of the British Coleoptera. Running in its turn to a massive 443 pages, this companion work of his would effectively have the handbook field to itself for the two decades to follow. Although in the very next year a rank outsider, the firm of Crofts, was tempted to try its luck too, with The British Coleoptera Delineated, of which the delineator in question (of its 94 plates), William J. Spry, was paired with W. E. Shuckard as the provider of the shortish accompanying text, that proved hardly a serious competitor.

If those two publishers supposed that they were riding an ascending wave, however, they were soon to be shown up as mistaken. For already signs were appearing that the favourable trade wind that had borne along such hitherto unlikely commercial ventures was beginning to drop. Though three parts may have been all that Henry Bohn had ever envisaged for F. W. Hope’s The Coleopterist’s Manual before that came to an end in 1840 after three years, the one solitary fascicle beyond which A. H. Haliday’s Hymenoptera Britannica had failed to proceed only the year previously was undisguisedly a failure for Hippolyte Baillière, as knowledgeable a navigator in such out-of-the-way waters as the invariably canny Bohn. Shuckard’s Elements of British Entomology suffered a similarly premature demise at Baillière’s hands within that very same span of months, strengthening the impression that there had been an unexpected change in the market weather. Even without that, however, coleopterists had surely been presented by then with as many works of reference as they had need of or were mostly able to afford. A pause on the part of the publishers was in any case overdue. Books, moreover, were no longer the sole means of printed communication in a field such as this, for specialised journals were now coming into existence, in which novelties could be described and interesting finds placed on record no less satisfactorily. The enthusiasm of the beetle collectors continued to be sustained well enough just by those and by the meetings of the societies that catered for them too. Henceforward, the output of book titles on any particular minority interest would cease to be a reliable indicator of its popularity at the time: it could equally well be an artefact of misplaced judgement within the trade.

***

Apart from propelling more entomologists into those underinvestigated side-branches, their great expansion in numbers post Kirby and Spence also had the effect of turning them into a self-consciously separate community. The glue of Linnaean methodology and of the society that constituted the corporate expression of that, which had been temporarily holding the different parts of natural history together, was beginning to lose its grip. While it is true that botanists and entomologists had led independent existences since the start of the eighteenth century as far as London was concerned, spasmodically throwing up little societies that catered for their special interests, that tendency had long continued to be highly localised and the memberships too small and too unenduringly cohesive to convey a sense of nationwide apartness. From around 1740 till 1824 London had no fewer than six nominally distinct entomological societies at one period or another, fostered by the specially intense commitment to forming personal collections, and consequently the exchanging of specimens, characteristic of that field of study. Though leading entomologists like Marsham and Kirby appreciated the wider horizons of the Linnean Society and no doubt its library and more elevated atmosphere socially as well as intellectually, becoming Fellows early on, they were the exceptions. That the loyalties of Adrian Henry Haworth, another leading figure (Fig. 61), were even so divided is shown by his having founded one of those specialist societies (in 1801) while retaining his Linnean Fellowship. That was the more revealing in view of the fact that a passion for cultivating and studying succulent plants was scarcely inferior to his devotion to collecting and describing Lepidoptera. In the latter respect, indeed, Haworth performed very much the same role in British entomology as that performed in British botany by the arch-Linnaean, Smith. His majestic four-volume monograph, Lepidoptera Britannica, which the august firm of John Murray spent most of the first quarter of the century (1803–28) bringing out part by part, was as much the standard text in that field for many years as Smith’s The English Flora was in its. What is more, it was based on the Linnaean classification as well as similarly written in Latin and austerely unillustrated. In both works, too, the unusually detailed descriptions had been drawn up directly from specimens studied completely afresh. The two men even both died suddenly, at much the same age—so suddenly in Haworth’s case that he was carried off by cholera from total health in under 24 hours. Yet again, like Smith, he was another of that generation’s many naturalists who trained for a profession, in Haworth’s case law, but who could afford not to practise and opted to devote their time and intellect instead to demanding scholarly work. Without the steady supply of such men, who could also afford to put into print the products of their labours at a time when that was still more or less beyond the means of everyone else, natural history in that era would have been infinitely less well provided-for in its basic need of comprehensive sets of illustrations and descriptions. Over and above that, though, the fact that what they produced tended to become standard works, widely owned and continually referred to over an exceptionally long period, could in some cases have an accidental bonus. Haworth’s Lepidoptera Britannica was a particularly good example: during a period in which the scientific names of the butterflies and moths were in a bewildering state of flux, the vernacular names used in that work were able to serve as a stable alternative means of communication between collectors.

Haworth never ceased to be unhappy with the yoking of entomology to botany within the Linnean Society, and increasingly zoologists of other stripes came to share that unhappiness too. For a time, the society staved off the threat of mass desertions by creating a Zoological Club and conceding to that a large degree of autonomy within its overall framework; but eventually that compromise was found unsatisfactory too. The founding of the Zoological Society of London in 1826 was not at first a serious threat, as its focus was initially on establishing its menagerie; but gradually its scientific activities grew in importance and soon proved capable of attracting Linnean Fellows. Finally, in 1833, a long-feared full-scale breakaway took place, with the forming of an Entomological Society of London of much greater substance and (as it turned out) staying-power than any of its string of short-lived predecessors.

The appearance only three years after that of a Botanical Society of London too may have been interpreted at first as the arrival of the undertakers. That body, however, had no such ambitions: it set out to recruit at a lower social level and to cater in the main for collectors of British and Irish plants as well as for beginners, and so never constituted a serious rival to the Linnean despite the enfeebled and semi-moribund condition the latter had by that point fallen into for a combination of reasons.

What the Botanical Society did do, however, as vocally as it could, was to champion the newly ascendant rival to the Linnaean classification, the natural system. For many years by then that had not been without one or two brave protagonists, who waged a kind of guerrilla warfare on its behalf, never quite entirely stamped out by the ferocious retaliations of the Linnaeans. In 1829, however, that cause at last found a powerful and fearless spokesman in the young appointee to the newly-created chair of botany at University College London, John Lindley (Fig. 62). In a volume based on his opening course of lectures bearing the title—with a provocative sting in its tail—A Synopsis of the British Flora: Arranged according to the Natural Orders, Lindley used the preface to denounce the Linnaean classification as ‘a system which has almost disappeared from every country but our own, and which ought now to find no other place in science than among the records of things whose fame has passed away.’ Warmly received by the young, those words predictably proved too strong for some of his seniors; undaunted by their protests, however, he returned to the attack, in much more vehement terms, in the preface to the second edition six years later. This time, while conceding that the Linnaean system ‘effected much temporary good’, he insisted that ‘when it fell into the hands of such men as were esteemed the heads of the Linnaean System during the last quarter of a century, it became a positive incumbrance upon science … Wherever the influence of the Linnaean school extended, the science itself gradually declined; … it became so feeble and impotent as to meet with universal public neglect.’ By 1820, botany in Britain ‘was bedridden and paralytic’ as a result. The Linnaean system, he roundly declared, now found favour only with ‘those to whom it is endured by old habits and ancient recollections’, was ‘repudiated everywhere by the rising generation’ and ‘ought to be excluded from all courses of public instruction.’

A kind of inverted funeral oration, that marked the end of the nearly century-long Linnaean rule. Even so, relics of it lingered on for two decades more. So deep was the devotion to the older system in more conservative parts that the authors of one county catalogue, a Flora Devoniensis published by Longman in 1829, felt obliged to go to the costly length of presenting that as two separately paginated halves, arranged on the one system and then the other in turn. As late as 1845, a maker of natural history cabinets put onto the market a jigsaw puzzle consisting of the genera of Mollusca ‘arranged according to the System of Linnaeus’. Later still, in the 1850s, at that renowned home of lost causes, the University of Oxford, its professor of botany decided to adopt the Linnaean classification for the Botanic Garden’s collection of British species. Perhaps he intended it as a parting gesture of defiance.

CHAPTER 8
Self-Help

THE INCREASING OVERSPILLS OF interest into areas of the subject that were intrinsically less attractive brought to the fore the long-looming problem of how the crucial monographs of those, once written—as assuredly they sooner or later would be—could be made adequately available by being put into print. The species requiring to be described and, ideally, illustrated as well were likely to be so numerous in almost every case that a properly comprehensive account could not avoid extending to a very considerable size. Even supposing the cost of printing were to be brought down drastically by some miracle, fiscal or economic, it was difficult to see such works ever selling in sufficient quantity to render them commercial propositions without heavy subsidies. And although individual naturalists of ample means had so far been prepared to supply those subsidies in certain cases, the potential calls on their munificence threatened to be too many and continual to make that a reliable solution in the longer term. The only alternative, therefore, was for ways to be devised of spreading the cost, either over time or among numbers of individuals, so that it was rendered relatively undaunting to any one person.

One such way, as it happened, was already in being, though its possibilities in this particular direction had not been fully tested yet. This was the part-work: a book masquerading as a periodical to the extent of appearing in instalments at (in theory) standard intervals, but differing in being devoted to a particular topic throughout. As a publishing method it shared with periodicals the attraction that money was received in advance, in the form of subscriptions, and that could be banked and earning interest before the printer’s bill had to be paid; in addition, the publisher could spread his costs over a longer period, gaining more time to prepare the plates that were a sine qua non if the necessary number of subscribers were to be brought in to render the venture apparently feasible. Tentatively introduced latish in the seventeenth century, the method was becoming popular about the time that Albin introduced it to the world of natural history early in the century following. Here, as we have seen, its adoption was at first artist-driven, for it was a device most obviously open to professional painters who wished to bring their work out in book form. It was the paintings that brought in the subscribers, they well knew, and the requisite accompaniment of some text was so very secondary in importance that they could turn to someone else of greater literacy or better knowledge to produce that anonymously on their behalf, if necessary. Had it not been for the luck that one or two of the painters came to delight in collecting and breeding butterflies and moths in addition to painting them, consequently treating the volumes they produced as a way of communicating with fellow enthusiasts for that branch of natural history, part-publication might long have been regarded as having no particular relevance for the study of the native fauna or flora. Entomology, however, was special: the need to run after insects and wield eccentric equipment tended to confine its appeal to the less sedate and the less well-off—the very antithesis of the typical buyers of beautiful books for elegant libraries. The only way in which the general run of lepidopterists could hope to have the practical benefit of volumes like those of Benjamin Wilkes and Moses Harris was by being able to purchase them by easy instalments. Part-works thus came to be recognised by each of the parties concerned, artists, naturalists, publishers and booksellers, as the best means yet available of providing those most in need of them with well-illustrated works of identification while also, in the process, extending the market for natural history books into new social territory.

Part-publishing was by no means a charity operation, however. It was still rightly seen as a way of making a lot of money as well as losing a lot of it too. That it did not necessarily have to perform the role of a crutch so far as natural history was concerned was amply demonstrated by the large profit made through this method in the closely allied field of horticulture by the Botanical Magazine, launched in 1787 by William Curtis (Fig. 63). Admittedly, there were many more connoisseurs of hothouse exotics than there were potential subscribers to a comparable work on the wild flora or fauna of Britain at that period, but choosing a topic with a large public following could not guarantee success in itself. Nor could superb illustrations do so either—and no work on British botany has had more superb ones than Curtis’s concurrent Flora Londinensis – if the strict discipline in production that the method requires was not observed as well. For by its very nature it is susceptible to two main uncertainties: for one reason or another the parts may not appear with the regularity that the subscribers are entitled to expect and, far worse, the work may not survive long enough to complete its intended run. Not a few natural history part-works, indeed, have continued no further than the initial volume, and sometimes not even that: the plates and/or the text have not come up to the expectations aroused by the prospectus, subscriptions have fallen off steeply and, in the absence of emergency inputs of funds by the author or patrons, the publisher has had to call a halt. In one exceptionally ill-fated case, The Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera, published by Longman in 1846–52, the original author of the text, Edward Doubleday of the British Museum, was first so deeply affected by the death of his father that he was temporarily forced to break off when the work had reached its 14th part; then the artist, W. C. Hewitson, went down with a long and severe illness at the 20th; and finally, at still not even the halfway point, Doubleday suddenly died (at the age of only forty-eight). The one bit of luck the project had was that the no less capable J. O. Westwood proved available to step in and take the text to completion (Fig. 64). Considering how prone the Victorians were to illness, it was miraculous that hardly any part-works seem to have terminated prematurely from that cause.

Some of those who initiated these inevitably long-running ventures, particularly if they were entrepreneurs by temperament and relished the challenge of starting up but were inclined to become bored, failed to appreciate that their undivided attention was required throughout. Dawson Turner fell down on the task from that cause twice over: not only did he let down Borrer over their Lichenographia Britannica, as we have seen, but he similarly allowed his numerous competing interests and commitments to take him away from an earlier part-work of his, on seaweeds (Fuci, of 1807–19) (Figs 65 & 66). It was also a major reason why William Curtis never managed to make a profit, let alone the hoped-for fortune, out of his Flora Londinensis. Energetic but chronically restless, Curtis had forsaken practice as an apothecary for running courses on herb recognition for students, and those in turn for an increasingly ambitious succession of commercial botanic gardens, while producing an occasional work or two on entomology in the meantime. He would have done much better to delegate the Flora to a full-time editor with the kind of stern discipline and unswerving drive that John Gould was to bring to his own comparable undertakings. It was fortunate that Flora Londinensis was so desirable a work that the subscribers were not easily shaken off, but for that same reason they were quick to complain, and very vociferously, when the appearance of the parts became erratic. Three years into the work Thomas Frankland wrote from York to express ‘much disappointment’ that only two numbers had been published in about 10 months. After delays continued, an exasperated Lightfoot was moved to remonstrate altogether more forthrightly: ‘I thought you a man of more spirit and perseverance than to creep at the rate of a number in two months. Let me entreat you for the sake of your own credit and reputation … to move on with more vigour and expedition.’ What these malcontents probably did not realise was that Curtis had seriously underestimated at the outset the size of the overall investment needed, and latterly the work was to be saved from collapse only by generous loans from that almost bottomless purse of the Earl of Bute and from an affluent physician, J. C. Lettsom. In the end its completion took 23 years, but though a far longer time than most other natural history part-works ran to at that period that was to be equalled by its contemporary, English Botany – which was very efficiently managed by comparison—and well exceeded by Haworth’s Lepidoptera Britannica. It thus served as a warning of what subscribers must be prepared for in the case of a venture that aimed to cover with some thoroughness a sector of natural history made up of very many species.

Very few who had had no experience of bringing out a work by this method were probably aware of how nerve-wrackingly complex such operations normally were. They resembled nothing so much as erecting a large building, in which teams of craftsmen—bricklayers, plasterers, carpenters, glaziers and so forth—have to be brought on site in a rigorously controlled sequence and each required to complete their respective tasks within a specified period. In the early nineteenth century, when this form of publishing was in its heyday, up to eight successive stages could have to be gone through from start to finish (though one or more of the middle ones could be dispensed with if the special skills involved were combined in one person). Each stage had to be completed before the next one could be embarked upon, and at every juncture hold-ups were liable to occur.

The first step was for the author to draw up a prospectus, complete with one or more specimen plates, and have copies of that printed and circulated to likely individuals and appropriate booksellers. Only when that prerequisite was available could the tedious and time-consuming process begin of signing up subscribers and collecting the normal initial deposit (the balance being usually deferred till the entire work was completed). The difficulty of this naturally varied, depending on the subject and the overall cost involved. Gould found 397 people able to contemplate paying nearly £80—equivalent to about £4,000 today—for a set of his Birds of Great Britain in 1862–73, but he was fortunate to be able to look to the wealthier members of the shooting classes for much of his custom, and it is no great surprise to learn that he succeeded in securing sales from 12 monarchs and more than 100 peers (Fig. 67). He also had an established, international reputation by then for producing works of this kind impressively on schedule. By contrast, a newcomer like Sarah Bowdich, inexperienced in such matters and perhaps with few personal contacts after many years overseas, evidently had much less success in prising subscriptions out of anglers for her no less beautiful The Fresh Water Fishes of Great Britain, to judge from the rarity of surviving copies. Timing must also have been important. Flora Londinensis was launched in 1775 on the back of the wave for Linnaean botany, but half a century later to recruit again some 320 subscribers for a similar work on British wild flowers would have been considerably more difficult in a botanical community that no longer included the opulent in anything like the same proportion.

Quite an armoury of ploys was used in the attempt to lure subscribers. The commonest and most obvious was to offer a discount for any who signed up by a specified date. More subtle were various methods of playing upon vanity: undertaking to print subscribers’ names in the opening number, inviting the cost of individual plates to be donated in return for having them personally dedicated, or producing an exclusive edition of a specially superior quality. The first edition of William Lewin’s The Birds of Great Britain was limited to just 66 copies, in which the 323 plates were all original drawings coloured by that professional artist himself—and consequently today very much sought after. But probably no one stooped so low as Gould once did: as a condition of one wealthy collector subscribing for a set of one of his ultra-expensive works, he agreed to sell him an egg of the extinct great auk that had come into his possession.

Once sufficient money had been subscribed in advance to justify starting production, a full set of sketches had to be drawn as a basis for the engraving (or, alternatively, after 1820, lithographing)—assuming original paintings were not to be used. If the author had the requisite artistic skill, he sensibly did those drawings himself, in view of the substantial saving in cost that allowed; otherwise, one or more others had to be commissioned to do them instead, in which case it was best if they were naturalists themselves. Unless the author’s own collection was sufficiently extensive to contain examples of all the species needing to be drawn, a public or private museum served as a substitute or supplement, access or even loans being usually granted in view of the expected benefit to science. Sadly, artists who worked in a subordinate capacity by no means always received the acclaim or even recognition that was properly their due, forfeiting much or all of that to the person identified as the work’s originator or manager—just as the director of a film may completely overshadow its actors in the eyes of the public. John Gould provides the best example of that ‘over-branding’ tendency: praised and renowned for the beauty of ‘his’ books, he was in reality no more than an indifferent draughtsman himself and as far as that aspect was concerned depended heavily on his wife Elizabeth and, after her early death, on her two brilliant successors, Edward Lear and Joseph Wolf in turn (Fig. 69). But it was not only artists who suffered from lazy mental shorthand of this kind: the supplier of the text, which could be as important and as valuable as the plates, could be unfairly demoted as well, as Smith tended to be when people spoke of English Botany, much to the chagrin of that spoilt young man; admittedly, though, it was James Sowerby who had conceived that work in the first place, who risked his money on it, and who produced all the plates, which were probably the major reason for buying it as far as most of the subscribers were concerned.

The next, and most taxing, stage was transferring the sketches to metal or stone. Metal engraving has been in use for works of natural history ever since the mid-sixteenth century, initially in the form of etching (with an acid) and soon after that with line engraving (with a steel burin) as an alternative. Engraving from a drawing was highly skilled work that in expert hands could produce results that were very pleasing artistically, if not necessarily scientifically also. It was, however, very time-consuming and so very costly if put out to specialist craftsmen, and for that reason many naturalist authors went to the trouble of learning to do their etching for themselves. Among those were Albin, Edwards, Bolton, Lewin and the incomparable Prideaux John Selby (Fig. 70), the Northumberland squire whose etchings for his Illustrations of British Ornithology, published in quarto by the Edinburgh firm of Constable in 1821–34, are rated by Britain’s foremost authority on bird art, Christine Jackson, as the most magnificent ever achieved (Fig. 71). Selby was taught the technique by a naval brother-in-law, an amateur artist who had learned it himself from no less a teacher than Bewick. Cutting out the professional engraver had the added advantage that, if the drawings had been produced by a naturalist, they were spared the risk of losing their original subtleties of detail in the hands of someone unfamiliar with the plants or creatures depicted, as notoriously often happened.

Around 1830 copper-plate engraving was overtaken in popularity by lithography. That had been invented in Germany some 30 years earlier but did not arrive in Britain till 1817, when its manifest superiority for natural history work caused it to be immediately pounced upon for use in a geological book. In welcome contrast to placing the artist at the mercy of a non-naturalist intermediary, this new technique allowed his drawing to be transferred to a plate directly. Minute details, the importance of which only the naturalist could appreciate, were thus ensured of being preserved. Apart from that, the cost was only about a third of engraving on copper, and printing the result was quicker. On the other hand it required a printing-press of a very different kind and the procedure was undeniably messy: ‘lampblack and grease work’, Edward Lear was to call it, and the greater strain involved drove him to painting landscapes in watercolour for a living in its stead. The mess arose from the need first to use a greasy crayon for putting the drawing onto a certain kind of limestone and then to apply an oil-based ink that adheres to the lines.

William Swainson was persuaded by W. E. Leach to adopt this then novel technique for the first series of his Zoological Illustrations of 1820–23, with a view to demonstrating its potential for natural history works. It was probably unwise to have chosen for such an experiment an extensive work that was due to be produced in monthly parts, when the process was still so uncertain that it was often necessary to repeat a drawing two or three times before the printer came up with a reasonably satisfactory impression. Swainson soon decided he needed to move from his home in Liverpool and live in lodgings in London for most of each year in order to be permanently on hand. In the end, though, the results were generally agreed to be brilliant, and many doubters were won over to the new technique. Others, however, were to be disillusioned, after having bad experiences. One such was Hooker, who was put off by the laboriousness and uncertainty he had found lithography involved at that early stage and went out of his way to try to discourage W. H. Harvey (Fig. 72) from using it for his projected part-work on seaweeds, Phycologia Britannica. Harvey must have received better reports, however, for he went ahead and employed it none the less, doing all the drawing and lithographing himself. Another who proved dissatisfied was Joseph Wolf, but in his case it was the loss in freshness and vigour when his drawings (for Gould’s Birds of Great Britain) were transferred to stone that produced the disappointment.

Lithographic illustration, at any rate, ‘almost invited hand-colouring’, in the words of a leading historian of these techniques. And as far as part-works were concerned that was the necessary next stage, for they would scarcely have been viable propositions without taking advantage of natural history’s special strength in the competition to attract the general book-buyer by providing a generous splash of colour plates. If these plates were at the same time to serve the needs of naturalists, by doubling as aids to identification, it was essential, however, that they included a lot of fine detail, and until the mid-nineteenth century the only way in which that as well as the colour could be captured by the printer, at any rate satisfactorily and not too expensively, was for the colour to be put on to the engraving or lithograph by hand, as an independent process.

In the hands of an expert, like George Graves, who supervised the team of 30 or so engaged for the hand-colouring of Flora Londinensis, the effect produced could be a wonderfully precise resemblance to an original watercolour painting. Normally, though, employing experts was much too costly for a job that the trade liked to think could be done passably well, as a low-level routine, by poorly paid women and older children. In some cases these could include, or be wholly replaced by, members of the author’s own family (as for William Baxter’s British Phaenogamous Botany, for example), as a way of cutting the cost further still. However well supervised, though, the skill and degree of application of each individual colourist inevitably varied; at worst, little better than daubs were the outcome. The complexity of the task could vary considerably too, in the number of colours and the amount of detail involved. When the work had to be hurried, to meet a deadline, it was liable to be inferior from that cause in turn. The resulting unevenness was not uncommonly so glaring that subscribers were moved to complain. ‘Your colourists are by no means equal,’ snapped that regular critic of Flora Londinensis, Thomas Frankland: though some plates were very good, he conceded, ‘some I wish plain again.’ An alternative often open to the more fussy on this score, like him, was to pay for a special set of an altogether higher standard, which could be had for half as much again. Hand-colouring still continues to this day for producing works of more-than-ordinary splendour, in which cost is only a minor consideration, but as an everyday technique it did not survive the advent of chromolithography later in that century.

Once the artwork had been completed, there was the comparatively simple matter of putting together the ration of text, known as the letterpress, that was to accompany each particular batch of plates which together with that constituted a ‘number’. If the text was the responsibility of someone uninvolved in the artwork, as was the case with English Botany, then it could be being produced while the other was in progress—though doubtless that did not always happen. Spared the numerous possibilities of delay that the production of the artwork was subject to, the letterpress was in any case much quicker to produce, particularly if that was done ‘off-site’, away from the distractions of a populous workshop. As a result, it could be piling up while the plates scheduled to complement it were badly behind. Such a situation was presumably responsible for the extraordinary disjunction that developed in Morris’s Natural History of British Moths for a period in the 1860s, when the letterpress outran the plates by several ‘numbers’. In an effort to appease the subscribers, after a serious interruption had occurred in the artwork supply line, it must have been decided to carry on providing them with reading matter rather than jeopardise the continuance of the project with a lengthy vacuum in which nothing appeared at all. To appease them further, they were sent free copies, spread over two years and seven issues, of A Catalogue of British Insects in all the Orders compiled by Morris, until eventually normal service was resumed. Whether that satisfied the subscribers or not, it has at least provided later book collectors with a bibliographical curiosity of a kind they particularly relish, with the added spice that not all surviving copies are of the same length and in most of them one publisher’s name has been crossed out and another’s substituted in its stead.

Before a range of learned journals began to become a standard feature of scientific life, from the 1830s onwards, part-works necessarily stood in for those to some extent as a periodical medium in which to announce the latest discoveries of note and describe new species. Despite their inherently finite existence, they were in many cases more reliably long-term than most of the first generation of those journals proved to be, so they continued for many years to serve a valuable supplementary role in that respect. Starved of journals in which to publish, naturalists of the highest calibre were consequently available as outside contributors of letterpress. Such an arrangement, however, was not always without a certain tension, as well shown by the condescending behaviour that Smith all along displayed towards James Sowerby in contributing to English Botany. Apart from giving the impression that he was doing a great favour by deigning to risk his scientific reputation by publishing original scholarly matter in an undisguisedly speculative venture, largely dependent on the pulling-power of its illustrations, Smith persisted in preserving a social distance and keeping their relationship on a strictly business footing, despite the fact that Sowerby was a fellow naturalist of patently wide knowledge and ability.

In the case of some of the earlier part-works (though not English Botany) a special refinement was for the letterpress to be produced in another language in addition to English, in order to extend the sale on the Continent. The extra one chosen for Dawson Turner’s Fuci was Latin, but more often English was paired with French, at that time the language next in importance to Latin in scientific circles across the Channel. This practice brought into play a clever cost-saving dodge at the printing stage, the second language being run on the back of the same page that held the English version.

Printing, of course, was subject to delays of its own no less than the artwork stages—particularly if the sending out and return of proofs are regarded as part of that process. It was also by no means a once-only operation, for part-works could grow and fall in demand quite considerably at different periods on their journey from launch to termination, as word spread about their excellence or their very publication increased the amount of interest in the particular branch of natural history they were covering, just as they could so fail to come up to the prospectus or so deteriorate over time that many subscriptions were cancelled. Initial underestimates of demand could easily be rectified by reprinting in part, while serious mistakes in the other direction could be mitigated discreetly by remaindering. A particularly extreme example of the former occurred with Edward Donovan’s Natural History of British Insects, which ran to 16 volumes from 1792 till 1813, one of six zoological part-works he produced in which the illustrations were all drawn and hand-coloured by himself (Figs 73 & 74). So unexpectedly great was the surge in the sale of that after its arrival in the bookshops that no fewer than seven reprintings proved necessary even before the second volume came out (and the work in its entirety preceded ‘Kirby and Spence’, be it noted). It might be inferred from this that Donovan had the great good luck to have a publisher nimble and canny enough to extract the maximum profit from such a situation for both the author and themselves. Unfortunately, though, as he was to discover to his horror only much later, putting oneself into the hands of a firm as commercially sharp as Rivington could work both ways. As he was to reveal in a bitter seven-page memorandum circulated among his fellow entomologists near the end of his life, through naivety on his part the then standard arrangement of an equal share of profits had apparently never been put down in writing in the case of any of his works that the firm had handled. When no payments proved forthcoming, Rivington were repeatedly evasive, in effect defying him to sue, confident in the knowledge that he could produce no documentary evidence to support his case. Once wealthy enough to spend heavily on putting together a personal museum unrivalled in its coverage of the British fauna in all its branches, eventually so extensive and spectacular as to be put on public display in London’s West End for a number of years, Donovan’s diligence in illustrating and describing much of the contents thus brought him none of the prosperity on which he had been counting; and he ended up by having to dispose of his great collection by auction, broken-hearted as well as seriously embarrassed financially.

After the printing, the final production stage for the part-work was not, as one might suppose, sending the pages to be bound, as with a book of the normal kind. Instead, binding was regarded as the subscriber’s responsibility, to allow them the opportunity of making some rearrangement (such as into the Linnaean order, as William Curtis intended to be done when Flora Londinensis was completed, or having the plates and the letterpress kept apart en bloc in separate volumes, as Selby did, a dodge which enabled the author to reduce the number of free copies that had to be deposited by law at the Stationers’ Office). To that end, subscribers would have been sent the contents in a numbered sequence as publication proceeded, together with the title page and other prefatory matter plus, at the relevant intervals, an index to each volume that the individual ‘numbers’ constituted. The lengthier part-works were divided up on more than ordinarily elaborate lines, for convenience of reference: in the case of Flora Londinensis, for example, the ‘numbers’ were grouped 12 to a ‘fascicule’, and three ‘fascicules’ in turn made up each of the two volumes concerned.

What must have seemed at the time much the most trivial of all the many procedures involved in the whole long-drawn-out process has turned out in later years to have been of very great value. This was the printing (or writing) of the full calendar date of issue on the paper wrappers into which it was standard practice for the pages constituting a ‘number’ to be stitched before being sent out. Although it has always been obvious that the lengthier part-works must have been published over a number of years, in the case of many shorter ones this was liable to become lost to sight once they had been bound. To obscure matters further, a slipshod usage had grown up of taking the year given on the title page as denoting that the work as a whole had appeared within that period—which common sense ought to have suggested was in many cases hardly likely. Though for the average person that was of little moment, for anyone concerned with applying scientific names in accordance with the law of priority that underpins the international codes of botanical and zoological nomenclature such vague dating became a growing worry. So very many new names were being published during the period when the greatest number of these part-works were appearing that the decision on which name had priority could in some cases turn on a particular month or even day, let alone a year. A highly specialised branch of bibliographical scholarship developed in response, one product of which was the founding of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History in 1936. After much laborious detective work in libraries and archives in many parts of the world, surviving examples of the original wrappers (which were commonly discarded at the binding stage) have been run to earth, enabling the sequence of publication of such works to be reconstructed in detail and the date of the appearance of the individual ‘numbers’ to be established definitively.

A further refinement in this esoteric line of research has recently arisen from the realisation that the wrappers have in some cases been written upon by whoever was responsible for seeing the work in question through the press, having been found handy for comments of one kind or another, answers to queries about the content of future parts or even extracts from letters received from subscribers—all of it matter apparently not repeated in print subsequently, and some at least of evident historical value. The wrappers used for H. T. Stainton’s classic, A Manual of British Butterflies and Moths, which initially appeared in parts in 1856–9, are one example. This realisation has given rise in turn to the need to devise a standard way of indicating in references on which particular part or parts of a wrapper such matter has been written. The contribution to natural history of bibliographical scholarship has surely found in this its ultimate stratum of penetrability.

***

Despite the many opportunities for delay, error and substandard performance in a production process of such length and intricacy, authors themselves were capable of injecting jarring uncertainties of their own, sometimes through surprising thoughtlessness. On one occasion Harvey announced at short notice that he proposed to suspend work on Phytologia Britannica for 12 months. This drew an understandably exasperated response from the publisher, Lovell Reeve, pointing out that, if only he had been given longer warning, he could have arranged to avoid interrupting the continuity in publication by bringing out parts at half the intended rate, in every alternate month instead. To leave the subscribers with nothing for a whole year, he went on, would both injure his firm’s reputation and cause new and potential purchasers of the work to lose confidence that it would be completed. If Harvey was determined to drop out for the length of time he was envisaging, Reeve suggested that maybe another authority on seaweeds, such as Greville or David Landsborough, might prove willing to supervise copy in his absence. As both of those two lived far away in Scotland, the London-based Reeve presumably saw that role as amounting to little more than proofreading.

However, other authors of part-works had already found that much closer and almost continued involvement with the production process was necessary. If they were inextricably rooted in some other part of the country—and so unable to relocate for the duration of the project, as Swainson wisely did—they needed to arrange for some trusted friend with relevant experience and knowledge to deputise for them on the spot. Thus, stuck up in Norfolk, Dawson Turner relied on a fellow banker and botanist in London, Edward Forster, to act on his behalf in negotiating the terms on which a new publisher there was prepared to take over his Fuci. Similarly, Harvey soon realised that it was impracticable to deal directly from Dublin with all the many matters that arose as Phytologia Britannica passed through production in London, and turned to William Hooker and his son Joseph, conveniently nearby at Kew, to keep a running eye for him on progress.

Collaborating at a distance, and at the mercy of unreliable and expensive mails, added an extra layer of tension and mishaps to a type of operation fraught with more than enough of those already. Authors and publishers tended to have clashing aims from the start, but that was more the case as a growing surplus of would-be publishers of these works over willing and knowledgeable providers of the texts and illustrations tilted the balance in favour of the latter and required their wishes to be taken account of as never before. While publishers had their standards no less than artists or authors, naturalists made particularly exacting co-workers, for they were not only visually very aware, but dealt in an intellectual small coinage of differentiating details that were difficult to communicate to others without their intimate acquaintance with the plants and animals concerned. If those details were portrayed incorrectly or inadequately, the worst that could happen to the publisher was fewer subscriptions for the work in question than hoped for, its premature abandonment and a heavy resulting loss;for the naturalist, however, a lifelong reputation could be at stake. Precision was all-important to the one party, but keeping down costs an ever-present consideration for the other. They were bound to be uncomfortable bedfellows.

Even if the publisher was himself a respected naturalist and more than capable of spotting scientific errors made by the contributor of the letterpress (as James Sowerby was), and if the latter was a touchy perfectionist, impatient with commercial constraints (as Smith was in his turn), there was still ample scope for criticisms and disagreements, generating a vast correspondence if they were situated at a great distance from one another, as those two were throughout the 24 years of their collaboration on English Botany. In that period, it has been estimated, not fewer than 700 letters passed between them on that subject. It is no wonder some naturalists came to regret ever having allowed themselves to become caught up in what must have seemed at times interminable ventures, rivals for energy that could have been expended on collecting or research probably to much greater profit and certainly more enjoyably. In some cases even the subscribers wearied of these long-term commitments to which they had chained themselves. ‘I shall be glad if I live to see the end of the monthly works, etc., which I am taking in,’ sighed Bishop Goodenough in a letter to Smith in 1814. But he persisted none the less.

The generations that have come afterwards have much reason to be grateful that those massive burdens were even so shouldered, oppressive though they tended to become. For the result has been a glorious legacy of beautiful works that very few comparable subjects can boast, works moreover with plates of such trueness to nature that some of them can still even today serve as useful guides for the inexperienced, enabling them to identify at least the commonest species they encounter.

At the same time there is a certain irony in the fact that some of these works were created out of desperation—for want of apparently any alternative. For a naturalist of slender means who had devoted years to the study of some particular section of the native flora or fauna there seemed to be then no other way of putting the distillation of that into print. Equally, buying by easy instalments seemed the only way of enabling such a person to own for ready reference a comprehensive, authoritative, up-to-date, adequately illustrated ‘bible’ of a kind essential for any serious worker. That desperation helps to account for the heroic way in which some authors persisted with a part-work in the face of a looming heavy loss. Whether or how far it was going to end up in the red or the black could often have been difficult to gauge until quite a late juncture, and to have had to amputate at that point so major an undertaking into which so much dedication and effort had gone over such a lengthy period would have been heartbreaking.Throughout these ventures subscribers must have fluctuated in number for one reason or another, and not necessarily in response to the quality or reliability of what they were being given. Production costs, too, must have been hard to predict in view of the possibilities for delay at almost every stage. Blue skies at the start, moreover, could become clouded all too thickly and ominously by the unforeseen arrival of a too-direct competitor. The near-total coincidence in duration of two similar part-works on British entomology, with even confusingly similar titles, by John Curtis and J. F. Stephens respectively, could well be the explanation of why both of those reputedly made a considerable loss. Had they not coincided, maybe the incomparably fine plates of Curtis would have brought that work the success enjoyed by its contemporary and counterpart, Selby’s Illustrations of British Ornithology – success at least to the extent of more than covering its costs (as Selby confided to Audubon).

For all the succour it brought to natural history’s most favoured fields of interest, the part-work was nevertheless only a part-solution for the subject as a whole. There still remained the eternal problem of how the less appealing or more unobtrusive or inherently complex end of the spectrum of diversity with which naturalists have to grapple can receive its necessary share of printed monographs. Publishing inescapably ponderous works by instalments enabled useful inroads to be made into a book market governed by the iron laws of economics, but those inroads could be taken only so far. Generally speaking, only those sections of the plant or animal kingdoms that combined everyday attractiveness with a large enough number of reasonably distinct entities to sustain a serial publication for as long as several years lent themselves to this form of treatment. Large swathes of the subject were still left in limbo. Any area of study that lacked a large enough following to yield enough subscribers to underwrite the cost of even one major publication would have to remain bookless indefinitely, it seemed.

There were, it is true, important developments now in train that promised to widen dramatically the market for natural history. A cluster of innovations in its technology had at last brought a steep decline in the cost of printing; many new fortunes made in industry were working through into a major further leap forward in the numbers of the more or less leisured, many of whom were keen to demonstrate that status by forming libraries and by taking up pursuits—such as natural history—that already carried prestige but did not need to entail more than modest expenditure; ever more naturalists, and ever more books written and bought by them, were in turn enticing one or two more publishers to specialise in the subject. Yet none of these developments turned out to be able to close the monograph gap more than marginally. The specialist publishers bent over in that direction further and more often than they could reasonably have been expected to, given that the prospering of their businesses had to be their basic concern, but even for them there was a point beyond which it was too reckless to go, however strongly they might be tempted.

***

The answer to that dilemma was eventually hit upon by two leading naturalists quite independently. This was for the burden of providing the subsidies for works of value that were unpublishable commercially to be shouldered collectively—through the medium of a private book club of a kind that existed already for just such a purpose in several other areas of scholarship.

For over a century the question of which of the two individuals concerned came up with this idea first remained a matter of contention, ever since the claim of one of them, the then recently deceased rising star of both palaeontology and ornithology, Hugh Edwin Strickland, was championed at considerable length in a memorial volume by his father-in-law, the prominent Scottish zoologist Sir William Jardine. Strickland is probably best remembered today for the historical symbolism of the accident that tragically cut short a career of great promise: while examining a geological section in a Midlands railway cutting, he stepped back to avoid an oncoming train only to be killed by another that hurtled unnoticed from the other direction. Initially, Strickland had high hopes that the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in view of the valuable ‘umbrella’ role that body had come to perform since its founding in 1831, could be persuaded to act in such a capacity. Lobbying by him to that end had led to its sectional committees being given power to vote money for ‘the assistance of such works as were decidedly deserving of support’, but by 1843 it had become apparent that the Association was disinclined to release funds for such purposes in any systematic fashion. Furious at its supineness, Strickland decided to bypass it and began canvassing among naturalist friends the founding of a society, to be named in honour of George Montagu, for the purpose of ‘publishing illustrated Memoirs on Recent or Fossil Zoology, and Comparative Anatomy’, with an annual subscription of a pound and with an unlimited membership. Although (as it has turned out) much the greater need for the subsidised book publication was in zoology, it would have been regrettably divisive if Strickland’s preference for a body restricted just to those areas of natural history in which his own personal interests lay had commanded support. Fortunately, however, a rival proposal, much more fully worked-out, surfaced at that point and he chose to step aside in favour of that.

This one came from George Johnston (Fig. 75), a physician in Berwick-on-Tweed who had emerged as the dominant figure in natural history circles in the eastern Borders and who usefully combined botany with the now-burgeoning field of marine zoology. With the drive and breadth of vision that would carry him to prominence in the civic life of his home region, he had done the subject one signal national service already by inventing the original of that key organisational device of the Victorian era, the field club (in 1831). He now did it another, no less lastingly valuable one by putting forward a blueprint for what he suggested might most suitably be called the Ray Society, a choice of name which could serve the dual purpose of honouring that venerated predecessor and at the same time indicating that natural history in the wide sense in which Ray had interpreted those words was the area of concern (Fig. 76).

The recent celebration by that society of its 150th anniversary occasioned a thorough sifting of the surviving evidence bearing on Strickland’s claim to have been its founder, and the conclusive verdict arrived at was that the honour rightly belongs to Johnston, as most people have supposed all along. Johnston, it turns out, had been nursing the idea for quite some years before the other appeared on the scene, and there can be no question that it was essentially due to his energy and initiative that the idea was converted into reality. As one who spent his life remote from good libraries, he had long personal experience of the difficulties involved in studying more or less virgin areas of the subject without ready access to the relevant specialist literature. As early as 1835 he had grumbled to a fellow marine zoologist in a letter, ‘I have almost daily proof of the want of manuals in every department, for I am applied to to recommend the best book on Shells, on Zoophytes, on Worms, on Insects etc., and there are none.’ Four years later he had tried to interest the recent publisher of A History of British Zoophytes by Johnston himself, the Edinburgh printer W. H. Lizars, in bringing out a series of seven volumes on various groups of marine invertebrates, but without success. Eventually, in November 1843, his growing frustration boiled over on learning that even John Van Voorst, the principal London publisher specialising in natural history, had regretfully had to turn down a monograph of unsurpassed quality (of the British nudibranchiate Mollusca, popularly known as sea-slugs) by two Newcastle friends of his, Joshua Alder and Albany Hancock, as impossibly expensive to bring out without a subsidy so huge as to be equally impossible for those authors to afford. Appalled at the prospect of the fruits of so many years of toil and a work so scientifically much-needed lying indefinitely stranded, Johnston was finally provoked into hatching his scheme for a mutual society on broadly the same lines that Strickland was envisaging for his own.

After trying his ideas out on one or two likely people (including Jardine) and obtaining favourable reactions, Johnston proceeded to draw up a prospectus, and within a month he had sent out batches of that to leading naturalists in various parts of the British Isles, inviting them to sign up as members and help by recruiting others locally and among their friends. To Johnston’s surprise, however, quite a number of the recipients had misgivings. These were mainly on two counts: that another national society would be an unwelcome competitor with those already existing, potentially depriving their journals of valuable material, and that the subsidised publication of books could seriously endanger the livelihood of those who had built up businesses producing natural history works for profit. Both contentions were clearly far-fetched and the fears almost certainly groundless. A particularly adamant critic was the Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow, Walker Arnott, but Jardine, who had volunteered to approach that fellow Scot, in a letter of reassurance to Johnston memorably dismissed their opponent as merely a ‘prickly porcupine’, who ‘must poor fellow have been disappointed in love, or of some Chair.’ Others had reservations of a more trivial kind. One thought calling the proposed society after Ray would win it more support in Scotland if Sibbald’s name were to be added; another considered the number of volumes per annum envisaged over-ambitious; two even pointed out (surely in jest?) that ‘Ray’ had a fishy connotation and suggested that a body bearing that name was liable to be mistaken for a seafood dining club.

As Johnston reckoned 500 members were the minimum needed to make the scheme viable, the amount of cold water in this initial response was deeply discouraging, and he began to despair of success. While still far short of that total he decided all the same to take the risk of establishing the society formally, trusting that many more would come in once it was perceived to be a going concern. It accordingly came into being, with himself voted into office as the secretary, in February 1844. Little did he know it, but a better time at which to be launching a new natural history venture could hardly have been chosen, for to judge from two other occurrences in that year in Britain the omens for the subject were evidently particularly good: the first book ever to be illustrated with a photograph was published, and the earliest-known instance of the purchase of a habitat seemingly for the express purpose of conserving a rarity occurred in the Isle of Wight.

At the inaugural meeting the annual subscription was set at Johnston’s originally suggested level of one guinea (at which it was to remain unchanged until the 1950s). The society’s main object was also defined more precisely as ‘the promotion of natural history by the printing of original works in zoology and botany; of new editions of works of established merit; of rare tracts and manuscripts; and of translations and reprints of foreign works which are generally inaccessible from the language in which they are written, or from the manner in which they have been published.’

To that multiple object the Ray Society has strictly adhered ever since, swerving from it not even to issue an occasional volume in conjunction with an outside partner (though it did for a period use a commercial firm as a sales agent). At the outset, however, what Johnston and surely most others saw as the priority task, the printing of monographs, had to wait until sufficient deserving candidates for that had materialised and eventually emerged from their meticulous and lengthy preparatory stages. Until then, translations of foreign works necessarily predominated. It was only in the 1850s that the elaborate, plentifully and beautifully illustrated original products that were to become the society’s staple and characteristic output began to come to the fore. Among those, Alder and Hancock’s mammoth work was predictably accorded pride of place, but that was so formidably costly to print—by virtue of its 77 superlative colour plates no less than its size—that it had to be issued in 14 parts spread over 11 years.

Johnston’s gamble that membership numbers would soon build up once publications started to flow forth proved to have been well justified, for within three years they soared to a much more than ample total of 868. However, once three volumes a year showed itself to be an unsustainable rate and more and more of the titles were of interest to only small minorities, many of that first wave of recruits dropped away and the figure settled down in the 1860s around Johnston’s original target of 500. Later in the century, though, a renewed decline set in, perhaps as a result of dispensing with a sales agent, and in the doldrums of the interwar years a worrying low of a mere 200 was reached. Had the society not had minimal overheads, at that point it might well have faded out of existence. Then in the 1950s came the great revival of interest in natural history and membership recovered to the 350–450 level. While the increased rate of publication that that made possible was a major factor in raising those numbers, it was also a hidden strength of the society that some of even the very earliest of its publications were still then standard works of identification and others were valued for their illustrations even if the text was hopelessly out of date.

By the time the 150th anniversary arrived, 163 titles in all had been put into print through the Ray Society’s efforts. That may not seem a large throughput after operating for a century and a half, but it has included a very high proportion of the finest products of years of intensely painstaking research by many of the most devoted and knowledgeable students of the obscurer sections of the fauna and flora of these islands. In return for entrusting their brainchildren to the society—and handing over in that process normally also the copyright—the most the authors have been able to expect by way of concrete recompense has been 20 free copies of their particular work. Despite that, some have even gone so far as to put in substantial extra sums out of their personal resources in order to mitigate the strain on the society’s finances that certain works are liable to impose. For without the existence of this ultimate saviour—and of the substantial supplementary grants in some cases that the society has been able to attract from other sources—many of them would have had little or no hope of appearing, unless in tragically much-abbreviated form, and been condemned instead to linger in manuscript in indefinite seclusion and obscurity. Some, even, might never have been embarked upon in the first place.

Not least of the Ray Society’s achievements has been to serve as a model for two other, analogous bodies, one soon after its birth, the other very much later. In 1847 its inaugural treasurer (and author of a four-volume monograph on sponges that it was to publish much later), a wealthy London distiller with very wide scientific interests, J. S. Bowerbank, played the leading part in founding the Palaeontographical Society, the aim of which was to ensure that figures of undescribed British fossils continued to appear in print to the general benefit. Established from the first on very similar lines, that and the Ray have quietly performed their respective roles in parallel ever since.

The short-lived Willughby Society on the other hand was a rival, though only in a very minor fashion. An offshoot of the British Ornithologists’ Union and founded in 1879 as if in celebration of the twenty-first birthday of that parent, this was in effect a narrow version of what Strickland’s abortive Montagu Society had been envisaged as becoming; and it can be seen in retrospect as an early manifestation of the ever-increasing tendency of the ornithologists, as they surged in numbers, to segregate themselves from the rest of the naturalist community and create new organisations exclusive to that study. Unlike the Ray Society’s, the aim of this one was solely to publish reprints of rare and important works—and in any case, of course, only ones on birds. The selection of those was delegated to a triumvirate of leading members. As customary in such bodies, in return for their subscriptions everyone received one free copy of each volume issued in the year of their joining and in all subsequent years. However, only a handful of titles seems to have appeared before the society suddenly collapsed, allegedly after ‘some trouble arose’ (in the discreet words of the later biographer of Alfred Newton, one of the triumvirate) between ‘a lady copyist’ and the series editor, W. B. Tegetmeier, a prolific freelance journalist, one-time practitioner of mesmeric healing and the national authority on pigeon breeding, on which latter subject he was Darwin’s main informant for the section on that in the Origin of Species. If the trouble in question necessitated Tegetmeier’s departure, it is difficult to understand why no replacement for him was found for what can hardly have been onerous work. Perhaps it was simply that sufficient enthusiasm for carrying on had drained away by then. Whatever the full story, in view of the much more restricted aim of this society compared with that of the other two its early demise, while regrettable, cannot be placed all that high on a Richter scale of disasters.

CHAPTER 9
The Popularisation Explosion

WHILE THE NATURAL HISTORY community was engaged in arduously evolving ways of bypassing the dictates of the market, in order to have available in print the full range of reference works essential for identifying what was collected, the book trade for its part was at long last liberating itself from the restraints imposed on it by an archaic technology. The demand for printed matter of every kind had by now risen to such levels that the need for faster means of production had become more and more insistent. Bringing steam-power to bear on printing, as it had been brought to bear successfully on other industrial processes already, was the obvious solution, and in 1807 that eventually became reality, in the shape of an all-purpose paper-making machine. Seven years after that the first mechanised press came into commercial operation in London. Though typesetting remained obstinately resistant to the same treatment till later in the century, the combination of technical advances made possible the rapid production of long print runs at much reduced cost. Within two decades the speed of presses increased 20-fold, and work that had previously taken two men five months to produce could now be turned out by one in as little as 10 days.

The immediate beneficiaries were the producers of magazines and newspapers. The book trade, wedded to the belief that editions of more than 2,000 copies were uneconomic, saw no need for operating at anything like such a rate or on the noisy, dehumanising lines of a factory, and it was not until the 1830s at the earliest that mechanised methods began to be adopted at all widely in that quarter. Book production nevertheless did undergo some changes in these years even while avoiding being transformed quite so radically. The most obvious of those was the disappearance of the traditional wooden hand-press at long last and its replacement by a cast-iron version, capable of much heavier use before wearing out. Perhaps because that also had the attraction that it did away with one of the two pulls hitherto necessary every time a page was printed, it quickly won almost general acceptance after the first one was installed in 1805. Other models followed that made the operator’s task simpler in various ways, but for many years it seemed possible to get by with no more than modifications to the long-accustomed usages. Eventually, however, in mid-century, when more and more books were selling so well that much longer print runs began to become common, mechanisation triumphed on this front as well. Though the binding of books remained largely a hand operation for still longer, issuing them in mass-produced cloth cases had by then constituted another notable step forward. Progressive reductions in the heavy duty on paper, culminating in its halving in 1836, made a further contribution to the steep drop in the retail prices of books that greeted the start of the Victorian era as a result of this flurry of developments.

There was still the problem that books were comparatively expensive items to send by post by reason of their weight. Apart from that, the cost had to be paid to the courier by the recipient, who for that reason might refuse to accept a parcel that was not expected. The few learned societies as yet that published volumes of ‘transactions’ or ‘proceedings’ sidestepped that as far as possible by inviting members to collect their copies from the society’s office in person. The gradual switch from folios and quartos to octavos and duodecimos that took place after 1800 was probably in part a response as well, though increasingly books were being bought for regular handling—as opposed to infrequent consultation, or merely for display to impress, in the libraries of the wealthy. Smaller books also used less paper, and that was an important consideration too, while the smallest of all were popular with anyone, and especially naturalists, who roamed the countryside and wanted a portable work of reference small enough to slip into a pocket (as Ray had appreciated, and in appropriate cases insisted upon, nearly two centuries earlier). Huge works with superb, life-size illustrations of birds or flowers would continue to sell to the super-rich, but the greatest number of book-buyers were now content with less perfection in return for a much lower price—to say nothing of a size that would fit more modest shelves. No wonder William MacGillivray saw fit to recommend Audubon to give up thinking in terms of imperial folios and settle for a format that the general run of naturalists were now becoming accustomed to.

The arrival and rapid spread of the railways not only brought immediate benefit to the book trade by substantially reducing the costs of distribution, but they undermined as well the assumption on which the pricing of the postal system had been based. By the end of the 1830s a reasonably fast network of train services was in the process of extending from London as far as Bristol and Newcastle upon Tyne, and a parliamentary select committee proved persuadable that it was volume of business, not the distance a letter or a parcel was conveyed, that determined the economics. In 1840, accordingly, uniform national rates were brought in for all inland mail, which were able to be sharply lower. Although charging by weight continued, and that change was thus of only limited help to the book trade, it nevertheless made for not insignificant savings in transmitting proofs and corresponding with authors. One firm calculated that it cut by as much as three-quarters of the cost of posting a single sheet between London and Edinburgh. Final salvation came, however, seven years later, with the instituting of a specially reduced rate for books.

Amid this ferment of change, economic on top of technological, the internal practices of the book trade were undergoing some adjustment as well. One minor, doubtless little-noticed innovation was the use of paid readers by the more enlightened publishers, now increasingly beset by manuscripts as more and more people took to authorship. Of much greater impact, though probably no more conspicuous to the outside world, was the establishment in 1829 of what were known in the trade as Booksellers’ Regulations. In response to an epidemic of competitive discounting of new titles, a group of dominant London firms succeeded in converting most of the rest to the view that this was to their collective disadvantage, and with the threat of penalising offenders with a general boycott they managed to keep retail prices unaffected by the practice for the next 23 years, though latterly that became harder and harder. In 1852, however, a legal ruling pronounced the regulations ‘contrary to the freedom which ought to prevail in commercial transactions’ and this forerunner of the twentieth century’s Net Book Agreement had to be abandoned, albeit with reluctance. Nearly half a century of completely unrestricted bookselling thereafter ensued, in which discounts of as high as 50 per cent might be given.

Three alternative ways of reducing prices were nevertheless available. New titles, or cheap editions of existing ones, could be brought out at exceptionally low prices by the use of various astute dodges; surplus trade stock (‘remainders’) could be bought, typically at auctions, and offered afresh to the public at bargain rates; and books which had already passed into public hands by gift or purchase could be bought and offered second-hand, at bargain rates similarly. None of those were proscribed by the trade—though buying remainders for resale had aroused intense hostility back in the 1770s when it originated—and from each of them book-buyers benefited greatly, if at some periods more than others.

Offering new books at the lowest possible prices was naturally a key consideration for any firm seeking a share of the huge potential new market now opening up in the lower layers of society, where the spread of the basic education obtainable at the many small private academies and mechanics’ institutes that had been called into being had produced an avid demand for informative literature especially. One way of outdoing rivals in the necessary paring of costs to a minimum was to be in a position to employ key individuals at well below the normal rate—as Richard Taylor, a leading publisher of works of a highly technical character, was able to have the use of the talents of his university-educated illegitimate son. Another ploy was to secure material more than ordinarily cheaply—as John Cassell went over to Paris and arranged to buy from publishers of illustrated periodicals electrotypes of numerous pictures suitable for stockpiling for future use in books.

The remainders market assumed particular importance for natural history between 1831 and 1864, the period in which the enterprising Henry Bohn was in business on his own behalf and making a great name for himself in that specialised form of book-dealing. Part of that success was due to his command of languages as the son of a German immigrant, but it may also have helped that he married the only child of the wealthy William Simpkin, one of the founding partners of London’s largest firm of wholesale booksellers. Having started out by trading in second-hand books under the tutelage of his father but then been refused by him a share in its management, he had struck out on his own and with much skill and shrewdness built up an immense stock, which by 1841 filled a catalogue of the sensational length of nearly 2,000 pages, nearly a tenth of them devoted to remaindered items. Finding the latter particularly lucrative, he concentrated on them for a few years before discovering that reissuing works of which he had also bought the copyright was more lucrative still. Some of his reissues are liable to be misclassified these days as reprints, but they were no more than remainders placed in new bindings and furnished with a different title page—no printer’s bills for him.A typical coup was his securing remaindered sets of Hooker’s five-volume revision of Flora Londinensis, which cost £874s when new, and selling them off, newly bound in half-morocco, for just about a third of that. Many scarce texts of lasting importance to specialists in one or other branch of natural history were in this way kept in circulation, and at a price moreover that brought them within ownership reach of those able to make best use of them. Bohn also did naturalists a further small service in acting on a limited scale as a publisher of new titles as well, spotting potential in works of identification that presumably others did not dare to touch. F. W. Hope’s The Coleopterist’s Manual (1837–40) and Henry Denny’s monograph of the British Anoplura (1842) are two examples. But in occasionally assuming that subsidiary function he was no different from many another antiquarian bookseller whose exceptionally close contact with a knowledgeable clientele can reveal overlooked gaps in the existing literature capable of being profitably filled.

Natural history’s particular need for high-quality colour illustrations and the consequently high price at which such a high proportion of the books on the subject had to be sold would have made it prime territory for Bohn and anyone else who chose this comparatively esoteric sector of the market in which to specialise. The continuing requirements of naturalists quite apart, such volumes could be relied on to sell for their beauty alone and thus to retain their appeal however obsolete the text. The older the text, indeed, the greater the captivating quaintness that could come to have—as well shown by the evergreen life of Gerard’s Herball. Though inevitably responsive to the ups and downs in the nation’s prosperity, the antiquarian market would therefore long continue to play an invaluable supporting role on the natural history scene, a recycling facility that the subject came to realise that it could not do without.

By its very nature, though, the trade in remainders was largely unaffected by the economic transformation currently taking place. But so too was the market for new works of a more or less learned character with a predictably limited sale that had traditionally constituted the staple of natural history publishing. If the subject was to benefit to any significant degree from the new technology, it could expect to do so only in so far as it succeeded in gaining a goodly share of the additional reading public which that technology had the potential to bring about.

***

The area more immediately exposed to the onset of mechanised printing, at any rate as far as a subject like natural history was concerned, was the production of periodicals. Here the effect was cataclysmic. The development of an alternative to books, a faster medium in which to publish finds and findings, had been a long-felt need throughout the world of learning, but the economics had frustrated that. Broadly speaking, only societies with a sizeable, affluent and stable enough membership to constitute a captive market could sustain a journal, and that necessarily reflected in its contents the particular field of interest the society existed to cultivate. One or two freestanding ventures had been tried, but without a comparable underpinning their lives were short or at best extremely precarious. It was an almost certain way of losing money, and natural history at any rate had never found a person willing to go on doing that indefinitely for such a cause.

Those who expected the now-altered economics to usher in an era of learned journals to which anyone could subscribe and submit material were in for a disappointment, however. What materialised instead was a sudden throng of magazines pitched at a non-learned level and undirected towards any one specialism in particular, some indeed aiming at so broad a readership that natural history had to compete for space in their pages with other areas of science and in one case even literature as well. All too many people had become aware that John Claudius Loudon, that many-sided entrepreneur, had hit a vein of gold with his Gardener’s Magazine and shared his delusion that he would have little difficulty in repeating that success with the Magazine of Natural History, with which he followed it up two years later, in 1828. But, as William Curtis had discovered to his cost earlier, when he made a killing with a horticultural periodical, the Botanical Magazine, then met disaster with a part-work on field botany, Flora Londinensis, the intellectual affinity between those two areas of interest did not translate into a market unity: gardeners and naturalists were largely separate communities and by no means comparable in size or average affluence. Overconfident and mostly inexperienced, many more teams rushed in with would-be competitors with the Magazine of Natural History than, as it quickly became apparent, there could conceivably be room for, and from the vicious fray that ensued a mere two managed to stay afloat till conditions turned more favourable in the 1860s. One of those, The Zoologist, owed its survival to the flair of its editor and proprietor, Edward Newman (Fig. 78), who was as much a journalist as he was a naturalist of distinction, who cannily let the contents be determined by what the readers showed from their letters and the articles or notes they submitted held for them the greatest interest. The other, the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, a more learned, Edinburgh-based venture, was saved by the skill of its veteran scholar-publisher, Richard Taylor, by being given a wholesale makeover and a rechristening followed by a merger with an ailing predecessor. That both survivors were (or in the case of the latter ended up as) devoted entirely to zoology was probably more accident than intention.

That very disillusioning struggle, little short indeed of a fiasco, must have dashed the hopes of many an aspirant natural history journalist. For the sudden proliferation of commercial periodicals had seemed to promise to be a major source of earnings for those who saw in the expansion of the reading public into the teeming lower social layers a chance of escaping from a drab, dead-end or otherwise unfulfilling occupation into a glorious independence living by their pen. The few who did pluck up the courage even so to try turning that dream into reality now found themselves faced with the disconcerting fact that writing for a living had shrunk back again into being more or less synonymous with the writing of books (or the letterpress to accompany sets of illustrations, which could be tantamount to that). That looked like harder work than writing for magazines as well as more risky financially, in view of the propensity of book publishers to insist on authors putting up a high proportion of the initial investment, unlike the proprietors of periodicals. The very regularity with which magazines and newspapers had to keep on appearing meant that they were forever hungry for material, which could be produced at very short notice—whereas a book was ordinarily a much more lengthy undertaking and the economic worthwhileness of the amount of earning time sacrificed to its writing was difficult to gauge at the outset. The book trade, moreover, as everyone was only too aware, was no more stable than any other section of the print market: publishers were no less liable to go out of business than magazines were to fold. Books had the big advantage on the other hand that, if they were well received, they could be reissued again and again, and if necessary substantially written afresh, so serving as a source of income over a period of years, a continuingly profitable ‘after-life’ that was seldom enjoyed by an individual article.

That full-time writers on natural history were so much more dependent on ‘ the book trade at this period than those who wrote on other topics was not without its advantages in the long term for the subject itself. Books were the main outlet for the colour illustrations that were so crucial to its popularity and so helpful for identification. For those two reasons they were particularly likely to be treasured, referred to again and again and handed down in families. Conscious of that, authors therefore tended to take more trouble over them than they would have done if or when contributing similar material to some more ephemeral medium. Although many of the books they turned out proved predictably and deservedly as short-lived as anything they might equally well have been publishing in magazines or newspapers, a highish proportion of them—as we, their descendants, have much reason to be thankful—did not.

As all but a lucky few found, however, naturalists who turned to full-time authorship could not sensibly confine themselves to writing on natural history alone. The career of one of them, G. W. Francis, illustrates that well. Best known as the author in 1837 of one of the two books (the other was by Newman) that started the Victorians on their long-lasting love affair with ferns, Francis had acquired a smattering of several sciences, on top of his primary passion for botany, in the course of early years as a schoolteacher and lecturer. Thanks to that unusual breadth, he seems to have been the only person apart from Newman to have any considerable financial success at that period with a periodical in that general field aimed at a popular readership. This was the Magazine of Science and School of Art, launched by him in 1839 (and printed by his brother, which kept down the cost). With that as a prop, he then felt able to pursue in tandem a career as a freelance writer, spending the next 10 years churning out inexpensive instructional works on an astonishing medley of subjects, including on some he surely knew beforehand little or nothing about—as journalists learn to do with the scantiest of compunction. In the end, though, toil though he might, it proved impossible to earn enough to support a wife and several children in reasonable security and comfort, and he was forced to emigrate to Australia. Initially practising there as a surveyor, he was ultimately to realise his life’s ambition of becoming a professional plantsman, creating for the new city of Adelaide the botanic garden that flourishes there today.

The luxury of keeping to just one field of knowledge was more easily achievable in a provincial backwater, well away from the fierce competition in the cities, if the experience of another botanist-author, Edwin Lees, is anything to go by. The secret was to have lived in one area long enough to know it outstandingly well and to have made a great number of useful contacts locally. Lees was ideally placed to collect those as a self-employed printer and bookseller in Worcester, as effective founder of both its natural history society and its literary and scientific institute and as editor of a quarterly magazine that specialised in the history of the neighbourhood. When he sold his business in his mid-thirties in order to write full-time, no one could have prepared the ground better. Not surprisingly, therefore, he succeeded in making a modest living without compromising his reputation as a naturalist or having to sacrifice his devotion to fieldwork. Early in that career a succession of lengthy walking tours gave him the idea of a series of articles showing what each month of the year could yield to ‘the botanical looker-out’—the title he chose for the book that grew out of those in 1842. The modishly florid style he felt obliged to adopt is liable to make modern readers shudder, but it went down well enough with the leisured spa visitors to Cheltenham, for whom it was originally written, to earn itself a second edition. Wisely concentrating thereafter on the geographical area with which he was most intimate—Pictures of Nature around the Malvern Hills and Vale of Severn and the Rural Life of Shakespeare were among the several books that followed—and on the aspect of natural history in which he was best versed, Lees turned himself into the prototype of a particular kind of professional writer on the countryside: the regional chronicler, a genre destined to grow in popularity in the twentieth century in step with the multiplication of regionally focused media. He might also perhaps be claimed as an anticipator of W. H. Hudson, the products of whose solitary tramps through the southern counties half a century later have been described as ‘the apotheosis of the townsman’s “day in the country”’.

An important strand in the particular pattern of activities that Lees wove to enable him to sustain a freelance existence with continuing success was the extent to which he was able to look to local newspapers and magazines to use his work on a regular basis. That could probably have happened at that period only in some of the shires, basking in conscious pride of a particularly beautiful countryside and ever-glad to be reminded of what that beauty was composed. But Lees also illustrates the importance to a freelance of being well-rooted: of keeping in well-informed contact with at least one community of energetic investigators, even if not embedded in it, not only as a way to keep abreast of developments and discoveries but also as a safeguard against perpetrating lapses or absurdities of a kind to which the socially isolated are prone.

In this respect the freelancing career of James Rennie provided a cautionary lesson. As professor of natural history in London’s recently founded King’s College his remuneration was so low that, in common with so many other men of learning in Britain at that period, to earn a tolerable livelihood he had to take to writing books as one means of supplementing it. Almost all the ones he produced were little duodecimos on popular aspects of zoology, on insects and birds about equally, no fewer than eight of them titles contributed anonymously to the ‘Library of Entertaining Knowledge’ put out by Charles Knight, the leading trawler of the market bottom. As a Scot who came to live in England only in his mid-thirties, Rennie was very much an outsider as far as entomology was concerned (for Scotland’s comparatively limited range of Lepidoptera kept that unfashionable there) and in a Conspectus of the Butterflies and Moths Found in Britain, which he ventured to publish in 1832, he blundered into a double disaster. Not only did he make himself a laughing-stock by replacing the long-familiar English names of various butterflies with new ones of his own invention, but he also had the effrontery, or alternatively the carelessness, to reproduce unacknowledged no trivial amount of text taken from a contemporary work by another author, landing himself in a well-publicised lawsuit as a result—to the vociferous approval of no small section of the entomological fraternity, who took the view that it served him right. Though the judgment went in his favour, his reputation can hardly have escaped serious damage in the circles that to him mattered most. When shortly after this his college post was done away with for lack of students, his attempts to find any comparable foothold proved in vain, and eventually he had to settle for the same solution as Francis and take himself off to Australia.

While writing book after book of the kind that Rennie did was hardly an activity that the average scholarly institution would have considered brought it worthwhile credit, it would appear to have been tacitly condoned as a price that had to be paid if staff of the desired calibre were to be held onto at the salary levels obtaining. Many a principal or director must have had recourse to similar work earlier in his career and well appreciated the financial straits in which younger colleagues were liable to find themselves. Publishing books was a recognised major part of the scholarly life, and provided their titles seemed consonant with a person’s area of expertise and their writing did not result in dereliction of duties, it would have been difficult to make distinctions and insist on some being written outside official hours. In the universities ridicule could generally be relied upon to act as an effective sanction in keeping colleagues on the scholarly straight and narrow, but in museums that had instructing the public as part of their formal remit it was difficult to define how far that could reasonably be regarded as extending. The most that a museum could insist on that was unchallengeably certain was that any information imparted must be accurate and not bring the institution into disrepute. Whether money earned through such activity, not necessarily in official time, could be required to be handed over in whole or in part tended to be a matter of fine judgement and to depend on such considerations as the amount of use made of the museum’s library or collections for the purpose in question.

Deciding what policy to adopt in this area was especially invidious for bodies whose function was to provide a service to the scholarly world but to do no more than that. These needed to be staffed with individuals who had the appropriate orientation, but the writing of books, however learned and beneficial to the standing of the body in the eyes of those it served, could hardly be said to be integral to the duties of the posts in question. One who ran into this problem was W. E. Shuckard, a leading authority on bees and wasps. Despite having served an apprenticeship in publishing he had found making a living from writing harder than he expected and took refuge from the insecurity of that existence by joining the Royal Society’s library staff. Though he presumably made no secret of the fact that he had some substantial scientific publications in his sights, and the society presumably intimated willingness to treat that side-interest of his with indulgence, it can scarcely have reckoned with the scale of what he was contemplating or with the financial recklessness to which the realising of that ambition might drive him.

Within two years of his arrival Shuckard had published at his own expense an Essay on the Indigenous Fossorial Hymenoptera of 259 pages and followed that two years later with an equally hefty tome intended as just the first part of a textbook setting out the Elements of British Entomology. Although this second one found a publisher, the author would have been required to indemnify the firm in the event of its making a loss—which indeed must have proved the case, as no further instalment ever reached print. The cost to him of the two together cannot have been other than crippling, and it comes as no surprise to be told that he subsided into insolvency, on which grounds the society dismissed him. Luckily, his fellow hymenopterists valued his publications sufficiently highly to be anxious to find a way of enabling him to continue to research and write, and thanks to some string-pulling by one of them, a senior figure in marine insurance, the editorship of Lloyd’s List, London’s oldest daily newspaper, was secured for him. In that substitute haven he was able to carry on for nearly 20 more productive years, one further major fruit of which was the text for a much-needed introductory volume on beetles.

In default of a permanent job to provide a solid underpinning, or the repeated distractions of one or more part-time ones, the next-best solution for a writer wholly dependent on what he or she could earn was a steady trickle of work from one particular source. If the work consisted of a series of books on a uniform plan, the stability was even greater and all the more welcome. Of such a kind was the lucky break that William Swainson (Fig. 79) had in 1833, when he was commissioned to write 14 volumes on zoology for one of the mammoth publishing projects dreamed up by a celebrated entrepreneur who went by the wonderful name of Dionysius Lardner. This one, the Cabinet Cyclopaedia, was to consist of 133 volumes in all, each devoted to a separate topic and a uniform 300 pages in length, the whole to be published by Longman. Considering the tight timetable that Lardner planned to keep the authors to, it was a punishing burden for Swainson to have taken on, but the payment offered was too tempting to turn down: £200 for the first volume, then £150 for each of the rest (one of them coauthored in the end with Shuckard). Though he fulfilled the commission conscientiously and in full, it soon became evident that the three months stipulated for each delivery deadline was quite unrealistic, and the work fell wildly behind schedule. It was also unrealistic by that period to expect a single individual to cover zoology in its entirety, for knowledge had accumulated so greatly that only a team of specialists was capable now of treating the various aspects with proper thoroughness and accuracy. His shortcomings, however, were cleverly camouflaged by Swainson by distracting his readers with dazzling displays of classificatory speculation arising from his enthusiastic embracing of the Quinarian system, at that time a matter of heated dispute in the zoological community. Nevertheless, there was no disguising his lack of familiarity with major parts of the animal kingdom and some volumes did no good at all to his reputation. And though the level of his writings both in this instance and more generally was far superior to that of Rennie, he was to be even less successful than him in building a scholarly career in a Britain still desperately deficient in suitable permanent positions for well-qualified naturalists, emigrating eventually in his turn—but to New Zealand for a change, instead of Australia.

Analogous opportunities, though of a much less demanding kind, existed lower down in the market too. The most notable of these were the book series launched around this time by two evangelical publishing bodies, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge and the younger and smaller Religious Tract Society. These had taken alarm at the flood of cheap reading-matter that had begun to descend on the semi-literate and the threat they saw of that acting as a vehicle for contagion by what in their view was a trend towards an atheistic interpretation of the natural world (as represented in particular by the currently much-debated, anonymous work, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation).As Protestant bodies with the written word as the basis of their faith they could hardly campaign for any form of literature to be suppressed, and so their counter-attack necessarily took the form of issuing equally cheap works on popular science that presented text within a Christian framework. To that end they cast around for authors who not only had proven skill in imparting scientific knowledge in simple language, but were also willing to write from the desired angle. It was the societies’ policy to run their publishing operations on commercial lines, and the authors were to be remunerated at market rates as appropriate. From a careful sifting for areas of science most suitable for popular treatment, zoology and botany emerged as two obvious choices, and the authors who measured up to the requirements best—and who were to produce most of the natural history titles between them—were William Linnaeus Martin and Anne Pratt, respectively.

Martin owed his highly appropriate middle name to having a leading natural history illustrator for a father. He had abandoned an intended career as an apothecary when appointed by London’s Zoological Society to take care of its new museum, only to be edged out of that after some years. Having picked up a wide acquaintance with vertebrate zoology during that time, and written extensively already for the many new penny periodicals, he had turned fulltime freelance as the best alternative open to him.

In contrast to Martin, who was used by the Religious Tract Society only, Anne Pratt (Fig. 80) wrote for both bodies but mainly for the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge, whose close ties with the Church of England she may have been more comfortable with after a sheltered provincial upbringing as the daughter of a wholesale grocer in Chatham. A restlessly enquiring mind frustrated by a delicate physique in childhood had led the family doctor to prescribe botany as a palliative—a common practice then, a legacy of the immersion of medical students in that study—but the customary genteel ways of pursuing that she had augmented with unusually voracious reading. It may have been because of fuss that that might tax her strength that she embarked on her career as an author (with a book for Charles Knight) without letting anyone know. She was twenty-two by then but would be forty before free of family ties and in a position to produce regularly in the interstices of schoolteaching. The chatty miscellanies of information culled from a great range of sources that were her forte (‘Anne Prattle’ they have been unkindly dubbed) were well judged to appeal to the kind of readers that the SPCK was keen to attract. More accurate than the general run of popular books at that period, they were not in fact so entirely derivative as commonly supposed, for scattered through them are mentions of country remedies that she had clearly learned of at first hand and systematically collected from local villagers. With the advantage denied to Martin that the SPCK permitted its authors to publish under their own name, she was able to build up such a strong personal following that the society increasingly had to indulge her: at first with more and more generous allowances of illustrations (all from her own hand) and ultimately with a part-work that extended to five volumes over eight years (1850–7) and was furnished with a relative profusion of colour drawings. Though grandly titled The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Great Britain, this was not the comprehensive scientific manual those words may have suggested to the unwary but it nevertheless met a need and did so appealingly enough to run to a ninth edition by the century’s end. The craze for ferns that had meanwhile broken out in the mid-1850s led the SPCK to use those plants to ‘carry’ two further, separate books covering the duller-looking grasses and the like, perhaps in response to earnest pleading by the author. They were to be almost the last new titles she was to produce, for the flow dried up soon after her late marriage, when in her sixties, her need to write for a living having apparently thereupon come to an end.

***

That it was mostly publishers or printers who took the initiative, and not authors, in exploiting the new market for cheap literature is well illustrated by several of those case histories. That was no more than to be expected, for it was at the production end that technical innovations first became known about and their potential impact on costs could best be appreciated and acted upon. The writers of books were much too preoccupied with putting words down on paper to take much cognisance of how markets were changing. In the course of time the more professional of those would have agents on whom they could rely to keep them abreast of developments, but that still lay half a century or more in the future.

In keeping with that pattern, it was a printer in Edinburgh, W. H. Lizars (Fig. 81), who arrived at the conviction, around 1832, that market conditions were ripe for publishing at an unprecedently low price a major series of books devoted to natural history in its entirety—or rather, more accurately, as it turned out, to zoology (as the title chosen for the series, The Naturalist’s Library, reprehensibly failed to make clear). Lizars was an artist manqué, having had to sacrifice a career of promise as a portrait painter in order to assist his family when the death of his father left it in a dire position financially. In the production of fine bird books, however, he had found a substitute means of displaying his unrivalled skill, and it was with specialists in that branch of the subject that he had mainly come to mix. Certainly natural history was more or less synonymous with zoology for his friend and brother-in-law, Sir William Jardine (Fig. 82), who was the person to whom he automatically turned with his idea. Jardine’s standing and extensive range of contacts made him the obvious choice as editor of the work that Lizars had in mind, but he had onerous editorial commitments already and so might well have refused had it not been for the fact (as we now know) that he had fallen heavily into debt and saw this as an opportunity to restore his finances. Because of his image as a laird with broad acres, it has sometimes been assumed that the Library was subsidised by him at least in part; in reality, however, the financial risk was borne by Lizars alone throughout. Aware that Jardine was in no position to come in on the basis then standard in non-fiction publishing whereby authors or editors were required to underwrite the risk before sharing any profit, Lizars accordingly took the very unusual course of agreeing to pay him a royalty (£15 for every 1,000 copies of each volume sold).

Several major book series of the kind envisaged had begun to appear in other fields already, such as the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott and Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia, and these provided a ready-made model for the Naturalist’s Library in the matter of basic format. It would thus consist of a large number of volumes of uniform size, compact enough for easy handling, but with the title and contents different in each case. The two reckoned 40 volumes, issued at quarterly intervals over 10 years, would be an appropriate target to aim at. The series would be divided into a number of broad subject groups, in the hope that some subscribers would at least buy one of those if they could not afford the whole set (but in the event most volumes were bought singly). As for the contents, those were to follow a standard pattern too, with the inclusion of a biographical memoir plus engraved portrait of a different famous naturalist in each case.

Although ‘natives of this country’ appeared in the prospectus as one of the criteria for selecting titles, the intention from the outset was to range over the world as a whole. In the event, more than half of the volumes were concerned with exotic species mainly or wholly, so this exceptionally large and impressive undertaking is strictly speaking germane to a survey of books on the fauna and flora of these islands only in small part. On the other hand the way in which it was carried out has a wider relevance—and that we happen to know in unusual detail, thanks to rich material having found its way into archives for once.

The key to success, Lizars was convinced, was to offer as many colour illustrations as could be afforded at the lowest price to which it was economically feasible to push the retail price and still show a profit. That price could be as little as six shillings (roughly £15 in present-day money), he calculated, which would allow each volume 30–40 engravings together with some woodcuts. Such a bargain was without parallel at this bottom end of the natural history market and would surely be irresistible. The lower cost of printing in Edinburgh gave an edge over London competitors for a start, but as well as taking advantage of every saving offered by the new technology, the costing assumed paying for the manual skills on a piecework basis and using only authors who found a fee of around £40 acceptable. Still further savings could have been achieved had Jardine fallen in with Lizars’ initial suggestion of compiling much of the text from published sources, or had they followed the common practice of natural history publishers of reissuing plates that had been used previously—but they had promised in the prospectus that original drawings would be provided, so they could hardly go back on that, at least to any noticeable extent.

The first volume came out in March 1833 and the final one in July 1843, very nearly as planned at the outset. Eleven of the fourteen were in the event written by Jardine himself. The standard print run adopted was 1,000 copies, but some titles sold much better than others, as was only to be expected. The volume on hummingbirds, a group of well-proven appeal, was chosen to open the series and did outstandingly, though no doubt helped by the ‘halo’ effect of novelty; other topics could not hope to match that in pulling-power, however, and in any case sales declined overall as the novelty wore off. The records of Longman, who acted as London distributor, show that the early titles sold anything from 1,500 to 5,000 copies and some later ones attained 10,000. All in all, therefore, the Naturalist’s Library proved fully as profitable as Lizars could have dared hope. Additionally, he had the satisfaction of having demonstrated that even in a field like natural history, with its special need for plentiful illustrations, preferably in colour, a low price did not necessarily have to mean low quality too. As his counterpart, Richard Taylor, had meanwhile been proving on the periodicals front as well, professionalism combined with frugality was capable of working wonders. It was a heartening revelation to the natural history world as a whole—even though few outside the trade can have appreciated quite how rigorous was the discipline needed to bring off such feats, or how very exceptional were the firms that prized their standard of what they produced so highly that they were prepared to go to that almost masochistic length.

The rewards of cheap-but-good publishing did not necessarily end, what is more, once a work had been issued and had had a sufficient run in the bookshops: it might then benefit from the attentions of Henry Bohn and enjoy a profitable further lease of life. The Naturalist’s Library was just the kind of publication that Bohn relished, and, sure enough, when the time came he duly pounced, bought the copyright from Lizars and in 1848 reissued all 40 volumes at three-quarters of the original price. Any who had missed buying one or more of those first time round were thus given a second chance of obtaining them for their shelves.

The Library predictably attracted an imitator. This was The Miscellany of Natural History, the first number of which appeared only a few months after the other had started. It was modelled on that so closely that news of what Lizars and Jardine were planning had clearly leaked out some while before to the rival Edinburgh team behind it. The prime mover was an enemy of Lizars, Captain Thomas Brown, who had completed the duplication even to the extent of deploying a baronet of his own, Sir Thomas Dick Lauder—but in this case as the financial backer. Brown was a one-time officer in the Forfar and Kincardineshire Militia who had lost his patrimony in the destruction by fire of an uninsured flax-spinning mill and taken to writing prolifically for the popular market, mainly on natural history, as a substitute means of support. His invariable use of his militia rank in this unrelated capacity was doubtless because he was not the only contemporary author with such a common combination of names. Undeniably he had a wide knowledge of the subject dating from boyhood, with land and freshwater Mollusca as his primary concern, but he and Lizars had fallen out while collaborating on an earlier part-work, Illustrations on the Conchology of Great Britain and Ireland (1827), and from the little that is known about him he emerges as a somewhat unscrupulous individual, liable to plagiarise unblushingly and putting ‘F.L.S.’ after his name on title pages while failing to pay his Linnean Society subscriptions for the record total of 23 years. At first worried by the unexpected entry of this competitor into the ring, Lizars and Jardine were soon reassured by the scorn with which it was greeted, pronounced by one reviewer ‘creditable to the binder, discreditable to the author, and useless to the public’. It did not take long to founder.

While Brown deserved no sympathy, another contemporary for whom one cannot help feeling some is the hapless William MacGillivray (Fig. 83). Famous among naturalists for his unrivalled physical endurance, a legacy of a hardy Hebridean upbringing, and in particular for one extraordinary hike from Aberdeen to London by an extra-punishing circuitous route, MacGillivray has featured in these pages twice already as a producer of textbooks for students. He had won through to an academic career only after a long, unenviable struggle to survive as a freelance naturalist, in the course of which he had laboriously worked out a radically new way of classifying birds that relied heavily on differences in their digestive system that he had discovered by performing hundreds of dissections. ‘I know few occupations more delightful than that of poring over the entrails of a rare bird until you have satisfied yourself as to some minute point of structure,’ he was later to write, in introducing, in 1837, the massive, five-volume A History of British Birds, in which that classification was ultimately presented. It was an approach not exactly guaranteed to capture a wide readership for the work among the traditional purchasers of books with such a title, who were perfectly content to tell one kind from another by plumage and other external characters. With a view to appeasing those, MacGillivray had therefore given the text a leavening of lighter material, drawing on his own experiences in observing birds round Edinburgh. As a further sop to those indifferent to the finer points of anatomy he had planned to include a selection of colour plates; unfortunately, though, he could find no way of meeting that heavy extra expense and had had to settle for small woodcuts instead. Yet despite having gone to that special trouble to render the work more palatable to one set of potential readers, at the same time he alienated the rest by decrying the efforts of his predecessors in unguardedly contemptuous terms. Having thereby offset with tactlessness in one direction such goodwill as he had hoped to earn in the other, he added a crowning piece of folly by changing the English names of several birds, seemingly quite perversely, replacing ones long in use with outlandish substitutes—in just the same way that his fellow Scot, James Rennie, had lately rechristened many of the butterflies and moths, to hoots of derision from lepidopterists.

What can have possessed MacGillivray to endanger the success of the magnum opus to which he had devoted so many years of his life? If he hoped to convert systematists to his novel classificatory approach, it would have been sensible to have done so in a more sweetly reasonable tone. And why had the work such a curiously hybrid character? Did he write it in the first place with an academic readership exclusively in mind, only then to be told that it was unpublishable unless given a more popular slant? Certainly, the fact that it was handled by an obscure London house suggested that the Edinburgh ones had cold-shouldered it, and perhaps he had become desperate. If that was the case, though, the publisher can hardly have had an accurate idea of the natural history market, for that had ceased to be a single entity and it was no longer realistic to expect any book to be capable of penetrating all of its now separate strata. With years of experience of popular writing on science behind him, MacGillivray of all people ought to have realised that he was attempting the now-impossible in addressing two such different audiences simultaneously. If he did so purely of his own volition nevertheless, then maybe it was a doomed, last-ditch try on his part at disproving that awkward fact, of showing that it was still possible to bestride the two increasingly divergent and even contradictory worlds of which natural history had begun to consist (a dualism which he himself personified particularly): the field and the dissecting-room, the outside and the indoors.

Whatever the explanation for its intriguingly composite character, the work appeared to unsurprisingly adverse reviews and the first three volumes sold so poorly that the publisher jibbed at handling the further two. Another London publisher, William Somerville Orr, a semi-specialist in the natural history field (for whom Rennie had written six books and may have acted as intermediary), proved willing to take over, however, and see the work through to completion—but only in return for MacGillivray putting some money into the firm and becoming one of its authors in a cheaper and more certainly profitable direction. Orr was no less desperate than MacGillivray, though, as it was to turn out, for only two years after fulfilling his part of the deal, in 1852, his firm collapsed into bankruptcy and MacGillivray’s investment was lost.

Not the least upsetting aspect for MacGillivray of this sad, long-drawn-out story was the striking success that another writer had been enjoying with three volumes of his own with exactly the same title and—by a double coincidence—in that very same span of years, 1837–43. By a horrible irony, MacGillivray had lost out to a work by a man whose experience of popular writing was far more limited than his, and one that was just the kind of book he could and should have written himself, had he not become obsessed with giving the world his revolutionary classification. His scientific credentials were fully as great as those of this newcomer, whose background was in field sports and whose text was no more than passable, though written with charm. The great strength of this other History of British Birds, rather, was that it was extensively and beautifully illustrated—with 520 wood engravings by a master of that technique, John Thompson, and printed moreover by a firm, that of Richard Bentley and his brother, with an outstanding reputation in its field in turn. Nor was it a lumbering elephant like its namesake: instead it was issued at two-monthly intervals in 37 parts and was thus easier to purchase; indeed, author and publisher counted themselves lucky that it appeared six months ahead of the first part of the analogous volume in The Naturalist’s Library, considering that much more of a competitor, if only for the reason that it offered colour illustrations at such a low price (Robert Mudie’s cheap little Feathered Tribes of the British Islands (Fig. 84), which first appeared in 1834 and was to be frequently reissued, could be safely discounted, however, for it had a mere 18 colour plates). Well-timed, therefore, well-crafted and, in terms of the market segment at which it was aimed, well-judged, it had little difficulty in establishing itself as the standard work of reference on the subject for a whole generation, bringing a small fortune to its author in the process.

That fortunate individual was William Yarrell (Fig. 85), a genial bachelor much in evidence on the London scientific scene and destined to be one of the mainstays of each of the three societies in the Metropolis concerned with zoology. After a brief start in banking he had joined a cousin as a partner in a West End newspaper agency, living in some state in the heart of Clubland with an extensive library and collections and frequently giving small dinner parties for his naturalist friends. ‘He was an excellent carver,’ one of them was to recall: ‘his knowledge of comparative anatomy told him where exactly to plant his knife in dissecting for the table fish, game, or any small joint that required nicety in helping.’ As a keen angler indeed he had as intimate a knowledge of fish as he had of birds, going to the length of collecting them direct from fishermen’s nets on the south coast and having them served up for dinner, ‘curious to try the flavour of several kinds not usually esteemed fit for the table.’ ‘Some of these we thought very fair eating; others rather indifferent; two or three such as we never wished to put in our mouths again.’ A History of British Fishes (Fig. 86) had appeared from his hand two years before his bird book, but though that went through three editions it did not become such a standard work; the two together nevertheless are said to have earned him, up to his death in 1856, the equivalent of more than £20,000 in present-day terms. Such could be the proceeds to be had by that time of bringing to bear on an ever-expanding throng of naturalist readers the skills and experience of a new generation of publishers, emboldened to specialise in the subject by the great opening-up of the market for lower-priced books that had so profitably and noticeably occurred.

CHAPTER 10
The Nineteenth-Century Publishers

HAVING MADE HIS NAME, and a great deal of money, with his two books, William Yarrell wrote no more, content to subside onto his laurels. For their publisher, on the other hand, those books were merely the start in an outstandingly successful career that was to bring enormous benefit to natural history, the subject in which he was quick to specialise. This was John Van Voorst, then a little over thirty and in business on his own for only a year or two as yet.

Considering his importance, Van Voorst has been disgracefully neglected by biographers till only very recently. Even though his death took place six years before the Dictionary of National Biography was completed, he suffered the fate of many another businessman of prominence in being denied an entry in that. Equally, because he never appeared in print as the author of any scientific work himself, he was passed over by those who placed on record with great diligence the lives of many naturalists whose achievements were but slight. Yet his name appears on innumerable books that were valued and even acclaimed in their day, some of them works of great usefulness which the natural history world might never have had but for his keen personal interest in the subject, kindly encouragement, high standards in production and commercial astuteness.

Unlike so many of those in the nineteenth-century book trade whose surnames were other than British, Van Voorst was no recent immigrant. Though of Dutch noble stock—celebrated in the name he was to choose for his private residence: Utrecht House—his family had been settled in England for several generations and enjoyed sufficient standing socially for his eldest brother to be educated at Eton. Nothing is known of his own upbringing, however, except that it was at least in part a London one.

One thing that we can be sure about is that Van Voorst must have early shown a bookish tendency, for otherwise he would hardly have been packed off to serve an apprenticeship in that particular trade. And he must have displayed a talent for it in order to be taken on thereafter by the huge and venerable firm by that time known as Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green. Longman was a good choice not only by virtue of its dominant position in the trade and of being both a bookseller and a publisher, but also because it was well entrenched in natural history. Three years after he joined, in fact, an ardent entomologist arrived alongside him, in the person of William Longman, a great-grand-nephew of the firm’s founder and destined eventually to become head of it in turn. For all the advantages that long continuity brings, however, dynastic businesses have the drawback that a discouraging number of the senior positions tend to be earmarked for the family members, and that may have been a factor in causing an able outsider like Van Voorst to leave to make his mark elsewhere after a stay of seven years. Probably, though, his heart had always been set on striking out on his own, and by then he could have gained the wide experience and contacts and accumulated sufficient capital (without also accumulating dependants, for he was never to marry) to be able to do so with reasonable equanimity. At any rate, when he did take that step, in 1833, he had the confidence to do so from premises in Paternoster Row, as fashionable a London address for someone running a book business as Harley Street had recently then become for a physician.

Though for Benjamin White, his one antecedent as a specialist publisher of natural history books on a major scale, it had been standard practice to have a substantial retail operation as well, by Van Voorst’s day that was increasingly no longer the case. But his dispensing with a shop does not mean that he was a publisher in quite such a narrow sense as that word conveys today. For he is known to have also dealt on the side in out-of-print and second-hand works, acted as an agent for other publishers (and not just foreign ones), and was no more than the distributor of titles published under his imprint in many more cases than where the words ‘for the author’ on a title page make that explicit.

Whether or not he had intended from the outset to specialise in natural history, his almost immediate success with Yarrell’s two books can hardly have failed to put that idea into his head. Drawn into Yarrell’s social circle as a result, he would speedily have made the acquaintance of other leading London zoologists, several of whom were also to write books for him during the first five or six years, noticeably outnumbering their botanical counterparts. He was indeed strikingly successful in signing up so many outstanding figures for his list so very early, establishing a position that promised to be impregnable provided he resisted the temptation to try to move ahead too rapidly. His start was, however, reassuringly cautious, largely confined to offering reprints of long-selling works in a variety of fields outside natural history, limiting titles in that to a quarter of his list at the most. Only after five years did that share approach half. It was then to climb steadily, to reach a peak (in 1871) of almost two-thirds.

Even had he been an active naturalist himself, the demands of a small business would have allowed Van Voorst scant chance of developing or sustaining a reputation as one or of mingling with fellow workers in that field. Despite that, no fewer than 16 people, mostly of some prominence, put their names to the form nominating him for election to Fellowship of the Linnean Society in 1853, which attests to a wide popularity that the kindliness and quiet encouragement displayed by him in his letters to authors leads one to expect. From some of those we know he sought advice about books proposed or submitted to him, but whether he asked any to read and report on manuscripts in a formal and paid capacity is unclear.

Nor is it clear how far Van Voorst approached likely authors with suggested topics as opposed to waiting for proposals to come to him. In all probability he did the initiating in the early days, when it was more important to construct his list carefully and he was much less able to afford mistakes; later, when he was well known and established, no doubt suggestions and offerings poured in, and he was familiar enough by that time with who could be relied on to deliver successful books of the kind he wanted to publish not to have to make the same effort to find them. Even so, he was still capable of making a serious mistake as late as 1859, when he signed up the country’s then leading authority on British birds, Alfred Newton (Fig. 87), to produce a new edition of Yarrell’s lasting money-spinner—only to discover to his dismay that he had hooked a meticulous academic with all the time in the world to devote to what turned out to be a far more elaborate undertaking than either had imagined at the outset. Newton was to contend that he had never agreed to deliver the work by a set date, that the amount of revision that it had turned out to require involved consulting hundreds upon hundreds of publications, many of them very obscure, and that he could not cover the subject to his satisfaction if he was hurried. After 22 years had elapsed with only two of the four promised volumes yet written Van Voorst’s heroic patience finally snapped. Threatened with legal action, the recalcitrant professor was forced to hand over the completion to someone else, though he did so only with a very ill grace, grumpily insisting on the insertion of a note that he was ‘not responsible for anything that may follow by another editor’ and describing his ejection, in a letter to a friend, as ‘a terrible wrench’, depriving him of what for all those years had been ‘one of the main objects of my life’. Heedless of commercial realities, however, he failed to appreciate that the copyright in Yarrell’s work was becoming close to expiring, leaving the way open for competitors to rush in with rival works under the same title. At the same time Van Voorst had not made things any easier by originally announcing—without reference to Newton (or so the latter claimed)—that the work would be appearing in monthly parts. Few greater mismatches between an author and a publisher can surely ever have occurred.

Fortunately for Van Voorst, Newton was far from typical of the thin scatter of university teachers who possessed the expertise to commend themselves as potential authors. Only Newton’s botanical counterpart at Cambridge, Charles Babington, was comparably well supplied with independent means and ample leisure to have been able to behave similarly; however, rather than produce the multi-volume replacement for Smith’s English Flora of which he was quite capable, Babington chose to compress the fruits of his ongoing taxonomic research into a pocket-sized Manual of British Botany, bringing that to Van Voorst in 1843 and repeatedly updating it in seven more editions. A work of that type, intended for field use by experienced amateurs rather than for teaching students, would have been a welcome alternative to battling in the crowded market for textbooks. Though Van Voorst certainly did not avoid those, especially in later years, he edged in that direction via his mainstream natural history list initially. One of the first that clearly ranked in that category, to judge from its title, A General Outline of the Animal Kingdom, and Manual of Comparative Anatomy, which Thomas Rymer Jones produced in 1838–41, looks rather forcibly squeezed—under the unique label of a ‘companion volume’—into what Van Voorst was attempting to make out to be a series on ‘The Natural History of the British Islands’.

That series itself, though, has rather the appearance of a post-hoc confection, a choice repository for titles that in many cases had probably originated independently. Series were favourite devices of publishers at that period, along with ‘libraries’ of volumes in identical format, designed to appeal to the collecting instinct (which was of course especially highly developed in the naturalists of that era). But it is hard to believe that the concept served much purpose in Van Voorst’s case after his series had proceeded very far, in view of the comprehensive coverage of natural history that his list speedily embodied. It obviously made good sense to build on the success of Yarrell’s pair of books, on the fishes and the birds, with a complementary pair on the quadrupeds and reptiles (which Thomas Bell (Fig. 88), recently appointed professor of zoology at King’s College London, was well fitted to supply); but after those the titles began to become noticeably more diverse and thematically intrusive. The next one was on ferns, as yet a very unfashionable subject. A very readable introductory account of those by Edward Newman chanced to have been serialised in the periodical that he had recently founded, The Phytologist, and turning that into a book clearly presented Newman with no difficulty. Then came a volume on the starfishes and other echinoderms (by Edward Forbes), one on the forest trees (by Selby) and following that one on the eggs of British birds (by the then leading authority on those, W. C. Hewitson). By then it was 1842, a severe trade depression had set in, and there was an interruption of four years in which no further titles were added. Providentially, the seashore craze then rolled in and rescued the series from that temporary stranding. Alert as ever to new trends, Van Voorst thereupon jumped at an offer by George Johnston to produce an enlarged edition of his 1838 book for Lizars on zoophytes. He also commissioned from Forbes and his friend Sylvanus Hanley, a wealthy shell collector who had become an authority on the bivalves, the four-volume, heavily illustrated work on the Mollusca that turned into a classic almost from its first appearance in 1848–53. Thomas Bell was further prevailed upon, a third time, to come up with a volume on the stalk-eyed Crustacea—as they were denominated unflinchingly in its title. More marine contributions were to follow during the succeeding decade, on equally specialised subjects. By that time Van Voorst’s business was so confidently prosperous that he was evidently prepared to bring out, by what only could have been cross-subsidy, some much-needed introductory manuals on sections of both the plant and animal kingdoms with such small followings that books on them were hardly viable propositions commercially. To a limited extent he thus valiantly relieved the Ray Society of the burden it was shouldering.

If all the editions and supplements are taken into account, ‘The Natural History of the British Islands’ ran to a (slightly notional) 62 volumes at its completion in 1880, six years before Van Voorst’s retirement. While those were doubtless his own favourite children, there was much else that he published of which he was entitled to feel proud and which included some equally good earners and mainstays of the backlist. All told, during the 52 years during which the firm was under his direction—19 more than Benjamin White’s comparable innings—about 170 new titles on the natural history of these islands have been traced as attributable to it. Of those concerned with only one branch of the subject, 39 were on plants (including 12 local Floras), insects accounted for 30, marine invertebrates for another 30 (a third on molluscs), but birds for only 24—and almost all of those not till 1870 or later, when interest in them surged at last. A mere three on the mammals and one only on the reptiles reflect the general lack of interest in those at that period, but that only three titles on our fishes stand to Van Voorst’s credit is more surprising. It must not be overlooked that the firm also handled the printing and distribution of six national journals concerned with our fauna and flora in whole or in part. Taken together with the high standard of production that Van Voorst was renowned for, the debt that the subject owed to this one firm was truly enormous.

On his retirement in 1886, in the absence of anyone in his family to leave the business to, Van Voorst handed it over to his two assistants, Messrs Gurney and Jackson. Under their names it continued as a still substantial publisher of natural history for a further three-quarters of a century, until it was eventually taken over, shortly after the Second World War, by the old-established Edinburgh firm of Oliver & Boyd—only for that to be taken over in its turn in 1968 by, ironically, the Longman Group, in which Van Voorst had had his start in publishing 142 years before. He himself continued to be active until well into his nineties, dying the equivalent of a multi-millionaire in present-day terms. Not all of that vast fortune, however, may have been derived from publishing.

***

Lovell Augustus Reeve (Fig. 89), Van Voorst’s main rival, had a very different start. The son of a well-to-do London draper and mercer (and with one of its lord mayors for a step-uncle), he was not saved by brilliance in his schoolwork from being apprenticed at thirteen with a view to a trade. A passion for shell collecting, however, which deepened into a scientific study, began to tug him in a different direction, and by the time he was twenty he was discoursing learnedly on the classification of the Mollusca and had used up his patrimony to put into print a major, two-volume illustrated monograph that he had written himself. Promptly restoring his finances with a shrewd trade in a Dutch shell collection, he was then emboldened by that to go into business as a dealer in natural history specimens, opening a shop off The Strand for the purpose. But with a further, far more massive publication, Conchologica iconica, now hatched in his mind, his self-printing of that as a monthly part-work, illustrating and describing shells from many parts of the world—which would eventually run to 20 volumes (1843–78)—soon diverted his energies and, proving a much more remunerative line of work, enabled him to turn into a publisher of books on exotic travel and on natural history more generally.

Considering he had had no training for this new career, Reeve’s speedy success in it is truly remarkable. Much of that can only have come from sheer zest combined with exceptional capacity for multi-management; however, with sufficient of a reputation as a naturalist already for the Linnean Society to have elected him to its much-coveted Associateship, he was spared having to put as much effort as Van Voorst would have had to into building up contacts. His regular attendances at meetings of both the Zoological Society and the Linnean must have helped in that as well, though such business as he attracted thereby must have been offset by what he lost through an excessive pugnaciousness in print. He had the prudence, moreover, to concentrate initially on building up a solid revenue base, as opposed to the far riskier course of gambling on some early successes with a rapid turnover of solo volumes of moderate size. To that end he lost no time in launching three further, less ambitious part-works to run alongside his massive Conchologica iconica, two of those aimed like that at fellow shell collectors, the other a first series of the exquisite colour drawings of British fungi by Mrs T. J. (Anna Maria) Hussey. As further underpinning still, he also set about acquiring a stable of periodicals, carefully starting with a Kew-based pair that had been running for some time already, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine and The London Journal of Botany. As a bonus, these two brought with them regular involvement with that hub of botanical activity, and with the Hooker dynasty as well.

It was Sir William Hooker’s son Joseph (Fig. 90) who was instrumental in gaining Reeve his first natural history book project of major importance that was other than ‘inhouse’. This was W. H. Harvey’s magnificent crowning work on the seaweeds, Phycologia Britannica, with its 360 colour plates designed to make up for the near-lack of those in his Manual of the British Algae of 1841 (Fig. 91). A pioneering example of collaborative investigation by a network of collectors, many of them women, scattered around the coasts of Britain and Ireland and regularly patrolling those after storms for specimens from deeper waters, this could safely be predicted to become the standard work of reference on the subject for at least a generation. It was to be issued in 60 parts, making up into either three or four volumes as preferred, a process that would take about six years (1846–51). In competing with Van Voorst for such a choice catch, Reeve reckoned that a cover price of £7.10s would allow a basic fee for the author of £160 supplemented by whatever extra proved to be justified by the number of copies sold—which proved in the event to be £180. Unfortunately, still inexperienced, he greatly underestimated the cost of the colouring, and the better terms that led him to quote gave his bid the edge. That mistake cost him dear, however. For though he gained a valuable early opportunity of demonstrating that his firm was capable of producing high-quality work for publications of such a testing kind, winning it a reputation that he was to go to extreme lengths to maintain ever after, the shortfall could only be made good by squeezing other parts of the budget. As a result, he acquired instead an undeserved reputation for meanness, at any rate in the eyes of the irascible Joseph Hooker, who proceeded to blacken his name in letters to Harvey: ‘Every one calls him the most stingy chap in London,’ he exploded: ‘In less than 6 months without advertising he has a sale of 200 copies … Reeve wants us to puff to save him the expense … A man who will not, out of the most disgusting avarice, exert himself in the regular business way.’ Those words were written of course in ignorance of the true state of affairs, but they boded ill for Reeve’s relationship with Hooker when he became the chosen publisher of the latter’s Flora of New Zealand a few years after. On that occasion he was again to be denounced to Harvey for allegedly ‘playing all sorts of disagreeable devices and delays’. One cannot help wondering if Hooker would have behaved in the same way towards Van Voorst, who was more his equal socially.

By 1846 Reeve had accumulated such a heavy load of steady work that he was obliged to give up shell-dealing and devote himself to publishing entirely. The change was marked by a move to new offices and the formation of a partnership—though the other two partners, one of them his brother, seem to have been little more than sleeping ones, if that. Solidly established at last, the business had reached the point at which it was now safe to develop a more varied list. Over the next 10 years, accordingly, that was to take the dual form on the natural history front of accepting numerous shorter works while simultaneously introducing a series of specially commissioned titles.

Why Reeve chose to plunge down-market for this first series is hard to understand. For apart from endangering the image the firm had sedulously cultivated up till then, competition was ferocious at lower levels, as he must have been aware. Possibly he was under the delusion that some of the authors who were writing for him already would welcome the opportunity to share their expertise with a very much wider audience. If so, however, he was quickly proved mistaken. Harvey, for one, declined the invitation to produce a simple introductory guide to seaweeds; and doubtless others approached rebuffed Reeve similarly. Consequently, for those to write the proposed titles in this ‘Popular Natural History’ series (as it was to be called) he had to turn to others who had yet to make their mark—and were sufficiently anxious to do so to be prepared to accept, in return for the copyright, the paltry sum of £20 (plus £10 more in the Sold on the idea of series, Reeve had meanwhile succumbed to the suggestion of launching a second one, but this time at the top of the market. ‘Insecta Britannica’, as this one was called, had been conceived by leading menebers of the Entomological Society of London as a reasonably loose chain of independent volumes that would build up to become a national insect Fauna, analogous to what existed in botany. It had already proceeded as far as a prospectus by the time Reeve agreed to take it on in 1851, and the forceful advisory committee appointed for the purpose then stipulated a common pattern that soon turned out unacceptably rigid for some of the intended authors, which resulted in long delays. Though an admirably daring venture and scientifically very valuable, after three years a volume on the Microlepidoptera by Stainton and three on the Diptera by Francis Walker proved sufficient to show that it was never going to pay: scholarly treatments of little-studied groups had simply too little market potential, and were best left to the Ray Society to publish as and when it could.

Reeve had had no better luck in the meantime with another, equally worthy undertaking. This was a comprehensive account of the Irish fauna, extending to many octavo volumes, that the leading Belfast naturalist of the day, William Thompson, was to produce (Fig. 92). All too soon, however, after only three of the promised volumes had come out, and those covering just the birds (and admirably thoroughly), the author died unexpectedly, in 1852, when still not fifty. Shortchanged already by a misleading title—for where was the botany, let alone the geology, in a work claimed as comprising The Natural History of Ireland? – the subscribers received a further, almost insultingly short measure as a result, and that after a five-year wait: only a single volume more, into which the whole of the rest of the fauna was cursorily crammed, the best that two of Thompson’s friends had been able to do with merely fragmentary notes of his to go on.

Eventually, in 1866, the firm found its length with the ‘Crown’ series, pitched at a level between those other two. The volumes in this were again intended to be introductory in character, but for more confident and experienced naturalists than the more or less uninitiated of the ‘Popular Histories’. Thus they had correspondingly lengthier and more authoritative texts, better (though at first rather fewer) colour plates, an octavo format and a rather higher price of 25 shillings. Botany and zoology were covered about equally, but the zoological titles were noticeably more adventurous, with volumes on the beetles, spiders and bees all in the opening batch. As with most series, though, the authors varied in competence: there were some of the calibre of Stainton (on the Lepidoptera) and G. E. Massee (on the fungi), but while the very first volume, E. C. Rye’s on the beetles, was a model of its kind, with figures of nearly 100 species engraved from actual specimens and as a result in continuing demand by later generations of collectors, Miss E. F. Staveley’s on the spiders was scarcely more than an abridgement of Blackwell’s superb Ray Society monograph of only a few years earlier. Inconveniently, a masterly, basically similar (though plateless) earlier introduction to the land and freshwater molluscs that Reeve himself had written was published three years before the series started—having very possibly given him the idea for it—and, apparently because he was averse to interpreting series as loosely as Van Voorst, it had to be excluded and the Mollusca left glaringly uncovered.

Tragically, Reeve was never to see in print the series that so fittingly bore the name ‘Crown’. Around the middle of 1863 he became seriously ill, and after an agonising 18 months, latterly in a wheelchair, contending with what we now know was cancer, death eventually released him towards the end of 1865. He was still only fifty-one (scarcely any older than William Thompson had been), with every prospect of many more years of no less fruitful industry ahead of him. A publisher for much less than half as long as Van Voorst and more obviously self-made, he ended up a relative pauper by comparison.

Luckily, a successor was immediately on hand. Three years before, almost overwhelmed by the amount of work that he had taken on in his enthusiasm, Reeve had been forced to recruit a right-hand man to relieve him of some of the burden. Though made a partner, Francis Soper seems to have had no knowledge of natural history (and perhaps never had much interest in it either), and in that respect would have been heavily dependent on the other for guidance. But he was evidently a good businessman and determined to keep the firm going. There was more than enough work in hand, for Reeve had been commissioning as energetically as ever and many of the books under contract could be expected to take years being written. More natural history titles, or at any rate ones concerned with the fauna or flora of these islands, would in fact appear from the firm after Reeve’s death than had appeared before it, many of them no less worthwhile or important. Though William Thompson’s sadly truncated Natural History of Ireland had come in time for Reeve himself to be its publisher, the new regime would be able to boast such further triumphs as the three-volume British Moss-flora of Robert Braithwaite (1880–1905) and no fewer than six further hefty monographs with ‘of the British Islands’ in their title, seemingly the tail-end of Van Voorst’s long-running series of that name and handed over on his retirement to this willing rival. The magnificent six-volume set by W. Weekes Fowler on the beetles (1887–91 and 1913) and the even vaster 11-volume masterpiece on the Lepidoptera by C. G. Barrett (1892–1907) were among those (Fig. 93).

That apparent surge in initiative was misleading, however. A change in direction had occurred, roughly coinciding with the firm’s defensive move in 1900 to limited liability status. Without its founder’s dynamism and abundant personal contacts, and with more and more competitors now entering the natural history market, it found the publishing of books less and less profitable and—reversing the usual course of events—more and more turned into a postal retailer of them, living off its back stock. Reeve himself had set a precedent for that, though only as a supplementary activity, in buying up from John Curtis (Fig. 94) in 1849 the unsold copies of the latter’s superlative British Entomology of 1823–40 for making up into a (partly revised) new edition (Fig. 95). The deal was complicated and briefly generated an acrimonious exchange between the two, but enough subscribers were found for the 20-guinea sets—including the Prince Consort, who bought two—to enable the work to be issued in 1862 at what one must hope was more than the bare profit that Reeve claimed at the outset to be expecting.

Most of the expensive titles that the firm went on to publish in its later years were doubtless looked upon as the equivalent of vintage wine, likely to grow in value the longer they were kept in store. But the success of such a policy depends on the cost of the requisite space not rising to the point where it exceeds the likely profit, a point which was reached by Reeve & Co. in the inflation that followed the First World War, with a move from London to furthermost Kent as the consequence. By then, Soper had died in his turn and two of his sons were in charge and debating whether it was worth trying to carry on. Somehow, the firm nevertheless managed to do so for three decades more, only finally coming to an end effectively in 1958, when the stock that still remained was sold to a Dutch competitor.

***

Less well known than Van Voorst and Reeve, Robert Hardwicke (Fig. 96) was the only other publisher to specialise in natural history as a whole on a major scale during the Victorian era. Alone among the three in doubling as a retail bookseller and stationer, he entered the field much later that the others, overlapping with Reeve by scarcely a decade, and was in business for much less long as well. More of a niche operator, he opened up two areas, microscopy and the lower plants (as then understood), that the other two had largely neglected, while by no means disdaining the cheap end of the market, with a ‘Plain and Easy’ series that carried on where Reeve’s equivalent had finished.

Why and how Hardwicke entered the book trade is unknown. Born in 1822 into a long-established Lincolnshire farming family, his country upbringing may have produced his lasting sympathy for natural history, even though that never developed into any practical involvement in the subject personally. A key influence may have been the choice of a medical career by a younger brother, whose hospital training in London perhaps drew Hardwicke to the Metropolis in his wake. At any rate, by the age of twenty-five he was a partner in a firm of printers and booksellers there and by thirty-four its sole owner and ensconced for good in a capacious four-storey building at the smart and busy end of Piccadilly, almost opposite Burlington House.

By that time he had started as a publisher of natural history with two disastrously ill-chosen books to his discredit: A Plain and Easy Account of British Ferns, under the anonymous authorship of a Reverend Edwin Bosanquet, which appeared to shocking reviews (and accusations of plagiarism) in 1854; and, the next year, a 32-page booklet by a Charles Watkins allegedly setting out the The Principles and Rudiments of Mineralogy, Botany, Zoology, which features in at least one modern bibliography with the word ‘nonsense’ printed alongside. Luckily, he then found a scientific mentor in the person of Edwin Lankester, a physician who had been a fellow medical student of his brother (and father of a future director of London’s Natural History Museum, the controversial Ray Lankester). With Edwin Lankester’s guidance and numerous contacts Hardwicke began building a more promising list, combining natural history with medical works. In 1860 the Ray Society appointed him its first official sales agent, and he followed that up by acquiring a series of footholds in the stabler periodicals market, as Reeve had done before him. The first of those, in 1861, was a quarterly, Popular Science Review, to which he then added, at two-yearly intervals, a new Journal of Botany, his own brainchild Hardwicke’s Science Gossip, and finally the British Medical Journal (with which Lankester was initially closely involved)—though the second and fourth of those for only limited periods of what were to turn into very long lives.

It was appropriate that Science Gossip, unusually, bore the name of its proprietor in its title, for the contents of that readable miscellany faithfully reflected Hardwicke’s own personal range of interests. A success from the first, it was indirectly one more fruit of his friendship with Lankester, for in or about 1860 the latter had introduced him to the perfect editor for it, the colourful Mordecai Cubitt Cooke (or ‘M. C.’, as he preferred to be called, as he detested the first of the names his parents had given him) (Fig. 97). Condemned to rein in much of his boundless energy in posts beneath his abilities that nevertheless provided security, Cooke found multiple alternative pulpits in writing and lecturing on the side from which to realise his lifelong mission of preaching the gospel of natural history to the multitude. A non-stop outpouring of instructional books to that end began with three for Hardwicke in the single year of 1862, the first of several he was to write for him on his more special passion, fungi. Self-taught as a mycologist, Cooke’s impact on that study was to be second only to Berkeley’s, that first little book alone, with 24 colour plates from engravings by himself plus text figures, running to an astonishing 18 editions eventually—and there were to be many more from him on that subject to follow, increasingly learned and increasingly massive. He received a further helping hand from Hardwicke along that path when a series of articles he had contributed to the Popular Science Review were republished in book form, under the provocatively unlovely title of Rust, Smut, Mildew and Mould. So great was the need at that time for a guide to the microscopic kinds of fungi that even that achieved a seventh edition and went on to become a university text in America.

Unfortunately, messianic individuals like Cooke tend to be a law unto themselves. His gifts as a communicator were offset by the faults of the prima donna: he could be over-forthright, tactless and difficult. The nervous strain of so much impassioned work was not helped, either, by what we now know was a family life of almost unbelievable bizarreness and complexity. After six years Hardwicke and he fell out. A mycological journal, Grevillea, thereafter received the benefit of Cooke’s editing instead, while another of Hardwicke’s ‘finds’, J. E. Taylor, a local journalist in Norfolk, took over Science Gossip in his place.

Hardwicke’s collaboration with Cooke had meanwhile widened his scientific circle in two useful new ways. In 1863 he saved from foundering a small group of young botanists that Cooke had gathered around himself by offering it a room in his house in which to meet. This was to lead to his publishing, six years later, the magnum opus of two of its members, Trimen and Dyer’s Flora of Middlesex, which propelled Britain’s tradition of county Floras on to an altogether more ambitious plane. In the same way, when Cooke and two friends moved on to start the Quekett Microscopical Club, to cater for beginners for whom the Microscopical Society of London was too dauntingly august, that served as a recruiting ground for authors of just the kind that Hardwicke needed on that newly popular pursuit, as those instruments at last became cheap enough for the average naturalist to be able to own one. Here, again, the faithful Lankester had helpfully stepped in, by producing for Hardwicke an anonymous instructional booklet for such beginners, Half-hours with the Microscope, which sold over 7,000 copies within five years of its publication in 1859 and was destined to pass through innumerable editions.

It was while his business was expanding encouragingly in this variety of directions, at the start of the 1860s, that Hardwicke succumbed to the temptation to take on a project that could hardly help but strain the capacity of a firm as small and undercapitalised as his. Having learned that the plates used for reproducing James Sowerby’s long-admired coloured drawings for that monumental classic, English Botany, were available for purchase, he was seized with the idea of harnessing them like cart-horses to an updated text, in the belief that they still had the pulling-power to render commercially profitable the new national Flora that was widely recognised by now as badly needed. Half a century had passed since the final volume of that previous grand summation had been published, and in the intervening years an enormous amount of further work had been done which, while presumably familiar to the cognoscenti, had substantially escaped the notice of the wider botanical public. To cover that work with the necessary thoroughness, however, would be feasible only by limiting any new publication to flowering plants and ferns alone. To accommodate full accounts even of just those, together with an illustration of every species, would nevertheless still require numerous volumes, as before, issued one by one over a considerable period of years and purchased by subscription in the time-honoured way. In the event, 12 volumes were to prove sufficient—but 12 exceptionally fat quartos, which took up all or most of a bookcase shelf.

While Hardwicke was clearly correct in assuming that only a set of attractive plates could enable a text of the scholarly comprehensiveness envisaged to be published at all, it was not necessary for the new work to bear the same title as its illustrious predecessor: that was no more than a marketing ploy of his. Several natural history works over the years have reused the illustrations of a forerunner without going to that length. Hardwicke was not even correct in presenting his replacement national Flora as a ‘third edition’ of that earlier one, for two abridged versions of the original had appeared already, the second of which had a reasonable claim to be considered just that. While it is true that recycling the title English Botany usefully conveyed that this was another work of comparable scope and authoritativeness, that was to prove detrimental in the longer term, for it had a backward-looking effect that was to result in serious underrating of the historic importance of the entirely novel text (considerably more novel than Hardwicke probably envisaged, and certainly no mere revision). It also did a grave disservice to the ‘editor’—who should rightly have been termed the author—for just as people had infuriated Smith by perpetually referring to the original English Botany as ‘Sowerby’, so they fell into the same habit again, as Hardwicke ought to have foreseen.

If the illustrations were the only connection with the original work that at all supported the pretence that the new work was just an edition of that, they too were more novel than generally appreciated. Though it was mentioned in the preface that errors in the outline or colour of James Sowerby’s drawings had to be corrected, that several were so irretrievably inaccurate that they had to be replaced entirely, and that the omission of magnified details of the fruit had to be remedied for every species, the inferior quality of the colouring compared with that of the originals only became evident as publication proceeded. The reason for that has become public knowledge only very lately. It turns out that Hardwicke could not afford to pay the normal going rate for retouching and settled for what J. E. Sowerby—a grandson of James—could produce ‘on the side’, working in evenings, by gaslight. The extra strain involved probably contributed to that man’s death, at only forty-five, before reaching the sedges and grasses, which then had to be done by someone less skilful.

Nor could Hardwicke afford the kind of sum that someone of comparable stature to Smith would have required as an inducement to enter into such a lengthy and onerous commitment that producing the text would entail, and he had no alternative but to settle for someone who had yet to make his mark. This was John T. Boswell Syme, a one-time surveyor and erstwhile part-time curator of the Botanical Society of London, the collapse of which had left him in need of steady paid work pending his inheritance of an ancestral estate in Fife. With a reputation for conscientiousness but at that point with only limited knowledge of the British flora, he was fortunate to have the long-continuing help of the Reverend W. W. Newbould, Babington’s chief henchman and a private scholar of ample leisure but unshiftably self-effacing, whose ‘long and extensive study of critical plants and synonyms’ was freely made available to him, as Syme gratefully acknowledged in the preface. Indeed, if the great gossip of Victorian botany, the aptly named T. B. Flower, is to be believed, many or even all of the species descriptions were also referred in draft to Newbould for comment and approval, once Syme had gone to the great labour of drawing up a wholly fresh set of those (based as far as possible on specimens collected and identified by himself). As what emerged from that process was insufficiently legible to go to the printer as it stood, Syme’s wife took on the task of producing a fair copy. The output of finalised text must therefore have been considerably slower than Hardwicke had doubtless reckoned upon.

A noteworthy innovation for which Syme was seemingly alone responsible was the use of the category of subspecies for the second time in British botany, a suggestion he owed to Watson. However, he applied that in a far wider sense than the one in which its introduction later in the century was to cause intense controversy among zoologists, for to him it was merely a convenient ‘umbrella’ term for the diverse range of less saliently distinct entities to which many contemporary botanists were loathe to accord specific rank. That use in the event did not catch on, and a full century further had to elapse before subspecies (in the modern sense) became part of the standard taxonomic coinage of students of British plants. Even so, it was a boldly defiant step for such a comparatively unknown figure to have taken, reflecting Syme’s determination to stick up for those ‘few of our own Botanists’ who, in his words, ‘through their labours have sometimes been stigmatized as species-making’ but to whom ‘we are indebted … for a much more accurate knowledge of plants than we previously possessed.’ In thus embodying the views of what could be called the ‘critical school’, the more progressive (as we now recognise) of two competing taxonomies at that period, the work acquired the status of a bible in the eyes of the adherents to that, a status that it was to hold so enduringly that it was rated ‘still a useful work of reference’ 100 years later by the authors of the national Flora that only truly constituted its replacement.

Once the parts comprising the first of the 12 projected volumes were ready for binding by their owners in 1863, the next 10 volumes were completed at roughly yearly intervals—and with no interruption when the eighth year coincided with Syme’s removing from London to Scotland on inheriting his estate. On the completion of the 11th volume in 1872, however, there was a prolonged hiatus. The initial cause of that was ill health on Syme’s part, forcing him to drop out; even more seriously, Hardwicke then died, in 1875, from a sudden stroke, when scarcely over fifty (just like Reeve).

Though Syme had the consolation of an honorary doctorate from his local university, St Andrews, and lived on long enough to see the work completed (as possibly Newbould did too), Hardwicke must already have been deeply unsure whether that would ever happen, for his business had descended into financial chaos. It has sometimes been asserted that he was in fact bankrupted by the project; but though he certainly ended his life scarcely any richer than when he started out, there was enough potential left in that work for George Bell & Sons to judge it worth spending £3,000 (roughly £180,000 in today’s money) to acquire the copyright, stock and plates. A Kew botanist, N. E. Brown, who had already done drawings for the project, was thereupon commissioned by that firm to supply the text for the volume still outstanding, and in 1886 the full set was at long last available for offering. The sales of that over the next two decades proved sufficiently satisfactory to justify a single-volume supplement of additional material in 1891–2. Bell seriously contemplated bringing out an entirely new edition even after that, but developments in colour printing had by then rendered the plates commercially obsolete and the idea had to be dropped. A 30-year innings in print, even so, must be accounted extremely creditable for a work of such a size and scholarly ambitiousness.

The rest of Hardwicke’s business, which contained several titles similarly giving evidence of some profitable future still, was acquired by a firm headed by David Bogue, son of the publisher of the two best-known books by Edwin Lees. For the best part of a decade longer 10 new natural history titles appeared under that new aegis, but the fresh lease of life proved, alas, only temporary, for Bogue’s collapse into bankruptcy in 1882 was not to be followed by a second rebirth.

***

In addition to that trio of specialist firms there was a fourth publisher who rose to prominence in the century’s closing years (and continued to prosper well into the next one). This was Richard Henry Porter, who personified the sharp change that came over the subject at that period not only in choosing to concern himself exclusively with books on birds, but also by being enabled to do so by the ascendancy fast being achieved then by ornithology. In contrast to the other three, next to nothing seems to be known about him, but he evidently set up in business around 1878 at about the age of thirty. Twelve local Avifaunas stand to his credit as well as such landmark works as E. T. Booth’s Rough Notes (1881–7), R. M. Barrington’s The Migrations of Birds as Observed at Irish Lighthouses and Lightships (1900) and H. Eliot Howard’s The British Warblers (1907–15). Some 30 titles with a focus on these islands in whole or in part were published up to 1907, at a rate of anything from none to three in any one year, and the list is the more impressive in containing nothing at all from the popular end of the market. Given that record, it is surprising that the firm did not take over from Van Voorst’s successors as the publisher of Ibis till as late as 1904. Porter died in 1912 and the firm was carried on for a time in the same name by his son.

Three London booksellers that largely filled their shelves with natural history but also published on occasion new titles themselves deserve some mention too. William Wood was the first of these to surface, in 1815, in a shop in The Strand that went in more especially for works on conchology, his own personal passion. So strong was the shell-collecting vogue at that period, and so great the demand that gave rise to for illustrated catalogues from which to identify specimens, that he had given up practising medicine to seek a living from offering those for sale, several of which he had compiled himself. From works on shells he had extended into natural history as a whole. In time his shop came to replace Benjamin White’s in the valuable role of serving as a place of rendezvous for naturalists in London.

No sooner had Wood retired in 1840 than William Pamplin succeeded to the well-established international business of his father-in-law John Hunneman, based on a shop off Soho Square. The son and grandson of nurserymen and already a dedicated collector of rare works on botany, Pamplin was ideally qualified to continue the firm’s dual specialities of acquiring out-of-the-way books on that subject and dealing in herbaria and sets of dried specimens. The incoming correspondence arising out of his 23 years in that botanical equivalent of the early career of Reeve was luckily preserved in its entirety and is now in the university library at Bangor, enabling its nature and extent to be reconstructed unusually precisely. As a publisher, Pamplin was heavily dependent on works on tropical botany that came to him through a strong connection with Kew, but five local and county Floras also came his way (though of those he probably acted essentially as distributor). A second marriage to a woman of means, however, eventually led him to exchange business life for a long-nursed dream of a retirement to deepest Wales (where he continued to live on for nearly 40 years more, latterly in dire poverty). His stock was disposed of by auction in 1863, most of it going to Dulau & Co., a specialist in books with a botanical connection.

It was then the turn of an entomologist, Edward Wesley Janson, to occupy that niche, in 1852. Of Dutch extraction like Van Voorst and a deserter from a medical career like William Wood, Janson had spent half his working life by then as ‘something in the City’ at his father’s insistence, with a passion for collecting, buying and exchanging beetles frustratingly confined to his leisure hours. As soon as his father died, leaving him independent, he was free to give rein to that passion full-time and proceeded to trade in every aspect of (in particular) entomology that offered some commercial scope, lotting and cataloguing books for auctioneers, acting as a subscription agent for journals and selling apparatus for collecting and mounting specimens. Antiquarian bookselling formed an obvious complement to those for this equally ardent bibliophile, the amasser of a large and valuable library of his own, and out of that developed some limited publishing of original works by entomological authors, on beetles in particular. Among those were three by David Sharp, a two-volume Aid to the Identification of Insects by C. O. Waterhouse (1880–90) and for the Hon. Herbert Cox an excellent Handbook of the Coleoptera of Great Britain and Ireland (1874), this last the first book on the fauna of these islands to be furnished with dichotomous keys. He was also the publisher of a periodical, Cistula entomologica.

Happily, Janson had a son who shared his passion for beetles and to whom he could confidently hand over his business shortly before his death in 1891. That son too had an entomologist son in his turn, thus enabling the family firm to continue into a third generation, latterly as Janson and Sons, in premises in Great Russell Street, by the British Museum, famously advertising its existence with an outsize butterfly in the window. Following its eventual demise, well after the Second World War, the firm’s extensive records passed to the Natural History Museum. Disappointingly, those fail to reach far enough back in time to include the letter-book of the founder, whose reputedly ‘peculiar temperament’ (in the tactful words of one of his obituarists)—which provoked a dangerous rift in the Entomological Society of London during his controversial term as its Curator—would surely have preserved for posterity some entertaining reading.

***

A surprisingly large number of other firms published books with at least some bearing on the flora and fauna of these islands in the course of the century, but in no case sufficiently exclusively to rank as specialists in the subject. Many were tiny and more or less ephemeral, others large and long-established with broad and variegated lists. Many extended into natural history from cognate areas, from educational or technical publishing in particular, but children’s books, travel, sport and gardening also provided bases from which incursions were mounted with varying degrees of success. Any book on an ‘improving’ subject such as this stood a good chance of selling if its price was low enough, and especially if it had plenty of pictures, for the purchasers were as often as not buying for others, as presents or prizes, and not for themselves, and were in no position to judge the usefulness or accuracy of the contents.

Of the general publishers, far and away the largest producer of natural history was that giant of the trade, Longman, responsible by the 1830s for almost three quarters of the London output of educational and technical books. Any naturalist author with a text of a reasonably scholarly character and not already committed to another house would have been likely to approach it first before trying anywhere else. Not far short of 100 titles relevant to our flora and fauna carried its imprint, as either publisher or just distributor, at some time or other during the century—and almost as many in the early years, what is more, as in the later ones. Solidly learned works formed a higher proportion of the natural history output at first, but as the following for the subject broadened the firm adjusted its list in step: by the 1860s it was not above stooping for minor droppings from the table of the prolific F. O. Morris and was starting to displace Routledge as publisher of the ever more prolific and popular J. G. Wood, to whom it was to add in the century’s final years the yet more lucrative Hudson—after Longman’s Magazine had saved that man from near-destitution by taking periodic essays of his. At the opposite extreme, seven local Floras owed their achievement of print, or at any rate distribution nationally, to this firm’s indulgent high-mindedness.

A major reason for Longman’s strength in the upper layer of the natural history market was the lack of any significant competition from university quarters until the middle of the century. The university presses of both Oxford and Cambridge continued to see their main functions as the publishing of bibles, hymnals and prayer books, which Oxford’s developed into such a profitable activity that the output of its scholarly imprint, the Clarendon Press, was able to be cross-subsidised. Like the Cambridge University Press, however, that was available normally just to authors with official university status. To be published by it, moreover, was regarded as an honour and a privilege: it was considered indecent to expect money on top. Oxford’s comparative neglect of botany and zoology found reflection in just two Clarendon titles relevant to the subject of this book, O. V. Aplin’s The Birds of Oxfordshire and G. C. Druce’s grandiosely comprehensive Flora of Berkshire – both of them, significantly, local topics and in the century’s final years, 1889 and 1897 respectively, following the recruitment (from Cassell) of the first-ever Secretary to the Delegates with experience in commercial publishing.

The pattern at Cambridge was basically similar, but the greater passiveness there of the counterparts of Oxford’s delegates, the Syndics, allowed a bookshop in the town established in 1843 by two enterprising Scots from the Isle of Arran, the Macmillan brothers, to develop a publishing side that became in effect a substitute university press. Till 1870, however, despite the move of that side to London, natural history barely fell within its orbit and it was only in the 1890s that it began to cultivate the subject seriously, the important work by L. C. Miall, The Natural History of Aquatic Insects, constituting one of five titles brought out in 1895 alone.

Apart from Taylor and Francis, which topped up its essentially printing business with the occasional book (including several on birds, a personal interest of Francis), the upper layer of the market was otherwise left to firms run by Continental immigrants, from cultures in which catering for scholars was more of a publishing tradition. The principal two of those as far as natural history was concerned were Baillière and Swan Sonnenschein. Baillière dated from the 1820s, when a Paris publisher of that name opened a London branch, run by his brother Hippolyte, initially to import French medical texts. Over the next 40 years it diversified into issuing original English works, with emphasis on medicine and microscopy, which crossed over into entomology more particularly. Passing then into English ownership, to become Baillière Tindall Cox, the firm continued to operate in a small way on natural history’s margins till losing its independence to the Cassell Group a century later.

By contrast, William Swan Sonnenschein (who substituted his mother’s maiden name of Stallybrass for the third of those in later years) was of Austrian extraction, his schoolteacher father having arrived in London in 1848 from Moravia. Proving too sensitive for an intended medical career, the son opted for publishing instead, serving an apprenticeship in a recently established firm specialising in German literature, Williams & Norgate, where he started acquiring the immense bibliographical erudition for which he became renowned. Setting up on his own in 1878, at the age of twenty-three, his unusual combination of business acumen with great width of learning and extremely painstaking editing brought an international succès d’estime despite an annual turnover averaging £14,000 at most. Thanks to facility in German and moving in Fabian circles, he became the first to publish in English both Marx and Freud—and even had the temerity to advise Bernard Shaw to abandon novels and stick to plays! Fortunately, activity in that direction did not prevent him from building a substantial and varied natural history list, microscopy being one of his enthusiasms. Launching that, cautiously, with a seven-fold volley of ‘Young Collector’s Handbooks’ in 1883, all written by junior British Museum staff, he then reinforced those with ‘The Young Collector’ series of 15 titles, for a slightly less advanced readership, in 1886–97. Braver moves then followed, notably two local Faunas and six works by J. W. Tutt, the brusque and autocratic headmaster who co-founded and long served as editor of that much-valued periodical, The Entomologist’s Record. The last of those six took the form of an ambitious co-publication with a Berlin firm, A Natural History of the British Lepidoptera, of which in the event only eight out of a projected 11 volumes materialised in time to appear under Sonnenschein’s auspices, in 1899–1909.

Unfortunately, Sonnenschein was just beginning to get into his stride as a publisher of natural history of that more demanding kind when in 1902 he became involved in a bank-inspired scheme to use the good name of the long-established firm of George Routledge & Sons, which had recently gone into receivership, as the basis for a new firm of academic publishers with much more capital behind it, to be run by himself. Founded back in 1836, Routledge had thrived at the cheap end of the market and by specialising in remainders and the pirating of American titles, belatedly discovering how natural history books could benefit from his entrepreneurial astuteness after acquiring J. G. Wood as an author. Unfortunately his sons had not inherited his flair, and under them the firm ran out of money. In a sense, though, it was carrying on in disguise, for the ablest of his partners (and brothers-in-law), Frederick Warne, broke away in 1865 to specialise in educational books, which extended to a strong natural history list of a similar character that was destined to come to the fore in later years. Under Sonnenschein the new Routledge was taken more up-market and natural history largely left to its imprint ‘twin’, Kegan Paul, the end-product of a series of mergers, which was acquired in 1911 to add more substance and so produce a group that made a more enticing prospect for investors.

Kegan Paul came with a natural history backlist that was sizeable and impressive, notably in the topical area of animal behaviour, anticipating the subsequent launch of its ‘International Library of Psychology’ and long-lasting identification with that discipline more particularly. Sir John Lubbock’s Ants, Bees and Wasps, which went to at least 17 editions from its first appearance in 1882, was by far the most successful of a cluster of titles that included ones also by such other prominent figures as C. Lloyd Morgan and G. J. Romanes—an arresting early instance of a publisher setting out to act as an incubator and nursery for an infant subdiscipline. Further evidence of a laudable adventurousness was provided by two monographs on fungi and two on Crustacea, while a sign of great things yet to come was a bird book from a previously unknown author called Witherby.

Under Sonnenschein this newly created group prospered. Sadly, though, the business that bore his name (which did not move with him) failed to do so without his guiding hand and, after a merger, descended into bankruptcy.

There were several other well-known, long-established publishing houses that put out natural history to a limited extent and spasmodically: John Murray; Smith, Elder (which Murray was to acquire in 1918); Cassell; Simpkin, Marshall; Chapman & Hall; and Groombridge. The last of these is better reserved for discussion in the context of its star author, the inexhaustible Morris. Chapman & Hall, a textbook-cum-literary house that grew rich on its Dickens copyrights, is of interest as the publisher of Hudson’s first, albeit slender book on the English countryside as well as eight of the numerous titles of the not much less influential Charles Dixon. Cassell was similarly a latecomer to natural history. The creation originally of a temperance reformer (like Collins and the Edinburgh firm of Chambers), it was freed by his early death in 1855 to switch into books on low-cost recreational travel, which turned its attention to the growing interest in country matters. That brought it Richard Jefferies, the son of a gamekeeper, and led to the unearthing on its own staff of that pioneer of bird photography, Richard Kearton. A former shepherd-boy, the latter had been spotted as a smart lad while acting as a beater on a grouse-shoot attended by one of the directors and began by addressing envelopes at 14 shillings a week. Also deserving of mention—if only because of its boldness in handling several local Floras—was the firm founded by George Bell in 1839 to specialise in educational books. Like many others, the 1870 Education Act and the consequent teaching of elementary biology in all government schools jerked it into bringing natural history within its concerns. As we have seen, it made a dramatic entry by completing and then reissuing Syme’s English Botany shortly after publishing, in 1872, one of field botany’s longest-running successes, W. R. Hayward’s The Botanist’s Pocket-book, an identification manual stripped down to the barest bones. Another, even later entrant at a more popular level but with a less catchpenny list of titles than the average (including ones on dragonflies and hawk-moths), was Upcott Gill, a specialist in books on hobbies. Its useful Naturalist’s Directory ran to at least 10 editions from 1895.

Finally, it must not be supposed that London enjoyed a monopoly of natural history publishing during the century. Edinburgh, in particular, also had numerous firms that brought out at least a sprinkling of books on the subject, even if none can be said to have specialised in it. Lizars, strictly speaking a printer, has featured in these pages already, likewise the firm that gallantly sustained Greville’s works on cryptogamic plants, Maclachlan & Stewart. Oliver & Boyd regrettably pulled out of the subject around 1840 and did not return to it till the twentieth century, while the venerable A. & C. Black, which rose to prosperity on the Encyclopaedia Britannica and had no London base till 1889, had a similar in-and-out involvement with the subject: a bad experience with Alexander Murray’s The Northern Flora in 1836 may have put it off, and it was only by publishing a series of textbooks for Edinburgh University’s professor of botany, J. H. Balfour, that it seems to have reestablished contact. Alfred Newton’s massive A Dictionary of Birds (1893–6), basically a reprint of the account he produced for the Britannica’s ninth edition, heralded its return at last in force—to become one of Britain’s major publishers of bird books in the decades that followed. But it was the firm of David Douglas, which found books on birds combined well with ones on shooting and allied sports, to which the greatest accolade is due. As publisher of the series of 11 volumes that constituted the magnificent ‘Vertebrate Fauna of Scotland’, it attracted a succession of more narrowly focused Scottish local Avifaunas.

CHAPTER 11
Contingent Damage

NOT ALL OF THE innumerable books on natural history that were pouring out from publishers by this period brought much if any benefit to the subject. At the cheap end of the market, predictably, many were ill-written, shoddily produced and not dependably accurate enough even to be instructive. The best that could be said for those was that they demonstrated by their very profusion that this was a subject with a large enough following to warrant many people going to much trouble to produce such books, a subject which a sizeable section of the public very evidently found interesting and worth pursuing energetically and seriously. Yet even bad books were better than no books: by the simple fact of being available for casual inspection by the mildly curious, they might have the luck to catch a susceptible mind or two and stimulate a search for others that were more satisfying.

At the same time a book could be written with the best of intentions, meet an obvious need and achieve no small commercial success, yet all the same do some lasting injury. For one such book no less a person than Lovell Reeve was innocently responsible. This was the Handbook of the British Flora by George Bentham (Fig. 98), which of all that firm’s many titles was to have by far the longest existence in print, fading away only when the firm itself did so, exactly 100 years after it had been commissioned.

That book came to Reeve through his Kew connection in 1856, nine years before his early death. It was then largely unwritten, but the opportunity of capturing for his list a systematist of international reputation doubtless outweighed any uncertainty whether someone with no previous experience of writing a work aimed essentially at novices could come up with something with sufficient sales prospects to justify the initial print run of 2,000 copies that he enthusiastically spoke of at the outset. Accepting the proposal on the strength of just a sample, he offered what for him was a generous £20 for the copyright, to which Bentham, wealthy enough to be unconcerned about the money aspect, agreed without demur.

Reeve’s gamble paid off probably faster than he expected, following the book’s launch two years afterwards. It sold well from the first and was still selling strongly enough eight years later for Reeve’s successor, Soper, to slip it into the firm’s ‘Crown’ series retrospectively, presumably in order to give that a boost, inappropriate though it must have looked in it. For despite being proclaimed in the subtitle as ‘for beginners and amateurs’, it was every bit as daunting as an introductory work as might have been expected from someone of Bentham’s intellectual loftiness. For a start, it opened with an uncompromising 33-page section explaining the terms in use by botanists for describing plants and the procedures followed in procuring and processing specimens for the herbarium. This was considered so admirably comprehensive by Bentham’s colleagues at the Royal Botanic Gardens that copies of it were run off separately for the benefit of the many novice collectors overseas whose help Kew aimed to enlist. Even for them, however, it must have been heavy going, let alone for ‘the ladies’ for whom Bentham reputedly once owned that he had primarily written the book.

Worse, though, that first edition was entirely devoid of illustrations of the plants described. Black-and-white drawings of every species included had in fact been intended, but Bentham’s airy assumption that Kew’s crack draughtsman, Fitch, could produce those from dried specimens (as Bentham had produced all the species descriptions) proved to have been a misapprehension, and they had had to be deferred till a hypothetical second edition. In contrast to Reeve, Bentham was probably not much put out by their omission, for he attached overriding importance to introducing beginners in botany to the fascinating potential of the classificatory system: of working out the identity of an unknown plant by carefully examining its characters and running it down, step by step, by means of the keys provided and the final confirmation of success by finding a description that fully tallied. It had been his own personal entrancement with that analytical method as a seventeen-year-old, while living among the logically minded French and exposed to the regular employment of that approach by botanical authors there, that had led him to turn on to botany the acute legal brain he shared with his illustrious uncle Jeremy. Like William Withering before him, he now wanted to share that discovery with as many others as possible. There was one concession to his would-be readers that Bentham felt obliged to make, even so, and that was to give the English names of the species the greater prominence, by placing them before the Latin ones, closing his eyes to the fact that that was ‘an abomination to the Professors’ (in the words of his friend, Joseph Hooker) and unfitted the book for teaching students as surely as the provision of illustrations would too.

The book’s chances of serving as a student text having apparently being written off, the second edition that turned out to be justified duly appeared in 1863–5 (in parts, on that once-only occasion) with Fitch’s line-drawings now throughout. This transformed its prospects more profoundly than either Bentham or Reeve can have suspected. For it so happened that volumes with naturalistic black-and-white drawings, such as the finest of the illustrated herbals, tempted many of their owners to colour those in, as and when they came across living examples of each of the plants depicted. If deprived of illustrations, a few with the necessary talent went so far as to paint in miniature versions of their own in a book’s margins alongside the entry in the text on the species concerned (Fig. 99). A copy of Bentham’s Handbook has survived in family hands in the Isle of Wight in which that unillustrated first edition not only provoked that treatment, but additionally substituted for a herbarium—and doubled as what today would be called a ‘life list’—by the place and date of the first-ever find being written beneath each little painting. Once illustrated ‘Benthams’ arrived in the bookshops, they evidently began to be snapped up for this very un-Benthamish purpose, as it gradually assumed the dimensions of a coterie fashion. By 1878 Fitch’s drawings ranked so highly by comparison with the book’s text that they were promoted to a separate, companion volume of their own, purchasable separately, and in 1916 ‘a paper suitable for colouring’ was advertised as specially in use.

Unfortunately, Bentham had had an additional motive in writing the Handbook, an ideological one of which at the outset Reeve was no doubt unaware. For many years by then the botanical community had become divided into two hostile camps, the so-called ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, the former refusing to accept a narrower interpretation of species in many cases where the latter followed the lead of Smith in believing that to do so accorded better with the reality observable in nature. The views of the ‘splitters’ were finding regular embodiment in the repeatedly revised Manual of British Botany by their current principal exponent, Babington, and more extended treatment now as well in the new English Botany, which began appearing five years after Bentham’s Handbook came out—and to which the ‘splitters’ must have seen it as a forceful counterblast. The battle between these two rival taxonomies was to rage for much of the nineteenth century and, in an attenuated form, through the first half of the twentieth century too, for it was one which neither side could hope to win conclusively as long as the mechanisms that produced the abnormal reproductive systems that were responsible for the exceptionally complex areas of the flora in question were not understood. Matters were complicated by the fact that even an arch-‘splitter’ like Babington was a lifelong disbeliever on the other hand in the existence of hybrids on any significant scale.

Not all ‘lumpers’ held that stance for the same reasons. Many did so for no better one than that otherwise matters became so much more complicated: too many distinctions of a fineness that could be mastered only by special study, too many extra names to be remembered, too many more gaps in the herbarium that needed to be filled. Others, however, had a deep and dogmatic adherence to the received idea that species were natural units of a more or less uniform size that was obviously apprehensible. Bentham was one of this second persuasion—and to the extent that he was convinced that, if only enough specimens were examined from a wide range of climates and habitats, as he made a point of doing in drawing up his Handbook descriptions, the differences on which many European botanists were founding new species would be found to be without merit. Unluckily for him, though, a paper he submitted to the Linnean Society in which he claimed that his Handbook work fully bore out that conviction, chanced to come up for reading at the very meeting at which the historic paper by Darwin and Wallace, setting forth the arguments for organic evolution, just preceded it. Profoundly disconcerted on hearing that, Bentham hurriedly withdrew his own. But even if it should now turn out that he, and those who thought like him, had all along been mistaken about the nature of species, he had still another reason for interpreting them broadly to fall back on. This was one shared by fellow botanists in the great herbaria who were in the front line of the struggle to cope with the almost overwhelming mass of diversity that was continuing to pour in on them from all around the globe. Fearful that the classificatory systems that had been developed would collapse if pushed too far and be brought into disrepute, the overriding consideration for those was the exercise of restraint in the describing of novelties.

Bentham used the lengthy introduction to the Handbook’s first edition as a kind of gun emplacement from which to deliver a broadside at his opponents, the ‘splitters’. In doing so, however, he was decidedly rash, for he was well known for basing his taxonomic work on herbarium specimens more or less exclusively (and he would indeed shortly be publishing Floras of Australia and Hong Kong without ever having set foot in those). Such little fieldwork as he had done to date had been mostly in southern France, where he had been brought up, and he had given no reason for anyone to suppose that he had other than slight experience of British plants in the living state. Yet here he was questioning the judgement of many able people who had devoted years to investigating the flora of these islands with great minuteness. Having recklessly chosen such very weak ground on which to issue his challenge, he was not surprisingly fired back upon mercilessly by Babington and his many supporters, who proceeded to review the Handbook scathingly wherever given the chance and damn it as well in private correspondence—in sharp contrast to the botanically less well-informed, whose reception of it tended to be laudatory. As Babington was another of Reeve’s authors and a no less valued one of considerably longer standing, to what must have been his no small consternation the publisher now discovered belatedly that he had unwittingly provided the site for a major pitched battle in a long-lasting scientific civil war.

Though Bentham had written the book ostensibly just for beginners, he can hardly have failed to anticipate such a hostile reception for it in quarters where his credibility as a taxonomist undeniably mattered. Not surprisingly, therefore, the introduction to the second edition was written in a distinctly hurt and defensive tone, this time in much more guarded words and substantially modifying the sweeping terms in which the judgements of the ‘splitters’ had earlier been dismissed. He did not retreat by any means entirely, however, nor—as he could well have done—seek to pass off the ‘lumping’ approach he had employed for it as no more than the degree of simplification accepted as normal and necessary in publications intended for an unsophisticated readership. Instead, he kept the main body of the text essentially unchanged, refusing to concede that his broad interpretation of a species did not hold true when exposed to detailed and prolonged scrutiny from at any rate a European perspective. With nature’s inconvenient corners of complexity written out of the picture, his determinedly myopic version of the ‘British flora’—or rather, to be more accurate, of the flowering plants and ferns of this whole off-continental archipelago—was the one that continued to be placed before that substantial middle segment of the botanical community that mainly bought and used his book. That might not have mattered overmuch, however, had the Handbook not gone on to dominate that segment for very many years more, in the long-continuing absence of any effective competitors and the freakish buoyancy conferred on the text by the steady demand for its companion volume of paintable line-drawings. Through a combination of accidents that were in no way Bentham’s doing, his wrong-headed taxonomy was thereby perpetuated through generation after generation, his supposed authoritativeness preserving the standpoint of the ‘lumpers’ long after that had become scientifically unsustainable.

By the time Bentham died, in 1884, the Handbook had enjoyed a steady sale for a quarter of a century and there was still no sign of its profitable life-span in print drawing to an end. To the non-naturalists who were by then its publishers its capacity for harm was not apparent: with only periodic light updating it promised to earn its place on the backlist for many more years to come. Even they, though, recognised that some revision of the text was overdue, and for that they were able to turn automatically to Bentham’s long-time friend and collaborator, Joseph Hooker, from whom Bentham had extracted a promise before his death to ensure that the book continued—but essentially unchanged. In giving that promise, however, Hooker had placed himself in an invidious position. For privately he had always had strong reservations about the book, and indeed he had gone to the length, back in 1870, of producing a substitute of his own devising, The Student’s Flora of the British Islands, to make up for the unsuitability of the other as a teaching text, even enlisting the aid of a leading ‘splitter’, his colleague J. G. Baker, to provide up-to-date accounts of several difficult genera for that. Hooker was also conscious that the work really required a much more radical overhaul than implied by Bentham’s parting wishes. This task was not rendered any easier, either, by the fact that, just like Bentham, he had spent most of his life working on the floras of distant parts of the world and was largely unfamiliar with that of (at any rate) England. He did his conscientious best, all the same, and certainly enough to justify his name being linked with Bentham’s henceforward as effective coauthor: a duo to become as well known in the world of botany as ‘Kirby and Spence’ had become in that of entomology.

With that doubling of seeming authoritativeness behind it, the title became impregnable. No other guide to the flowering plants and ferns combined compactness, keys, at least the appearance of comprehensiveness required for service as a ‘life list’ and, most important of all, illustrations of every species covered. A School Flora by W. M. Watts, published by Warne in 1878, was one of a series of attempts to satisfy the need for a simpler, heavily condensed equivalent in that junior section of the market, but none of those persisted for all that long. The main deterrent to producing a rival was the sheer grind of producing several hundred detailed descriptions. The few botanists with the breadth of up-to-date expertise that qualified them for the task lacked the time or the energy to undertake it as an individual endeavour, or else they could see no alternative to a large-scale collaborative project involving contributions by numerous specialists on the difficult groups. Two successive initiatives on that second model, to be examined in later chapters of this book, were both to peter out by being overambitious. For Ireland, with scarcely half Britain’s total of species, the task of producing a teaching text covering the flora of that alone was proportionately less daunting; yet even there A Student’s Illustrated Irish Flora, produced (from Canada) by a former Dublin professor, John Adams, in 1931, failed to catch on, leaving it to D. A. Webb’s An Irish Flora of 1943 to do so in its stead (despite lacking illustrations) and for the next half-century enjoy a deserved monopoly. In Britain, by contrast, so desperate did the need for the equivalent to that become that teachers in some universities had to have recourse to ‘Bentham and Hooker’ for want of anything more fitting.

Thus, for a whole century, the field-botany community was lumbered with a standard identification manual that was taxonomically misconceived from the first and ever more obsolete latterly, yet which defied the processes by which unsatisfactory works normally undergo timely extrusion. Free from any serious competition, it drifted on and on serenely, to end up like a four-masted barque in a steel-plated era of battleships and liners, all the while keeping that community as divided as ever by two deeply different conceptions of what many stretches of the flora comprised.

***

A more obvious way in which books could do harm, commonly in all innocence, was by fuelling outbreaks of exceptionally voracious collecting, with appalling depredation as a result.

Though relentless over-collecting had long been the dark underside of natural history, growing in amount as the subject grew in popularity, it was not until the middle years of the nineteenth century that the much-increased mobility of a much higher proportion of the literate became capable of turning that into more or less indiscriminate assaults en masse. That heightened mobility had come with the greatly expanded railway network, along which excursionists and holiday-makers could now be conveyed cheaply and quickly by the trainload and deposited on the countryside or the beaches. At the seaside, decorum on the whole still prevailed and the shortage as yet of commercialised amusements threw visitors onto their own resources, the sea in particular obligingly coming to their help by regularly washing up new objects that they could spend time and surplus energy in industriously gathering up. When Philip Henry Gosse began opening eyes to what the tide-pools contained, in book after book of enticingly written prose and brightly coloured illustrations, and above all in describing how to create a marine aquarium in A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast in 1853, he ignited a sudden intensification of that pastime, which rapidly grew out of control. Hordes descended on that hitherto-spurned habitat, and its denizens were carried off by the bucketful to grace the glass tanks that everywhere invaded suburban parlours (Fig. 100). For someone like Gosse it was now frighteningly possible to be over-successful in awakening the public to what nature had to offer.

What Gosse had not reckoned with was the sudden arrival of cheap plate glass, a breakthrough in technology that usefully coincided with the lifting at long last, in response to much lobbying, of the heavy duties on that material, which had kept its price artificially high. But if the whirlwind public response gave marine zoologists a nasty surprise, that was as nothing compared with the havoc the same development visited upon botanists. In that other quarter, the simultaneous occurrence of a switch in visual taste turned what might otherwise have been but a passing minor storm into a long-lasting hurricane of unparalleled dimensions.

The botanists did at least have some warning hints far in advance of what could happen if ever a section of the native flora were to take the fancy of a now rapidly proliferating gardening community. For as early as 1844 a hawker had been noticed on a London street offering for sale roots of the rare maidenhair fern. Till then, little interest had been shown in ferns by either field botanists or gardeners. In the second half of the 1830s, however, the advent of gas for lighting and heating made it no longer possible to keep floral decorations indoors for any length of time (and even flowers on balconies were effectively precluded in cities already by the heavily polluted air). A solution to that was promptly found by an observant London naturalist, who discovered that plants and even animals could flourish indefinitely if kept in almost-airtight glass cases with a modicum of soil in the bottom, for those constituted a natural system in miniature; and ‘Wardian cases’, as they were named after their inventor, thereafter began to become a feature of the interior décor of the homes of the comparatively wealthy.

Around the same time two books by field-botany enthusiasts, one of them that captivating writer Edward Newman, stimulated collectors to make more effort to discriminate the different kinds of native ferns, which by lacking the obvious appeal of wild flowers had till then suffered neglect. Some who took up the study of those in response then began to find that certain species are liable to produce aberrant fronds of sometimes considerable beauty, and seeking those out in particular they took examples home to propagate. This awakening to the subtle attractions of these intricate, lace-like effects can now be seen as the reverberation in the sphere of botany of that major stylistic readjustment that found its most conspicuous expression as the Gothic Revival in architecture. Ferns were consequently ideal choices for growing in the newly fashionable Wardian cases.

It merely remained for the Crystal Palace to show off the potential of the newly cheap plate glass at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and send everyone clamouring for their own tiny versions of that—and for ferns, of course, to fill them. One particularly alert horticultural publisher, the firm of Groombridge, had anticipated this, as it turned out: three years before, it had brought out a book on ferns that had already appeared in serialised form in the Gardeners’ and Farmers’ Journal. The author of this was Thomas Moore, a budding horticultural writer who was to found a career on those plants, on which he was to publish extensively (Fig. 101). Groombridge had caught the publishers who specialised in natural history looking in the wrong direction, with eyes only for the comparatively minuscule market represented by the interest in ferns developing in field botany. For that, Van Voorst had brought out in 1842 a second edition of Newman’s seminal, eminently readable book, A History of British Ferns, that was over four times the size of the original one and effectively a new work altogether. That same year Simpkin Marshall had similarly produced a second edition of the excellent little volume of 1837 by the real pioneer, G. W. Francis, which had been hidden behind a misleadingly heavy-sounding title: An Analysis of the British Ferns and their Allies. Now, however, as the pages of the much more influential Gardeners’ Chronicle began to fill with notes and queries on ferns, in the wake of Moore’s writings, all those other publishers were in a position to riposte with further editions of their respective runners. They were predictably soon joined, in the year of the Great Exhibition, by Reeve, till then a conspicuous absentee, for whom Moore had been meanwhile engaged in writing, for a less specialist readership, his Popular History of British Ferns (Fig. 102). Complete with lists of places, region by region, in which the various species were on record as occurring, and with the unbeatable asset of Fitch’s colour lithographs, this looked a certain winner from the first. ‘This stands at the head beyond all comparison,’ pronounced the Gardeners’ Chronicle.

Three more years had to elapse, nevertheless, before the number of fern books on the market began to look like a feeding frenzy. In 1854–5 no fewer than 14 new titles or further editions of the existing ones were rushed out, four of them by fresh arrivers on the scene, drawn by the commotion. One of those was Robert Hardwicke, who made his dreadfully unimpressive entry as a natural history publisher, as we have seen, by putting out a disgracefully ill-informed little work on the subject by an anonymous hack (subsequently revealed to have been an obscure clergyman).

Much more formidable competition was now imminent from the horticultural stable of Groombridge. At the insistence of the enterprising smalltown Yorkshire printer, Benajmin Fawcett—of whom more will be heard in the next chapter—the knowledgeable E. J. Lowe had been recruited to write a major work which was to run to eight quarto volumes (1856–60). As indicated by its title, Ferns, British and Exotic, this was designed to appeal across the market to field botanists and gardeners alike. Thanks to the fact that ferns tend to be a dull green or brown, the plates for this needed much less hand-colouring than in most of the works that received the benefit of Fawcett’s unequalled mastery of wood-block colour printing, and the consequent cost-saving allowed 479 plates to be provided.

While that was making its majestic way into the libraries (before being reissued, with a supplement then to follow), publishing enthusiasm was building up to a second peak in 1861–2, when the previous oligopoly of the natural history ‘majors’ plus Groombridge was at last broken as yet more firms joined in. An interesting new development at that point was the first appearance of books on the ferns of just particular districts, showing that the market had broadened further as fern collecting became a branch of tourism. Rambles in Search of Ferns, the first of several cryptogamic titles by Margaret Plues, was another newcomer of 1861 indicative of this. By this time, too, one or two people had even begun issuing sets of dried specimens of British ferns, with the names appended, for sale in souvenir shops in favourite tourist areas.

An almost non-stop trickle of books on ferns, from every conceivable angle, and for every kind or level of reader, continued till right to the century’s end, and even a little beyond, as more and more publishers became convinced that they were missing out and ought to have this subject on their list, while those who had been ensconced in the market already were determined to carry on milking it for all it was worth. By that time, though, the hurricane-like craze had spent most of its force. Everyone who had shared in the great urge to scour the countryside for ferns to put in albums or grow under bell-glasses or plant out on rockeries had gone as far as they wished. Many indeed had soon found themselves repelled by the lengths to which it had been taken: royal ferns sent up to the London markets by the wagonload; private estates ransacked by the agents of the nurserymen; lines of packed hampers at country stations; pestering by fern touts even on the summit of Snowdon; entire districts stripped of every one of these plants—with the exception presumably of the ubiquitous bracken—by impecunious cottagers and their children eager to earn some money from what must have seemed to them an inexplicable source of bounty. It was only fortunate that the native ferns are a tough tribe, for it was to be a century before their numbers noticeably began to recover.

Just as ornithologists were learning to expect periodic descents on seabird colonies by trigger-happy gunners, so botanists too henceforward had to be prepared for irruptions of trowel-wielding hordes. It was a sharp reminder that they had dangerous neighbours also, that invaders from over the garden wall were not confined just to foreign plants of a damaging aggressiveness (Fig. 103).

How far the publishers were to blame for ‘pteridomania’ (as Charles Kingsley dubbed it) is arguable. Immured in their London offices, they were physically remote from the effects that their books had clearly played some part in encouraging; if they holidayed at all in the countryside, though, their eyes must surely have been opened to the horrific results. In their minds, however, they probably made little or no distinction between botanists and gardeners, or between wild plants and cultivated ones. Natural history was still largely a matter of forming collections, after all, and collecting in any field is always liable to run out of hand, they probably told themselves. If any trade was seriously at fault, it must surely be the nurserymen, who were involved more directly and on whose express behalf a sizeable proportion of the damage was being perpetrated.

The initial focus on ferns did have a few undeniable benefits that could be pointed to, in any case. Most of these were scientific: the classification of these plants was considerably furthered, useful extra characters for distinguishing the species were discovered, the existence of hybridity was proved, an unsuspected auxiliary mode of reproduction was stumbled upon. But there was one noteworthy by-product for the book world too: the exploiting of the long-known technique known as nature-printing to capture the intricate details of fern fronds on paper and use the results as a strikingly beautiful form of illustration for volumes on the subject. Very much a German speciality through the centuries, a special form of the technique had been perfected by a firm in Vienna and patented in 1852. This involved pressing part of a plant between two metal plates, one of them of lead, on which a remarkably precise impression was reproduced; that was then transferred to a copper electrotype, itself a newish method, and multiple copies run off. In a disreputable piece of industrial spying, which justifiably led to an international furore, a leading London firm of banknote printers, Bradbury & Evans, surreptitiously obtained the details by smuggling in one of its apprentices, and took out a patent in Britain for its supposedly independent invention. The Viennese had thought the process could replace herbaria, but it was so complicated and costly that it never proved sufficiently profitable to be worth persevering with commercially. In 1855–6, however, Bradbury & Evans demonstrated its possibilities in a breathtaking imperial folio of 51 colour plates, for which Thomas Moore supplied an accompanying text. Entitled The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, this gave rise to such a chorus of admired comment that the firm was stimulated into bringing out a two-volume version of ordinary octavo dimensions for people of more modest means. This was no less beautiful, and its text gave Moore the opportunity to describe many new varieties. A still cheaper edition followed in 1863. Subsequently, the technique was to be put to good service by palaeobotanists for reproducing fossil ferns. All in all, though, that cannot be rated much in the way of compensation for an episode that otherwise did such an extraordinary amount of harm to the flora itself.

CHAPTER 12
Victorian High Tide

AFTER THAT DECADE OF depression, the ‘Hungry Forties’, the two that came after saw the return of boom conditions and widespread optimism.

The book trade not only shared that prosperity in full measure, but a prospect of still better times opened up for it as a massive investment at last took place in elementary education. In the 10 years from 1850 government expenditure on schools increased about sixfold, which quickly fed through into a marked reduction in illiteracy. More generally, the acquisition by more and more people of a higher social status brought an exceptional demand for instruction in the niceties of household management and numerous similar matters, to the extent that books on these outsold even fiction.

In step with that thrust for self-improvement, free book-borrowing was made available at local government expense. One or two towns and cities had been lucky to possess a public lending library for many years already, but all above a certain size were now expressly empowered to raise the necessary funds to enable this to become a more widespread form of provision (though not to buy any books, rather oddly). Go-ahead Manchester was the first to respond, in 1852, and in the initial year of operation over 77,000 loans were recorded there—and those only after the books had been identified via the catalogue, for browsing the open shelves was unheard-of anywhere until the 1890s. As it would be many years yet before the better-off, well catered-for already by the commercial equivalents, took to using the municipal libraries on any wide scale, the loss of business by bookshops caused by this innovation was probably far less than predicted.

A second major new market arrived with the railways. In the mid-1840s a second spurt of building had brought into being a fully national network, and the consequent enormous increase in that mode of travel, much of it daily and between a dormitory town and a city, boosted the sales of books as well as magazines and newspapers—once the novelty had worn off and people no longer felt obliged to converse with their fellow passengers (as they had on coaches). Trains did not sway to the extent that coaches had, so reading while in motion was much less of a strain now. The books, however, had to be of a size convenient to handle as well as light to hold and pack. Disposable paperbacks had been introduced in Germany in 1841, with British tourists there particularly in mind, and that bright idea was soon being copied over here for the cheap reprints needed for sale by the new bookstalls on stations, the first of which was opened at Euston in 1848 by W. H. Smith. Routledge’s ‘Railway Library’, rushed out for those, cost a shilling a volume. Short novels, preferably with grisly subject matter, were the prime favourites, but once that firm acquired J. G. Wood some natural history titles probably joined those. His Common Objects of the Country (1858), little more than 100 pages in length and with a dozen colour plates, is known to have sold an astounding 10,000 copies within a week of publication, and very many of those must surely have been impulse purchases on stations (including by parents in an attempt to keep excited children quiet, perhaps).

The much longer print runs justified by the greatly increased sales that successful titles at the less expensive levels of the book market could be expected to achieve meant that mechanical presses were now a necessity. A great deal more paper was needed too. It was just as well, therefore, that the excise duty on that key commodity was finally done away with in 1861 and that machine-made paper had similarly become usual, its cost greatly reduced by the displacing of rags as the raw material by imported wood pulp and esparto grass. Further cost savings were achieved with the general adoption of standard-sized cloth binding-cases, which obviated the cutting and trimming of pages by the binder.

For illustrations, lithography had risen by now to a peak of popularity and a certain amount of its use was in colour—though chromolithography was economic only for expensive works. It was too early yet for photographs, though, except for rare appearances as virtuoso achievements or curiosities. Plants had served as test subjects for several of the experimental processes that had led up to those, and it was probably no accident that W. H. Fox Talbot, the inventor in 1835 of the ultimately triumphant negative-positive process, Anna Atkins, the exponent of cyanotypes, and G. W. Francis, who championed ‘photogenic drawings’, were each field botanists as well. Animals, however, were less cooperative, at least when alive, for they were so seldom completely motionless. Close-ups of birds sitting on their nests were the best that could be hoped for in that direction, and even they were some years off. In zoology for the time being it was dead specimens or nothing. A Southampton lepidopterist had accumulated by 1859 photographs of mounted butterflies and moths ‘showing all the markings, etc., with the greatest exactness’, and could have used those to illustrate a book had he or anyone else been so inclined, but without colour those were inferior in appeal to engravings. Only four years later, however, that objection was exposed as groundless, when a series of photographs of shells published by Sylvanus Hanley in the Conchological Miscellany included seven coloured by hand. But the problem still remained that photography was too slow and costly to compete with the alternatives as far as book illustration was concerned. When one of his authors wanted to include two prints in a book in 1862, Van Voorst had to warn him that they would take 10 days to a fortnight to produce, adding that ‘clear weather is indispensable.’ A further snag at that period was that prints tended to fade as a result of an insufficient amount of washing agent having been used, the requisite chemical being rather expensive.

On the legal front there were also two important changes to which the trade was now having to adapt. In 1842 the period in which books remained in copyright had been extended to either 42 years or the lifetime of the author plus seven years, whichever was the longer. That represented a drastic tightening of the situation that had obtained for nearly 70 years by then. Conversely, in 1852, the control over discounting that the cartel of leading London booksellers had successfully exercised for many years had to be done away with, and for nearly half a century unrestrained competition in that activity accordingly returned. How far that affected natural history titles, however, we are unlikely ever to know.

***

The exceptionally favourable market conditions could hardly have failed to produce many outstanding publishing successes, especially in a field that was well established already. It is therefore no surprise to find that just about all of the ‘popular classics’ that we most associate with high-Victorian natural history made their debut in the 15 years following 1850. Just as that previous wave of prosperity 20 years earlier had thrown up a generation of naturalist writers eager to try riding that with book after book addressed to a non-specialist readership of fast-expanding dimensions, so this second wave predictably did so too. This new generation, though, had a much easier time. The ground had been well dug already and both authors and publishers had a clearer idea of what best appealed to this section of the market. Many of the new readers had probably had their interests and tastes substantially moulded by parents or teachers who had discovered natural history in the 1830s, so less in the way of basic instruction needed providing. Above all, two decades of increasingly widespread literacy had left a legacy of readers in much greater numbers, numbers in which lay proportionately greater safety: more of the books published were capable of selling more copies. In theory at least it was therefore less difficult to earn a livelihood entirely by the pen, and the penalty for failing to do so was no longer necessarily so drastic as emigration to the Colonies.

The publishers who were to produce the most successful—or at any rate the longest-selling—titles to emerge from this mid-century period effectively numbered only four. Significantly, two of those, Routledge and the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge had received a good burnishing already in the lowest level of the market, where the competition was fiercest and it did not pay to be too relaxed and gentlemanly. The brash George Routledge had acquired a well-deserved reputation for running one of the most enterprising houses in London, but he evidently so relished the cut and thrust at that depth that the comparatively staid field of natural history would have held scant appeal for him but for the chance arrival on his patch around 1850 of a recently ordained clergyman by the name of John George Wood (Fig. 104).

A naturalist from boyhood, the son of a doctor, Wood had quickly found parochial work beyond his strength (he suffered from exceptionally brittle bones, which compelled him to take life rather cautiously). Taking to the pen to supplement his meagre earnings in other clerical capacities instead, he discovered he had a flair for this alternative form of preaching and eventually, in 1873, that evolved into a full-time occupation. No stylist, and without any scientific pretensions, his sole concern was to capture the interest of the uninformed by describing animal behaviour through analogies with that of human beings and by making extensive use of anecdotes. Homes without Hands (1864–5) and Nature’s Teachings: Human Inventions Anticipated by Nature (1877) were two of his titles that made that message particularly explicit. It was an approach that alienated the more knowledgeable and orthodox but was to prove highly effective in winning lasting converts to the study of natural history—or at any rate zoology, which for him (as for Jardine before him) was virtually synonymous. He had some first-hand experience to draw on, moreover, having bred moths in his teens and taken a course in anatomy while a student at Oxford. Museums and libraries he nevertheless found repellent: they were ‘filled with facts dead, hard, dry and material as the fossil bones that fill the sealed caverned libraries of the past,’ he was once moved to lament; ‘true science’ alone, he insisted, ‘will breathe life into that dead mass, and fill the study of zoology with poetry and spirit.’ In those words there is a marked echo of that other compulsive preacher, Emerson.

As Wood was never free from financial anxiety (according to his son) and had a poor head for business, he must have been exploited by his successive publishers quite disgracefully, for many of his books were reprinted again and again, some continuing to sell into the twentieth century. Common Objects of the Country, that hit of 1857, is on record as having been one of the steadiest sellers for many years in Routledge’s list, yet, disastrously, he had agreed to accept only £30 for it, parting with the copyright. His output was indeed prodigious: over 70 titles have been traced and even that may not be the full total, for some were so ephemeral that they may have eluded even the most assiduous bibliographers and collectors. Not all were on natural history—for he also produced books on manly sports—but at least 46 were, three of them in the final years coauthored with his son Theodore in whole or in part. Routledge enjoyed a monopoly of his natural history for the first 10 years, after which they had to share him, mainly with Longman, but after that he was still loyal enough to his ‘discoverer’ to write a 20th book for that firm. One or two of his books, most notably Routledge’s Illustrated Natural History of 1859–63, came out first in monthly parts and were later reissued as independent volumes. It is no surprise to learn that halfway through his writing career Wood’s typical working day was ‘from half-past four in the morning till nearly eleven o’clock at night … with the exception of time taken for a short morning walk and a nap after dinner’, during which period he was writing two books simultaneously, for many months.

Routledge were so gratified to find that natural history could be so lucrative that after Wood’s first money-spinners they lost no time in enlisting further naturalist authors. The first of those to prove seriously rewarding was a London artist and book-illustrator, William Stephen Coleman. The two titles he produced for a new series, ‘Country Books’—possibly the earliest appearance of that iconic word ‘country’, destined to become ubiquitous from the 1890s onwards—were both to run to numerous editions. The partly botanical Our Woodlands, Heaths and Hedges came out first, in 1859, to be followed the next year by British Butterflies (Fig. 106). But providing illustrations for comparable books by fellow Routledge authors evidently proved a more congenial outlet for Coleman’s talents, which thereafter became lost to the painting of landscapes and tableware. His stable-mate showed no more staying-power, either. This was John Christopher Atkinson, the vicar of an isolated country parish in the North Riding of Yorkshire, whose main interests were folklore and local history. He had inherited a keenness for ornithology from his father and grandfather, however, and in middle life he got round to producing British Birds’ Eggs and Nests Popularly Described in 1861, in a companion format to Coleman’s books. In the opinion of the leading Essex naturalist, Miller Christy, writing some 30 years later, ‘few, if any, books have in their day done more to popularise that science’, and even after many editions it was ‘still one of the most popular works on ornithology in the English language’. Though Atkinson had a second book published by Routledge that same year, a weightier work of twice the length, that sold far less well and he and the firm then parted company. A late volume of reminiscences, Forty Years in a Moorland Parish (1891), a medley of natural history and historical information, for which he is remembered best in learned circles, was to have Macmillan as its publisher instead.

Ironically, both Wood and Atkinson, by virtue of being Anglican ministers, were just the kind of authors that the SPCK were keen on finding, and they would surely have lodged in that rival stable had Routledge not secured them first. Although the Christian house had for some years by then had two promising runners, somewhat lower down in the market, in Anne Pratt and Gosse, that it was still keen to be represented at the next level up was evidenced by the backing it had been giving since 1846 to another clergyman, Charles Alexander Johns (Fig. 107).

Johns was unusual among clerical authors at this period in pursuing his book-writing in the interstices of the demanding career of a headmaster; the lengthy school holidays, however, and an intervening stretch as curate-in-charge of a country parish, in which the duties were only light, fortunately made that feasible. Though he had broad natural history interests, his particular passion was botany, of which his knowledge was based on much more field experience than Anne Pratt’s. In youth he had had the benefit of guidance from Plymouth’s leading figures in that study and had even contributed a record or two to the august English Botany of Smith and Sowerby. Now, in middle age, he drew on that youthful store of expertise to produce, in remarkably rapid succession, a trio of what were each to prove hardy evergreen works: first, in 1847, The Forest Trees of Britain, a year later A Week at the Lizard and then, in 1851 (contrary to the reference books), by far his greatest success, Flowers of the Field – his gift to his fellow headmasters for innumerable prize-givings over the years. The first and the third of those, both brought out in two volumes initially, were to be reissued again and again at frequent intervals till well into the next century. Flowers of the Field, while still selling steadily in its original guise, additionally underwent a fairly sweeping renovation in 1907, at the hands of Clarence Elliott and under the auspices of Routledge ‘Mark Two’, the chief feature of which was the addition of 92 colour plates by Elizabeth Gwatkin (illustrating between them 268 species) to the generous scatter through the text of small black-and-white woodcuts on which would-be identifiers had had to rely up till then (Fig. 108). That much-improved, if inevitably more expensive, parallel version gave the title an extra lease of life, lasting itself for over 40 years till as recently as 1949. Just short of a century in print altogether, the title thus closely rivalled in longevity its somewhat more comprehensive but more austere scientific counterpart, Bentham’s Handbook of the British Flora. Sadly, just like the equally innocent Wood, Johns parted with the copyright in return for a once-and-for-all payment of £100 at the outset and so was never to receive a penny more subsequently.

A Week at the Lizard similarly brought Johns just an outright £40 and nothing further. That very much smaller figure naturally reflected its much smaller size—a single duodecimo as against two octavos—and its incontrovertibly narrower appeal. Commercially, indeed, it fared no better than either author or publisher could have expected, running to only four editions and those with lengthy intervals between them. For generations of field botanists, on the other hand, the book has long been a treasure. Cornwall’s Lizard Peninsula, a paradise of rare plants on account of its unusual geology and climate, was part of Johns’ ancestral countryside and upbringing, and the writing of this vivid, delightfully personal little local guide came from the heart. Additionally, there are botanical observations in it that in more recent years have turned out to be strikingly acute. Initially sold at two-and-sixpence, its 300-plus pages included over 70 attractive engravings (from watercolours by Emily Stackhouse, a family friend and local landowner’s daughter) and there was a fold-in map as well. The long-continuing demand for the book from a discerning minority kept it in the SPCK catalogue till as late as 1916, and in 1992 it received the ultimate accolade of a facsimile edition.

Johns was on shakier ground when persuaded to extend his book-writing to birds. Publications on those still tended to reflect the violent—or at least violating—approach that the general run of Victorians had unthinkingly taken over from their predecessors, and his first title on that subject for the SPCK was, all too necessarily, Birds’ Nests and Eggs. Eight years later, in 1862, his British Birds in their Haunts was accordingly something of a novelty in laying emphasis on habits and behavioural clues to recognition. With over 600 pages it was more than three times the length of Atkinson’s equivalent published just the year before and so unavoidably pricier, yet despite that it was to enjoy a very long life as well, attaining a 25th edition in 1948. Allegedly, it exceeded in popularity even Morris’s contemporary brace of bird books, and as neither of those outlasted the nineteenth century by more than a year or two that claim has credibility.

Francis Orpen Morris is the odd-man-out among these mid-Victorian big sellers (Fig. 109). He was the only one who was primarily an entomologist, the only one who owed his success to an engraver-cum-printer and not to a publisher and—alas, it has to be said—the only one to have perpetrated a deplorable amount of inaccuracy. Even his background was distinctive: the eldest son of an admiral, his upbringing was partly Irish. Gifted with more energy than was good for him and a writer of dangerous facility, his strong views on almost everything continually spilled over into fierce public controversy (including a one-man pamphlet war against the theory of evolution): he was natural history’s George Bernard Shaw. Another Yorkshire country vicar like Atkinson, but in the East instead of the North Riding, his relative isolation from well-informed circles was to be his undoing—though he would probably have been disdainful of correction or advice in any event.

Just as Wood’s son left a graphic account of his father’s working habits, so Morris’s did too. From that we know that the whole of his enormous literary output (which extended well beyond natural history) was the product solely of his evenings, for he rose late—unlike Wood. The mornings had to be sacrificed to replying to his innumerable correspondents and afternoons were mostly devoted to visiting his parishioners. Once evening arrived, however, he ‘seldom ceased writing’, continuing till nearly midnight. It helped, though, that he wrote with great rapidity: ‘it was more like a perpetually running stream than anything else; time, place or circumstance seemed to make but little difference to him.’ Even so, ‘it was only by the strictest economy of the hours and the minutes as they fled that he could have done what he did.’ But after he moved to a much smaller parish in 1854, life became somewhat easier.

Some four years before that, Morris happened to drop in at the bookshop in his nearest small town, Great Driffield, near Bridlington, and was shown by its printer proprietor, Benjamin Fawcett, a sample plate for a book on birds that the latter had conceived and for which he needed someone to supply a readable, non-scientific text. Knowing that Morris counted bird lore as one of his interests, he invited him to be that person. Fawcett had invented and perfected a novel process for fine printing in colours, which consisted of first producing wood engravings from drawings (both done by himself), hand-colouring those and then colour-printing them from multiple wood-blocks. A perfectionist who has justifiably been compared with Bewick, he recruited local girls on leaving school and gave them a much more rigorous training than was then usual. His firm would go on to win worldwide acclaim for the quality of what it produced.

Fawcett and Morris are said to have planned the work together with great thoroughness. Deciding to call it A History of British Birds – despite that title having been used twice already only 13 years before, though admittedly for books of different types—they settled on royal octavo size as best suited to display the 358 colour plates which were to be issued in parts to make up six volumes (a smaller-sized version in eight was to follow a decade later) (Fig. 110). Without the excellent illustrations the work could hardly have sold anything like as well as it did, but much of that commercial success was also thanks to the shrewd choice, at Morris’s suggestion, of the hard-selling London firm of R. Groombridge & Sons as the national distributor. Founded by an original Richard Groombridge back in the early 1830s, this had been one of the first British publishers to bring out reasonably well-produced part-works at remarkably low prices, most notably the Florigraphia Britannica of Richard Deakin and Robert Marnock, which was sold in sixpenny parts in 1837–48. Since then it had rather specialised in horticulture, including a monthly magazine, The Floral World, edited by a brilliant journalist, Shirley Hibberd (a man despite that forename), who also wrote for it very readable books on fashionable topics of the day (such as Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste, which in 1856 gave a helping boost to the fern craze). Despite their being at such a great distance from one another, Fawcett and Groombridge at once realised that their businesses were valuably complementary, and their association was to develop into a strong and mutually very profitable one that ended only with the publisher’s bankruptcy in 1891. Even after that it was to continue in ‘ghost’ form, for Groombridge’s more lucrative titles, including the major ones of Morris’s authorship, were snapped up and resuscitated by George Bell & Sons, the firm which had breathed renewed life into Hardwicke’s English Botany similarly.

That interdependence of the publisher and the illustrator proved anything but comfortable for the third member of the team, however. Morris allowed himself to be hustled by the growing ambitiousness of the other two into taking on much too much further work than any sensible person ought to have agreed to. Before the massive publication on birds had proceeded all that far, he found himself under regular call as well for monthly slices of text for two other, shorter part-works that the team could not resist issuing concurrently: A History of British Butterflies (1852–3) and A Natural History of the Nests and Eggs of British Birds (1853–6). It comes as no surprise to learn that Morris, caught up in the general enthusiasm, rushed through the writing of the later parts of the History of British Birds. Not that his readers probably noticed, though, for few probably knew much about the subject and valued the text mainly for its anecdotes (the plates, by contrast, were so accurate that taxidermists came to rely on them implicitly). Even so, some of those readers were men so poor that they went without beer and pipe in order to buy each monthly part (as Morris was made aware), so it was regrettable that the opportunity was missed to provide them with something more helpfully informative.

Fortunately, Morris knew much more about butterflies and moths than he did about birds, and his contribution to the same team’s multi-volume publications on those have attracted much less criticism over the years. Though they similarly tend to read as though delivered from a pulpit, with poetry and the Classics drawn on in place of the Bible, they contain more meat, based as they were on the author’s own lengthy experience as a collector. The worst that is said of them is that Morris was too unsuspicious of purported captures in these islands of unlikely foreign butterflies, which were more probably the product of fraudulent subterfuge by dealers.

Given the rashness of his versatility, it is perhaps surprising that Morris was not also roped in for the works that the team’s other two members each separately brought out on fishes—the predictable next choice, especially considering how well Van Voorst had done with Yarrell’s much earlier book on those and the profusion of anglers that so obviously existed. However, Morris could not have hoped to compete with Jonathan Couch, the village doctor of Polperro, whose A History of the Fishes of the British Islands (1860–5), in four volumes and with 252 colour plates (from paintings by the author), was also brought out by Groombridge (Fig. 111). Thanks to his key position in that small Cornish fishing community in which he spent most of his life, Couch encountered none of the difficulties in obtaining fresh specimens of unusual species to study that Montagu had complained of (in a letter to James Sowerby in 1801). Montagu’s Devon fishermen had proved unwilling to take the trouble to supply those ‘even for money’, forcing him to employ someone to collect them from the shore by moonlight. Despite inventing an apparatus that sprayed salt water on specimens while he rapidly captured their colours before dissecting them, even Couch, however, often had no choice but to paint dying or dead examples, and the colouring of his illustrations is sometimes as a result unnaturally bright. By the time he was ready to produce that major work for a non-specialist readership he had been publishing learned papers on the subject for 40 years and was generally recognised as the foremost national authority, so he was himself a prize catch for a firm like Groombridge that specialised in the less scientific sector of the book market. As confidently expected, the work was reissued many times—and yet, once again, the sum earned from it by the author was miserably small, a mere £50, not much more than the comparatively minuscule A Week at the Lizard had brought the no less deserving Johns.

Curiously, it was not Groombridge but a much more obscure London house, Mackenzie, that published William Houghton’s British Fresh-water Fishes in 1879, the 41 colour plates in which are regarded by leading authorities as the finest examples of Fawcett’s mastery of wood-block colour printing. The little-known Houghton had been a headmaster in holy orders, just like Johns, but was retired when he wrote that book. A further hint of some jostling between publishers to have this subject represented in their lists is the SPCK‘S success in luring away Frank Buckland from Richard Bentley to produce a Familiar History of British Fishes for them in 1873. A knowledgeable zoologist and a convivial raconteur, Buckland had abandoned a career as an army surgeon for journalism on achieving spectacular success with a series of articles in Bentley’s Miscellany, one of the leading magazines of the period, when those were republished in a series of volumes in 1857–66, as Curiosities of Natural History. Luckily, he had not remained content with drawing on his immense repertoire of anecdotes but went on to create an ideal niche for himself as the national authority on fish culture, a matter then of growing concern to governments and on which he was to do much influential advisory work.

Fish had appeared on the menus of both the SPCK and its evangelical counterpart, the Religious Tract Society, a decade ahead of any of those other works. As both bodies had good records of keeping alert to trends in popular taste, the fact that the two brought out a title on that subject almost simultaneously suggests that the timing was well-considered. It is additionally suggestive that each used for the purpose the respective authors on whom they were then relying to come up with zoological books more or less to order. One of those was the RTS‘S long-serving William Linnaeus Martin, the other the SPCK‘S more recent acquisition (in 1844), Philip Henry Gosse (Fig. 112).

Gosse inherited from his father the twin talents for writing and painting that he was able to combine to such great effect. And it was to a spell of unemployment at sixteen on the coast of Dorset, after an abortive start as a clerk in a counting-house (like John Martyn two centuries earlier), that he originally owed the lasting fascination with the denizens of rock-pools for which he is primarily remembered, at least by naturalists. After some years in North America, he had returned to England in 1839 with a sufficient store of natural history knowledge to liberate himself from a hated new career as a schoolteacher, at first as a paid collector of specimens and then as a full-time writer on the subject. A wave of public interest in the deep sea engendered by the scientific voyage of Sir James Clark Ross led the SPCK to elicit from him an early successful book on that, The Ocean, in 1845; but it was a bout of nervous indigestion, brought on by overwork, that chanced to send him back to the seaside, by then the standard solution for anyone in need of a reconditioning. Once there, a reawakening of that teenage passion promptly occurred, first at Torquay, in the south of Devon—which Montagu had shown to be so productive half a century earlier—and later the same year in the north of that county, at Ilfracombe.

A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, a little duodecimo of 451 pages of text and 12 seductive lithographs in colour from Gosse’s paintings, was the outcome, in 1853, of that prolonged change of scene. Though this was to prove by no means the most widely bought of his many books (The Romance of Natural History, the first series of which was published in 1860, has that distinction) nor the one by which he set most store himself (that was his superb monograph of 1858–60 of the British sea-anemones and corals, Actinologia Britannica), it must be accounted easily his most influential, by reason of its appendices of instructions on how to form marine aquaria and the destructive craze for those that it was pre-eminently responsible for (Fig. 113). Besides elevating his work onto a higher platform of esteem as well as popularity, it also consolidated a 20-year association with an additional publisher (for three more books for the SPCK were still to follow, and later several more for yet another firm, Nisbet, by comparison with those an intruder into natural history). The addition was the prestigious Van Voorst, who up till then had tended to concentrate on rather more up-market works by people with some standing already as scientists. As Gosse was at that point very hard-pressed financially, his then wife having just lost her inheritance in a mining speculation, Van Voorst also had the attraction of being willing to handle the book under the less orthodox type of arrangement that for an author was potentially very much more lucrative. This involved the publisher acting only as the distributor, leaving the author to bear most of the risk in return for retaining the copyright. For Gosse, it was a gamble that was to turn out amply justified (and one which he would thereafter have the confidence to repeat in the case of others of his books).

For Van Voorst, on the other hand, the results of that association proved decidedly mixed. For only four years after the resounding success of A Naturalist’s Rambles he found himself the surely embarrassed publisher of Omphalos, the attempt by an anguished Gosse to reconcile the theory of evolution with his fundamentalist convictions, and then the year after that of the magisterial but similarly heavily loss-making Actinologia Britannica (for which he had allowed Gosse’s reputation and enthusiasm to tempt him into ordering much too large a print run). That was too much for Van Voorst, who felt unable to take any more chances with such an uneven author, and though the two remained on good terms their business association consequently ended. Nevertheless, the six titles other than Omphalos that he had had the luck to be entrusted with in that golden span of just eight years had by 1867 earned the author £4,158, of which the two editions of The Aquarium of 1854 and 1856 contributed nearly one-third. Though that figure looks derisory to present-day eyes, it is in fact equivalent to about a quarter of a million pounds in our values. Small though Van Voorst’s share was by comparison, on balance he must surely have profited considerably. Though his list had not been short of marine titles before Gosse came to him, and had included good sellers like Harvey’s The Sea-side Book already, it clearly did that no harm either to be able to boast this string of further ones at the time when the long-developing interest in the flora and fauna of the beaches and coastal waters was arriving at its very conspicuous peak.

Although Gosse was not yet fifty when the last of those six works began to appear, like many an author who has enjoyed outstanding success with one topic or approach in particular he must inevitably have tired of producing books on that again and again as long as the demand for them lasted, easy though that was. Luckily, however, around that time his financial circumstances took such a marked turn for the better that he was spared that fate. Not only did the ensuing Romance of Natural History sell much better and sell more enduringly than any of its predecessors, but his gamble in not parting with the copyrights in any of his books with Van Voorst also began to pay off in the form of a growing royalty income. But much more important than either of those was the inheritance in 1864 by his second wife, a member of the wealthy Gurney banking family, of a legacy large enough to relieve him of any further worry on that front. He consequently wrote no more on natural history at book length after that.

Turning out work for the popular market must have become increasingly frustrating for Gosse by then in any case, for alone of the other outstandingly productive writers on natural history he was all along as well a dedicated conductor of original and valuable research on the organisms about which he wrote for the general reader. In the light of that, his popular success must be accounted all the more well-deserved. It was nevertheless achieved at the expense of what would surely otherwise have been a more substantial published scientific oeuvre. As far back as 1849 he had embarked on what would have been a second major monograph to his name, one on the Rotifera, had he only had the time to finish it; as it was, the data he accumulated were sufficiently extensive to warrant his featuring as assistant author of an eventual two-volume work on that group by C. T. Hudson that Longman brought out in 1886, two years before Gosse’s death. In the meantime he had had the consolation of also seeing in print his impressive Manual of Marine Zoology (1855–6), a pioneer attempt at a comprehensive survey of what that section of the British fauna was so far known to comprise. Very few others have managed to ride both those horses, the popular and the learned, with such consistently high standards and without the one causing any more harm to the other than in restricting the number of its appearances.

That an author as productive and well-known as Gosse, some of whose books remained in print for many years, was freed from financial worry only by the arrival of a legacy is a sharp reminder that the commercial success of a title by no means necessarily translated into money for the person who had written it. It was still so usual for the inexperienced to plump for the more certain option of a once-and-for-all payment right at the start that very few books in a field like natural history had any pecuniary afterlife as far as the author was concerned. For that reason, even though the market was so much larger now and the trade was enjoying a period of particular prosperity, it was still as rare as ever for a naturalist to earn a respectable livelihood by depending on the pen alone—or at any rate by restricting his other efforts solely to books. Gosse’s bibliographers have traced some 230 articles that he also contributed in the course of his writing career to 48 magazines and the like. Wood’s equivalent ‘second string’ was his uniquely well-illustrated public lectures, which proved such crowd-pullers that he was eventually touring Britain with them and even the United States. For Coleman, on the other hand, the situation seems to have been reversed: illustrating was the mainstay and book-writing the subsidiary earner.

In contrast to those three, all the others who produced the popular classics of this period wrote only to supplement a more or less stable income earned in a different occupation. Atkinson and Morris had clerical stipends underpinning them securely; Johns exchanged employment as a teacher for running a school of his own; Couch had a long-established medical practice without significant competition. It is tempting to class them as part-timers, were that not scarcely a word that describes an all-out dynamo like Morris in any way accurately.

***

One other, little-remarked-upon product of the hearteningly greater robustness of the market for natural history in these mid-century years was the first signs of emergence of a reminiscence literature: that is, relaxed, informal narratives written for the enlightenment and entertainment of fellow enthusiasts in particular, recapturing the highlights of past fieldwork or recounting how a particular line of investigation came about and attracted a following. Such a book is Wanderings among the Wild Flowers, a disparate collection of light essays by a Burton-on-Trent physician, Spencer Thomson, who probably thought himself lucky to find a publisher willing to take it on without a subsidy when he tried offering it around in 1854. If so, however, he reckoned without the ability of a firm like Groombridge to extract long-running sales out of an unillustrated octavo volume with seemingly slight general appeal, for in the event it went through three impressions in two years and was still going strong 10 years after that. One person known to have bought a copy was the novelist George Eliot, in whom it created ‘at least a longing for something more complete on the subject’ (as she confided in one of her letters).

From that and other equally obscure little ancestors lurking in the mid-Victorian undergrowth—Hardy Ferns: How I Collected and Cultivated Them, by Nona Bellairs, is another, alluringly chatty example of 1865—a slowly broadening line of descent can be traced to such latter-day counterparts as P. B. M. Allan’s Moths and Memories, Robert Lloyd Praeger’s A Populous Solitude, Oliver Gilbert’s very recent The Lichen Hunters and many, many more. Down through the years books such as these have happily caught for posterity the inner reality of natural history that otherwise tends to lie hidden behind the misleadingly formal surface of records and reports, monographs and minutes. But it is a genre that could have begun to make its appearance only at a point when there were at last enough fellow naturalists around to appreciate it and to encourage a more venturesome publisher or two to take a chance with it.

CHAPTER 13
Wider And Deeper SUI

THE RENEWED SURGE IN national prosperity that the middle years of the nineteenth century brought did more than just produce a corresponding surge in the numbers buying books on natural history and, more importantly, putting those to practical use. Even more beneficially, the mere existence of many more naturalists enlarged the proportion able and confident enough to master one field of interest in particular and bring to it a long-term commitment. Just as had happened two generations earlier, the marked swelling of natural history’s ranks was sufficient just in itself to generate more specialists and stimulate the opening-up of further stretches of the plant and animal kingdoms that had hitherto been largely or wholly neglected (mainly for lack of the necessary instruments—microscopes in particular, but also more efficient dredges and other aids to collecting). This was consequently to be a second period characterised more especially by the producing and publication of path-breaking monographs, which acted in their turn to render those stretches more accessible still.

Because it had been relatively well patronised for some time already, it was entomology that experienced the sudden leap in numbers most noticeably of all. At least two of its leading figures were moved to remark in print on ‘the vast increase’ in their ranks that had taken place since the 1840s—one welcome by-product of which had been a detectable decline in the ridicule that the wielding of a net tended to elicit from onlookers, so much more familiar had their activities become to the public. Insect collectors were still much less numerous than botanists, however, one of those commentators noted, which could have been one reason at least why that sister pursuit was ‘one looked on generally with more respect’.

It was with the massive influx of especially young and impecunious collectors particularly in mind that the prodigiously productive H. T. Stainton (Fig. 114), newly released from the burden of the Entomological Society’s honorary secretaryship, produced for Van Voorst his soon-legendary Manual of British Butterflies and Moths in monthly threepenny parts in 1856–9. Duodecimo in size and with text figures necessarily substituting for colour plates, to keep the price down, it provided descriptions of all accepted species, lists of localities where those were known to occur and much readable information besides. The veteran G. B. Longstaff was to laud it over half a century later as ‘perhaps the best book on the British Lepidoptera ever published’. ‘It was a privilege to be started with such a book in one’s hands,’ he recalled, ‘and many and many a time have I thanked my stars that I was brought up on Stainton, rather than on the spoon-food of Newman’—for its very lack of pictures was an advantage, in his view (one shared, as we have seen, by the university teachers who deplored the provision of plates with Bentham’s Handbook of the British Flora). As late as 1937 another veteran, P. B. M. Allan, still regarded the work as ‘indispensable’.

Just like his botanical contemporary, Bentham, Stainton tossed off that guide for beginners in the interstices of profuse monographic work. In his case that was mainly The Natural History of the Tineina (the clothes moths), a long-time interest of his, on which he was fortunately wealthy enough to be able to pay Van Voorst—if that was indeed the case—to bring out a multilingual succession of 13 volumes, with 104 colour plates, spread over 19 years (1855–73). No such luxury, alas, was open to the no less able and prolific J. O. Westwood (Fig. 115), Stainton’s predecessor in that same key Entomological Society office. Until elected in 1861 to the new chair in zoology at the University of Oxford, endowed (specially for him) by the munificence of fellow entomologist F. W. Hope, the frugal Westwood had opted to subsist largely on what he could earn from freelance drawing and authorship, spending his book-writing energies on works more assured of bringing in money. By the mid-1850s the best from his pen that a publisher could lay hands on, to help fill the market gap exposed and exploited by Stainton’s Manual, was a slimmed-down version of his highly regarded British Butterflies and their Transformations of 1841, deprived of the colour plates by his collaborator, H. N. Humphreys, that had been the original work’s chief glory and temptation to buyers.

If the lepidopterists had seemingly been caught unawares by the publishing implications of the dramatically enlarged following their study had attracted, the coleopterists were better placed to respond. It may have been just luck, but a steady flow of valuable works appeared from that quarter in that same span of years. First to come out, from Van Voorst in 1854, was a monograph of the carnivorous ground beetles, Geodephaga Britannica, by a clergyman, J. F. Dawson. This cleared away a mass of confusion created by the previous treatment by Stephens. Then, in a four-part Catalogue of British Coleoptera in 1858–61, G. R. Waterhouse radically overhauled the rest of the order with similar decisiveness. Apparently in response, in 1863, Reeve reissued the beetle portion of John Curtis’s British Entomology as a stand-alone volume, following that up in 1866 with the much-praised introductory volume contributed to his ‘Crown’ series by E. C. Rye, Waterhouse’s son-in-law. Imprisoned to his distaste in a legal career, Rye had just then started to specialise in beetles, and so grasped exceptionally well what a beginner needed to be told. He would go on to produce over 240 papers on the subject, as well as to edit the Zoological Record.

Beetles, though, had at least enjoyed a major flurry of publishing attention already, three to four decades earlier: all that had been required to restore their study to vitality was the removal of a taxonomic roadblock. But matters were very different when it came to reinstituting work on spiders—by long tradition, ‘honorary insects’ for publication purposes. Next to nothing had been published on those since early in the eighteenth century (and probably there had been scant collecting of them, too). That state of affairs was now to be rectified, but only after a sequence of events that came some way to rivalling, in length, hazard and complexity, the journey into eventual print of Thomas Penny’s first-ever manuscript on the insects of these islands.

This particular journey owed its start to a brilliant young Belfast entomologist, Robert Templeton, the only son of one of the founding fathers of Irish natural history, a wholesale merchant in that city prosperous enough to be able to afford to send his son to Edinburgh University. Long a keen collector, the son’s zoological sophistication by then drew him to orders that had been glaringly underinvestigated, not least in his corner of Ireland. One of those was the Thysanura, the primitive bristletails and springtails, on which he got as far as publishing the first-ever paper of significance to appear in the English language (and the last for another 50 years or so, as it was to turn out). Unfortunately, comparable work he accomplished on the Irish spiders and mites had not advanced far enough to proceed into print similarly by the time he embarked on a career as an army surgeon in 1833 and devoted his attention thereafter to tropical faunas exclusively. He did, however, leave behind a manuscript in which he had described and figured 43 species, several new to science. Years later, in 1850, that was offered to a by then monograph-hungry Ray Society, in the belief that it was valuable enough as far as it went not to be left in oblivion. The society agreed with that assessment, but because of the manuscript’s narrowish scope decided it was publishable only in combination with a more substantial work on the subject that had long been impending from a retired Manchester businessman, John Blackwall.

Blackwall had been publishing on spiders ever since 1827, and had begun studying them intensively on abandoning the linen trade and moving to a remote part of Denbighshire in the very year that Templeton discontinued his own work on the group. Despite relying almost entirely on a strong pocket-lens (instead of a by then customary microscope), his descriptions were greatly superior to Templeton’s and indeed the first adequate ones to be produced by anyone in these islands. He had made a limited study of spider behaviour as well.

Although the Ray Society confidently advertised at that mid-century point that a joint publication by the two specialists was shortly in prospect, another 10 years went by before that appeared. For reasons best known to itself, it failed to press Blackwall to come up with what he had accumulated, and in his happy isolation the prospective work grew to such dimensions that it needed two folio volumes to accommodate it when it eventually materialised. The original idea of publishing Templeton’s manuscript in tandem with it consequently had to be dropped, and when A History of the Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland did at last arrive in print, in 1861–4, it bore Blackwall’s name alone (Fig. 116). Even to reach that point, though, it had had one final vicissitude to overcome, for the chief illustrator, Tuffen West, had fallen ill and a further delay of about 10 years had intervened while he slowly recovered. Nevertheless—in the words of the late W. S. Bristowe, to whose relish for historical research as well as for araneology we owe the piecing-together of this complicated story—the lengthy wait proved well worth it in the end: the coloured illustrations were ‘of unsurpassed beauty and accuracy’ and a high proportion of the 304 species described were new to science. Sadly, though, the descriptions of those had lain for so long in manuscript by then that alternative names for many had meanwhile been published by fellow specialists on the Continent, depriving Blackwall’s of priority. Sadly, too, though there was evidence of his work here and there, Templeton’s descriptions had been too sketchy for anyone to be sure which species were intended, and none of his proposed names could consequently be taken up.

The most heartening aspect of this story is the aftermath. For, unlike all too many monographs that have been no less hard-won, Blackwall’s gave rise to an unbroken lineage of productive enthusiasts all through the century that followed. Among the first, and much the most influential, was Octavius Pickard-Cambridge (Fig. 117), a would-be barrister turned Dorset rector and an all-round naturalist, whose two volumes on the spiders of that heath-rich county in 1879 and 1881 were of very much more than just the local importance those topographical limits suggested. Though that was to be his only publication of book length, his output of papers on the subject was great indeed, and the number of species new to science that eventually stood to his name would be well over a hundred. He thus has a good claim to be ranked as the zoological counterpart of botany’s Berkeley, that other English country clergyman of comparably ceaseless productivity and equally great longevity.

Though Pickard-Cambridge did not start publishing on spiders till 1852, by which time he was in his mid-twenties, he appeared on the scene early enough to be able to give the by then ageing Blackwall a badly needed helping hand, spending a week with him in his North Wales fastness and drawing some of the plates for the monograph’s second volume. When finally failing sight and health compelled even so dogged an octogenarian as Blackwall to abandon further work, the other had long been the heir-apparent and was ready to take his place. In his turn, Pickard-Cambridge went on to inspire, encourage and assist two further generations of spider aficionados, and thereby ensured that the study continued to thrive after he was gone. Which is just how such things ought always to be managed, surely.

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Meanwhile, under-studied sections of the plant kingdom had been undergoing reinvigoration, similarly. Thanks to the wide availability by now of reasonably effective microscopes, botanists no longer had little option but to restrict their gaze to the flowering plants and ferns, the larger fungi and—that special exception—seaweeds, in the same way that entomologists had so long had to concentrate on the butterflies and the larger moths and beetles. In theory at least, the whole of the plant kingdom had been thrown open to inspection, and the areas that had been closed off except to very determined specialists were at last common ground on which everyone who so wished might productively wander.

Among the more obvious beneficiaries of that situation were the mosses and their close allies, the hepatics or liverworts. By 1855, a second updating of the standard work on the mosses, Museologia Britannica, which the elder Hooker and his Irish collaborator, Thomas Taylor, had originally produced in 1818, was seriously overdue. Nine years had passed since Hooker had invited his long-time protégé in that field, the Warrington-based William Wilson, to undertake that task and transferred to him from Kew the very extensive personal collection of those plants that he had accumulated. Wilson, however, was a man of such a nervous disposition that he had found even the relatively tranquil life of a smalltown solicitor insupportably agitating and, despite having been able to devote himself full-time to botanical study on a modest independent income ever since his twenties, was such a perfectionist that his progress had been extremely slow. Nevertheless, what finally emerged was so thorough that it was very largely a new work altogether—though the substituting of Bryologia for Museologia in the title was the nearest that great difference came to receiving acknowledgement outwardly.

Wilson’s masterly overhaul of the national moss flora seems to have been fortuitously well-timed, for only the previous year, in 1854, an introductory volume on these plants, by R. M. Stark, an Edinburgh nurseryman, had been included in Reeve’s widely-bought ‘Popular History’ series. Such converts as that may have won for the study then received a second helping in 1863 from the ever-industrious Berkeley, on temporary leave from the fungi, in the shape of a substantial Handbook to British Mosses, also from Reeve.

At much the same time there was a noticeable flurry of interest in lichens as well. Like the mosses and liverworts, those similarly owed that increased attention to the appearance of both major scholarly works and practical handbooks for beginners. First of all, as a kind of outrider in 1851, came a monograph from the Ray Society on The British Species of Angiocarpous Lichens. The author of that, W. A. Leighton (Fig. 118), though in holy orders (and briefly at first a holder of curacies), was independently wealthy thanks to having an heiress for a mother, and he had already published an exceptionally lavish Flora of his home county of Shropshire, almost certainly largely at his own expense. The fact that the plates illustrating the lichen volume were well below the normally high Ray Society standard suggests that that was heavily author-subsidised too, while in the case of his culminating The Lichen-flora of Great Britain, Ireland and the Channel Islands of 1871 all discretion on that point was finally dropped. Both works were to remain in long-lasting demand, given the shortage of aids to identifying those then still poorly understood organisms, a shortage only slightly ameliorated by J. M. Crombie’s Lichenes Britannici, published in 1870 nominally by Reeve—but considering that it was written in Latin, presumably subsidised like its predecessors.

Leaving the fungi to his competitor, Hardwicke, Reeve had a near-monopoly at this period of low-priced introductory guides to these two other sections of the cryptogamic flora (perhaps by a gentlemen’s agreement?). With one for mosses already secured for his list, adding another for lichens must have seemed a virtual obligation. And having looked to Scotland for the person to write the moss volume, it was in that direction that he turned again, to be rewarded with a particularly competent and willing author in W. Lauder Lindsay (Fig. 119).

It was fortunate that Lindsay had chosen to follow the career of an asylum medical officer, for he would doubtfully have had the time for so considerable an undertaking otherwise. But had Lindsay refused, there was another Scottish lichenologist who happened to be engaged in that same line of work, James Gilchrist, whom Reeve could have recruited instead. Though the two doctors worked in separate institutions, they collaborated closely by post on those plants. The treatment of mental illness had become an increasingly popular medical specialism at that period, appealing perhaps especially to men, like those two, who were gentle and retiring by nature and could find fulfilment in devising more progressive methods. More generally, though, all through the nineteenth century and even earlier the running of asylums, private as well as public, was an occupation to which naturalists of many kinds noticeably gravitated in disproportionate numbers. This may have been in part because it was less stressful and less leisure-devouring than the standard career alternatives for medical graduates, but it probably also possessed appeal for a special few who saw promising potential in natural history as occupational therapy for the less seriously ill, actively encouraging patients to form collections and even arranging classes for them in the subject.

Lindsay was not alone for long in seeking to win a wider following for the study of lichens. The very next year, 1857, after his Popular History on them had proved modestly successful—enough at any rate to justify a second edition not long afterwards—it was joined by a similar attempt by the indefatigable Berkeley. This took the form of a section within an Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany as a whole, a publishing venture by the firm of Baillière, the specialists in works on microscopy. Though the highly controversial finding that lichens are not a discrete part of the vegetable kingdom (as up to then generally supposed) but the dual product of an association between a fungus and an alga was then still some 10 years off, they could be seen as constituting a natural extension to Berkeley’s fungal territory, and he had been giving signs of interest in them for nearly a decade already. A Manual of British Lichens, self-published locally by the unfortunately named William Mudd, followed a short time after, in 1861. At that date still in manual employment as a gardener on a north of England estate but soon to be appointed curator of the University Botanic Garden at Cambridge,the botanically self-taught Mudd had appeared seemingly from nowhere and produced what has come to be regarded as a minor classic. It was the first reasonably comprehensive handbook and the first in Britain to take taxonomic advantage of spore characters. Sadly, though, the massive amount of microscopic work entailed by that had apparently damaged his health, which may have been one reason why at Cambridge he did not live up to expectations and, once there, seems to have abandoned not only lichens but fieldwork altogether.

Contrary to the obvious inference, it was not the publication of Mudd’s Manual that was responsible for recruiting the able and productive Crombie to the subject the very next year: rather, that was apparently the outcome of the latter’s rescuing an Irish lichenologist, Theobald Jones, from death by exposure after a crippling fall while collecting that summer in the Cairngorms above Braemar. Like his equally hardy fellow Aberdonian, the luckless MacGillivray, Crombie was to become well known for often spending the night in the field, so the circumstances in which that lightning conversion took place were highly fitting. That he had been recently ordained a Church of Scotland minister, and that that conversion to lichenology was at the hands of a retired admiral, adds further to the colourful mix of people who were won for specialised byways of natural history like this.

Those same treacherous hills above Braemar also played a role in the annals of algology around the same time, but in that case an ultimately disastrous one. While leading a group of his students there, the newly appointed professor of botany at Aberdeen, George Dickie, caught a serious chill which developed complications that eventually brought his career to a premature end. Britain thereby lost its foremost authority on seaweeds following the death of Harvey, a field in which Dickie had been publishing extensively ever since 1844. That marine aspect of algology could hardly be accounted one of botany’s neglected branches by that mid-century period, for books on it addressed to a non-specialist public had been appearing in a steady trickle. Among the latest were an inevitable volume in Reeve’s ‘Popular Histories’ series by David Landsborough in 1849, and the instructive, well-illustrated two volumes of British Sea-weeds by Margaret Gatty (or rather, as she preferred, ‘Mrs Alfred Gatty’, in deference to the convention of the day) from Bell and Dalby in 1863. But the much less obtrusive algae of fresh water, subjects for the microscope more exclusively, had attracted by comparison very little notice and were ripe for specialist study.

Two medical men and a Unitarian minister effectively closed that gap with three substantial works between them in just over 15 years. Of those, John Ralfs was probably first into the field, by a short head, around 1840 (Fig. 120). His career as a surgeon had been brought to a cruel halt at the age of only thirty, when tuberculosis forced him into what was to turn out a lasting retirement in the hopefully beneficial climate of furthermost Cornwall, at Penzance. Taking refuge in botany there, he was soon making up for his constricted existence physically with a torrential exchange of letters with Berkeley on fungi and algae. Deciding to specialise in a unicellular group of the latter that are particularly beautiful but on account of great variability very challenging taxonomically, the desmids, he proceeded to expand the species of those on record for Britain from a derisory four to more than 60 -16 of those new to science—meanwhile contributing a stream of papers on them to journals.

That work ought to have culminated without a break in a definitive major publication. Alas, however, in 1845 Ralfs had a serious accident and his health deteriorated so badly as a result that for many years afterwards he was unable to study for months at a time. After much struggle, with several interruptions, The British Desmidieae was nevertheless gradually put together, to be published by Reeve in 1848, nearly half the 500 copies printed having been subscribed for in advance (Fig. 121). By that time the number of species known had shot up to 180. The descriptions were accompanied by 34 coloured plates of great beauty based on excellent drawings by a fellow desmid enthusiast, Edward Jenner, a commercial traveller in Sussex. Described in the author’s obituary in 1890 as ‘probably the finest monograph which has appeared of any group of British plants’, its place in natural history’s pantheon of classics was assured virtually from the first. It would eventually receive the now-customary posthumous honour of a facsimile reprint, in 1962.

As if nature had not been unkind enough to Ralfs already, in his mid-fifties his eyesight gave way. Like many another Victorian naturalist, he had no doubt paid the price of too many hours working in poor light and peering down a microscope.With the algae consequently off-limits thereafter, he switched to recording the district’s flowering plants and ferns, to producing a catalogue of the 12,000 volumes in the remarkable library that is one of Penzance’s special jewels and ultimately, with the arrival of his seventies, to making a start at collecting beetles.

Meanwhile a second medical man had been actively at work on the freshwater algae also. This was Arthur Hill Hassall (Fig. 122), whom microscopy was to carry in a very different direction, as a public analyst and medical officer of health and a leading figure in the sanitarian movement. He had started out by studying what were then loosely known as zoophytes while a medical student at Dublin, for which purpose (as he was later to record in his memoirs) he donned ‘a special costume’ that enabled him to examine the submerged rocks near the shore, from which he obtained ‘a rich reward’. He also arranged for the master of a local trawler to deliver to him a large hamper of the creatures once a week.

On qualifying, but before starting in general practice, Hassall spent some time back with his family in Hertfordshire and, becoming interested in freshwater algae while there, decided to specialise in them. Ever a man in a hurry, within five years he was ready with A History of the British Freshwater Algae, which Longman proved willing to bring out in two volumes in 1845. Though well aware that Ralfs had a monograph in preparation on the desmids, about which the two had been corresponding at some length, he was apparently affronted when the other refused to pass over all his data on those and retaliated by omitting all mention of him in the book, leaving Ralfs lastingly embittered. That Hassall was afflicted with ‘most painful neuralgia’ from getting so often wet on algal forays seems poetic justice in the light of that. His book was by no means the classic that it has sometimes been acclaimed, for it was mainly compiled from the work of others, its principal virtues being that it enabled the species then known to be identified, and that it recorded many of them as British for the very first time. Though twice reissued, it was the most that the author had time to contribute to that study before rushing on to other and grander pastures.

The third member of the algological trio, William Smith—not to be confused with the pioneer of geological stratigraphy—similarly emerged from an Irish start, but from Belfast instead of Dublin, his ministries subsequently taking him to various parts of Britain and to Jersey. Like the other two, he was led by fondness for microscopy to concentrate on organisms that could be investigated only through that means, and in his turn selected diatoms. The eventual product of that was A Synopsis of the British Diatomaceae, brought out in two volumes (by Van Voorst, for a change) in 1853–6. Tuffen West, the artist used for Blackwall’s monograph of the spiders, drew the 69 mostly uncoloured plates, which carried figures of nearly 400 species in all. On the strength largely of that, Smith obtained the new chair of natural history at Cork; but his health had been declining for many years by then and he was to hold that position for no more than three years before dying at only fifty. A catalogue of the British Museum’s diatom collection, which that institution had done him the honour of asking him to produce, appeared posthumously in 1859.

That left only the fungi without an updated monograph. The obvious person to come up with that was the veteran Berkeley, but his innumerable commitments left him no space in which to bring together the fast-accumulating knowledge into a second major compendium, as opposed to endlessly describing novelties in journals. The most that could be squeezed from him was an Outlines of British Fungology in 1860, for which Reeve paid him £40. Cooke, the only other mycologist of note who was up to producing books, was still only getting into his stride and confining himself to introductory texts for the time being. His two-volume Handbook of British Fungi would not be ready for publication by Macmillan until 1871, and the first of his monographs for Williams & Norgate not until four years after that. For all its popular appeal, the study was for the moment marking time, saving its breath for greater things to come.

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It was in marine zoology, though, that monographic work was most in evidence in these mid-century years. A late starter as a field of investigation, that finally now matured in a magnificent burst of vigour, throwing up one much-needed publication after another like a carefully paced display of fireworks.

The two charismatic figures who principally provided the organisational impulse have made appearances in these pages already: Edward Forbes (Fig. 123) and George Johnston. Close friends for 15 years, they both identified with the northern half of Britain and with Scotland more particularly after a formative period at university in Edinburgh—though Forbes was Manx by upbringing and Johnston’s life was mostly spent just on the English side of the border. Both were genial, sociable, determined and first-class organisers; both died, however, comparatively young, within nine months of each other, Johnston at fifty-eight and Forbes at a tragically early thirty-nine. In other ways, though, their lives were sharply different. Johnston was tied by a very demanding medical practice to Berwick upon Tweed (of which he became three-times mayor), whereas Forbes led an unsettled, disjointed existence and for lengthy spells was overseas. Remote from the centres of scientific activity, Johnston felt keenly his limited intellectual circle and the difficulty in obtaining key books and journals locally. Forbes, by contrast, was based in learned institutions surrounded by fellow researchers throughout his career, with ready access to the scholarly literature, and was restrained only financially from travelling when and where he wished. The two, moreover, came to marine zoology at very different ages: the precocious Forbes as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy, rowed out to a good collecting-ground by indulgent fishermen and later, when nominally a medical student, playing truant to dredge in the Firth of Forth; Johnston, mainly a botanist at first, not before his mid-thirties.

Unlike ‘mainstream’ marine botany, which tended to revolve around the pivotal figure of the Dublin-based Harvey, marine zoology was a dual monarchy, with two domains geographically well apart. Johnston was necessarily limited to the far northeast of England, where a close-knit network of specialists developed under his energetic leadership, while Forbes early became focused on dredging in deeper waters, an activity which evolved from using rowing-boats into the hiring of crewed ships, with an increase in teamwork and expenditure accordingly. Although there were a few naturalists, from the start of the nineteenth century if not earlier, wealthy enough to own yachts and happy to take parties of fellow dredgers out in those (Forbes was able to borrow a brother-in-law’s), they were not necessarily located where some of the most promising research areas were. At the instance of Forbes, the British Association for the Advancement of Science was therefore persuaded in 1839 to appoint a national Dredging Committee, through which a grant of £60 was funnelled for this emerging form of collaborative work. A wide scatter of local initiatives followed, many of which were to receive grant support from that body as well. Though efforts were widely dispersed, Forbes was the natural choice as a central coordinator and the person to whom, in 1850, eventually fell the task of compiling a lengthy report on the overall results.

The far heavier costs of publishing the flow of monographs that had meanwhile begun materialising were valiantly borne by Van Voorst and the Ray Society, with Lizars in Edinburgh contributing initially in a small way as well. As far back as 1838 Johnston had conceived the bold idea of ‘a series of manuals illustrative of the history of our native molluscs and radiated animals’, each volume ‘copiously illustrated’. He even tried to tempt Lizars with this by providing him with a list of possible titles. These designedly ‘popular’ volumes, however, never became reality beyond the two by himself that Johnston managed to interest that wary publisher in bringing out: first, in 1838, the one on ‘zoophytes’ (as he called them) on which he had been at work for six years, and then in 1842 a much slighter follow-up on sponges and ‘lithophytes’. Nor was Lizars to be drawn when his growing rival, Van Voorst, meanwhile published for Johnston’s counterpart A History of British Starfishes and Other Animals of the Class Echinodermata, ‘one of the most charming of nineteenth-century monographs’, in the words of Eric Mills, the foremost historian of this field: ‘all Forbes—scholarly and accurate, but witty and well-illustrated’ (though those illustrations were only uncoloured text figures).

Up to that point both Forbes and Johnston had evidently become resigned to the notion that any work on such an out-of-the-ordinary topic as marine invertebrates had no hope of reaching print without a heavy subsidy unless tailored to appeal to the purses and tastes of the general market. Johnston’s founding of the Ray Society in 1844 now provided a way of circumventing that problem and encouraged the writing of monographs that could be heedlessly scholarly in character and furnished with plentiful colour plates. As the great work by Alder and Hancock on the sea-slugs (Fig. 124), which had provoked Johnston into that heroic action, was consequently starting out at last on its prolonged journey into print, a steady succession of broadly similar treatments of other sections of the marine fauna came down the slipways.

First to be floated off, in 1847, was Johnston’s greatly extended, much-improved version of his own volume on the zoophytes of a decade or so earlier, now running to two volumes (but acceptable nevertheless to Van Voorst, who had woken up to the new wave of interest in the contents of the seashore). The next year the first of the four volumes of A History of British Mollusca and their Shells by Forbes and Sylvanus Hanley made its appearance. A part-work (1848–53) manifestly intended only for the library and inevitably expensive, the large number of wealthy collectors that conchology still retained or recruited made this a safer speculation for Van Voorst. Even he, though, can hardly have anticipated its eventual active shelf life of a century or more, regularly consulted in particular for its over 200 excellent plates (139 of those in colour, by G. B. Sowerby the Second, if the grander of the two alternative formats was the one opted for) (Fig. 125). The longest work that Forbes ever found the time to undertake, even though a collaborative one, it incorporated a mass of fresh research and brought that heavily patronised branch of natural history thoroughly up to date. It was also one of the earliest accounts of the molluscs to give the geographical distributions of the species as well as depth and habitat details. The next two monographs to come forward were on more esoteric groups, and the Ray Society had to be the publisher of those. The first, in 1848, another by Forbes, was on the Naked-eyed Medusae (or hydroid jellyfish), old favourites from his days studying the plankton off the Manx coast. The second, in 1850, The Natural History of the British Entomostraca (the water-fleas, ostracods and their relatives), was by William Baird, a medical friend of Johnston’s and like Alder and Hancock another member of his Northumbrian network, although by then his standing as a zoologist was such that he had been recruited to the British Museum staff.

There was then a hiatus, during which two works on shells for less advanced collectors came to hand. One of those, An Introduction to Conchology by the untiring Johnston and for Van Voorst again, in 1850, was a distillation of articles he had contributed for the mainly young readers of Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History two decades earlier. It was no slight work, even so, for it extended to 614 octavo pages. A Manual of the Mollusca, on the other hand, by a member of a conchological dynasty, S. P. Woodward, was a compact aid to identification of the traditional type. Brought out in three parts, in 1851–6, by the little-known firm of Weale, it filled the gap that had opened up for something of that kind, and sufficiently well to earn itself several editions in the next 40 years.

Van Voorst then resumed the series of heavyweight launches in 1853 with a monograph on the Stalk-eyed Crustacea (the crabs and their allies). The author of this was Thomas Bell, the dental surgeon who had gained the chair of zoology at King’s College London. An interloper onto what was otherwise very much a north British stage, Bell had the expertise in anatomy that Johnston (to his often-voiced regret) and others in his network lacked. The London distiller J. S. Bowerbank (Fig. 126), who was carrying out the thorough overhaul of the British sponges that was needed to replace Johnston’s feeble volume on those, also ranked as an interloper in a purely geographical sense; in return for his staunch support of the Ray Society, however, that could be forgiven. Predictably, it was that body which was the publisher of the resulting four-volume monograph, starting with the three that were able to appear in 1864–5 from Bowerbank’s hand before his death.

While the sponges were being properly covered after all, Van Voorst was bringing out the perfect complement to Forbes and Hanley’s History of British Mollusca. This was the no less important and majestic British Conchology by J. Gwyn Jeffreys, which was brought out, like the other, in parts over an extended period (1862–9 in this case, to constitute five volumes). A Swansea solicitor, Jeffreys had amassed over many years one of the most complete collections of shells from British coastal waters and neighbouring seas, and his monumental work was to be valued especially for its authoritative text, for as long as later generations of shell collectors turned to ‘Forbes and Hanley’ to check their specimens against its plates.

Though Johnston still had the energy to produce a catalogue of the non-parasitical worms in the British Museum collection in the years leading up to his death, following the loss of Forbes in 1854 the momentum behind the publication programme could no longer be kept up by just one of them alone. By then the marine-zoology community had probably in any case seen into print just about all that it was capable of coming up with for the time being. It needed a lull in which to catch its breath. As the last in that long line of authors, Jeffreys had thus brought the magnificent sequence of volumes to a fittingly grand climax.

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There was one other large-scale monograph published in those years that was of major and far-reaching importance, but a monograph of a very different kind. This was the four-volume summation of H. C. Watson’s (Fig. 127) 20 years of studying ‘British plants and their geographical relations’ (in the words of its subtitle) which he eccentrically—or provocatively?—chose to name, after an ancient Greek goddess, Cybele Britannica. Watson had been converted to the novel science of plant geography while a student at Edinburgh University around 1830 and, following the example of its main founder, Alexander von Humboldt, had set about accumulating data on the individual distributions within Great Britain (but not Ireland) of all of its accepted species of flowering plants and ferns and on the factors, in particular climate and soil type, responsible for the differences. In part this was a primitive form of what would later mature as ecology, but it also developed as a study in its own right with a national distribution atlas as its logical destination.

Watson carried out considerable fieldwork in the Scottish Highlands to that end early on, but increasingly he became drawn into the much simpler but very onerous task of compiling manuscript registers of the species recorded from—in the first instance—each of 18 multi-county regional clusters, which he termed ‘provinces’ and named after their principal rivers. These were too large to be all that informative, but he regarded them as the practicable first step on the way to an eventual mapping unit as small as a dot. At mid-century the number of field botanists of acceptable competence was indeed too small for anything more ambitious to be feasible. Watson took from the published literature all that he judged reliable, and supplemented that with provenanced records supported by specimens personally checked by him and with the equivalent of modern field cards marked up for certain counties or districts by volunteers. It was a massive undertaking for a single individual, but he had a taste for system and just sufficient private means and a lack of dependants to be able to devote all his time to it. In effect, he was a self-employed professional botanist. He did have unsuccessful tries for rare professorial vacancies, but he was no team player and thanks to notorious prickliness and a habit of over-forthright criticism of others he alienated most of his potential supporters.

The Cybele (as that work was commonly referred to), which appeared under the Longman imprint between 1847 and 1859, was only a halfway staging-post. It had been preceded since 1832 by a succession of privately printed progress reports and a preliminary county-by-county picture of which rarer species had been recorded where (with a view to showing up the thinness of the information extant at the outset). It was then to be succeeded in 1873–4 by a first version of Watson’s ledger-size register of approved species records on the by then much narrower basis of ‘vice-counties’—his rather unfortunate coinage for the 112 very vaguely equiformal units into which he had meanwhile further subdivided Britain. Of this he had a mere 100 copies printed and distributed, at his personal expense, on the well-founded assumption that it would generate so many extra records, to fill the gaps revealed in its 650 pages, that a second edition would soon be needed. That indeed proved to be the case. And though Watson did not live to complete it, his protégé and executor, the Kew botanist J. G. Baker, and that inveterate compiler on behalf of others, W. W. Newbould, stepped in and saw the result into print in 1883.

Topographical Botany was the rather sweeping title Watson had chosen for that culminating register. It consisted in the main just of lists, under each putatively native or at least well-naturalised species, of those vice-counties in which, in his personal judgement, there was satisfactory evidence that it occurred (or had done so within the recorded past). A crucial feature was that in every instance he scrupulously provided that evidence, in the form of at least one sample record keyed to a source identified in the introduction. That gave the catalogue a credibility that a bare list of vice-county numbers might well not have carried (as would indeed be the case with its ostensible successor in 1932, the Comital Flora of the British Isles by G. C. Druce).

This provision at long last of an authoritative baseline, against which the novelty or otherwise of a find in one or other of those comparatively small areas could readily be checked, gave botanising anywhere in Britain a dual dimension, a national context simultaneously with a local one, far more compellingly than Cybele Britannica had been able to. A vice-county was a small enough area to provide many a sporting opportunity of chalking up something nationally new; it coincided in whole or in part with a territorial entity with which people had been accustomed to identifying for centuries and to which it was usual to feel a certain loyalty; the approximate geographical sequence of Watson’s numbering, moreover, made it feasible, after some experience, to form a rapid mental picture of the distribution pattern that the vice-county numbers denoted.

Topographical Botany additionally served as a challenge: to try to ensure that the provisional picture it embodied was extended and (in so far as might be necessary) amended, in order to reflect as fully and faithfully as possible the actual position in nature. It thus provided an alternative outlet for energies that hitherto had tended to be monopolised by the compiling of records of only local interest or relevance and by the collecting of specimens for private herbaria.

The flowering plants and ferns were the most obvious candidates for Watson-type treatment. The organisms that botany is concerned with are relatively stationary and tend to exhibit in their spatial occurrence readily discernible patterns inviting explanation, and it was naturally the most conspicuous representatives of the plant kingdom that had been the most collected and recorded by the time Watson began work. In the case of less-studied groups, such as the mosses and lichens, sufficient data would not be forthcoming till much later to warrant comparable work. One of Watson’s most dedicated converts, the initially Isle-of-Wight-based A. G. More, a chronic semi-invalid of great ability unable to follow a profession until late in life, had early tries at demonstrating what could be derived similarly from the information already extant on the distribution of birds and butterflies in Britain. But nothing much came of those, and it would not be till 1881 that the vice-county system established a foothold in zoology, when W. Denison Roebuck, a Leeds solicitor, adopted it for the land and freshwater Mollusca.

More was probably wise to concentrate in the end on producing an equivalent of Cybele Britannica for Ireland, whither he moved to live in 1867, after becoming increasingly intrigued by the geographical conundrums that its flora and fauna were presenting. The much smaller number of naturalists there convinced him that a system of recording based on areas as small as vice-counties was too ambitious for the foreseeable future. Accordingly data continued to be amassed on the basis of the kind of broader divisions that Watson had adopted initially for Britain, ultimately to be brought together in 1898 in a volume with the word Cybele in its title to indicate that fact. By then, however, the coming man of Irish natural history, Robert Lloyd Praeger, felt that approach had become needlessly modest; and within the remarkable space of a mere six years, in which he undertook much of the necessary fieldwork single-handed, he had amply proved his point in the shape of an Irish Topographical Botany, on very similar lines to its namesake, which was published in 1901. It made an ideal way in which to start a new century.

CHAPTER 14
Local Floras and Faunas

ATHIRD FEATURE OF the nineteenth century’s middle years was a marked leap in ambitiousness in the accounts that found their way into print of. the flora and/or fauna of relatively limited areas. That leap took two forms: from districts up to whole counties or even regions as the geographical focus, and from little more than lists of species up to productions of considerably greater informativeness and structural elaborateness. The first of those was in evidence in more than one branch of natural history, the second as yet in botany alone. Both changes were reflected in necessarily bulkier publications: in full-sized books rather than mere booklets. Both also pointed to a higher determination on the part of the compilers to press ahead regardless of commercial realities, to allow the quantity and value of the accumulated material to determine the length and character of what they produced, in the increasingly confident hope that some way would eventually be found of enabling that to be put into print.

Ever since Ray’s Cambridge Catalogue of 1660 local lists of plants had been appearing periodically, but the inherently restricted market for such works combined with the horrendous cost of printing till at least the 1830s kept the number published artificially tiny and their contents unappetisingly meagre and austere. Quite a number that were written did at least remain consultable in manuscript, even if seen then by far fewer, and some of those have survived down to this day. Others, however—probably more than we know of—must have been destroyed unthinkingly by those who came to possess them and failed to appreciate their value.

The extent of that deprivation was serious in as much as it was at the local level that most fieldwork, as always, took place. As long as transport remained poor, horizons stayed stubbornly limited. Though the spread of the railways had greatly improved matters, away from the towns daily existence continued by and large to be rooted and static and, except for a privileged few, investigating one’s surroundings had to be conducted on foot. Despite the dense stocking of the countryside with the university-educated, many with recreational interests of a more or less learned kind, doctors and clergymen in particular, the demands on those of practices and parishes combined with the physical isolation compelled them to concentrate on the immediate vicinity, whatever their choice of study.

The books that grew out of that enforced isolation of day-to-day observing and recording fell into two categories. Very much in the minority were ones that ranged across natural history as a whole in seeking to convey a pen-portrait of a certain district in a discursive and readable fashion, avoiding all semblance of a detailed audit. White’s Selborne constituted one obvious model for anyone aspiring to that approach, but above-average literary flair was in that case a prerequisite. That was certainly well in evidence in The Letters of Rusticus on the Natural History of Godalming, a collection of articles contributed anonymously to various national periodicals over the years and eventually brought together as a book, for publication by Van Voorst in 1849. The author chose to keep his identity a strict secret, and it was only after his death that he was publicly unmasked as none other than Edward Newman. It had been the product of a 10-year residence in that Surrey town early in his life and of intermittent escapes from it into the surrounding wilds from a deeply distasteful initiation into business as a wool stapler that ultimately proved of no avail. Very few naturalist contemporaries wrote as well and as knowledgeably as Newman, but his Godalming period had become buried by time and nearly everyone satisfied themselves that the mysterious ‘Rusticus’ was J. D. Salmon, an ornithologist turned botanist more prominently associated with that place.

An even closer stab at the Selborne formula was the much later (1913) Kingham, Old and New, the Cotswold village in which the author, William Warde Fowler, an Oxford history don, long enjoyed a second home. With several bird books to his credit by then, he is perhaps even better remembered today for his extraordinary feat in adding the marsh warbler to the British list just by recognising its song even though well-nigh stone-deaf.

Other works falling into that same broad category were modest in their literary reach. The early-Victorian writings of Edwin Lees on the region around the Malvern Hills have received deserved mention in an earlier chapter. Henry Ullyet’s Rambles of a Naturalist round Folkestone, published in 1880, was similarly representative of a steady trickle that owed its attainment of print to the initiative of one local bookseller or another, without serious expectation of selling much more widely.

Far more usually, though, and from the very first, accounts of the flora or fauna of a particular area were just straightforward registers of all the species known, or at least reputed, to occur in it. These were simply the product of one of the basic impulses that propel natural history: the urge to make lists. Their purpose was essentially to make accumulated information more widely available, and whether the starkness of that function was given some clothing, to make it more interesting or even attractively readable, was a consideration that was only secondary.

Compiling, or contributing to, a local list has always been a way open to even the least expert to leave a mark on the published literature. Had the cost of printing not constituted such a formidable barrier all through the years, it was a kind of publication that would undoubtedly have flowed forth in an ever-increasing torrent, entirely altering the character of the natural history book market. Had local lists only had a more certain prospect of being converted into print, that would have imparted greater urgency and direction to local fieldwork, perhaps speeding up the rate of significant discoveries in the process.

***

That it was botany that led the way in generating and subsequently perfecting this second type of publication is hardly a matter for surprise. Not only did active field botanists long outnumber their counterparts in any aspect of zoology, but botany resembles geology in having a strongly spatial focus. In contrast to birds and mammals at any rate, the plants that compose the indigenous flora are reasonably stationary. Those with particularly deep root systems can persist in the same small spot for a great length of time, enabling an individual patch to be relocated after a gap of a century or even more in some cases. Individual species also tend to exhibit patterns in their occurrence laterally across the countryside that are aesthetically satisfying to work out and often challengingly difficult to explain.

As a study, botany also had for long the further advantage of constituting part of the standard medical curriculum. That suggested a small but steady market might exist for a printed guide to the local flora in those centres where it was established practice for student classes to be led out into the fields and acquainted with the appearance in nature of a range of the commoner plants credited with healing potential. London (especially), Edinburgh and Cambridge, where instructional ‘herborising’ was a feature for the longest span of years—though not necessarily continuously—were consequently among the first places where booksellers thought it worth their while to keep such a guide in stock.

Away from the leading centres of medical teaching, for a local list of plants to have been produced for public sale was largely a matter of a double ration of luck. It depended not only on the presence of someone with the botanical ability and readiness to persevere, but also on that person being, or knowing, someone able and willing to sacrifice the by no means inconsiderable sum required to put the completed product into print.

Many of those responsible for the first noticeable cluster of such volumes, called forth by botany’s Linnaean fashionableness, probably acted in the spirit of patronage then conventional in the circles in which they moved, though it was hardly a way of making very much more than a ripple, let alone a social splash. Walter Wade, for one, would certainly have preferred to provide the botanically inclined of Dublin with a lavish equivalent of Curtis’s Flora Londinensis; the response to the prospectus for that, however, proved too slight and he had to settle instead for the staidly scientific, unillustrated Catalogus systematicus … that in due course stood in for it, in 1794. For a hard-headed Glasgow businessman like Thomas Hopkirk, on the other hand, it was probably enough to be identified with a branch of learning currently as well-regarded as this (he founded that city’s botanic garden, in addition) without trying to dress up a modest publication on the subject in sumptuous clothes. Even he, though, felt obliged to give the account of the plants of the Clyde area that he brought out in 1813 one of the grand-sounding Latin titles—Flora Glottiana in this case—that were evidently de rigueur at that period for any volume intended to be taken seriously as a contribution to scientific knowledge, slight and parochial though that might be. Any further nod in a Classical direction, however, was coming to be sensed as now just a trifle pretentious, given the increasingly general abandonment of Latin for English; but as ‘list’ seemed too mundane and unimpressive a word to use for productions that were beginning to acquire accretions of matter that rendered them quite variously informative, ‘catalogue’ was gaining widespread adoption as a more appropriate alternative (though catalogue raisonné, applied to the Floras of French départements, would have been more fittingly descriptive still).

If the compiler of a local list could not afford to put it into print as a book, or was willing to forgo the kudos of having such a publication to his or her name, or simply did not consider it substantial enough to merit such treatment, it was still possible for it to be included in a volume of a broader character by someone else, if necessary much condensed. The often massive works on the topography and antiquities of individual counties that were such a feature of that era frequently played host to accounts of the flora and fauna as well, some of those valuably lengthy. Richard Pulteney’s extensive knowledge of the natural history of Dorset, for example, and Joshua Gosselin’s manuscript list of the plants of Guernsey were saved thereby from possible oblivion otherwise. The local guides for visitors put out in many a spa or seaside town by booksellers, in the nineteenth century in particular, commonly performed a similar service, if usually more fragmentarily. Though a class of literature traditionally treated circumspectly as a source of natural history records, and with good reason, those sometimes acted as a filter that caught when everything else slipped through. It was solely thanks to a chain of them, for instance, that the cream of a now-lost Isle of Man list, made by Edward Forbes in his botanising youth before marine zoology monopolised his attention, succeeded in trickling down to posterity.

As the species identifications to which every local Flora tends to owe its credibility, indeed its very existence, have normally been arrived at with the aid of one or more national textbooks amply furnished with the means to that end, it early came to be tacitly accepted that it was superfluous for local works to include species descriptions as well. The Flora Devoniensis of 1829, produced by two otherwise obscure local enthusiasts and saluted already in these pages for its costly compromise of arrangement on the Linnaean and natural systems in turn, indulged in the further compromise of at any rate brief descriptions still of most of the species included. As if to make up for that doubly backward-looking stance, however, that work at the same time broke new ground by extending to introductory sections on topography, climate and the like in addition to covering most of the plant kingdom. At over 200 pages, it was consequently a much bulkier volume than any of its contemporary counterparts.

Towards the middle of the nineteenth century there were two more determined attempts to resist that trend to dispensing with species descriptions. The authors in those cases were exceptional in having had the luck to come into a large inheritance at an unusually early age, when as yet unmarried or with at least no children to support. Unobliged to stint themselves, they evidently felt no compunction in bringing out their Floras on the most textually untrammelled scale that the genre could justifiably extend to.

One of those, W. A. Bromfield (Fig. 128), decided to forgo the medical career for which he had trained and devote his thenceforward limitless leisure to investigating what the Isle of Wight held in the way of flowering plants and ferns—and to do that with a thoroughness never previously brought to bear on any area of so considerable a size in either Britain or Ireland. An equally carefree expansiveness characterised his periodic reports in print of the choicer finds that were yielding to that especially intensive combing. Directions to the sites concerned were set out with a richness of detail and precision as to be tantamount to a modern six-figure grid reference, with what even in those days not a few would have considered culpable recklessness (for already there were protests about over-collecting). Moreover, instead of the conventional economy of identifying contributors of records, where appropriate, just by their initials, their names were invariably given at length, with a forename as well in numerous cases.

That the eventual Flora Vectensis, which appeared in 1856 seven years after Bromfield’s early death (from cholera caught on what sounds like a similarly reckless tour of the Levant), contained full descriptions of every species may not have been of his own intending, however. He had apparently drawn those up from fresh specimens over the years with a view to establishing to his private satisfaction that they met with his criteria of a ‘good’ species—for he was a ‘lumper’ by long conviction. The two friends entrusted with the task of putting what he had left into publishable form considered the descriptions too good not to be made publicly available, and fortunately the extra cost could comfortably be met from Bromfield’s estate.

No such extenuating circumstances are known in the case of W. A. Leighton’s Flora of Shropshire, however: the lumbering of that with species descriptions, quite unnecessarily, can therefore only be read as a rich man’s defiant extravagance. The laborious drawing-up of those must surely have been partly to blame for that work’s ‘unusual length of time in the writing’, for which the author apologised in the preface when it eventually appeared in 1841, though he had also become sidetracked into his deepening study of lichens. That competing interest led to his announcing his intention of complementing the coverage of the flowering plants and ferns, to which that volume was limited, with a companion one devoted to the remainder of the cryptogams; in the event, though, his absorption even further into taxonomic work prevented him from realising that idea.

It was just as well that those two Floras failed to set a trend in that respect, impressive though they were more generally. For the great additional cost that emulating them would have involved would have been such a severe further deterrent to publication that the genre might never have developed in the alternative, more progressive directions that presently followed.

As it was, a third youthful enthusiast for this same line of work, Charles Babington (Fig. 129), fortunately had very different ideas on how best to fertilise it with money, when in his late teens the death of his father left him with financial freedom of action similarly. In his case, that change happened to coincide with a scarcely less traumatic territorial severance. Having poured his adolescent energies into compiling a Flora of the district around Bath (which he was now able to afford to put into print), the arrival of his university years dictated a wrenching disengagement from that. Cambridge, however, provided a double substitute anchorage: another countryside to help assuage that Flora-compiling hunger; and after graduation and becoming a resident semi-don, a base from which to extend his floristic curiosity to the British Isles as a whole.

The Channel Islands provided Babington with an early opportunity of combining those two roles. Two consecutive summers of impressively wide-ranging fieldwork there yielded him enough material to be publishable shortly afterwards, in 1839, as a little duodecimo volume. It is possible that the firm of Longman, under whose imprint that appeared, saw it selling well enough to visitors to be worth taking a chance on; more probably, though, it was the author’s money that secured it the privilege of print, for by being given a Latin title, Primitiae florae Sarnicae, its scholarly character was left undisguised. The first of these words emphasised that it embodied the result of what Babington regarded as no more than a reconnaissance, while its diminutive size may have been meant to encourage its use for handy reference in the field by those who came after. The work could in fact be regarded as the earliest example of a ‘pre-Flora’: the type of booklet often produced and circulated when a local Flora is being embarked upon, by means of which what is credibly on record already is brought to notice, attention is directed to what particularly needs noting or closer-than-ordinary study and hitherto unreported finds are flushed out. But to bring out something of that kind between hard covers was clearly an indulgence open only to an author as affluent as Babington.

Though taxonomic complexities thereafter increasingly became his central concern, Babington continued to be a staunch believer in the value of thorough, long-term study of plant distribution in limited areas, and he did all he could to encourage the adoption of a more methodical approach. Not a few field botanists who came under his influence while students at Cambridge later went on to put into practice in their home counties what he had preached. He himself too would eventually produce a model Flora of his own county, its publication timed to commemorate the bicentenary of the appearance of the Cambridge Catalogue of his illustrious predecessor. In that, he made the most of that county’s particular strength, its exceptionally long historical sequence of plant records, drawing attention to the many changes that the local countryside had experienced within the past half-century and examining how those had affected the floristic make-up. For he rightly saw that one of the key functions of a publication of this type is to provide a datum-line against which the amount and nature of change can be measured at successive future points in time.

No less influential than Babington’s teaching (and that ultimate example) were the writings of H. C. Watson, most notably in his Cybele Britannica. Even before the first volume of that appeared, in 1847, one or two would-be local Flora writers had already begun to give careful thought to how fieldwork to that end might be rendered less biased in its coverage. In a paper read to the Botanical Society of London in 1836 a prickly schoolmaster by the name of Alexander Irvine (subsequently to find additional mouthpieces as editor of a popular botanical journal and as a minister in an obscure little religious sect) had a try at raising recruits for a collaborative Flora of the London area. That that met with no success may at least partly have been because the recording system he proposed was a full century ahead of its time. Among the innovations envisaged was the use of a standard form, the noting of comprehensive habitat details wherever a species list was drawn up and the adding of compass references.

Advisedly more modest were the methods that another schoolmaster, W. H. Coleman, began employing four years later in embarking on a Flora of Hertfordshire. Those included dividing up the county into a number of ‘botanical districts’ based on the river drainages (which had the advantage, he pointed out, of being readily distinguishable on the Ordnance Survey maps that by then had become generally available) and devising what is nowadays known as the ‘stand’ system of recording. The latter involved walking a standard distance from various sample points and listing all the species seen along the way. By that means what Coleman deplored as ‘the evils arising from the distant residence or partiality [for richer districts] of the compiler’ were mitigated and the coverage rendered strictly systematic.

Thereafter, subdividing the total area into a number of districts based on some aspect of its natural geography became standard practice for at least Floras of the larger counties. Presenting the localised records in those terms in the eventual volume had the extra advantage that marked differences in the frequency of a species from one district to another revealed themselves more readily to the reader, especially to anyone unfamiliar with the local place names (and especially as a good map, ideally with the district boundaries marked on it, was not an invariable accompaniment).

Even so, it was not until the 1860s that the county Floras began to acquire the considerably greater elaborateness that they have tended to have ever since. The spread of the railway system and in many counties an increased density of botanists combined to produce much greater quantities of records and of the corresponding proportion of those judged worthy of being cited individually together with the locality. Introductory sections on the local geology and climate came to be accepted as desirable accessories too. But it was in 1869 that the most noticeable expansion in size and scope took place, with the publication of the Flora of Middlesex, by two up-and-coming professional botanists of future distinction, Henry Trimen and W. T. Dyer (later Sir William Thiselton-Dyer). By that date London had substantially overflowed into that small county, with the consequence that an abnormally high proportion of the records were of historical interest only. In view of that, in an appendix of startling length the long history of its botanical investigation was recounted in detail. Reputedly the work of Trimen, the inclusion in this of much original scholarship has led the book to be prized in later years no less by historians than by botanists. Only G. C. Druce’s Flora of Berkshire of 1897 was ever to come up to the superb standard that it set in what many authors would prefer to consider no more than an optional extra.

That jump in voluminosity naturally made the cost of putting local Floras into print even more of a problem than ever. One unfortunate result was a tendency to defer that aspect indefinitely, and to continue with the satisfying task of logging records in the vague expectation that a solution could be found eventually. One that was resorted to from time to time, and from surprisingly early on, was serial publication in a journal. The main disadvantage of that was the very long time it could take: the first to appear by that method, Bromfield’s provisional Flora of the then still combined county of Hampshire and the Isle of Wight, required 27 parts spread over three years (1848–50) before The Phytologist completed it. T. B. Flower’s Wiltshire counterpart needed no fewer than seventeen years (1857–74) to wend its way through the much less frequent issues of the journal of that county’s relevant society. Floras of Northamptonshire and the Bristol coalfield were also squeezed out into print in that way in the 1880s, but it was very much a second-best. Authors did not favour it, as they did not receive anything like the amount of credit—or the review coverage, for that matter—that publication in book form could bring.

For a relevant learned society to sponsor the work and meet the cost of publication was the most obvious alternative. But that could require a long wait as well, while the body in question built up the necessary funds (if it did not have enough already). Moreover, it usually entailed the appointment of an editorial or at least a steering committee, and some authors did not take kindly to working in harness or conceding a measure of control or the possibility of being harried by people with scant notion of the size and complexity of the task and of what a volume of this kind was by now expected to embrace. Others were natural loners in any case. Nathaniel Colgan, who produced one of the sadly few Irish examples of the genre, that of County Dublin in 1904, was such a person, though the reason he preferred to give for never revealing that he had been preparing that for years was a fear of becoming embroiled in wrangles with well-meaning helpers who reported unlikely-sounding finds.

Sponsorship by a society, though, could ensure continuity. It brought a corporate commitment that could keep such projects going in the event of an author dying or having to drop out through illness. The Cotteswold Naturalists’ Field Club valiantly kept afloat the first Flora of Gloucestershire worthy of that name through several changes of editor and saw it safely into print after 71 years (admittedly, with two quite lengthy lapses). The Liverpool Botanical Society was to sustain the compiling of a Flora of South Lancashire for over half a century, similarly (Fig. 130). Failing that, more esoteric solutions were feasible in special individual circumstances. A Flora of the Neighbourhood of Reigate appeared in 1838 thanks to the fact that the author, George Luxford, was a self-employed jobbing printer and so could run it off himself (paying Van Voorst then to act as distributor). The manuscript of C. B. Clarke’s List of the Flowering Plants of Andover went out to India in the author’s baggage on his departure to a teaching post there in 1865 and was converted into print in Calcutta, at far less expense than it could have been in Britain. That dodge also allowed the book to be the last local Flora to include a fair number of plant descriptions.

There was also a chance—even if that was more and more an outside one as the nineteenth century wore on—that a wealthy individual might materialise and underwrite the publication cost. The best-known case of that was the rescue of William MacGillivray’s The Natural History of Dee Side and Braemar by no less a person than Prince Albert. Left stranded at the author’s recent death, the manuscript was bought by the Prince primarily by reason of its inclusion of the area around Balmoral, but its pioneer description of plant communities also made it of special interest scientifically. Edwin Lankester, Hardwicke’s multiple mentor, who chanced to be introduced to the Prince not long after while staying nearby with the Queen’s physician, was accordingly asked to edit the work for publication. That proved a formidable task, for apart from pruning the text severely Lankester thought it advisable to have various portions scrutinised by respective leading authorities; he also added a section on the red deer, compiled mainly from replies to a questionnaire circulated to local landowners, gamekeepers and foresters. The result was printed by Royal Command in 1855, for private circulation only.

Less out of the ordinary was the total funding of F. Hamilton Davey’s (Fig. 131) 1909 Flora of Cornwall by the wealthy A. O. Hume. After a distinguished career in the Bengal Civil Service, during which he had won a reputation for collecting the Indian fauna with an almost bloodthirsty abandon, Hume had decided to pour his retirement energies into forming a collection of the British flora with the same passionate intensiveness. A lifelong radical like his better-known father, the politician Joseph Hume, and concerned by the lack of facilities for the study of plants among the less well-off, he conceived the idea of founding the South London Botanical Institute that stands to this day. Handsomely endowed by him, it was to have that collection of his as its nucleus. In casting around for someone to help enrich it with Cornish specimens, he came into touch with Davey, an employee in an arsenic mine, whose enthusiasm quickly released more of that torrential liberality. The long-needed full-scale Flora of that county, for long an impossible pipe-dream for the young man, was a simple matter for the other now to place within reach. But another decade’s more fieldwork, some of it by the two together, proved to be required before that intention was realised.

In the event of a fairy godparent materialising, however, it was naturally incumbent upon the author concerned to come up with a publishable text within a reasonable period, before the patron lost interest (or died). One who conspicuously failed in that respect was a Lincolnshire vicar with the wondrously ornitho-botanical name of E. A. Woodruffe-Peacock, who around 1890 embarked on what he termed a ‘rock-soil’ Flora of that large county, in which the environmental factors determining the species’ distributions were to be the central focus. A novel aspect was a Darwinian piling-up of patient observations of plant dispersal in action. That entailed repeated visits to selected spots, some of those well beyond walking distance and to reach which he made use of a pony-trap hired by the day for a token sum from a well-disposed parishioner. The value of that work for the infant discipline of plant ecology was not lost on the future Sir Arthur Tansley when eventually it came to his notice; so anxious indeed was he for the findings to be made available in print that he offered to meet the cost of that personally. Obsessed with obtaining ever more data, however, Woodruffe-Peacock kept putting off the writing-up, until at length the post-1918 inflation rendered the cost of publication prohibitive. In the end the incomplete set of manuscript notes was donated to Cambridge University Botany School, where for many years it lay like a stranded whale on the library’s open shelves, inspected mainly by the curious.

Yet, given that such increasingly massive outcomes of local fieldwork were so fearsomely expensive to publish, were the resulting volumes in most cases of sufficient value or interest beyond just a relatively tiny circle to warrant going to that length? Was the prospect of print merely a necessary bait to ensure the huge commitment of time and effort over such lengthy periods and to hold together what were increasingly teams of contributors? These were questions the uninvolved may have begun to ask, even if only among themselves. It may indeed have been the case, in so far as such works were bought by other than naturalists, that local or county loyalty was the generator of sales more or less exclusively.

It so happens that we know where a high proportion of the copies of one late-Victorian county Flora have at least ended up. That is the one of Warwickshire, a more than usually comprehensive, if staidly conventional volume, published in 1891. The author, J. E. Bagnall, had spent his entire career as a clerk in a Birmingham pen-nib factory and it was obvious to everyone aware of his prolonged undertaking that he was in no position to bear the cost of publishing a book of the size required to hold the great amount of information he had laboriously assembled. That city’s leading bookseller proved willing to print and help distribute it only if guaranteed against loss, but the requisite sum was such that eight guarantors had to be found prepared if necessary to cover it collectively. One of those signed up was Joseph Chamberlain, the city’s famous one-time mayor who also happened to be a member of a local clan of ardent entomological collectors. In the event, however, none of those needed to be called upon, for meanwhile nearly all the necessary subscribers were secured, three years ahead of publication, for the heavily discounted, limited edition of 500 individually signed and numbered copies that had been reckoned the number affordable.

Ninety years later, one of the county’s then botanists, J. M. Price, decided to celebrate the sesquicentenary of Bagnall’s birth by trying to establish the present whereabouts of those 500 copies. A two-year postal trawl of libraries around the world resulted in the locating of 209. Considering that many must have succumbed in the intervening years to the various vicissitudes to which books are prone, that figure is by no means unimpressive. Perhaps surprisingly, fewer than half proved to be in institutional libraries: 35 in public ones, 29 in those of universities and 16 in botanic gardens or museums. Hardly any had found their way overseas, or at any rate remained there, and almost all of those were in the libraries of learned institutions in the United States. The majority were thus in private hands, as perhaps also were at least some of the many copies untraced, reflecting the fact that local Floras, and especially county Floras, have long been collectors’ items (with heavy prices on their heads as a consequence, which works in favour of their preservation). One copy had passed into the possession of a ticket collector at Shakespeare’s Birthplace and another was owned by a former mayor of Coventry, but best of all was the current resting-place of no. 203: from a member of the local gentry and then the plant-hunting sister of a surgeon it had passed eventually to an outfitter in the town of Alcester who, by a very pleasing coincidence, turned out to be living in the very house in which one of Bagnall’s principal predecessors had written a Flora mainly of that district in 1817–21.

Several people in recent years have risen to a more obvious numerical challenge. That is to calculate how many local and county Floras have been published in particular time periods, chart the resulting figures and see what inferences can be drawn by thus examining the genre in the aggregate. A basic problem with such exercises is that the category is open to a range of definitions: stand-alone systematic lists between hard covers is probably one that would command reasonably general assent, however. An added complication is that till well into the nineteenth century the figures are a measure of how far botany had recruited the locally affluent, not the amount of overall botanical activity nor even of how much of that activity was productive of publishable lists. The most recent such study has nevertheless come up with broad conclusions that probably tally well with the average person’s subjective impressions. These are that it was around 1880 that the incidence of these publications ceased to be erratic and became more truly a reflection of the vigour of field botany at the local level; that after that point the average number published each year suddenly almost doubled, a jump which coincided with a rise in the proportion of Floras covering a county as opposed to just a district; and that those changes were then both broadly sustained till the start of the Second World War.

What factors brought about that tipping-point can only be guessed at. Improved transport, particularly the advent of the bicycle, could well have been one but hardly seems enough to have been responsible just on its own. The blanketing of large parts of Britain with field clubs, with their greater emphasis on getting feet dirty than attending functions indoors—in contrast to the urban societies they increasingly complemented—was surely a major influence too: their practice of holding meetings in different parts of their area in turn had stimulated collaboration on a wider geographical basis. That a noticeably greater number of Floras were sponsored by local or county bodies from mid-century onwards was probably not unconnected. The fashionableness of natural history among the many hundreds of Church of England clergymen who poured from the universities into relatively isolated country livings must have contributed as well. At any rate, of the 16 English counties provided with major Floras in the century’s final 15 years, no fewer than six had a clerical author or coauthor, most of whom kept in regular touch botanically and doubtless urged each other on.

That prominence attained eventually by the clergy, however, must not be over-interpreted as an ascendancy, for the landed gentry also produced authors of major county Floras, who were the equal of some at least of those as botanists. Lord de Tabley, whose Flora of Cheshire arrived in print in 1899, had admittedly gained his national reputation first during years spent in London before inheriting that title and accompanying estates; but J. C. Mansel-Pleydell was as a naturalist very much Dorset-bred, and the appearance of his Flora of that county in 1875 was preceded by a decade or so of personal fieldwork before that volume coincided with his coming into his inheritance of two very substantial slices of it.

Wealthy businessmen were more than capable of producing one or two of these major works as well. G. S. Gibson, whose Flora of Essex of 1862 was well up to the standard of the time, was on the way to being a multimillionaire in present-day terms, after inheriting a banking fortune as an only child. G. C. Druce (Fig. 132), by contrast, rose to great wealth by combining parsimony with enterprise, having never owned anything more considerable than a small chemist’s shop. His record of four Floras of a block of counties in the south Midlands is unlikely ever to be surpassed.

***

Zoology lagged well behind botany in developing a comparable tradition. That was not because botany’s early primacy, especially its strength in the higher reaches of society, placed it in such good odour with the book trade that titles concerned with the flora of areas even as small as districts were seen as having commercial prospects: the seemingly general insistence on author subsidies tells against that assumption. Rather, it was because there are features special to field botany that are conducive to lengthier and more detailed lists. Most obvious of those is the existence almost everywhere of many more kinds of plants than at least of birds or mammals or Macrolepidoptera.

Even after entomology and ornithology eventually acquired followings that equalled botany’s in size, for many years much less effort in those than in botany went into compiling records with publication in view, an activity hardly furthered by the less consistent provenancing of specimens by collectors of birds or insects. Whereas flowering plants and ferns were mounted on sheets of paper large enough to leave ample room normally for a note of where, when and (especially also) by whom they had been collected, insects were mounted on pins or tiny pieces of card with no comparable room to spare to invite the inserting of more than just the scientific name. Till well into the nineteenth century, even some collections outstanding in their richness, on which enormous care had otherwise been lavished, had no details of provenance added, rendering them largely useless for later scientific study. The labelling of bird specimens was rarely any better. Specimens were essentially personal trophies, and that their provenance could hold interest for anyone but the collector commonly failed to be appreciated. There was the further problem that in certain branches of zoology, unlike in botany, collecting was so intensively competitive that individual examples of great rarities were liable to acquire such a high monetary value as to encourage the faking of provenances.

Not surprisingly, comparatively few of the local lists of Lepidoptera published during the nineteenth century were sufficiently lengthy and detailed to be brought out in the expensive form of books. The first one, a Suffolk list by E. N. Bloomfield, did not appear till 1860 and ran to no more than 64 pages—half the number of the Flora of that county published the very same year. A quarter of a century then elapsed before a member of the Dorset gentry, C. W. Dale, treated another county to an equivalent. Serialisation in the first instance in a local society’s journal enabled more to struggle into print from 1885 onwards, but there was nothing comparable to the massive outpouring of county Floras and Avifaunas that was well under way by then. Harrow Butterflies and Moths, which ran to two volumes, each of over a hundred pages, in 1895–7, was the single conspicuous exception—and that is readily explained by the fact that one of its two authors bore the name of Rothschild (the Hon. Charles, of subsequent nature-reserves renown).

Despite the fellow handicaps that it laboured under, ornithology was thus left to be the one sister study to break the long-standing near-monopoly enjoyed by botany in this frustratingly uncommercial ‘parallel market’.

Ornithologia Danmoniensis; or, an History of the Habits and Economy of Devonshire Birds, privately printed in 1809, is generally regarded as the first of Britain’s local Avifaunas, though as an illustrated part-work it was quite untypical of the genre as that later developed. Next to nothing has ever been discovered about its author, Andrew Tucker, apart from the fact that he lived in the county, in Ashburton, and may have been surgically trained (to judge from much evidence in the text of ‘the multitudes of birds which I have dissected’). The text also bears out the arrestingly unfashionable subtitle, for it was clearly the product of much patient observing in the field. Unfortunately, the six plates to a part—plain or (for a higher price) coloured, as customarily offered—must have been too weak an enticement to counterbalance the merely local relevance suggested by the title, for the work was discontinued after only two parts had appeared.

That was hardly an encouraging precedent. Tucker was by no means alone in compiling a county bird list by that period—indeed, one for Cornwall, extending to 129 different kinds, entered in the margins of a copy of Willughby’s Ornithologia and credibly attributed to that county’s major contemporary collector, Walter Moyle, dates from as early as 1715—but, as always, transferring a list from manuscript into print, at any rate in the form of a book, was doubtless too deterringly costly. Certainly, very few works of a local character concerned with birds alone managed to struggle out before the nineteenth century was well beyond the halfway mark. The Couch family’s more broadly based A Cornish Fauna (in three volumes, 1838–44) nevertheless merits very much more than a token welcoming nod, as the first sign of a distinctive sub-genre years in the making.

All of a sudden, in 1866, that situation changed. The founding eight years before of the British Ornithologists’ Union, followed shortly after by the launching of a journal of its own, Ibis, had advertised to the natural history community that the bird men now regarded their field of interest as an autonomous branch of zoology, and one who could hardly have failed to take good notice was Van Voorst, whose first great publishing success had been with Yarrell’s History of British Birds back in the 1830s. Further encouraged no doubt by the boom conditions the book trade was experiencing after mid-century, his was predictably the first house to recognise the potential for profit at last in local Avifaunas, provided those took an area as large as a county as their focus. The two front-runners in what was soon to turn into a very bunched field both accordingly carried the Van Voorst colours: J. E. Harting’s The Birds of Middlesex and the first of the eventual three volumes of Henry Stevenson’s equivalent for Norfolk.

As Middlesex was the county whose Flora was just about to break the mould of the botanical version of the genre, it was nicely appropriate that it was also one of the scenes of this comparably decisive step forward taken by its ornithological counterpart. That county’s position next to London, where bird enthusiasts disproportionately congregated, naturally placed it at an advantage. At the same time it is striking that both volumes, the Avifauna as well as the Flora, were the works of authors in their middle twenties—as though minds not in thrall to the past were best placed to bring about the respective innovations.

That was not the only way in which these two parallel streams of volumes, fed from a common wellspring of county pride and loyalty, had parallels in their authorship. The Babington who produced the Avifauna of Suffolk was the cousin of the one who wrote the Flora of adjoining Cambridgeshire. The William Borrer whose account of the birds of Sussex appeared in 1881 was the son of the man of that name whom botanists had long looked to in vain to provide that county with the full-scale Flora it deserved. Two other counties, Wiltshire and Cheshire, were each presented with a Flora and an Avifauna in such quick succession, within a matter of months, that one cannot help suspecting races. There was no question of that in the case of Dorset, however, for its leading all-rounder, J. C. Mansel-Pleydell, performed there the as yet unrivalled feat of providing a county with both an Avifauna and a Flora (the latter in two editions, what is more); for good measure, he also produced a book-length account of its Mollusca. Luckily, he was rich enough to stand the entire cost of publication in every case himself.

It was the English counties that were mostly provided with Floras or Avifaunas during the initial span of years, reflecting the simple fact that it was in England that naturalists existed in greatest numbers. That implied not only more people producing records, but also more potential purchasers of the volumes that embodied those. During the final third of the century, from the baseline of 1866, 19 of those counties were provided with a first Avifauna and 18 with a first Flora of the new, more substantial kind. Contrary to what might have been expected, those were the same counties in only six cases, even though the great majority were in the south or the Midlands. From that it can be inferred that there was no coordination of the coverage geographically. In both cases very few volumes appeared before 1885, and at wide intervals at that, but thereafter at least one of either appeared almost every year, the Floras in a marked bunch in 1886–9, the Avifaunas more evenly.

Despite those similarities in the numbers produced, at that period a county Avifauna and its botanical counterpart bore little resemblance to one another in their contents. Though both depended heavily for records of rarities on mounted collections in the one case and herbaria in the other, field observations unsupported by specimens were inherently less reliable for birds as long as so few ornithologists made use of telescopes or similar precursors of prism binoculars—as well as in the absence yet of a standard drill for the noting of key identifying characters. A plant specimen, on the other hand, could usually be procured from the original spot should the correctness of a record be doubted. Visual assessments of quantity were also much easier for botanists, as their more spatial mode of operating enabled coverage to be more systematic. Whereas the amassing of records of plants could be expected to lead to the emergence of suggestive patterns in distributions and stimulated attempts to correlate those with geology and climate, the only patterns discernible in records of birds shot were in the frequency and seasonality of occurrences. Nineteenth-century Avifaunas consequently had no reason to be as bulky and as diversified in their subject matter as the Floras had become. Only in the decade after 1900 did a measure of convergence become apparent, in response to the increased emphasis on watching (and photographing) instead of shooting and a less casual approach to recording. That began to bring Avifaunas of a distinctly altered kind, in which the distribution of each species was considered in detail and the causes of any significant changes in numbers examined.

***

If the equipping of the English counties with these sets of volumes proceeded on no concerted plan—even to the extent that rival, simultaneous initiatives materialised in one or two of them—in Scotland matters took a very different turn. With many fewer naturalists and vast tracts of barely accessible country requiring to be investigated, the prospect of achieving a comparable coverage there seemed a dauntingly distant one. Though a thin scatter of projects based on counties were nevertheless put in hand, by 1900 only two Floras of the modern kind and two Avifaunas were all that had appeared, and three out of those four only in the final decade of the century.

Tackling that country on some broader basis than its counties (which in many cases commanded shallower loyalty than most English ones) seemed to many Scots a more practicable undertaking. It also offered the opportunity of switching to geographical divisions that held more meaning for naturalists. In 1872 F. Buchanan White, a Perth physician freed by an advantageous marriage from any need to practise, discriminated a series of what he termed ‘faunal areas’, analogous to H. C. Watson’s botanical ‘provinces’ in coinciding with the basins of major rivers. Though Buchanan White in the end stayed loyal to counties, and was to publish a Flora of his home one, Perthshire, his faunal areas subsequently commended themselves to John Alexander Harvie-Brown (Fig. 133), when that genial Stirlingshire laird decided to turn in this direction the drive and organising ability he had been putting up to then into the study of bird migration in Scotland.

Carefully planned, wide-ranging surveys, ideally with a numerical component, had been a favourite theme in the ornithological exhortations of Harvie-Brown’s professorial mentor, Alfred Newton, in his days as a Cambridge student. A group of such surveys he now saw as the best way of filling the glaring gaps in zoological knowledge of Scotland’s north and west more particularly. And just as George Johnston on the Northumbrian coast to the south had fostered and coordinated the production of a series of monographs on the marine invertebrates by a loose consortium, so Harvie-Brown envisaged a set of volumes on the vertebrates emerging similarly from a long-term collaborative programme of field and library work. Though covering the vertebrates as a whole was a laudable ambition—Harvie-Brown was a keen angler, after all, and there were not all that many mammals—in the event the birds turned out to receive so much the greater share of the attention that in effect what came out was not much more than a set of further Avifaunas.

A bachelor of very substantial independent means and with few other calls on his time and enthusiasm, Harvie-Brown set about that huge task with a fitting panache by treating himself to a custom-built yacht. This he saw as a prerequisite for working sea lochs with adequate thoroughness and for reaching the more out-of-the-way islands. Various members of his team of prospective fellow authors were among those who joined him on the resulting expeditions, which he even equipped with a geologist as well as an official photographer (whose excellent pictures were to grace the eventual volumes). Those expeditions were anything but holiday jaunts, for Harvie-Brown always threw himself wholeheartedly into anything he undertook and set an example of conscientiousness as leader. From the outset he had expected to be the contributor of at least some of the volumes that were to be written, and in the end out of the total of 11 that appeared between 1887 and 1911, the last of them five years before his death, he was to have a major hand in no fewer than seven. For most of those he had as coauthor T. E. Buckley, who also assisted with the overall coordination. Their volume on Orkney happily incorporated much material put together for an Avifauna of those islands by an earlier author, R. F. Spence, who had had the misfortune—which must surely be unique—of having to abandon it when it was already partly set in type. This he had done with such abruptness that the one surviving printed copy came to an end in the middle of the entry on the rook.

It had been the intention to leave every part of Scotland provided with a vertebrate Fauna, but except for Tweedside the southernmost quarter of the country was still uncovered when the final volume appeared. That the Forth area, in which Harvie-Brown had his home, was among those omissions was a particular disappointment. He had had every expectation that it would receive very full treatment at the hands of William Evans, an insurance official by occupation who was generally regarded as the finest all-round Scottish naturalist of the day—his reach extended even to spiders—and early on Harvie-Brown had confidently handed over to him a mass of data he had accumulated already on the area himself. Alas,Evans was seemingly not one of nature’s compulsive compilers, and even after many years his book never proceeded far enough to be publishable even if rescued by another hand.

Though the programme of research-cum-publication thus fell some way short of its original target, the scale of the achievement by that small group of individuals can only be called heroic. Though the contemporary work on bird migration by W. Eagle Clarke, and Praeger’s superbly organised ‘mass attacks’ by waves of specialists on first Lambay and then Clare Island off the Irish coasts fully bear comparison, the aims of these were very different. As a straightforward cataloguing-in-depth of the traditional type, Harvie-Brown’s bold venture would have no parallel in the breadth of its geographical scope combined with organisational complexity until the national distribution atlases of the mid-twentieth century. Certainly, no other single fieldwork project has culminated in the hatching of so large a clutch of long-needed books.

CHAPTER 15
Shifting Ground

AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY entered its final quarter, the long-enduring edifice that we think of as ‘Victorianism’ started to break up. Its cultural cement was no longer strong enough to hold it together, its resistance to change weakened by its venerability. While the crumbling of religious certainty, under the impact of Darwin’s writings, was the most obvious sign that the traditional architecture was swaying, the overdue acceptance by the state of financial responsibility for primary education and by the ancient English universities of the natural sciences as examined subjects were the two that most directly affected the study of the flora and fauna of these islands.

The Education Act of 1870 brought into being compulsory schooling of at least an elementary kind, to be provided by local authorities where nothing acceptable so far existed. Within 10 years that would enormously enlarge the percentage of the population capable of reading printed matter, some of which the book trade confidently looked forward to capturing even while resigned to the fact that newspapers and magazines were likely to be the main beneficiaries. Particularly promising for publishers of natural history seemed to be the requirement included in the Act that the national curriculum of the new ‘elementary’ schools was to include some instruction in science. That last word, however, was deceptive; for in so far as it was conceived as including some botany and zoology, what came to be taught was not at all natural history as traditionally understood but a quite novel confection, ‘nature study’, a suitably watered-down version of the very different entity that pair of disciplines had meanwhile turned into in the universities and technical colleges.

Much earlier in the century, the strongly practical character of its higher education had enabled Germany to pull well ahead of the rest in Europe in rising to the great new research possibilities that much-improved microscopes had opened up. The emphasis in botany and zoology there had shifted as a result from the traditional descriptive approaches to investigating the previously hidden underworld of structures and processes now at last brought within range. To the majority of students and up-and-coming academics those new avenues seemed to offer infinitely more scope than the ever more thorough cataloguing of the globe’s exterior diversity, a type of work which relied on procedures that had scarcely altered for centuries, which many would-be researchers found frustratingly restrictive, which tended to be aridly taught, and which were largely dependent on non-living material. The microscopic examining of tissues had to be conducted of necessity indoors in a laboratory and was not easy to combine with extended excursions into the field or with the routines of a museum: it enforced a type of existence that was sharply different from those, with a rhythm of its own. In addition to a novel terminology and techniques that were inaccessible without special training, converts to this nascent ‘biology’ (a label flourished like a banner to proclaim its radical distinctness) were thus largely separated physically as well. That very distance, though, from a domain traditionally thought of as populated almost wholly by amateurs usefully served to strengthen a wished-for image of thoroughgoing professionalism. For, as in Germany, the rise of the new research fields had been accompanied by a rise in the number of academic posts, bringing into being for the first time departments with several lecturers instead of, as previously, a solitary professor, thereby inducing a sense of corporateness. Commonly misidentified as the professionalisation of science—for there were numerous natural history professionals by then—this was more correctly its ‘academicisation’, but an upward step in scale of historic importance none the less.

That basic reconfiguration of those two life sciences took half a century to prevail in Britain. Though welcomed and readily absorbed wherever in these islands the curriculum was heavily tilted already to the teaching of practical subjects, such as the colleges that had grown out of one-time mechanics’ institutes, the Scottish universities and the determinedly secular University College London, it was stubbornly resisted in those bastions of conservatism, Oxford and Cambridge, which fully succumbed only in the 1880s. Self-governing and comfortably self-supporting, that pair could afford to keep modernity at arm’s length—even indefinitely, as many may have supposed. That dogged refusal to admit to the privileged core of examined subjects any science other than mathematics was fuelled by special concerns, however: the heavy cost in space and equipment that the provision of laboratories would involve, but also, deeper and seldom explicit, a lingering mental association of science with mechanics and technicians—in other words, a source of potential subversion of the ideal of the cultivated gentleman that those universities had long seen as one of their prime functions to realise and sustain. Even at Cambridge, despite traditional intellectual leanings that made it better disposed toward science than Oxford, it was not until 1861 that its ten-year-old Natural Sciences Tripos was eventually conceded honours degree status. Several of the leading private schools responded by appointing a chemistry master or two during that notably progressive decade in Britain, though that had the paradoxical result of touching off a fashion for instituting natural history societies in them as well: science pursued only in its long-established, respectable guises, and essentially as a recreation.

That estrangement within the world of education between the two alternative approaches to investigating the natural world was not unwelcome to the primary schoolteachers becoming enthused by ‘nature study’. The converts to that failed to discern in the forming of collections the pedagogic virtues that their parents and grandparents had seen; rather, they saw it as harmfully destructive activity. Nature, they insisted, was not something to be pored over in cabinets or peered at through glass: it was to be marvelled at for its ever-changing movement, with restraint and preferably out-of-doors. The seeds of a contrary ethic were in the process of being very vigorously sown.

***

Ignored or actively belittled in academic quarters, and with its centuries-old ways of operating attacked in others, that late-Victorian generation of naturalists unsurprisingly had its confidence shaken. And signs can be detected in the literature of the period of a certain amount of internal debate about whether the time had come to move in some radically different directions. In particular, there was disillusioned querying of the usefulness of further collecting of at least the more conspicuous sections of the flora and fauna of at any rate Britain (even if not also of Ireland) and of the further describing of what seemed to many ever more trivial variants. Surely the basic inventorying and the subsequent working-out of distributions had now been accomplished, one or two ventured to say aloud. With the chances of finding more of much significance becoming ever slighter, they suggested, the future could hold only staleness and banality unless alternative approaches were adopted.

Various possible ways of escape from that supposedly fast-looming impasse consequently began to be explored in these years, with a greater or lesser degree of determination and by greater or lesser numbers of individuals. For those among the dissatisfied who were botanically inclined but unable to repress compulsions to identify and list, one ready substitute for conventional floristics lay just over the horizon. Taxonomic expertise was going to be essential for discriminating the key constituent species in the mosaic of distinctive plant communities of which natural vegetation was beginning to be perceived as consisting. But that British attempt to emulate the phytosociology then being born on the Continent would not get under way until early in the next century—and despite an energetic start would eventually run into the sand.

There were other alternatives for botanists in the meantime. They could switch, as a few certainly did, to copying Darwin by investigating, for example, the dispersal mechanisms of different kinds of wild flowers; or to following the lead of Darwin’s pre-eminent pupil, Sir John Lubbock (Figs 135 & 136), in studying the relations between wild flowers and insects (as enticingly laid before them in that man’s books, in 1874 and 1878). Or they could have carried out some much-needed testing of the constancy or otherwise under cultivation of the numerous infraspecific variants that had had scientific epithets recklessly sprinkled on them. By and large, though, the patient, protracted programmes of observation that work of such kinds entails, let alone the conducting of experiments after the manner of Mendel, were too demanding and too much at a right angle to customary forms of fieldwork to hold an appeal for the general run of amateurs. The same could be said of entomologists too, when invited to dedicate hour after hour, day after day, to watching and interpreting the behaviour of social insects, another line of work in which Lubbock had been busily engaged and which he wrote up for a wider public in his classic of 1882, Ants, Bees and Wasps.

For vertebrate zoologists, on the other hand, and ornithologists above all, the study of behaviour, for so long generally assumed to be too physically difficult to be attempted in any systematic way, had the good luck to become at last practicable just as this increasing questioning of the established pattern of natural history was coming about. By the 1880s much better field-glasses, in the shape of binoculars with prismatic lenses, were available to anyone who could afford their not inconsiderable cost (schoolboys had to be content still with pocket telescopes). Shooting could consequently be dispensed with for ordinary purposes by anyone who owned those—though for a long time yet sight records of rarities would be justifiably treated with reserve.

By no means every ornithologist was ready to jump at that new option, but enough were relieved to be able to switch entirely to watching to effect a transformation of the study into an essentially quietist pursuit within a reasonably short span of years. The changeover may have been induced more rapidly by the offensive extremes to which the contemporary fashion for wearing feathers and even entire plumage had been taken by the millinery trade, for that gave the rising cause of bird protection an extra head of steam.

The study of birds has so many intrinsic appeals and advantages compared with other branches of natural history that it would surely have outstripped all of them in popularity far earlier had it not been for that functional enslavement by firearms. Once that could be sidestepped, ornithology immediately started to attract a following of the size that could otherwise have been expected for it.

When the book trade began to find that titles on birds were noticeably growing in demand, it evidently did not appreciate at first what a deep and decisive change in attitude lay behind that. For there could scarcely have been a more unlikely-sounding harbinger of a new dawn in that study than a volume that appeared in 1878 with the title The Gamekeeper at Home. The very last things that the burgeoning new readership wanted to be told about were bags and trophies: the mental pictures they were after were of nature alive on the wing, not hung up dead on a fence as an advertisement of efficiency.

As it happened, the contents of that book had originally been a series of articles on the then depressed state of the countryside, contributed to one of the leading progressive weeklies of the day, the Pall Mall Gazette. The words ‘sketches of natural history and rural life’ that appeared as a subtitle were possibly tacked on at the instance of the publisher, the very experienced firm of Smith, Elder & Co.,then shortly to embark on the Dictionary of National Biography. That its previous few forays into the natural history field had included the sporting memoirs of Charles St John, notorious for the crocodile tears shed in their pages over his ruthless shooting of the last surviving ospreys, perhaps helps to explain the obsolete conception of the market that egregious choice of title seems to indicate.

The author, the as yet scarcely heard-of Richard Jefferies, owed his knowledge of country matters to an upbringing as a farmer’s son, but printer’s ink flowed in his veins from both parental lines and had soon drawn him away to pursue journalism for a living. In that first book and in a quick succession of further ones that followed he unwittingly resuscitated the hybrid genre that the Worcestershire naturalist, Edwin Lees, appears to have been the first to hit upon, back in the 1840s. Behind titles cunningly chosen to raise longings for an idyllic rustic past in many an unwillingly exiled townsman—Wildlife in a Southern County, The Life of the Fields, The Open Air, increasingly from a variety of other publishers—Jefferies varied what was predominantly a discourse on country matters in general by working in some natural history here and there. In that deliberately gentle way the idea that some knowledge of birds, insects and plants, without necessarily being able to put names to more than a few of them, was integral to a proper appreciation of the countryside came to be assimilated by a very much wider public, one which could never have been captured by the kind of frontal assault to which earlier, more earnest generations of Victorians were susceptible, with identification manuals brandished at them. That no longer worked, now that collecting had been dethroned as the one-and-only entrée.

Just two years after that inaugural book arrived from the quietly seductive pen of Jefferies, one addressed to the already converted appeared from another previously unfamiliar author. This was introduced on the title page as Rural Bird Life, with the words Essays on Ornithology, with Instructions for Preserving Objects relating to that Science added beneath—a similar, but more blatant attempt at having things both ways again, the modish ‘rural’ offset by an unashamed appeal to skin or egg collectors. It was as if the publisher had no confidence that a book in which ‘observer’ and ‘observing’ were used repeatedly, and a notebook was recommended as an ‘inseparable companion’ along with a ‘first-class telescope or field-glass’, could hope to succeed on the strength of such a revolutionary approach alone. Indeed, it may have been only because it could be presented as an instructional manual that it had been accepted for its list by the education-oriented house of Longman. Evidently the subject matter was not at all what the publisher understood by ‘ornithology’, let alone ‘science’, which could account for the fact that that was the first and only occasion on which it acted for that author, the subsequently prolific Charles Dixon (about whom strangely little seems to be known). Equally, though, it could be that the approach was still at that point too novel to appeal to enough traditional buyers of bird books to render the venture profitable.

No fewer than 19 further books, all but two with ‘birds’ in the title, were to pour out from Dixon over the next decade and a half, at times at the rate of two a year. After some noticeable chopping and changing with other firms with relatively learned lists, around 1890 he eventually found his niche further down, handled by publishers less staid in their choice of titles: thenceforward it was ‘essays on ornithology’ no longer, but Stray Feathers from Many Birds or Idle Hours with Nature. After 1895, what is more, the publisher changed with every book, a pattern suggestive of a bidding war—a development by no means inconceivable in the case of a writer with a demonstrable record of regularly producing reasonable ‘earners’ on a subject by then regarded in the trade as ‘hot’. Many of those later ones, though running to around 300 pages of text, were devoid of illustrations or had a single colour plate at best: production costs, clearly, had to be kept low enough to allow a price affordable by a readership that, while manifestly more than barely literate, was drawn in probably substantial part from among the very far from affluent. Bird-watching, as had become very apparent, was socially well-nigh universal in its potential reach.

In the same year, 1890, in which Dixon at last succeeded in demonstrating that inexpensive books entirely about birds would sell without an accompaniment of pictures provided they were readable and adequately informative, the cause of nature protection revealed its growing strength when a title unambiguously with that message, Wild Nature Won by Kindness, and aimed at that same market layer, sold spectacularly well. Its author, Eliza Brightwen (Fig. 137),was by an odd coincidence the adopted only child of the founder of the publishing house, Smith, Elder & Co., responsible for launching Jefferies. She had devoted an isolated upbringing on her uncle’s estates to assiduously making nature notes, and despite that link with the book world, had never thought them worthy of print until persuaded to the contrary by a discerning literary nephew, no other than Gosse’s son Edmund (who, ironically, was later to portray his father’s passion for the subject in a ridiculous light in a distastefully distorted pseudo-autobiography). His ‘Aunt Lizzie’ was by then sixty, barely recovered from a prolonged breakdown in health and diffident to a fault, but much to her surprise the manuscript was immediately accepted and won admiring reviews on publication. By the time of her death 16 years later it had passed through numerous editions spanning over 20,000 copies and brought her the vice-presidency of the Selborne Society, the national body founded in 1885 expressly to champion the protectionist cause. Married to a stockbroker and living in some grandeur on the northern fringe of London, she clearly wrote not for money but simply to share her enthusiasm. That was just as well, for the elusiveness today of the six further titles she went on to produce—almost all again for the newish firm of T. Fisher Unwin (progenitor of the later, far better-known George Allen & Unwin)—suggests that none of those came near to matching that first one in popularity, and certainly not in influence.

Within four years of Mrs Brightwen’s arrival on the scene that same cause had acquired the literary services of another fervent crusader in the person of William Henry Hudson (Fig. 138). In his case the chosen medium was a series of pamphlets for the even newer Society for the Protection of Birds. That body could hardly have woken up by then to what a major catch they had made, for he had only recently changed direction as an author and taken to writing mainly on the countryside of England instead of about his native South America.

Considering that he was doubly an alien (for his parents were both United States citizens who had emigrated to the pampas of La Plata from New England), Hudson’s rapid emergence as the supreme master of the genre revived by Jefferies, and his skill at capturing and communicating the essence of a landscape on which he had never set eyes till well into his thirties, seem at first sight miraculous. That he had the advantage of experiencing it as a stranger and so with an extra freshness is hardly sufficient as an explanation. It does seem that he had a more than ordinarily sensuous relationship with natural scenery—his own theory, put forward in his final book, was that a kind of subliminal hearing was the operative factor—and certainly he had immersed himself so profoundly in that landscape of his youth that it continued to haunt him for ever after. Despite that, from the age of fifteen, when an intensive bout of reading resulted in his encountering The Natural History of Selborne and becoming entranced by that, he had been convinced that the downs of southern England were his true home in spirit.

It was in 1874 that Hudson had eventually taken ship to Britain with a view to testing that conviction against reality. Emboldened by the enthusiastic response of the Zoological Society in London to specimens and written accounts of the little-known Argentinian avifauna that he had begun sending to it, he arrived in the high hope of obtaining employment as a naturalist. That proved elusive, however, and he had to fall back on trying to earn a living as a full-time freelance writer, resigning himself to an enduring, deeply incongruous exile in London’s dreary inner suburbs. Years of poverty followed, as he vainly struggled to justify his belief that he had the talent to be a successful novelist—an entirely correct belief, as it would later turn out—and it was only when, in despair, he at last allowed his naturalist alter ego to take over, and indulged in controlled recollection of the sights and sounds in which he had once delighted, that his fortunes notably improved.

The rally can be dated with precision to 1892, when the first of two books drawing on his Argentine experiences brought in sufficient money to enable him to treat himself to a pair of field-glasses and start taking the long, leisurely rambles through the English countryside for which he had yearned. Birds in a Village was the immediate outcome: a slender octavo published the next year by Chapman & Hall, the much-respected firm with a strong literary-cum-academic list that was already handling his other American writings. A more suitable publisher he could hardly have found, for it was just then bringing out Charles Dixon’s fast-developing flood of books on birds. Yet it was to be under the imprint of Longman that Hudson’s next four appeared, perhaps because the first of those, British Birds, was better suited to that other firm’s list by reason of being a textbook; more probably, though, it was time now for him to be returning the favours he owed Longman for having kept him afloat in his darker days by taking material from him for the magazine it ran. Though the terms he accepted for that particular book, £150 in return for the sacrifice of the copyright, hardly seem enough to have secured the run of loyalty that followed, maybe Longman dangled the prospect of better deals to come—in which case it kept faith with him, as for Birds in London, in 1895, the next one, a 15 per cent royalty was to be payable once 2,500 copies had been sold. And that confidence was surely rewarded by the last two in that particular bunch: Nature in Downland in 1900, the product of a saunter on foot through Sussex, and then, after taking belatedly to a bicycle and devoting two leisurely years to exploring his favourite county of all, Hampshire Days in 1903.

The award of a modest Civil List pension had made possible the more extended breaks that gathering the material for the last two of those books entailed, but the sums they earned him were additionally enough to make him financially comfortable for once. Their success, indeed, was such that he now had the bittersweet experience of publishers vying eagerly for anything more that he had to offer. It was a situation that many another author might have relished, but for Hudson it arrived too late to be capable of affording him pleasure—or so he claimed, in a letter to a friend: after having never received as much as a civil word from anyone to whom he submitted work during all the years in which he was desperate and penniless, he found this volte-face by the trade nothing less than nauseating.

Such was his disillusion that he seems to have made a point of turning his back thereafter on the old-established firms to which he previously looked for succour, signing up instead with three comparative newcomers, none of them extant before 1880 and one founded as recently as 1898. The failure to return to Chapman & Hall was the more blatant, as that had the most illustrious fiction list of any house in London at that period, and it was to his novel-writing, which all along had been closest to his heart, that Hudson had by then returned with renewed confidence and energy. Longman had no reputation in that area, and that could have looked reason enough for the severance of that lengthier connection. Yet why did Longman not try harder to hold on to the countryside books, which were seemingly consonant with its list and had begun to prove their worth? Given its commanding position in the trade, it could surely have afforded to outbid any competitor. The simple answer may be that Hudson was in no mood to be influenced by money alone and was bent on a radical shuffle, come what may.

That the novels went to the newish firm founded by Gerald Duckworth, one of Virginia Woolf’s brothers, was due to the famously influential publishers’ reader, Edward Garnett, who for some time had been a keen admirer of Hudson’s fictional work. But that the other books went elsewhere was probably on account of Duckworth’s loss as a partner at that point of A. R. Waller, who had been busily acquiring for the firm a considerable natural history list. A keen botanist who had earlier founded and run one of the two national clubs for the exchanging of herbarium specimens, Waller had had a try at netting for Duckworth a much-needed new British Flora when that was announced, very prematurely, as in course of preparation; but his departure to Cambridge University Press—the eventual publisher of that Flora, by a different team—could imply too academic a leaning for he and Hudson to have felt comfortable with one another. As it was, it was Hutchinson, another firm actively building a natural history list, that was entrusted with bringing out the next three of the countryside books, most noticeably The Land’s End in 1908 and Afoot in England in 1909, while to Dent finally went the privilege of publishing the rest of Hudson’s oeuvre, including his more strictly autobiographical volumes.

While it cannot be claimed that Hudson contributed significantly to advancing knowledge of the fauna or flora of these islands, the influence of his books was undeniably immense in helping forward the changing attitude to nature, and especially in focusing attention on birds, the sector in which that switch in ethic stood the best chance of being speedily and conspicuously brought about. Above all, that inimitable blend he fashioned of ‘field notes and social history, poetry and science and imaginative musings’ (in the words of the most recent of his biographers), put over in a meandering style suggestive of peaceful rural lanes, was to occupy the central place in that extensive and long-lasting literary genre that had emerged to fill the middle ground between unalloyed natural history and passing curiosity about the make-up of a countryside newly rendered unalien and soon familiar by spreading private transport and railway branch lines.

***

Hudson was trebly lucky to have come to the fore as a writer at the time when he did. For not only was the countryside of Britain starting to be appreciated and in places even safeguarded in ways and on a scale as never before, not only was the study of its wildlife undergoing a major reconfiguration, but bookselling in Britain was in the process of acquiring a markedly different, and nationally distinctive, character as well.

Following the forced abandonment in 1852 of the suppression of competitive discounting that the trade had managed to achieve for a period, a relapse into total anarchy had taken place. Once again, any new title could be offered to the public at whatever price a bookshop chose. Once again, publishers had no control over how a title fared after it had left their hands. As the century wore on, however, a contrary trend began to take hold right across industry which was eventually to cut across that: groupings of people or firms with economic interests in common increasingly recognised that there was much to be gained by collaborating and accordingly began to set up formal bodies to act as watchdogs or negotiators on their collective behalf. That had the effect of instilling an orderliness that had not existed since pre-industrial days and a drift towards a quasi-professionalisation that promised heightened respectability as it lowered risk.

By the 1880s even the book trade was unable to resist that contrary current. Its first manifestations were the founding in that decade of the Society of Authors and the emergence of literary agents in their modern form. By at last making common cause and delegating to a new breed of specialists the business aspects of their work, the creators of the primary material from which the trade ultimately derived its profits were thereafter much better placed to fight their particular corner. Firms which failed to offer terms that the authors’ own watchdogs regarded as satisfactory were thenceforward liable to lose their more valued clients and decreasingly attract others in place of those. In the longer term, publishers would gradually be prevailed upon to move over to payment of royalties as the norm, in lieu of the risky half-profits agreements and the potentially confiscatory sale of the copyright at the outset.

Placed under collective pressure by authors, while at the same time frustratingly at the mercy of price-cutting in the bookshops, the publishers themselves soon saw the need of a body to represent their interests similarly, now that the book trade had largely become divided into two distinct business categories that, while broadly complementary, could find themselves in conflict with one another too. The Publishers’ Association and the Booksellers Association were accordingly brought into being—in one and the same year, 1895.

The time now seemed propitious for turning the trade into less of a rough-house. The obvious priority was to try for an end to the price war in the shops, which was so mutually detrimental. In the face of widespread scepticism that anything could be done, the publishers’ leading spokesman eventually won support from all sides for what became, in 1900, the tripartite Net Book Agreement, whereby all books falling within a certain category could be sold only at the publisher’s stipulated price. The stability secured on this particularly important front would prove to last for almost the whole of the next century, four times as long as the previous period of control had turned out to be sustainable. That achievement could hardly have been possible, though, had it not been for that rather sudden onset of a culture of greater reasonableness and in general more scrupulous behaviour as well.

While the trade was busy sorting out its internal structure and accustoming itself to the altered relationships now emerging, those between authors and publishers especially, a further flurry of technical developments had meanwhile been changing once again the character and economics of the physical processes of book production, the base on which that elaborate marketing edifice rested.

The most important of those developments was the arrival of mechanical typesetting. Ever since the printing-press had been mechanised the obvious priority candidate for similar treatment was the slow, crudely manual method to which compositors had traditionally been restricted, but repeated attempts to devise a machine for that purpose that was also a commercial proposition had proved repeatedly unsuccessful. The race was eventually won in the United States, where two equally practicable designs were brought out in the 1880s within three years of each other and quickly found favour across the Atlantic as well. The front-runner, the Linotype, was used mainly for newspaper work, leaving book-printing to be the prime beneficiary of the Monotype, at any rate in Britain. Both kinds of machine were simple to operate: the compositor had to do no more than tap in the letters on a keyboard resembling a giant typewriter, once having set the mechanism to the particular size of spacing between letters and lines that was required. Unfortunately, to make alterations at the proof stage it was as necessary as ever to ‘unlock’ the type and change the individual letters concerned with a pair of tweezers, a time-consuming procedure that was correspondingly expensive (and one, moreover, which carried the risk of introducing new errors unless performed with the greatest care). Except in that one respect, though, mechanised typesetting had the double advantage of much greater speed and less wear on the type (and on the nerves of the compositor). Nevertheless, for specialised work hand-setting continued in use for some years yet.

A further aspect of printing to undergo mechanisation was lithography, which continued to be the usual method of reproducing plates in books right until the century ended. Powered presses, which damped and inked the stone, with the aid of two sets of rollers, had appeared on the market in 1860, were common by the 1880s and enjoyed a near-monopoly of such work till around 1895, after which they gradually gave way to rotary machines, of which the ‘offset’ kind was the one that was in due course to prevail.

Because print was such an expensive medium if only a smallish number of copies was all that was required, ways and means of circumventing it had also attracted much interest from inventors. One halfway solution that achieved some popularity from around 1880 was the hectograph, an apparatus that reproduced handwriting. A boon in particular for anyone with multiple sets of labelled specimens to circulate to fellow specialists or offer for public sale, this was resorted to in one or two cases on the Continent for publishing en masse descriptions of new species, a form of scientific communication often unwelcome to learned journals and deterringly costly to bring out as a subsidised printed book. In 1895 the Botanical Exchange Club was circularised by that method by the experienced businessman then serving as its secretary, but no other examples of its use in Britain in a natural history connection have been traced. Though simple letter-copiers had been standard office equipment since the end of the eighteenth century, anticipating the advent of carbon paper, it was only in 1881 that London saw the first duplicating machine capable of multiple runs. This was the Cyclostyle, equipped with a wax stencil, invented by a Hungarian immigrant, David Gestetner (who went on to introduce typewriter stencils seven years later). That and its subsequent competitors were probably too expensive at first to be affordable by any but large offices, and they apparently did not become general in Britain till the second decade of the next century—by which time the first photocopier had made its appearance in America. That explains how ‘quite a sensation’ was caused among his fellow hymenopterists when in 1892 the sixteen-year-old Frederick Sladen distributed among them copies of a booklet, The Humble-bee, its Life-history and how to Domesticate it, ‘composed, stylographed in imitation of printing, illustrated, and even bound, entirely by himself’.

Though self-producing a book by using a hand-press to print it had been a feasible, if very laborious, solution open to impecunious naturalists for a century by then (as demonstrated by the efforts in that direction of William Turton back in 1803), this was evidently the first time one of them had the initiative to take advantage of one of these new and far less demanding ‘near-print’ techniques to achieve a comparable result. Inexplicably, Sladen seems to have tempted very few if any other naturalists to follow his example, leaving desk-top publishing to await the advent of personal computers. Sladen was fortunate to find a publisher, Macmillan, willing to bring out his subsequent, invaluable monograph, The Humble-bee, in 1912 on a normal commercial basis. That same year he emigrated to Canada, where, on the strength of his by then unrivalled expertise on the behaviour of both wild and domestic bees, he was to be designated Dominion Apiarist.

Not the least noteworthy feature of the booklet put together by that enterprising young man was the inclusion of five hand-coloured plates of different species of bees, ‘photographed directly from nature’. That was three years before Richard Kearton made ornithological history with the first book in that sister field to be illustrated throughout with photographs—and those were all in black and white.

***

Of all the various ways in which technical developments were having a major impact on natural history book publishing at this period, none were more obvious to the public than those taking place in photography. That had failed up till then to capture the strong following among naturalists that early enthusiasts had predicted for it, for a variety of reasons but perhaps most of all because as long as photographs could not be reproduced in colour, they could not compete with the hand-coloured illustrations with which natural history was so bountifully provided and so especially identified. Though photographic prints could be hand-coloured too, and often were, the result was not nearly so impressive, and in any case the very precision of the likeness of which the camera was capable did not ordinarily allow the latitude to highlight features of taxonomic importance open to an informed wielder of a pencil or a paint-brush. The complexity of the processes involved and the weight of the equipment that photography for many years entailed effectively made it an indoor pursuit, moreover, which constituted for the naturalist a serious deterrent.

A breakthrough in the second of those respects came in 1879, when a perfected version of dry plates came on the market, allowing the tether to a laboratory at last to be cut and such equipment as was still inseparable from the pursuit to be taken out into the field. Even then that was no small burden. In the words of Frances Pitt, recalling that era, ‘men and women … staggered under the weight of heavy stand cameras and loads of glass plates, carefully focusing their subjects on a ground-glass screen, with a black cloth over their head to exclude light.’ The camera used by one of the earliest pioneers, R. B. Lodge, was so heavy that he and his brother tramped for miles pushing it on a wheelbarrow. Even in 1908, a decade or more further on, one of Lodge’s leading competitors as a freelance, Lilian Bland, records in her unpublished memoirs setting off to photograph seabirds on the west coast of Scotland ‘with a large trunkful of negatives and Lumière colour plates’, which weighed such a lot that the boatmen whom she had hired asked in jest if they were gold bars that she had with her. But at least all of those were spared the cans filled with water, for washing the negatives, that their wet-plate predecessors had also had to cope with.

Birds were the great challenge for that first generation of nature photographers. That was not merely because in the wild they were so seldom sufficiently motionless for the capability of the cameras of the time, but also because the wish to study them without having recourse to a gun was just then so fashionably strong. These improvements in technique had come along at just the right moment.

The winner of the race to have the first photograph of birds in the wild in print was the author of a county avifauna: J. C. Mansel-Pleydell, whose Dorset volume of 1888 had as its proud frontispiece a print of some of the semi-tame denizens of the famous Abbotsbury swannery. Six years later, the Reverend Murray Matthew’s analogous work on Pembrokeshire roundly trumped that with four plates of gannets and kittiwakes, which were not only truly wild but obviously more demanding as subjects.

Those two books were addressed to comparatively limited, comparatively sophisticated readerships, though. Obviously just for the well-heeled connoisseur, too—despite its title—was Oswin Lee’s four-volume set of folios, Among British Birds in their Nesting Haunts, with Illustrated by the Camera as a subtitle; published in 1896–9 by the Edinburgh firm of David Douglas, the 140 photographs offered a veritable cornucopia compared with those others, but must have come as a nasty let-down even so, for with just a single exception they were all of unoccupied nests.

For introducing bird photography to a very much wider audience, indeed a transatlantic one, the credit belongs, rather, to Richard Kearton’s British Birds’ Nests: how, where and when to find and identify them, which was brought out in 1895 by Cassell & Co. Kearton had had the luck some years before to be taken on, in scarcely more than a stamp-licking capacity, by that large and enterprising London publishing house, known more especially for low-priced yet generously illustrated works aimed at the bottom tier of the book market. Twenty by then, he had not been citified long enough for a typical country boy’s passion for hunting for nests and eggs to have drained away. Consequently, when word of that spread to his superiors, it was decided to give him his head by asking him to contribute the section on that topic to a long-running part-work, Familiar Wild Birds, which the firm had coincidentally just launched. Though it had had considerable success previously with two similar ventures with ‘natural history’ in their titles, this one for some reason had to be ended prematurely after five years, whereupon Kearton came up with the well-received suggestion that that section of his might be worth bringing out afresh as a separate book. Even he, though, can hardly have expected that his much slighter effort of five years earlier, the similarly titled Birds’ Nests, Eggs, and Egg-collecting, would prove such a strong and steady seller to have warranted 18 further printings by the time he came to write his autobiography 36 years later.

After that, Kearton could evidently do no wrong in the eyes of his employers, for the firm published a stream of further books in the same line that he wrote in his spare time. Alas, though, as an in-house author who was but a junior underling he was scarcely in a position to negotiate the level of remuneration that an outsider might have been able to. Though the dozen or so other titles that he went on to produce all did well enough to be reissued seven or eight times in their turn, in later years he was to observe wryly that, in proportion to the amount of time he had put in as their author, the financial returns to him had been less than those of ‘anybody else who has touched them, whether compositor, block-maker, machine-minder, bookbinder or the man who sold them over a counter.’

Particularly galling for Kearton, in view of that, must have been the very large sale that his second and third books achieved, for all that they brought him an international reputation. Though British Birds’ Nests was in essence just another guide for young egg collectors with photographs added for shock effect, its successor two years later, With Nature and a Camera, was unambiguously a summons to open-air photography. The infusing of that extra ingredient had been largely thanks to the flair for the new technique shown by Kearton’s young brother, Cherry, whom he had lured from the family home in the depths of the North Riding to join him at Cassell’s. The exploits and innovative devices—most notably their ingenious variety of hides—described in those books had thereafter been joint ones, even though it was the senior of the two who wielded the pen and featured as the author.

Though the Keartons gained the most publicity, supplementing their book with numerous lantern lectures, they were by no means the only naturalists to take speedy advantage of the dry-plate breakthrough. A professional portrait photographer at Southport in Lancashire, Benjamin Wyles, had had successful results with taking photographs of wild birds, some of them in flight, even before that, by 1888 at least. The better-known R. B. Lodge was active by 1891, subsequently contributing some of the results as illustrations for two of Hudson’s books. Another pioneer, Oliver G. Pike, followed the lead of the Keartons not long after with a volume of his own with a similar but doubly trendy title: In Birdland with Field-glasses and Camera, brought out by Eliza Brightwen’s publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, in 1900. Within seven years Pike would come up with the first-ever wildlife film to be shown to a paying audience in Britain.

Further technical advances had meanwhile taken place and were rendering it ever more feasible to photograph creatures of every kind. Around the time that dry plates had come in, portable hand cameras became available in the shops and thereafter increasingly an accompaniment on rambles. In 1890 those were joined by the telephoto lens—hailed as ‘even better than the field-glass’ by the Selborne Society’s magazine Nature Notes – and three years after that the first flashlight photograph of a bird was taken.

Photographing wildlife in situ in colour, however—let alone that ultimate dream, reproducing its movement in colour too—was still a few years off and would not be other than tricky out of doors for considerably longer even then. So for the time being the book trade had to be content with the best that commercial colour-printers could produce with the range of new photomechanical processes that had begun to supplant engraving on metal. Lithographs, already printed in coloured inks by mid-century (and extensively in use for natural history illustrations by reason of the cost advantage over hand-colouring), had been the first to be reproduced photographically, in the 1860s, and halftone and photogravure had followed two decades later. Apart from their greater speed these offered greater flexibility as well, enabling colour plates to be readily enlarged or (to the dismay of the artists) reduced to whatever size required. Though there was no getting away from the fact that mechanised printing could not match the high standard attained by hand craftsmanship, the quality of what was turned out did show a marked improvement around 1900 at the same time as its cost also fell sharply, a change which met with admiring comment from reviewers of natural history books in those years. It was a development that was to make the very long wait for ones fully illustrated by colour photographs that much easier to bear.

It also helped that the great tradition of superlative colour part-works had been temporarily revitalised in the later years of the century by a cascade of commissions from a fresh quarter. An increasing number of men of often great wealth with a passion for shooting for sport had come to broaden their gaze and acquire an aesthetic-cum-scientific interest in wild birds of every kind, to the extent that ornithology had substantially taken on the appearance of an adjunct to the gun-room of the typical country mansion. The finest wildlife painters of the day were the principal beneficiaries, among whom Archibald Thorburn, George Lodge and Joseph Wolf have generally been acknowledged as pre-eminent, though J. G. Keulemans, a recruit from Holland, produced much highly regarded work as well. The text to accompany their paintings was expected to be of a matching authoritativeness, and the person called upon to write that in more cases than anyone else was the redoubtable Richard Bowdler Sharpe (Fig. 140).

Genial and sociable yet at the same time tirelessly industrious, Bowdler Sharpe was a museum systematist of much the same stamp as J. E. Gray, that no less prolific describer of plants of an earlier generation with whom he just overlapped as a colleague. Launched into bookselling at sixteen by a publisher parent, he soon realised that his passion for identifying birds was too all-consuming to be assuaged by anything less than a full-time professional outlet, and he succeeded in obtaining a post in the British Museum, after a spell as the Zoological Society’s first librarian. Entering government service, however, required his sacrificing a sum equivalent to eight times his initial annual salary in giving up his planned collaboration with H. E. Dresser on A History of the Birds of Europe, a monumental part-work on which the two had just embarked. The Yorkshire-born Dresser, a wealthy businessman of enormous drive and a collector of the most fanatical kind, all the same pressed ahead with that on his own, undeterred, only for the horrendous strain—of regularly turning out the promised 84 parts while also coordinating the production of the 632 colour plates by a team of artists—eventually to start to tell. The only solution then was for Bowdler Sharpe to be brought back in and contribute the final tenth or so of outstanding text, thus enabling the last of the eight volumes to be completed, in 1882, after 11 years of unremitting effort.

Dresser’s subscribers were then at last free to invest in the first of two similar works that promptly followed, one after the other. Besides being less ambitious, though, these had a strictly domestic focus: A History of British Birds … (that well-worn title, once again) by Henry Seebohm in 1883–5 and Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands by Lord Lilford in 1885–98 (Fig. 141). Seebohm was superficially a second Dresser: another businessman of wealth, similarly Yorkshire-born, and similarly an inveterate collector in the course of extensive travel, in the north of Eurasia especially (Fig. 142). But a powerful intellect combined with restless curiosity led him into deeper pondering on matters such as migration and into the formulating of original and unorthodox evolutionary ideas. Through these last he became the foremost British ornithologist to argue for the taxonomic recognition of geographical races and the widening of zoological nomenclature to the additional category of subspecies to accommodate those—a long-lasting and heated argument in which he and Dresser were in opposing camps. Unfortunately, unlike Dresser, he had left too late the producing of his own, much more modest, culminating magnum opus and died before proceeding very far with an intended eighth volume to be devoted to the eggs (Fig. 143). That was accordingly another work that Bowdler Sharpe had to be brought in to complete, for publication in 1896, more than full though his hands already were with monographs of his own, as well as by others, on the birds of numerous other parts of the world.

That Bowdler Sharpe nevertheless noticeably began loading himself even further around that time with an increasing amount of work for commercial publishers (including three books for the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, no less) can surely only have had growing pressure on his personal finances as the cause.By then he and his wife had no fewer than 10 unmarried daughters, of which at least the four eldest had acquired sufficient skill at hand-colouring plates for their father to be helping out (with presumably very modest earnings) at that for other authors. Certainly, on his death in 1910 the sum he left was scarcely enough to make much difference to the lives of so many, and subsequently his widow was reduced to applying for a Civil List pension.

The most widely appreciated outcome of that late spurt of freelancing, all done in his own time in the evenings, was a two-volume, lavishly-illustrated edition of White’s Selborne – with which Bowdler Sharpe became so enamoured that he ended up living in that village himself. His concurrent role as editor-in-chief of ‘Allen’s Naturalist’s Library’ is likely to have been a sizeable undertaking too, despite the little more than nominal role that such a title commonly denotes. The ‘Naturalist’s Library’ had been conceived by the firm of W. H. Allen as a successor to the great series of Jardine and Lizars back in the 1830s, but unwisely it had been decided to attempt a ‘carry-over’ of the reputation earned by that predecessor by reissuing the original plates—but in the hopefully more appealing form of chromolithographs. That was similar to the trick that Hardwicke had tried to bring off with his bogus ‘third edition’ of English Botany; but at least he began with originals renowned and treasured for their beauty, whereas the situation in this case was hardly comparable. The pretence of a second birth was the harder to sustain, moreover, by reason of the multi-volume character this time of most of the titles. As before, by no means all were devoted exclusively to the fauna of these islands, and those which were varied a good deal in quality. The one on British mammals by Richard Lydekker, which appeared in 1895, was criticised by reviewers as over-derivative and for not being the comprehensive updated text on those that by then had become sorely needed; by contrast, the companion to that on birds, by Bowdler Sharpe himself, published alongside it but equipped with many more plates (editor-in-chief’s privilege, perhaps?), came in for high praise.

Lord Lilford’s part-work, the third of that massive late-Victorian trio on birds, differed from the other two in several ways. For a start, it was not first and foremost a systematic monograph with resplendent illustrations, for which reason the amount of accompanying text was on the whole comparatively brief and it was not Bowdler Sharpe who was called in (but another leading ornithologist, Osbert Salvin) to do the completing when the author, like Seebohm, died before the end. Rather, Lilford’s primary motive in launching such a work seems to have been to act as a patron of bird art. Much more than the other two, he evidently took delight in birds as living creatures, having kept menageries in his school and student days and built up a much-admired aviary on his Northamptonshire estate. He was thus more akin in spirit to the new kind of ornithology then in process of being hatched.

Additionally, Lilford is known to have been unhappy with the trend, initiated by John Gould, of elevating into an extension of the art market a genre that had started out with the modest practical aim of overcoming the limitations for taxonomists of having species defined in words alone. From a mere tool it had been turned into an outlet for conspicuous consumption, stratospherically priced accordingly and affordable only by a very few as a consequence. As he was in the practice already of surreptitiously aiding financially publications of value to ornithologists otherwise at risk of foundering, it would have been entirely in keeping for him to have subsidised very generously this major venture of his own, in order to bring it within the reach of many more. From the figures that have come down to us, however, it is difficult to tell how far that was the case. That two editions of the work were produced, in part during the same span of years, could lead the unwary to suppose that a less expensive, abridged version was indeed made available as an option; but in fact that was not the case. Because subscriptions proved at first disappointing, the intended number of 1,000 copies was cut by almost half, only for demand to bounce back so robustly when the quality of the work became more widely appreciated that the original target was judged worth returning to—and at a considerably higher price; as the opportunity was also taken to make some alterations, the restored copies were just about passably described as a new edition.

Altogether Lilford’s Coloured Figures ran to 36 parts and 421 hand-coloured plates, most of those chromolithographs, the whole making up into seven large-octavo volumes. Considering the author became severely disabled around the time the first numbers were appearing, it was doubly cruel of fate to inflict illness also on his artist, Keulemans, and force the latter to drop out as a result after completing little more than a quarter of the plates. Luckily, Thorburn was available to produce almost all of the rest; and though arguably not the finest work of that considerably better painter, its exposure en masse made that collection, in reproduced form, the prime choice thereafter for illustrating bird books of a much more modest kind in the half-century that followed.

CHAPTER 16
A Jubilee of Monographs

EVEN AS NATURAL HISTORY was finding itself propelled in radically new directions, the era of collecting was coming to a brilliant climax in a greater-than-ever outpouring of monographs and handbooks in almost every field. Despite the rising chorus of misgivings about the seemingly endless filling of cabinets and herbaria with rows or sheets of specimens, the traditional routines of collecting and describing continued to attract a strong following regardless—and would necessarily continue unabated in the still much underinvestigated groups, especially of invertebrates and cryptogams, in which material needed to be taken back from the field for microscopic study or for critical comparison with authoritatively named examples. Thanks to the ever-proliferating railway network and now the extension by bicycles of the range comfortably achievable on foot, distributions and seasonal incidence were being worked out with a much greater thoroughness, especially in the remoter and less populated regions and in the Highlands and Ireland in particular. In the well-known areas, too, where adding to the lists of species in the more favoured groups was becoming at last increasingly difficult, more and more naturalists had been turning to studying and recording the infraspecific variants and aberrations or rising to the challenge of the less readily separable stretches of the macrofauna or - flora for which specialist attention was demanded. As a consequence, reference works had been becoming outdated ever more quickly.

As usual, it was in the sectors of natural history with the greatest followings that the literature could most easily be kept abreast of advances in knowledge. Proportionately more enthusiasts tended to mean more people competent as well as willing—not necessarily the same thing, of course—to write the new works required. Greater numbers of likely buyers also gave those works the greatest chances of being published commercially, and by methods involving their authors in least physical stress or financial worry. The plants and animals with the widest appeal aesthetically tended to be colourful and as a result the most often painted, and the existence already of a set of attractive illustrations that could be flourished at a publisher further tilted the scales in their favour. By contrast, those that were less visible, and perhaps only adequately so through a microscope, tended to need drawing specially, and that could take much time and might have to be commissioned from an artist of exceptional skill and so be more than ordinarily expensive. From the scientific point of view, the works that were most badly needed, by virtue of opening up a new or neglected field and calling into being a subcommunity of specialists in it, were the hardest to put into reasonable circulation and at a price affordable by all those best able to make good use of them. It was a topsy-turvy state of affairs, which only made worse the heavily disproportionate attention given to those portions of the natural world that were the most well known (and doubtless always would be).

Many might nevertheless prefer to take the view that it is the needs of whichever branch of natural history that commands the largest following that ought to have priority, that providing that with authoritative and up-to-date works of reference in the most generally convenient form should be the overriding consideration. From that ‘greatest-happiness-of-the-greatest-number’ standpoint, it was obviously by now the students of birds who were the most deserving; and, equally obviously, what they badly needed was a compact version of the four-volume edition of Yarrell’s History of Birds that Newton had exasperated Van Voorst by taking such an inordinate length of time over. Embarked on as far back as 1859 and completed in 1885, for all its admirable thoroughness it had not been the book that the publisher had intended and had left a gap in the market that had become steadily more apparent as a less affluent, less library-bound generation took over. Van Voorst’s happy choice for the invidious role of Newton’s supplanter for the final two of the four volumes, Howard Saunders (Fig. 144), the incomparably meticulous joint editor of the journal of the British Ornithologists’ Union, the Ibis, was the natural choice again to undertake the textual slimming-down (while retaining the 564 woodcuts). But the resulting single volume, An Illustrated Manual of British Birds, that emerged from Van Voorst’s heirs and successors, Gurney & Jackson, in 1888–9, was even so still dauntingly bulky, and it was saved from strict confinement to bookshelves only by its long-unrivalled comprehensiveness. As a teenager in the 1920s, R. M. Lockley would feel bound to lug it with him on a day-trip all the way to Lundy Island and back: thus armed, together with a light macintosh, he recalls in his autobiography, ‘I felt I could face the whole world.’ And no doubt there was many another like him.

It was presumably the third edition of 1927 that Lockley possessed, after W. Eagle Clarke, the leading authority of that era on bird migration, had produced in turn a revised and enlarged version of ‘Saunders’ in 1897–9, taking it one step back again in the concertina-like changes in thickness that Yarrell’s original work passed through in its more than century-long career.

At least ornithologists had been kept reasonably supplied with a range of less satisfactory alternatives until that standard work at last became available. Those whose primary enthusiasm was for mammals or for amphibians and reptiles had had a much more protracted wait for an equivalent, however. The problem with them was that too few kinds are native to these islands, and for long too little had been known for certain about the behaviour of so many of them, that it was hard to come up with a volume of an acceptably substantial length. Some authors, like Bewick and Beilby in 1790 (or Edmund Sandars as recently as 1937, in A Beast Book for the Pocket) extended the coverage to domestic animals or exotic ones as well, by way of a solution.

For at any rate the mammals, that gap was at last filled very satisfactorily in 1874 by a second edition of the History of British Quadrupeds published 40 years earlier by the dental surgeon Thomas Bell. Though that appeared in Bell’s name again, it was an open secret that it had had to be virtually rewritten by a brilliant young comparative osteologist, E. R. Alston, so out of date had the original contents become. A chronic invalid, Alston had time only to follow that with a seminal volume on the mammals for the Glasgow-inspired Fauna of Scotland in 1880 before dying within months at only thirty-five.

Alston had begun early, however, for already at the age of twelve he had begun contributing notes and articles to The Zoologist, that one great success in Edward Newman’s stable of natural history journals. And it was Newman’s long-term successor as editor of that, J. E. Harting, who was to do much to consolidate the rising interest in mammals by making a point of publishing county lists for those in its pages. Though prolific journalism in other directions was to frustrate his intention of producing a Ray Society monograph on the bats, among the numerous books of a more popular character on zoological topics that Harting did manage to write was Some British Animals Extinct within Historic Times, which Trübner & Co., specialists in publishing learned works that other houses were loathe to take a risk on, proved in 1880 willing to add to their list.

Instead, it was left to two others to come forward with full-scale treatments of the kind that Harting would surely have produced had he only had the time. One of those was J. G. Millais, a professional artist like his far better-known father, Sir John Millais, who also had the ill luck to specialise as a painter of wildlife in the shadow of the matchless Thorburn. His three beautifully illustrated volumes on The Mammals of Great Britain, which began to appear in 1904, formed a natural complement to the stream of similar books on game birds, and ducks especially, that were his primary concern, and like those they were aimed at the shooting men of affluence whom his regular London publisher, Henry Sotheran, specialised in cultivating (Fig. 145). A dedicated naturalist as well, Millais spent seven years initially familiarising himself with the mammals in the wild at first hand before describing and painting them (as he eventually disclosed in an otherwise run-of-the-mill sporting autobiography). Six expeditions just to study grey seals and 20 or so to Scotland’s outer isles to trap examples of their smaller rodents indicate the remarkable lengths to which he was prepared to go in the interests of accuracy.

It was a more rigorously scientific public, on the other hand, that G. E. H. Barrett-Hamilton (Fig. 146) had in his sights with his even more ambitious History of British Mammals, which, though never completed, was to serve as the standard text for the generation to come. Conceived well before the nineteenth century’s end, it was not till 1910 that the first of its many projected parts began appearing from Gurney & Jackson. That the author was an army officer turned farmer was at first sight rather unlikely, and hardly any more likely was that—like that distant predecessor on the subject, The Experienc’d Huntsman of 1714—it emanated from Ireland, the mammalian fauna of which has only about two-thirds of the diversity of Britain’s. But Barrett-Hamilton had shown such brilliance as a zoology student at Cambridge that Alfred Newton rated him the naturalist of greatest promise out of all the many he had taken under his wing over the years, and he had quickly justified that expectation by jointly demonstrating that the Irish stoat was sufficiently distinct to be ranked as a separate species (though subspecific rank is now generally considered more appropriate). That coup had led him to look for geographical variants among the mammals more generally, for which the rodents seemed to offer the greatest potential, but the taxonomic extremism with which he insisted on pressing the results of that searching was to render his work in that direction lastingly controversial.

As his illustrator, Barrett-Hamilton had been able to secure the services of a student friend and rival, Edward Wilson, remembered today as one of the companions of Scott on his terrible, fatal trudge back from the South Pole. And it was in Antarctica too, and within only months of that, by a macabre coincidence, that Barrett-Hamilton died tragically young too—in his case while investigating on behalf of the government the allegedly indiscriminate slaughtering of whales there. The History of British Mammals was at that point barely halfway, the bats, insectivores and a few of the rodents having alone been covered. Luckily, though, a highly competent rodent specialist proved willing to take over. This was M. A. C. Hinton, an equally unusual individual then working as a volunteer researcher at the British Museum (Natural History) in the leisure left over from his employment as a lawyer’s clerk in the City. Resuming at Volume 2 Part 16, Hinton’s progress could not help but be slow and his involvement ended prematurely in turn, in 1921, when the excellence of a pamphlet he had written for the museum gained him appointment to its staff (despite his being largely self-educated and devoid of the normal academic qualifications). His subsequent official duties, which would take him eventually to the keepership of zoology, never left him the time or energy to return to the task and the rest of Volume 2, dealing with the ungulates and carnivores, together with the whole of the projected Volume 3 in the end failed to reach print.

***

Just as the mammals had long been overshadowed by the birds, the land and freshwater molluscs had been left in comparative obscurity by the enduring popularity of their marine counterparts with collectors. The heroic monographer to materialise for those was John William Taylor (not to be confused with his contemporary, John Ellor Taylor, the editor of Hardwicke’s Science Gossip for a time and a popular writer on general natural history). As the owner-manager, jointly with a brother, of a colour-printing works in Leeds, Taylor was in the lucky position of being able to sidestep most of the tribulations inseparable from publishing a learned work with an obviously limited market. For 20 years before embarking on his long-running, self-published magnum opus, he had indeed already been circulating free of charge to fellow specialists a small quarterly booklet, in which new records were notified and attention drawn to gaps in the reported distribution of the various species. By 1894 he recognised the time had come to draw together all of the additional data that had been flushed out and, handing over what had meanwhile grown into a full-scale journal to the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland to serve as its official organ, concentrated thereafter on bringing out his monograph by the time-honoured method of issuing it in a long series of parts to a published list of over 200 subscribers—possibly the last occasion on which this latter elaborate (and expensive) device was resorted to for a natural history work of this type. In addition to comprehensive accounts of each species on record from the British Isles, there were 77 colour plates as well as numerous text figures and distribution maps. The parts made up into four volumes, the last of which had yet to be completed when the work was abruptly brought to an end by the author’s death. It had been in progress by then for 27 years.

Taylor deserved high praise not least for carrying that great work entirely on his own shoulders and so sparing the Ray Society from having to assume the burden instead. The Ray was similarly relieved of two monographs that it had gone to the point of commissioning but which in the event proved acceptable to other publishers: in 1886 Longman brought out C. T. Hudson’s two volumes on the Rotifera, minuscule aquatic creatures less than a millimetre in length; and in 1895 the august Clarendon Press bore the expense of F. E. Beddard’s monograph of one of the main groups of earthworms, at that time classified as the Oligochaeta, near relations of Taylor’s Mollusca. On the other hand Percy Sladen’s predictably masterly treatment of the British representatives of the Echinodermata (starfish, sea urchins and the like), commissioned in 1888 when the completion of his protracted research on the riches dredged up by HMS Challenger was immediately in prospect, was denied the Ray Society when the author went down with a chronic illness and subsequently died at only fifty-one.

Fortunately the Ray Society was hardened to losing a proportion of its prospective titles for one reason or another. Though some of the monographs that came to it were in an advanced or even complete state already, others were as yet unwritten—and might never be but for the spur of a formal invitation and the lure of the next-best thing to assured appearance in print of what finally emerged. While the society accepted that its basic function was to act as midwife to any deserving major work that was clearly not publishable otherwise, it was more exhilarating for it to be proactive in identifying groups in particular need of up-to-date treatment taxonomically and finding authors for those. In attempting to perform that further role, however, it was up against the eternal problem that authors with the relevant rare expertise tend to be so much in demand that they can only start on such a long-term undertaking once free of other commitments. They also tend to be perfectionists endlessly in pursuit of essential further data. Without a commercial deadline to deploy as a sanction, the society was at their mercy. As the authors were fellow researchers, of often great distinction and eminence, moreover, the society only too well appreciated the difficulties they were liable to labour under and shrank from chivvying them. Nor was its budgetary planning made easier by the unpredictability, as a result, with which completed drafts came to hand.

Understandably fearful of losing a once-in-a-generation chance of having a neglected group authoritatively covered, the Ray Society was also particularly prone to tortuous, long-drawn-out sagas of the kind it had gone through earlier in trying to secure a monograph of the spiders. Another of those was only brought to a conclusion in these late-Victorian years after dragging on for a quarter of a century. This was on the Tunicata or sea-squirts. Originally commissioned back in 1863, its authors were that same Alder and Hancock whose magnificent monograph of the nudibranchiate Mollusca had triggered the society’s very founding and then brought it such special credit. In view of that, it would have been invidious to have had to turn this successor down in the event of the finished result not being found acceptable. Ten years later, however, both authors had died and the work was still not quite finished. The coloured illustrations were again captivating, but the taxonomy was sufficiently controversial to raise doubts whether proceeding further with the work was justifiable. As Thomas Henry Huxley had carried out research on the group in the recent past, he was approached for advice and invited to contribute an introduction in the event of his recommending that publishing was worthwhile. To have left the matter in the hands of someone so ultra-busy, however, was ill-advised, for after three years it transpired that it had escaped his attention and he saw no likelihood of being able to deal with it in the immediate future. That impasse was accordingly used by the society as a pretext for deferring further action indefinitely, leaving the marine-biology research community fuming at its consequent deprivation of a certainly useful, albeit imperfect guide to so important a group, a lack which was being felt ever more keenly. In 1882, and twice more in later years, Professor W. A. Herdman, who had been allotted the tunicate collection amassed by the great Challenger expedition (on which he was to produce three major papers), tried without success to interest the society in publishing an up-to-date replacement, which he was more than willing to write himself. The explanation for those refusals could only have been that the society felt itself under a moral obligation, if not a legal one as well, to proceed with what Alder and Hancock had contracted to produce. And accordingly that, at long last, was what it did eventually bring out, in three volumes in 1905–12, after energetic lobbying led by one of the authors’ original collaborators, Canon A. M. Norman. By then, though, for all the conscientious editing that was put in, the text was largely obsolescent.

With a sorry record of such tangles, it is perhaps not surprising that the Ray Society left it to Bernard Quaritch, the antiquarian book dealer, to be the rescuer of another valuable monograph on a marine group that had been similarly left uncompleted—though in this case after most of it had reached print. This one was on the true crabs (or brachyurans), of which it described and figured in colour about two-thirds of the species on the British Isles list today. A product of W. E. Leach’s seven stupendously productive years on the staff of the British Museum,and illustrated as well as published by James Sowerby, it had begun coming out as long ago as 1815 in what were expected to be about 19 parts, under the forbidding title (as customary at that period) of Malacostraca podophthalmata Britanniae, but with a more enlightening subtitle in English. Leach’s collapse into permanent ill health in 1820, however, had left it stranded for half a century two parts short. Finding the work still in demand despite that long interval—for it had not seriously dated—Quaritch had bought the unsold stock off one of the Sowerby grandsons and recruited another member of that talented dynasty, G. B. Sowerby the Second, to close the gap at long last, in 1875, with one double part of text, seven extra plates and, crucially, an index.

***

It was in entomology, though, that this general end-of-century retooling was in evidence most of all. Though it broadly coincided with the culminating surge in popularity that the Lepidoptera in particular enjoyed at the same period among collectors of almost every age and class, it is hard to believe that the two developments were causally connected, at any rate directly. For the authors of the monographs and updated manuals in question must have been drawn from an earlier generation of enthusiasts to have been capable of producing works manifestly based on many years of accumulated expertise. That is not to say that they may not have been encouraged to persist in their laborious undertakings by the knowledge that their branch of natural history had a greater following than ever before and by a not unreasonable belief accordingly that what they were producing was for the benefit not only of their immediate peers, but also of the many more whom they could now confidently be expecting to materialise in the years ahead.

If so, however, there was an element of self-deception in those authors’ buoyancy. For much of that late popularity was shallowly rooted and liable to be lost as quickly as it had been gained. Around 1870, a sudden ballooning in the number of lepidopterists—brought about most probably by the near-simultaneous publication then of Edward Newman’s matchlessly informative Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies and the third edition of the no less widely bought, similarly titled work by Morris—had seemingly been responsible for a noticeable change in the character of the pursuit, which a correspondent in The Entomologist in April 1875 felt driven to complain about. From ‘principally a day’s innocent pleasure’ of a comparative few, he insisted, it had been taken over by a mass of newcomers whose overriding concern was to own a larger collection than someone else, accompanied by a general deterioration in the standard of behaviour and a susceptibility to cheating about the provenance of specimens. However much truth there may have been in that, it is at any rate undeniable that there was a very marked rise in the published recording of captures at this period. For if the number of notes and papers in the three leading entomological periodicals is a fair reflection, there were two and a half times as many of those in 1891 as there were 20 years earlier.

For those newly teeming numbers of lepidopterists two of the monographs published at this period held a particular appeal. Indeed, one of them was so widely desirable that the Ray Society, its publisher, acquired a noticeable temporary influx of new members while it was appearing, most or all of whom can safely be assumed to have joined expressly in order to acquire it at the preferential discount. This was William Buckler’s The Larvae of the British Butterflies and Moths, which came out as a set of nine volumes in 1886–1901 (Fig. 147).

Buckler (Fig. 148) had been a throw-back to the likes of Benjamin Wilkes and Moses Harris, for like those founding fathers of British entomology he initially arrived on the scene as a painter of portraits for a living—in his case ones of a standard high enough to win places in Royal Academy exhibitions. A native of the Isle of Wight, he had forsaken London around 1848 and settled on the Hampshire coast opposite, where a developing keenness for entomology and the growing threat to his livelihood presented by photography led to his switching to drawing insects instead. Some 10 years later he responded to an appeal by Stainton in one of the journals for someone with the necessary dual expertise to provide figures of the larvae, leaf-mines and food plants for his massive part-work on the clothes moths. On the strength of the reputation gained by what he produced for that, he thereafter devoted the remaining 20 years of his life to depicting and describing the caterpillars of as many as possible of the species of Lepidoptera then known to occur in Britain, with a work of his own of comparable magnitude to Stainton’s in prospect. Poor eyesight forced him to rely on other collectors for most of the specimens needed and to use a magnifying glass for all his drawing, while periodic attacks of scrivener’s palsy handicapped him further. He had nevertheless managed to produce figures of 850 species before his sudden death cut the project short. Thanks to Stainton, the Ray Society was able to secure those in their entirety for the bargain price of £300, though the transfer of the drawings to 164 hand-coloured plates proved fearsomely expensive, and was so technically complex as well in the case of the smaller moths, that the final three volumes proved feasible only by having them lithographed in the Netherlands. The result, however,was an artistic-cum-scientific triumph, which over time was to bring the society some much-needed profit.

Before that work began appearing, lepidopterists had been able to subscribe in 1872–80 to another, less accomplished part-work on the same subject by Owen S. Wilson. That formed the first in the series of six uniformly bound works on British insects already identified in these pages as the prime publishing achievement of the team that carried on the firm of Reeve after its founder’s early death. Among its later jewels that series included the partly posthumous 11-volume Lepidoptera of the British Islands (1892–1907) of C. G. Barrett (Fig. 149), but the others were all on insect orders that had received less attention. Two of them, remarkably, were the work of one and the same person: Edward Saunders, a wealthy Lloyds underwriter whose father, brother and a nephew also gained distinction in one natural history field or another (Fig. 150). Predictably, given that family tradition, an entomologist from boyhood, Saunders began specialising in those poor relations of the beetles (in terms of their popularity), the Hemiptera-Heteroptera, on which after 20 years a monograph appeared from him in 1892. He thereupon exchanged those for the bees—probably as a result of his father’s purchase of Shuckard’s fine collection of those—and only four years later had an even fatter revision of the Hymenoptera-Aculeata to his credit. In the meantime James Edwards had taken in hand the Hemiptera-Homoptera (the aphids and other plant bugs) and in 1894–6 was able to produce a complement to that first monograph of Saunders.

As the beetles had all along been next in popularity with collectors to the butterflies and moths, with the result that specialists in those had been similarly privileged with periodically updated aids to their identification, it can have been no surprise that the other monograph in that batch was The Coleoptera of the British Islands, in five volumes (1887–91). Its author, William Weekes Fowler (Fig. 151), a schoolmaster in holy orders (not to be confused with his near-namesake and contemporary, William Warde Fowler, the Oxford tutor who wrote on birds), had become a specialist in Coleoptera around 1879, shortly before moving to Lincolnshire, the county with which he is more particularly associated. Though a warmly acclaimed two-volume handbook with a similar title, by H. E. Cox, had been published as recently as 1874, Fowler’s monumental work greatly outdid that in comprehensiveness and especially in the unprecedented fullness of the species distributions and the equipping of many of the 200 plates with magnifications of structural details.

At the outset, Lovell Reeve’s non-naturalist successor failed to appreciate what an enormous difference the provision of colour illustrations of the species makes to any work that is bought first and foremost as an aid to identification. The firm’s surviving letter-book reveals that he seriously contemplated publishing that work without any plates at all, after estimating that it would cost at least £900 more to include the number that Fowler had in mind and calculating that implied a price that would deter the majority of potential purchasers. Interestingly, rather than lose the work to the Ray Society, however, he urged Fowler to apply to the Royal Society for a grant from the government fund instituted for such purposes and administered by that body, if he considered the inclusion of that many plates absolutely essential. Nevertheless, soundings in the trade must have convinced Reeves that the work was likely to make a heavy loss unless a version with colour plates was at least offered as an option, for in the event they made a double compromise: those subscribing for the work part by part as it initially came out could have it with uncoloured plates, at a cheaper rate, if preferred; while a completed set entirely without illustrations was also available at almost a quarter of the price of the colour version. Though no breakdown of the eventual sales figure has come down to us, it seems a fair guess that most coleopterists wanted the colour regardless of the price; certainly, the second-hand booksellers would have preferred that too, for such was the work’s continuing usefulness that two supplements were thought worth producing as long afterwards as 1913 and even 1931, and down to this day it remains by no means without practical value for reference.

The greater freedom of action that its steady income from membership subscriptions gave the Ray Society, as opposed to being all-dependent on the uncertainties of profit margins, enabled that body to make heavy investments in providing monographs with high-quality illustrations with much greater equanimity than a commercial publisher like Reeves. Its overriding concern, in any case, was to ensure that the natural history community was not deprived of works fundamental to the better mastering of lesser-known areas of the plant and animal kingdoms solely on the grounds of their profitability or otherwise. It consequently made no sense to it to stint on making such works as efficient as possible as guides to identification. Its generosity on that score has been noted in several instances already: G. Bowdler Buckton’s four-volume Monograph of the British Aphides (1876–83) was yet one more. Like another of the society’s authors, A. D. Michael, a solicitor who produced two much-needed monographs on the mites at this period, Buckton retired early from his professional career as a research chemist in order to have more time and energy for his private investigatory passions (he was also a dedicated amateur astronomer, with an observatory of his own). The colour plates of the aphids cost the society nearly £1,700—getting on for £100,000 in present-day money, a crippling outlay even for a body able to operate on an exceptionally long timescale; and perhaps because of that, the author’s two volumes on the British cicadas that followed, in 1890–1, were published by Macmillan.

***

Botany had a goodly share too of this spectacular late-Victorian bounty of new standard works, though there was comparatively little evidence of that on its most heavily populated front, the flowering plants and ferns. More than sufficient further work had been done on those by specialists in the intervening years to warrant the production of an updated national Flora, but though there was talk of that, nothing came of it just then. The periodic filling-in of that all-important gap had fallen out of phase with analogous initiatives in natural history’s other major branches, for reasons that have been examined in these pages already. In the absence of a compendium of moderate size reflecting the current state of knowledge, the more advanced botanist had to be content with either a combination of the massive and unwieldy (and formidably expensive) English Botany of Syme and the minuscule, much-condensed Manual of Babington or else, unshiftably occupying the middle ground, Bentham’s Handbook with its defiantly aggregate taxonomy.

Influential revisions of two long-perplexing groups of flowering plants that did come out at the very end of that period are none the less worthy of notice. One was the Handbook of British Rubi, a radically new treatment of the brambles by a Bournemouth vicar, W. Moyle Rogers. In breaking away from the constricting approach of Babington that had previously held sway, that had the result of filling the annual parcels distributed by the two vascular plant exchange clubs with fearsome quantities of prickly specimens during the period in which the consequent revival of interest in those plants persisted.

The other group to benefit from a monograph was the genus Potamogeton, the pondweeds. The vegetative characters used in classifying those are particularly liable to be modified by the conditions under which they grow, and as a result their taxonomy had long been controversial. Alfred Fryer (Fig. 152), a would-be member of the gentry who had had to resort to market gardening to survive, was uniquely well-placed in the Cambridgeshire Fenland, living amid waterways exceptionally rich in the broader-leaved kinds, to follow their growth over several seasons and observe the effect of changes in water level; additionally, he cultivated many in order to test their constancy. After nine years he was forced to the reluctant conclusion that he was dealing in certain cases with hybrids, some of them fully fertile—an awkward propensity in the plant world that most nineteenth-century botanists had determinedly refused to accept. On the other hand, hardly any of the supposed new species he described himself have stood up to critical scrutiny subsequently.

A dilatory perfectionist, proudly independent but struggling financially, self-willed and touchy, Fryer did not make an easy author for Reeve & Co. when finally pushed by friends into bringing his findings together in the form of a book. Not long after that began appearing, in monthly parts in 1898, friction developed, and after two years Fryer pulled out with the work far from finished. Friends again intervened and a modest grant from the Royal Society was secured to assist his financial problems sufficiently to encourage him to resume; but that ploy failed, alas, and it was not until 1913–15, after his death, that the work was taken to completion by two others, A. H. Evans and then Arthur Bennett, in turn—and then, regrettably, without Fryer’s profound knowledge of the group to draw on. Despite having fallen victim to one of the thankfully rare cases in natural history of a breakdown in relations between author and publisher, the work was fortunate indeed to have been rated sufficiently valuable to have escaped being simply written off.

In bryology, by contrast, the output of major publications in these years was decidedly impressive. No doubt that was only to be expected, for between the appearance of Wilson’s Bryologia Britannica in 1855 and that of the first volume of Robert Braithwaite’s The British Moss-flora in 1880 all that had been published was a trickle of more or less introductory works pitched at an elementary level. A London physician who was also a microscopist of prominence, Braithwaite achieved that breakthrough onto a more learned plane thanks to being sufficiently well-off to pay Reeves to take the risk of publishing his monograph, to provide it with a lavish 128 plates and to take in his stride the £240 that he lost on it (as he disclosed to a friend many years later). H. G. Jameson’s Illustrated Guide to British Mosses, which followed in 1893, was similarly self-financed, for though that was the much more modest venture of an Eastbourne vicar, in the background there was a family fortune colourfully made—like that of the famous archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann—from dealing in indigo. Three years after that, the founding of a Moss Exchange Club, indicative of an intensification of activity, was accompanied by the arrival of The Student’s Handbook of British Mosses by H. N. Dixon, the head of a school for the deaf in Northampton—a choice of career suggestively similar to that of those lichenologists who had found a niche as medical officers on the staff of asylums. Adding to the impression of a relay race, Dixon took over Jameson’s keys and illustrations, but his handbook was much the larger and more authoritative, deservedly becoming the new standard work and continuing in demand sufficiently to attain a third edition in 1924.

It was then the turn of the liverworts. There were fewer species of those than there were of mosses and—though there was really no reason why it should follow—fewer people concerned to collect them. In 1893, coinciding with Jameson’s guide to the mosses, the prolific M. C. Cooke took time out from his preoccupation with the fungi to produce a poorly illustrated Handbook of British Hepaticae and was lucky to be able to interest the firm of W. H. Allen in taking that on an apparently normal commercial basis, doubtless on the strength of his lengthy track record by then of writing books on the less appealing sections of the plant kingdom that had sold reasonably well. But as usual, the going proved more difficult once specialists began to come up with works of a more learned character. When, for instance, in 1902 H. W. Lett, a country clergyman in County Down who had been mastering the Irish bryophytes for 40 years, was at last ready with A List of All Species of Hepatics Hitherto Found in the British Islands, complete with descriptions in non-technical language, he had to bring it out at his own expense. And when W. H. Pearson, a yarn agent in the Manchester textile trade, came to Reeves with his much more substantial two-volume Hepaticae of the British Islands in 1899 and 1902, the immediate reaction was that it would have to appear in the traditional, cautious, long-drawn-out way: monthly part by monthly part over a period of several years (four, as it turned out). When eventually it emerged from that process, by an odd coincidence the number of pages of text, 520, was exactly the same as in Dixon’s solitary octavo; its 228 black-and-white drawings, however, outnumbered the latter’s by nearly four to one. However, it did not succeed in similarly becoming the standard work in its field, being subsequently outclassed in 1912 by The Student’s Handbook of British Hepatics—as the title implied, intended as a companion to Dixon’s volume—of S. M. Macvicar, an Inverness-shire laird with a medical training (Fig. 153).

Even slighter than that following for the liverworts was the one gained by the lichens, a state of affairs hardly helped by so many of the species having to be muscularly dislodged with a chisel and subsequently determined under a microscope with the aid of chemicals. By this period the sole British specialist left from whom a monograph was still likely to be forthcoming was Crombie, despite that eccentric debut of his back in 1870 with a list of the plants published entirely in Latin. An Aberdonian of the bag-of-oatmeal school, his choice of the penurious life of an unattached Evangelical preacher had the compensation of providing him with opportunities for collecting in many parts of Britain. Eventually having come to rest in London and gained a lectureship in botany at one of its hospitals, he thereafter devoted the greater part of his time to cataloguing the extensive lichen collections of the British Museum (Natural History). In return, he was able to look to the museum to publish on his behalf A Monograph of the Lichens found in Britain, the first part of which appeared in 1894. In the more than 20 years of preparing that, Crombie received much help from a Finnish botanist resident in Paris, W. Nylander, the foremost lichen taxonomist of the day, to whom he had turned for lack of any British worker in whose judgement he had felt sufficient confidence. Though Nylander also provided two-thirds of the work’s 78 illustrations, there was mysteriously no printed acknowledgement of his assistance. Possibly that was planned to appear in the second part, but Crombie’s death occurred before that was complete, and it was not till 1911–18 that a valiant fellow volunteer researcher at the Museum, Annie Lorrain Smith, a former governess, was in a position to produce the further two volumes in his stead (Fig. 154).

The freshwater algae were similarly long overdue for a comprehensive monograph, now that advances in microscopy were at last bringing them to wider attention. The pioneering work by Ralfs on the desmids earlier in the century had been taken much further forward in the intervening years, by extensive collecting in Ireland by William Archer, but the diffidence that led that man to turn down the chance of a professorship at Dublin’s Royal College of Science was no doubt responsible for his leaving no volume to his name. Predictably, the irrepressible Cooke did his customary best to fill that further hole in the cryptogamic literature with no fewer than three books in nine years (1882–90), for two respected scientific publishers, Williams & Norgate and Kegan Paul; his knowledge in this case, however, did not match his good intentions, and later authorities were to pronounce his plates of scant use for determining the species.

It may have been those very deficiencies of Cooke’s that provoked a pharmacist turned technical college teacher in Bradford to start specialising in these plants in 1888. This was William West (Fig. 155), then aged forty and soon to be joined by his teenage son George Stephen in what would evolve into one of those pre-eminently fruitful research partnerships especially characteristic of this period, when many an expert amateur had his reach stimulatingly extended by a son or a daughter versed in the novel methods and thinking imparted by an advanced biological training. After a decade and more of very wide-ranging fieldwork, in the course of which the two together investigated the phytoplankton of almost every lake in the British Isles, they were ready to offer the Ray Society a Monograph of the British Desmidiaceae, a work so compendious that it was expected to require six bulky volumes to accommodate it (though in the event all proved squeezable into only five). As this gradually made its majestic way into print, in 1904–11, the minuteness of the descriptions, the thorough disentangling of the complex taxonomy and, not least, the excellent figures (the work of the son, who since the age of fifteen had been the illustrator of all his father’s papers in journals) gave an immense impetus to the study of these plants worldwide. A major finding, which came as a startling revelation to fellow specialists overseas, was the extraordinary profusion and specific diversity of the desmid flora of Europe’s Atlantic fringe compared with that of the continent’s centre.

The son having meanwhile capped a brilliant student career with A Treatise on the British Freshwater Algae (published by Cambridge University Press in 1904 and thenceforward the standard teaching text) and then been appointed to the chair of botany at Birmingham University in 1909, he increasingly took the lead on the algal front while the father turned his attention to the ecology of the bryophytes and lichens, earlier favourites of his. The son’s command of the taxonomy was by then in no way inferior, and reputedly he could identify at sight any one of the 5,000 or so species of desmids that by that time were recognised. In all likelihood he would have gone on to produce a companion monograph to the one on the desmids, covering the rest of the British Isles freshwater algae, had he not fallen victim to the 1919 influenza pandemic and died at only forty-three. Even before that, an earlier illness had seriously delayed his drawing of the illustrations for the final volume of the desmids monograph, and now his death threw the completion of that into lengthy doubt—his father having died by then as well. Thankfully, however, one of his students eventually stepped in and prepared that for the press, enabling the curtain to be finally brought down on the great work in 1923, after a worrying and frustrating 12-year interval.

If a group so long neglected as that could gain so magisterial a treatment, it would have been shaming if one so heavily studied by comparison as the fungi had not also given rise to some weighty compendia at this same period. The ever-industrious Cooke had been moving step after step in that general direction, but it was evident that handbooks were his forte, not the backbreaking labour of full-scale monographic work. There was, however, someone else, a generation younger, who gave promise of performing that task in his stead: G. E. Massee (Fig. 156).

Massee had arisen from a background oddly similar to that of the contemporary monographer of the mammals, Barrett-Hamilton. Like him, he had fought in a war overseas and pursued natural history in such leisure as he could snatch from working on the family farm. But there the similarities end: instead of the brilliant student career the other had had, Massee had been sent down from university for tipping one of the dons into a fen; instead of fighting the Boers, he had joined the French Foreign Legion and it was the Prussians whom he had opposed in battle. There was a wild, devil-may-care streak in him and a youthful restlessness that makes his later emergence as a well-respected taxonomist as impressive as it originally looked unlikely.

Settling down in his thirties, Massee moved on from painting the larger fungi to mastering them scientifically, subsisting on earnings as a freelance lecturer while working on the collections in the Kew Herbarium. In 1889–92 three increasingly weighty monographs on different sections of the British fungus flora poured forth from him in quick succession, presently earning him appointment to the post there that his mentor, Cooke, had vacated. Meanwhile his British Fungus-flora, a four-volume textbook for students, was being brought out by Bell (who had been content to leave the monographs to Reeve & Co. and Methuen). It was a dazzling starburst of productivity, typical of this famously dandyish man, and it brought him the presidency of the British Mycological Society when that came into being not long after, in 1896. Nevertheless, it was not the overarching authoritative compendium that the more sophisticated enthusiasts must have been hoping for; and though further works from him were to come, those were more in a Cookean mode and disappointingly slight. It would seem that there was truth in the pithy verdict passed on him by another mycologist of distinction many years later: he would have been a genius if only he had had a capacity for taking pains. His was too volatile a temperament to manage the staying-power and meticulousness essential to the scholarly long haul.

***

That so many authors died before the publication of their monographs was complete was sad but not entirely surprising. Like those who devoted the better part of a lifetime to compiling a local Flora or Fauna, too many deferred overlong the onerous writing-up of their protracted research. It was the research that they had relished: putting together the eventual mass of descriptions, producing the illustrations (or arranging for ones of a standard acceptable to them to be produced on their behalf) and finally the sometimes heartbreaking decisions about how much could be included or must be omitted to make the eventual manuscript publishable—those were the stages that virtually all dreaded. There were always uncomfortable lacunae in the data and taxonomic uncertainties to allow them to persuade themselves that the time for publication was still some way off. Even supposing friends or predecessors had warned them of the complexities and the lengthy timescale that bringing out multi-volume illustrated works involves, most probably preferred to block their ears to such unwelcome forebodings, using them as a further pretext for delaying.

At the same time, the very need for so many monographs to be published piecemeal, over several years, served unintentionally as a form of insurance as far as the authors were concerned. For once publication had proceeded halfway or even further, the lower the likelihood of the work being abandoned and the greater the likelihood of someone else with enough of the relevant expertise, or at least sufficient familiarity with the subject matter, being rated worth the expense of being brought in to take the work to its intended conclusion. The key consideration was to live, or at least remain in health, long enough to see publication reasonably well advanced. Did insurance agents realise there was a market here for their services, one wonders?

Unless a monograph was glaringly perfunctory or its taxonomy unacceptably idiosyncratic—and word would quickly have got round if that was the case—it could normally expect a lengthy life in print, even one lasting several generations if the demand for second-hand copies kept up. The more esoteric and unfashionable the group dealt with, the more confident the author could feel that that would happen. But though works requiring so much labour could hardly have been written entirely regardless of the use to which they would be put in the future, the overriding concern of their authors must have been to ensure that the effort put into a project over normally so many years received visible embodiment in a unitary printed work—rather than, or in addition to, in the more elusive form of a series of papers in journals.

Victorian natural history could hardly have found a more fitting way of rounding off its own 60 glorious years’ of ceaseless investigating and record-making than in this magnificent, culminating burst of retooling. It was as well that very few probably guessed that the half-century that lay ahead would be anything but a straightforward continuation of what had been done thus far.

CHAPTER 17
Edwardian Makeover

THE HANDFUL OF YEARS from the turn of the twentieth century to the outbreak of the First World War constituted one of history’s classic periods of transition. The distinctive social and cultural mould that had roughly coincided with Queen Victoria’s reign was in the process of terminally disintegrating and a very different one was showing signs of cohering in its place. Because that mould had set particularly hard, the disintegration was all the more protracted, and all the more intolerable to those less willing to contain their impatience, with increased social and industrial strife as a result. That impatience was made the more difficult to rein in by a marked increase in the tempo of daily life, as telephones and telegrams accompanied the arrival of automobiles and aeroplanes, as wireless sets would soon be available for flicking on and off as momentarily and insouciantly as was already the practice with electric lights. The main impact of that further flurry of technological advances, greater even than the one centred on steam and gas that had ushered in the Victoria era, would not be felt till the new century’s second quarter and even then would be slow to have much influence on a pursuit such as natural history. Nevertheless, early warnings of what was to come could have been spotted by the more vigilant: by 1902 a motor car was in the garage of Gilbert White’s one-time home at Selborne, and by 1908 at least one local natural history society had started varying its field meetings programme with excursions by motor coach. Amidst the general loosening and brightening there were promising auguries like those of a tremendous extension to many a naturalist’s operating range.

Much of the innovation, in every aspect of life, was now coming from the other side of the Atlantic, a trend from which book publishing was conspicuously not exempt. The first country to develop into a mass market, the United States led the way in learning how to exploit the advantages that offered. Mid-Victorian Britain had not lacked newspapers fully capable of matching transatlantic ones in their promotional brashness—handbills plastered on the rocks in Wales, for example—but its book publishers had been decidedly restrained by comparison, in their advertising efforts typically going no further than inserting at the back of a volume an extra page or two drawing attention to related titles available in their list. The reviewing of books in the learned journals was especially underdeveloped, severely limiting the opportunities for slipping in favourable comments by those whose judgements could be expected to carry weight. However, the adoption of dust-jackets, rarities at mid-century but common by the nineties, led publishers to realise, surprisingly belatedly, that those could be turned into a major new weapon, by being made more eye-catching and equipped with a ‘blurb’—a word reputedly coined by a New York firm in 1907. The Americans were also responsible for the introduction over here of book clubs and direct selling.

But the most spectacular change on the publishing front was the outburst of ‘libraries’ of cheap classics. Printing a number of titles in a standard format and calling that a series, in the hope of creating the strong identity and superior staying-power possessed by ‘brands’—as well as appealing to the collecting instinct of book buyers—had long been a widely used marketing ploy. An extra layer of costs could be saved by making the books diminutive in size and using only reprints of well-established titles. The last of those, however, had been rendered very difficult to achieve by the aversion of British publishers to leasing the copyright in their books to competitors, having learned from bitter experience that that could open the way to the pirating of titles by the unscrupulous; now, though, the copyrights in nearly all the works of the leading Victorian writers were in the process of expiring and that problem was increasingly surmountable. The arrival of the first new rotary presses added a decisive ingredient to that mix, by making it possible to bring to bear on this conveniently standarised publishing category the sizeable further economies achievable by mass-production.

The first firm to realise these new possibilities and seize the initiative was the one founded in 1888 by a Quaker philanthropist, J. M. Dent. This had some minor series under way already (and was emerging as a major publisher of natural history), but its ‘Everyman’s Library’, launched in 1906 after more than a year in preparation, was breathtaking in its boldness. Not only were the volumes placed on sale at the hitherto unheard-of price for new books of just a shilling—for 500 pages of some of the most highly rated works of literature—but no fewer than 1,000 titles were announced as being in prospect (and that was no idle boast, for the target would be in sight by 1938). That boldness proved very quickly justified, and the very next year two other houses, Nelson and Collins, responded with ‘Sevenpennies’ of their own, within three days of one another. Excitedly acclaimed ‘as great a boon as cheap bread’ by the then chief arbiter of the general public’s reading tastes, Arnold Bennett, the combined result was to bring a high proportion of the accepted classics—White’s Selborne among them—within the financial reach at last of even the bottommost layer.

Alongside that great reprints boom three further technical developments of note brought major advances in printing at this period, each representing additional steps on ladders of inventiveness that had been expectantly leading up to those.

One was the introduction, around 1908, of offset lithography. This was the product of adapting a type of rotary press already in use by substituting rubber for the tin from which the plates had previously been made. The lithographic design was ‘offset’ on to paper from the plate—whence the name of the process—by means of three continuously revolving cylinders. That hardly sounds much of a change, but it required printers to move over to a quite different way of operating, adding skills in photography and the paste-up of copy to their traditional letterpress expertise. The disruption that caused was easily outweighed by gains in the sharpness of print and photographs and by significant savings in time and money in allowing the two to be reproduced in a single process. Dust-jackets and other display material were the most conspicuous ways in which book publishing experienced the benefits more immediately.

Of special importance for natural history, though, were two additions to the range of methods available for reproducing colour illustrations in books. The first of those to arrive, by 1906, was a process that achieved results closely simulating actual photographs. Named after the city in which it had been perfected, Philadelphia, this involved the transfer of red, yellow and blue photographic negatives to printing blocks and combining them mechanically. The best-known instance of its use was by Warne for Richard South’s Butterflies of the British Isles, but numerous others followed (Fig. 157).

The earliest-traced use of true colour photographs by a British publisher for a natural history book was by Dent in 1910, to illustrate one on the flowers of the High Alps. One with a British focus came the next year from Cassell, the house from which Richard Kearton’s books pioneering the use of black-and-white photographs had appeared in the 1890s. This was Wildflowers as they Grow, one of a series of identification handbooks for which colour photographs of a high standard taken by H. Essenhigh Corke were used. Three years later that mode of illustration was on the way to becoming commonplace.

***

It was partly because it was so obviously rich in photogenic subject matter, especially now some of that could be presented to the public in colour, that natural history found itself more than ordinarily in favour with the purveyors of the ‘New Journalism’. That creation of the second half of the 1890s had as one of its distinguishing features an unprecedently strong reliance on pictures, in seeking to capture the custom of the many thousands more now emerging from the schools who were able to read but often only with some difficulty. A chance additional factor, though, was that the person principally responsible, Lord Northcliffe, had been, in his prior incarnation as Alfred Harmsworth, a passionate birdwatcher in boyhood. Sufficient embers had seemingly remained of that passion for a selection of naturalist writers—one of them Henry Williamson—to be engaged as contributors to Harmsworth’s mass-market Daily Mail; mostly, however, his preferred role for natural history was to reflect the changing of the seasons, to which end he confined its albeit regular appearances to the relative obscurity of ‘Nature Notes’.

Many of that newspaper’s imitators took over that idiosyncrasy of its proprietor apparently on the assumption that it was one of the ingenious novel touches that had made for its astounding and immediate success, and it has been perpetuated as a kind of ritual nod in the countryside’s direction by some of them ever since. One or two of them, however, most conspicuously the quasi-national Manchester Guardian, were less grudging with their space and, while retaining the original concept of a regular column devoted to the subject, treated it notably more generously. A lengthy lineage of naturalist writers has been provided with some crucial shelter in an otherwise perilous freelance existence through that means, shelter assured and prolonged enough to have made possible some books of value that might otherwise never have been written. Foremost among those writers must be counted the Cheshire-based T. A. Coward, who turned full-time freelance in 1900, years before he was in a position to start coming up with the three-volume classic on birds for which he is primarily remembered today.

It was not only through that half-accidental patronage by the newspaper industry, if in a rather hole-in-corner fashion, that natural history benefited from the advent of the New Journalism: soon it was in favour as well, but for quite a different reason, in another quarter into which it had penetrated. This was in a less salient, much more diffuse role as a member of the supporting cast of the fashionable new escapist presentation, ‘country life’. Almost coinciding with Harmsworth’s irruption on to the scene, a periodical with that very title was launched by a team headed by his chief rival, George Newnes. Conceived, appropriately, on a Surrey golf course in a flash of inspiration—or so legend has it—this projected a novel interpretation of what those two words stood for: less the traditional lifestyle of the landowning gentry, but more the semi-rural idyll at the end of the new branch-lines which better-off city folk were adopting in fast-growing numbers. So nicely judged did that venture prove that the periodical was joined by a book list some six years later, in 1903. In Country Life Books an important extra publisher of natural history thereby came into being, for that was predictably one of the areas at which the high-quality illustrated works in which it specialised were aimed. Over the next 40 years its output of titles on British birds, in particular, would be exceeded only by those of Witherby and Hutchinson.

The non-emergence of a sizeable periodicals market, to complement the flourishing one for books, had been a main reason why freelance writers on natural history a century earlier had had such a disillusioning experience. This time the outlets available to their successors were safely more diverse, and living by the pen was proportionately less of a struggle, especially now that it had become normal for full-timers to use agents and for books to be published on terms less unfairly tilted against the author. The sudden new demand for titles on birds, and on how they could and should be watched instead of being shot, doubtless improved matters further by thinning out competitors, for many of the older generation could well have been left stranded with an obsolete store of knowledge and a discordant approach not easy to disguise or adapt. Certainly, there is evidence suggestive of an influx of new authors into that field around the turn of the century. The first book of the subsequently prolific George Dewar, for example, made its appearance in 1899, and the first in the steady stream from Edmund Selous two years after that. In 1904 Arthur H. Patterson, a school attendance officer who had been publishing on Norfolk birds but was as yet unknown other than locally, was able to secure the confident backing of Methuen & Co., a firm quite new to popular natural history, for a rapid succession of books even though the first turned in a heavy loss. Evidently it was apparent by then even to hitherto complete outsiders that the demand for books on disarmed ornithology, or for that matter on non-collected natural history in general, was no mere passing fad but a deeper trend with a profitable life-span ahead of it.

A convert to that view which in the long run was to prove a particularly useful catch was the firm founded by Frederick Warne back in 1865 on the dissolution of his partnership with his brother-in-law, George Routledge. Till now that had been content to leave such a competitive field as low-priced natural history books largely to Routledge, that maestro of the bottom layer of the market, concentrating instead on cheap reprints of classics and books for children (Little Lord Fauntleroy had been a particular hit). When the management of the business passed to Warne’s sons 30 years later, however, the wisdom of that lukewarmness towards such an obviously cognate area came into question and a specialist in it, Edward Step, was recruited to rectify matters (Fig. 158).

The forty-year-old Step had been working in publishing since leaving school at fourteen. A long-time naturalist of increasingly wide knowledge, he had discovered a flair for putting the subject over to the less advanced and, pursuing that as a private sideline, was by that time on to his seventh book. This was Wayside and Woodland Blossoms (Fig. 159), which followed in the 1850s footsteps of Anne Pratt to a rather shameless extent; that ‘Prattle’ approach proved nevertheless as appealing as ever, the first impression selling out within a year, and the title was destined to remain in print till as recently as 1963. ‘Wayside and Woodland’ consequently dictated itself as the name for a series of beautifully produced volumes on different divisions of the plant kingdom that Step proceeded to write for Warne in 1904–8—before then moving to the rival firm of Hutchinson, for reasons unknown, and blithely continuing it (and extending it to insects) under that different aegis. He was to go on adding to it almost till the day of his death in 1932, heavily relying as ever on the talents of his daughter for the colour illustrations.

From a letter he once wrote to a Cornish botanist we know that Step was frustratedly aware of his limitations.

He admitted in that, quite candidly, that most of his books were mere potboilers, written from the need to support himself and his family, for which reason ‘all … have had to be “popular”’. Sadly, his avowed ambition of writing ‘at least one scientific bit of work’ was never to be realised: always too hard-pressed financially to afford to retain his copyrights instead of accepting fees, unlike Gosse he therefore never enjoyed an income from royalties that might have permitted the easing-up in later years necessary for that. For all the further expansion of the market for writing on natural history of an unlearned kind, it was still as hard as ever to wrest a comfortable livelihood from it by doing that and nothing else.

Matters were made no easier for the likes of Step by a marked downward shift at this period on the part of the scientifically more knowledgeable. The late-Victorian surges that entomology and ornithology in particular had enjoyed had brought to light a gap in the market between relatively uninformative works by and for the relatively uninformed and authoritative monographs that were as costly to buy as they were cumbersome to use. It was a state of affairs analogous to the one in the 1850s that had tempted individuals like George Bentham, combining professional-level expertise with freedom from the pressures of a professional career, to descend like colonists onto that empty-looking middle ground. Their possession of ample leisure set those apart from the experts on the staff of museums, among whom at all times there were liable to be some propelled by one motive or another—more mouths to feed than anticipated (like Bowdler Sharpe) or missionary zeal (like Cooke) or sheer superabundance of energy—into dashing off publication after publication conspicuously unworthy of their time and talents. But at some periods the financial pickings could look so rich that even those who had no need to could not resist taking time off from writing manuals or monographs for periodic forays with something much lighter.

Such a person was the entomologist J. W. Tutt (Fig. 160). Interspersed with multi-volume works like The British Noctuae and their Varieties of 1891–2, with its mass of descriptions of races and aberrations, and the even more stupendous Natural History of the British Lepidoptera, embarked on in 1899 but never completed, were frequent relative trifles for a miscellany of popular publishers. Tutt’s contemporaries naturally supposed that, as a headmaster of a succession of schools in the poorer parts of London, he wrote with such double-barrelled prolificness out of economic necessity: unknown to them, however, as emerged after his death, he was a property owner on an extensive scale. The simple fact was that he had turned out words with the same uncontrollable avidity as he had collected moths. He was a person without brakes—and he eventually paid the price for that in premature death from a stroke.

Tutt was notoriously without brakes in his behaviour more generally, and his unbridled forthrightness had a serious divisive effect on British entomology organisationally as well as socially. Just as many contemporary botanists had not been able to abide H. C. Watson’s shafts of excessive ferocity and steered well clear of him, so Tutt’s similar outbursts on paper and in person alienated all too many. In the enclosed world of schools he had spent too many years of unchallenged ordering-around, of pontificating and correcting with brutal if well-intentioned frankness. Always certain of the rightness of his own views, it was virtually foreordained that he would end up with a journal of his own, the Entomologist’s Record, to serve—after the manner of many an embattled nineteenth-century German professor—as the outlet for work more especially on variation and a central concern of his own: its causes. Yet it was largely from the pages of that journal in the first instance that his invaluable Practical Hints for the Field Lepidopterist emerged, part by part, in 1901–5. So invaluable was that indeed that it has stayed in demand ever since, the copies (most of them interleaved, to take records and other notes) so heavily used by their owners that second-hand ones eventually became so elusive that the Amateur Entomologists’ Society was driven to produce a facsimile reprint in 1994.

Prized almost as enduringly as that repository of Tutt’s lifetime experience was the similar Text Book of British Butterflies and Moths, compiled for much the same readership over seven years (‘with liberal application of wet towels over his head’) by L. W. Newman with the help of H. A. Leeds and finally published in 1913. A freelance dealer by then, with his well-known ‘butterfly farm’—the second to be established in Britain—on hand for ready reference, Newman had an almost captive market among the clientele of that, with the result that together with sales to friends the printing costs were covered ahead of publication: an arrestingly novel way of enabling a small-circulation book to clamber into print.

More widely renowned than either of those, however, was to be the trilogy on the Macrolepidoptera produced by Richard South for Warne’s (and Step’s) ‘Wayside and Woodland’ series, The Butterflies of the British Isles (1906) and its two companions on the moths (1907 and 1908). A boiled-down version of C. G. Barrett’s monumental monograph of 1892–7—though Barrett had died before covering most of the micro-moths—but with the better colour plates now made possible by the Philadelphia process and including much additional information that had meanwhile become available, this was to dominate the field for the greater part of the century that followed. It owed its immediate success to an unbeatable combination of features: a concise account and lifelike illustrations of every species on the British Isles list, individual volumes that could fit into a reasonably capacious pocket, and a breadth of appeal so confidently predictable that it justified mass-production and a seductively low price in consequence. That combination had not been technically achievable any earlier, so the work was also a milestone in natural history publishing, setting a new standard for field handbooks that would not be surpassed till the 1950s.

Anyone less like the ferocious Tutt than South would be hard to imagine. The quietly relaxed possessor of independent means, a dapper dresser (even when out collecting), renowned for a courtesy that bordered on courtliness, he was very much a member of entomology’s ‘establishment’, in particular as editor of The Entomologist, to the proprietorship of which he succeeded after a 10-year stint as editor. It was as well that he and Tutt had different journals to run, for they were destined to fall out from the very first and were quarrelling in print before either became an editor. Just as the two leading figures of mid-Victorian field botany, the gentle Babington and the fiery Watson, had reached a modus vivendi by supporting different societies and periodicals, so South kept equally carefully out of the other’s way—which was not as easy as it sounds, for both of them were Londoners and both had a particularly keen interest in lepidopteral variation.

Despite the production of that rich crop of guides, however, and the continuingly robust health of entomology that it seems to suggest, the specialist periodicals indicate otherwise. A count of the papers and notes published in the three leading ones during these years has revealed that a marked decline in quantity took place. If that was not simply a reflection of growing editorial fastidiousness, then either more of the energy of those with confidence to publish had been switched into producing books—encouraged perhaps by greater entrepreneurship on the part of the publishers—or the rise that was equally pronounced in the late-Victorian period owed much to contributors who had since become less active or ceased to be active at all. In other words, that preceding surge in the subject’s popularity had been less solidly based than fondly supposed: many of those new recruits were not of publishing calibre or their interest was no more than transient. If the latter was the case, and the boom in numbers the subject had attracted was succeeded by an actual slump (as fashions so often are), then was anything other than simple apathy responsible for that? Could it be that some of the less fervent had succumbed to the infection that was starting to spread through other areas of natural history and decided that collecting no longer held an attraction for them? Had some even turned to watching birds instead?

Certainly, ornithology was now the subject to pursue for any naturalist whose main concern was to be in fashion. Not only had it turned non-destructive, but it was also giving signs of a growing cooperativeness, brought about initially by the necessity of teamwork if the mysteries of migration were capable of ever being solved. The coordinated attack on that since 1879 had succeeded in producing a mass of data; that had required prolonged analysis, however, to say nothing of extensive further research, by one of the participants, W. Eagle Clarke, before he was satisfied enough to go to press with the culminating two-volume outcome, Studies in Bird Migration, which at long last finally appeared in 1912 (Figs 161 & 162).

Eagle Clarke’s career had been in some ways a reprise of that of his botanical predecessor and fellow Scot, Boswell Syme: both started out as civil engineers, before finding more congenial footholds as professional naturalists, and both ended up with honorary doctorates from the same university, St Andrews, on the strength of their respective mammoth undertakings. As conscientiously methodical as only a rigorous Scottish training could have instilled, Eagle Clarke had tried the patience of his collaborators by taking so long to come up with the definitive results of a research programme that belonged to the previous century. The one who had coordinated (and substantially paid for) the Irish portion of the work, R. M. Barrington (Fig. 163), a rather testy barrister turned farmer and land-valuer, had indeed gone so far as to jump in with a massive report of his own, confined just to that portion, 12 years ahead. Three years after that, in 1904, similarly tired of waiting, the British Ornithologists’ Club had set out to supplement the information on coastal movements to which that programme had been limited by organising the collection of data on inland movements as well. Though that follow-up was cut short by the outbreak of war in 1914 and no more than annual progress reports on it appeared in print, a useful distillation of those for the benefit of non-specialists was at least worked by T. A. Coward into a slender overview of the current state of the subject, entitled simply Bird Migration, which more or less coincided with Eagle Clarke’s eventual book.

Before that second instalment of cooperative work on ornithology’s most outstanding mystery had had time to proceed very far, however, that was overtaken in its turn by the launching in 1909 of large-scale ringing schemes, consequent upon the perfecting in Denmark of that more direct method of assault on the problem. And by then the harvest of new knowledge in other directions as well, much of it the product in one way or another of the increasingly exclusive reliance on field-glasses, had begun to make it very evident that a further compendium to replace the ‘new Yarrell’ produced by Howard Saunders in 1888–9 was already needed. That author’s feat of fitting everything into a single volume was generally accepted as now out of the question, and a part-work making up into four volumes was the solution adopted instead. No one person, moreover, could now hope to cover with authoritativeness all the various, increasingly specialised sub-studies that had begun to replace the previous unity. The British Bird Book, which came out in 12 parts in 1910–13, accordingly broke new ground in being—by a short head—the first work of its kind on the fauna or flora of these islands to be wholly made up of identifiably separate contributions by many different hands, under the coordination of an overall editor (in this case F. B. Kirkman). In so far as it was intended to serve the traditional role of a guide to identification, it was additionally novel in the extent to which the descriptions went beyond plumage details and the like to include helpful points on behaviour. The fruits of much recent behavioural study pervaded the text as a whole, indeed, and that escape at last from the tyranny of dead specimens was further assisted by 200 colour plates produced from paintings by leading bird artists of the day in which the subjects were portrayed in lifelike poses in characteristic natural settings.

It was surely not entirely a coincidence that that encyclopaedia-type approach, with separate sections contributed by recognised authorities, was adopted for a roughly analogous work on the flowering plants and ferns that in 1911 Cambridge University Press expressed an interest in publishing. That had been conceived two years earlier by the dynamic new curator of that university’s Herbarium, C. E. Moss (Fig. 164), following the donation of a set of widely admired pen-and-ink drawings of British plants that a solicitor, E. W. Hunnybun, had been making as a hobby. Just as Hardwicke’s acquisition back in the 1860s of the originals of James Sowerby’s superb coloured drawings for English Botany had given him the idea of reissuing those to enhance the sales possibilities of a major new national Flora, so Hunnybun’s drawings had fired Moss with an identical ambition. Unfortunately, the existence of that predecessor and the still-continuing use made of it seem to have led Moss to model The Cambridge British Flora (as this one was to be called) more or less closely on it, without considering alternatives sufficiently or at all. Instead of plumping for 10 volumes of folio size, intended for library shelves exclusively,it might have been more realistic to produce a modernised, text-only equivalent of Bentham’s still-enduring Handbook a compact, portable, workaday tool, of which even students might reasonably expect to own a copy. The illustrations were in any case not altogether suitable for such a major scientific work, for they lacked the taxonomic detail that Sowerby’s had. The text, on the other hand, was above reproach, particularly in the refreshing extent to which it took account of Continental work (a virtue it shared with The British Bird Book) and its novel inclusion of distribution maps.

Despite its great promise, and the general goodwill shown to it by the field-botany community at the outset, Moss’s imaginative undertaking nevertheless fell far short of the expectations aroused by it. The responsibility for that was very largely his own. From the first, his Tutt-like brusqueness alienated several of the specialist contributors, whose track records as taxonomists were much superior to his and who ought for that reason to have been handled with a special helping of tact. Nor was that manner useful in oiling wheels when the delays inseparable from complex operations of this type soon began to build up. It was not only the slow rate of progress, though, that proved unexpected: even more unexpected was the outbreak of war soon after the start and, worse still, the departure of Moss in 1917 to a chair in South Africa, from where he even so insisted on continuing to hold the project’s reins while delegating the main burden of coordination to an ex-student of his, A. J. Wilmott, back in England. However, it cannot have come as much of a surprise to anyone except Moss that in 1920 the publishers, despairing of the situation, called a halt. It was a wonderful opportunity squandered. For a similarly collective move in later years to fill that central hole in the literature of British and Irish field botany was also to come to nothing, and in the end it would be 70 years before a work of comparable scope and authoritativeness became available to take the place on the shelves that The Cambridge British Flora had been intended to occupy.

Ironically, Moss had been a refugee from the burgeoning study of plant ecology. His impressive book, The Vegetation of the Peak District, which in 1913 followed a similar one by him six years earlier on Somerset, ought to have led to a university post lecturing in the field in which his expertise lay. Unfortunately, ecology was too novel to have given rise yet to such tailor-made openings; though Cambridge had gone so far as to institute teaching on the subject, that was the unofficial preserve of one of the existing botany lecturers (appointed, by a further irony, on the strength of his research on the anatomy of ferns), the future Sir Arthur Tansley, the acknowledged leader of that infant discipline in Britain (Fig. 165). Tansley was uninspiring in the lecture-room, the written word being better suited to the philosophical cast of mind that also led him at the time to take a deep interest in that other nascent study of dynamic processes, psychoanalysis (on which he published an introductory book). It was another man with much the same cast of mind, Patrick Geddes, whose teaching at Dundee had been responsible for ecology taking a strongly geographical form in Britain initially, with the distinguishing and mapping of the salient types of vegetation in different regions as its focus. Types of British Vegetation was indeed to be the title chosen for a collaborative volume under Tansley’s editorship published in 1911 by Cambridge University Press, in which the work achieved to date through that approach was comprehensively summarised, more particularly for the benefit of the overseas participants in the International Phytogeographical Excursion across the British Isles due to take place that summer.

By that time British plant ecologists had become increasingly convinced that the sociological approach that had gained favour in certain Continental centres—and that had grown directly out of work on local floras—was doubtfully applicable along the Atlantic fringe, where the more changeable climate precluded the degree of stability presupposed by the elaborate classification and pigeonholing of that alternative. That taxonomy was not Tansley’s forte, either, may have contributed to that view, for working out the constituent species of the hierarchy of plant associations that the Continental approach required called for higher than average floristic expertise. For that reason, though, it held a special appeal for experienced field botanists, together with the further advantage that its findings could be incorporated more readily into local and national Floras of the traditional kind.

It was consequently a severe setback for that sprinkling of British and Irish fieldworkers who had warmly embraced such work, as a way out of the dead end in which they saw Victorian natural history as in imminent danger of landing, when the emphasis in Britain now veered in a markedly more experimental direction, in an effort to understand and to disentangle the complex relationships between the environment and vegetation. The special, laboratory based training that new departure demanded had the predictable effect of confining ecological research very largely to the domain of academic biology thenceforward. The founding of the British Ecological Society, along with a journal of its own, in 1913 thus came at the end of a promising new step forward for the general run of naturalists, even as it marked the rise of ecology to autonomy as a scientific discipline.

For obvious reasons, animal ecology was much slower to develop. Birds and other creatures were much less noticeably constrained by a complex environmental structure, whereas their behaviour, individually or in groups, could not help but attract attention, especially if it had the conspicuousness and seeming inexplicability of seasonal migration. The noting of ‘habits’ was one of natural history’s traditional ingredients, but without efficient field-glasses to do that with any intensiveness, for lengthy periods at a time, must have been as uninviting physically as it seemed questionably rewarding scientifically. The revulsion against shooting and egg collecting, however, left those unsatisfied with identifying and record-logging with little choice but to turn in this direction. The popularising of the use of hides by nature photographers and the belated spread of bird-tables had speedily demonstrated that the difficulties of closing the distance between the observer and the observed had been considerably exaggerated. Long spells in the field, in solitude and motionless, were by no means for everyone, though, and fewer still had also the depth of curiosity and the intellectual drive to press this line of work to the point of formulating theories.

By common consent, the two outstanding exponents at this period of this other new branch of study—sufficiently distinct to gain itself the name of ethology—were Edmund Selous and Henry Eliot Howard. Selous was the shy, introverted younger brother of the boisterous extrovert of that surname renowned as an African big-game hunter. Trained as a barrister but as hopelessly unsuited to that career as George Bentham (and the distinguished mycologist Carleton Rea), he had retreated to the Suffolk Breckland and eked out a slender private income with the little he earned from his trickle of eight path-breaking books. The first of those, Bird Watching, was published by Dent in 1901 and improbably illustrated by that specialist in grotesque figures in books of fairy tales, Arthur Rackham. The two words of the title had a far deeper meaning for Selous that they would have conveyed to anyone else and the contents (in the words of Erwin Stresemann) ‘declared war on all previous ornithological writing’. As set out bluntly and belligerently in a third book, The Bird Watcher in the Shetlands, published by George Allen in 1905, it was his firm belief that ‘the zoologist of the future should be a different kind of man altogether: the present one is not worthy of the name. He should go out with glasses and notebook,prepared to see and to think.’ It was not so original a message as he made out, for Charles Dixon had said much the same back in 1880; what was most certainly original, though, was the extraordinarily thoroughgoing way in which he was already putting that creed into practice, as demonstrated in extracts from what he called his ‘observational diaries’ that he began publishing in The Zoologist in 1899. Obsessive to the point of oddity, he thought nothing of devoting entire weeks on end to scrutinising behaviour out in the wild and jotting down on the spot what he saw, voluminously, disjointedly and—by anyone sufficiently dedicated to consult those notes today—well-nigh unreadably. But they were, after all, the equivalent of a painter’s rough sketches and made for his eyes alone.

The tragedy was that when Selous did get round to putting his mature thinking into later books with more explicit titles, such as Realities of Bird Life, Thought Transference (or what?) in Birds and Evolution of Habit in Birds (all published by Constable in the period 1927–33), those were deemed unworthy of review by Britain’s two leading journals of ornithology and so went unread by almost everyone best able to appreciate the import of what he was saying. At the same time he did not help himself by avoiding all socialising and thus opportunities of spreading his gospel alternatively by word of mouth. So extreme was his obscurity by the time of his death in 1934 that not a single obituary of him seems to have appeared.

The one person who did realise, and publicly acknowledge, the value of that work was Julian Huxley, at that time at the start of his career and as a newly fledged demonstrator in zoology at Oxford around 1912 embarking on bird courtship as a long-term research topic (later to devote much of his honeymoon, with belated appropriateness, to studying that in great crested grebes). But another who could have benefited no less greatly from discussions withSelous was the wealthy Worcester steelmaster, Eliot Howard. The younger of the two by 15 years, his similar isolationwas imposed by an under-leisured business life, the early morning hours before breakfast being the one time when his fieldwork could be done. Free from the financial pressure that forced the other to write books with commercial appeal,Eliot Howard could afford to confine himself to scholarly monographs, and seemingly without regard to their expense. Thefirst of those, The British Warblers, brought out in 1907–14 by the specialist publisher of Avifaunas, R. H. Porter, was indeed furnished so resplendently with superb paintings by Henrik Grönvold that it is hard to believe it was not subsidised by the author at least in part. There was even the indulgence of a possibly deterring subtitle: A History with Problems of their Lives. Any would-be purchaser or reader led to expect a treatise of the usual taxonomic kind might well have been disconcerted to find that it was devoted instead to a comparative study of behaviour, for which a group of species as closely related as the warblers offered particular scope. It was a study of that aspect, what is more, that gave no concessions to the cursory: after detailing the results of what was patently a great deal of prolonged and thoughtful observation, the author went on to suggest how certain kinds of instinctive development in birds came about. One of those was the defending of territory, a phenomenonto which several earlier writers had drawn attention but which received its first substantial exposition in this book,before being discussed at fuller length in his next one, Territory in Bird Life, in 1920.

Though rated a less acute thinker than Selous, as a writer Eliot Howard was much the clearer and more graceful of the two. However, the limited edition in de luxe format in which he chose to place his ideas before the public in that first book, which inevitably restricted its circulation, and its ill luck in appearing on the eve of war, prevented it from having much impact initially. It was only after the second one came out and E. M. Nicholson had then given them a belated trumpeting in his widely read How Birds Live in 1927 that they began to exert the profound influence they deserved.

The fact that the writings of those two, like those of Tansley on ecology, continued on their onwardcourse undiverted or suppressed by the four years of war, years that put an abrupt end to so much else, is good evidence for the sturdiness of the green shoots that the natural history of a widely different character was now beginning to put forth. Parts of that, ornithology above all, were already so changed that the Victorians would have had difficulty in recognising them; other parts, though, they would have found still reassuringly familiar, even as late as 1913.In that year, for example, British Rust Fungi, which W. B. Grove, a college lecturer in Birmingham, had beenworking on for many years, was published by Cambridge University Press. A standard account unlikely to be superseded fora generation or more, that was the kind of work that might just as easily have appeared a quarter of a century earlier. The same might be said of E. W. Swanton’s British Plant Galls, brought out by Methuen the previous year. For all contemporaries could tell, these and their like were the delayed leftovers from that great climax of monographs and handbooks of the closing years of the previous century. But another book of 1913, The Gannet, a Bird with a History, by J. H. Gurney the younger, identified by James Fisher many years later as ‘the first deep monograph ever to have been written on one species of living wild bird’, clearly falls in quite another, much more modern category. In that short span of years, loosely fixed in the mind of posterity, however inaccurately, asthe Edwardian age, the old and the new existed side by side, and it must have called for finer-than-ever judgement, not least on the part of the book trade, to decide what had a lasting future and what was destined soon to disappear.

CHAPTER 18
Wanderings

THE FIRST WORLD WAR had two major adverse effects as far as natural history was concerned, one immediate and direct, the other subtler and more lasting. Instead of the exciting new departures, the refreshing breaks with the past that the closing years of such a great convulsion normally encourage the winners to look forward to, this one brought disillusionment and defensiveness. What was to prove in the end just short of a decade of consequent economic turmoil plunged the book trade into a backwards-looking conservatism, a state of anxious caution in which clinging to the tried-and-trusted was preferred to experimenting with novelty. The result for naturalists was that standard works rendered obsolescent by increasing knowledge failed to be displaced, and there was too little prodding from publishers for replacements for those to be written. That a dearth of professional posts for graduates in botany and zoology stunted the institutional reflection of newly developing aspects of those sciences did not help. The combined result was a prolonged period of marking time, in which most of the offerings between hard covers were essentially the Edwardian diet reheated and served up afresh.

Though the book trade was spared the catastrophic physical destruction that would be visited upon it a generation later, those war years were nevertheless intensely frustrating for it. The decline in entertaining and the long spells of inactivity experienced in the armed forces produced a surge in demand for reading matter, the more time-consuming and the more escapist the better. Yet it was a demand that the trade was increasingly unable to satisfy. That disempowerment came from three separate causes. First, all paper and wood pulp, the key commodities of printing and publishing, had to be imported from distant countries over wide expanses of sea; as shipping losses mounted, and war material had to take priority for cargo space, supplies became severely restricted and the consequent shortages pushed up prices horrendously. Secondly, the loss by the printing industry of almost half its entire male labour force to the armed services and other war work by the middle of 1916 left it so short of skilled operatives that by the war’s end compositors’ wages had doubled, machines were having to be left unmanned for lengthy spells and production had so slowed down that a book that might previously have taken three weeks to print was taking as many months. It was a good time for second-hand booksellers but anything but that for the producers of new titles, the annual output of which had dropped by a third by 1918, to no great surprise. Thirdly, on top of those cost pressures special to the book trade were piled increasingly onerous ones on the buying public as well. After only one year the expense of waging war compelled a raising of the standard rate of income tax, which then had to go up again and again till the increase had been fivefold. Even that ultimate symbol of stability, the penny post, was not spared from the fiscal sacrifices that had to be made.

But worse still was to come as soon as the war ended. The complexities of managing highly developed economies were as yet inadequately understood, and the fatal error was made of promptly lifting the wartime control of prices that had belatedly been introduced. In a flush of baseless optimism, wholesale prices responded by hurtling upwards to more than three times their 1914 level. Only drastic cuts in government spending and further increases in taxation succeeded in regaining control and bringing the boom to a sudden end early in 1921. The price of paper stabilised eventually two years after that, but only at around the mid-war level.

Undercapitalised as always, smaller publishing houses that had just about managed to struggle through the war years were in no fit state to survive the fearsome sting that period turned out to have in its tail. But even the survivors, however strong their backlists, were shocked into proceeding more warily than they might otherwise have done during the decade that followed. That some of the bolder spirits on their staffs failed to return from war service no doubt acted as an additional brake.

Natural history was nevertheless lucky in that all the firms with strong lists in the subject emerged from that period seemingly without permanent harm. For that, it had to thank the lasting popularity it had enjoyed for so many years previously, which had made possible the building-up of protective buffers of safely copyrighted steady sellers. Smith, Elder & Co., the original backer of Richard Jefferies, forfeited its independence to John Murray in 1917, but that was only because the last Smith capable of running it had died; the two firms had long had close connections and that merger was as natural as it was amicable.At the start of the 1920s Cassell & Co., which had similarly nurtured Richard Kearton, fell prey to the Berry Brothers, the future Lords Camrose and Kemsley; but when its printing business was subsequently brought low by strikes, the book side was sold off to one of its staff, under whom that then prospered afresh and became again a significant publisher of titles on birds. Warne & Co., however, suddenly grown rich in 1902–13 after striking a seam of gold called Beatrix Potter, was only just saved from going under by that author’s personal intercession and by turning itself into a limited company. Having lost one of Frederick Warne’s three sons to sudden early death and another to gaol (for fraudulent conversion), it fortunately had more of the family to fall back on and returned to the natural history path from which that freakish run of success with children’s books had diverted it.

Two specialist sections of the trade in which natural history traditionally had some presence had also enjoyed a measure of immunity from the general tribulations. Those were the publishers of school books, which had been carefully shielded by the government as far as possible from the wartime paper shortage, and the purveyors of lavish, ultra-expensive showpieces to the very rich. Provided the latter had held at the outset an adequate stock of the quality materials on which they depended, they had no cause for worry until tax increases bit deeply enough to start giving their clientele real concern—and that would not happen until the Slump. Thus it was while the war was at its height that Archibald Thorburn’s four-volume British Birds, mainly consisting of 82 superb colour plates reproduced from watercolour drawings (made as far as possible from life) by that master of zoological art, had made its gradual, stately appearance.

From that seemingly reassuring roll-call of survivors it would nevertheless be dangerous to conclude that natural history bookselling was well set to take up where it had left off. For unfortunately, that change in the overall trading climate quite apart, the crumbling of the confident certainty of the Victorians about what the term ‘natural history’ denoted had resulted by now in a disabling loss of focus. Those two words now meant markedly different things to different people, leaving many publishers in a quandary about which of various possible approaches would best repay backing—or whether to concern themselves with any of them at all. Not surprisingly, one or two that had built up some strength in the subject in the recent past, such as Chapman & Hall, Macmillan and Bell, seem to have withdrawn from it more or less entirely, evidently preferring to leave others to try to cope with its problematical new range of guises.

Two approaches with a proven record of success were therefore understandably clung to. One was the turning out of routine identification handbooks, from the comprehensive to the skimpily inadequate and from the scientifically austere to the copiously illustrated, the demand for which continued to be as rock-solid as it had been for the best part of a century by then. That was not without its dangers, even so: old favourites were liable to be kept in print, with only minimal revision at best, and block the way for more fully up-to-date or better-conceived replacements. It was seductively easier, after all, to persist with established titles that more or less sold themselves than to invest money, time and energy in putting new ones on the market.

The other approach that commended itself was the Hudsonian one: the country ramble recalled in tranquillity and accompanied by a preoccupation with birds. That had the additional attraction of sitting well with the predominantly literary outlook of many of the general publishers, very few of which could expect to share the luck of Cassell or Duckworth in having in-house expertise in the technicalities of the subject.

Consonant with it, moreover, was the great surge in the popularity of rural roaming that noticeably occurred just as soon as the war ended; as motor vehicles of all kinds poured out into the countryside unprecedented numbers of people never previously able to sample its scenery and its peacefulness so speedily, so regularly and so comparatively cheaply. The idealisation of that complementary world in which it was possible to seek temporary refuge—from cramped towns and cities, from factories and offices—was now assuming dimensions of which its originators, Hudson and Jefferies, can scarcely have dreamed. The possibilities it raised for publishers were irresistible. To not a few of them this seemed the obvious peg on which natural history could be hung henceforward most lucratively. Subsequent titles such as English Scenes and Birds (from Jonathan Cape) or Birds and Green Places (from Dent) neatly illustrate the dual target that some at least of them hoped to hit.

The problem with that strategy, though, was that for the great majority of people likely to buy books about the countryside it was its overall visual attractiveness that they wanted to be reminded about, not its details. Any reading matter aimed at that great majority, therefore, had to be kept carefully light, for its primary function was to recapture a merely generalised responsiveness. In so far as some natural history was acceptable, it had to be in a supporting role and comparatively unobtrusive. Only authors with a modicum of knowledge tended to find that limitation tolerable, and so ‘countryside books’ came to acquire a reputation among naturalists for disingenuousness and inaccuracy. At the same time they did serve as a vehicle for conveying awareness in quarters that might never otherwise have been penetrated that birds and wild flowers and insects were more than just a pleasant background accompaniment of sounds and colours. Many a rambler had eyes opened to differences and felt the urge to start putting names to those. At the very least, for all their craftily rationed informativeness, such books made a smattering of natural history knowledge socially acceptable, even an accomplishment to be admired and emulated, helping to bury the subject’s still-lingering associations with musty albums and cabinets of eggs.

So strong had that identification of natural history with country rambles become by the end of the 1920s that simulated examples of those must have seemed the obvious choice when radio producers decided the time had come to take up the challenge that a subject in which the appeal is preponderantly visual so dauntingly presented. The person they lighted upon to that end was a Methodist minister in Carlisle, G. Bramwell Evens, who by reason of gipsy parentage on both sides felt justified in adopting the wayfarer-like pseudonym of ‘Romany’ (‘Nomad’ was the flatteringly similar one to be chosen by the best-known of his several imitators). An experienced broadcaster to north of England schools by the time of his recruitment in 1931 for an experimental series of in-studio ‘outings’—based on his intimate knowledge of Cumberland’s Eden Valley—Evens’s touch was so sure that the programmes attracted such enormous numbers of devoted listeners (13 million at their peak, of whom nine million were estimated to be adults) that what may well have been natural history’s first-ever media tie-in followed, six years later, in the shape of a book commissioned by the University of London Press. Ironically, the editor to whom that was entrusted, firmly anchored in the south, had never heard till then of either the programmes or their creator; and though Out with Romany fully lived up to its radio popularity when translated into print, to the extent that five successors proved to be called for, that was clearly more than that publisher can be said to have deserved.

Not everyone at that period engaged with the countryside at that relatively superficial level. There were others for whom such wildness as it still possessed was a necessary antidote to the artificialities of modern life, a balm for the soul. Such a person was Henry Williamson, whose literary masterpiece, Tarka the Otter, walked off with the coveted Hawthornden Prize in 1927. Six years in the hatching, the product of exchanging London and journalism for isolation and austerity in deepest Devon, it was a work of natural history in as much as it was based on prolonged personal observation supplemented with much close questioning of the local huntsmen. At the same time it was undisguisedly a work of fiction, as too were the string of lesser ‘animal biographies’ that subsequently issued from the same pen (and from a publishing house, Putnam, that was an outsider similarly). The supreme British contribution to a genre that was North American in both origin and essence, a deeply romantic glorying in the wilderness that had had Thoreau as its founding ideologue, the book was very much of its time in being delayed jetsam from a pre-war current. For the genre had crossed the Atlantic back in the years round 1900, perhaps most notably in the form of Ernest Thompson Seton’s widely read Lives of the Hunted. In able hands, like Williamson’s, it could rise to art of a high level; in less able ones, however, sentimental anthropomorphism tended to be the dire result.

It was his 24 full-page wood engravings for an illustrated edition of that book of Williamson’s in 1932 that first brought into prominence the work of Charles Tunnicliffe. Later to be rated by Peter Scott as one of the four greatest bird artists of all time, Tunnicliffe was one of a group of book illustrators to come to the fore in these years who made use of a range of black-and-white techniques that produced effects fashionably in keeping with the Modern Movement in design, that were also versatile from the positioning point of view (for chapter headings, for example, or as tail-pieces) and, most important of all, were less expensive to reproduce than photographs or anything in colour—a prime consideration at this period, when production costs had to be held down to an absolute minimum, and yet natural history books intended for other than scholarly specialists were generally accepted as seriously handicapped if unprovided with at least a modicum of illustrated matter.

Nature photography had in any case progressed disappointingly. Though cameras in the field were commonplace by 1920, subjects that moved continued to present a challenge and it was only around that date that the cliché of a bird on a nest began to be left behind. Though the apparatus in use conveniently shrank greatly in size, its efficiency hardly improved. The results obtained were on the whole sufficiently unimpressive to keep the demand from the book trade and quality magazines too small to enable any full-time professional to specialise in wildlife photography exclusively till as late as 1937, when after eight years of trying Eric Hosking, the lone pioneer, at last began to make a satisfactory income from that. Although colour film had improved enough in quality by then to attract several of those professionals, the necessary emulsions were extremely expensive and black-and-white work was still not in sight of being seriously challenged, much less displaced.

Wood engraving, which Bewick had taken to such a state of perfection, had undergone a renaissance in Britain from 1910 onwards at the hands of Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Apart from Tunnicliffe, one of its other leading exponents in the natural history field was Eric Fitch Daglish, who had learned the technique in the course of his war service from his friend Paul Nash. Unusual not only in having had a university training in biology, but in being an author-cum-illustrator of books of his own as well, Daglish had the good fortune to be taken up very early in his freelance career, and backed on a long-term basis,by the publisher of Hudson’s final writings, the firm of Dent (which had earlier had the distinction of leading the field in adopting true colour photographs for books on the subject). No doubt conscious of having worked the Hudsonian mine to the point of exhaustion, culminating in a collected edition in 1926–30, and of the gaping hole consequently looming in its small natural history list, Dent thereby became one of the handful of publishers that were principally responsible for nurturing and sustaining the subject in Britain through the economically very difficult inter-war years.

Daglish lived up to Dent’s faith in him by duly writing bird book after bird book for it from 1929 onwards, as well as providing illustrations for others on field sports and the countryside more generally. The association led to his being designated general editor of a series of reprinted classics on the English countryside, ‘The Open Air Library’, launched by the firm in 1932, for which his main role was to produce an appropriate frontispiece for each of the volumes concerned. More out-of-the-ordinary, and seemingly less ephemeral than his other titles, was Name that Bird in 1934, a probably foredoomed attempt to convert bird-watchers to using an elaborate ‘key’ system of identification along lines long familiar to botanists and zoologists of other stripes and particularly popular with the very logically minded French. It may indeed have been inspired by the English translation of a similarly titled work by a Frenchman, Gaston Bonnier, that was widely bought by wild-flower enthusiasts around the same period. Compared with the field guides that the subsequent generation was to be provided with, that method was decidedly cumbersome, but, for want of anything better, copies of that book of Daglish’s are known to have persisted and been persevered with until as late as the 1950s.

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For a publishing house at that period to make rather a speciality of books on birds for the popular end of the market called for more audacity and determination than a present-day reader might think. For already that field was dominated by a firm, H. & F. Witherby, whose dominance, what is more, thanks to the exceptionally wide and close acquaintance with the bird world that one of its partners possessed, was likely to become greater still.

Originally engaged solely in bookselling, from a shop in London’s High Holborn, the parent of that, Witherby & Co., had developed its publishing offshoot during the second half of the nineteenth century. A list that seems at first to have extended over a broad range of non-fiction had latterly come to be focused on travel and natural history—those two cognate fields in which Benjamin White’s firm had similarly chosen to specialise a century earlier. Nothing strictly classifiable as natural history, however, seems to have come out under the firm’s imprint till a year after a member of the family with a schoolboy passion for birds, Harry Forbes Witherby, joined it as an eighteen-year-old in 1891, to fulfil what had doubtless long been taken for granted on all sides as his career destiny. That inaugural venture into the field, even so, was with a botanical title (British Mosses, with a senior judge as its unlikely author, Sir Edward Fry); and the assignment of that to a ‘Knowledge Series’, which may well have extended in very different directions, suggests it was probably a chance acquisition rather than the harbinger of a policy switch occasioned by the arrival in the firm of an enthusiastic naturalist. That impression of indifference to what the young recruit may specially have had to offer is strengthened by the fact that when he came up shortly afterwards with the manuscript of a book written by himself, a product of his New Forest upbringing, it was another firm, Kegan Paul, that published it.

After 16 years spent learning the business, Harry Witherby at last seems to have been given his head, and the first book appeared that had surely found its way into the firm’s list at his personal instance (to judge from its title and contents): H. E. Forrest’s The Vertebrate Fauna of North Wales. Within months of that, British Birds magazine, under his sole editorship, also made its appearance under the firm’s aegis. Though it was not that unusual for book publishers to own and run a periodical alongside their main business—nor for that matter was it the first for this particular firm—it is hard to believe that it would have agreed to take on that extra risk had it not been for the persuasiveness of this junior colleague and the respect he had earned by then for his drive and manifest high standing in the ornithological community. In the absence of any account of the firm’s inner politics, that can be only surmise, however.

In the years that followed, and more particularly after Harry Witherby’s return from war service, books on birds poured forth from the firm, those concerned with British birds, in whole or in part, outnumbering by far the total put out by all its competitors combined. Between 1900 and that watershed year for book publishers in Britain, 1940, the 62 new titles it brought out in that sub-category compared with a mere 22 from the runner-up, Hutchinsons. And that was by no means an exclusive little field that hardly any others felt any inclination to enter, for no fewer than 155 rival imprints have been identified as intruders into it at some time or other in the course of that same span of years. Despite its towering market lead, Witherby’s share of the total output of new titles on British birds over that period was no greater than 12 per cent. It nevertheless gallantly shouldered the heavy weight of nine county Avifaunas, leaving the ‘also rans’ with a disproportionate number of more obviously profitable titles.

That degree of dominance placed the firm in the enviable position of taking its pick of most of what a fast-expanding bird world had to offer—for we can be sure that, if only thanks to Harry Witherby’s unbeatable range of contacts, it was the one that normally knew first what was being contemplated or written. In him it had a famously sympathetic listener as well as someone supremely well qualified, by many years of first-hand experience in the field and the library, to give advice or tips. Furthermore, he valuably bridged two generations that had substantially conflicting ideas on how the study of birds ought to be conducted. For having been a dedicated collector of skins from a time when that was the accepted approach to take, with an admirably extensive knowledge of racial variation in European birds as a result, he latterly turned into the foremost initiator of the cooperative enquiries that took ornithology in Britain in revitalising new directions in the Edwardian years and after.

Of all the publisher-naturalists Britain has so far seen, none indeed have risen to such a position of ascendancy in both facets of that dual role. Lovell Reeve came nearest, but he had to give himself too wholly to running his business later in life to sustain his earlier eminence as a conchologist. Harry Witherby, on the other hand, had the triply good fortune not only in having had a family firm of publishers waiting for him to step into, one moreover excellently placed to accommodate and benefit from his obsessing leisure interest, but also in being able to share the burden of running a business with others. Indeed, it is obvious that he must have been allowed no small amount of latitude, to attend to the magazine of which he was either sole editor or editor-in-chief for an interrupted 36 years as well as to travel widely overseas, or he could hardly have achieved so much, a ferociously hard worker though he was in everything he undertook. Despite partly retiring in 1936, he was forced to return when wartime exigencies required his full-time involvement again, as senior partner by then. But the heavy managerial workload on top of his unceasing ornithological labours was too much for his by that time uncertain health, and he died at what must have been for him a frustratingly premature seventy.

As a publisher of natural history that firm is remembered today so exclusively in terms of birds that it comes almost as a shock to find that in 1932 it also brought out a sizeable work on a group of insects. This was the Practical Handbook of British Beetles by Norman H. Joy, one of those medical men who have long been represented in the ranks of entomology especially numerously. This was no mere popular guide that its title might suggest, what is more, but a scholarly work that required two volumes, one of text and a complementary one of illustrations, to cover a branch of the fauna that runs to very many more species than the birds. Even so, that was three volumes fewer than the forty-year-old standard work by Canon Fowler that this one effectively replaced. Though the knowledge that predecessor had embodied had been kept reasonably up to date with a tail of supplements in the intervening years, those were of only limited help to a new generation of coleopterists able to obtain copies of the original work for their personal use only at great difficulty and expense. A major reason for that expensiveness had been the 200 colour plates (in addition to text figures), but Joy got round that by providing over 2,000 camera lucida drawings, nearly all by himself, reproduced in 167 line-block plates. For a work published in the depths of the Depression, such a sacrificing of colour was unfortunately an inescapable economy measure.

If the house of Witherby was prepared to step off the ornithological straight and narrow to take on such an unorthodox addition to its list, it is hardly less surprising to discover that the two important contributions to the nascent study of bird behaviour that appeared at the start of the inter-war period came out from publishers with up till then only a negligible record in the natural history field at best. It may be that the very uncertain market conditions just at that time deterred the much more obvious candidates from augmenting their lists any further, the more so if, like these two, the books in question were out of the usual run and so with especially unpredictable commercial prospects.

Certainly, Harry Witherby cannot have been unaware of the fascinating story that lay behind Edgar P. Chance’s The Cuckoo’s Secret, which came from Sidgwick & Jackson in 1922, for that book had been preceded by a string of advance reports in magazines, one of them Witherby’s own British Birds. A wealthy London businessman with a flair for publicity, Chance had also spent the previous autumn showing a remarkable film he had taken in this connection not only to leading zoological societies, but also to the press and then even to the general public at the New Gallery Cinema. To be ranked many years later by no less a judge than David Lack as one of the five most scientifically important publications on British birds to be produced in the twentieth century’s first 40 years, Chance’s volume stood out for two other reasons as well: it was the product of a lengthy programme of well-planned and ingenious field investigation, carried out (like Eliot Howard’s) in a businessman’s all-too-scanty leisure; even more unusually, though, it was the work of a prominent egg collector. In that last fact lies a possible further explanation of why the book found a publisher only on the outermost fringe. Yet disentangling the habits of that parasitic bird called for oological expertise no less than for abundant patience, and this demonstration of how that increasingly deplored activity was capable of yielding highly acclaimed scientific side-benefits came as a general eye-opener—as well as unexpected ammunition for its beleaguered defenders. Nearly 20 years later, in The Truth about the Cuckoo, the author was to produce a follow-up, improving on and expanding that earlier work, but this time its wide appeal was sufficiently appreciated, and the profile of egg collecting so much lowered by then, that it gained itself, in Country Life Books, a publisher in the mainstream.

The august firm of John Murray, which published in 1920 Eliot Howard’s second classic study, Territory in Bird Life, had at least brought out a natural history book or two in the course of its venerable history, albeit ones of sharply contrasting kinds and at very irregular intervals. However, it had a notably strong backlist, which enabled it to take risks that younger competitors would probably have shied away from; it was also well known as a literary house and the tendency in that direction of Eliot Howard’s writings may have commended this book to it as a bjridge’ work, extending its reach into the scientific field not inharmoniously. On the other hand, a publisher without a good acquaintance with the contemporary natural history scene was hardly the best choice for an author no better placed in that way either. Though Eliot Howard seemingly wrote his books more as an exercise in putting his own thoughts together than with a view to gaining as wide an audience for them as possible, in the lucky position of being able to afford to be indifferent to how well or badly they sold, their impact could nevertheless have been earlier and better had he only been taken in hand by a firm better attuned to the mind of the average bird-watcher. Possibly, though, he had approached Witherby in the first instance, only to jib at the suggestion of a major overhaul.

A subsidiary reason why Witherby so dominated the market for bird books for so long must have been its virtually exclusive commitment just to that branch of natural history. While its leading competitors evidently also recognised that was the category with much the greatest potential at least in the medium term, for diversification in treatment no less than for sales, they probably saw such narrow specialisation as commercially inadvisable, even supposing that it was an achievable aim in their particular cases. Of the other natural history ‘majors’, Warne gave no indication of wanting to abandon its tradition of middle-level identification guides across the natural history field as a whole, while Hutchinson, though shadowing Witherby fairly closely, not only kept its list noticeably more diverse than the latter’s, but very shortly after the war made a plunge into entomology of some conspicuousness. Sudden shifts of that kind were easier for Hutchinson to make than most others, for it was on the way to becoming a sprawling octopus by then, made up of an ill-assorted collection of fiction and non-fiction lists alike, with consequently little enough of an identity overall to be worth caring much about.

That entomological foray of Hutchinson was at a lower level than Witherby’s much later one, and it seems to have been occasioned by just the same kind of situation in which W. Keble Martin’s Concise British Flora in Colour was to find itself in the 1960s: a visually most appealing book that seemed nevertheless impossible to publish at a price that its likely market could stand. In this case the manuscript had been ready for handing over to a publisher when the war intervened, but 10 years of repeated head-scratching thereafter took place before it eventually reached print.

The book in question was F. W. Frohawk’s (Fig. 166) much-admired and widely treasured Natural History of British Butterflies (Fig. 167). With 60 superlative life-size drawings by another of the great zoological artists of the day, that must have seemed an obvious candidate for that stratospheric layer of the market for which others were continuing to paint so lucratively. The trouble was that subscribing for such works had now become limited very largely to devotees of field sports, with eyes only for paintings of the kinds of creatures that they hunted or shot—and butterflies were emphatically not among those. As a firm that prided itself on its success in publishing part-works profitably at the lower end of the market, Hutchinson presumably agreed to take the book on in the airy assumption that it could make that method work higher up as well. They were soon disillusioned, though. Enough advance subscribers were not forthcoming, and it was necessary to fall back on offering the book for purchase outright and at a price, of six guineas for two quarto-sized volumes, that was beyond the reach of the majority of lepidopterists. Not surprisingly, the sales were unimpressive.

Frohawk—his real name and not the moth-like pseudonym that a writer on popular entomology might adopt, as some may have assumed—was in his sixties by the time that masterpiece of his arrived in print, having embarked on studying the life cycles on which it was mainly based when on the threshold of thirty. There was thus only a six-year gap between that start and the sudden death of William Buckler, the predecessor who had similarly made the study of those his special concern. The similarity between the two did not stop there, for both were first and foremost artists by profession, both were at the same time thoroughgoing naturalists as well, and both were dogged by problems with their eyesight—virtual blindness in one eye from a teenage illness in Frohawk’s case, though he was spared the other’s reliance on a magnifying glass latterly. Unlike Buckler, though, Frohawk had had to forgo a conventional training as an artist, because of financial recklessness on the part of his father, which had made it imperative for him to start earning a livelihood as a book illustrator as soon as he could. In the physical lengths to which he showed himself prepared to go to defy the consequent austerity of his early manhood—walking 42 miles in one night, for example—he recalls, rather, the pondweeds specialist, Alfred Fryer, for whom a walk of 24 miles just to see a cricket match, standing all day and subsisting on just a ginger beer, was of no great moment.

Much of Frohawk’s illustrating took the form of woodcuts produced for The Field, of which he latterly became the natural history editor. That magazine was thus the natural choice for the serialisation of much of his research on life cycles when embodying that in a book initially seemed an unlikely prospect. It may have been because of the frustrations he experienced at the hands of Hutchinson when that prospect later crawled into a reality that he took his subsequent books to Ward, Lock & Co., a long-established house whose previous incursions into natural history had been confined to juvenilia. It was appropriate therefore that the first of those to appear under that imprint, in 1934, The Complete Book of British Butterflies, was aimed at the pockets of a younger as well as less affluent readership than his previous one. The colour plates this time, however, were not only half as many but also necessarily a different set, the original ones having in the meantime been bought by Lord Rothschild on realising their scientific value and donated by him to the British Museum (Natural History). Varieties of British Butterflies, a portrayal of 125 select aberrations in 48 colour plates, brought that particular section of the Frohawk oeuvre to a fittingly dazzling conclusion in 1938, by which time he was in his seventies. Tragically, though, two years later a bomb was to destroy the publisher’s warehouse and all the remaining stock as well as the artwork of the last two were lost, preventing their ever being reissued and depriving the author of further royalty income at a time in life when he was badly in need of it.

While the less expensive version of ‘Frohawk’ made an ideal present for beginners—though it was prized by many more than just those—it was essentially a book for the library shelves. For field use (if taken out one at a time), South’s three volumes of 1906–8 continued to have no rival for comprehensiveness combined with compactness; they had the further advantage too of covering not just the butterflies but most of the moths as well. So well served were lepidopterists by ‘South’, indeed, that naturalists of other persuasions had come to eye it with no small envy. Though botanists continued to lack any equally handy equivalent with all of the flowering plants and ferns depicted accurately in colour, its publishers, Warne, realised that the time was ripe to provide birdwatchers with an approximate replica and looked around for a suitable author. That firm was then in the process of picking itself up from its near-bankruptcy with a strengthened management and then, in 1921, the reacquisition as an author of the ever-productive Edward Step—in circumstances as mysterious as the ones in which he had broken away 10 years before—and the revival of the ‘Wayside and Woodland’ series that he had instituted. All Warne now needed was a well-noticed success with which to celebrate the recovery of its balance and its reversion to its earlier course.

That success proved to be T. A. Coward’s The Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs, the first volume of which entered the shops in 1920 (despite ‘1919’ on the title page) and immediately began to realise the high hopes that were riding on the title (Fig. 168). Similar in format to ‘South’ and similarly a threesome (though in this case all the volumes were published together), temptingly priced at what in today’s money would be around seven pounds, that was perfectly judged to occupy the market niche that had been waiting to be filled: the aid to identification that almost every bird-watcher would feel it necessary to own—right up until the advent of ‘field guides’ of the modern type in the mid-1950s, as it was to turn out.

Not the least of the attractions of that work were its very superior colour plates. Warne had astutely acquired the rights to make lithographed prints of the glorious paintings, mostly by Thorburn, of each bird in a characteristic pose and natural setting, that Lord Lilford had commissioned for that late-Victorian part-work of his, Coloured Figures … (and had that benevolent aristocrat still been living, how great would have been his pleasure that they were to have a second life as a practical aid to a later generation of the unaffluent). Protectionists may have deplored the inclusion of comparably fine illustrations of the eggs, convinced that that would only encourage and condone the continued collection of those; their omission, however, from a work justly prized for scientific accuracy and completeness would have been as hard to defend as publishing ‘South’ or ‘Frohawk’ without depicting the larvae. Egg collectors in any case had ample books at their disposal already that enabled them to identify what they sought and found, and it was from one of those, the early-Victorian monograph by W. C. Hewitson included in one of Van Voorst’s series, long out of copyright, that the illustrations were chosen for re-using, similarly.

The author no less than the book itself, the habitually cloth-capped Coward, the one-time hand in a Manchester bleaching works, is seen by some today as a symbol of the new, more democratic era in British ornithology that these early post-war years were ushering in. Certainly, his long experience by then of writing for the average newspaper reader in the industrial North had honed a style of easy straightforwardness that accorded well with the many new recruits that study was now attracting from well outside the sporting circles by which it had hitherto been dominated, circles in which he himself felt out of place and from which he chose to stand aloof.

Coward’s book did a great favour to more than just ornithology, however. For such was its success that Warne proceeded to make it the ostensible start of a new generation of field handbooks that carried on where its preceding ‘Wayside and Woodland’ series had prematurely broken off. Though the increasingly disparate character of the volumes squeezed in under that continued label made it less and less easy to justify so categorising it—as had similarly happened with Van Voorst’s analogous pseudo-series, ‘The Natural History of the British Islands’—they did at least have a recognisable unity of purpose. All were at least meant to be for beginners and to be slippable into a (fairly capacious) pocket, all had an authoritative text accompanied by a generous helping of normally coloured illustrations of a quality sufficient for identifying specimens, and they came out in what at times was a more or less yearly stream, a stream which would wind on and on till just short of half a century later. ‘Wayside and Woodland’, however, came to be thought too redolent of a passing era and the words ‘of the British Isles’ (a harking back to Van Voorst’s choice?) were gradually accorded the greater prominence, though not consistently till two volumes with a worldwide coverage, on geology and marine life respectively, had been out of the public glare for long enough to cease to be embarrassments on that particular score.

Probably because of the stiff competition on the botanical front presented by such ineradicable perennials as Johns’ Flowers of the Field and the paintworthy ‘Bentham and Hooker’, the great majority of the titles with which Warne followed up Coward’s Birds … were zoological, though the imbalance was rectified to some extent by issuing revised versions of Edward Step’s early ‘Wayside and Woodland’ offerings in that other direction. That bias became eminently forgivable, however, when in 1932 attention started to be given to covering neglected groups of invertebrates. So pressing had the need become for introductory guides to those, and so unbeatably well had Warnes given ample evidence of being capable of filling those gaps, that specialists in the groups concerned began volunteering to write them without having to be asked. The one by Cynthia Longfield on the dragonflies in 1937 was especially notable for her conferring of English names on all the species: ‘should these be accepted,’ she wrote rather defensively, her hope was that they would have a major effect in making those conspicuous and attractive insects ‘arouse more interest than they do at present.’ She was to live to see that hesitant innovation of hers well and truly justified.

***

Those who appreciated Coward’s work probably most of all were the incurably collection-driven, for whom sightings now did duty for skins or eggs—but still only as a means of ‘bagging’ as many as possible of the species on the national list. Increasingly mobile by this period, they were nevertheless very far from as well-served by transport yet to be able to take that activity to the extreme lengths of their latter-day successors, the ‘twitchers’. For though popular motoring was making its arrival in these first post-war years, few of that bird-watching far wing would have possessed cars as yet. Public transport, though, already extended to a network of rural bus services and, in privileged areas, electrified railway lines, while the private sector supplemented those with charabancs and motorcycles.

Luckily for those unable to afford much in the way of fares and who lived at a great distance from the rich bird life of the coasts, the culminating stages of the sanitary revolution initiated by the mid-Victorians had conveniently sprinkled across the countryside and even the suburbs two novel habitats that were belatedly becoming widely known as magnets for out-of-the-ordinary species. As a result, this inter-war period was to be ‘the years of reservoirs and sewage-farms so far as British ornithology [was] concerned’—in the (obviously exaggerated) words of the veteran H. G. Alexander, reminiscing in the 1970s. Although the potential of reservoirs had been appreciated by one or two as early as the 1860s, many years had had to elapse before those acquired plentiful herbage cover on their margins; sewage farms, on the other hand, had turned into ornithological oases—alas, for a limited stretch of years only—in consequence of the recent addition to those of filter-beds. So large did these two habitats loom for bird-watchers based in the built-up areas that Ernst Hartert and F. C. R. Jourdain even saw it as acceptable to append to the title of their 1920 Avifauna of Buckinghamshire the words ‘and the Tring Reservoirs’—a barefaced cheat, for those lay across the county boundary in Hertfordshire.

The nearest equivalent to those ‘hot spots’ that botanists had long enjoyed were municipal dumps and dockyards, but the ephemeral crops of principally alien species that those tended to yield were a poor substitute for seeing native rarities in the mainly far-off places to which those were alluringly mentioned in the literature as largely or wholly confined. A book-length account of The Adventive Flora of Tweedside such as G. C. Druce and Ida Hayward produced in 1919 was for connoisseurs of the challengingly exotic: for most others, the preferred option, if they could afford it, would have been a kind of grand tour to see the best of what the British or Irish flora had to offer, taking in some beautiful scenery in the process. A new literary genre was called into being in response. As early as 1909 Robert Lloyd Praeger had produced A Tourist’s Flora of the West of Ireland, with the aim of diverting the footsteps of the first trickle of the car-borne, newly at liberty to flit from one botanical ‘sight’ to the next, to where that region’s specialities could most surely be seen with the maximum saving of time. But as the numbers of motorised tourists grew, and they were prepared increasingly to fan over the country more generally, he turned its 1934 replacement, The Botanist in Ireland, into a guide to many more parts, his own personal exploration having ranged far more widely and intensively in the intervening years. Perfectly suited to its purpose, embodying a mass of first-hand information while highly readable none the less, this had the unusual extra feature that, for ease of reference, it was the paragraphs allotted to each notional stopping-point that were numbered and not the pages. Unfortunately, it was so good—and so deliberately under-priced, to make it available to as many potential users as possible—that it went out of print all too fast, to become ever since a much sought-after treasure itself.

For more than a century, collectors of British and Irish plants were so well served by the annual exchanges of dried examples of those carried out under the auspices of successive societies and clubs that they had had much less need than their zoological counterparts to make lengthy pilgrimages to obtain desiderata for themselves. Not all field botanists went in for collecting, however, and as the revulsion against that gathered strength non-injurious alternatives were propelled into greater popularity by the new freedom to roam great distances.

‘Collecting’ nature by photographing it, species by species, was one such alternative that was available to botanists particularly early—thanks to the greater immobility of the subjects. The principal of an Eastbourne art school, E. J. Bedford, who had published in 1909 Nature Photography for Beginners, was one of the first to demonstrate the possibilities by ‘taking’ with his camera the different kinds of wild orchids in appropriate natural settings and widely exhibiting the results. But that failed to catch on as fast as it might have, probably mainly because of that well-entrenched tradition of ‘painting one’s Bentham’ in watercolour, as a way of registering the first-ever discoveries by the owner of that work of each of the species described and (from 1863) depicted in it.

The greatly enhanced opportunities of extending personal ‘life lists’ that motor vehicles afforded introduced a noticeable new restlessness into natural history at this period, memorably likened by E. M. Nicholson in one of his early books to the contemporary habit of ‘moving on to another nightclub’: a modish contrast to the dogged earnestness of their firmly rooted, narrowly focused Victorian predecessors. In botany, the lighthearted escapades and occasional embarrassments that those plant-hunting tours gave rise to generated in their turn a distinctive class of reminiscence literature, commonly in the form of handwritten journals, one or two of which have earned themselves print only many years afterwards. A Prospect of Flowers (1945) by Andrew Young, a clergyman and well-regarded poet, and The Botanical Diary of Eleanor Vachell (1879–1948), published by its inheritor, the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, as recently as 2006, are outstanding examples. Miss Vachell, the daughter of a Cardiff physician, was one of those dauntless ‘Bentham’ painters; far from well-off, she managed to scrape together enough from forays into journalism to be able to acquire a third-hand car in 1927, after which nothing could hold her.

So specially intimate was the relationship between inter-war natural history and that early, still ingenuous delight in the still somewhat haphazard propulsion by personal petrol-driven vehicles that one popular writer of the day, H. Mortimer Batten, even produced a book with Nature Jottings of a Motorist as the title. It was doubtless no coincidence that the year that came out was the very same one in which Eleanor Vachell succeeded at last in becoming a car-owner.

***

One casualty of that exultant uprootedness that might have been expected was the energy that had hitherto been poured into the compiling of local Floras and Avifaunas. How far, if at all, that was the case, though, is difficult to decide, for the lengthy timescale typical of such undertakings prevents the number of those published from being at all an accurate reflection of contemporary activity. For not a few that arrived in print in these years would have had their roots in Edwardian or Victorian times, perhaps even in some cases their trunks: their initiator may have left the scene, the momentum then being lost and the project revived by other hands only after perhaps a sizeable interval. The availability of funds and to some extent the general economic climate, far more than enthusiasm or persistence, were the prime determinants of when, or if, the goal of publication was reached.

As far as Avifaunas were concerned, if there was any widespread expectation of that genre petering out, in view of the growing distaste for reading of rarities that had been shot, that was emphatically not borne out. So far from such works ceasing to be written, they were merely transformed in character to reflect the general shift to watching, and in that altered guise the genre started to flourish as never before.

No similar makeover was required of the botanical equivalent as yet. Floras of counties, inevitably more capacious than ones of smaller areas, continued to be conceived and published on the same elaborate model that had come into general favour as far back as the 1860s, their backbone the lists of botanical records for the less common species grouped for ease of reference under a number of ‘botanical districts’. That made for very fat volumes, the high cost inseparable from small print runs pushed higher still by heedlessly spacious layouts and complicated typography.

During the 1930s, dissatisfaction with the crude picture of species distributions that model provided and with the vagueness of the insights it offered into the factors determining those led a leading academic phytogeographer, R. D. Good, to devote successive summer vacations from his chair at University College, Hull to devising a more informative replacement. To that end, using his native county of Dorset as a suitable test-bed, by reason of its comparative smallness combined with environmental diversity, he single-handedly worked out in unprecedented detail the distribution of every one of its established species of vascular plants. A set of dot-maps was the outcome, the first to be produced in such quantity of any group of organisms in Britain (though Germany had thrown up a forerunner over 70 years earlier). A selection of those published eventually in 1948 in his radically new version of the genre, A Geographical Handbook of the Dorset Flora, would have a deep impact and soon inspire the production of dot-maps by automatic data-processing machinery as the basis for delineating thenceforward the distribution of organisms of (in due course) every kind.

For lack of that overdue shake-up, county Floras on that traditional model continued to trickle out all through the difficult inter-war period (and indeed for several decades after that) despite that model’s manifest drawbacks. They might well not have appeared in such numbers, even so, had this line of activity not been the beneficiary of a revitalising infusion of financial succour in those years from an out-of-the-way quarter. This was the arrival on the scene of a firm of publishers run by a couple of dedicated naturalists, with the good of the subject so much at heart that they were ready to lean over backwards to enable books that were scarcely viable propositions commercially to appear none the less.

The firm was T. Buncle & Co., of the seaside town of Arbroath, not far from Dundee. Originally just the printing plant on which a local newspaper had been produced, like many similar businesses this had acquired added stability over the years by taking on outside work to keep the presses from standing idle in between production of each issue. By the time of the death of its long-time sole proprietor, the firm had grown into a handsome dowry that one of his two surviving daughters was able to bring to her subsequent marriage to a local lecturer in chemistry, R. H. Corstorphine, in 1902 (Figs 169 & 170).

That marriage was from the first a many-sided partnership. Though her husband stepped in at her wish as managing director, Margaret Corstorphine’s involvement in the business continued to be an active one (so much so that during his absence on war service she ran it in his stead). A shared passion for field botany meanwhile occupied much of their leisure, leading to their compiling a new Flora of that county, Angus, for which a secondary home they acquired in Glen Clova made an ideal base. For the two to expand the firm’s publishing side into the natural history field on a much wider scale was thus an easy choice, especially given the numerous contacts, national as well as local, they privately had in that direction already. Training the compositors in the niceties of biological nomenclature, they were soon in a position to offer high-quality work at prices few or no rivals could match. One customer was even heard to marvel that the plate the firm had produced of an orchid was better than the original photograph, such was the informed attention to detail for which it became renowned. So specially lenient were the terms on which it undertook work for the Botanical Society and Exchange Club, underpinned the North Western Naturalist, brought out six or more local and county Floras and revived interest in lichenology nationally (through a series of introductory guides to that study by a neighbouring compatriot, Ursula K. Duncan) that the Corstorphines came to be accused of running the business more as a hobby than as a means of making money. Certainly, they could have built it much further had that been their intent, and they neglected investing in it sufficiently to keep it abreast of changing trends, leaving it with increasingly antiquated typefaces that did not help when adverse times came along after their deaths and eventually brought about its demise.

***

If toiling away at massive compilations of distributional data was hardly in keeping with the general mood of the years after 1918, the laborious putting together of lengthy monographs of difficult or neglected groups was certainly no different. Similarly slow-paced and equally half-deaf to the dictates of the market, that will always be another line of work in which the eventual end-products surface in print too randomly for anything much to be safely deducible from the timing of their appearances.

While it does appear that considerably fewer publications in that especially demanding category came out in the inter-war period than in the closing years of the previous century, it could simply be that that remarkable late-Victorian burst of productivity in this direction had filled so many of the gaps then existing, and filled those so satisfactorily, that replacements were not going to be needed for quite some time yet. Those predecessors, moreover, may have taken most of the plums, leaving only the less tempting morsels. Another possibility is that work of monographic scope that was formerly considered publishable only if it took the form of a book was now increasingly finding its way into journals instead, either in toto as a special supplement or piecemeal in a number of separate papers.

The Ray Society, at any rate, was still available to serve in its traditional role of a safety-net. Though its membership had fallen off during the war—like that of learned societies in general—and reached a dangerous-looking low of 262, as early as 1915, luckily it had a staunchly loyal core and emerged still sufficiently solvent to resume its programme of publication within two years of the ending of hostilities. That monographs of the scope and quality for which it existed to cater materialised so quickly was reassuring evidence that keeping it going had been justified and that it was likely to be needed no less than before. The authors of the first two were also reassuringly typical of those who had produced such works in the past. W. J. Lucas, for example, who had come up with what amounted to the first comprehensive treatment of the grasshoppers and their allies, the Orthoptera, was a schoolmaster in Kingston upon Thames, who had specialised for many years in the dragonflies as well (Fig. 171). Disappointingly, though, for all its thoroughness and accuracy, it was not written with possible converts in mind and so failed to render that group any more fashionable than before. The other monograph dealt no less authoritatively with a small group of algae characteristic of brackish water, the Charophyta or stoneworts, which by virtue of being similar in size and appearance to some aquatic flowering plants are conventionally collected by botanists whose cryptogamic concerns are otherwise limited to the ferns and their allies. The pair responsible for that one, James Groves and G. R. Bullock-Webster, had been respectively toiling away in the interstices of a career as an accounts clerk in that massive London emporium, the Army and Navy Stores, and in the course of a demanding life as an Anglican rector in that city.

A quiet counter-current to the noisy mainstream, monographic work will always hold an appeal only for a special few, capable of the unswerving persistence it requires and even the long-term sacrifice of other natural history interests. By that very character, however, it is shielded from the ebbs and flows occurring elsewhere, and so in the inter-war years the restlessness and loss of direction that sapped productive achievement on many of the subject’s other fronts left it unaffected. Equally, it was unlikely to suffer to any significant extent from the decline in number and size of private incomes becoming noticeable at this period, for lack of time has traditionally not been allowed to be a handicap to the dedicated specialist: as we have seen, many who conducted the research from which monographs grew led very full and exacting workaday lives with narrower margins of leisure than the twentieth century was becoming accustomed to. The one thing, rather, that then looked likely to lead to a major contraction in this line of activity was the advent in taxonomy of more sophisticated approaches that could push out of their depth those without training in the novel techniques concerned and access, where necessary, to the associated specialised equipment.

Paradoxically, it was in one sub-branch of natural history that had been all along one of the most heavily patronised and most readily accessible that this ominous development was taking place most conspicuously. This was the taxonomy of the flowering plants and ferns. Botanists in many parts of Europe had been turning up more and more pockets of exceptional diversity in those, some of it so anomalous as to defy being treated on the standard pattern. In one or two genera the describing of new entities had been taken to such lengths that it had begun to seem a process without apparent end. Even so, there continued to be no shortage of aspirants keen to try mastering those problematic stretches, a tradition that flourished in Britain probably as strongly as anywhere, as a well-respected alternative, or sequel, to the compiling of a local Flora. In some groups, however, such efforts were in vain, for the specialists were up against an invisible barrier that there was no chance of overcoming without more penetrating tools, slowly though that often came to be appreciated. It was not until well into the 1930s that the looked-for assistance from genetics, cytology and biometrics began to be forthcoming, and it would not be till after the next war—when more extensive funding for doctoral research in experimental taxonomy became available—that the resulting enlightenment would be completed in large part. Two groups which had been battlegrounds for a particularly long period, the roses and the brambles, would turn out to be very much more complex genetically than anyone could possibly have expected, while, at the opposite extreme, one or two would be exposed as taxonomic mirages.

In contrast to the invertebrates, however, great slabs of which required equally slab-like monographic treatment, the higher plants had pockets of complexity that in most cases were sufficiently limited that revisions of those could be comfortably accommodated in journals and did not need to take the form of a book. Of the two obvious exceptions, one even so was accepted by a journal and brought out as a supplement to that—though one of such daunting dimensions that it might just as well have been a book—while the other was published by a university press. There were thus no leavings for the Ray Society, the output of which became as a consequence almost exclusively zoological for a lengthy period. It also had the result that the initial fruits of that growing interaction between traditional, purely recreational research on the one hand and its incoming academic equivalent on the other, which was taking a taxonomic form in botany that paralleled the similar convergence under way in the study of bird behaviour, appeared largely unnoticed by the book trade and so by the wider natural history public. The one way in which that failure in communication could and should have been avoided was by the producing of the long-deferred new national Flora, in which that influx of revisionism would have been incorporated and through which it would have been disseminated and absorbed. However, for reasons to be explored in the next chapter, that was to continue to prove an elusive achievement until after the Second World War.

***

Even supposing that the inter-war book trade had been prepared to see possibilities of profit in scientific shifts occurring deep below what it preferred to regard as ‘natural history’, in the first half of the 1930s it had much more pressing concerns in any case.

Although the terms of trade had swung heavily in Britain’s favour during the World Depression, rendering imports of paper, for example, exceptionally cheap, and although labour costs too were held down by the general shortage of jobs, the lower book prices that the public could reasonably have expected to result were failing to materialise. So long as economic conditions remained so very uncertain, the priority for publishers was to make their businesses more secure by ploughing back their profits and squeezing their costs. As the Net Book Agreement ruled out competitive reductions in the shops, the only actions open to them seemed to have to be defensive ones.

The priority for the public too was to hold on tightly to its money. Books had to be treated as luxury purchases, for presents or for prizes, or borrowed just for a fee from one of the commercial lending libraries that continued to prosper—or if that was rated a luxury too, from the free public library instead, now that fears of picking up infections from its books were starting to abate and the stock had improved after the granting in 1929 of a 10 per cent discount by the trade. Buying books from second-hand dealers still involved spending and was in any case socially frowned upon unless pursued as a hobby by collectors. Wheldon & Wesley, the leading dealers in natural history, found that side of their trade extremely hard going at that period: the only titles that were easy to sell were scarce ones that naturalists needed as working tools for reference, while collectors ‘were few and invariably drove hard bargains.’ The government made matters even worse with needlessly severe budgets in 1933–4, with major cutbacks in public spending and a further round of worried belt-tightening by the public as the results.

The only way forward out of that impasse open to publishers was to make books irresistibly cheaper, by adopting new methods that made that feasible. The most obvious of those was to reduce their physical size very noticeably. That was a ploy often used in the past, though generally in order to circumvent the exorbitant cost of paper. This time there clearly had to be a different justification of equal plausibility, and natural history was exceptionally well placed to provide one: by long tradition, it had need of books of a convenient size for taking into the field, and one that fitted into the palm of the hand was even better than one that fitted into a pocket.

Thus were born Warne’s ‘Observer’s Books’, among the smallest hardbacks with a seriously instructional purpose that can ever have been devised—and regarded in the trade at the time as one of its miracles. They were so small indeed that they looked almost like toys, an illusion encouraged by their selling at the kind of price that people associated with children’s books: initially two shillings and sixpence, roughly six pounds in today’s money. Yet, as a quick perusal of the contents showed, they were clearly intended for teenagers and adults. The early ones were in fact little more than diminutive replicas of some of their ‘Wayside and Woodland’ predecessors, that parentage betrayed by wholesale borrowings of Edward Step’s very words—to the extent that, as their recent historians have pointed out, Step was effectively their real author. That reuse of pre-existing texts was one way in which that amazingly low price was achieved; the other was Warne’s long-standing practice of buying the rights to reproduce the sets of colour illustrations of some of the past classic works on the fauna and flora of these islands. Thanks to the second of those, it was possible to furnish the first pair of titles particularly resplendently, with on the one hand the bird paintings by Thorburn and others used once already for Coward’s Birds of the British Isles and on the other the ‘coloured figures’ that James Sowerby the elder produced for English Botany well over a century earlier. No wonder the initial print runs of both sold out within a few months of their launch in June 1937. By 1940, and after the launch of three more, the number of copies sold in the series had passed the 200,000 mark. Soon after that, however, the subject matter was widened beyond natural history to a great variety of unrelated fields and that figure was quickly left behind. Thirty million would have been sold by the time the series came to an end in 1984.

Predictably, Warne was not alone in assaulting the natural history market with a ‘books for the pocket’ series during those straitened years. Oxford University Press had anticipated that firm by three years with a small yet widely bought one, in which the volumes were rather larger than the ‘Oberver’s’ ones, more scientific and five times as expensive. The one on British mammals, by Edmund Sandars, was noteworthy for its inclusion of Homo sapiens and an entertaining, tongue-in-cheek description of that species and its habits, on formal zoological lines. Hutchinsons and A. & C. Black also launched comparable ventures.

None of those, not even the ‘Observer’s’ books, however, attracted anything like the publicity that attended the debut of Penguin Books in 1935. The story behind that is too well known to bear repeating here, particularly as natural history has never had more than a rare, walk-on part in the extremely broad-based subject coverage of that series. It is all the same worth emphasising that it was not the reduction in size and certainly not the revival of paper covers that were the keys to that even more spectacular breakthrough: it was Allen Lane’s bold exploiting of unconventional distribution channels—most famously Woolworth’s, then still synonymous with ultra-cheap retailing regardless of quality. Without that, the sale of 17,500 copies that each title needed to sell to justify its rock-bottom price of sixpence would have been the impossibility that all his competitors had declared it to be. It was a lesson that the trade had been reluctant to learn: that mass-marketing can work miracles even in the case of a commodity like books, provided it is targeted sufficiently precisely and pressed home with the necessary forcefulness.

It has become almost forgotten today that, five years after that, a Penguin toe—or rather, a toe of its more up-market Pelican—was at length dipped into natural history water. That was James Fisher’s Watching Birds. A very readable, remarkably comprehensive introduction to that then still comparatively underpopulated study (by an author who was later to become a much-respected book publisher himself),this is reputed to have been one of the best-selling of all Pelican paperbacks. Thanks to the huge numbers such books reached in an abnormally book-hungry wartime Britain, it was enormously effective too in winning recruits for a more scientific approach to bird-watching at a critical juncture, if the 446 applications for membership that the newish British Trust for Ornithology received identifiably through it can be taken as indicative. It was a heartening sign that what had been for two decades by then substantially two separate worlds of natural history in Britain were at last beginning to come together.

CHAPTER 19
Direction Recovered

WHILE WHAT WAS ESSENTIALLY a prolongation of Edwardian natural history was being propagated by the book trade (and over the radio), an alternative to that was in the process of being born. It was in the universities that that birth was mainly taking place—though by no means in those exclusively. For half a century or more, the post-Darwinian crusade to reconstruct evolutionary lines of descent had led to comparative anatomy and morphology receiving such a heavily disproportionate share of attention in biological teaching and research that work in other directions had fallen into disregard, even into disrepute. To such an extreme had that lurch gone that a forceful reaction eventually was only to be expected. Even without the eternal proneness of academia to intellectual fashion swings, any line of enquiry and debate pursued so dominantly and intensively tends to acquire a fatal feel and look of staleness through the mere passage of time, unless the results prove rewardingly spectacular. That apart, however, anything so undisguisedly a legacy of late Victorianism was ripe for replacement on that account alone.

To scientific palates dulled by such a long-unchanged diet nothing could have seemed more refreshingly different than to go out of doors and study the behaviour of living organisms under natural conditions and the complexities of their interaction with the environment. That challengingly under-investigated area of knowledge had begun to put forth promising green shoots already before 1914, and colonising it had started to become no longer easily dismissed as career-risking foolhardiness. After a lengthy war, which many of that generation had spent in the trenches, that same yearning for rural peace that had driven Henry Williamson into solitude in Devon no doubt played a part as well: there was a mood swing, not just an intellectual one.

Far in the van of that procession back into the field on the part of university scientists had been the pioneers of plant ecology, from the turn of the century onwards. In the form that study initially assumed it had looked like the reinvigorating new path that a traditionally taxonomy-oriented field botany was destined to take, but its subsequent experimental turn, together with the rejection of the sociological classification of plant communities that won favour on the Continent, had led to the early strong following among amateurs falling away. In their stead, it was through biology teaching, in the secondary schools and afterwards, that converts to the study were principally won, initially by T. W. Woodhead’s The Study of Plants: an Introduction to Botany and Plant Ecology, published by Oxford’s Clarendon Press in 1915, and more especially by Tansley’s textbook for Allen & Unwin in 1923, Practical Plant Ecology. But the continuing lack of a comprehensive, up-to-date work suitable for providing students with a grounding in plant identification had the result that all too many embarked on ecological practicals and subsequent research with an insufficient ability to put names accurately to the species they encountered. The number of errors that found their way into print as a result only alienated the general run of amateurs further.

At bottom, though, lay the problem that ecology had developed, at any rate on this side of the Channel, into a subject demanding a conceptual mode of thinking that did not come easily to anyone not already schooled in that. It was thus sharply at variance with the mind-set of those fascinated by the spatial patterns in which individual species occur and who prefer to concentrate on working out those patterns with greater and greater precision—a semi-aesthetic approach shared with many geologists. When a rare university botanist who had this other mind-set, Hull’s Professor Good, happened to materialise, his research immediately set ablaze the world of local Flora-writing and transformed its methodology.

The shifting of the main mass of field botanists from their traditional concerns was not made any easier by their much greater disinclination than their zoological counterparts to record numbers, let alone conduct experiments. Admittedly, birds in particular have a visual impact quantitatively that makes counting them a more obvious step than counting plants. As a result, field botanists have been three generations behind ornithologists in noting population sizes. Even plant ecologists, though, were for long not very noticeably number-minded either. Of that study’s founding figures, E. J. Salisbury was exceptional, at least outside the agricultural field, in having recourse to counting on any extensive scale: Studies in Quantitative Biology was the subtitle that he (or his publisher, Bell & Sons) was to choose in 1942 for the eventual book in which the war years gave him the time to bring together his accumulated observations as The Reproductive Capacity of Plants, an aspect in which seed counts necessarily played a prominent part. Salisbury was further exceptional in his lasting interest in the behaviour of individual species, another line of enquiry from which traditional field botany has long stood aside. In that last connection Salisbury was the first to propose, in 1928, what took shape much later as the British Ecological Society’s long-running ‘Biological Flora of the British Isles’, a book-like project consisting of free-standing accounts of single species, which were published as appendices to issues of the society’s journal—instead of being designed for eventual binding up and numbered accordingly, as in the case of a part-work. The nearest botanical equivalents of the typically book-length studies of individual bird species, by their very nature those had no chance of matching the latter in popular appeal, however. Here again, field botany was held back by the handicapping weight of the far greater number of species with which it has to concern itself compared with, at any rate, ornithology.

Although that relative rarity of books (and many of those textbooks) as opposed to papers in journals was the standard pattern in science by then, it had the effect of lowering plant ecology’s visibility to the wider botanical world. As most of those papers came out in the two journals Tansley had founded and long continued to edit, and as they became increasingly specialised in their terminology, that effect was only made worse. But it was a singularly unfortunate period in any case for a novel subject to be struggling for autonomy, for the universities were under very much more than their usual financial pressure and additional posts of any kind were ultra-hard to obtain. At Tansley’s university, Cambridge, nascent disciplines had a difficult struggle winning footholds even at the best of times, and despite his generosity in using his not insubstantial private means to promote ecology in other ways, those were not nearly sizeable enough to extend to the funding of permanent positions. Unlike Salisbury at University College London, who was promoted to a readership in 1924 explicitly in plant ecology and only a year later to a personal chair alongside a departmental head, F. W. Oliver, who fully shared his commitment to that study, Tansley’s official title was merely ‘Lecturer in Botany’, and he gained the more senior post that he so clearly merited only by migrating to Oxford on being appointed to its Sherardian Chair in 1927. Nowhere in Britain, indeed, during the inter-war years was a single new post created for an ecologist specifically, and the lack of a career path precluded encouraging student converts to specialise in the subject at postgraduate level.

Despite that prolonged stunting on the teaching front, a great deal of research meanwhile proceeded in a great diversity of directions, and it was increasingly apparent that a successor to Types of British Vegetation was badly needed to draw together all the knowledge that had accumulated since that appeared in 1911. Even before that work’s print run of 1,500 copies had been exhausted, within three years of publication, Tansley had confided to a correspondent: ‘It should be revised rather extensively, but I don’t want to do it just now.’ Even had he not displayed a talent for synthesis, he was the obvious person to undertake the equivalent task again; but no one was more aware than he was that its size was growing in formidableness as the years went by, 16 of which had elapsed by the time he arrived in Oxford and acquired the administrative burdens of running a department on top of editing two journals. The later part of that final 10-year stretch in academic harness he nevertheless set aside for what would eventually emerge in 1939, two years following his retirement, as The British Islands and their Vegetation.

Apart from coming from the same publisher, Cambridge University Press, and being no less profusely illustrated, that work proved in the event to have very little in common with its predecessor. Whereas that had been multi-authored, Tansley had decided that the subject had become too disparate for uniformity of treatment to be possible and it would have to be written in its entirety just by himself. Whereas the forerunner had been designed for field use and kept small enough to be carried in a hand, the new version ran to nearly a thousand pages, had 168 plates, 418 photographs and 179 text figures, filling as a result a single volume of such unexampled stoutness that it was no inconsiderable feat merely to lift it down from a shelf (and, not surprisingly, it was to be reissued as two volumes 10 years later). Acclaimed as the ‘milestone in British ecology’ that it aptly resembled in those physical proportions, it embodied the completion of what could fittingly be called ‘the Tansley period’—for he more than any other single participant in it had fostered and watched over from first to last that necessary preliminary phase of the new science. While that had consisted in the main of classifying the plant communities that existed, determining in each case the particular vegetational succession involved and, by means of pollen analysis and the study of stratigraphy, gaining some broad understanding of their past history, it had additionally extended into taking account of the impact of animal life and other major factors. Ahead still lay the intrinsically more complex task of establishing the subtle processes and relationships that operated, and investigating those more especially by experimental methods with which Tansley by personal temperament would have felt much less at ease.

***

Unlike in botany, in zoology the gradual infiltration of the universities by field-centred research and teaching had the luck to coincide with an altered mind-set on the part of a growing number of amateurs that proved entirely compatible. In ornithology, lines of enquiry had spontaneously developed that meshed extremely well with what Huxley and his ‘school’ were propagating. The most salient of those had had its origin back in the 1880s and had arisen out of the need for passage-movements in birds to be studied at widely separated points by coordinated chains of record-keepers. That had called into being a form of collective research that depended on the deployment of such large numbers of competent volunteers as the amateur community was alone capable of supplying. That community was in any case much riper for conversion to the investigation of behaviour than amateurs in other branches of natural history, given the limited scope for the traditional taxonomy and working-out of geographical ranges that the avifauna of these islands offer as compared with the flowering plants, say, or the more diverse groups of insects. That groundwork had effectively been completed in ornithology, and recruits to alternative outlets for their curiosity and energy had been waiting to be beckoned.

A zoological counterpart to plant ecology had been comparatively late in coming, for the obvious reasons that the links between animals and the environment were seen as being much more elusive than in the plant world and high mobility in so many cases posed a major obstacle to studying behaviour over time. There was nothing as salient as vegetational succession, moreover, that appeared to offer a comparable integrating principle. The impressive amount of interest that the discriminating and mapping of plant communities initially gained among field botanists nevertheless predictably attracted envious glances. From 1909 onwards a thin scatter of papers in one or two of the more widely read journals carried tentative suggestions for how an equivalent approach might be constructed; but before anything more than toe-dipping had taken place, two books came out in America in 1913 with ‘animal ecology’ baldly in their titles, signalling that the outlines of such a science were already taking shape in zoology departments on the other side of the Atlantic.

At that point the war had intervened. And it was not till that was over that anyone in a British university was in a position to take up the challenge those American books had at once been appreciated as representing. The one who in the event did so was Julian Huxley, on returning from war service (and a spell of research in America) to Oxford and its zoology teaching and already bent on infusing the zoological aspects of natural history with a more rigorously scientific approach, with carefully planned projects focused on specific problems—as exemplified in his own earlier work on courtship display in birds. Huxley was hardly assisted in that aim, however, by that university’s idiosyncratic structure. In contrast to Cambridge, it was the colleges that dominated undergraduate teaching, and those continued to have the power to resist losing resources to novel subjects in which they had little or no interest. The main sufferers from that were the sciences, and the biological ones in particular, for the latter had minimal appeal to Whitehall ministries, the principal sources of the outside funds that countered the university’s impotence at any rate in part. Zoology did at least have two chairs, one more than botany, but posts beneath that level were scarcely more numerous and most of their holders were excluded from college life. Though Huxley was an exception in this latter respect, his botanical counterpart, A. H. Church, whose outstanding pioneer work on the impact of physical, biotic and human influences on vegetation, best known through his Introduction to the Plant Life of the Oxford District (1922–5), gained him election to Fellowship of the Royal Society, nevertheless remained without any college attachment throughout, seriously limiting the influence he could have had. On his appointment as professor, Tansley indeed found the Department of Botany in such a stunted state that he felt obliged to concentrate on broadening its teaching and research and to underplay the boost he could otherwise have given there to ecology.

Luckily, the depressing institutional stasis was richly offset by the presence in that first post-war intake of undergraduates of what quickly proved a remarkable constellation of exceptionally able and determined young naturalists, some of whom had an impressive amount of experience behind them already. Among those were the mammologist Charles Elton, the entomologists O. W. Richards and E. B. Ford, the marine biologist A. C. Hardy and the ornithologists B. W. Tucker and E. M. Nicholson (Fig. 172), all of whom would go on to reinvigorate those respective branches of natural history in their turn. Though Ford had come up as a classicist before switching to zoology, Nicholson was the only one not to be a student of Huxley in a formal capacity, as he was reading for a degree in history; he was nevertheless an integral member of that group and was to do more than any of the others at that time to win converts beyond academic walls to the Huxleian creed that they had enthusiastically joined in embracing.

By 1927 Elton was ready with a book, with the simple title of Animal Ecology, that served as a kind of opening broadside. That its publisher was Sidgwick & Jackson, the ‘outsider’ which had darted into the natural history field five years earlier to bring out Edgar Chance’s revelation of the cuckoo’s parasitic habits, was perhaps significant just in itself, for it suggested that one firm at least saw commercial potential in this infant subject. However, it was for the rival house of Methuen, and for a series of low-priced biological monographs it had launched, that Elton was to follow that up in 1933 with a more elementary version with a similar title, The Ecology of Animals.

Those two books jointly performed a seminal role analogous to that of Tansley’s Practical Plant Ecology of 1923, in bringing the equivalent zoological approach to much wider attention than papers in journals could, in setting out the broad lines along which it gave promise of developing, and in firmly establishing its scientific credentials. Elton had further consolidated its position by persuading the British Ecological Society that the zoological version of the subject was sufficiently distinct from its botanical one, and that the groundswell of good papers on it was sufficiently encouraging, to warrant the society launching an additional journal to cater for it alone.

Very little of the massive amount of research carried out by that generation of incipient animal ecologists was to find embodiment in books. At the formative stage in careers, publishing papers in specialist journals was necessarily the norm: there was neither the time nor the breadth of experience that producing a major work requires. The books would flow forth a generation later, supplying much of the scientific backbone of the subsequent ‘New Naturalist’ series. But because the general run of naturalists saw few if any of the journals in question, the scale of the transformation that this widespread swing back to field studies on the part of trained biologists was bringing about went largely unappreciated outside those specialist circles.

Luckily for ornithologists—though, regrettably, only for those—that gap in communication was bridged extremely effectively, energetically and more or less single-handedly by one who was a leading participant himself during his student days at Oxford in one of the novel lines of work then in the course of developing. This was Nicholson. Even before those days had begun, excited by what he could discern taking shape and fervently convinced that recreational bird-watching could be revitalised by shifting into such different channels, Nicholson was contributing articles to a range of general periodicals of a kind likely to be perused by those whose interest in birds extended to the scientific literature scarcely if at all. Valuable historical documents just in themselves, these drew attention to the various ways at that time in which a more purposive kind of study was giving signs of emerging.

Enough of those articles had appeared by 1926 for reprints of them to form much of the substance of a book, published in that year under a title with a noticeably Hudsonian ring, Birds in England. To reinforce his campaign with a number of hard-hitting books as well may have been Nicholson’s own intention from the start, but the initiative for that first one could equally well have been its publisher’s, on the look-out, as publishers so often are, for well-written and authoritative-sounding pieces in newspapers or magazines on topics that might gain in appeal by being developed at greater length. That alternative possibility is made the more likely by the fact that the firm in question, Chapman & Hall, had been the first to bring out the bird books of both Dixon and Hudson in turn. If it had been prepared to dart in with a book offer to an as yet unknown author, just as Sidgwick & Jackson similarly seems to have darted in to snap up Elton’s Animal Ecology, gambling on being in the van of a profitable new trend, that might explain the otherwise eyebrow-raising failure of the dominant force in the market for bird books, Witherby, in allowing such a seemingly appropriate catch to elude it. In view of Nicholson’s personal closeness to Harry Witherby and their shared enthusiasm for the developments Nicholson was writing about, the absence of the Witherby imprint from either that or its two successors does indeed look anomalous at first sight. Alternatively, Dent might have been expected to be interested, especially as the book’s illustrations were by Eric Fitch Daglish, with whom that firm had such a lastingly close relationship.

Probably, though, the simple explanation is that Nicholson’s writings did not conform to the depressingly fixed idea held by the inter-war book trade that ‘natural history’ had worthwhile commercial potential only if pitched at an elementary level scientifically or else as a contribution to a genre that veered towards belles-lettres. Certainly, the fact that all four of Nicholson’s books came from different publishers, and those all marginal firms as far as natural history was concerned, suggests that at least the last three may have been difficult to place. The second one, How Birds Live, which closely followed the first, in 1927,was taken by the academic house of Williams & Norgate, though Kegan Paul would have been a more predictable choice in view of the special attention this volume gave to behaviour and to the theories of Eliot Howard; it evidently sold well enough to earn itself a second edition two years later, moreover. The Study of Birds in 1929, on the other hand, came out in Benn’s ‘Sixpenny Library’, while The Art of Bird-Watching, which brought up the rear in 1931, surely deserved better than a place in a series on sports and pastimes, in which such an admirably comprehensive guide for the more or less uninitiated on how to set about the study (with even a chapter on ecology) might easily have been overlooked by those best able to profit from it.

Yet had at least the majority of those books not been published, it would have been a grievous loss, for however well or poorly they did in the event sell, they reached sufficient of their intended readership to win many converts to the new-style field ornithology and thereby considerably speeded its development. When James Fisher a generation later penned a warm tribute to ‘the pioneer books of the “fact-finding” school … in starting us all bird-watching’, two of Nicholson’s quartet, How Birds Live and The Art of Bird-Watching, were the only ones to be singled out by name—and hardly anyone else can have been better qualified than that subsequent author of the bestselling Watching Birds to deliver that verdict. There can indeed have been very few occasions in the annals of natural history when a small group of books has made so forceful a contribution to overturning a prevailing mind-set and replacing it with another.

Valuable and highly effective though that populist crusading of Nicholson’s was, however, it was equally important to ensure that those already actively engaged in studying birds by the traditional approaches were kept abreast of the changing state of knowledge with periodic authoritative overviews. While Harry Witherby’s magazine British Birds was performing that role to a certain extent, major compendia between hard covers were clearly required as well, and another of those was manifestly due as soon as the war was over.

Initially issued in parts in 1919–24, to make up into two volumes, A Practical Handbook of British Birds was undisguisedly an updated version of The British Bird Book of 1910–13 that had met the needs of the generation just before but which was already glaringly out of date. Repeating the pattern of that predecessor, the newcomer again consisted of separately authored sections on various broad aspects contributed by acknowledged authorities. Of the six of those this time, the increasingly ubiquitous Witherby provided one in addition to acting as the overall editor. As with any account of a local fauna or flora, not least of the benefits of such a work were the many gaps in knowledge that it revealed and the stimulus to fill those that it provided. Sadly, though, it completely outclassed a third edition of Howard Saunders’ Manual, on which Eagle Clarke had been labouring by then for many years with characteristic thoroughness as soon as his classic book on bird migration was out of the way. Gurney & Jackson, the inheritors of Van Voorst’s business, must have felt in duty bound to keep in print a work that had been specially close to their former employer’s heart, descending as it did from his very first success; publication in 1927, however, so closely in the wake of such a rival, can have done the new ‘Saunders’ no commercial good.

The Practical Handbook passed out of print in 1934, by which time research on British birds had again raced ahead in numerous directions and a replacement for that in turn was beginning to look overdue. Though it clearly made good sense for that to bear a similar title, to emphasise the continuity, the wisdom of retaining the word ‘handbook’ for a work that this time ballooned to five fat volumes was perhaps questionable. Nevertheless, it was as The Handbook of British Birds that the predictably nominated successor made its gradual and stately appearance in 1938–41, to be justly acclaimed as ‘unrivalled for excellence in any country’ (Fig. 173). Witherby had again been prime mover, forcefully seconded by another veteran, F. C. R. Jourdain (Fig. 174), but of the earlier team of six authors the only others that had further innings were Tucker and N. F. Ticehurst. Witherby’s family firm was again the publisher.

The Handbook had two particularly welcome additional features. One was the more complete depiction of plumages, which could luckily be done economically by repeating the relevant colour plates that had already appeared in a Dutch work. The other was the much fuller coverage of field characters, represented by sections contributed by Tucker and Jourdain on display and posturing and by Tucker alone on habitat and voice. Those reflected the attention those two had been devoting to developing, and then inculcating, a field routine that was designed to ensure that sufficient details on these points were noted down on the spot to enable sight records to be acceptable in the absence of a specimen. The Oxford Ornithological Society had served as the testing-ground for that, and its subsequent wide adoption, induced especially by the rigorousness of the screening to which claimed sightings of rarities were subjected by Witherby and his fellow editors of British Birds, not only greatly improved the average standard of field identification but also served notice on the book trade in Britain that pocket guides in the future were going to be expected to have taken into account the additional features that this major innovation implied.

***

In depressing contrast, progress on the equivalent botanical front, the study of the flowering plants and ferns by the traditional, non-experimental approaches, continued to be frustratingly slow. Taxonomic activity was as vigorous as ever, but in many of the difficult areas it was hard to move forward convincingly without assistance from genetics, cytology, the application of statistical techniques or the conducting of cultivation experiments, and until that assistance came it was substantially a matter of marking time. Organisationally, the death in 1932 of the by then octogenarian G. C. Druce, the Oxford-based retired pharmacist who (in the face of much controversy and with the aid of a constitutional vacuum) had built one of the two small exchange clubs into a substantial society that was nevertheless a personal fiefdom, had allowed that to be rescued from the Edwardian time-warp in which he had kept it locked. Various groups and individuals who till then had held aloof had now come together and were combining to turn it into a national scientific society of an orthodox type. In particular, the registering and publishing of vice-county records was being overhauled and rescued in turn from the confusingly inaccurate basis on which Druce had left it in his posthumously published Comital Flora of the British Isles, the latest in a series of major updatings to H. C. Watson’s Topographical Botany. Filling the blanks in the picture that Watson himself had left back in 1874 was another area of activity that had retained its popularity, just as the compiling of local Floras had as well. There too, even so, horizons were still unenthrallingly limited and the pace plodding, albeit steady.

Nevertheless, the central problem remained the glaring lack of an up-to-date national Flora, let alone one in any way approaching the comprehensiveness of the Handbook of British Birds (which would have required the completion of the yet-to-be revived ‘Biological Flora of the British Isles’). That lack was being felt all the more acutely now that the universities were returning to providing students with instruction in plant identification and found there was no text suited to their purposes more recent than the 1884 revision of J. D. Hooker’s Student’s Flora of the British Isles. A text was needed in any case that took account of the copious new data that had begun to accrue from ecological and other sources, the incorporation of which could enable species entries to extend more stimulatingly beyond the traditional rather arid staple of a description followed by a terse line or so on distribution. It was also a serious handicap that no work existed of sufficient authoritativeness and in such general use that its taxonomy and nomenclature could serve as a lingua franca between botanists of all levels and interests. Though ‘Bentham and Hooker’ continued to have a large and loyal following, for want of any competitor offering the same combination of very full descriptions, dichotomous keys and a supposedly complete species coverage—to say nothing of line-drawings that could be painted-in—that had long ceased to be acceptable to the taxonomically sophisticated, even supposing that its volume of illustrations could be kept out of the hands of students. Indeed, its persistence had even become positively harmful, in its perpetuation of a scientifically unjustifiable divison into ‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’, giving encouragement to ‘Bent-hooks’ (as some of its more dedicated users had lightheartedly taken to calling themselves) to keep their eyes firmly closed to the many pockets of complexity whose existence Bentham had airily denied or discounted.

In 1930, in a laudable attempt to bridge that divide, a supplementary volume to ‘Bentham and Hooker’, with the title of Further Illustrations of British Plants, was produced for Reeves by R. W. Butcher, a professional freshwater biologist in whom a plant-hunting passion had failed to be eliminated by a laboratory training. Designed to be bought as a companion volume to the existing pair and given a matching appearance to those externally, this was nevertheless radically different from those internally in having the line-drawings and the species descriptions placed side by side, which was a marked improvement in convenience if at the expense of disqualifying the volume for teaching purposes (at any rate in theory). On the assumption that the new set of line-drawings, by Florence Strudwick, Fitch having long since died, would also attract painting-in, paper of a thickness suitable for that was thoughtfully chosen as well.

In undertaking the very considerable labour that putting together a work of even such a limited scope entailed, Butcher hoped that by dressing numbers of ‘splits’ in the reassuringly familiar ‘Bentham and Hooker’ livery he could overcome the conventional refusal to consider anything mentally consigned to that category, with the result that some at least would become assimilated to the Benthamite canon almost without being noticed. It was an ingenious idea, but he hardly helped matters by selecting many of the ‘splits’ for that purpose from two groups that had only just recently been the subject of taxonomic revisions (one of them by himself) and had not yet had time to receive proper critical assessment—which, as it turned out, was definitively adverse. Nevertheless, undaunted, Butcher embarked on a mammoth version of ‘Bentham and Hooker’ in its entirety on that same text-alongside-figures model. But even after slashing the descriptions and sacrificing all the keys, the result was two volumes of such a thickness as to be extremely cumbersome to handle and prohibitively heavy to take into the field. Those defects apart, however, A New Illustrated British Flora had in any case been fatally overtaken by events by the time it eventually appeared in 1961 from the firm of Leonard Hill.

Almost 30 years earlier, in 1933, not long after Butcher had come up with his supplement to ‘Bentham and Hooker’, and possibly indeed provoked by that, a renewed attempt had been set in train at filling that same embarrassing hole with an altogether new work of a sufficiently high standard and authoritativeness to dominate the field without fear of challenge for a generation to come. So formidable had the size of that task become with the passing of the years, however, that it was obvious to all that it was achievable only by drawing heavily on the current national stock of expertise in the many difficult groups. Once again, though, the only way of doing that that had commended itself was to invite the specialists themselves to contribute accounts of their respective groups. Yet, as the ill-fated Cambridge British Flora ought to have served as a warning, that introduced an extra layer of potential delay and discord, which only a great deal of tact and chivvying could hope to overcome. The more obvious weaknesses of that predecessor—its multivolume character and the fact that it was ‘largely an artificial erection founded upon a set of over-rated drawings’ (in the words of one reviewer)—nevertheless loomed so large that the major contribution to that failure made by that choice of such a cumbersome way of proceeding was insufficiently appreciated. As a result, the attempt to produce a ‘New Student’s British Flora’ (as this latest project came to be called) was to end up even more of a fiasco in its turn.

The instigator of this one is known to have been Bristol University’s then professor of botany, MacGregor Skene, the author of a subsequently well-received Flower Book for the Pocket for a new Oxford University Press series already mentioned. It was presumably in that context that he repeatedly drew to the attention of that publisher’s scholarly offshoot, the Clarendon Press, the opening that existed for an academic equivalent, the 90-year reign of Babington’s Manual of British Botany being seemingly at last over and its only two competitors so out of date as to be salvageable only by being written all-afresh. Such further soundings as the Clarendon took must have led it to conclude that taxonomy in the universities had fallen to such a low ebb that it was only in the government service that potential authors with the requisite authoritative knowledge by then existed. The two names that would particularly have come up in that connection were those of A. J. Wilmott, deputy keeper of botany in the British Museum (Natural History), whose expertise on European vascular plants was without rival in Britain, and J. S. L. Gilmour (Fig. 175), who had recently exchanged a university post—Moss’s old one at Cambridge, as it chanced—for the assistant directorship of Kew. Both had the added credentials of having been brought on to the general committee of the newly reconstituted Botanical Society and Exchange Club, which promised close relations with most of the leading amateurs. The two thus seemed at first sight the obvious choices as joint editors of the proposed work, and the Clarendon Press accordingly approached them.

Unfortunately, it was far from clear at that point how demanding that role was likely to be. Though the two both took the precaution of making their acceptance conditional on their being released from their official duties to the extent that might be necessary, it is hard to believe that their respective directors would have assented to that as airily as they seem to have done had they appreciated what editorship in this particular case might involve. The Clarendon, for its part, evidently viewed that assent as a mere formality, for otherwise it would surely not have made the fatal error of not securing it in detail in writing. For, as soon became all too apparent, Wilmott and Gilmour both already had heavy commitments in other directions that they were unable or unwilling to shed or cut down. That Wilmott was notorious for inconstancy in his research enthusiasms did not bode well, either. To make matters worse, on deciding that an independent chairman was desirable of an editorial committee that would otherwise consist of those two official representatives of what were to some extent rival institutions, the Clarendon chose for that position someone fully as heavily committed as well. This was Tansley, the current occupant of Oxford’s botanical chair. Though the Clarendon was probably unaware that taxonomy was not his forte—to the extent that he was unable to put names in the field to all but the very commonest species, as he once confessed—that was not necessarily a disqualification for the role envisaged; it ought, however, to have known that he continued to edit the Journal of Ecology, was deep into a massive culminating monograph and on top of those had the innumerable other calls on his time that the head of a university department and a scholar of international reputation is sure to be prey to.

At their first meeting the three agreed at once that any work intended for use in the field had to consist of a single volume, and one moreover compact enough to be carried and consulted with ease. Fifteen shillings (about £45 in today’s money) was reckoned the maximum students could be expected to pay for a personal copy, but a preliminary calculation suggested that was feasible if 2,000 or so species could be covered satisfactorily in not more than half that number of pages. An unknown factor, however, was the possibly idiosyncratic demands on space made by some of the numerous outside specialists from whom it was decided accounts of many of the more complicated groups needed to be commissioned. Initially, Wilmott had revealed that he had long been intending to produce such a work and believed he was already capable of producing most of those accounts himself—as well as drafting the greater part of the remaining text. The other two had naturally jumped at that offer, but when it emerged that the number of groups in need of specialist attention could be as many as 83, it was tactfully agreed to lighten his load by ‘farming out’ 30 of them without more ado.

With those key decisions taken, the three thereupon sat back with relief—and for three years nothing more noticeably happened. No invitations to that 30 went out because of prolonged uncertainty about what to offer them in the way of remuneration. The publisher hoped a free copy of the eventual book would be acceptable, but the other two feared that some of the lengthier accounts could not be secured without some financial inducement as well and thought the sum might need to vary. The matter was finally resolved by giving the editors discretion to pay a sum they judged appropriate in special cases only.

When at last the specialist contributors had all been signed up—and those 30 eventually grew to an even more unwieldy 44—a battle broke out over which of several alternative classifications was the most desirable one to use. Perhaps fearful of further fractiousness, the editors thereafter chose to keep aloof and desisted from pressing for the stipulated nine-month deadline for submitting of the first drafts to be kept. Unsurprisingly, the result was that very little was in a publishable state by the time the Second World War broke out and effectively sent the project into storage for the duration. On its retrieval from that in April 1945, the dispirited conclusion was come to that publication remained still five or even 10 years off, and only a few months later the project seems to have been quietly laid to rest.

The coup-de-grâce had doubtless been the news that three university teachers who had been contemporaries at Cambridge, A. R. Clapham, T. G. Tutin (Fig. 176) and E. F. Warburg, more desperate than ever for that long-promised student text, were preparing one themselves, at the instance of a disillusioned Tansley and under the rival colours of Cambridge University Press (an influential position in which was held by an enthusiastic field botanist in the person of R. W. David). By sidestepping any farming-out and merely seeking guidance from specialists as necessary, that new team was to win that botanical version of the University Boat Race by a good many lengths, reducing the time from start to publication, in 1952, to just seven years. Indeed it would appear to have been substantially complete four years earlier than that, to judge from the date printed beneath the page of acknowledgements. Much of the credit for that speed was due to Tutin, as his two collaborators were at pains to make clear in a separate note: not only had he written a substantial part of the text himself, but he had taken on as well the onerous role of general editor, urging the other two on ‘when we flagged’. The most purely a taxonomist of the three, Tutin found the experience of that role so bracing that it was to lead straight on to his initiating of the huge Flora Europaea project.

The Flora of the British Isles (as it was boldly titled, or ‘CTW’, as it quickly became more readily referred to) was even so, for all its numerous merits, hardly the ‘usable tool for the ordinary student’ that Tutin had defensively promised at the outset that it would be—in contrast to ‘the big Flora’ then still theoretically in preparation. Rather, it was the up-to-date, taxonomically rigorous national Flora for which the field-botany community had been waiting so disgracefully long. For even though it was the single, compact volume of octavo size that everyone was agreed to be essential for teaching purposes, that had been achieved only by printing its more than 1,200 pages on the thinnest paper practicable, which soon turned out to be too flimsy for a work needing to be consulted very frequently, including in the open air. It was also undeniably quite ‘big’ itself, heavy in the hand and hardly an ignorable burden in a backpack. ‘Lugging’ is the word that students of the time now tend to use in calling it back to memory. It would only be when a less expensive, slimmed-down version was produced in 1959, as the Excursion Flora of the British Isles - and that only after the initial one had been reprinted twice and a four-volume set of illustrations (by Sybil J. Roles) perhaps superfluously been embarked upon - that the kind of class book for less advanced students envisaged in the first place arrived at long last, after a wait of 29 years.

The work that had gone into the abortive ‘New Student’s Flora’ was by no means entirely wasted, however. Most of the contributions that were in the event written were subsequently to find their way into print in other forms in a variety of places. Perhaps its least-known yet most enduring legacy, though, was that eventual lineup of 44 specialists in particular groups. The existence of that proved irresistible to the new regime concerned to steer the Botanical Society and Exchange Club into more scientifically productive waters, and all 44 accepted that body’s invitation to double up as a panel of referees to whom its members could submit specimens for determination. Continued and expanded over the years since, that panel in its present guise consists of just short of 100 individuals, each willing to bring his or her expertise to bear on rather more than that number of ‘groups’, an elastic term which covers anything from a single species up to genera and even entire families. In a subject like natural history there are always plenty of opportunities for recycling, surreptitiously or otherwise.

CHAPTER 20
New Naturalists

THE VICISSITUDES OF THE book trade during the Second World War were in some ways similar to those it had undergone in 1914–18 and the immediate aftermath, but in others they were sharply different. As before, paper was a prime victim of the cutbacks in imports that became necessary and increasingly severe. This time, however, who received what was decided by the government instead of being left to market forces and uncoordinated with national needs in other directions. In order to operate a scheme that had an economic rationale, the pattern obtaining on the outbreak of war was assumed to be a reasonable reflection of firms’ proportional requirements, and publishers were accordingly awarded allocations based on the amount they had used for books issued in the 12 months up to August 1939. As it was unknown how long hostilities would last or rationing would need to, little or no flexibility was built in to allow for fluctuations in market share as time went on: as in a game of pass-the-parcel, whoever chanced to be prospering at the moment the music stopped did well under the scheme and vice versa. In other words, the market was artificially frozen for the duration (and for three further years beyond that, as it would turn out, as a result of the subsequent sterling crisis), additional entrants were effectively precluded, and cumulative distortions were liable to develop. At first the ration was a not too uncomfortable 60 per cent; soon, however, 50 per cent was found to be necessary, and for a period, when bringing in supplies from Scandinavia ceased to be practicable, a low of 30 per cent was reached. Within the static framework that applied to individual allocations, there were thus also major unpredictable swings affecting the trade as a whole.

As before, too, educational books were singled out for indulgent treatment. Deciding which titles fell into that category cannot have been easy, though, and it was fortunately not equated with those intended just for classroom use. Warne’s ‘Observer’s Books’ were an important beneficiary.

But even the educational publishers were not spared the other exigencies characteristic of wartime that descended all-afresh. Once again, publishers and booksellers lost many of their staff, not just to the services this time but also, as they were not ‘reserved occupations’, to alternative forms of civilian employment that rated higher priority, and once again, too, the consequent manpower shortages pushed up wages. Production and transport hold-ups meanwhile made it hard to guarantee that orders would be met, and for that reason some publishers felt obliged to dispense with their travellers.

On the other hand, the amount of physical destruction that the book trade suffered was entirely without precedent—at any rate since London’s Great Fire of 1666. In just a single night in December 1940, at the height of the Blitz, intensive bombing of the streets around St Paul’s Cathedral, for three centuries the heart of British book publishing, totally obliterated the warehouses and offices of no fewer than 17 firms. Printers and binders did not escape, either. Six million volumes were lost by Simpkin Marshall alone, the wholesaler on which the trade had come to depend too heavily for comfort. During that winter as a whole, 20 million books are reckoned to have gone up in flames, almost all of them in just the last few nights of the year.

As bookshops and public libraries and schools suffered destruction from bombing in their turn and agitated for replacement of their stocks, the paper rationing severely limited what could be done. A national book famine was the consequence. Yet, because of the black-out, of reduced opportunities for evening entertainment outside the home and, above all, of long spells of inactivity off-duty for those in the services, people wanted to read and read on a scale that the trade had previously only dreamt of. Publishers with the necessary paper to spare pounced on manuscripts that they would previously have turned down with little more than a glance. Booksellers found that even titles they might ordinarily have had little hope of moving disappeared from their shelves with dumbfounding rapidity. The second-hand dealers were glad to buy almost anything they were offered that was in a tolerable condition—and paid uncommonly well for it.

The one drawback to the indiscriminate character of that boom was that the trade patterns that obtained in normal times became substantially buried, which laid up trouble for the future. In particular, the ability to distinguish genuine trends in taste was lost. The shops had been full of inter-war titles, and the ease with which those were now selling gave rise to the mistaken assumption that that particular mix was an accurate reflection of what the public preferred to buy and read. As James Fisher was later to observe, publishers were slow to realise that the soaring popularity of books on bird-watching was a development quite separate from, and independent of, that general wartime surge in custom. When eventually they did grasp its distinctness, there was a rush into print with titles on that subject, many of those written or compiled in obvious haste. Out of 100 bird books that came out in 1943–8, only half were in his view sufficiently honest and thorough to be rated ‘worth while’. From that he concluded that probably about a quarter of the paper made available for books on birds, during a period in which that material was rationed, had been ‘devoted to worthless work, by uncritical or uncaring publishers’.

The impressively large and steady sale achieved by Fisher’s own Penguin book, Watching Birds, following its appearance in such a seemingly inauspicious year as 1940, can have left him in little doubt that the second wind that natural history had found for itself in the 1930s had provided it with exceptional staying-power. What is more, so far from so specific a field of interest being stifled by war concerns, it looked like standing to gain by serving as a refuge from those.

Evidence soon mounted that that intuition was shared in a diversity of quarters. In 1941, for example, Thomas Nelson & Sons confidently brought out a reprint of the 1938 edition of Kirkman and Jourdain’s British Birds, with 200 luscious colour plates (from paintings mostly by A. W. Seaby) repeated from The British Bird Book that Kirkman had edited on the eve of the first war. Hardly a wartime economy gesture, that must have seemed to many a splendidly defiant assertion of continuity. In June of that same year, in a parallel piece of shoulder-shrugging, the Society for the Promotion of Nature Reserves convened a national conference on ‘Nature Preservation in Post-war Reconstruction’, which led to the setting-up a year later of the seminal Nature Reserves Investigation Committee and then to the consequent log-rolling that would culminate in the post-war creation of the Nature Conservancy. The end of 1943, when the fortunes of war seemed at last on the turn, saw the birth of the Council for the Promotion of Field Studies, the parent of the later chain of residential field centres—an initiative born appropriately of the wartime evacuation to the countryside of East Anglia of a London schools inspector.

More conspicuous by far than any of those, however, and no less far-reaching in its consequences for natural history, was the launching at one of the war’s lowest moments, nine months after Dunkirk, of the long-running ‘Britain in Pictures’ series. Conceived by an Austrian refugee, at a time when literary parading of the nation’s heritage was making its own special contribution to boosting national morale, and at a time also when new books were abnormally scarce, the sudden eruption of increasingly spectacular displays of almost skeletally thin octavo volumes on a great miscellany of topics made the hoped-for profound impression and met with immediate commercial success. In essence, it was tantamount to a set of omnibuses broken down into their individual components and sold off cheaply. Each volume ran to a mere 48 pages of choice prose by seasoned writers plus a plentiful sprinkling of eight colour and up to 20 black-and-white illustrations (none of them original and some long-familiar). Full-page colour plates in a work priced at a comparatively trivial four shillings and sixpence was the key feature, for it represented an astonishing bargain at that period. Not unexpectedly, with colour accorded such a prominent role, six of the volumes were devoted to different branches of natural history, of which the one on birds was to sell nearly 100,000 copies. Later, in 1946, those were the subject of a reverse confection and re-published as an omnibus, under the title Nature in Britain, with a preface by one of the six authors, Geoffrey Grigson, and sold at a handsome discount to what the individual titles would have cost when bought initially.

Apart from again opening publishers’ eyes to the mouthwatering sales figures that well-conceived books on birds had become capable of achieving, ‘Britain in Pictures’ also played a significant role in bringing together several of the key figures behind the subsequent ‘New Naturalist Library’. Not only were both of the same parentage, the product of a crucial collaboration between a specialist in colour-printing techniques, Wolfgang Foges, and a large publishing house of long standing, the Glasgow-based William Collins Sons & Co., much envied by its competitors for its strength on the retail front (by virtue of being a major producer of stationery as well), but half of the authors of the ‘Britain in Pictures’ natural history titles would go on to write volumes for its successor; two of those, what is more, James Fisher and John Gilmour, were to be members of the latter’s editorial board too.

***

The ‘New Naturalist’ series has been fortunate to find in Peter Marren a recent historian of admirable lucidity and thoroughness, for which reason no more than a bare outline of its origin and development needs repeating here.

On the face of it, Collins was hardly a likely firm to take the place of Witherby as the dominant force in the natural history book market for the twentieth century’s second half. For throughout its well over a century’s existence, until those wartime years it seems to have made not the slightest attempt to move into the subject, even despite a strong educational list early on. In the previous two decades it had come to the fore as a general publisher of impressive breadth, but it was with crime novels and detective stories that it had particularly made its mark. It so chanced, however, that the fifth William Collins to rise to the top tier of the family firm (to become in 1945 its chairman) had a personal fondness for country life that spilled over into natural history and extended to acquiring some of the most beautiful works on that to have been published in the past. We have his own word for it that he had long nursed an ambition to bring out a series of just the kind that was to emerge; but, if an in-house legend is to be believed, it was the firm’s possession of a stock of a desirably larger size of Kodachrome film, then virtually unobtainable in Britain, that finally jolted that ambition into reality.

At that early point in the war Collins was better placed than most of its competitors when paper rationing was brought in, thanks to the high sales many of its titles had enjoyed in the late 1930s. Though it lost its London warehouse in the Blitz in 1940, and had to replace its West End office when later that was destroyed too, it was lucky that its manufacturing capacity was located far away from the capital, in the comparative safety of Scotland. Its printing machines there remained as hungry as ever for the long runs that maximised their profitability, and major book series were a good way of satisfying that insatiable appetite. A second one, to supplement ‘Britain in Pictures’, was thus a production imperative—and natural history suggested itself as the subject by reason of the scope it offered for deploying the secret weapon, the large-format Kodachrome.

In the spring of 1942 Billy Collins (as he was more familiarly known) and his associate, Foges, approached Julian Huxley to seek his preliminary reaction to the novel form they envisaged that the series they were contemplating might take (Fig. 177). Huxley by that time had left the university world for the secretaryship of the Zoological Society of London and through extensive writing and broadcasting had risen to public prominence as an expounder of current trends in the biological sciences; he would thus have occurred to the two as a good choice as a sounding-board, even if he had not been earlier in his career (as they may possibly not have realised) the teacher and inspirer of several obvious potential authors of the particular kind of books they had in mind. Huxley would have lost no time in pointing out that James Fisher was only one of a quite a number who were capable of communicating intelligibly and enthusiastically to a reasonably informed lay readership the newly developed breadth of vision and the rush of findings coming through from the more solidly scientific forms of field study now in the ascendant. However, he is known to have needed some persuading that the reproduction of colour photographs was yet good enough to justify using them to support a natural history series on the extensive scale contemplated (30–50 per book, as would initially prove to be the case).

By the following January an editorial board had been set up and begun meeting every two months. Chaired by Billy Collins himself in so far as his other responsibilities would permit, this had an outside membership of five: four scientists plus a photographic editor. As the last of those, Eric Hosking had been the obvious choice, just as Huxley had been as one of the four others. Fisher, Huxley’s one-time pupil and subsequent collaborator and protégé, had seemed a ‘must’ too, even though that meant a heavy over-representation of vertebrate zoology (and ornithology more particularly). To cover the earth sciences L. Dudley Stamp had been another easy choice, especially given his growing involvement in government planning, but though an invertebrate zoologist might have been thought to have as strong a claim to the fifth place as a botanist, that in the event went to Gilmour, a plant systematist whom Huxley had worked with and found like-minded.

The outside members were reasonably well remunerated for their services, but their editorial loads were proportionally onerous—perhaps more onerous than some were given to expect at the outset. When, within only the next year or two, career moves landed both Huxley and Gilmour with crushing administrative burdens professionally, there were signs that the latter at least was struggling to cope. As that move had taken him from British field botany into international horticulture, he might perhaps have dropped out at that juncture had the board not rated continuity in its membership more important than having a modicum of turnover. Huxley’s seniority and scientific weightiness placed him in a special category, but increasingly his function of de facto managing editor had to pass over to the indefatigable Fisher. In due course that role was to culminate in Fisher’s appointment as advisory overseer of Collins’ by then fast-expanding natural history list as a whole. Though he was to leave in 1954 to run a firm of educational publishers (in partnership with the ever-present Foges), he nevertheless carried on as a ‘New Naturalist’ editor as industriously and as devotedly as ever, his record term brought to a close only by his untimely death, in 1970, when not yet out of his fifties.

By the time the editorial board lost that final member of its original team of outsiders, an astonishing 70 titles—including 21 monographs—had passed into print (Fig. 178). At the outset Billy Collins had contemplated 36 at the most and doubtless thought even that figure audacious (as his competitors would certainly have done), but the others had considered that faint-hearted and insisted on 50 as the target. As these words are being written, however, the total, even exclusive of the monographs, is soaring well past the 100 mark.

Fundamental to what has proved to be one of the outstanding success stories of post-war British book publishing was the perfect timing of the start. When the first titles appeared late in 1945, naturalists in these islands had been subsisting for nearly three decades by then on a sadly unnourishing diet, made up in large part of one identification handbook after another, nearly all confined to the same limited stretches of the fauna and flora and all too monotonously similar. Almost any major departure from that would have been well received, but the reception was bound to be all the more enthusiastic after the end of a lengthy war and when fresh beginnings were on just about every menu. The sudden arrival in the shops of these meaty-looking, scientifically authoritative volumes of an arrestingly unfamiliar type, less expensive than they appeared at first glance, with lively-looking jackets and, above all, with up to 40 colour photographs, had all the shock effect that had been hoped for.

The series was also well timed in a second and quite different way—and luckier in that than anyone in those years can have suspected. Ecology, the scientific discipline central to the ‘new natural history’ that this set of volumes was intended to embody and demonstrate, was then still at a stage in its development when its language and methods were not yet so discordant with those of the average intelligent person without biological training as to constitute a serious barrier to communication. The authors of most of the earlier volumes had been members of the student generation that came to the new, more rigorously scientific forms of fieldwork straight from teenage years spent passionately engaged in basically similar, just less advanced versions of those. They were in essence still field naturalists of the traditional kind at heart, and a strong sense of kinship with those for whom they wrote their volumes very noticeably survived. By the 1960s, however, ecology ‘had begun to creep back indoors’ (in the words of Peter Marren), having taken a generally more abstract turn, ‘obsessed with checks and balances, inputs and outputs, models and statistics.’ Opportunities of pursuing it as a specialist career had so improved in the meantime that its practitioners were now numerous enough to constitute a coherent body of professionals, wearing that different intellectual uniform and in the habit of addressing mostly one another. For these newcomers, writing for a lay readership came distinctly less easily.

Apart from the excellent timing, hardly less crucial to the success of the series was the fact that its publisher was one with resources of the massiveness and the confidence born of long experience that Collins had. It is hard to believe that any other house at that particular juncture could have matched its combination of plentiful paper, ample production capacity and sheer promotional muscle—even without that plus of colour reproduction without equal in Britain just then for such quality at such a price. It is hard to believe, too, that a smaller, less solidly based firm would have dared to raise the initial print order for the first titles no less than fourfold, as Collins did, merely on the strength of the amount of interest shown ahead of publication. It probably even helped that Collins had never concerned itself with natural history until those wartime years, for that meant fewer and looser preconceptions to have to shed. It also made for greater readiness to seek and rely on the guidance of outsiders with the relevant specialist knowledge combined with track records of addressing, in print and on the air, the particular section of the reading public that it was desired to reach. Indeed, the strikingly onerous, long-term involvement of so sizeable a team of non-staff editors of such a high calibre has been almost certainly without precedent in the natural history field. The only previous series to have attempted a comparably broad coverage of the subject with at all a similar thoroughness, Van Voorst’s ‘The Natural History of the British Islands’ of a century earlier, gives no evidence of having been conceived on so ambitious a scale from the outset. Rather, it appears to have been pieced together more or less haphazardly once the opening cluster of volumes had established a credible unity. That forerunner, in any case, had never been intended to be other than straightforwardly descriptive.

For all the stunning impact of its opening salvo, the ‘New Naturalist Library’ was nevertheless no different from most if not all ventures of the same sort in experiencing a marked fall-off in sales, in this case after four years, once the novelty had worn off and once the steady flow of further titles made it increasingly prohibitive for individuals—if not for institutions—to buy each one that came out. Whereas the very first two, E. B. Ford’s Butterflies and R. S. R. Fitter’s London’s Natural History, jointly sold 40,000 copies within a year of publication, such a rate quickly proved unsustainable. Apart from being the first off the starting line (and on topics of predictably high appeal, like the volume on hummingbirds selected to open Jardine’s ‘Naturalist’s Library’), that pair had the added advantage of an initial price well below the one that soon after became standard. Only one other title, indeed, was to sell more copies in hardback in the home market than the 53,000 eventually achieved by Butterflies – and that exception came about only because the volume in question chanced to double as a teaching text.

Such was the wave of optimism raised by the magnitude of that introductory response that the opportunity was taken to launch a series-within-a-series on the back of it. This consisted of monographs of individual species or groups, with one or two volumes on specialised topics of a broader character interspersed. Most of them smaller and slimmer than the volumes in the main series and (as it chanced) confined to zoology almost exclusively, the 22 members of this subordinate string, which trickled out, from 1948 till 1971, fulfilled expectations as a succès d’estime; however, with one conspicuous exception—The Salmon, which even went into a North American edition—they sold relatively poorly all along and some even failed to cover their high production costs. Another, even bolder initiative, Fisher’s New Naturalist magazine, also launched in 1948, sadly had a very much briefer existence, concluding without an explanation after only six numbers. For all its excellence it had seemingly been a misjudgement commercially.

By the 1960s competition from other publishers—and indeed from Collins’ own ventures into natural history in other directions—had greatly increased. From a wartime low that output in Britain of new natural history titles had rocketed by 1955 as much as sixfold. A high proportion of those were on birds, the result in particular of the revolution in the photographing of those brought about in the second half of the 1940s by the advent of high-speed flash, a technique which at last made the capturing of fast movement possible, that elusive dream since the days of the Kearton brothers. Improved cameras, lenses and film speed, to say nothing of much more work in colour, supplemented that breakthrough, which also happily coincided with the maturity of several specialists of outstanding skill in this line of work.

Much-reduced sales compared with the golden days of the series 20 years earlier inevitably found reflection in a thinning and more erratic procession of new titles and cuts in the ration of colour plates. The 1970s then brought a further wave of woes: the sudden, huge leap in cover prices enforced by the great inflation of those years and the deaths in turn of the two longstanding mainstays, first Fisher and later Billy Collins himself. By the end of that decade continuing was no longer justifiable on commercial grounds alone, and in 1984 cessation was seriously considered. Only pride and prestige kept the series afloat.

Eventually, though, after further vicissitudes and some rather desperate experimenting, the corner was turned in the mid-1990s. And with the aid of a progressive facelift, and especially thanks to resorting to cheap but high-quality printing newly available overseas, the by then venerable vessel was hauled back to buoyancy once again.

CHAPTER 21
Field Guides Aplenty

THE BOLD BREAK WITH the past that Collins made with the ‘New Naturalist Library’ was far from typical of the British book trade in the immediate post-war period. Rather, the 15 years following the end of paper rationing in 1949 tended to be a time of fumbling and uncertainty for the majority of publishing firms. As the historian of one of them has recollected of those years, ‘nobody knew what was normal’: how the market worked under peacetime conditions had become largely erased from collective memories by its grossly distorted wartime character, and much had to be learned quite afresh.

An early fright did not help. The worldwide commodity boom produced by American stockpiling in response to the outbreak of the Korean War in the summer of 1950 fed through into a 40 per cent rise in production costs in little more than 12 months. It looked for a time like 1919–21 all over again, only for the supply situation to right itself almost as rapidly as it had deteriorated in the first place.

Perhaps not surprisingly, quite a number of publishers seem to have chosen to play safe by looking backwards and simply adding to genres that had proved worthwhile in the past. The most extreme instance of that was the 12-volume The Birds of the British Isles, which the veteran Edinburgh firm of Oliver & Boyd—with Van Voorst’s heirs, Gurney & Jackson, newly tucked under its belt—gradually brought out, in the grand old part-work manner, in 1953–63. The mature fruit of a long partnership between two much-travelled individuals, the renowned wildlife artist George Lodge and an acknowledged expert on African ornithology, David Bannerman, this had been conceived in mid-war when the two were nearing the end of an almost equally massive compendium on the birds of tropical West Africa. Though already over eighty by then, Lodge nursed a still-unrealised ambition to paint all the species then on the British-cum-Irish list, a feat which called for 385 colour plates. The brushwork for all of those had nevertheless been finished by the time of his death in 1954, but the no less meticulous Bannerman had been trailing a good way behind with old-style, deliberately discursive and readable essays, some of them contributed by authorities on particular species, and 10 volumes at that point had still to appear. Fortunately, completion of the work was ensured by their having jointly vested the sum in a special trust set up for that purpose. Referred to today as ‘a sacred relic’, its price no less stupendous than its size, it possesses the additionally appetising challenge for would-be purchasers that the fifth volume, devoted to the birds of prey, is very much scarcer than the rest. With such a huge undertaking at last off their hands most authors would collapse on their laurels in protracted relief, but Bannerman promptly embarked on yet another multi-volume publication, on the birds of Macaronesia, his determination still magnificently unspent.

That there was still commercial mileage in the part-work tradition that had served natural history in the past so well was also convincingly demonstrated during much the same span of years by the superlative black-and-white Drawings of British Plants of Stella Ross-Craig, which George Bell & Sons started bringing out in 1948. Like Fitch with his long-admired line-drawings for Bentham’s Handbook a century earlier, another of Kew’s supreme practitioners of the highly specialised skill that botanical draughtmanship demands now showed what could be done in bringing that to bear on the local wild flowers—this time as a largely leisure occupation. Around 1,350 species in all were depicted, at the rate of nearly two a week, complete with that accompaniment of magnified floral and other details for which the Icones Plantarum, the periodical founded by the older Hooker in 1837, continued to set the standard. As always, though, artistic excellence does not come cheap: the 31 parts, originally priced at six shillings each, made up into eight volumes and came to a daunting outlay for the set in its entirety. That tended to restrict its ownership to institutional libraries rather than individuals. The parts were in any case too precious to risk in the field and, given also the absence of colouring and descriptive text, the work met the needs of the average plant-hunter unfortunately only for visual checks against specimens brought home. For that purpose, however, it still has no rival.

Admirable though both of those ventures were, the very traditional form they took could not help looking incongruous at a time when so much else on the natural history scene in Britain was subject to exciting innovations.

That one more great part-work with beautiful paintings was overshadowed, inevitably, by the transformation of wildlife photography by the advent of high-speed flash—or HSF, as it was generally referred to (after the wartime habit of concealing secret weapons behind initials). Though much ingenious experimenting with other forms of flash had taken place in the inter-war years, including the use of automatic trip-wires, it was not until intense brilliance of an extremely short duration was made realisable by the strobotron tube in the early 1940s that the long-awaited breakthrough, of ultra-sharp action pictures obtainable even at night, had come to pass. The requisite apparatus was field-friendly, what is more, though its initial tendency to inflict severe electric shocks made its adoption slower than it might otherwise have been. Once that defect was overcome, however, many converts were won, and by Eric Hosking’s eye-opening book, Birds in Action, in particular.

But it was by no means only flight in all its subtleties that could now be captured on film: the nocturnal activity of mammals could also be illuminated at last and made the subject of detailed, first-hand study. It was doubtless no coincidence that a marked revival of interest took place on the second of those fronts around that time, signalled by the founding of the Mammal Society of the British Isles in 1954, and the publication 10 years after that by Blackwell Scientific Publications of the first of the successive editions of H. N. Southern’s Handbook of British Mammals.Those were years, though, in which other neglected areas of natural history were similarly experiencing a resurgence in interest and similarly giving rise to new specialist societies and then to handbooks to meet their needs. The British Herpetological Society materialised in 1947, the British Phycological Society in 1952, the British Lichen Society in 1954. It was the 1830s all over again: as the numbers of naturalists multiplied there was a useful overspill into underpopulated areas.

Not all of the innovations then sweeping in were of a kind that generated books, at any rate as a principal or even major way of communicating with the public. That was especially true of the dazzling array of developments that flowed from the establishment of the Nature Conservancy in 1949. Conservation—that less defensive-sounding word that had been exchanged for ‘protection’ halfway through the war years—was to enter the domain of print more by way of reports, papers in scientific journals and articles in magazines and newspapers than as lengthy expositions between hard covers. The scientific aspects found appropriate outlets mainly in the types of literature that ecologists published in and read; the promotional and educational aspects mainly in periodicals addressed to other than professionals. Apart from rare exceptions, such as Marion Shoard’s 1980 broadside, The Theft of the Countryside, acreages of print hardly commended themselves as an effective campaigning medium. The very few other books addressed to the general public have tended to be broad magisterial surveys, particularly by the subject’s founding fathers, either outlining the programme—like Tansley’s Our Heritage of Wild Nature (with A Plea for Organized Nature Conservation as its more informative subtitle) published in 1945 by Cambridge University Press—or reviewing the concrete achievements at successive points in time. Among the latter have been Britain’s Nature Reserves, tossed off by Nicholson for Country Life Books in 1957, five years into his term as the Conservancy’s second director-general; L. Dudley Stamp’s posthumous Nature Conservation in Britain, published in the ‘New Naturalist’ series in 1969 (which sold scarcely better than the volume on spiders, not altogether surprisingly, for much of the news was distinctly stale by then and drab production did not help); an updating of Nicholson’s book by Peter Marren in the ‘Poyser Natural History’ series and, still more recently, a ‘New Naturalist’ volume by him as well, entitled simply Nature Conservation. The National Nature Reserves, which numbered 214 by 1987, have obviously been a major ingredient in the various topographical guides that have been produced to places of particular natural history interest. Otherwise, though, book readers have encountered the topic in innumerable incidental ways, at greater or lesser lengths, and perhaps most instructively in the many ‘New Naturalist’ and other volumes written by current or former employees of the various conservation bodies, drawing on research carried out as part of their professional work or in the interstices of that.

Thus, contrary to what many may have expected, the conservation movement has turned out to be a consumer of ‘hard-cover’ natural history rather than a producer—which indeed reflects the fact that the two tend to intersect at a certain angle, proceeding along complementary but separate courses.

***

Consequently, once again, it has been guides to identification that have occupied the centre of the stage since the 1950s. At first, Penguin Books gave promise of being the star performer on that, for on the back of its resounding success with Fisher’s Watching Birds in 1940 it had been building an ornithological list that included a four-volume series, Bird Recognition, from that same author in 1947–55 and Bird Watching for Beginners by Bruce Campbell in 1952. Meanwhile it had made one or two forays into the botanical field and is known to have commissioned an illustrated work on British wild flowers in 22 paperback volumes. Conceived in mid-war, when Penguin was very advantageously placed under paper rationing, that ambitious project may have owed its abandonment in 1949—when the first volume was in proof and the text for the next four already written—to the loss of that advantage when paper rationing in that year came to an end. But a more conclusive dashing of Penguin’s chances of dominating natural history publishing at the introductory level must have come with the arrival from Collins of the vanguard of that firm’s subsequent ever-growing array of field guides of a revolutionary type. For all its high reputation and ubiquitous presence, Penguin had no likelihood of competing successfully with those.

Confusingly, the term ‘field guide’ has come to be used in two different senses, a narrow and a broad one. If a (genuinely) pocket size, good illustrations, an authoritative text and a low price are taken as the genre’s defining features, then its ancestry could be traced back at least to the little work on British ferns by G. W. Francis in 1837 that kindled the fire that eventually flared up into the destructive national craze for collecting those plants. Colour illustrations being not then economically feasible at the price, Francis was able to get away with copperplate engravings thanks to his brother being the possessor of a printing plant. The volume sold out its first impression of 1,000 copies inside two years, which was no small achievement for a fairly learned handbook at that period.

Field guides in the narrow sense appeared first in the United States. They would have appeared somewhat earlier than April 1934 had not their artist originator, Roger Tory Peterson, had his prototype rejected by several firms before the prestigious Boston house of Houghton Mifflin very cautiously accepted it—so cautiously that no royalties were payable until it sold 1,000 (but those were the Depression years, it has to be remembered). Subtitled a Bird Book on a New Plan, A Field Guide to the Birds was designed to make identification ‘on the spot’ as quick and as confident as possible by directing the observer’s eye to just the basic essentials, indicating with arrows the principal visual characters crucial to recognition, giving emphasis in the painting to any distinctive colouring and showing comparative sizes and silhouettes. Peterson had been heavily influenced by Jourdain’s transatlantic counterpart, Ludlow Griscom, who since 1923 had been similarly urging ornithologists in America to switch to relying on ‘field marks’, but it needed a skilled painter with ample bird-watching experience of his own to translate that approach into a soundly based pictorial system. The book gratifyingly shocked the publisher by selling 2,000 copies in the first week. Well over three million have been bought since.

Had Eric Fitch Daglish only been a painter rather than a wood-carver, Britain might have had from him an equivalent of Peterson’s book instead of the cumbersome, bagatelle-like system of keys that he proffered in Name That Bird, in that very same year, 1934. A full decade and a half, however, passed before plans for something on the same lines for European birds were belatedly laid, after Guy Mountfort, a leading British bird-watcher with the sharp eye for innovations in display methods of the advertising executive that he otherwise was, made Peterson’s acquaintance at an ornithological gathering in Pennsylvania. On those two then learning that the editor of a low-level condensation for Witherby of The Handbook of British Birds, P. A. D. Hollom, already had in mind producing an all-Europe version of that, they proposed combining their efforts. After extensive travel on the Continent together, the pooled expertise of the three triumphantly came together as A Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, brought out by Collins, to much acclamation, in 1954.

Though not everyone may have realised at the time, that book was two historic firsts in one. It not only introduced the Peterson system of identification to the Old World at last, but in addition it heralded the great post-war widening in the horizons of British naturalists in general, as holidays lengthened in duration and adventurousness. Those would bring in their train a growing demand for comparable guides to the fauna or flora of ever more unfamiliar regions for which only rare and costly learned monographs had previously been available at best, if at all. More lucrative by far, though, were to be guides covering both the British Isles and some neighbouring region, typically Northern Europe, with a sufficiently high proportion of shared species for that to be feasible, as those provide opportunities for using the same set of illustrations for editions in one or more other languages—though for many European countries nowadays the English text is likely to be acceptable.

Just a year or so before that irresistibly comprehensive, pan-European pioneer volume, Collins had brought out as well The Pocket Guide to British Birds, the start of a long and seemingly unstoppable stream of variously innovative books in that same broad category to come from the hand of Richard Fitter (Fig. 181), some in collaboration (with R. A. Richardson, in this first instance), others by him alone.

Though costing the same as that semi-rival, even though obviously narrower in scope, this other one was nevertheless preferred by some of the less experienced, especially for its unorthodox grouping of the birds by colour, habitat and size, with a sparrow used ingeniously throughout as the standard for the last of those. Many-sided in his natural history interests, especially mindful from personal experience of what beginners found helpful or offputting, Fitter went on to partner a leading field botanist, David McClintock, in devising a comparable introductory work on wild flowers, in which this time the classification was according to flower colour; a Michelin-type star system to indicate the degree of rarity, prominence given throughout to the English names (many of them novel ones) and the provision of several keys, including even one to scents, were further enticing features. Though a botanical work in post-Victorian days could hardly hope to match the 130,000 copies its companion one on birds sold in its first 12 years, that too rewarded Collins even so more than satisfactorily over an extended period, attaining an eighth impression six years out from its launch in 1956. By 1972 the two had jointly passed the 400,000 mark, and it began to seem a bottomless well.

Of the multiplicity of pocket guides that have poured out since, of varying quality and from quite a range of authors, not all have been without their critics. Those illustrated throughout with colour photographs, a development which became feasible and fashionable by the later 1970s and of which Roger Phillips was the most prolific exponent initially, undeniably have superior directness, but for many botanists at any rate coloured drawings still have the edge in allowing details important for identification to be highlighted. Apart from the various defects that photographs taken under natural conditions can have, the relatively high cost of that form of illustration also has a tendency to be compensated for by inadequate accompanying descriptions. ‘Where-to-see-it’ guides, a longstanding variant of the genre, raise their own special grumble as well, for they have a built-in bias towards places or areas rich in rarities or in commoner ones in spectacular abundance.

Ironically, the field guide which has won the highest praise of all from botanists so far is one that enables plants to be identified when not in flower—thanks to its novelty of keys to them in their vegetative state, arranged by habitat. This is The Wild Flower Key, which Francis Rose produced in 1981 for Warne, drawing on an exceptional familiarity with those at all seasons and in a great diversity of conditions, much of it acquired by him in the course of over 50 years’ experience of teaching students in the field. After being continuously in print for a quarter of a century, that was eventually overhauled by the author in collaboration with Clare O’Reilly, and reissued in an updated, more comprehensive and more user-friendly edition in 2006.

Yet for all the ingenuity and expertise that has gone into working out new ways of enabling the less advanced to identify the birds or the wild flowers or the butterflies and larger moths, disappointingly little of that brainpower by comparison has been devoted to trying to rescue the less mainstream fields of study from relative neglect. As the popularity of bird-watching has continued to grow and grow, the already lopsided shape of natural history has become all the more glaring and scientifically unhelpful. By the end of the 1930s, the need for ecologists and increasingly conservationists, to say nothing of students on field courses, to be able to identify animals and plants of all kinds, had begun to force a range of national bodies, among them the Systematics Association, the Linnean Society, the Royal Entomological Society and the Field Studies Council, to take action to remedy the acutely felt deficiency in that respect. Even if a reasonably up-to-date monograph of a particular group happened to exist, it probably cost more than the average student or amateur could afford and might be too cumbersome for repeated quick checks in any case. Introductory guides, on the other hand, were not at that period generally considered commercially viable for any study without a largish public following, and any that did exist were likely to be too low-level, lack keys and have inadequate descriptions and species coverage. Accordingly a new class of intermediate literature was conjured into being, at the instance of the natural history community itself. One or two of those initiatives would eventually attract commercial distributors and even a Research Council grant or two, but those lay well in the future.

Warne, to its great credit, was the one firm to make a major effort to help fill that gap. It was a niche role it was increasingly obliged to play, as it came to recognise that it was insufficiently resourced to compete successfully any longer in the more densely occupied stretches of the market in which it had prospered in less demanding days. Traditionally a rigorous parer of costs in the Lizars mould, it had become accustomed to economising on illustrations, in particular by reviving the colour plates of earlier part-works. Though it resorted to that solution as late as 1959, in equipping a guide to the beetles with reprocessed plates from Canon Fowler’s great monograph of three-quarters of a century before, it was not a practice likely to be indefinitely sustainable in the era of colour photographs. Even so, taking short cuts in production was obviously pardonable in the case of desperately needed introductory works that might never otherwise have appeared in print (for the Ray Society would probably have looked at them askance). Authors came to Warne in the knowledge that it offered the only realistic hope of having a book of such a type published and were ready to fall in with whatever the finely calculated economics involved were reported to require.

It is in niche firms, moreover, that major developments sometimes originate, their potential overlooked or discounted by mainstream competitors. In 1937, Warne had the good judgement to take on The Dragonflies of the British Isles, till then a group curiously disregarded, in spite of their beauty and conspicuousness. The author of that, the widely travelled Cynthia Longfield, from the Anglo-Irish landed background that has given rise to a disproportionate number of naturalists over the years, had turned herself into an authority on those insects from a self-taught start and had an excellent feel for what was required to set beginners going. Despite the handicap of a disgracefully uninspiring set of illustrations, her book acted as the starting gun for what has proved to be a long-running publishers’ relay race, in which the baton has passed between five firms to date at roughly 15-year intervals, so continuous has been the subsequent eagerness to bring out improved and steadily more comprehensive accounts. Extending to a manageable number of species, identifiable without having to be collected, dragonflies turned out to have an unanticipated appeal for ornithologists no less than entomologists and have become honorary birds as a result. The grasshoppers and crickets now give promise of ascending a ladder of favour similarly. If only the flies and the beetles did not exist in such infinitely greater diversity—and in the case of the beetles range in size down to virtual invisibility—guides to identifying even those might hold more attraction for publishers and thereby substantially enlarge the followings for those insects as well.

To produce a guide compact enough for field use to any section of the fauna and flora that extends to several hundred species or more is patently a formidable undertaking, for authors and publishers alike, and not surprisingly very few attempts at a total coverage in such cases have ever been made. Even in the case of the flowering plants and ferns, the eternal popularity of which has rendered portable means of identifying them a particularly pressing requirement, the compromise almost invariably resorted to has been to include the commoner species only—and sometimes, even, omit altogether any sedges and grasses (‘the greens and dulls’, as they have been contemptuously dubbed). Deciding which rate as ‘common’, however, is a largely subjective matter and great regional differences in that respect introduce further complications: MacGregor Skene irritated users of his Flower Book for the Pocket with a marked Scottish bias in his selection, for example. On the other hand, as George Bentham and, more recently, Tutin and his coauthors have found, squeezing fullish descriptions of over 1,000 species into just a single octavo cannot be achieved unless illustrations in their entirety are forgone. ‘Bentham and Hooker’ would never have enjoyed its century-long life in print had it not been for the addition of a companion volume of line-drawings, but taking the two together out into the countryside was too awkward a burden to be ordinarily practicable. For users of ‘Clapham, Tutin and Warburg’, however, that possibility did not even arise, for the set of volumes of uncoloured illustrations later published as an accompaniment to that were designed unmistakably for bookshelves only.

All except intellectual ascetics like Bentham, or teachers concerned with instilling in students the discipline of working through keys, nevertheless prefer to identify with the aid of illustrations. They prefer those, moreover, in colour and prefer to buy and use no more than a single volume—even if that means the descriptions can only be brief or, in extremis, entirely lacking. A field guide, after all, should not necessarily be expected to provide more than a preliminary indication: ampler works exist for consulting in libraries in which the correctness or otherwise of that can be checked at greater leisure.

***

Given the difficulties of satisfying everyone, botanists had long given up hope of ever seeing a book that succeeded in reconciling even the majority of the contrary ideals: coverage of all the relevant species, each illustrated in colour with sufficient truth to nature to permit confident identification, a single volume of manageable size and a price low enough not to deter even the only casually interested. Yet in 1965 such a paragon did at last materialise.

There was a lengthy history behind that. An evangelical clergyman, W. Keble Martin (Fig. 182), by that time eighty-eight, had been making coloured drawings of British wild flowers ever since his university days, in response to complaints by fellow students about ‘the difficulty of identifying them from the long wordy descriptions in works then available’. This soon developed into a long-term ambition to ‘collect’ with his pencil and brush every species on the then national list. To that end he devised the equivalent of a loose-leaf album of 100 large sheets, each of which was reserved for his portrayals of some 15–20 species, all carefully positioned in the scientific order then in general use for British Floras. In effect, that was just a more original, more accomplished alternative to the widespread and long-standing practice of merely colouring in Fitch’s line-drawings in the companion volume to ‘Bentham and Hooker’ (with which it had in common the entering alongside of the date and the place where the specimen depicted had been found).

After some of the completed sheets had drawn admiring comment at exhibitions, Keble Martin was eventually emboldened in 1959 to try to interest a publisher in bringing the collection (by then comprising about 1,500 drawings) out as a book. Seven leading firms in succession, however, could conceive of no way of doing that except as a heavily subsidised limited edition, so high was the cost at that period of colour reproduction of the high quality that such a work clearly deserved. The kind of sum mentioned was far beyond Martin’s own means; but not a man to be easily deterred, he promptly launched a public appeal by letter, explaining the circumstances, enclosing a sample sheet and inviting a contribution towards the cost.

Instead of solving the problem for which it was intended, however, that letter touched off a sequence of high-level intercessions that at length brought the work to a firm that, unlike all the others, relished the challenge of bringing out a book of such a kind profitably. This was George Rainbird, headed by the man of that name who had won a reputation as an adroit operator in a newish form of freelance activity known in the trade as ‘packaging’. That involved developing on a publishing house’s behalf certain of its titles that for one reason or another would have better prospects if not handled wholly in-house, for apart from the advantage of lower overheads ‘packagers’ had specialised know-how and contacts capable of securing important economies. Rainbird’s expertise lay especially in the colour-printing field, acquired first in a training under Wolfgang Foges and then by producing expensive editions of colour-plate classics (some of them botanical ones) for Billy Collins—the very duo whose combined publishing élan had been responsible for the success of the ‘Britain in Pictures’ series, out of which had come the ‘New Naturalist Library’. In a very roundabout way, Martin’s work had thus finally landed up in what, at one remove, could be said to have been all along its natural home.

For Rainbird, just as for Foges and Collins, the colour plates were at least as important as the text to the success of the kind of books that were his forte. In addition, though, as a one-time advertising man, he thought first and foremost in marketing terms, looking to hard selling to move sufficient copies of a book to offset its production costs sufficiently to allow it to be offered at a temptingly lower price than would otherwise be the case. That was the opposite end of the telescope down which most publishers tend to look.

Enquiries among botanist contacts speedily convinced Rainbird that Martin’s book had, in marketing jargon, a unique selling point: in this case the unexampled degree of completeness with which the country’s range of wild flowers was covered (‘an integrity’, as he rather oddly put it). That core attraction was backed up by the author’s field-botanist credentials, as one of the two editors of the massive Flora of Devon published in 1939, and, not least, by the publicity mileage to be had from the fact that the book was the triumphant outcome of a clergyman’s passionate hobby over more than 60 years. In the eyes of the botanically sophisticated its taxonomy was rather noticeably out of date and the descriptions too meagre for comfort, but those were shortcomings unlikely to bother the kind of people expected to constitute the great majority of its purchasers.

On putting those arguments to two firms familiar with his track record of turning seeming ducks into golden swans, two which in combination would have the printing capacity and marketing punch necessary, Michael Joseph and the National Magazine Company (which had a subsidiary, Ebury Press, suitable for the purpose), George Rainbird succeeded in persuading them to commit a joint initial print of 50,000 copies to the venture. That was the minimum that would have to be sold, all were agreed, to enable the cover price to be brought down to a sufficiently tempting figure for a book with such a great number of colour illustrations. While comparing that huge number with the mere 5,000 that Billy Collins at first decided to order for the opening volumes in the ‘New Naturalist Library’ is obviously not altogether fair, given that those consisted in substantial degree of solidly scientific text, the magnitude of the difference at least brings home the breathtaking size of the gamble. In effect, the book’s backers were counting on its selling almost as many copies as E. B. Ford’s Butterflies succeeded in doing in hardback in the home market during its entire life of 35 years in print (and in the face of scant competition during the earlier years of those, what is more).

There was no question of relying just on the tempting price and the book’s intrinsic appeal: the bookshops had to be subjected to a massive preliminary sellin and the public bombarded with advertisements in the national press (in which the fact that the Duke of Edinburgh had contributed a commendatory foreword could receive mention).

While all that was being put in hand, the launch was timed for May, when the countryside is looking its best. Careful thought clearly also went into the choice of a title, The Concise British Flora in Colour, that encapsulated the book’s strongest points. ‘Concise’ was intended to convey the multum in parvo character, but it may have misled those without a sight of the book into supposing that it was pocket-sized, whereas in fact it was quarto in format and so hardly a handbook in the strict meaning of that word (though some of its purchasers certainly did take it into the field and try to match its illustrations with living plants on the spot). In so far as it went into pockets, these would have to be the ones alongside the front seats in cars, tucked away like a road atlas for use as occasions for referring to it arose.

Once the book was on the market, Rainbird’s conviction that he was on to a winner very quickly began to be borne out, more quickly indeed than probably even he had been expecting. That first print of 50,000 was exhausted within only four months, and the same number again had sold out even before the pre-Christmas surge of book-buying was reached. It was as well that a further 30,000 were ordered in time for that, for the book had hurtled up to the top of the non-fiction half of what passed in those days as the ‘bestseller list’ (in reality, just what a few major bookshops up and down the country had the impression were the titles currently in most demand) and at the top of that it would continue to stay for month after astounding month. Even after three Christmases some bookshops were still placing it among their top sellers of the season. By 1980, 15 years on from the launch, just short of a million and a half had been sold, including a good many thousand in an edition in Dutch. It had been one of those phenomenal successes that from time to time take the book trade completely by surprise, bursting forth from a section of the market where nothing on that scale is generally supposed to be capable of occurring. At a time, moreover, when the more conservative-minded had begun to tell each other gloomily that only what they considered pornography now filled the bookshops, that it was a book of such a thoroughly wholesome, even old-fashioned type that had achieved such dominance was splendidly reassuring.

Sadly, Keble Martin proved to have only four more years of life left to him in which to savour the triumph. But it was long enough in which to receive an honorary DSc from Exeter University, to see the General Post Office issue a set of four stamps based on his drawings and to celebrate by marrying again. Sadly, too, George Rainbird was never to bring that special magic of his to bear on any more natural history books of a comparable kind. All in all, indeed, it was an episode that seems to have had a disappointingly slight effect in winning lasting recruits to recreational botanising. But perhaps that was expecting too much: field botanists were well served by a wide range of aids to identification already, and this one fell short of their needs in two opposite directions. While it must have been the first book on the subject that many of the thousands who bought it had ever felt in need of hitherto, what proportion of those put it to much more than merely passing use remains unknown. Probably its principal value, rather, was the example it set of how well another work of natural history might fare if only it were to be privileged with a comparable amount of marketing investment and bravura.

***

By coincidence, an ardent naturalist from boyhood with many years’ experience of colour printing from the production end arrived on the scene just as Rainbird’s short-lived presence on it was about to end. In 1964, brought in to restore the fortunes of a sizeable firm of printers, Curwen Press, Basil Harley found himself with a longed-for opportunity to become involved in natural history publishing at last (Fig. 183). That took the form of taking the firm some way in a very exacting direction new to it: reproducing the colour plates for superbly illustrated zoological and botanical works, some of those new, some editions of past classics. Most of those had non-British subject matter, but one exception was a particularly fine Ray Society monograph, British Tortricoid Moths, by J. D. Bradley, W. G. Tremewan and M. Smith, published in two volumes in 1973 and 1979.

The last of those made Curwen Press an obvious choice for another, much more ambitious entomological project then being prepared, The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland. Since the appearance of the latest in the long and proud lineage of great illustrated part-works on those, Barrett’s 11 volumes of 1892–1907, a serious lack of a definitive, up-to-date means of identifying the moths had become apparent when the Nature Conservancy’s Biological Records Centre turned in 1967 from its initial concentration on the flowering plants and ferns to carrying out a comparable geographical stocktaking of the Lepidoptera. The organiser of that, John Heath, while temporarily stopping the gap with a series of guides to the more difficult groups of species, had become convinced that nothing less than a new ‘Barrett’ was really needed, and with a group of prospective collaborators he had set about planning one. The envisaged schedule, however, soon proved wildly optimistic once the project started on its way in 1972. As Harley later ruefully recalled: ‘None of us then had any idea how long authorship of such a complex work would take nor of the amount of detailed work involved.’ Multiple authorship notoriously brings problems of coordination—and in this case the section on butterflies alone was eventually contributed by 30 different hands. In the event, the first volume came out two years later than intended and the other nine all at much lengthier intervals than assumed at the outset to be feasible. As senior editor, Heath found the burden too great for one person and A. Maitland Emmet, an authority on the ‘micros’ and a schools examiner by profession, stepped up to assist him almost from the start (Fig. 184). On Heath’s subsequent sudden death in 1987, Emmet thereafter became the project’s linchpin, till he too died in 2001, still toiling away at it at ninety-three. Even then, there still remained three volumes yet to be shepherded into publication by Apollo Books, a Danish counterpart to which Harley sold both the series and then the entire stock of Harley Books on retiring from business in 2006–8.

Strictly speaking, the publisher of that majestic work had changed long before then, in 1983, when Curwen Press handed it over to Harley on his departure to specialise exclusively in natural history on his own account, in partnership with his wife, herself the daughter and niece of leading plant taxonomists and with a publishing background in her own right. More beautiful works then flowed forth under that new imprint, each benefiting in turn from their unrelenting perfectionism and a commitment of time and money way beyond the call of business. Entomology above all owes the two an immense debt for numerous invaluable further works of reference that it would probably never have had otherwise—and almost certainly not ones produced to such an impeccable standard. Invidious though it is to single out any of those for individual mention, the three-volume Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland by Michael Roberts (1985–7) has to be an exception, by reason of its having been a rescue of a work that was so crucially needed (as well as one so outstandingly illustrated by its author).

A very special genre to which Harley Books has made contributions along with many others is the comparatively novel one of distribution atlases. The off spring of automatic data-processing, those have been pouring forth for one aspect of natural history after another ever since Thomas Nelson & Sons, an atlas specialist, published in 1962 the main results of the pioneer national project to that end conceived and carried out by the Botanical Society of the British Isles in the 1950s (Figs 185). The bespoke machinery and know-how developed in that connection passed to the project’s co-funder, the Nature Conservancy, to form the basis of its Biological Records Centre, the body which was then to play a key role in processing the data collected by the respective national societies and organisations responsible for the numerous similar schemes that have followed—so numerous indeed that the bird atlases by now are into a fourth generation and the mammal ones into a third. Again, however, it is as impracticable as it would be invidious to single out any for individual notice here.

***

Finally, this bird’s-eye view of the mass re-equipping of naturalists with working tools, which the years since the Second World War have witnessed, would not be complete without passing mention as well of two gigantic international publishing projects in which Britain has played the central co-ordinating role.

The first of those, Flora Europaea, a grand combined overhaul of the taxonomy of the entire continent’s flowering plants and ferns, owed its inspiration to a group of mainly British botanists attending the 1954 International Botanical Congress in Paris. The bulk of the research funds were UK government ones (over £150,000 via the Science Research Council), the Linnean Society was co-sponsor, the secretariat was shared by two English universities, and an almost exclusively British editorial committee elicited, with typically British phlegm and tact and willingness to compromise, accounts of families and genera from at least 70 different contributors. It was consequently only fitting that the publishers of the eventual five folio volumes (1964–80) was a British one too, Cambridge university Press.

Overlapping with that, in 1977–94, came another lumbering leviathan, the nine volumes of The Birds of the Western Palaearctic, from Oxford University Press. Unlike the botanical counterpart its opposite number had taken on, this was conceived as a replacement for an existing work of merely national reach, The Handbook of British Birds, already embarrassingly inadequate after three more decades of further multifarious research. The much-widened horizons of British ornithologists in the meantime had rendered so narrow a focus out of date, but the implication was so daunting that 10 years went by before Stanley Cramp accepted the challenge of running a project of the scale required, on retiring early from the Civil Service. So horrendous was the strain, however, of coordinating the work of over 100 collaborators (and the wholesale delegation of certain aspects to a team of experts in the Netherlands) that after eight years his health gave way, culminating in his death in 1987 just as the work was in sight of completion. Two other leading British ornithologists successively steered into the press what still remained to be done. The plates and in particular the comprehensibility of the text were subsequently to come in for criticism, but all in all that too was a remarkable collective achievement.

Will we ever again see the like of such stupendous undertakings, though? Even by the standard of the great part-works of earlier days, have the managerial complexities not become too nerve-wracking and the funding problems too great to elicit successors? Is not fresh knowledge accumulating at such a rate now, and are classifications not being rendered so rapidly obsolescent, that attempting to capture the current state of play between hard covers, or even in print, has perhaps become at last impracticably utopian? Those are perplexing questions that are surely going to have to be faced.

CHAPTER 22
New Uncertainties

THE 30 YEARS AFTER 1945 proved such a conspicuously prosperous period for publishers of natural history books of all kinds that would-be intruders from other fields were continually being tempted to try to obtain shares in that prosperity for themselves. As always, most of those intrusions were tried in the bottom layer of the market, where potential purchasers tend to be least well-informed and price alone usually the deciding factor. The traditional weapon of penetration, however, an elementary field guide, was up against much superior weaponry now that Collins had moved into that area and effectively dominated it. With so many highly experienced naturalists so rewardingly producing new-style guides for that firm, there was scant room for anyone else. One newcomer which did succeed in thriving in that section of the market none the less was the Poole-based Blandford Press; originally a specialist in trade magazines, it had begun diversifying from that solid base back in 1927 into hobbyist books that extended as close to natural history as gardening. By the 1950s, however, it was unable to resist the boom in bird books, and with a series of all-colour volumes on those rose to tie for sixth place in that sub-market with the venerable Oxford University Press.

There were more opportunities for newcomers higher up, but the amount of specialised knowledge needed to flourish there was proportionately much greater, and acquiring that took time and persistence. The simplest means of entry was to occupy a place vacated by a predecessor—as T. & A.D. Poyser, most notably, filled the very large hole in the bird field left by the fading of Witherby once bereft of its ornithologist driver. But there were also niches that had been waiting to be exploited. One firm that quickly established itself in that way around 1970, unfortunately only temporarily, was David & Charles, which suddenly irrupted in strength, like collared doves, from the at first sight unlikely quarter of railway history (its headquarters, most appropriately, was a former station, at Newton Abbot in the comparative remoteness of Devon). The two partners had supplied their fellow steam buffs so lucratively with just the kinds of books that they relished themselves that they began spilling over into cognate territories in which amateur enthusiasts similarly abounded. The local recent past in general was one obvious choice and beyond that, equally obviously, lay natural history. A very welcome ‘Regional Naturalist’ series was the first result, soon accompanied, to the gratified astonishment of the botanical community, by two major local Floras, a genre which national publishers had always hitherto fought shy of. Though over-inclined to dragoon its authors in an effort to impose an excessive uniformity, this rather strange alien was nevertheless humoured in the hopeful expectation of further previously untilled ground coming to the attention at last of a vigorous commercial ploughman. Alas, though, all too soon David & Charles found it necessary to withdraw, more suddenly even than it had arrived, caught out overextended when what turned out to be a severe trade recession intervened abruptly.

The worldwide inflation touched off by the sudden quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 found many another publisher dangerously exposed. Good times had lasted for so long that the trade had been lulled into banking on their lasting for very much longer still. Yet the Korean War inflation of the 1950s had proved short-lived and it was tempting for those who remembered that predecessor to delay taking action on the off-chance that matters would repeat themselves. Unfortunately, they did not. The rate of inflation in Britain reached double figures by 1974 and then surged by a horrendous 24 per cent the following year. Some printing and publishing costs rose at even higher rates, by up to 30 or 40 per cent. Rents and rates, petrol and postage—just about everything rose, rapidly and inexorably. But the prices of books in the shops, disastrously, failed to keep pace.

By 1975 publishers were beginning to experience cash shortages, and all-round retrenchment could no longer be deferred. Publishing programmes had to be cut back and, in extreme cases, contracts cancelled wholesale. But temporary pullingback was not nearly enough: changes in practices had to be put in hand that would have the effect of altering the character of the trade chronically and profoundly. Staffing levels would be reduced, in-house editing carried out more cursorily and as many operations as feasible transferred to freelance out-workers. A much harsher climate would turn out to have set in for the foreseeable future.

Only publishers with the deep roots that strong backlists provide, or else well-shielded by a very solid financial godparent, stood much chance of holding out against an economic storm of such a magnitude. Others were either swept away into immediate oblivion or had to take refuge in amalgamation with a competitor or suffer the ignominy of being taken over by an intruder from outside the book world. One or two had been shaky even before the storm had built up much force. In 1969 Cambridge University Press almost fell victim to a reversal of the long boom in academic books, when the price of those rose so abruptly that individual purchasers turned to borrowing from libraries instead. In that same year Cassell forfeited its independence to a transatlantic giant, Crowell Collier Macmillan, an ominous portent of a separate wind of change that would also be growing in strength. In 1970 Sidgwick & Jackson, the firm which had taken a chance on Elton’s Animal Zoology back in 1927, was sold to Charles Forte, the hotels and catering magnate, while Ward, Lock & Co., which had followed Hutchinson as the publisher of Frohawk, was converted into a property company for a while before being absorbed in an ill-starred bookshop group of recent provenance. Another of natural history’s befrienders in the difficult inter-war years, Dent, also succumbed around that time after a series of annual losses.

Even the comparative giants were by no means altogether safe. For as the decade wore on, newly enriched media companies started to circle hungrily, sensing financial vulnerability in a neighbouring field of business into which there seemed logic to be diversifying. Acquiring the publishing houses from which bestselling novels emanated in above-average numbers might at any rate prove less expensive than bidding in auctions for the rights to those—or so perhaps it appeared to London Weekend Television, before it snapped up Hutchinson in 1978. Four years later, particularly sadly, even Warne, unable to hold out any longer, fell into the lap of Penguin Books.

***

The impact on the booksellers was less immediately calamitous. Retailing is a more stable form of business than manufacturing, not exposed directly to fluctuations in commodity prices nor heavily dependent for its profits on successful speculation with a relatively narrow range of lines. Nevertheless, in so far as it is synonymous with shopkeeping, it is no less at the mercy of rises in rents and local government rates. Some of the older-established bookshops escaped the first of those if they were fortunate to occupy freehold premises or ones on lengthy leases, in which case they were probably net gainers from inflation thanks to the steep rises in property values; for the rest, though, rises just in the level of rates could be enough to banish from the busier streets a form of retailing with such a comparatively low rate of turnover. Increasingly, in bookselling as in so much else, it tended to be only the branches of national chains that could afford to hold out against that process. If they were to survive, independents had to retreat to side streets or even more obscure locations, where only the more determined shoppers were likely to discover them.

Two ways of resisting that form of creeping exile were, however, developed. One was to specialise in selling the increasing abundance of remaindered stock generated by publishers. That abundance had a double cause. The Victorian practice of keeping titles in print as long as some profit could still be wrung out of them had not been able to survive the surging cost of property, which rendered the storing of stock, on the premises or even in distant warehouses, more and more uneconomic. The collapse of the great wholesaler, Simpkin Marshall, which had so long helped to relieve publishers in that function, came therefore as a particular disaster. Titles could now be granted far less time in which to prove their profitability, which greatly reduced the chances of late-developing ‘sleepers’ eventually winning through (as The Natural History of Selborne was luckily able to). With supportive backlists no longer made up so largely of established titles eking out slowly fading commercial lives, publishers had to compensate by commissioning many more new ones in the hope of lighting upon some good and quick earners among those, while ruthlessly discarding any that gave no early promise of more than covering the cost of their production. Such speedily remaindered stock, with colourful jackets still intact, was no different in appearance from the brand-new versions on offer in the high-street outlets, the heavily discounted prices made for a comparatively brisk turnover, and it was consequently economic for it to be sold from centrally located premises where pavement traffic was thick enough to offset the higher rents.

Catalogues have come to play an increasingly important role over the years for dealers at all levels who depend on collectors for a significant part of their trade, to such an extent that more and more businesses have become predominantly postal in character. A shop nevertheless makes possible the building and cementing of relationships with regular customers face-to-face, while one situated in the centre of a major international city can be a favourite port of call for visitors from overseas, providing those with a better idea of individual items than any catalogue can. For the major antiquarian specialists those considerations have tended to outweigh the increasingly heavy property costs involved; for the rest, however, the multiple advantages of moving out to a rural location, not least for greater storage space, have made more and more sense, from the 1930s onwards. As a result, those ‘refugees’ came off comparatively lightly when inflation became more severe.

Contrary to what outsiders may suppose, the antiquarian trade has probably been just as subject to major ups and downs as publishers and other kinds of booksellers, but they have tended to be different in kind, arising out of that trade’s special character. The 1920s were bonanza years for it, thanks to the widespread abandonment of no-longer-affordable great houses and the consequent disposal of numerous extensive libraries, some of great value; but the 1930s proved just the reverse, as prices collapsed under the impact of the Depression. Good times returned after the Second World War, this time thanks in the main to the creation of so many additional academic libraries, both in Britain and overseas, as well as the huge expansion of those already in existence. Many standard works had meanwhile become much scarcer, having fallen victim to wartime bombing and reckless salvage drives. In 1953, when the Systematics Association produced a second edition of its Bibliography of Key Works for the Identification of the British Fauna and Flora, the chief potential supplier of those, Wheldon and Wesley, found to its dismay that 70 per cent of the zoological titles listed and 66 per cent of the botanical ones were out of print, and even many that were still in print were very hard to obtain. In the experience of that leading natural history specialist, demand remained greatest for taxonomic works, but a surge of interest in the Victorian age also led to dramatic rises in what customers were prepared to pay for some of the better-known classics of that era, irrespective of their quality scientifically: the price of Morris’s History of British Birds, for example, rose more than eightfold between 1950 and 1970. To some extent the shortages were made good by the publishing of facsimile editions, which had an additional attraction for librarians of enabling expensive originals to be removed from open-access shelves.

Leaner times arrived in the 1970s, as university funds worldwide came under sharply greater pressure and ever greater shares of academic library budgets were taken by ever more numerous (and ever more costly) journals at the expense of books. The general decline in the teaching of taxonomy also began depriving natural history specialists of a traditional major source of demand. Prices of older books of all kinds had risen so much that many fewer collectors could afford the expensive works that form the staple of the antiquarian trade, and increasingly that was having to be sought overseas (two-thirds of Wheldon & Wesley’s turnover would be exports by 1990, for instance).

Against that generally disheartening background, however, the 1970s also saw two huge bursts of activity on this particular front, both entirely unexpected, one welcome and the other anything but.

Around the start of the decade a worldwide fashion sprang up for framing individual hand-coloured plates taken from earlier natural history works (in particular) for hanging on walls, as stand-ins for paintings, to convey an impression of antiqueness that was cheerful instead of, as so often, rather grim. In the rush to lay hands on such works for breaking up, print dealers pushed up prices at auction to levels that antiquarian booksellers, who would have hoped to sell the works intact, could not possibly match. Coming on top of the huge number of similar books that had been disappearing off the market into libraries, this “biggest mass-destruction of books in history’ (in the words of one appalled witness) drastically diminished still further the stock available to the trade for dealing in. The position in that respect ultimately became so difficult that in 2004, after a century and a half of specialising in natural history, Wheldon & Wesley decided it was no longer worth persisting and went out of business.

Just as that fashion was starting to peter out, after a 10-year run, with the supply of works capable of being vandalised nearing exhaustion, demand from Japan suddenly exploded, restoring antiquarian dealers’ spirits. In response to the mounting pressure on that country to reduce its enormous trade surplus, university libraries there devoted some 15 years to buying up books on Western civilisation in all its aspects. Natural history was among the many categories to benefit from that splurge, which extended to recently published titles also (an account of the development of the subject in Britain even sold impressively well in a Japanese translation).

***

In the 1990s it was the turn of the publishers again to run into a stretch of rough water. That decade opened, ominously, with a second bout of spiralling inflation, which required interest rates as high as 15 per cent to bring that under control and brought down yet another of natural history’s long-time allies, George Bell & Sons, as one of the casualties. More lastingly destructive, however, was to be the collapse in 1995 of the long-standing Net Book Agreement and the consequent loss by the publishers after almost a century of their control over the prices paid for their books in the shops. Inside 10 years more than one book in every two sold in the home market was being offered by retailers at discounts ranging from 10 per cent up to five times that amount. As the defenders of the Agreement had warned again and again would happen in its absence, trade seeped away from the specialist bookshops to a wide range of additional outlets in which they were accorded no special reverence, and most threateningly to the supermarkets, whose margins the bookshops in at any rate the high streets saw scant hope of matching.

To begin with, however, the worst fears of the established trade gave little sign of being borne out. As expected, it was the better-selling fiction titles, and those invariably in paperback, in which the newcomers were mainly interested; a high proportion of the purchasers of those, moreover, would probably have patronised specialist bookshops seldom if at all, awed by their alien bookishness or restricted by income level to free borrowing from public libraries. By their heavy discounting, rather, the additional outlets seemed likely to have widened the overall market considerably, by making books cheaper relative to wages than ever before. Indeed, they were destined to become cheaper still once the use of the internet became widespread, as buying books second-hand through that medium cost hardly more for town-dwellers than the fare to the nearest public library branch. Public libraries, even so, are bound to retain importance for those needing more specialised categories of non-fiction such as natural history, especially for access to expensive reference works, considerations which are not sufficiently taken into account by local authorities in their haste to use the steepening decline in borrowings—mainly of fiction—as an excuse for closing branches and running down book stocks overall.

As time has gone on, the new free-for-all has begun to assume a more menacing aspect, however. The big bookshop chains have taken to copying the ruthlessness of the supermarkets in their treatment of suppliers. Increasingly publishers are being required to pay, or concede exceptionally high discounts, to have their titles accorded any display or preferential positioning other than on the shelves with all the rest. The stock ordered of any new title is also liable to be returned within days if it fails to start moving more or less immediately. That is not bookselling as it has traditionally been conducted in Britain.

The cost to publishers of complying with such heavy further promotional expenditure has the effect of forcing them to concentrate more and more on titles with the best-looking chances of repaying that level of investment. Any reckoned to have only modest sale prospects or clearly intended for a relatively specialised readership—as so many natural history titles are fated to be regarded, rightly or wrongly—are consequently likely to be handled by the bigger firms, with their greater range and depth of specialised back-up, with more and more reluctance, and left to the smaller companies.

Fortunately, there will probably always be enough of those minor players to go round, despite their greater susceptibility to periodic intensification of the great range of risks to which all book publishing is exposed. It is a type of business in which it is easy to start up, especially in locations where fixed overheads are lower than in cities. New specialisms will continue to arise and produce potential niches for exploiting by the adventurous. Existing specialisms, too, may be seen as candidates for diversification or expansion and develop greater market strength with the aid perhaps of acquisitions—as A. & C. Black recently returned to being the major publisher of bird books that it was in first half of the twentieth century (but then ceased to be), by absorbing two imprints that rose to prominence in that field in the interim, Christopher Helm and T. & A. D. Poyser.

At the same time, as natural history has shown itself capable of giving the publishing world the occasional stunning surprise, more of the new Big Ten—the huge international conglomerates conjured into being by the need for financial resources of the size required to live with the stranglehold exerted by the big retailers—may yet find the subject worthy of attention on the scale that George Rainbird gave it. That possibility is made the more likely by the form in which those conglomerates have found it advisable to structure themselves: as groups of reasonably autonomous imprints (some bearing still-familiar names) linked together by sharing such common services as offer significant economies of scale. That has the advantages of fostering diversity of publishing initiatives as well as the personal relationships to which authors attach much weight.

***

But is even that structure due for dismantling in its turn by the further radical changes that numerous commentators are currently expecting to be brought about as the digital era enters new stages? Are even books themselves about to become extinct, as the bolder forecasters have become fond of suggesting?

The hardback in particular has had its impending demise confidently predicted for quite some years already. ‘Overhyped, overpriced and now oh so over’, inconveniently heavy but not necessarily any more durable than a paperback, it is dismissed as a ‘moribund’ format overdue for abandonment, kept in being only by the comparative disrespect in which literary editors obstinately insist on holding paperbacks in choosing titles for review. At the same time those critics conveniently overlook the one great drawback that paperbacks have: their tendency to be mentally equated with magazines by a high proportion of the population, as a form of reading matter so essentially ephemeral as to be pilfered without a serious qualm or publicly discarded without so much as a moment’s thought. Not for nothing have librarians always preferred to avoid stocking paperbacks as far as possible, despite their lower price—or else put them between hard covers as a protective disguise. The price difference between the two formats has in any case been substantially narrowed, at any rate for works of a more scholarly kind, by the recent great lowering in printing costs achieved by transferring that part of the production process to Asia. An octavo-sized hardback with 430 pages of text and 10 of high-quality colour photographs can now, thanks to being printed in China, have an undiscounted price as low as £22.50, a feat which would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. By comparison, pocket-sized paperbacks on topics of similar intellectual weight with roughly the same amount of text and at most a thin scatter of black-and-white illustrations, but printed in Britain, retail in the £9–10 range. It is the paperbacks that now look overpriced, if quality and quantity of illustrations are the deciding criteria—but an octavo hardback will not of course slip into a pocket or handbag of normal size (though a briefcase will take one with ease).

Scholarly monographs, though, undeniably present a special problem. It could well be that publication of those in the present form, or even as books at all, will soon cease to be a practicable proposition other than on a wholly subsidised basis. Inescapably costly to print by virtue of their size and an often copious and elaborate armament of notes and references—to say nothing of numerous tables and graphs in many cases—yet too specialised in content to be able to justify more than minuscule print runs, their prices have to be set so high that they are increasingly unaffordable by other than research libraries. Individual specialists unaffiliated to institutions with libraries of that calibre, yet requiring such volumes ready to hand for everyday reference, are consequently at a serious disadvantage—and contrary to widespread assumption, the advancement of knowledge is by no means limited these days to universities, research institutes and museums. Digitalisation, and access via the internet, appears at first sight the logical answer, but how in that case is the problem of copyright to be surmounted?

Technological solutions in the book world have led to so many false dawns in recent decades that wariness about them has become well justified. Ingenuity may not necessarily be rewarded with user acceptability; conveniences may be cancelled out by inconveniences; gadgets may promise breakthroughs, but their cost cannot be brought down far enough to be affordable by enough potential purchasers to make their production economic. The path of progress has too often turned out to contain unsuspected pitfalls.

Most certainly, the galloping advances made since the Second World War in the storage, retrieval, analysis, transfer and—perhaps especially—visual presentation of data have brought enormous benefits to all data-dependent activities, of which natural history is a prime example. From typesetting to taxonomy, from dichotomous keys to distribution mapping, the impact of computers and other electronic applications has become all-pervasive. Few aspects of this group of studies have remained unaffected by the improvements that have come in the train of those.

Yet two of the benefits that computers have brought to natural history on the book front have proved to be not without their own special drawbacks.

Online bookselling, that great breakthrough of the 1990s, the answer to the eternal problem of the sheer multiplicity of titles and the difficulty of locating copies requested, has made it possible for anyone to buy by post, more or less instantaneously, just about any published title available in the world for purchase either new or second-hand. That is a boon not just to individual customers but to small second-hand dealers as well, by greatly enlarging their potential market; at the same time, though, the system is so efficient that many people have given up patronising bookshops altogether. The worldwide price comparisons that this development has also made possible have turned out to be two-edged in their effect too: on the one hand they have deprived the dealers of much of their former room for manoeuvre, while on the other they have greatly reduced the opportunities for book collectors of spotting bargains and thus robbed that activity of its principal source of excitement.

Nor has desktop publishing, now open to anyone with a personal computer and printer, proved to be without a downside, similarly. Lists of the flora or fauna of single habitats or self-contained small areas such as a public park or a private estate, which have traditionally had to be regarded as of interest to too few others to justify the expense of bringing out as a booklet, can today be turned out with ease, put in a plastic cover and distributed, probably free of charge, to anyone who might appreciate a copy. In the past, the outcomes of small-scale, self-challenging exercises of this kind occasionally qualified for publication in a local natural history journal (or even, exceptionally, a national one, if the area in question was sufficiently widely known for that to be sensible); in such cases, though, they would have had to pass editorial scrutiny before reaching print and had to stand up to that of fellow naturalists after appearing. Now, however, they can be put into circulation, and potentially into the permanent literature, without passing through any external filter. What is more, that circulation may be so extremely limited that it arguably does not deserve to be described as ‘publishing’, especially if the wider availability of copies is not made known (and an address for that purpose provided) and none are donated to a library or museum. Yet lists of this kind are potentially of much more than ephemeral interest or value, for they can serve as benchmarks against which changes over time can be measured periodically. The private manner in which they are produced ought not to result in their distribution being treated as a purely private matter as well.

There is more than enough evidence already on the internet of a growing degree of anarchy in the circulating of information, some of it dubious or even dangerously wrong. In some areas of knowledge a great range of opinions of unknown weight may not matter all that much, but in the sciences that is hardly a route to progress. For those at least, publication in some refereed medium, preferably in the universality of print (currently 82 per cent of people over 60 in Britain are not online and it is more likely than not that almost all of those never will be), still seems to be the one safe course. As periodicals cannot conceivably accommodate the total amount of information that qualifies for publication in print, that points to books continuing to play an important role, even if in some fields a subsidiary one.

For natural history, in which fieldwork plays such a dominant part, portability has long been one of the special advantages that books have been able to offer. If the advance reports are accurate, even that is at last coming under challenge from an electronic gadget with a curiously inapposite brand name, the Kindle. In effect a lightweight miniature library, into which the full contents of up to 200 volumes can be loaded (at a cost of £5 each), this has evidently been devised with the needs of long-distance travellers primarily in mind, as a way of avoiding the weight and bulk of even a collection of paperbacks in luggage. It also seems intended more especially for books of the kind that are read from cover to cover. It hardly sounds a very serviceable replacement for the range of field guides with which naturalists tend to travel, given their requirement for hurried dips and flips, from illustration to illustration or description to description. Will the average office-worker, moreover, be content to devote further hours of leisure as well to staring at a screen—and at a screen that does not cover the whole of a page? The Kindle runs on a battery lasting up to a week, but it is a battery none the less. Just to buy the gadget itself will entail a by no means trivial outlay, and such a novelty is liable to be stolen and so there will be an insurance cover to pay for on top.

It does not sound as if the traditional book, with its unmatchable flexibility and relative imperviousness to sand and water, is in all that much danger of being driven into extinction for quite some time yet. Even when and if that does happen, however, people will surely continue to admire, consult and collect the very many that will certainly remain, even if out of date.

Appendix

Some of the more notable part-works on Britain’s natural history up to the mid-nineteenth century (in order of publication)

Principal Sources
(exclusive of obituaries and articles in biographical dictionaries)

CHAPTER 1

Artisan naturalists: Secord (1994, 1996)

Proctor: Weekley (1968) amended by Uglow (2006)

Latham: Mathews (1931)

Bowdich: Beaver (1999)

Natural Arrangement authorship and

repercussions: Gray (1872a, 1872b), Allen (1986, pp 4–5)

Hassall and Ralfs: Groves & Groves (1890)

Tutt’s British Lepidoptera: Townsend & England (1938)

CHAPTER 2

Anglo-Saxons: Fisher (1966)

Daniel: Harvey (1983)

Herbals: Arber (1938), Amalia D’Aronco (2003)

Turner: Jones (1988), Rydén (2003)

Bestiaries: George (1981, 1985), Yapp (1985, 1987), Baxter (1998)

Penny: Gardner (1880, 1930), Ley (1967)

de l’Obel: Louis (1980)

CHAPTER 3

Goodyer: Gunther (1922)

Johnson: Kew & Powell (1932), Gilmour (1972)

Merret: Raven (1947)

Ray: Raven (1950)

Lister: Wilkins (1957), Parker & Harley (1992)

Sibbald: Mullens (1912)

CHAPTER 4

Bradley: Thomas (1952), Walters (1981)

Petiver: Stearns (1952)

Dandridge: Allen (1966), Bristowe (1967)

Wilkes and Dutfield: Lisney (1960), Wilkinson (1966, 1978)

Glanville: Bristowe (1975)

Taylor White: Calmann (1977), Allen (1981)

Edwards: Mason (1992)

Morton: Druce (1908), Kerney (1987)

Threlkeld: Mitchell (1974), Nelson (1979)

Blackstone: Kent (1949), Bowlt & Bowlt (2000)

Book trade: Raven (2001)

CHAPTER 5

Bute and Hill: Miller (1988), Lazarus (1994)

Stillingfleet: Coxe (1811), Ketton-Cremer (1944)

Artisan clubs: Secord (1994, 1996)

Harris: Mays (1986), Salmon, Marren & Harley (2000)

Withering: Britten & Boulger (1914), Peck & Wilkinson (1950)

Wakefield: Shteir (1985, 1990, 1996)

CHAPTER 6

Pennant: Pennant (1821), Rees & Walters (1971), Noblett (1982)

Lightfoot: Slack (1986), Bowden (1989)

Benjamin White: Noblett (1982), Cornelius (1994)

Gilbert White: Mabey (1986), Foster (1988)

Montagu: Cleevely (1978, 1995), Mearns & Mearns (1988)

Ellis: Savage (1934), Cornelius & Wells (1988) Allen (1996b)

Turton: Rees & Walters (1971)

Hayes: Jackson (1985)

Bewick: Uglow (2006)

CHAPTER 7

State of the book trade: Raven (2001), Knight (1980), Topham (2000), Desmond (2003), St Clair (2004, 2006)

Smith: Ross (1956), Greene (1957), Simpkins (1974), Allen (1978), Walker (1988)

Hooker: Hooker (1902), Curtis (1951), Allan (1967), Desmond (2003, pp 104–5)

Berkeley: Price (1985)

Lichenographia Britannica: Hawksworth & Seaward (1978)

Kirby and Spence: Spence (1852)

Entomology boom: Allan (1980)

Beetle fashion: Beare (1901), Jarvis (1976) Marren (2008)

Haworth: Stearn (1965), Salmon, Marren & Harley (2000)

London entomological societies: Neave & Griffin (1933)

CHAPTER 8

Part-publication as a method: Price (1982) Desmond (2003, pp 16–23)

Flora Londinensis: Curtis (1941), Lousley (1945) Bowden (1989), Desmond (2003, pp 102–5)

English Botany: Simpkins (1974)

Gould: Tree (1991)

Selby: Jackson (1992)

Techniques: Bridson (1989)

Turner’s Fuci: Price (1982, 1984)

Donovan: Jackson (1985)

Wrappers as a source: Williams (2005)

Ray Society: Jardine (1858), Curle (1954), Platts (1994), Davis (1998)

Willughby Society: Wollaston (1921)

CHAPTER 9

Technical and economic innovation: Moran (1973), Knight (1980), Sheets-Pyenson (1987) Allen (1996a), Twyman (1999), Topham (2000) Fyfe (2004)

Booksellers’ Regulations: Sutherland (1981)

Bohn: Swann (1972), Desmond (2003, pp 19–20)

Periodicals market: Allen (1996a)

Francis: Allen (1969), Best (1986)

Lees: Jones (1980)

Rennie: Page (2008)

Swainson: Farber (1985), Knight (1986)

Evangelical publishers: Fyfe (2004, 2005)

‘The Naturalist’s Library’: Iredale (1951) Sheets-Pyenson (1981, 1987), Jackson & Davis (2001, pp 21–83)

Thomas Brown: Jackson (1944)

MacGillivray: Ralph (1999)

Yarrell: Jenyns (1885)

CHAPTER 10

Van Voorst: Williams (1988, 2004)

Newton’s edition of Yarrell: Wollaston (1921 pp 213–14)

Reeve: Melvill (1900), Price (1982), Harley (2004), Petit (2007)

Hardwicke: English (1986)

Cooke: English (1984, 1987)

Syme’s English Botany: Bell (1924), Allen (1980)

Janson: Darby (1981–2004)

Non-specialist publishers: Munby (1934) Munby & Stallybrass (1955), Nowell-Smith (1958) Black (1984), Howsam (1999), James (2002)

CHAPTER 11

Bentham’s Handbook: Allen (2003a), Shteir (2003)

Fern craze: Allen (1969, 1996b), Hall (1984)

Nature-printing: Bradbury (1856), Cave & Wakeman (1967)

CHAPTER 12

Wood: Wood (1890), Munby (1934)

Johns: Coombe (1970), Dare & Hardie (2008)

Morris: Morris (1897), McLean & McLean (1988)

Couch: Couch (1891), Tucker (1956)

Gosse: Freeman & Wertheimer (1980), Thwaite (2002), Lingard (2003)

CHAPTER 13

Beetles: Beare (1901)

Spiders: Bristowe (1951, 1958), Curle (1954) Chesney & Nash (1980)

Bryophytes: Preston (1991)

Lichens: Seaward (1988), Mitchell (2003)

Freshwater algae: Hassall (1893), Gray (1983) John, Whitton & Brook (2002)

Marine zoology: Mills (1978, 1984), Davis (1995)

Watson: Egerton (2003)

CHAPTER 14

Local Floras: Marren (1999), Preston (2003) Allen (2003b)

Woodruffe-Peacock: Seaward (1971)

Bagnall’s Flora of Warwickshire: Price (1980)

Statistics: Rich (2006)

Local Avifaunas: Alexander (1960), Tate (1985)

Local lists in entomology: Chalmers-Hunt (1989)

Scottish faunal areas: Taylor (1986)

Harvie-Brown Faunas: McNaughton (1936)

CHAPTER 15

Brightwen: Brightwen (1909)

Hudson: Hudson (1925), Tomalin (1982)

Transformation of book trade: Sutherland (1981), Waller (2006)

New techniques: Jackson (1986), Bridson (1989

Early nature photography: Kearton (1926), Pitt (1953), Bagnall-Oakeley (1954), Nowell-Smith (1958)

Bowdler-Sharpe: Jackson (1994)

Lilford: Radclyffe (1994), Evans (2007)

CHAPTER 16

Mammals: Millais (1919), Pickvance (1964)

Ray Society monographs: Curle (1954)

Increase in entomologists: Beirne (1955)

Fryer: Preston (1988)

Bryophytes: Preston (1991)

Lichens: Mitchell (2003)

Freshwater algae: John, Whitton & Brook (2002)

CHAPTER 17

Cheap reprints of classics: Dent & Dent (1938)

New Journalism: Jackson (2001)

Patterson: Manning (1948)

Step: Marren (2003)

Tutt and South: Allan (1946), Salmon, Marren & Harley (2000), Salmon & Edwards (2005)

Newman’s Text Book: Newman (1967)

Decline in entomology: Beirne (1955)

Cambridge British Flora: Bunting, Briggs & Block (1995)

Ecology: Tansley (1947), Pearsall (1964), Salisbury (1964), Lowe (1976), Sheail (1987, 2005) Bird behaviour: Stresemann (1951), Lack (1959)

CHAPTER 18

Impact of First World War on book trade: Brock & Meadows (1984)

State of nature photography: Bagnall-Oakeley (1954), Hosking & Lane (1970)

Daglish: Bliss (1930), Horne (1994)

Evens: Evens (1946)

Dominance of H. & F. Witherby: figures calculated from Tate (1985)

Frohawk: Chatfield (1987), Salmon, Marren & Harley (2000)

Coward and Warne’s ‘Wayside and Woodland’

series: Marren (2003)

Reservoirs and sewage-faunas: Boyd (1957) Alexander (1974)

Praeger: Collins (1985), Lysaght (1998)

Dorset Flora: Allen (2003b)

Ray Society monographs: Curle (1954)

Second-hand trade: Swann (1972)

Warne’s ‘Observer’ series: Marren & Carter (2002)

Penguin Books: Lewis (2005)

CHAPTER 19

Change of emphasis in academic biology: Pearsall (1964)

State of ecology: Tansley (1939), Sheail (1987)

Oxford biology: Morrell (1994)

Animal ecology: Sheail (1987)

Butcher: Allen (2003a)

Abortive ‘New Student’s Flora’: Briggs & Gorringe (2002)

CHAPTER 20

Quality of wartime bird books: Fisher (1948)

New Naturalist Library: Keir (1952), Marren (1995)

CHAPTER 21

Bannerman & Lodge: Savory (1986)

HSF photography: Bagnall-Oakeley (1954)

US pioneering of field guides: Devlin & Naismith (1978), Barrow (1998)

Identification guides published by learned

societies: Kermack (1986)

Warne’s guides: Marren (2003)

Dragonfly renaissance: Hayter-Hames (1991)

Keble Martin: Martin (1968), Rainbird (1985)

Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and

Ireland: Harley (1989)

Flora Europaea: Anon (1977)

Birds of the Western Palaearctic: Nicholson (1994)

CHAPTER 22

Antiquarian and second-hand trade: Swann (1972), Markham (2004), Mandelbrote (2006)

Breaking of colour-plate books: Anon (1987, 1988)

References

Note. The Society for the History of Natural History, its journal and its newsletter have each undergone confusing changes in title. As that journal is cited so particularly frequently below and three of the titles are lengthy ones, initials have been substituted:

JSBNH—Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History (1936–80)

SBNHN—Society for the Bibliography of Natural History Newsletter (1977–83)

ANH—Archives of Natural History (1981– )

SHNHN—Society for the History of Natural History Newsletter (1983– )

Alexander, H. G. (1960). Ornithology in Britain fifty years ago. Ibis 102, 111–15.

Alexander, H. G. (1974). Seventy Years of Bird Watching. Poyser, Berkhamsted.

Allan, M. (1967). The Hookers of Kew, 1785–1911. Michael Joseph, London.

Allan, P. B. M. (1946). On becoming 1000. The Entomologist 79, 195–208.

Allan, P. B. M. (1980). Leaves from a Moth-hunter’s Notebooks, ed. R. S. Wilkinson. Classey, Farringdon.

Allen, D. E. (1966). Joseph Dandridge and the first Aurelian Society. Entomologist’s Record78, 89–94.

Allen, D. E. (1969). The Victorian Fern Craze: a History of Pteridomania. Hutchinson London.

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Index

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature of your e-book reader

Note: page numbers in bold refer to figures. Publishers are listed under their full, official names.

A. & C. Black 231, 403, 459

Abbot, John 94

Actinologia Britannica 261, 262, 263

Acts:

Apothecaries Act 1815 (field classes in botany) 99, 140

copyright Act 1710 130

extension of, 1842 248

1870 Education Act 231, 310

Adams, John 239

Adventive Flora of Tweedside, The 393

Afoot in England 320

Aid to the Identification of Insects 227

Albin, Eleazar 18, 67–71, 68

Alder, Joshua 282

Alexander, H. G. 4, 393

Algae Britannicae 144

Allan, P. B. M. 265

Allen & Unwin 406

‘Allen’s Naturalist Library’ 332

Alston, E. R. 336

Among British Birds in their Nesting Haunts, Illustrated by the Camera 325

Analysis of the British Ferns and their Allies, An 241

Animal Ecology 410

Annals and Magazine of Natural History 186

Ants, Bees and Wasps 230, 314

Aplin, O. V. 228

Apollo Books 448

aquarium, parlour 240

Aquarium, The 262

Art of Bird-Watching, The 413

artisans’ clubs 100

Atkinson, John Christopher 253

Atlas of the British Flora 449, 451

Augustin 22

Aurelian, The 94–6, 95, 96, 463

Avebury, Lord see Lubbock, Sir John

Avium praecipuarum … brevis et succincta historia 27

Babington, Charles 136, 207, 236, 294, 294–5

Bagnall, J. E. 300–1

Baird, William 282

Baker, Henry 74

Baker, J. G. 286

Balfour, Andrew 58

Baillière 151, 229, 274

‘Banckes’s herbal’ 26

Bannerman, David 433–4

Barrett, C. G. 217, 217, 345, 345

Barrett-Hamilton, G. E. H. 338, 338

Barrington, Daines 115

Barrington, R. M. 225, 368, 369

‘Barry, Dr Martin, md, frs’ 18

Baxter family 57

Beast Book for the Pocket, A 336

Beddard, F. E. 340

Bedford, E. J. 394

Beilby, Ralph 126, 127

Bell, Thomas 18, 208, 208, 284, 336

Bell & Sons see George Bell & Sons

Bell and Dalby 275

Bellairs, Nona 265

Benn 413

Bennett, Arthur 350

Bentham, George 232–8, 233, 235

Bentley’s Miscellany 260

Berkeley, Miles Joseph 14, 138, 141–3, 141, 274

Berkenhout, John 93, 93

bestiaries 28–9

Bewick, Thomas 3, 125–8, 125, 127

Bibliography of Key Works for the Identification ofthe British Fauna and Flora 456

binomials, use of 84

‘Biological Flora of the British Isles’ 407

Biological Records Centre (NatureConservancy) 448, 450

binding, responsibility of subscriber 170

Bird Migration 369

Bird Recognition 437

Bird Watcher in the Shetlands, The 373

Bird Watching 373

Bird Watching for Beginners 437

Birds and Green Places 379

Birds Ashore and A-foreshore 19

Birds in a Village 319

Birds in Action 435

Birds in England 412

Birds in London 319

Birds’ Nests and Eggs 255

Birds’ Nests, Eggs, and Egg-collecting 326

Birds of Angus and The Mearns 19

Birds of Europe, The 465

Birds of Great Britain (Gould) 4, 5, 160, 163, 166

Birds of Great Britain, with their eggs, The (Lewin) 161, 463, 464

Birds of Middlesex, The 305

Birds of Oxfordshire, The 228

Birds of the British Isles, The 433

Birds of the British Isles and their Eggs, The 390–1

Birds of the Western Palaearctic, The 450

Blackstaff Press 78

Blackstone, John 79

Blackwall, John 269–71, 270

Blackwell Scientific Publications 435

Blandford Press 452

Bloomfield, E. N. 304

Bohn, Henry 11, 184

Bolton, James 142

book clubs 92

private 175

Booksellers Association, formation of 321

‘Booksellers’ Regulations’ (1829) 183

Booth, E. T. 18, 225

Borrer, William 13, 144–5, 144

Bosanquet, Rev Edwin 220

Boswell Syme, John T. 223–5, 368

Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Britain, A 98

Botanical Dialogues: Between Hortensia and Her Four Children 100–1

Botanical Diary of Eleanor Vachell (1879–1948), The 394

Botanical Magazine 156, 186

Botanical Society and Exchange Club 398, 419

Botanical Society of London, founding of 153

Botanical Tables … 86

Botanist in Ireland, The 393

Botanist’s Guide through England and Wales, The 135

Botanist’s Pocket Book, The 231

Bowdich, Sarah 9, 161, 465

Bowdler Buckton, G. 348

Bowdler Sharpe, Richard 328, 328, 331–2

Bowerbank, J. S. 180, 284, 284

Bradbury & Evans 245

Bradley, Richard 14, 63, 71

Bradley, J. D. 447

Braithwaite, Robert 217

Brightwen, Eliza 316, 316–17

‘Britain in Pictures’ 425–6, 444

Britain’s Nature Reserves 436

British Bird Book, The 369, 413, 425

British Birds (journal) 385

British Birds (Hudson) 319

British Birds (Thorburn) 378

British Birds’ Eggs and Nests Popularly Described 253

British Birds in their Haunts 255

British Birds’ Nests: how, where and when to find and identify them 325

British Butterflies 6, 6, 252, 252

British Butterflies and their Transformations 268

British Coleoptera Delineated, The 150

British Conchology 284

British Confervae 464

British Deer and their Horns 337

British Desmidieae, The 276, 277

British Dragonflies 399

British Ecological Society 407, 411

British Entomology 218, 219, 268, 465

British Fauna 123

British Flora, The 102

British Fresh-water Fishes 260

British Fungus-flora 355

British Herpetological Society, formation of 436

British Islands and their Vegetation, The 408

British Jungermanniae 139, 464

British Lichen Society, formation of 436

British Medical Journal 220

British Mosses 383

British Moss-flora 217, 350

British Natural History Books 1495–1900: aHandlist x

British Noctuae and their Varieties, The 364

British Ornithology 464

British Phaenogamous Botany 57

British Plant Galls 375

British Psychological Society, formation of 436

British Rust Fungi 375

British Species of Angiocarpous Lichens, The 273

British Tortricoid Moths 447

British Trust for Ornithology 404

British Warblers: A History with Problems of theirLives, The 225

British Zoology 104, 106, 108, 463

Bromfield, W. A. 292–3, 293, 297

Broome, C. E. 143

Brown, Capt Thomas 14, 198

Brown, N. E. 225

Brown, Peter 114

Bryologia Britannica 272, 350

bryology, starting of 62

Buckland, Frank 260

Buckler, William 343, 343–4, 344, 389

Bullock-Webster, G. R. 400

Butcher, R. W. 12, 417–18

Butterflies 431, 445

butterflies, English names given 67

butterflies, first printed work 67

Butterflies and Moths Shown to Children 4

Butterflies of the British Isles 359, 365

Butterfly Collector’s Vade Mecum 147

Buxton, Richard 16

Cabinet Cyclopaedia 191

Caley, George 3

Cambridge British Flora, The 370

Cambridge University Press 228, 320, 354, 370, 375, 408, 421, 436, 450, 454

Campbell, Bruce 437

Carmichael, Dugald 10

Cassell, John 184

Cassell & Co. 230, 325, 360, 378, 454

Catalogue of British Coleoptera 268

Catalogue of British Insects in all the Orders, A 167

Catalogus plantarum Angliae (‘the English Catalogue’) 51

Catalogus plantarum circa Cantabrigiam nascentium (‘the Cambridge Catalogue’) 49, 288

Catlow, Maria 214

Cave Pulleyn 47

Chance, Edgar P. 385

Chapman & Hall 230, 319, 378, 412

Charles Knight 189

Christophe Plantin 35, 37

Christopher Helm 459

Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, The 34

Church, A. H. 410

Cistula entomologica 227

Clapham, A. R. 421

Clarendon Press 57, 228, 406, 418

Clarke, C. B. 298

Coleman, W. H. 296

Coleman, William Stephen 6, 6, 252, 252

Coleoptera of the British Islands, The 346

Coleopterist’s Manual, The 151, 185

Colgan, Nathaniel 297

collecting:

beetles 148

butterflies 103

end of era of collecting 334

ferns, ‘pteridomania’ 243–5, 244

framed hand-coloured plates 456–7

insect 147–9

over-collecting 239–45

seaweed 121

shells, ‘conchology’ 56, 103, 114, 226

Collins see William Collins Sons & Co. Collins, William (‘Billy’) 426, 427, 427, 428

Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms 142, 464

Coloured Figures of Marine Plants, Found on theSouthern Coast of England 121

Coloured Figures of the Birds of the British Islands 4, 328, 329, 333

Coloured Figures of the Eggs of British Birds 331

Comital Flora of the British Isles 286, 416

Common Objects of the Country 247, 250

Compendium florae Britannicae 3, 136

Complete Book of British Butterflies, The 389

Conchologica iconica 210

Conchological Miscellany 248

Concise British Flora in Colour, The 386, 443, 445

conservation movement 436

Conspectus of the Butterflies and Moths 190

Constable 374

Cooke, Mordecai Cubitt 221, 221–2, 279, 351

Cooper, T. H. 17

copyrights 81

Act of 1710 130

extension of (1842) 248

Cornish Fauna, A 305

Corstorphine, Margaret 396, 397

Corstorphine, R. H. 396–8, 397

Couch 305

Couch, Jonathan 259, 259

Council for the Promotion of Field Studies, formation of 425

‘Country Books’ 252

Country Life Books 361, 385, 436 county Floras 296

Coward, T. A. 369, 390, 390, 391

Cox, Hon. Herbert 227

Cramp, Stanley 450–2

Crofts 150

Crombie, James M. 11, 273, 352

Crowell Collier Macmillan 454

‘Crown’ series 216

Cruijdeboek 37

Cuckoo’s Secret, The 385

Curiosities of Natural History 260

Curtis, John 218, 219, 268, 465

Curtis, William 94, 133, 156, 157, 158, 186, 463

Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 211

Curwen Press 447, 448

Cybele Britannica 7, 285–6

Cyclopaedia 136

Cyclostyle 323

da Costa, Emanuel Mendes 114

Dale, C. W. 304

Daglish, Eric Fitch 381–2, 438

Dalyell, Sir John 18

Dandridge, Joseph 67

Daniel, Henry 23–4

Darwin, Charles 148, 313

Darwin, Erasmus 98

David & Charles 452–3

David, R. W. 421

David Douglas 231, 325

Dawson, J. F. 268

De historia stirpium 27

de Jussieu, Antoine-Laurent 131

de l’Ecluse, Charles (‘Clusius’) 37

de l’Obel, Mathias 34–7, 35

de Tabley, Lord 302

Deakin, Richard 258

Denny, Henry 10, 148, 185

Dent 320, 358, 360, 379, 382, 454

Depression, World, effects on nature publishing 401–2

Derham, William 70

Descriptio 45 desktop publishing 461

Dewar, George 361

Dickie, George 18, 275

Dictionary of Birds, A 231

Dillen, Johann (Dillenius) 61–3, 61, 84

Dillenius see Dillen, Johann Dillwyn, L. W. 464

Dioscorides 47

distribution:

distribution atlases 448–50

dot-maps 285, 395, 449

Dixon, Charles 315–16

Dixon, H. N. 350

Dodoens, Rembert 37

Donovan, Edward xiii, 168, 169, 169–70, 463, 464

Doubleday, Edward 157, 465

Douglas, J. W. 5

Dovaston, J. F. M. 128

Dowager Duchess of Beaufort 69

Dragonflies of the British Isles, The 442

Drawings of British Plants 435

Dresser, H. E. 328

Druce, G. C. 228, 286, 296, 302, 303, 393, 416

Duckworth, Gerald 320

Dudley Stamp, L. 427, 428, 436

Duncan, James 15

duplicating machine, first, see Cyclostyle

Dutfield, James 74

Dyer, W. T. 222, 296

Eagle Clarke, W. 309, 336, 367, 367–9, 368, 414

Ebury Press 445

Ecology of Animals, The 410

Edwards, George 6, 74, 76, 77, 103–4, 124

Edwards, James 346

Ehret, Georg 74, 122, 122

Elements of British Entomology 151, 191

Elliott, Clarence 254

Ellis, John 122, 122

Elton, Charles 410

English Botany 133–4, 133, 135, 142, 463

English Entomologist, The 148

English Flora, The 137, 140

English Lepidoptera: or the Aurelian’s PocketCompanion 94

English Moths and Butterflies, The 73, 73, 74, 463

English names provided for genera and species 102

English Scenes and Birds 378

engravings:

wood, in colour 256–7

metal 162

Entomologia Britannica 114, 149

entomological societies in London 151

Entomological Society of London, founding of 153

Entomologist’s Record, The 229, 365

Entomologist’s Useful Compendium, The 147

Essay on the Indigenous Fossorial Hymenoptera 191

Essays upon Natural History and OtherMiscellaneous Subjects 124

Essay towards a Natural History of theCorallines … , An 122, 122

Essenhigh Corke, H. 360 ethology 373

Evans, A. H. 350

Evans, William 308

Evens, G. Bramwell (‘Romany’) 380

‘Everyman’s Library’ 358

Evolution of Habit in Birds 374

Excursion Flora of the British Isles 422

Exeter Book 22

Experienc’d Huntsman, The 78

Exposition of English Insects, An 96, 95

Familiar History of British Fishes 260

Familiar Wild Birds 326

Fasciculus (of Blackstone) 79

Fasciculus stirpium Britannicarum 52

Fauna of Scotland 336

Fawcett, Benjamin 242, 256, 257

Feathered Tribes of the British Islands 201, 201

Ferns, British and Exotic 242

Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland, The 245

Field Guide to Birds: a Bird Book on a New Plan, A 438

Field Guide to the Birds of Britain and Europe, A 439

field glasses, improvements in 314

field guides 434, 438

Fisher, James 403, 426, 427, 428

Fitch, W. H. 214

Fitter, Richard S. R. 431, 439, 439

Fleming, John 87

Flora, first for non-scholarly, in English 98

Flora Anglica 90, 99

Flora Devoniensis 154, 292

Flora Europaea 422, 450

Flora Glottiana 291

Flora Londinensis 133, 156, 158, 186, 291, 463 new edn 139, 464

Flora of Berkshire 228, 296

Flora of Berwick-on-Tweed 5

Flora of Cheshire 302

Flora of Cornwall 299

Flora of County Dublin 309

Flora of Devon 445

Flora of Essex 302

Flora of Inner Dublin, The 309

Flora of Leicestershire and Rutland 11

Flora of Middlesex 222, 296

Flora of Shropshire 293

Flora of the British Isles, The 422

Flora of the Liverpool District 298

Flora of the Neighbourhood of Reigate, A 297

Flora of Ulster, A 18

Flora Scotica 109, 111

‘Flora Selborniensis’ 90

Flora Vectensis 292–3

Floral World, The 258

Florigraphia Britannica 258

Flower, T. B. 224, 297

Flower Book for the Pocket 418, 442

Flowering Plants and Ferns of Great Britain 194

Flowers of the Field 254, 254

Foges, Wolfgang 426, 427, 444

Forbes, Edward 14, 279–81, 280, 465

Ford, E. B. 410, 431

Forest Trees of Britain, The 254

Forrest, H. E. 383

Forty Years in a Moorland Parish 253

Francis, G. W. 188, 241, 438

Frederick Warne 230, 362, 402 see also Warne & Co.

Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain, The 9, 161, 465

Frohawk, F. W. 6, 387, 387–9, 388

Fry, Sir Edward 383

Fryer, Alfred 349, 349–350, 389

Fuchs, Leonhart 27

Fuci 158, 158, 159, 464

Fundamenta entomologiae 94

Further Illustrations of British Plants 12, 417–18

Gamekeeper at Home, The 314

Gannet, a Bird with a History, The 375

Garden Calendar 89

Gardeners’ and Farmers’ Journal 241

Gardeners’ Chronicle 241

Gardener’s Magazine 186

Gatty, Margaret (Mrs Alfred Gatty) 275

gazetteers, regional 104

Geddes, Patrick 372

Genera of Diurnal Lepidoptera, The 157, 465

Genera of Recent and Fossil Shells, The 464

Genera plantarum 131

General History of Birds 8

General History of Quadrupeds 126

General Outline of the Animal Kingdom, andManual of Comparative Anatomy, A 207

General Synopsis of Birds, A 114

Geodephaga Britannica 268

Geographical Handbook of the Dorset Flora, A 395

George Allen & Unwin 317

George Bell & Sons 225, 231, 355, 378, 406, 435, 457

George Routledge & Sons 230, 247, 249, 362

Gerald de Barri (‘Giraldus Cambrensis’) 23

Gerard, John 37–41, 38, 39 ‘Gerard emaculatus’ 45

Gesner, Conrad 28, 29 ghosted books 17

Gibson, G. S. 302

Gilbert, Oliver 265

Gilchrist, James 273–4

Gilmour, John S. L. 418–21, 419, 426, 427, 428

Gladstone, Sir Hugh 19

Glanville, Eleanor 67

Gleanings in Natural History 2

Gleanings of British Algae 141

Goedart, Joannes 55

Good, R. D. 395

Goodyer, John 42–4, 47

Gosse, Philip Henry 10, 214, 240, 260–5, 261, 263

Gosselin, Joshua 75

Gough, John 2

Gould, John 4, 5, 160–1, 160, 162, 163, 465

grasshoppers and crickets, earliest national list 94

Graves, George 464

Gray, Samuel Frederick 16

John Edward 16, 17

Gray, Samuel 91

Grete Herball, The 26

Greville, Robert Kaye 143–4, 465

Grevillea 222

Griffiths, Amelia 14

Griffiths, Moses 110

Grigson, Geoffrey 426

Griscom, Ludlow 438

Grönvold, Henrik 374

Groombridge see R. Groombridge & Sons

‘grotto-work’ 122

Grove, W. B. 375

Groves, James 400

Gurney & Jackson 209, 336, 414, 433

Gurney, J. H. 375

Gwatkin, Elizabeth 254, 254

H. & F. Witherby 382, 385, 386, 414

Half-hours with the Microscope 222

Haliday, A. H. 151

Hamilton Davey, F. 299, 299

Hampshire Days 319

Hancock, Albany 282

Handbook of British Birds, The 414, 415, 450

Handbook of British Fungi 279

Handbook of British Hepaticae 351

Handbook of British Mammals 435

Handbook of British Rubi 348

Handbook of the British Flora 232–4, 235

Handbook of the Coleoptera of Great Britain andIreland 227

Handbook to British Mosses 272

Hanley, Sylvanus 248, 281, 465

Hardwicke, Robert 219, 219–23

Hardwicke’s Science Gossip 220

Hardy, A. C. 410

Hardy Ferns: How I Collected and Cultivated Them 265

Harley, Basil 447, 447, 448

Annette 447

Harley Books 447, 448

Harris, Moses 94–6, 95, 96, 463

Harrison, William 34

Harrow Butterflies and Moths 304

Hartert, Ernst 393

Harting, J. E. 305, 336–7

Harvey, W. H. 136, 165, 165, 172, 211, 212, 465

Harvie-Brown, John Alexander 231, 307, 307–9

Hassall, Arthur Hill 17, 277–8, 278

Haworth, Adrian Henry 152, 152, 464

Hayes, William 124–5

Hayward, Ida 393

Hayward, W. R. 231

Heath, John 448

Heaton, Richard 47

hectograph (to reproduce handwriting) 323

Henry Sotheran 337

Hepaticae of the British Islands 351

Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes, The 37, 39

herbarium, instructions for 100

‘herborising’ 290

Hewitson, W. C. 157, 208, 391

Hill, John 85–7

Hinton, M. A. C. 339

Histoire des Plantes 37

Histoire des Plantes qui Naissent aux Environs deParis 64

Historia animalium 28, 34

Historia animalium Angliae 56, 78

Historia insectorum 8, 9, 54, 67

Historia muscorum 62

Historia plantarum rariorum 64

Historia sive synopsis methodicae conchyliorum 56

Historie of Serpents, The 31–2

History of British Birds (Bewick) 3, 127, 127

History of British Birds, A (Fawcett & Morris) 257, 257, 456

History of British Birds, A (MacGillivray) 199

History of British Birds … , A (Seebohm) 328

History of British Butterflies, A 258

History of British Ferns, A 241

‘History of British Fishes’ (Bewick) 128

History of British Fishes, A 203, 203

History of British Mammals 338

History of British Mollusca and their Shells, A 281, 465

History of British Quadrupeds, A 18, 336

History of British Starfishes and Other Animals ofthe Class Echinodermata, A 281

History of Quadrupeds 107

History of the Birds of Europe, A 328

History of the British Freshwater Algae, A 17, 278

History of the Fishes of the British Islands, A 259, 259

History of the Fungusses growing about Halifax, An 142

History of the Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland,A 270, 270

Holinshed, Raphael 34

Hollom, P. A. D. 439

Homes without Hands 250

Hood, Elizabeth 235

Hooker, William Jackson 137–41, 138, 165, 272, 464

Joseph 211, 211, 238

Hope, F. W. 151, 185

Hopkirk, Thomas 291

Horsefield, Thomas 2

Horwood, A. R. 11

Hosking, Eric 381, 427, 428, 435

Houghton, William 260

Houghton Mifflin 438

How Birds Live 375, 412

How(e), William 47

Howard, H. Eliot 225, 373, 374–5

Hudson, William 89–90

Hudson, William Henry 317–20, 318

Hulme, A. O. 299

Humble-bee, The 324

Humble-bee, its Life-history and how toDomesticate it, The 323

Hunnybun, E. W. 370

Hussey, Anna Maria (Mrs T. J.) 14, 15, 211

Hutchinson 320, 362, 383, 386, 403, 454

Huxley, Julian 374, 409, 427, 427–8

Hymenoptera Britannica 151

Icones Plantarum (periodical) 435

Idle Hours with Nature 316

Illustrated Guide to British Mosses 350

Illustrated Index of British Shells 283

Illustrated Manual of British Birds, An 336, 414

Illustrated Natural History of British Butterflies 342

Illustrations of British Entomology 17, 149–50, 150, 465

Illustrations of British Mycology 14, 15

Illustrations of British Ornithology 163, 164, 464

Illustrations on the Conchology of Great Britainand Ireland 198

In Birdland with Field-glasses and Camera 327

Index entomologicus 251

inflation, effects on nature publishing: 1970s 453–5 1990s 457–9

Ingpen, Abel 147

Innys 62, 70

insect collection auction, first recorded 147

‘Insecta Britannica’ 214

Insectorum, sive minimorum animalium theatrum 31, 32, 33

Insects of Great Britain, The 162

Instructions for Collecting, Rearing and PreservingInsects 147

‘International Library of Psychology’ 230

Introduction to Botany 3, 91

Introduction to Botany in a Series of Letters, An 100

Introduction to Conchology, An 147, 283

Introduction to Cryptogamic Botany 274

Introduction to Entomology, An 145

Introduction to the Natural History andClassification of Insects, An 147

Introduction to the Plant Life of the Oxford District 410

Irish Flora, An 239

Irish Topographical Botany 287

Irvine, Alexander 18, 295

Iter 44

Jacob, Edward 102

Jacson, Maria 100–1

Jameson, H. G. 350

Janson, Edward Wesley 226–7

Jardine, Sir William 195–6, 196

Jefferies, Richard 315

Jeffreys, J. Gwyn 284–5

Jenner, Edward 276

Jermyn, Laetitia 147

Jesse, Edward 2

John Martyn (botanist) see Martyn, John

John Martyn (publisher) 51

John Murray 152, 230, 377, 386

John Norton 37

Johns, Charles Alexander 253, 253–5, 254, 260

Johnson, Thomas xiii, 37, 38, 42, 44–7

Johnston, George 5, 147, 175–9, 176, 279–81

Jonathan Cape 379

Jones, Thomas Rymer 207

Jourdain, F. C. R. 393, 415, 415

Journal of Botany 220

Journal of Ecology 420

Journey through Wales 23

Joy, Norman H. 384

Kearton, Cherry 12, 326

Kearton, Richard 231, 325–6

Keble Martin, W. 386, 443, 443–4, 445, 446

Kegan Paul 230, 353, 383

Keulemans, J. G. 327, 333

keys, dichotomous 87

Kindle 462

Kingham, Old and New 289

Kirby, William 145–7, 146

Kirke Swann, Harry 399

Kirkman, F. B. 369

‘Knowledge Series’ 383

Lady’s and Gentleman’s Botanical Pocket Book,The 101

Land’s End, The 320

Landsborough, David 275

Lankester, Edwin 220, 222, 299

Lardner, Dionysius 191

Larvae of the British Butterflies and Moths, The343, 343

Latham, John 8, 109, 114

Lauder Lindsay, W. 273–4, 274

Leach, W. E. 341–2, 464

Lee, James 3, 90–2, 91

Lee, Oswin 325

Leeds, H. A. 365

Lees, Edwin 2, 16, 188–9

Leighton, W. A. 273, 273, 293

Leonard Hill 418

Lepidoptera Britannica 152, 153, 464

Lepidoptera of the British Islands 217, 345, 447

Lett, H. W. 351 letterpress in English plus other language 168

Letters of Rusticus on the Natural History of Godalming, The 289

Lewin, William 161, 162, 463, 464

Libellus de re herbaria novus 26

Liber de mirabilibus sanctae scripturae 22

libraries:

free book-borrowing 246

public lending 246, 458

‘libraries’ of cheap classics 358

‘Library of Entertaining Knowledge’ 189

Lichen-flora of Great Britain, Ireland and theChannel Islands, The 273

Lichen Hunters, The 265

Lichenes Britannici 273

Lichenographica Britannica 13

Life of the Fields, The 315

Lightfoot, John 109–11, 109

Lilford, Lord 4, 328–31, 329, 332

Lindley, John 12, 153–4, 154

Linnaeus 62, 84, 91, 131

Linnean Society of London 131, 236

Linnaean system 2, 84–9, 97, 100, 102, 130

List of All Species of Hepatics Hitherto Found in theBritish Islands, A 351

List of the Birds that have been Observed to Breedin the Island of Arran, Scotland, since the year1835, A 18

List of the Flowering Plants of Andover 298

Lister, Martin 54–7, 55

literary agents, emergence of 321

lithography 164

offset 322, 359

Lives of the Hunted 381

Lizars, W. H. 195–7, 195

local Floras, effects of costs 297 local lists 290

Lodge, George 327, 433–4

Lodge, R. B. 326

London Flora, The 18

London Journal of Botany, The 211

London Weekend Television 454

London’s Natural History 431

Longfield, Cynthia 392, 442

Longman 136, 139, 140, 150, 154, 227–8, 286, 294, 319

Longman Group 209

Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green 205

Longstaff, John 5

Loudon, John Claudius 186

Loves of Plants, The 98

Lowe, E. J. 242

Lubbock, Sir John 230, 313, 313–14

Lucas, W. J. 399, 399

‘lumpers’ and ‘splitters’ 236–8

Luxford, George 297

Lydekker, Richard 332

Lyte, Henry 37

McClintock, David 440

MacGillivray, William 99–100, 198–201, 199, 298

Mackenzie 260

Maclachlan & Stewart 143, 231

Macmillan 253, 378

Macvicar, S. M. 351, 351

Magazine of Natural History 186

Magazine of Science and School of Art 188

Maitland Emmet, A. 448, 449

Malacostraca podophthalmata Britanniae 342

Mammal Society of the British Isles, formation of 435

Mammals of Great Britain, The 337

Mansel-Pleydell, J. C. 302, 306

Manual for the Butterfly Collector 147

Manual of British Botany (Balfour) 136

Manual of British Botany (Babington) 207, 236, 418

Manual of British Butterflies and Moths, A 171, 267

Manual of British Lichens, A 274

Manual of Marine Zoology 264

Manual of the British Algae 212

Manual of the British Coleoptera, A 150

Manual of the Land and Fresh-water Shells of theBritish Islands, A 123

Manual of the Mollusca, A 283

Marnock, Robert 258

Marren, Peter 426, 436

Marsham, Thomas 114, 148–9

Martin, William Linnaeus 193, 260

Martyn, John (botanist) 63–4

Martyn, John (publisher) see John Martyn Martyn, Thomas 113

Martyn, Thomas (illustr.) 148

Massee, G. E. 354–5, 355

Materia medica 47

Mavor, William 101

mechanised presses, introduction of 181–2

mechanised typesetting, introduction of 322

Linotype 322

Monotype 322

medical students, walks in countryside 34, 50, 58, 99

Meinertzhagen, Richard 4

Mercurius botanicus 45, 46

Merret(t), Christopher 47–8

Methodus plantarum nova 53

Methuen & Co. 355, 361, 376

Meyer, Albrecht 27

Miall, L. C. 228

Michael Joseph 445

Migrations of Birds as Observed at IrishLighthouses and Lightships, The 225

Millais, J. G. 337, 337–8

Miller, John 86

Miscellaneous Tracts relating to Natural History,Husbandry, and Physick 88

Miscellany of Natural History, The 198

Moffet, Thomas 30–3, 30, 31, 32, 33

‘Moniepennie, Alexander’ 19

Monograph of the British Aphids 348

Monograph of the British Desmidiaceae 353–4

Monograph of the British Nudibranchiate Mollusca 282

Monograph of the Lichens found in Britain, A 352

Monson, Lady Ann 90

Montagu, George 113, 117–21, 118, 119, 120, 121

Moore, Thomas 214, 241, 242, 242, 243, 245

More, Alexander Goodman 7

Morris, Francis Orpen 167, 255–9, 256, 257, 342

Mortimer Batten, H. 394

Morton, John 78

Moss, C. E. 370, 370, 371

Moss Exchange Club, formation of 350

Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland,The 447, 449

Moths and Memories 265

Mountfort, Guy 438

Moyle Rogers, W. 348

Mudd, William 274–5

Mudie, Robert 201, 201

Murray, Alexander 231

Muscologia Britannica 139, 272

Muscologiae Hibernicae spicilegium 139

Naked-eyed Medusae 282

Name that Bird 382, 438

Names of Herbs … , The 26

National Magazine Company 445

National Museums and Galleries of Wales 394

National Nature Reserves 436

Natural Arrangement of British Plants, A 16

Natural History and Antiquities ofNorthumberland, The 116

Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, in theCounty of Southampton, The 4, 89, 114–17

natural history calendars 89

Natural History of Aquatic Insects, The 228

Natural History of British Butterflies 387, 388, 389

Natural History of British Birds 464

Natural History of British Fishes 464

Natural History of British Insects 168, 169, 169, 463

Natural History of British Moths 167

Natural History of British Quadrupeds, The 464

Natural History of British Shells 464

Natural History of Dee Side and Braemar, The 298

Natural History of English Insects, A 67, 68

Natural History of Ireland, The 215

Natural History of Many Curious and UncommonZoophytes, The 123

Natural History of Northampton-shire, The 78

Natural History of Oxfordshire 18

Natural History of Songbirds, A 18

Natural History of Spiders and Other CuriousInsects, A 70

Natural History of the British Entomostraca, The 282

Natural History of the British Lepidoptera, A 19, 229, 364

Natural History of the Nests and Eggs of BritishBirds, A 258

Natural History of the Tineina, The 267

natural history professional, first 61

Naturalist’s Diary, The 4

Naturalist’s Directory 231

‘Naturalist’s Library’ 195–8, 431

Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast, A 240, 261

Nature Conservancy, formation of 425, 436, 450

Nature Conservation 436

Nature Conservation in Britain 436

Nature in Britain 426

Nature in Downland 319

Nature Jottings of a Motorist 394

Nature Photography for Beginners 394

‘nature-printing’ (fern fronds) 245

Nature Reserves Investigation Committee, formation of 425

Nature’s Teachings: Human Inventions Anticipatedby Nature 250

Nelson 358

Net Book Agreement (1900) 321, 401, 457

New Herball, A 27

New Illustrated British Flora, A 418

New Illustrations in Zoology 114

‘New Journalism’ 360, 361

New Naturalist (journal) 432

‘New Naturalist Library’ 411, 426–32, 429

‘New Student’s Flora’ 422

Newbould, W. W. 224, 286

Newman, Edward 94, 186, 187, 208, 241, 289

Newman, L. W. 365

newspaper industry, influence of 360

Newton, Alfred 206–7, 207, 231, 307

Nicholson, E. M. (Max) 375, 410, 411, 412–13, 436

Nieuue Herball 37

non-existent works 18

North Western Naturalist 398

Northern Flora, The 231

‘Notices of British Fungi’ 142

Nylander, W. 352

Observations on the Structure of Fruits and Seeds 12

‘Observer’s Books’ 214, 402, 424

Ocean, The 261

Octavian Pulleyn 47

Oliver & Boyd 209, 231, 433

Omphalos 262

Open Air, The 315

O’Reilly, Clare 440

Ornithologia 52

Ornithologia Danmoniensis; or, an History of theHabits and Economy of Devonshire Birds 304

Ornithological Dictionary; or Alphabetical Synopsisof British Birds 118, 119, 120, 121

Our Heritage of Wild Nature: A Plea for OrganizedNature Conservation 436

Our Woodlands, Heaths and Hedges 252

Out with Romany 380

Outlines of British Fungology 279

Outlines of the Natural History of Great Britainand Ireland 93

Oxford University Press 403, 450, 456

‘packagers’ 444

Paillou, Peter 74, 105

Palaeontographical Society, formation of 180

Pall Mall Gazette 314

Pamplin, William 226

Papilionum Britanniae icones … 66, 66–7

Parkinson, John 36, 36

part-works 155–74

Patterson, Arthur H. 2, 361

Pearson, W. H. 351

Pelican Books 403

Penguin Books 403, 437, 454

Pennant, Thomas 4, 104–9, 105, 106, 108, 463

Penny, Thomas 29–30, 30, 31

periodicals, production of 185

Perring, F. H. 449

Peter Elmsley 94

Peterson, Roger Tory 438

Petiver, James xiii, 64–7, 65, 66

Phillips, Roger 440

Philosophica botanica 91

Philosophical Account of the Works of Nature 71

Philosophy of Zoology 87

photography:

early developments (dry plates) 324

first portable hand-cameras 327

first flashlight 327

origins 247

state of the art, 1920s 381

since 1950s 432, 435

true colour photographs 360

Phycologia Britannica 166, 172, 211, 212, 465

Phytologia Britannica 47

Pickard-Cambridge, Octavius 271, 271–2

Pictures of Nature around the Malvern Hills andVale of Severn 189

Pike, Oliver G. 326–7

Pinax rerum naturalium Britannicarum 48

piracy, publishing 71

Pitt-Rivers, Gen. 117

plagiarism 17

Plain and Easy Account of British Ferns, A 220 plant-press, first description in print 100

Plantae Favershamiensis 102

Plot, Robert 18

Plues, Margaret 243

Pocket Guide to British Birds, The 439

Popular History 274

Popular History of British Ferns and Allied Plants,A 242, 243

‘Popular Natural History’ 213, 272, 275

Popular Science Review 220, 221

Populous Solitude, A 265

Porter, Richard Henry 225–6

‘Poyser Natural History’ 436

Practical Handbook of British Beetles 384

Practical Handbook of British Birds, A 413, 414

Practical Hints for the Field Lepidopterist 365

Practical Plant Ecology 406, 410

Praeger, Robert Lloyd 265, 287, 309, 393

Pratt, Anne 193–4, 193

Priest, Robert 37

Primitiae florae Sarnicae 295

Principles and Rudiments of Mineralogy, Botany, Zoology, The 220

printers, dispersal from major cities 80 as publishers 34

printing, spread of technology 25, 181, 182, 323

Proctor, William 3

Prospect of Flowers, A 394

publication costs:

dispensing with professional printer 57

commission from author 81

author full cost of publication 81

Publishers’ Association, The, formation of 321

publishing, early difficulties 8

risk compared to bookshop 112 publishing trade’s fragile economics 21

Pulteney, Richard xi

Putnam 380

Quaritch, Bernard 341

Quekett Microscopical Club, formation of 222

R. Groombridge & Sons 230, 241, 242, 257, 259

R. H. Porter 374

Rackham, Arthur 373

‘Railway Library’ 247

Rainbird, George 444

Ralfs, John 17, 275–7, 276, 277

Rambles in Search of Ferns 243

Rambles of a Naturalist round Folkestone 289

Rare and Remarkable Animals of Scotland 18

Ray, John 8, 9, 12, 48–54, 49, 177 classification 84

Ray Society 177, 340–1, 344, 348, 398–400

formation of 176–80, 282

Realities of Bird Life 374

Rees, Abraham 136

Reeve, Lovell Augustus 172, 210, 210–19, 232–3, 242, 268, 276, 384

Reeve & Co. 350, 355, 417

‘Regional Naturalist’ 453

Religious Tract Society (RTS) 192, 260

remainders market 184, 455

‘reminiscence’ literature, emergence of 265

Rennie, James 17, 189–90

Reproductive Capacity of Plants, The 406

Richards, O. W. 410

Richardson, R. A. 439

Rivington 170

Roberts, Charles 4

Roberts, Michael 448

Robson, Edward 102

Robson, James 124

Roles, Sybil J. 422

Romance of Natural History, The 261, 264

‘Romany’, see Evens, G. Bramwell

Rose, Francis 440

Ross-Craig, Stella 435

Rothschild, Hon. Charles 304

Rothschild, Lord 389

Rough Notes … on the Birds Observed … in the British Islands 18, 225

Routledge see George Routledge & Sons Routledge’s Illustrated Natural History 250

Rural Bird Life 315

Rural Life of Shakespeare 189

Rust, Smut, Mildew and Mould 221

Rye, E. C. 269

Salisbury, E. J. 406–7

Salmon, The 431

Salvin, Osbert 332

Samouelle, George 147

Samuel Smith 53

Sandars, Edmund 336, 403

Saunders, Edward 345–6, 346

Saunders, Howard 335, 335–6

Scharff, R. F. 7

School Flora, A 239

Scotia illustrata, sive prodromus historiae naturalis 59

Scottish Cryptogamic Flora 143, 465

Seaby, A. W. 425

Seafarer, The 22

Sea-side Book, The 262

Seebohm, Henry 328–31, 330, 331

Selby, Prideaux John 163, 164, 208, 464

self-publishing 324

Selous, Edmund 361, 373–4

Sharp, David 227

Shaw, Dr George 15, 463

Sherard, James 60–1

William 60–1

Shoard, Marion 436

Shuckard, W. E. 150, 191

Sibbald, Robert 58, 58

Sidgwick & Jackson 385, 410, 454

Simpkin Marshall 230, 241, 424, 455

‘Sixpenny Library’ 413

Skene, MacGregor 418, 442

Sladen, Frederick 323

Sladen, Percy 340

Smith, Annie Lorrain 352, 352

Smith, James Edward 94, 113, 131–7, 131, 463

Smith, Elder & Co. 230, 314, 317, 377

Smith, John 3

Smith, M. 447

Smith, William 278–9

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) 192, 249, 260

Society for Promoting Natural History 131

Society for the Bibliography of Natural History ix, 153

Society of Apothecaries 44

Society of Aurelians 71

Society of Authors, formation of 321 socii itinerantes 44

Solander, Daniel 87–8, 87, 122

Some British Animals Extinct within HistoricTimes 337

Soper, Francis 216

Sotheran, Henry 458

South, Richard 359, 359, 365–6

Southern, H. N. 435

Sowerby, James 5, 133, 133, 142, 342, 463, 464

Sowerby the Second, G. B. 282, 283, 342, 464

Species plantarum 62, 84

Specimen botanicum … plantarum rariorumAngliae … 80

Specimen of a Lichenographia Britannica; or anattempt at a history of British lichens 145

Spence, William 5, 145–7, 146

Spiders of Great Britain and Ireland 448

Spry, William J. 150

Stackhouse, Emily 255

Stainton, H. T. 171, 266–8, 267, 344

Stalk-eyed Crustacea 284

Stanhope (printing press) 182

Stark, R. M. 272

Stelfox, A. W. 1

Step, Edward 362, 362–3, 363

Stephens, James Francis 17, 149, 150, 465

Sterling, Dougie 4

Stillingfleet, Benjamin 88–9, 88

Stirpium adversaria nova 35

Stirpium historiae pemptades sex 37

Stirpium observationes 35, 37

Stokes, Jonathan 13

Stray Feathers from Many Birds 316

Strickland, Hugh Edwin 175

Stringer, Arthur 78

Strudwick, Florence 12, 417

Stuart, John 109

Stuart, John, third Earl of Bute 85–7, 85

Student’s Flora of the British Islands, The 238, 416

Student’s Handbook of British Hepatics, The 351

Student’s Handbook of British Mosses, The 350

Student’s Illustrated Irish Flora, A 239

Studies in Bird Migration 367, 367, 368

Studies in Quantitative Biology 406

Study of Birds, The 413

Study of Plants: an Introduction to Botany andField Ecology, The 406

subspecies, use of category 224, 330

Swainson, William 130, 165, 191–2, 192, 464, 465

Swan Sonnenschein, William 229–30

Swanton, E. W. 375

Swete, E. H. 16

Synopsis of Quadrupeds 107

Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum 53 3rd edn 62

Synopsis of the British Diatomaceae, A 278

Synopsis of the British Flora: Arranged according tothe Natural Orders, A 153

Synopsis stirpium Hibernicarum 79

Systema naturae 84

Systematics Association 456

T. & A. D. Poyser 452, 459

T. Buncle & Co. 396, 396, 397

T. Fisher Unwin 317

Tansley, Sir Arthur G. 371, 372, 406, 407–8, 420

Tarka the Otter 380

Taylor & Francis 229

Taylor, John William 339–40

Taylor, Richard 184, 186

Taylor, Thomas 139, 272

Templeton, Robert 269

Tenby 10

Territory in Bird Life 375, 386

Testacea Britannica 119–20 Supplement 120

Text Book of British Butterflies and Moths 365

The Field 389

‘The Natural History of the British Islands’ 207, 209

‘The Open Air Library’ 382

The Phytologist 297

‘The Young Collector’ 229

The Zoologist 186, 374

Theatrum botanicum 36, 36, 46

Theft of the Countryside, The 436

Thomas Cadell 94

Thomas Nelson & Sons 425, 450

Thompson, John 201

Thompson, Spencer 265

Thompson, William 215, 215, 217

Thompson Seton, Ernest 381

Thorburn, Archibald 327, 378

Thought Transference (or what?) in Birds 374

Threlkeld, Caleb 79

Ticehurst, N. F. 415

titles, misleading book 18

Topographical Botany 286, 287, 416

Topsell, Edward 31

Tourist’s Flora of the West of Ireland, A 393

Tournefort 64

natural classification 84

Tractatus … de araneis 55

transportation of books 82

effect of railways on costs 183

Treatise on the British Freshwater Algae, A 354

Tremewan, W. G. 447

Trimen, Henry 222, 296

Trübner & Co. 337

Truth about the Cuckoo, The 385

Tucker, Andrew 304

Tucker, B. W. 410, 415

Tunnicliffe, Charles 381

Turner, Dawson 7, 13, 138, 139, 144, 158, 158, 159, 464

Turner, William 26–8

Turton, William 123

Tutin, T. G. 421, 421

Tutt, J. W. 19, 229, 364, 364–5

Twelve New Designs of British Butterflies 71, 72

Types of British Vegetation 372

Ullyet, Henry university presses 228

Upcott Gill 231, 399

Vachell, Eleanor 394

Van Voorst, John xiii, 177, 204–10, 241, 262, 289

Varieties of British Butterflies 388, 389

vasculum, first description in print 100

Vegetable System, The 86

Vegetation of the Peak District, The 371

Velley, Thomas 121

Vertebrate Fauna of North Wales, The 383

‘Vertebrate Fauna of Scotland’ 231, 307–8

Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation 192

Vivarium naturae, or the Naturalist’s Miscellany 463

W. H. Allen 332, 351

Wakefield, Priscilla 14, 100–1

Waller, A. R. 320

Wallis, John 116

Wanderings among the Wild Flowers 265

Warburg, E. F. 421

Ward, Lock & Co. 389, 454

Warde Fowler, William 289

‘Wardian cases’ 241

Warne & Co. 359, 378, 402, 440, 441, 442, 454

wars, effects on nature publishing:

Napoleonic Wars 129–30

First World War 376–78

Second World War 423–8

Watching Birds 403–4, 425, 437

Waterhouse, C. O. 227

Waterhouse, G. R. 268

Watkins, Charles 220

Watson, H. C. 7, 20, 285, 285–7

Watson, William 88

Watts, W. M. 239

‘Wayside and Woodland’ 362, 365, 391

Wayside and Woodland Blossoms 362, 363

Webb, D. A. 239

Week at the Lizard, A 254, 255

Weekes Fowler, William 217, 346–7, 347

West, Tuffen 270, 278

West, William 353, 353–4

George Stephen 353–4

Weston Dillwyn, Lewis 57

Westwood, John Obadiah 157, 157, 267–8, 268, 465

Wheldon and Wesley 399, 456

Whiston, John 112

White, Benjamin xiii, 106, 111, 112–13, 114, 135

Gilbert xiii, 89, 114–17

White, F. Buchanan 307

White, Taylor 74–5, 76

White Cochrane 113

Wild Flower Key, The 440

Wild Nature Won by Kindness 316

Wildflowers as they Grow 360

Wildlife in a Southern County 315

Wilkes, Benjamin 71–4, 72, 73, 463

William Collins Sons & Co. 358, 426–29, 433, 439

William Somerville Orr 200

Williams & Norgate 279, 353, 413

Williamson, Henry 380

Willughby, Francis 50–1, 51

Willughby Society, formation of 180

Wilmott, A. J. 371, 418–21

Wilson, Edward 338

Wilson, Owen S. 345

Wilson, William 272

With Nature and a Camera 326

Witherby & Co. see H. & F. Witherby Witherby, Harry Forbes 382–4, 385, 413, 415, 415

Withering, William 13, 96–9, 97

Wolf, Joseph 166, 327

Wood, Emily Margaret 298

Wood, J. B. 15

Wood, John George 10, 247, 249, 249–52

Theodore 4

Wood, William 226, 251 woodcuts, ‘quality without equal’ 125

Woodhead, T. H. 406

Woodruffe-Peacock, E. A. 300

Woodward, S. P. 283

World of Insects, The 5

Wray, John see Ray, John

Wyles, Benjamin 326

Yarrell, William 202–3, 202, 203

Young, Andrew 394

‘Young Collector’s Handbooks’ 229

Zoological Illustrations 165, 464, 465

Zoological Miscellany, The 464

Zoological Society of London, founding of 153

The New Naturalist Library

Butterflies—E. B. Ford

British Game—B. Vesey-Fitzgerald

London’s Natural History—R. S. R. Fitter

Britain’s Structure and Scenery—L. Dudley Stamp

Wild Flowers—J. Gilmour & M. Walters

The Highlands & Islands—F. Fraser Darling & J. M. Boyd

Mushrooms & Toadstools—J. Ramsbottom

Insect Natural History—A. D. Imms

A Country Parish—A. W. Boyd

British Plant Life—W. B. Turrill

Mountains & Moorlands—W. H. Pearsall

The Sea Shore—C. M. Yonge

Snowdonia—F. J. North, B. Campbell & R. Scott

The Art of Botanical Illustration—W. Blunt

Life in Lakes & Rivers—T. T. Macan & E. B. Worthington

Wild Flowers of Chalk & Limestone—J. E. Lousley

Birds & Men—E. M. Nicholson

A Natural History of Man in Britain—H. J. Fleure & M. Davies

Wild Orchids of Britain—V. S. Summerhayes

The British Amphibians & Reptiles—M. Smith

British Mammals—L. Harrison Matthews

Climate and the British Scene—G. Manley

An Angler’s Entomology—J. R. Harris

Flowers of the Coast—I. Hepburn

The Sea Coast—J. A. Steers

The Weald—S. W. Wooldridge & F. Goldring

Dartmoor—L. A. Harvey & D. St. Leger Gordon

Sea Birds—J. Fisher & R. M. Lockley

The World of the Honeybee—C. G. Butler

Moths—E. B. Ford

Man and the Land—L. Dudley Stamp

Trees, Woods and Man—H. L. Edlin

Mountain Flowers—J. Raven & M. Walters

The Open Sea: I. The World of Plankton—A. Hardy

The World of the Soil—E. J. Russell

Insect Migration—C. B. Williams

The Open Sea: II. Fish & Fisheries—A. Hardy

The World of Spiders—W. S. Bristowe

The Folklore of Birds—E. A. Armstrong

Bumblebees—J. B. Free & C. G. Butler

Dragonflies—P. S. Corbet, C. Longfield & N. W. Moore

Fossils—H. H. Swinnerton

Weeds & Aliens—E. Salisbury

The Peak District—K. C. Edwards

The Common Lands of England & Wales—L. Dudley Stamp & W. G. Hoskins

The Broads—E. A. Ellis

The Snowdonia National Park—W. M. Condry

Grass and Grasslands—I. Moore

Nature Conservation in Britain—L. Dudley Stamp

Pesticides and Pollution—K. Mellanby

Man & Birds—R. K. Murton

Woodland Birds—E. Simms

The Lake District—W. H. Pearsall & W. Pennington

The Pollination of Flowers—M. Proctor & P. Yeo

Finches—I. Newton

Pedigree: Words from Nature—S. Potter & L. Sargent

British Seals—H. R. Hewer

Hedges—E. Pollard, M. D. Hooper & N. W. Moore

Ants—M. V. Brian

British Birds of Prey—L. Brown

Inheritance and Natural History—R. J. Berry

British Tits—C. Perrins

British Thrushes—E. Simms

The Natural History of Shetland—R. J. Berry & J. L. Johnston

Waders—W. G. Hale

The Natural History of Wales—W. M. Condry

Farming and Wildlife—K. Mellanby

Mammals in the British Isles—L. Harrison Matthews

Reptiles and Amphibians in Britain—D. Frazer

The Natural History of Orkney—R. J. Berry

British Warblers—E. Simms

Heathlands—N. R. Webb

The New Forest—C. R. Tubbs

Ferns—C. N. Page

Freshwater Fish—P. S. Maitland & R. N. Campbell

The Hebrides—J. M. Boyd & I. L. Boyd

The Soil—B. Davis, N. Walker, D. Ball & A. Fitter

British Larks, Pipits & Wagtails—E. Simms

Caves & Cave Life—P. Chapman

Wild & Garden Plants—M. Walters

Ladybirds—M. E. N. Majerus

The New Naturalists—P. Marren

The Natural History of Pollination—M. Proctor, P. Yeo & A. Lack

Ireland: A Natural History—D. Cabot

Plant Disease—D. Ingram & N. Robertson

Lichens—Oliver Gilbert

Amphibians and Reptiles—T. Beebee & R. Griffiths

Loch Lomondside—J. Mitchell

The Broads—B. Moss

Moths—M. Majerus

Nature Conservation—P. Marren

Lakeland—D. Ratcliffe

British Bats—John Altringham

Seashore—Peter Hayward

Northumberland—Angus Lunn

Fungi—Brian Spooner & Peter Roberts

Mosses & Liverworts—Nick Hodgetts & Ron Porley

Bumblebees—Ted Benton

Gower—Jonathan Mullard

Woodlands—Oliver Rackham

Galloway and the Borders—Derek Ratcliffe

Garden Natural History—Stefan Buczacki

The Isles of Scilly—Rosemary Parslow

A History of Ornithology—Peter Bircham

Wye Valley—George Peterken

Dragonflies—Philip Corbet & Stephen Brooks

Grouse—Adam Watson & Robert Moss

Southern England—Peter Friend

Islands—R. J. Berry

Wildfowl—David Cabot

Dartmoor—Ian Mercer

EDITORS

SARAH A. CORBET, ScD

Prof. RICHARD WEST, ScD, FRS, FGS

DAVID STREETER, MBE, FIBIOL

JIM FLEGG, OBE, FIHORT

PROF. JONATHAN SILVERTOWN

*

The aim of this series is to interest the general reader in the wildlife of Britain by recapturing the enquiring spirit of the old naturalists. The editors believe that the natural pride of the British public in the native flora and fauna, to which must be added concern for their conservation, is best fostered by maintaining a high standard of accuracy combined with clarity of exposition in presenting the results of modern scientific research.

Author’s Foreword
and Acknowledgements

FROM THE FIRST, it has been one of the declared aims of the New Naturalist Library to bring before the general reader interested in the wildlife of these islands the distilled results of modern research. That aim was understandably formulated with research on the biological and environmental aspects mainly in mind, but it could equally well have been interpreted as extending to research in complementary directions, such as historical and bibliographical matters.

At the time the New Naturalist Library was conceived, scholarly enquiry into the circumstances under which past publications on our fauna or flora have found their way into print had been taking place for many years, but it had yet to attract much of a following. Most of it arose as a by-product of taxonomy or out of the need to establish the provenance of specimens in museums, many of those the product of long-ago voyages and expeditions. Of those two motives, the taxonomic one was the more pressing, because of the rule of priority that governs biological nomenclature. Increasingly it had become apparent that numerous works in which new taxa had been described, or new nomenclatural combinations perpetrated by accident or design, bore misleading dates, especially if they had been issued part by part over a period of years. Establishing the correct ones as precisely as possible was a matter of some urgency, if names were to be stabilised.

The founding in 1936 of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History provided a link between the scattered specialists in a range of countries by then engaged in this recondite field of research, in particular through a journal, launched that same year, to serve as a vehicle for publication of the definitive findings—a very necessary if, alas, hardly very readable form of literature. So far as works on our own fauna or flora are concerned, the fruits of those admirably persistent investigations found comprehensive embodiment in 1980 in R. B. Freeman’s British Natural History Books 1495–1900: a Handlist, an indispensable reference tool that has never been far from my elbow throughout the writing of the present volume. Except in very rare cases, I have been content to take its dating of works as unchallengeably authoritative. My one regret is that the author did not live to produce a follow-up, bringing the coverage down to the year 2000. For want of that, the dating of twentieth-century works can be regarded as no better than provisional, by comparison.

By the 1970s the specific task for which that society had come into being was effectively completed. In the meantime, its focus had been broadening, as growing numbers of biographers and historians perceived in natural history promising pastures that were seriously undergrazed. Its title was therefore changed, along with that of its journal, to reflect the wider range of concerns it was acquiring. The prominent part it has played over the years and continues to play, in those successive guises, in fostering the scrutiny in depth of natural history’s past literature is very evident from the references at the end of this book.

We now know so much more than we used to about our outstandingly rich legacy of natural history books, many of great beauty and hundreds more the triumphant outcome of decades or even near-lifetimes of patient observing and recording, that it was high time that the great advances on this comparatively little-known front were brought to more general notice. The imminence of the 60th anniversary of the New Naturalists gave rise to the suggestion that a volume devoted to this subject could be a fitting way of marking that milestone, and this book is the eventual result.

The topic is one that could be tackled in a number of ways. It could be an anthology, composed of extracts from the writings of past naturalists or from biographical accounts of them, with perhaps a linking narrative. Or the emphasis could be on the illustrations—and excellent volumes on that aspect have indeed appeared (and from hands far better qualified for that than my own). Or a volume could be written from the standpoint of a collector of the books themselves, drawing on a wealth of connoisseurship and recalling some of the excitements of the chase—and an extended work of such a kind we could very usefully have one day.

As it happened, the editors chose to entrust the task to a historian, and to one interested more especially in the external factors that have shaped the pursuit of natural history in these islands down the years. So it should have come as no surprise to them that the theme that commended itself to me was the complicated, often tense relationship between the naturalists who have written the books and those who have been invited to produce and distribute them—in other words, how far the quality and quantity of the would-be published output has been affected by the changing economics of the trade. This was a theme of obvious central importance, it seemed to me, yet it did not appear to have been examined hitherto either in much detail or at any great length.

In view of the vastness of the literature, published and unpublished, potentially relevant to that theme, it was immediately clear that I would need to exclude periodicals from consideration and confine myself just to books (including those issued in parts). These were substantially different markets, latterly even competitors, with the one outpacing the other as far as the publication of scientific material was concerned. The geological components of natural history would also have to be excluded if zoology and botany, with more than large enough literatures of their own, were to be covered adequately—and even that could be done only by concentrating on books concerned with the fauna and/or flora of the British Isles at least in substantial part. Much of my own fieldwork having been carried out over the years in the western third of these, I was all the same anxious to try to ensure that books on Ireland’s natural history, or by Irish naturalists on Britain’s, received a proportionate share of attention. Similarly, I was determined to go out of my way to ensure that guides and monographs devoted to the less-studied groups were not neglected, even to the point of allotting them more coverage than some might consider the size of their followings have warranted. For it has been in many of the less populated stretches of the subject that some of the most heroic, and scientifically most needed, work has been carried out, while at the same time undergoing some of the most arduous and fascinatingly complicated journeys into print. At the same time it seemed only appropriate to recount at more than ordinary length the stories lying behind some of the principal works of identification in use at different periods, in so far as those have been pieced together and published as yet.

As a naturalist, my interests have always been preponderantly botanical, and that inclination has inevitably carried over into my research and writing on past aspects of natural history more generally. As far as the present work is concerned, though, I like to think that that tilt has not been without its advantages, for in the early years books on botany much outnumbered ones on zoology. Botanists, too, from Richard Pulteney in the 1790s onwards, have shown a particularly keen concern for the lives and works of their predecessors, increasingly seeing it as more or less obligatory to include a chapter on those whenever producing an account of a local flora, and have generated a biographical dictionary that in successive guises has greatly outdone in its range and depth those catering for other branches of natural history.

The hardest decision has been how much space to devote to books produced for novices and the less experienced, as opposed to those for the more advanced. Those that have been most influential from the scientific point of view have not necessarily been widely bought or read; indeed, they may have come before very few eyes indeed. On the other hand, some that have sold in great numbers for year after year may have had few scientific virtues, may even have been indifferently written or poorly illustrated, yet despite that played an important part in awakening interest. It seemed invidious to ignore those latter, especially as their sales have helped to sustain the commercial appeal of natural history as a publishing genre and made it possible for many a deserving work with otherwise doubtful market prospects to be privileged with print. What shape or size would Victorian natural history have had without its Gosse, its Morris or its torrent of J. G. Wood? All along, that less sophisticated layer of the market has borne the brunt of the ups and downs in the market by reason of its generally much larger sales and greater vulnerability to shifts in public taste and publishing fashions. Had it not been for its existence, much valuable scientific data would probably never have made it into print, for lack of cross-subsidy. For that we ultimately have the confidence and expertise of individual publishers through the years to thank, one or two of them dedicated naturalists themselves, many of the rest with scant interest in the subject beyond its capacity to yield a worthwhile margin of profit. Some portion of praise for those helping hands in the background, too often anonymous, is particularly overdue.

If the process of writing a narrative history in which the larger picture and the broader trends have been accorded major roles has resulted in the omission of some readers’ favourite books or saying too little about others that rate high in their estimation, I can but apologise. It is a very large topic, and a single volume can accommodate only so much.

Omissions in another direction may be a cause of some disappointment too. Natural history is fortunate to have a rich legacy of portraits of the more prominent contributors to the subject over the years, thanks in particular to the practice before the advent of photography of including a likeness of the author in many a book. Not only has that practice continued sporadically ever since, but the readier availability of photographs has made these a standard accompaniment to obituaries. Increasingly, compilers of biographical dictionaries make a point of providing information on this aspect, much simplifying the task of running portraits to earth. Despite my best efforts, however, there remain some glaring gaps in what it has proved possible to provide in that connection. Regrettably, no likenesses seem ever to have existed or at any rate to have survived—unless hidden away in the home of some distant descendant—of such major figures as Thomas Johnson, James Petiver, Benjamin White, Edward Donovan or even John Van Voorst. Of Gilbert White, tantalisingly, all that has come down to us for certain is one amateurish, unenlightening pen-and-ink sketch of his head, which it would have been pointless to reproduce.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Of the many who have assisted with this book there are two I have to thank first and foremost: Gabrielle Hatfield, co-author of my previous book, who has coped uncomplainingly with my raw material and all-too-numerous revisions, meanwhile fortifying me with words of encouragement from time to time; and Tim Bernhard, who latterly came to my rescue with invaluable assistance with the daunting task of securing the many illustrations. His infectious enthusiasm has spilled over, what is more, into providing the masterly frontispiece, replete with subtle iconography that will hopefully keep art historians busy in years to come.

I also owe a special debt to Peter Marren for many searching comments as well as sage advice on my initial drafts of what are now the last three chapters; in addition, he generously made a present to me of hard-to-find copies of his two recent volumes on the history of Frederick Warne & Co. Chapter 10 similarly benefited from the scrutiny of Ray Williams in the light of his unrivalled knowledge of Van Voorst, while Elizabeth Platts, who has long shared my admiration of that linchpin of mid-Victorian natural history, George Johnston, brought a well-informed eye to bear on Chapter 13. Had his health only permitted it, I am sure the text in its entirety would have gained much from an input of Basil Harley’s uniquely rich combination of expertise on publishing and British natural history alike, but I am more than grateful nontheless for a detailed history of Harley Books and the fruits of his research on Reeve & Co., both of which he very kindly placed at my disposal. Ted Pratt thoughtfully made available to me the unpublished memoir of his aunt, Lilian Bland, on the early days of bird photography, and Deirdre Dace was kind enough too to send me informative bulletins periodically as her biography of C. A. Johns progressed. Jack Gibson, John Jocelyn, Michael Darby and June Chatfield are others who allowed me to pick their brains on particular matters, just as a session with Nick Evans valuably filled me in on the policies of the Ray Society. My consulting of the Smith papers at the Linnean Society of London, of the Reeve archive at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and of the Jenyns correspondence at Bath Royal Literary & Scientific Institution was also facilitated by Gina Douglas, Amanda Ingram and Rob Randall respectively, and I take this further opportunity of thanking them for their assistance.

The generosity of the Linnean Society in making its collections freely available to its Fellows for photographing is beyond praise, and Lynda Brooks and Ben Sherwood were ever ready with assistance in that connection. The readiness of two owners of extensive personal libraries rich in early natural history works, Terry Dillon and Bill Hale, to make those available for photography was a further special privilege, as too was access for the same purpose to the antiquarian stock of Henry Sotheran (for which thanks are due to Chris Saunders in particular). Michael Salmon was similarly only too happy to lend photographs of past entomologists from the magnificent collection of those he has built up over the years. For assistance in obtaining individual items for reproduction thanks are also owed to Sam Berry, Declan Doogue, Jeremy Greenwood, David Hosking, Maureen Lazarus, Stephen Moss, Colin Pope, Mark Seaward, Rusty Shteir and Sarah Whild.

Lastly, I thank Myles Archibald and Julia Koppitz at HarperCollins and David Price-Goodfellow of D & N Publishing for their combined patience, and Hugh Brazier for his helpful and meticulous copy-editing. The heavy burden shouldered by my wife in handling the periodic massive influxes of text spewed forth from the internet must certainly not go without grateful acknowledgement as well.

About the Author

David Elliston Allen has had a specialist interest in the subject of this book for many years, the combined legacy of an undergraduate degree in anthropology, a period as an analyst of marketing surveys and co-authorship of two county Floras. A past President of the Botanical Society of the British Isles and of the Society for the History of Natural History, his books include The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History, first published in 1976. Allen has spent many years administering academic research grant programmes, particularly in aspects of history.

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Picture Credits

THE MAJORITY OF THE illustrations in this book have been reproduced by kind permission of the Linnean Society of London from paintings, photographs and printed works in its collections. Very substantially supplementing those are images reproduced from early works in the personal library of Terry Dillon or lent by Michael Salmon from his extensive collection of photographs of past entomologists. Other items as indicated by the page numbers are reproduced courtesy of the following: Patrick Armstrong 256; Tim Bernhard 108 bottom, 127, 217, 218 bottom, 330, 331, 387, 399, 458; Prof. R. J. Berry 199, 307; Botanical Society of the British Isles 303, 397, 419, 421, 449 bottom; A. Brent-Good 235; Mary Briggs 451; British Trust for Ornithology 411; Cambridge University Department of Plant Sciences 370; Dublin Naturalists’ Field Club & Sean Gilmartin 309; Eric Hosking Trust 415; Dr A. H. Fitter 439; Prof. W. G. Hale 164 bottom left and right, 329; Annette Harley 447; HarperCollins 427, 429; Lansdowne Club, London 85; Alex Lockton 434, 437; National Museum of Wales 105; National Portrait Gallery, London 249; Royal Society for the Protection of Birds 318; Prof. M. R. D. Seaward 352; Prof. Ann B. Shteir 101; Henry Sotheran 5, 163, 263, 337; Wellcome Images 278.

All reasonable efforts have been made to trace the owners of copyright in other images used. Photographs accompanying published obituaries or that have found their way into the archives of learned bodies are commonly unsourced and after any considerable lapse of time identifying the copyright owners is not ordinarily feasible. We nevertheless apologise to any who may have been overlooked.

Penguin Group (UK) formally disclaim such rights in the photograph on page 443 as may have passed to them on their acquisition of Michael Joseph Ltd, the publishers in 1968 of W. Keble Martin’s Over the Hills.

Copyright

This edition published in 2010 by Collins,
an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

HarperCollins Publishers
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London W6 8JB

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published 2010

© David Elliston Allen, 2010

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EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2010 ISBN: 978-0-007-37973-6

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Hardback ISBN 978-0-00-724084-5

Paperback ISBN 978-0-00-730017-4

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