My blog post for History Day 2021

 

This year, History Day is being held on 4th November, with the theme “Environmental History”. This was my contribution, published on their website:

https://historycollections.blogs.sas.ac.uk/2021/10/11/history-day-2021-explores-environmental-history-and-more/

 

I always enjoyed walking on my own in the countryside and along the coast of South Devon, where I lived. My love of natural history and, especially, of life in water stems from those walks, although there was always time for playing with friends or for making family outings. We never ventured far from home and our family visits were occasions for picnics rather than to visit interesting sites. We never went to museums or galleries and my shyness meant that I didn’t have the courage to visit them on my own. However, things were to change in my teenage years when I joined what was then the Torquay Natural History Society (TNHS).

Members of the TNHS had free access to Torquay Museum and its library. While the museum exhibits were of interest, it was the library that I enjoyed most. It was dark and dusty and had the characteristic smell of old books and old leather. Browsing through the collection took up many an afternoon and I was intrigued to discover that my interest in natural history followed from the passion of many earlier collectors and writers.

Having achieved A-level passes, it was then off to university. My first practical class at the University of Reading was held in the Cole Museum of Zoology and, while the class did not use the specimens in the collection, the choice of the Museum served to introduce us to this excellent resource and I enjoyed visiting it during my time at Reading. It was during my undergraduate years that I also developed my interest in paintings, and in the history of art, and I spent many Saturdays at the National and Tate Galleries in London. Just like my time in the Torquay Museum, the galleries encouraged me to connect with history and, with the help of reading and talks, I was able to understand more and begin to form my own opinions of what I saw.

After postgraduate studies at Durham and a demonstratorship at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, I returned to London as a Lecturer at Goldsmiths’ College and then transferred to UCL, where I was fortunate to be made Professor of Biology. While continuing with visits to galleries, I now became acquainted with the Grant Museum of Zoology, originally located in cramped quarters in the Medawar Building, but later moved to a splendid large building on Gower Street, that allows much better access for members of the public. The museum is used by school classes, and by several Departments at UCL, and I was very pleased that Jack Ashby (the curator at the time) allowed me to use some of the specimens in the course that I taught in Animal Form and Function. This used an approach that Victorian natural historians would have found familiar and I deliberately wanted to make that connection at a time when Biology was becoming more mechanistic.

During my time at UCL, I learned more about Robert Grant and his successor Ray Lankester and, through them, about the great observers of nature from the nineteenth century that I had first discovered in Torquay Museum, one of whom was Philip Henry Gosse.

Gosse fascinated me as he spent many years exploring the coasts of Torbay, the very areas that I had collected over as a boy. He was not only a diligent researcher, but was able to write enthusiastically about his findings and he was also an accomplished artist, who was able to convey what he saw in numerous drawings and watercolours. I have been lucky enough to see some of his original work in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter and in the Horniman Museum in London. The latter also provided the opportunity to look at the cyanotypes of marine algae made by Anna Atkins and the illustrations of a number of other natural historians.

So, museums and galleries have been important in providing material that has affected my own approach to natural history and the wonders of the natural world. Some of this appears in my blog posts, so please click on the links to see what I wrote and enjoy some of the excellent illustrations I discovered.

Two wonderful museums – and mention of another: http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2015/07/two-wonderful-museums-and-mention-of.html 

Brilliant illustrations of organisms: http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2015/01/brilliant-illustrations-of-organisms.html

A moving discovery at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum: http://www.rwotton.blogspot.com/2015/01/a-moving-discovery-in-royal-albert.html

Stunning biological illustrations: the connection between Gosse, Haddon and the Horniman Museum: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2017/04/stunning-biological-illustrations.html

A mystery at the Horniman Museum: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-mystery-at-horniman-museum.html

Wonderful first-hand observations of shore life: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-mystery-at-horniman-museum.html

The awesome cyanotypes of Anna Atkins: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-awesome-cyanotypes-of-anna-atkins.html

An artist who loved virgin nature: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2017/01/an-artist-who-loved-virgin-nature.html

The zoology of Bruegel’s The Fall of the Rebel Angels: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-zoology-of-bruegels-fall-of-rebel.html

How a great auk “flew” from Durham to Glasgow: https://rwotton.blogspot.com/2020/03/how-great-auk-flew-from-durham-to.html

 

 

 

 

A moving discovery in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Father and Son by Edmund Gosse is an account of the author’s difficult relationship with his father, the distinguished Natural Historian Philip Henry Gosse. It is regarded by many as an important work of English literature, despite Edmund’s reputation for inaccuracy, and is available as a Penguin Classic. The different personalities, and beliefs, of the two men caused a rift between them, but Edmund acknowledges that there was a time when they were very close.

After the death of his wife, Emily, in 1857, Henry Gosse moved to Torquay with Edmund on 23rd September, two days after the boy’s eighth birthday. They lived in a new villa, named Sandhurst, and this had the advantage of being close to the sea and in an area with which Henry had become familiar on previous visits. If the grief of bereavement wasn’t enough to bear, there was also the hostile response to Henry’s book Omphalos, published in November 1857. This was an attempt to reconcile the developing ideas of geological time scales with the account of Creation in the book of Genesis in The Holy Bible, and it pleased neither the religious, or scientific, communities. It is little wonder that the two were drawn closely together and they spent much time collecting animals along the shore, many of which were brought back to Sandhurst and kept in tanks. As Ann Thwaite writes in her biography of Edmund [1]:

Day after day,..the middle-aged widower and the small boy combed the rock pools at Anstey’s Cove, at Oddicombe, at Petit Tor, or took longer excursions to Maiden Combe northwards or Livermead to the south. Edmund was ‘his constant and generally his only companion’.

When Henry was away from Torquay giving lectures, there was a loving correspondence between them, with hugs and kisses sent by both [2]. Then, on Henry’s return, the visits to the shore could re-commence. Once material had been collected, Henry became absorbed in studying them and in making illustrations that would lead to further books. While Henry was busy, Edmund used a small room at the top of the house as his own “study”. He modelled himself on his father and this is what he wrote [3]:

I, the son of a man who looked through a microscope and painted what he saw there, would fain observe for myself, and paint my observations. It did not follow, alas! that I was built to be a miniature-painter or a savant, but the activity of a childish intelligence was shown by my desire to copy the results of such energy as I saw nearest at hand.

In the secular direction, this now took the form of my preparing little monographs on seaside creatures, which were arranged, tabulated and divided as exactly as possible on the pattern of those which my Father was composing for his Actinologica Brittanica. I wrote these out upon sheets of paper of the same size as his printed page, and I adorned them with water-colour plates, meant to emulate his precise and exquisite illustrations. One or two of these ludicrous pastiches are still preserved, and in glancing at them now I wonder, not at any skill that they possess, but at the perseverance and the patience, the evidence of close and persistent labour. I was not set to these tasks by my Father, who, in fact, did not much approve of them. He was touched, too, with the ‘originality’ heresy, and exhorted me not to copy him, but to go out into the garden or the shore and describe something new, in a new way. That was quite impossible; I possessed no initiative. But I can now well understand why my Father, very indulgently and good-temperedly, deprecated these exercises of mine. They took up, and, as he might well think, wasted, an enormous quantity of time; and they were, moreover, parodies, rather than imitations, of his writings,..

Of these efforts by Edmund, Ann Thwaite writes [2]:

It was his greatest pleasure to imitate his father and produce little learned treatises of his own. They were for his father, as is obvious in one of his booklets on butterflies, written and illustrated when he was ten. Under the ‘Green veined White’ he has written: ‘It is common in most places in England, and has been taken in Newfoundland, (by yourself), Europe generally and Siberia.’

While examining the collection of art works by Henry Gosse held by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter, Holly Morgenroth and I discovered one of the sheets of butterfly illustrations made by Edmund (see above). On the reverse, several of the butterflies are named in Edmund's handwriting and, at the bottom of the sheet, Henry wrote “By EWG in the spring of 1859”, so we know that Edmund was 9½ years old when the illustrations were made. They copy the style of unpublished work by Henry Gosse in Entomologia Terra Novae [4], a page from which is shown below. Henry made these paintings in 1833, when he was 23 years old, and they show well his accuracy and love of settings, in this case vegetation. Edmund is likely to have seen these illustrations and they probably formed the basis for his own efforts. Did Henry label, and keep, the sheet by Edmund because it reminded him of his early days, despite his reservations about its quality?

When looking at Edmund’s illustrations in the Museum in Exeter, it was impossible not to feel close to the story of Henry and Edmund in the late 1850s. In October 1859, Edmund was baptised as a member of the Brethren, fulfilling the last wish of his mother and an ever-present wish of his father, both being devout believers. In many ways, this marked a turning point, for it was the rigidity of Henry’s Christian faith, together with developing personality differences, that began the breakdown of the relationship between father and son. The sheet that Holly and I found in the Gosse collection at RAMM is a memento of an earlier, warmly affectionate, time and it is painful to know what was to come.

[1] Ann Thwaite (1984) Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape. London, Secker and Warburg.

[2] Ann Thwaite (2002) Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888. London, Faber and Faber.

[3] Edmund Gosse (1907) Father and Son: A Study Of Two Temperaments. London, William Heinemann.

[4] https://canadianmuseumofnature.wordpress.com/2014/04/11/a-rare-19th-century-manuscript-chronicles-the-quest-of-an-amateur-naturalist/

The illustration of the sheet by Edmund Gosse is reproduced with permission. ©The Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. Thanks to Holly Morgenroth, the Curator of Natural History, for letting me see the works by Henry and Edmund Gosse that led to this blog post.

Brilliant illustrations of organisms

Anyone fortunate enough to see the illustrations in First Editions of books by Philip Henry Gosse will be amazed by their accuracy and beautiful colours. I certainly remember my reaction to many of his book plates and admit to being one of Gosse’s avid admirers [1].

Recently, I visited the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter and met Holly Morgenroth, the Curator of Natural History. Together, we looked at the materials by Henry Gosse in the museum collections (some of which can be seen by searching for “Gosse” at http://rammcollections.org.uk). In addition to illustrations in pencil, pen and ink, and watercolour (see above for examples), there were several boxes of chalk drawings on large sheets of black paper, some being collages, and these are masterpieces of their type. They are attributed to Gosse, but yellow writing on some sheets appears to be in a different hand, although earlier white lettering on others is almost certainly by him. Each sheet has two loops of material glued to the rear of the upper margin, secured by strips of paper. Six of these beautiful illustrations are shown below:

They are certainly visible at a distance and may have been used in talks or on the field courses that Henry ran. In his biography of his father, Edmund Gosse wrote [2]:

Between 1853 and 1860 my father lectured on several occasions in various parts of England and Scotland, with marked success. He was perhaps the earliest of those who, in public lecturing, combined a popular method with exact scientific information. He was accustomed to use freehand drawing on the black-board, in a mode which was novel when he first began, but which soon became common enough. He gave up lecturing mainly because of the extreme shyness which he never ceased to feel in addressing a strange audience. Had he not expressed this sense of suffering, no one would have guessed it from his serene and dignified manner of speaking on these occasions. His fondness for romantic poetry, and his habit of reciting it at home with a loud, impressive utterance, naturally produced an effect upon his manner in public speaking and lecturing [2].

I imagine that the production of meticulous new illustrations at each lecture would be a labour too far and I think the many chalk drawings that we examined in the Museum in Exeter may have supplemented the “free-hand drawing on the blackboard” to which Edmund refers. They may even have been these drawings. Of course, this is speculation, but who would not be impressed with a series of them, accompanied by Henry’s oratorical style. It is no wonder that he was so admired as a communicator about Natural History in the mid Nineteenth Century, a time when visual aids were very much more limited than those of today.

Ann Thwaite, in her brilliant biography of Henry Gosse [3], wrote that lectures were well-received and she quotes from a newspaper report that they “made what would have been otherwise a dry and uninteresting subject to the larger portion of his auditory, popular and attractive”. The lectures could not fail to add to his already established reputation and, although they were agonising to present, Henry knew that they were both a chance to inform his audience and also promote sales of his Natural History books [3]. It is fortunate that the sheets of drawings that (probably) accompanied his lectures have survived for over 150 years and left us a further legacy of Henry Gosse's wonderful skills.

[1] Roger S Wotton (2012) Walking with Gosse: Natural History, Creation and Religious Conflicts. Southampton, Clio Publishing.

[2] Edmund Gosse (1896) The Naturalist of the  Sea-Shore: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse. London, Heinemann.

[3] Ann Thwaite (2002) Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888. London, Faber and Faber.

All images reproduced with permission  

© 2015 Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery, Exeter City Council