Abstract
This article will explore the intersection between ‘literature’ and ‘science’ in one key area, the botanical poem with scientific notes. It reveals significant aspects of the way knowledge was gendered in the Enlightenment, which is relevant to the present-day education of girls in science. It aims to illustrate how members of the Lichfield Botanical Society (headed by Erasmus Darwin) became implicated in debates around the education of women in Linnaean botany. The Society’s translations from Linnaeus inspired a new genre of women’s educational writing, the botanical poem with scientific notes, which emerged at this time. It focuses in particular on a poem by Anna Seward and argues that significant problems regarding the representation of the Linnaean sexual system of botany are found in such works and that women in the culture of botany struggled to give voice to a subject which was judged improper for female education. The story of this unique poem and the surrounding controversies can teach us much about how gender impacted upon women’s scientific writing in eighteenth century Britain, and how it shaped the language and terminology of botany in works for female education. In particular, it demonstrates how the sexuality of plants uncovered by Linnaeus is a paradigmatic illustration of how societal forces can simultaneously both constrict and stimulate women’s involvement in science. Despite the vast changes to women’s access in scientific knowledge of the present day, this ‘fair sexing’ of botany illustrates the struggle that women have undergone to give voice to their botanical knowledge.
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Notes
For a discussion of this, see Wakefield (1796, p. ii).
For a description of Linnaean classification based on the fructification of plants, see Morton (1981, p. 263).
For a summary of Rousseau’s involvement with botany and its influence on women, see George (2007, p. 5–6).
‘Introduction’ Rousseau/Martyn Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed To A Lady (1787, p. 12).
Darwin and Withering were both medical doctors and botanists, and fellow members of the Lunar Society, but there was rivalry between them. Withering had replaced Darwin’s esteemed friend Dr Small, a mathematician in the Lunar Society, and was soon being criticised by Darwin in a review in the Monthly Magazine of 1799. Darwin expressed disappointment at Withering’s work on British plants which, in Darwin’s opinion, had become little more than a loose translation from Linnaeus. In 1778 Darwin competed with Withering over a cure for scarlet fever resulting in a feud which lasted many years. Withering and Darwin were never reconciled although they kept up appearances at Society gatherings; see Cook (1993). Further details of Lunar Society members can be found in Schofield (1962) and Uglow (2002).
Her published works include An Elegy on Captain Cook, 1780, Louisa, 1794, Llangollen Vale, 1796, Original Sonnets, 1799, Memoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin, 1804, Poetical Works (posthumous, 1810). There are also long entries on Seward by Sylvia Bowerback in the DNB. She has inspired a number of biographies, though none of them are recent: Lucas (1907), Ashmun (1931), Pearson (1936).
Ann Shteir writes that ‘although the poet is unidentified internal evidence points to Anna Seward’ (Shteir 1996, p. 240). Shteir refers to the poem’s ‘implicit argument about the value of the Linnaean system’ yet she does not make further reference to its important social/political context (p. 15–16).
Anna Seward recalls that observations were often sent to journals signed ‘Lichfield Botanical Society’; no one knew there were only three members (Seward 1804, p. 99). For the Lichfield Botanical Society, see Uglow (2002, p. 379, 381–3, 389), Seward (1804, p. 98–100), and Allen (1976, p. 45–46). For a discussion of eighteenth-century natural history societies in general, see Allen (1976).
The oration Deliciae Naturae was delivered in Latin and proved so popular with students at the university that they made a special trip to Linnaeus’s house to ask for a Swedish translation to be published (see Blunt 1971, p. 229–30). From there it passed into English. Knut Hagsberg quotes widely from Deliciae Naturae, citing passages which demonstrate the hierarchical, military imagery: birds are ‘cavalry, light nimble, resplendently clad’ and amphibians ‘an ugly horrible, naked pack on foot’ (Hagberg 1952, p. 151). Delivered in December 1772, this oration was one of the last public addresses by the famous Swede. The striking imagery which Linnaeus employed to describe the natural world would be known to English Linnaeans.
Sten Lindroth writes that ‘Linnaeus was inspired above all by military ranks’ and traces martial imagery in a number of his works. Many of these examples are light-hearted; Linnaeus, for example, is reputed to have referred to himself as the commander-in-chief of all botanists and to his arch-enemy Siegesbeck as a mere corporal (Lindroth 1983, p. 23).
Siegesbeck on Linnaeus as cited in Stearn (1957–1959, Preface).
Charles Alston (1685–1760) was appointed King’s Botanist in 1716; he succeeded George Preston as Professor of Botany at the University of Edinburgh in 1738.
The project was organised by Erasmus Darwin; Joseph Banks and Samuel Johnson were consulted and Carl Linnaeus, the younger personally sent over an early version of Supplementum Plantarum for their use prior to its publication.
The true nature of Withering’s ‘improvements’ becomes apparent if we compare the names of those who assisted with the first edition to those in the third. By the 1796 version, a notable list of British botanists has superseded the smattering of ‘foreign Authors’ listed in earlier editions; with the exception of two botanists from the University of Uppsala in Sweden, the remaining thirty-two names are all British.
See Maria Jacson in George (2007, p. 92–6). Sir Brooke Boothby (1744–1824) of Ashbourne Hall was Jacson’s influential cousin and he provided her with a link to the botanical activities of the Lichfield scholars. He succeeded to the baronetcy on the death of his father in 1789. He published poems and was a member of the literary circle in Lichfield to which Darwin, Anna Seward, Thomas Day, and Richard and Maria Edgeworth belonged. The artist Joseph Wright of Derby painted him in 1781 in a botanical scene, holding a manuscript by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. For Sir Brooke Boothby, see Henry (1975, Vol 2, p. 132).
‘I flatter myself that the following work, in Botanical Lectures, will be found an early introduction to the use of the Translated System of Vegetables, the only English work from which the pupil can become a Linnaean or Universal Botanist’ (Jacson 1804).
In her recent study of Linnaeus, Lisbet Koerner states that Linnaeus ‘mourned the decline of Latin’ and points out that he had limited language skills despite his wealth of botanical knowledge. Quoting a passage from the autobiographical Vita Caroli Linnaei, she demonstrates that Linnaeus ‘learnt neither English nor French nor German nor Lapp, yes not even Dutch, even though he stayed a full three years in Holland’. The majority of his correspondents wrote to him in Latin although he did receive some letters in English and French (Koerner 1999, p. 47).
Wilfrid Blunt notes that Linnaeus’ botanical Latin was not ‘classical Latin but a technical language derived from Renaissance and medieval Latin’ (Blunt 1971, p. 247). Botanical Latin, which can largely be attributed to Linnaeus, is still a means of internationalising botanical science.
Richard Polwhele described female botanists as being ‘eager for illicit knowledge’: notes to lines 33–36 (Polwhele 1974, p. 9).
Whilst Darwin and Withering were both medical doctors and botanists, and fellow members of the Lunar Society, there was a rivalry between them Withering had replaced Darwin’s esteemed friend Dr Small, a mathematician in the Lunar Society and was soon being criticised by Darwin in a review in the Monthly Magazine of 1799. Darwin expressed disappointment at Withering’s work on British plants which, in Darwin’s opinion, had become little more than a loose translation from Linnaeus. In 1778 Darwin competed with Withering over a cure for scarlet fever resulting in a feud which lasted many years. Withering and Darwin were never reconciled although they kept up appearances at Society gatherings; see Cook (1993). Further details of Lunar Society members can be found in Schofield (1962) and Uglow (2002).
Erasmus Darwin, ‘Proem’ (1973, p. vi). Darwin writes: ‘I am only a flower painter, or occasionally attempt a landskip; and leave the human figure with the portraits of history to abler artists’ (‘Interlude’, p. 40). In her biography of Darwin, Anna Seward claimed that this remark ‘is neither true, nor did Dr Darwin desire that it should be considered as veritable’ (1804, p. 302).
‘Lo, here a camera obscura is presented to thy view, in which are lights and shades dancing on a whited canvas, and magnified into apparent life! if thou art perfectly at leasure for such trivial amusement, walk in and view the wonders of my inchanted garden’ (‘Proem’, Darwin 1973, p. v–vi).
For a general background to the anti-Jacobin sentiments that erupted in the Birmingham (and other) riots of the 1790s, see Thompson (1980, p. 111–30).
‘The Loves of the Triangles’ first appeared in The Anti-Jacobin or, Weekly Examiner on 16 April 1798, continuing on 23 April 1798 and 7 May 1798. The poem is written in mock-Darwinian verse, complete with scientific notes elaborating on the terms cited in the poem.
Works by Darwin were selected for censure by the Anti-Jacobin up until in 1798 when Zoonomia was placed in the same category as ‘atheistic’ works such as Godwin’s Political Justice (1791).
Her relationship to Darwin is ambivalent; she wished to distance herself from his radicalism and potentially inflaming sexual metaphors, yet the very fact that she chose him as a model caused her own book to be criticised in the Anti-Jacobin Review (no. 10, December 1801, p. 356).
The mimosa was central to the question of analogy between animal and plant because it appeared to have the elements of a nervous system [though Robert Hooke’s research had suggested that the mechanism was more hydraulical Maniquis 1969, p. 134; Bora 2010, p. 10)]. It became a symbol of human sensibility in Cowper’s ‘The Poet, The Oyster and the Sensitive Plant’ (1782) and was used to explore sentiency in nature and human feeling in Shelley’s ‘The Sensitive Plant’ (1820). The sensitive plant was also a metaphor for male and female genitalia in bawdy works: James Perry’s Mimosa (1779) contains phallic imagery. For a broad discussion of the mimosa as a literary emblem, see Maniquis (1969). Maniquis observes that ‘the sensitive plant’ appears three times in Darwin’s The Botanic Garden (1791) but he does not offer any reading of the poem, commenting instead on Darwin’s description of organs of sense in flowers in Zoonomia (1794–1801). He does not appear to be familiar with Rowden’s poem on the mimosa.
Colley has charted the deepening anxieties surrounding these shifting gender roles in late eighteenth-century Britain. By this time, ‘the boundaries supposedly separating men and women were, in fact, unstable, and becoming more so’ (my emphasis) (Colley 1996, p. 263).
These political tracts were: An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, signed ‘A Dissenter’ (1790); Civic Sermons to the People (1792); Sins of Government, Sins of the Nation. A discourse for the fast, appointed on April 19, 1793, By a Volunteer (1793). Stuart Curran observes that Barbauld had written ‘in a style of such commanding vigour that, when the word leaked out that they were written by a woman, it seemed incredible to all’ (Curran 1993, p. 189).
In ‘The Umbelliferous Plants’, for example, the children are told that the umbelliferous class has ‘five chives’ (Aikin and Barbauld 1792–1796, vol. 4, p. 74).
Darwin sent Seward’s verses to the Gentleman’s Magazine for publication without informing her that he had substituted eight lines of his own composition for her last six, causing a disagreement between them.
Seward claims that Darwin later made these lines the ‘exordium’ to the first part of his poem, interweaving them with eighteen lines of his own and that he did not acknowledge this (Seward 1804, p. 131–32).
‘Flora’ by Charlotte Smith appeared in Conversations Introducing Poetry Chiefly on the Subject of Natural History in 1804; Sarah Hoare’s ‘The Pleasures of Botanical Pursuits, A Poem’ was appended to the eighth edition of Priscilla Wakefield, An Introduction to Botany in 1818; and Arabella Rowden’s A Poetical Introduction to the Study of Botany was published in 1801.
‘The system of Linnaeus is called the sexual system of botany, because it is founded on observations, which seem to prove, that there are males and females in the vegetable world, as well as in the animal’ (Jacson 1797, p. 3–4).
For a brief discussion of this work, see Britten (1917).
Blunt and Stearn describe the work of these artists and their centrality:
The unsettled state of Europe during the opening years of the eighteenth-century was not propitious for the patronage of art and science; but before the middle of the century, the great names of Linnaeus (b. 1707) in botany and Ehret (b. 1708) in illustration became prominent. Many new plants from America were introduced and recorded at this time. The close of the century inaugurated, with the work of Spaendonck, Redouté and Turpin in France and of the two Bauers in England, a truly remarkable age when scientific illustration reached aesthetic heights never surpassed before or since. For this Linnaeus’s so-called ‘Sexual System’ of classification with its emphasis on floral details and his binomial nomenclature for species were in no small measure responsible (Blunt and Stearn, p. 327–28).
Georg Dionysius Ehret (1708–1770) is discussed on p. 159–65; Francis Bauer (1758–1840) and Ferdinand Bauer (1760–1826) on p. 221–35, and Pierre-Joseph Redouté (1759–1840) on p. 193–209.
There was probably some actual delay to the spring in the year that Seward’s poem was set but I have not been able to find meteorological data to confirm this; there was a precedent in Anna Barbauld’s poem the previous year: ‘On the Backwardness of the Spring 1771’.
E. P. Thompson identifies three different stages of the riot, culminating in an attack on the Bank of England itself. Those involved are described as ‘something of a mixture of manipulated mob and revolutionary crowd’ (Thompson 1980, p. 77–78). The second, more violent phase of the riot, is described as
one of licensed spontaneity, leading onto mob violence informed by ‘a groping desire to settle accounts with the rich, if only for a day’; some of the ‘better sort of tradesmen’ faded away, while journeymen, apprentices, and servants—and some criminals—thronged the streets (Thompson 1980, p. 77).
‘Observe to what irregularity passes/From the want of distinction of Sexes and Classes/No wonder we see such a grinning of Corals/Amidst this confusion of Manners and Morals’ (Anna Seward 1783, lines 56–8).
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George, S. Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education. Sci & Educ 23, 673–694 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-014-9677-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-014-9677-y