Snail by Peter Williams

Author:Peter Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Emblematic of the Victorian age were the ‘Aurelians’, collectors of butterflies, who held their subject material in such awe that they bestowed its golden splendour on themselves. Snail collectors didn’t give themselves an equivalent title but many saw collecting as a route for moral as well as intellectual improvement. A dedication to be found at the beginning of Shells of the British Isles, written as late as 1907 by Richard Rimmer, puts this point across:

To those of my fellow countrymen, amongst the working classes, who wisely employ their leisure hours in the pursuit of useful and elevating knowledge, with the hope that others, among their ranks, may be induced to forsake the paths of profitless and degrading dissipation, this volume is, with every good wish, dedicated by the author.20

By 1865 the use of the microscope had spread widely amongst the more well-to-do and educated public. The Microscopical Society of London had been founded in 1839. Worlds within worlds were consequently being opened up for scrutiny and with it the opportunity to inspect shell architecture and aspects of snail anatomy hitherto unexplored. This inevitably increased interest in these animals. By 1876 the Conchological Society of Great Britain and Ireland had been founded. Books such as British Conchology by John Gwyn Jefferies, An Illustrated Index of British Shells by G. B. Sowerby and The Land and Fresh-water Mollusks Indigenous to or Naturalised in the British Isles by Augustus Lovell Reeve were now available as well as many smaller texts for the amateur collector. In America, where the passion for collecting was equally strong, one of the most popular texts on snails, The Conchologist’s First Book, was written by an author who was to become better known as the founder of a whole genre of horror fiction, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe acted as a ghostwriter for his friend Professor Thomas Wyatt and was accused of plagiarizing another work, The Conchologists Textbook’ by Captain Thomas Brown. The book, ironically, became Poe’s best-selling work.

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