Collins New Naturalist Library (112) – Books and Naturalists by Allen David Elliston

Author:Allen, David Elliston [Allen, David Elliston]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2010-06-23T23:00:00+00:00

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.

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