In her book Kindred Nature, Barbara Gates discusses the part that women played
in the Victorian passion for Natural History. Seashore plants and
animals were found especially fascinating, as marine coasts were previously under-explored, and among the women who wrote guides was Anne Pratt. She is now almost
forgotten, yet Barbara Gates writes [1]:
When George
Eliot and George Henry Lewes arrived in Ilfracombe in 1856, awkward and
ill-equipped novices in seashore life but ready to learn enough for Lewes to be
able to write Sea-side Studies in
1858, they would have been as likely to be carrying Anne Pratt's Chapters on the Common things of the Sea-side (1850) as they would Philip Gosse's Aquarium (1854) or Kingsley's Glaucus.
Having posted previously on Lewes,
Gosse and Kingsley [2], I wanted to
explore Anne Pratt's book and imagine the impression that it made on its
readers.
As might be expected in a book
written by a specialist on land plants, Chapters
on the Common things of the Sea-side [3] begins with seaside plants and
seaweeds, going on to describe animals of various types; the text being
accompanied by Anne Pratt’s own illustrations (see below for an example). She enthuses about what we might
find and encourages close observation, including, where necessary, taking specimens
to small tanks of sea-water to get a better view of their form and function. A
good example of the style and approach of her book can be found in her
descriptions of zoophytes (i.e. animals that resemble plants):
Perhaps the
zoophytes best known as such to visitors at the coast, are the beautiful Sea
Anemones, which offer their loveliness to every eye, and need no microscope to
reveal their tints or forms. Clustered by thousands on sea-side rocks or sands,
adorning the sides of rocky pools, with flowers which resemble marigolds or
China-asters in their form, but which are brighter in their colours than any
flowers which our garden can show; redder than roses, of richer purple than the
violet, and wearing the rainbow hues of the gorgeous cactus flower, which the
painter in vain essays to copy, there are few objects in nature more calculated
to attract our notice that are these living flowers..
..To look down
upon these flowers, one would deem them the most helpless of living creatures.
The water, with its myriads of tiny insects, seems to afford their proper
nutriment, and none would guess, to glance at them, that they could possibly
kill, and swallow crabs and shell-fish larger than themselves. But the great
Creator, when he made them, furnished them all, helpless as they seem, with the
means of securing their appropriate nutriment. They possess a poisonous
secretion which soon extinguishes life in the animal which comes near them..
Reading these passages today, we
recoil at some of the descriptions (of “flowers” and “insects”, for example,
although we know what she meant) and many would dislike the creationist stance
that was not surprising in a book published by the Society for Promoting
Christian Knowledge. However, her readers in the mid-Nineteenth Century would certainly
have been encouraged to visit the shore and find some of the plants and animals
that she describes. Indeed, her work in Natural History was recognised by the
award of a grant from the Civil List, a reflection of her popularity with the
public.
In the Introduction of their excellent
bibliography of Philip Henry Gosse, Freeman and Wertheimer (1980) put Pratt’s
book into the context of the developing science of Marine Biology that made
such advances in the Nineteenth Century. They place Gosse’s work in comparison
to what has gone before [4]:
His seashore
studies.. ..marked an advance over previous books. Many of these, such as Mary
Roberts’ Sea-side companion (1835),
Elizabeth Allom’s Sea-side pleasures
(1845), Anne Pratt’s Chapters on the
Common things of the Sea-side (1850), and more importantly W. H. Harvey’s Sea-side book (1849), were successful
enough, but as works of art, literature and science, bore feeble comparison to
Gosse’s volumes.. ..Gosse’s lively and enthusiastic style was firmly based upon
something which very few of the previous authors had attempted – original
scientific investigation – and this makes them valuable for the present-day
naturalist.
No wonder that Charles Kingsley
was so impressed that he produced Glaucus
as a paean of praise for Gosse and his early books. Gosse wrote for both the
popular and the scientific audience and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society
in recognition of his discoveries.
Does that mean we should dismiss
Anne Pratt’s book about the shore in the way that Freeman and Wertheimer have
done? Decidedly not, for she, together with the other women authors they
mention, encouraged many who may otherwise not have become inspired by the study
of the shore and among their numbers must have been many women, to whom Pratt,
Roberts and Allom showed the way.
I would like to end with two
further quotes about Anne Pratt, the first from the doverhistorian website and
the second from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography:
..although she
brought the interest of botany to the masses, she never received academic acclaim
– she was self-taught and a woman. Indeed, fifty years after her death her work
was trivialised by the art historian Wilfred Blunt. [5]
Anne Pratt’s
works were written in popular style but were said to be accurate. [6]
Being self-taught was viewed as a
handicap in some circles and may explain the patronising comment about accuracy
in the second quote above. Perhaps of greater significance was that Anne Pratt
was a woman and a populariser, rather than a member of the developing
scientific establishment that was completely dominated by men. Does that
explain the condescension towards her?
[1] Barbara T Gates (1998) Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian
Women Embrace the Living World. Chicago, Chicago University Press.
[2] http://www.rwotton.blogspot.co.uk
[several posts].
[3] Anne Pratt (1850) Chapters on the Common things of the
Sea-side. London, Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.
[4] R. B. Freeman and Douglas
Wertheimer (1980) Philip Henry Gosse: A
Bibliography. Folkestone, Dawson.
[6] B. B. Woodward (2004-16)
Pratt, Anne (1806-1893), rev. Giles Hudson. Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.
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