The Women Behind The Big Victorian Names

The Women Behind The Big Names

Names On The Title Page Were Never The Whole Story

Open a Victorian book on birds or fossils, and a few famous names look back at you: Gould, Owen, Buckland, Darwin. But other people often did the work behind those names, and a surprising number of them were women who rarely made it onto the title page.

Elizabeth Gould The artist beside the Great Bird Books

John Gould’s great bird books made his name, and his wife drew many of the pictures in them. Elizabeth Gould, born in 1804, drew, lithographed and painted hundreds of plates between 1830 and 1841. She sailed to Australia with her husband in 1838 and drew the birds he collected there. She returned home in 1840 and tragically died the following year, aged just 37, shortly after the birth of her last child.

Her first book credited her alone on each plate. Later books were credited to “J & E Gould”. Her bird drawings for Darwin’s account of the voyage of the Beagle carried no credit at all. The artist Henry Constantine Richter finished the plates for The Birds of Australia after her death.

Mary Anning: The woman on the beach

Mary Anning was born in Lyme Regis, Dorset, in 1799. Her family sold fossils to tourists from a table outside their house, and she searched the cliffs for more, especially in winter, when landslips exposed new finds. When she was a girl, her brother found the skull of a huge sea reptile, an ichthyosaur, and she then found the rest of the skeleton. In 1823, she found the first nearly complete plesiosaur, and in 1828 the first pterosaur skeleton found outside Germany.

Gentleman scientists took her fossils into their collections and papers, and often did not name her. She could not join the Geological Society of London, or even attend its meetings as a guest, although its members sought her advice. She noticed that the odd “stones” found with fossils were actually fossilised dung, and the geologist William Buckland later named them “coprolites”. They were the same kind of lump that John Stevens Henslow found in Suffolk many years later.

In 1836 Mary was given a small government pension of £25 a year. The Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz named two fossil fish after her. She died in 1847, aged 47.

The Society’s tribute to her afterwards was the first it had ever given to a woman.

Closed Society Doors

The learned societies were another matter. The Linnean Society elected its first women Fellows in November 1904. The Geological Society did not do so until 1919, when it elected eight women. Until then women could be shut out of meetings even when they had won the Society’s prizes: in 1893 and 1900 two women who were awarded a Geological Society fund could not attend to receive it. The Royal Society did not then go on to routinely admit women until the 1940s.

Not every door was shut to women since the Linnean Society’s own history says that the Zoological Society admitted women from 1826, and the Botanical Society from 1837.

Women at home, creations under glass

At home, women took up the craft in their own way. A Canadian museum’s account of the Victorian natural history craze notes that women made glass domes filled with shells, wax, leaves, feathers and sometimes stuffed birds. Instruction books told them how. One book, by the American writer Levina Buoncuore Urbino, explained how to stuff a bird at home, using arsenic, which is a poison. That is worth remembering if you ever handle an old case!