Ferns, Rock Pools and the Victorian Parlour

A Glass Tank In The Victorian Front Room

In 1853, a naturalist named Philip Henry Gosse set up a house for sea creatures at London Zoo. It is described as the world’s first public marine aquarium, and Gosse is credited with inventing the word “aquarium”. The following year he published a book on keeping an aquarium at home. It sold well, and tanks began to appear in houses across Britain.

Ornate tanks had previously been on show at the Great Exhibition of 1851, and by the middle of the decade, everyone seemed to want one.

Seaweed, shells and eggs

The seashore offered more than animals for tanks. In 1843, Anna Atkins, a botanist from Kent, began printing seaweeds by laying dried specimens straight onto light-sensitive paper, an early photographic method called “cyanotype”. She published the results by hand in a very small number. Only 17 copies are known to survive, and her book is often described as the first illustrated book to use photographs.

Families pressed and mounted seaweeds all round the coast, and Margaret Gatty, a popular children’s writer, wrote a guide to British seaweeds that stayed in use for generations. Families also collected shells, birds’ eggs, beetles and butterflies.

Fern Fever

At the same time Britain caught what was called “fern fever”. In 1855 the writer Charles Kingsley, in a popular book about the seashore called Glaucus, gave this a name: he called it pteridomania, from the Greek word for fern.

The craze for ferns lasted about forty years – from the 1850s into the 1890s. People hunted ferns on country walks, pressed them in albums, bought them from nurserymen and grew them indoors and in garden ferneries. Ferns appeared on pottery by Wedgwood, Minton and Royal Worcester, and on glass, metal and cloth.

The Wardian case was the glass case that kept ferns alive in a typical smoky townhouse. It was named after a London doctor, Nathaniel Ward, who found in 1829 that plants would grow in a sealed glass bottle.

A Middle Class Pursuit

Who could join in? Well, it was mostly the middle class. An increasing number of households had money for a tank or a Wardian case, and also had time for a day at the shore. Cheaper print helped. The tax on advertisements ended in 1853, the stamp duty on newspapers in 1855 and the duty on paper in 1861. The penny post, introduced in 1840, had made letters cheap enough that the swapping of specimens and correspondence with other collectors was easy.

However, working men also took part and had done so before Victoria came to the throne. The historian Anne Secord has shown that weavers, shoemakers and blacksmiths in north-west England met in local groups to study plants and mosses and sent specimens to gentlemen naturalists to be named. Letters were expensive before the penny post, so they often passed notes by hand. The gentlemen were generous, and the working men usually refused payment, because taking money would have made them look like tradesmen.

Women were also included. Atkins and Gatty are just two who made their names. Emily Gosse, a trained artist, drew the plates for her husband’s aquarium book, but she was not credited.

The price of the craze

The craze did a lot of damage. To fill all those tanks, collectors raided the shore. A London shop run by William Alford Lloyd kept about 15,000 sea creatures in 50 large tanks and employed more than a dozen people to collect them and buy them from amateurs. Gosse’s own son Edmund later wrote that the rock pools had been emptied and “profaned”. He also said that his father came to see his part in this within a few years and was very distressed by it.

The tanks themselves rarely endured. One account says that within a few years, nine in ten home aquariums were thrown out or neglected.

Ferns suffered too. Collecting greatly reduced some rare wild species, such as the oblong woodsia in Scotland’s Moffat Hills. One fern enthusiast, Nona Bellairs, even called for “fern laws” to protect wild plants.

We meet this pattern again, on a far larger scale, in the story of the feather trade.

Nature under glass

Put these crazes together, and a pattern appears. The fern case, the aquarium, and the glass dome of stuffed birds were all ways to keep a piece of the wild in a Victorian parlour, safe behind glass.

In contrast, the living versions were hard work. Ferns needed light and care, fish needed clean water, and, as we have seen, people often gave up tanks. A cased bird needed no food or water, only dusting. That may be why so many domes survived when the aquariums did not.