The Curate, The Microscope and The Gull: Rev. James B.P. Dennis at the Great Exhibition 1851

A clergyman, two stuffed birds and the biggest show of 1851

A small entry in a very large catalogue

In May 1851 the Great Exhibition opened in Hyde Park, London. Under the glass roof of the Crystal Palace, visitors could see everything from steam engines to jewels to stuffed animals.

Among the stuffed animals was a small entry from a clergyman. He was one of thirteen British exhibitors in the taxidermy section, and his number in the catalogue was 161. His name was the Reverend J.B.P. Dennis, of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk.

The catalogue describes what he sent in two short lines:

“Stuffed birds: Peacock, with train spread, copied from nature. Small gull – showing a method of giving a natural lustre to the eye and eyelids, and restoring the rosy tint of the underneath plumage.”

(Some lists give his first bird as a peahen. The catalogue itself says a peacock with its train spread.)

The gull is the interesting one. It was not shown as a finished showpiece. It was shown as a method: a way of making the eye shine like a living bird’s, and of restoring the pink of its underfeathers.

The Man in the Census

The 1851 census, taken in March, a few weeks before the Exhibition opened, finds him at 62 Garland Street in Bury St Edmunds. He was 35 and a curate, which means an assistant to the vicar, at St John’s Church. He had been born in Colchester.

His household was a full one. His wife Eliza was 28. They had six children, the eldest eight and the youngest just one. Five servants lived with them: a nurse, an under-nurse, a cook, a housemaid and a lad of all work.

Most of the children had been born in Northamptonshire. A newspaper note written long after his death explains why. It says he had been curate at Maxey, a village near Peterborough, in the 1840s. So the family had come to Suffolk only shortly before the census.

It is easy to picture a quiet parish life. But the catalogue entry hints that there was more to him than that.

A second life under the microscope

Other records fill in the picture. The Oxford University register shows that James Blatch Piggott Dennis (the name is sometimes spelt Piggot) was the second son of Philip Dennis, a gentleman of Colchester. He went up to Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1835, aged 19, and took his degree in 1839.

The name, the birthplace and the age all match the curate in the census. Everything we can check points to the same man.

A notice in the Gentleman’s Magazine in February 1861 tells us the rest. It says he died at Bury St Edmunds on 13 January 1861, aged 45, and it describes him as a naturalist. He had spent years studying the inner structure of bone under the microscope. A very thin slice of bone, seen this way, shows patterns that can help tell what sort of animal it came from. The writer said his work opened up a new way of studying natural history.

He published papers on the subject in the 1850s. One looked at bones from a fossil bed at Felixstowe, on the Suffolk coast, that had been called whale bones. One biography adds that he found a small jawbone in the Stonesfield slate, near Oxford, and that in 1860 he gave a paper on how flying reptiles called pterosaurs moved through the air.

The newspaper note adds that the national biography calls him a histologist. That is someone who studies the fine structure of living tissue. In his case, the note says, it made him an authority on fossil bones.

A collection of birds

The same note says something that matters for the Exhibition. It says that in Bury St Edmunds Museum his collection of hawks and owls could be seen.

So he was not only a bone man who happened to send two birds to London. He collected birds, and he had enough of them to be worth showing in a museum.

Friends in high places

The 1861 notice names two men who thought well of his papers: Professor Henslow and Professor Owen.

John Stevens Henslow was a Cambridge professor of botany, and the teacher of the young Charles Darwin. He was also the rector of Hitcham, a village in Suffolk. Richard Owen was the leading anatomist of the day, and the man who gave dinosaurs their name.

Henslow is remembered for another discovery too. In 1843 he found lumps in a rock layer at Felixstowe that he took to be fossilised dung, known as coprolites. Farmers could use them as fertiliser, and a digging industry grew up across Suffolk and Cambridgeshire.

Dennis’s 1857 paper was about bones from that same layer at Felixstowe, and his 1860 paper was about creatures from the coprolite beds near Cambridge. So the two men were interested in the same rocks.

I have found no record that Dennis and Henslow ever met. Henslow died in May 1861, four months after Dennis.

Great Exhibition 1851 British Taxidermy Display by Rev J.B.P. Dennis

This is the original information card that was on display at the exhibition itself attached to the bird presentation of Reverend Dennis. This photo of the 175 year old original card appeared in the British Taxidermy Group led by Simon Rumble who also happens to live near Bury St. Edmunds where Reverend Dennis lived in the vicarage – quite a discovery!

Why a gull?

So why would a curate with six young children send two stuffed birds to the Great Exhibition? Once we know he kept a bird collection, the question is much less puzzling. A man who collected birds, and who spent his working hours studying fine detail, might well want to show how he made the eye of a gull shine.

We still do not know whether he prepared the birds himself, or who did. The note says he had a collection of hawks and owls. It does not say he stuffed them, and a collector can buy specimens or be given them. But the gull was shown as a method, and that reads like someone who had worked something out for himself. That is a reasonable guess, not a fact.

One man, many interests

Elsewhere on this site I ask why the Victorians became so fond of natural history. Dennis is part of the answer, though only a small part. He was a churchman, a family man, a student of fossils and a collector of birds all at once, at a time when many people found those things sat comfortably together.

He also shows that the craze was not only for wealthy collectors with country estates. A busy curate in a Suffolk town could study bones, collect birds, write papers and send his work to the biggest show in the world.

The notice written after his death said that his devotion to his microscope work had probably shortened his life. That was the writer’s opinion, and we cannot know. He was 45.

Anyone who is related to the Rev. Dennis, or anyone who knows where his bird collection went – please contact me