Victorian Natural History
Mania

The Victorians and their Inheritance

The Victorians did not start a mid-19th-century natural history craze from nothing. By 1800, three foundational things were already in place and led to the mania, for that’s exactly what it was.

First, a cataloguing system emerged.

The Swedish scientist Linnaeus developed a system for naming every plant and animal on the planet, so collectors in different countries could talk about the same thing in the same way.

Second, a taste of far-off wonders.

Joseph Banks sailed around the world with Captain Cook from 1768 to 1771 and returned with plants and animals nobody in Britain had seen before.

Third, the essence of looking closely at what was on your own doorstep.

In 1789, a country curate, Gilbert White, published his notes on the birds and animals of the village of Selborne, and the book became a favourite for generations. The interest was awakened.

Meanwhile, rich men had been filling “cabinets of curiosities” with shells, fossils, and stuffed animals since the 1600s. All that was missing there was the crowd because these cabinets had been for private viewing only (and showing off), and so in the mid-19th century your everyday Victorians were about to become “the crowd”

Read more: Cabinets of Curiosities

A Walk Along The Local Path

The crowd arrived in the 1840s and 1850s, and it did not need a ship. It simply needed a railway ticket.

New railways made the seaside an easy day out, and a day at the seaside soon meant looking into rock pools. In 1854, the naturalist Philip Henry Gosse published a book on keeping a seawater aquarium at home, and a craze inevitably followed. Families collected birds’ eggs, beetles, butterflies, shells, and pressed seaweed. It was a hobby for the whole household.

The author Charles Kingsley wrote a popular book on the seashore in 1855, and around the same time a mania for collecting ferns swept the country. This fern craze endures – this author simply cannot get enough of them!

Money and time were essential factors behind these crazes. In the mid-1800s, Britain’s middle class grew, with spare rooms and spare afternoons. Books and magazines became cheaper after the government scrapped taxes on both newspapers and paper in the 1850s and early 1860s, and the penny post, introduced in 1840, made it cheap and easy to write to other collectors and swap specimens.

Collecting natural history was not only a gentleman’s hobby. Women collected shells, ferns and seaweed, and some became skilled illustrators. In the 1840s Anna Atkins made photographic prints of seaweeds. Some working men, after long days in mills and mines, became skilled collectors of plants and insects.

And then there was sport. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who bought Balmoral in 1852, helped make the Scottish Highlands fashionable. Shooting estates grew up across the north, and a stag or a brace of grouse was a trophy. Trophies went to the taxidermist. Taxidermists worked in towns across Britain, from London to provincial places like Aberystwyth, and many of the cases that survive today display British birds and animals.

Read more: How the Victorians developed the hunt in the Scottish Highlands  ·  The upper-class decoration of country houses with taxidermy  ·  Hutchings of Aberystwyth.

The Open Path To The Rest Of The World: The Empire

The second path led overseas. Britain ruled an empire that covered much of the globe, and steamships and railways meant animals, plants, and feathers could travel faster and in greater numbers than ever before.

Even the plants had a breakthrough. In 1829, a London doctor, Nathaniel Ward, noticed that ferns kept growing in a sealed glass bottle. He built glass cases on the same idea and, in 1833, sent two of them to Sydney. They came back to Britain the next year with the plants in good health. Plants that had once mostly died on long sea voyages now mostly survived.

As a result, soldiers, officials, missionaries and traders collected as they went. Naturalists such as John Gould built their names on the birds that arrived in London. Dealers like Jamrach in the East End turned the arrivals into stock for zoos, collectors and taxidermists.

We should be honest about who did the work. Local guides and collectors from the exotic places the Empire reached did much of the finding and catching, and their names were seldom, if ever, recorded. The glamour belonged to the person who brought the specimen back. The story of the Belgian Congo, for example, told elsewhere on this site, shows how much wonder and how much harm could sit behind a single acquisition.

Empire didn’t cause the whole craze around natural history because, of course, without it, the Victorians would still have collected ferns, eggs, and British birds. What empire added was the exotic: the tropical bird under the dome, the lion in the hall.

Read more: The Wonder and Wounds of the Belgian Congo  ·  Darwin, Wallace and Buffon.

Making it public and respectable

Collecting became respectable when it became public. The Zoological Society of London was founded in 1826. Museums multiplied, and in 1881 the great Natural History Museum opened in South Kensington. In Brighton, a collector named Edward Booth built a museum to display his bird collection.

The biggest exhibition stage of all was the Great Exhibition of 1851. It ran in Hyde Park, London, from 1 May to 15 October, and drew about six million visitors, roughly a third of England and Wales’s population. Taxidermy had its own section. A German taxidermist, Hermann Ploucquet, showed stuffed animals arranged in little scenes from stories, and visitors loved them.

Among the British exhibitors was the Reverend J.B.P. Dennis, a curate from Bury St Edmunds. His small entry, a peacock and a gull, led this author to an unexpected story of a clergyman who studied bones under the microscope. His story is now told in full in its own article.

Meanwhile, specimens could be bought, of course. Specialist auction rooms, such as Stevens’ in Covent Garden, sold them, and dealers across the country supplied cases ready-made.

Read more: The Great Exhibition 1851  ·  Taxidermy at the Great Exhibition 1851  ·  Hermann Ploucquet’s sensational tableaux  ·  History of the Zoological Society London  ·  Edward Booth, Victorian gentleman collector. Stevens Auction Rooms

A clear conscience

There’s one more thing – it was about permission. For many Victorians, studying nature was not just interesting; it was a way of admiring God’s work.

William Paley forcefully put this idea forward in 1802 in his book Natural Theology, arguing that the wonders of living things showed the hand of a wise Creator. Many clergymen were keen naturalists. Gilbert White had been a curate. John Stevens Henslow, the botany professor who taught the young Charles Darwin, was also a clergyman.

We should not overstate this, though. It was not “faith”  that made people collect. Fashion, money, and curiosity did that. Faith made collecting feel respectable, even virtuous, so a clergyman, a lady, or a child could take it up without a second thought. And not every naturalist was a churchman.

The shock

Then came a series of shocks. In 1854, the first life-size dinosaur models in the world opened at the Crystal Palace, designed by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins with advice from the anatomist Richard Owen, and the public flocked to see them. In 1859, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. In 1860, at a famous meeting in Oxford, scientists argued in public about what it meant.

Faith did not simply vanish after 1859. But the neat idea that every creature had been made for display now had to share the stage with discussions of evolution and the deep past.

You might expect collecting to have stopped. It did not. If anything, specimens mattered more, because they became evidence. Everyone, believer or not, wanted to see the real thing.

Why a glass case?

This is where all the paths meet. A family with a little money and time, a love of nature, a belief it was good for the soul, and access to birds from Scotland or the tropics wanted somewhere to put it all.

The answer was a hand-blown glass dome. It kept out the dust. It let you look without touching. It fit the Victorian habit of keeping beautiful things that would otherwise fade, from locks of hair in a brooch to portraits of loved ones who had died. One way to see a bird under glass is to see it as one more thing saved from time.

The dome also said something about its owner. A case of exotic birds in the drawing room told visitors that the family was educated, well connected and had taste.

Read more: The Victorian attitude to death  ·  The Victorian era

The craze that consumed itself

The story does not end well for the birds. Feathers became high fashion, and by the late 1800s hats were being trimmed with whole birds and wings! Campaigners called it “murderous millinery”. Some species, such as the little egret, were pushed towards extinction for their plumes.

A reaction obviously came. In 1869, Parliament passed the Sea Birds Preservation Act, the first UK law to protect wild birds. It gave only limited protection, mainly against shooting and egg collecting in the breeding season, after public outrage at the slaughter of seabirds at places like Flamborough Head. Further laws followed.

In 1889, a group of women led by Emily Williamson founded the society that became the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. It campaigned against the feather trade, and finally in 1921 Britain finally banned the import of plumage.

The same fascination that had filled the glass cases helped empty the places they came from, and that led to the first laws protecting wild birds. It is an uncomfortable ending, and it is part of the story.

Read more: Adolphe Boucard, Walter Burton and the feather trade that consumed itself  ·  Victorian feather fashion craze.

What survives

Most of those glass cases are gone, broken or thrown out. The ones that remain are now collected, restored and admired again by museums, designers and people who simply like them, myself included. Behind each one there is a family, a fashion and a very long road. You can read about the cases that survive in Taxidermy Today.