CHAPTER FIVE

Our STEM Foremothers

There has been a recent spate of romance novels set during the Regency time period featuring heroines engaged in scientific research. Heroines like the delightful Miss Madeline Gracechurch of Tessa Dare’s When a Scot Ties the Knot, who spends much of the novel wrangling the pair of lobsters she is supposed to be observing for scientific purposes. Or Cara Elliott’s Circle of Sin Series, which centers on a group of female friends pursuing intellectual careers in the sciences. Sometimes people chuckle when I recommend such a novel to them in my bookstore, the Ripped Bodice. They laugh because romance novels are considered the ultimate fantasy and even there, they cannot imagine a female scientist in the nineteenth century.

Not only did women work in the scientific communities of the nineteenth century, but many of them worked together, supporting each other’s work, creating yet another example of an in-real-life network of Regency women.

There are some major names that emerge over and over in discussion of women and science during the nineteenth century—Caroline Herschel, Mary Anning, Jane Marcet, and Mary Somerville. Each, in her own way, has become a part of the storybook version of history. And they’ve each been put into a little box, rarely to be reexamined: Caroline Herschel as the devoted assistant to her brother, Mary Anning as the little old lady selling seashells, Jane Marcet as the consummate teacher, and Mary Somerville as the “queen of science.”

These boxes separate the women from one another, holding each one out as an unusual oddity rather than a part of a much larger cohesive community.

Making your way as a woman in the scientific communities of the nineteenth century was not an easy task. These women had to battle prejudice and constant questioning and undermining of their talents and motives.

The women in this chapter succeeded in achieving their dreams. They received recognition in their lifetimes—some more than others. But more important they left behind a record for historians to find, evidence of their work and lives. As we sift through their words and stories we see tantalizing glimpses of other women working in and around science. These assistants, observers, and helpers deserve recognition and study.

No matter whether they were celebrated or unseen and unthanked in their own time, the scientific-minded women of the Regency made incredible advancements in their fields.

CAROLINE HERSCHEL

Caroline Herschel is often credited as the first woman to discover a comet. It won’t surprise anyone reading this book to know that that honor actually goes to another woman, Maria Kirch, whose discovery of a previously unknown comet in 1702 was initially attributed to her husband and who spent her entire life fighting for any shred of official validation for her work in astronomy.

Caroline avoided a similar fate with her careful insertion of herself into her brother’s work and the greater scientific community. She also made sure her legacy was secure by writing two autobiographies, as well as a final memoir that she never finished. Instead she cheekily suggested that her niece Arabella continue the story, as a novel. That never happened. But what I wouldn’t give to read it!

Despite the pains Caroline took to write her own story, her autonomy as an astronomer has been very much called into question by historians. Her importance has become intertwined with her famous brother, William Herschel, a fellow astronomer. Due to the complicated relationship between the siblings, historians have chosen to simplify Caroline into a devoted servant and apprentice to her brother, stripping her of her own ambition. Although Caroline may have couched her motivations in acceptable language for the nineteenth century, she worked hard and wanted recognition for that work.

Caroline was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1750. She was the eighth child and fourth daughter in a not particularly wealthy or noble family. Her father, Isaac, was an oboist who became bandmaster of the Hanoverian Foot Guards. History tells us that her father supported his daughter’s education while her mother decidedly did not. The truth, of course, is slightly more complicated. While Isaac Herschel was born to a gardener and the daughter of a tanner, he had clear ambition. He taught himself the oboe and rose in the ranks of the guards. His wife, Anna Ilse Moritzen, was born to a provincial family near Hanover. Her upbringing must have been very different from her husband’s, and as such, history tells us that she lacked the ambition he had.

But because of the brilliant Caroline, we are given the chance to reexamine both mother and daughter centuries later. Caroline’s memories of her mother are not happy ones. In her memoirs, she tells stories of being forgotten and overlooked by her mother. And perhaps more important, it was Anna who insisted Caroline end her formal education in favor of learning embroidery and other useful household tasks.

Caroline also lived with a physical disfigurement, from a childhood bout of smallpox. Both her mother and father seem to have been in agreement that it meant there was little chance of their daughter contracting an advantageous marriage.

Caroline seemed to associate all the bad memories of her childhood with her mother, while she remembered her father with great affection and admiration. In particular she remembered his excitement at sharing the eclipse in April 1764 with his children. He gathered them around a tub of water in the courtyard so they could safely view the phenomenon in the reflection. Caroline remembered him urging his children to look to the stars and consider the heavens.

Anna, on the other hand, wanted Caroline to stay at home and serve as the family’s maid. In Caroline’s memoirs she reflects on this, and offhandedly mentions that Anna believed if her sons hadn’t become so educated they wouldn’t have left Hanover and their family for England, which they did in 1766. A year later Isaac passed away, and Anna was left a widow with many children to take care of.

Perhaps Anna simply wanted what was left of her family to stay together.

It was not to be. Caroline escaped her life in Hanover in 1772, when she moved to Bath, England, at the invitation of her brother William.

William had settled in Bath as an organist and music teacher, and invited his sister to join him. While Caroline had played the violin a bit as a child, she was not a trained musician. But she clearly recognized the opportunity for what it was, and spent hours training her voice, as well as preparing her family in Hanover for her absence.

When Caroline arrived in England in 1772, she didn’t speak English. Her brothers gave her a six-week crash course, and then sent her off by herself to the market.

Indeed, all the household tasks once again seemed to fall on Caroline, despite her burgeoning musical career and the hopes she had for it. Caroline struggled in her new life, and wrote in her memoirs, “The three winter months passed on very heavily. I had to struggle against heimwehe (home sickness) and low spirits, and to answer my sister’s melancholy letters on the death of her husband, by which she became a widow with six children. I knew too little English to derive any consolation from the society of those who were about me, so that, dinner-time excepted, I was entirely left to myself.”¹

And then everything changed again.

William had become increasingly interested in astronomy, and Caroline’s arrival in England coincided with his mania. He lost interest in training his sister’s voice, much to her frustration, and instead suggested she learn to assist him with his astronomical work.

Which she did.

She learned the necessary science and math.

She learned the mechanics of the telescopes William was building so she could properly clean and handle them.

She fed him bits of food when he was too busy to take his hands off said telescope for even a moment.

Caroline was dependent on her parents first, and her brother second. She constantly strove for her independence as her family undermined these efforts, either consciously or subconsciously.

Even if this new life was hard, Caroline was determined to make the best of it. Her positivity shines through her recollections. “When I found that a hand was sometimes wanted when any particular measures were to be made with the lamp micrometer, &c., or a fire to be kept up, or a dish of coffee necessary during a long night’s watching, I undertook with pleasure what others might have thought a hardship.”²

William decided to leave music behind in 1782 when he was offered the position of royal astronomer at Windsor, which came with the salary of £200, half of what he had been making as a musician. This meant that Caroline now had to run their household on half the money she had before.

The move to Windsor also meant that Caroline became William’s official assistant, through no choice of her own. Their brother Alex had helped in Bath, but he decided to stay there, so William announced that Caroline would take over his duties.

Caroline was resistant to this at first. She had spent years training her voice and preparing for a musical career. But after a few months of studying with William—and after she became comfortable with the materials—she began to enjoy her new responsibilities:

In my brother’s absence from home, I was of course left solely to amuse myself with my own thoughts, which were anything but cheerful. I found I was to be trained for an assistant-astronomer, and by way of encouragement a telescope adapted for “sweeping,” consisting of a tube with two glasses, such as are commonly used in a “finder,” was given me. I was “to sweep for comets,” and I see by my journal that I began August 22nd, 1782, to write down and describe all remarkable appearances I saw in my “sweeps,” which were horizontal. But it was not till the last two months of the same year that I felt the least encouragement to spend the star-light nights on a grass-plot covered with dew or hoar frost, without a human being near enough to be within call.³

It’s also clear that while William might have drafted his sister into service, he respected her talents and invested in them accordingly. In 1783 he built Caroline a new telescope, which she used to “sweep” the heavens.

In July 1786, while William was in Hanover delivering a telescope to the Observatory of Göttingen, Caroline discovered her first comet. She wrote in her recollections, “1 o’clock.—The object of last night is a comet.”⁴ Upon her discovery, Caroline immediately wrote to Charles Blagden, then secretary of the Royal Society, explaining that she had found a new comet, now known as Comet C/1768 P1 (Herschel).

The fact that she discovered the comet when William was away is telling. If Caroline was simply William’s loyal assistant with no ambition of her own, why was she sweeping without him? Indeed, all eight of the comets Caroline discovered were found when William was away.

The moment William was elsewhere, Caroline had more time to devote to her own observations, and her discoveries were celebrated by the scientific community near and far. A year later they were honored in a far more significant way when Caroline began to receive an annual pension of £50 from George III for her work as her brother’s assistant. This made her the first woman in England to receive an official government position and be paid in an official capacity for her work in astronomy.

By this point, Caroline had discovered five comets.

She was recognized during her own lifetime with a salary, praised and acknowledged by her contemporaries. Those writing about Caroline after her death, however, began to subtly insinuate and question her motives and choices.

In 1788, a year after Caroline began to receive her pension from the government, William married wealthy widow Mary Pitt. With her brother’s marriage, Caroline’s position in his life changed. She moved out of the main house, where their shared workroom was, and into external lodging. This vital perspective is often treated as a footnote when historians discuss the marriage and Caroline’s seeming displeasure with the match.

A year after she finally established herself financially, her brother changed everything. Again.

And she was powerless to stop him.

Caroline stopped writing in her journals the week after William and Mary married. But she recorded her thoughts in various memoranda and letters. It’s clear that the early years of the marriage were difficult for Caroline as she adjusted to her new role in her brother’s life. She was used to being everything to him, whether she wanted to be or not. Now she had to learn to share.

Which she did. The ever-adaptable Caroline eventually grew to love her new sister-in-law, the evidence clear in her affectionate letters to her, signed off with phrases like, “most obliged and affectionate.”⁵

Despite the (perhaps outsize) importance William’s marriage has been given, it was not the end of the siblings’ partnership, nor did it finish Caroline’s work.

In 1798 Caroline sent the Royal Society the Catalogue of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars, a project she undertook after she and William realized that the popular John Flamsteed’s catalog wasn’t particularly useful for their work, as it was riddled with errors. Caroline’s catalog included all of Flamsteed’s stars and 560 more that he hadn’t included.

William is often credited with the idea for this new catalog, and also the decision to pass it off to Caroline to focus on more exciting astronomical discoveries. But it was this catalog, this painstaking, backbreaking, tedious work, that earned Caroline another formerly unheard-of honor for a woman: In 1835 she and her contemporary Mary Somerville were officially named honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society, the first and only women admitted for thirty years.

Young, well-bred women of their time weren’t told they could be whatever they wanted when they grew up. They were told they could be wives and mothers or, if not that, a burden to their families. The women working in the scientific world of the nineteenth century are products of their time, and to ascribe to them modern ideas about ambition and legacy is to erase an important element they had to constantly fight against.

Caroline’s achievements are all the more extraordinary for the circumstances under which they took place. Disfigured and relegated to a life of servitude, Caroline learned not one but several complicated trades as she attempted to build an independent life for herself. In astronomy she found a field in which she could not only help her brother but distinguish herself, which she took pains to do. Caroline made sure each discovery was sent to a suitably impressive colleague and attributed to her.

She left behind as much of her story as she could, and directed her descendants to continue the next chapter. Caroline’s niece-in-law, Margaret Brodie Herschel, was fascinated by her brilliant aunt by marriage. It was thanks to Margaret’s many questions in letters and during visits that Caroline finally followed through and began to write her autobiography.⁶ Margaret’s daughters and daughter-in-law continued this legacy, as they ensured Caroline’s memoirs were published in 1876 and donated her gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society to Girton College, which also houses Mary Somerville’s papers.

MARY SOMERVILLE

It is deeply unfair but also true that in the nineteenth century, a woman’s ability to pursue any kind of academic career, let alone receive recognition for it, was almost entirely dependent on the men in her life. This unfortunate truth is nicely illustrated by the life of the brilliant scientist, mathematician, and thinker Mary Somerville and her two husbands.

Mary Somerville is the kind of woman who deserves many books and much examination from every angle. The scope of her scientific achievements is far beyond this historian’s comprehension, and her contemporaries were well aware of her genius. Her obituary in the Morning Post declared her the undisputed “Queen of Science.”⁷

Mary Fairfax was born into a family with a good name and not a lot of money to go along with it in Scotland in 1780. She was aware of her own intelligence from a young age, and the uphill battle she would have to fight her entire life to receive even a fraction of the same education she would have received if she had simply been born male.

As Mary herself put it, “I was annoyed that my turn for reading was so much disapproved of, and thought it unjust that women should have been given a desire for knowledge if it were wrong to acquire it.”⁸ It’s hard to argue with that logic, but argue the men of Mary’s time did.

After a year in a boarding school when she was ten, Mary’s formal education ended.

Sources differ on the moment Mary Fairfax showed her true brilliance. Some say she stayed up all night reading her brother’s copies of Euclid until her family took her candles away, and that then Mary took this challenge and used it, memorizing the problems and going over them in her head at night, checking to see if she was right in the morning.

Another story goes that Mary was at a tea party when she read a ladies’ fashion magazine that featured a mathematical puzzle she became engrossed in solving. She was thwarted until she overheard her painting tutor recommending Euclid’s work for better understanding perspective.

In both stories Mary obtains a copy of Euclid with some difficulty and reads it despite her family’s disapproval. And either way, it’s clear that Mary went out of her way to educate herself.

Mary continued to educate herself even as she married her cousin Captain Samuel Greig, who disapproved of such things, in 1804.

Captain Greig died three short years later, and Mary returned to Scotland with her two small children. Her widowhood allowed her to return to her mathematical studies, and she began a correspondence with several of the leading mathematicians of the time, who, unlike Captain Greig, encouraged her in her pursuit of knowledge.

In 1812 Mary married another cousin, Thomas Somerville. He had a very different opinion about his wife’s mathematical career than her first husband and continued to support her studies and work.

The couple moved to London in 1816 and quickly became a part of the leading circles of academics in the city, befriending many familiar names, including William and Caroline Herschel.

Mary published her first paper in 1826 and a year later began work on her first book, a translation of Laplace’s Mécanique Céleste, which came out in 1831 titled The Mechanisms of the Heavens. The book established Mary as an indisputable force to be reckoned with in the mathematical and astronomical world, even if it wasn’t a huge commercial success.

Four years after this groundbreaking publication, Mary was admitted as an honorary member, along with Caroline Herschel, to the Royal Astronomical Society. She was also awarded a civil pension to support her work by Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel first and Prime Minister William Lamb subsequently.

All of this was achieved with the support and help of her husband Thomas Somerville, who even acted as editor and note-taker for his wife at times, a reversal of the accepted and expected roles for a husband and wife.

Something history tries to do is isolate exceptional women, but Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville’s friendship, and the extended group they moved within, show us how curious, intellectual women found each other. They also clearly understood the importance of educating the next generation of women scientists. Mary Somerville personally tutored Ada Lovelace, daughter of disreputable poet Byron and Annabella Milbanke, an utterly brilliant scientist in her own right.

Mary’s social circle extended beyond just the scientific world. She was also a close personal friend of many of the women discussed throughout this book, including Maria Edgeworth, Mary Berry, and Amelia Opie. These friendships—across academic disciplines, social status, and even geography—remind us that even and especially the most brilliant women in history should be studied in totality.

In the overlap among artists, society ladies, and scientists we can begin to understand what is so fascinating about the Regency. It’s a time of incredible change and advancement, with more remarkable women at the foreground than we ever could have imagined.

Of Mary Somerville, her friend Maria Edgeworth wrote, “She has her head in the stars… but her feet firmly on the ground.”⁹

JANE MARCET

Jane Haldimand was born in 1769 in London into a wealthy Swiss banking family. Her father, Anthony Francis Haldimand, was a successful merchant and banker who filled his home with intellectual guests. Jane, one of eleven children, took over running the household after her mother, also named Jane, passed away in 1785.

Jane was educated alongside her brothers, receiving an extensive education in languages, botany, and history. She also showed a real talent for art and studied with famed artists Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Lawrence.

In 1799 Jane married a fellow Genevan living in London, Alexander Marcet, a physician trained at the University of Edinburgh. The couple had four children, one of whom, François, went on to become a physicist.

Much like at her father’s house, Jane and Alexander created a haven for academics, scientists, artists, and intellectuals in their home. Maria Edgeworth wrote about her visits to the family, painting a picture of a happy, lively, and extremely intellectual household that conducted scientific experiments for fun, like the time she arrived to find the family about to set a “paper fire-balloon” aloft.

Jane was an active participant in the intellectual life of her husband. She attended lectures alongside him whenever possible, including those of noted chemist Humphry Davy. It was after one of these lectures, legend has it, that Jane decided to write an educational text on the ideas she had been presented with, attempting to synthesize the complicated ideas into simpler, more understandable prose.

The initial book, Conversations on Natural Philosophy, was written in 1805 but not published until 1819. Instead Jane first published Conversations on Chemistry in 1805 anonymously.

The book is written in the form of conversations between a teacher, Mrs. Bryant, and her two pupils, Caroline and Emily. Emily, the older sister, is well behaved, while Caroline is a bit more disruptive, but often furthers the conversation with her inquisitive questions.

Conversations on Chemistry went through sixteen editions in England, and another sixteen in America. In her introduction Jane wrote, “In venturing to offer to the public, and more particularly to the female sex, an introduction to chemistry, the author, herself a woman, conceives that some explanation may be required; and she feels it the more necessary to apologise for the present undertaking, as her knowledge of the subject is but recent, and as she can have no real claims to the title of chemist.”¹⁰

In 1816 Jane published Conversations on Political Economy, which summarized and popularized the theories of Adam Smith, Malthus, and David Ricardo. While it was dismissed in some circles as “economics for schoolgirls,” this book was responsible for the spread of the principles of classic political economy in fashionable circles in the nineteenth century.

Jane made her subjects accessible. And she revolutionized the idea of widespread scientific education for women. She continued writing for children, especially girls, even as her popularity grew, eschewing more prestigious writing.

In 1820 Jane and Alexander traveled to Geneva with the intent of settling there. Sadly, two years later, Alexander died on a trip back to England. Jane was devastated by his death and suffered a period of depression, one of several throughout her life. She eventually returned to England, where she continued to work and publish.

In 1832 the twelfth edition of Conversations on Chemistry was published, and for the first time Jane was named as the author. This caused a bit of a stir in the United States, where the anonymity had allowed a number of (male) authors to take credit for Jane’s work. Three years later she published another instant classic, Mary’s Grammar.

Jane lived the last part of her life with her daughter and her family in London. She died in 1858.

Her legacy can be easily tracked because those she influenced often wrote about it. Famous chemist and physicist Michael Faraday credited Jane’s Conversations on Chemistry as introducing him to the topic. Harriet Martineau, the popular Victorian social historian, also cited Jane as an influence.

Mary Somerville herself said, “No one at this time can duly estimate the importance of Mrs Marcet’s scientific works.”¹¹

MARY ANNING

Have you ever heard the saying “She sells seashells by the seashore”? It’s a popular tongue-twister that originated at the end of the nineteenth century, and since the middle of the twentieth century has been inextricably linked to Mary Anning.

There’s no direct or even circumstantial evidence that Mary Anning inspired the tongue-twister, but the association persists. Mary Anning did not sell seashells by the seashore. In actuality she had a shop in the seaside resort town of Lyme Regis, where she sold fossils that she found along the Blue Lias cliffs.

Mary entered the world of paleontology at a moment of immense discoveries and intense speculation and fear over what they meant. The predominantly devoutly Christian scientific community was coming face-to-face with incontrovertible proof of evolution.

Mary’s father, Richard, died in 1810, leaving the family struggling financially. She spent the rest of her life working to provide for them. Despite her talent for finding fossils, Mary never received the kind of financial compensation that would have lifted her family out of poverty.

In 1811 Mary and her brother Joseph were fossil hunting when they spotted a dark, glistening something among the cliffs of Lyme Regis. Mary spent weeks excavating the entire skeleton, with the help of local laborers and sometimes her brother and mother. Eventually the discovery was officially named an ichthyosaurus, a name created by putting the Greek words for “fish” and “lizard” together. It was bought for £23 by local landowner Henry Hoste Henley, who turned around and sold the specimen to Bullock’s Museum of Natural Curiosities, which in turn sold it to the British Museum for £48.

In 1823 Mary was the undisputed discoverer of a plesiosaurus, a discovery so shocking that Georges Cuvier, the famous French zoologist, called it a fake.

A friend of Mary’s, William Conybeare, had discovered the first head of such a skeleton and came up with the name, meaning “near to reptile.” Mary immediately sent a drawing of her discovery to Conybeare, who could hardly believe what he was looking at, but knew that they were onto something.

In France, Georges Cuvier thought differently. He examined Mary’s drawing and believed the neck to be impossibly long. He wrote to Conybeare throwing doubt on Mary’s discovery and putting her reputation at serious risk.

A debate was called at the Royal Geological Society, to which Mary was not invited. Conybeare defended Mary’s find and Cuvier was finally forced to admit that he, not Mary, had been wrong.

Mary sold her plesiosaurus to the Duke of Buckingham, who paid £110—the most anyone had paid for a single specimen up to that point.

In our collective imagination, Mary is a little old lady, bent over with age as she sells simple seashells. But Mary actually died of cancer at forty-seven and never reached old age.

De la Beche meant no disrespect. A friend of Mary’s from childhood, Henry spent a considerable amount of time and energy making sure that Mary received at least some financial compensation for her contributions to science. As well as the sketch of Mary working, he drew the famous print Duria Antiquior—A More Ancient Dorset, based on the fossils Mary had found. [Figure 12] Then he arranged for her to receive some of the proceeds from sales of the print.

Thomas was not Mary’s only protector/defender. He collaborated with fellow scientist William Conybeare on a paper based on Mary’s findings, and the pair helped defend her against Georges Cuvier’s charges of fakery. Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Birch, another noted fossil collector, also took an interest in Mary and her mother, Molly. After learning of their financial struggles, Birch decided to sell his collection of fossils—largely collected by the Annings—in a noted auction that raised over £400.

Mary was also friends with noted local paleontology enthusiast the Reverend William Buckland. The pair spent many years hunting for fossils together, and the trips were important enough that Buckland’s daughter mentioned them in her biography of her father: “The vacations of his earliest Oxford time were spent near Lyme Regis. For years afterwards local gossip preserved traditions of his adventures with that geological celebrity Mary Anning, in whose company he was to be seen wading up to his knees in search of fossils in the Blue Lias.”¹²

Mary’s friendships with men were the subject of some speculation during and after her lifetime. People questioned the motives behind the generous help provided by Birch and De la Beche, but there is no evidence of anything other than friendship and mutual respect. And Mary didn’t just enjoy strong friendships with brilliant men; she had many close female friends as well. The Philpot sisters, especially Elizabeth, were Mary’s constant companions.

SPOTLIGHT ON THE PHILPOT SISTERS

The Philpot sisters are a perfect example of the tantalizing clues the historical record has left us of other women active in the sciences in the nineteenth century. Elizabeth (1780–1857), Mary (1777–1838), and Margaret (d. 1845) Philpot arrived in Lyme Regis in 1805. They moved into Morley Cottage on Silver Street, a house rented for them by their solicitor brother John.

The three sisters lived together and assembled an impressive collection of fossils. A neighbor, Selina Hallett, described it like this: “Several cases with glass tops and shallow drawers all down the front stood in the dining room and the back parlor and upstairs on the landing, all full of fossils with a little ticket on each of them.”¹³

Some twenty years older than Mary Anning, Elizabeth took her under her wing. The two formed a close friendship, writing to each other about their discoveries and sharing news of each other in letters to other friends.

The Philpots were at the center of Lyme Regis’s active community of amateur scientists. They regularly entertained visitors at Morley Cottage such as the eccentric William Buckland, the first professor of geology at Oxford and husband to Mary Buckland, another woman working in the field.

Details about the Philpots are tantalizingly few and far between. They appear in Mary Anning’s letters, as well as many of their scientific contemporaries. Some of Elizabeth’s letters to Mary survive, along with her impressive fossil collection: Over four hundred specimens are now housed at the Oxford Museum of Natural History, just waiting for an intrepid historian to discover them and give them the attention they deserve.

(BACK TO MARY ANNING)

In 1824 Mary also befriended a new arrival to Lyme Regis, a young invalid woman named Frances Augusta Bell. When Frances returned to London a few months later, she and Mary struck up a correspondence. The letters reveal a depth of feeling between the women that has led some historians and artists to question Mary’s sexual orientation. This speculation has led to a movie, Ammonite, written and directed by Francis Lee, starring Kate Winslet as Mary Anning and Saoirse Ronan as Charlotte Murchison, another woman in the extended network of women in the nineteenth-century scientific world.

Perhaps the best distillation of her contemporaries’ opinions can be seen in Lady Harriet Silvester’s thoughts after visiting Mary Anning:

The extraordinary thing in this young woman is that she has made herself so thoroughly acquainted with the science that the moment she finds any bones she knows to what tribe they belong. She fixes the bones on a frame with cement and then makes drawings and has them engraved… It is certainly a wonderful instance of divine favour—that this poor, ignorant girl should be so blessed, for by reading and application she has arrived to that degree of knowledge as to be in the habit of writing and talking with professors and other clever men on the subject, and they all acknowledge that she understands more of the science than anyone else in this kingdom.¹⁴

Despite all the acclaim and admiration she received, Mary still had to deal with the most inconvenient truth of her birth—her gender. The scientific world of the Regency simply wasn’t ready for all she had to offer, but that didn’t stop her and her female friends from fighting for their space.

MARY BUCKLAND

Mary Buckland, née Morland, was born in 1797 to Benjamin Morland, a solicitor, and his wife, Harriet, who died soon after Mary’s birth.

Mary was raised by her father and his new wife and half siblings. She was a thoughtful and curious child who evinced an interest in the natural sciences from a young age. She was encouraged in this by her father, who arranged for her to study with Sir Christopher Pegge, a professor of anatomy at Oxford. Pegge was fond enough of Mary to leave her “his mineral cabinets and all the minerals and fossils contained in them at the time of my decease and all my books of natural history and comparative anatomy as a mark of my esteem and regard for her.”¹⁵

Through her studies with Pegge, Mary learned to become a skilled scientific illustrator. Her services were much in demand by leading scientists like Georges Cuvier and William Conybeare.

Indeed, the story of Mary meeting her eventual husband, William Buckland, shows that her fame preceded her. The pair were traveling to Dorsetshire and both happened to be reading the same new text from Georges Cuvier and began talking about it. It is then that William remarked that the woman he was talking to must be Miss Morland, the very woman he was traveling to deliver a letter of recommendation to.

The couple were married in 1825, and took a yearlong honeymoon touring geological sites across Europe. They had nine children, five of whom lived to adulthood. Their son Frank Buckland became an important zoologist while one of their daughters, Mary Oke Buckland Gordon, became an author. She wrote a biography of her famous father.

Mary raised and educated her children around the work she and her husband were doing. [Figure 13] Her son Frank later wrote, “Not only was she a pious, amiable, and excellent helpmate to my father; but being naturally endowed with great mental powers, habits of perseverance and order, tempered by excellent judgement, she materially assisted her husband in his literary labours, and often gave to them a polish which added not a little to their merit…”¹⁶

Mary’s husband was a famous and celebrated scientist. He published several important works including Reliquiae Diluvianae (1823) and Geology and Mineralogy (1836), both of which were greatly enhanced by Mary’s illustrations. Despite all the work Mary did for him, William was still disapproving of women in the sciences. In 1831 the British Association for the Advancement of Science was formed and Buckland named president. The association debated allowing women to join, but Buckland wrote to Roderick Murchison: “Everyone agrees that, if the meeting is to be of scientific utility, ladies ought not to attend the reading of the papers and especially at Oxford as it would at once turn the thing into a sort of Albermarle-dilettante-meeting, instead of a serious philosophical union of working men.”¹⁷

This attitude is particularly frustrating in the face of how much Mary did for her husband. She supported him wholeheartedly in his career, traipsing all over the country and the world in search of fossils, often while pregnant or caring for small children. She reconstructed fossils for his study and illustrated many more fossils, countless of which ended up in Buckland’s published work. Many of the fossils she reconstructed for her husband’s eventual use are now in the collection of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History.

In 1845 William Buckland was named dean of Westminster and the family relocated. Mary turned her attentions to educating the local children, teaching geography at the village school. However, William’s physical and mental health had begun to deteriorate in 1842, and he passed away in 1856.

Mary spent the last years of her life continuing to promote her husband’s work and do her own experiments, often with the help of her daughter. She died in 1857.

CONCLUSION

In 1832 Charles Lyell, a professor of geology at Oxford, prepared to give a series of lectures based on his new book Principles of Geology. All university lectures were closed to women, and Lyell planned to follow tradition despite the fact that he was assisted and helped immeasurably in his work by his fiancée, Mary Elizabeth Horner. Lyell only relented when Roderick Murchison refused to attend the lectures unless his wife and fellow geologist Charlotte Murchison could as well.

This was a major, if short-lived, victory for women studying paleontology in the nineteenth century. After two lectures, women were once again banned. But Lyell’s mind at least seemed to have been changed. He resigned from the Oxford faculty and continued his lecture series at the Royal Institution, where women were allowed to attend.

The scientific world of the nineteenth century was small, and this episode highlights that. It also underscores the difficulties women in the sciences faced, even from the men they lived with and worked beside. These women had to fight for recognition in public and private.

In 2010, to celebrate the Royal Society’s 350th anniversary, a committee was convened to pick the ten British women who had had the most influence on science. Mary Anning, Caroline Herschel, and Mary Somerville were all included—underscoring the importance of Regency women to the history of science.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that one brilliant woman in history indicates a previously unstudied network of other brilliant women. The women working in the scientific world of the nineteenth century are certainly proof positive of this. While they might have relied on their husbands, brothers, or fathers for financial support and social security, it was their fellow female scientists who understood their unique challenges and the sweetness of their victories.