They say humanity divides into two kinds of people: those who want to know where something has come from and those who are more interested in how it works. In the last chapter I described how butterfly collecting ‘worked’. In this one I will try to pinpoint where this passion for butterflies came from and what sustained it for so long.
We could find a beginning in our oldest butterfly. Where is it? Dead butterflies are fragile things and yet, properly curated, they can last a surprisingly long time. Professor E. B. Ford of Oxford thought the oldest butterfly was probably a tattered Bath White, in Oxford, naturally enough. According to its label it was captured in May 1702 and it was passed, miraculously intact, from one collection to another until it ended up in Oxford’s University Museum. Back in 1702 the butterfly was known not as the Bath White but Vernon’s Half-Mourner, and it had no Latin name because they had not yet been invented. But Ford rarely paid much attention to the world outside Oxford and he was wrong about this being the oldest butterfly. He was out by more than a hundred years.
My own candidate is a flattened, faded wisp, almost the ghost of a butterfly, found preserved in the leaves of a manuscript dating back to 1589. With touching appropriateness, the manuscript was that of the famous Theatre of Insects of Thomas Moffet, the first book about insects, at least from Britain. Moffet was a Londoner, a Fellow of the College of Physicians and, at least in a Tudor sense, a naturalist. As a medical man he was interested in the using of ground-up bugs in various potions though he made an exception of ‘Day Butterflies’ (as opposed to ‘Night Butterflies’ or moths). These he admired for their own sake, for their beautiful ‘colours, attire, rich apparel, roundles, knots, studs, borders, squares, fringes, decking [and] painting’.
Moffet’s butterfly was discovered during a restoration of the original manuscript of the Theatre by the British Library. Though much faded, and minus its head and body, it is still easily recognisable as a Small Tortoiseshell. Evidently Moffet had taken some care over it for the wings are symmetrical and spread as in life. It is, in fact, a very good match for Moffet’s illustration of the butterfly, a woodcut based on an original watercolour. Could it be the very specimen that prompted Moffet’s rhapsodic description of the Small Tortoiseshell? One that celebrated its ‘light blood-color, dipt with black spots [with] golden crooked lines like the Moon, being itself a murry, nicked on the sides like a saw’.1 Moffet’s house, as we know from his own account, was full of cobwebs. Perhaps the butterfly had slipped through the window casement, as tortoiseshell butterflies do in late summer, seeking some cool, dark corner to hibernate, only to end its short life in a spider’s web.
For the oldest known butterfly collection we need to fast-forward nearly a century to the England of Leonard Plukenet (1642–1706). Professor Plukenet was a distinguished botanist, the Queen’s gardener and one of the first Fellows of the Royal Society alongside Isaac Newton and Robert Hooke (he is remembered in the genus Plukenetia, a low bush from South America with star-shaped fruits known as Inchi or the Inca-peanut). Plukenet’s butterflies are among a collection of insects he made by simply glueing their bodies on to the pages of a blank-leaved book. Among those that still cling to the page more than 300 years later are various squashed tortoiseshells, Peacocks, Meadow Browns and Brimstones. Plukenet’s ‘insect book’ was overlooked until recently because it was accidentally included in the botanical collections inherited by the Natural History Museum and not among the insects. The disadvantage of pressing and glueing insects into a book, of course, is that every time the volume is opened, bits of brittle, dried insect dislodge and fall out. Patches of sepia-toned paper now mark many of the places where Plukenet’s butterflies have dropped out over the years. His book is now kept in an airtight cabinet and only opened on special occasions.
Almost as old is another collection in the museum that not only pressed butterflies like flowers but pasted them in with pressed flowers. It once belonged to Adam Buddle, a clergyman and botanist who lent his name, with unconscious appropriateness, to the Butterfly Bush or Buddleia. His butterflies, frozen in mid-flutter amid sepia-toned rushes and other plants, prefigure the paintings of later artists who liked to show butterflies and flowers together. Buddle was careful to pen a short description of each one in Latin so that, even when the butterfly is missing, or represented now by only a sliver of leg or a patch of glue, we know what used to be there.
The oldest properly mounted butterflies once belonged to a London apothecary and Fellow of the Royal Society called James Petiver (1663–1718). Perhaps copying the insect collections he had seen in Amsterdam, he mounted his dead butterflies on a pin and spread their wings into a natural posture on a board much as collectors did two centuries later. But contemporary pins were thick with big round heads and, being made of soft iron or tin, were apt to bend or corrode. They were suitable for a butterfly the size of a Red Admiral but not for smaller skippers and blues, and still less for tiny moths. Petiver found an alternative method by carefully spreading the wings and holding them in place between two slivers of mica, a transparent natural material that resembles clear plastic. Once labelled and sealed with strips of gummed paper the result looks remarkably like a slide mount with a real butterfly in place of the developed film. One advantage of this method was that the butterfly ‘slides’ could be stacked together neatly in a cheap box. It also enabled you to handle the specimen safely and examine both sides of the wings, an advantage denied to glued butterflies. A few of Petiver’s mica-mounted butterflies still survive in the Natural History Museum. One that I once held in my hand is the first-known specimen of a Brown Hairstreak, caught, so the label tells us, by Petiver himself at Croydon in August 1702.
An awkward problem for these pioneers was how to kill the butterfly without harming its delicate wings. Beetles and spiders could be drowned in spirit but a butterfly or a moth needed more careful handling. Petiver’s first solution was crude and, one would have thought, impractical. He put his butterflies to death ‘by thrusting a pin [in] their body and sticking them in your hat’. He also advocated ‘gently crushing their head and body between yr fingers which will prevent their fluttering’.2 Pinching the thorax of a butterfly and bursting its heart results in almost instant death. The novelist and lifelong butterfly collector Vladimir Nabokov used this method all the time. But success requires nimble fingers and long nails.
Eighteenth-century butterflies died a variety of ugly deaths, some by a prick of a fine pen nib dipped in aqua fortis (nitric acid), others suffocated in the fumes of burning sulphur or by steam from a boiling kettle. One collector despatched his insects by holding them with forceps over a burning candle, at some risk, one would have thought, of the bug catching fire. Ether was apparently used to kill butterflies long before it became a widely used anaesthetic. By the nineteenth century many collectors had turned to cyanide, either produced naturally from crushed laurel leaves or, far more dangerously, in lump form, bought from a friendly chemist. Noxious fumes from these various chemical substances eventually replaced more home-made methods of killing. The butterfly succumbs to what looks like paralysis in a few seconds with unblemished wings.
No one seems to have speculated about whether butterflies suffer pain. Many come to atrocious ends in the wild, stuck in a spider’s web, nibbled alive by mites, or suffering a lingering death from a parasite. To feel pain, philosophers assure us, you require a capacity for emotion. Is the insect world emotion-free? One possible answer was suggested by George Orwell who, in a cruel moment, cut in a wasp in half with a knife as it feasted on a puddle of jam. The wasp just carried on eating the jam. It wasn’t going to let a little thing like the severance of its lower body interfere with a necessary metabolic process.
In due course Petiver’s butterflies passed into the greatest collection of natural objects of the day – the one that kick-started the British Museum. This was made by the wealthy philanthropist and antiquarian Sir Hans Sloane, who displayed his trophies in a magnificent gallery 110 feet long, crammed with cabinets of shells, corals, crystals, bird’s eggs, skeletons and skins. Among them were thousands of ‘brilliant butterflies’ gathered from all over the world by the crews of merchant ships keen to augment their wages by procuring specimens for collectors.3 Sloane was not the only one. Dru Drury, a London goldsmith and a connoisseur of insects, spent thousands of pounds on his worldwide collection of butterflies and engaged artists to paint likenesses of the best ones (the collection has long gone but the paintings remain). The Danish scholar Fabricius viewed Drury’s butterflies ‘with as much glee as a lover of wine does the sight of his wine cellar when well-stocked with full casks and bottles’.4
What happened to all these butterflies from the Age of Enlightement? The national collection is full of Victorian and Edwardian butterflies but it has relatively few from before the turn of the nineteenth century. Perhaps that will seem less surprising when we recall what happened to James Petiver’s butterflies. Petiver, it seems, was not a tidy man. According to one visitor, his celebrated museum, the Musei Petiveri, looked like a junk shop.5 When his butterfly collections passed in due course into more careful hands they were already in a sorry state. Sloane, who paid £4,000 for Petiver’s hoard after the latter’s death in 1718, confirms the Hogarthian conditions in which the objects were kept:
He had taken great pains to gather together the Productions of Nature in England; but he did not take equal Care to keep them, but put them into heaps, with sometimes small labels of Paper, where there were many of them injured by Dust, Insects, Rain etc.
Sloane paid tribute to Petiver’s ‘industry, though not to his tidiness’.6 Yet he held his eccentric friend in high regard and was one of the pallbearers at his funeral.
In Sloane’s great gallery the collection, or what was left of it, was well looked after. To preserve butterflies from the ravages of mites, collectors of his day rubbed each box or drawer with ‘Oil of Spike’ or lavender oil – which must have lent them a pleasant scent, unlike the harsher smells of camphor and naphthalene in later times. But when Sloane himself died in 1753 leaving his collections and objects to the new British Museum, much weeding-out took place. Museum curators, now as then, do not automatically welcome old collections and, indeed, may see them as more of a burden than an asset. The man in charge of the British Museum wanted new, topical and exciting objects to display and enhance the institution’s prestige, not a pile of old junk from the past.
And so, when Parliament decided to investigate the state of our first national museum in 1835, it seems that there was very little left of the first great international collection of butterflies. This is what Charles Koenig, the museum’s then ‘Keeper of Natural History and Modern Curiosities’, had to say about it:
Questioner: ‘Is the entomological collection which was left by Sir Hans Sloane in a perfect state at present?’
Koenig: ‘There is hardly any of it remaining.’
‘How does it happen that the collection has been lost?’
‘When I came to the Museum most of these objects were in an advanced state of decomposition, and they were buried or committed to the flames one after another. Dr Shaw [the previous curator] had a burning every year; and he called them his cremations.’
‘Is there any single insect remaining of the 5,439 which were presented by Sir Hans Sloane?’
‘I should think not.’
‘Do you think that so great a destruction of specimens can solely arise from Natural Causes?’
‘We considered them as rubbish, and [as] such were destroyed with other rubbish.’7
Hence what survives of our oldest butterflies did so by accident: Adam Buddle’s pressed butterflies, for example, escaped because they were accidentally stored among botanical specimens in the herbarium instead of in the insect gallery. It is thanks to such oversights that we still have a few faded butterflies to bring us face to face with the origins of entomology: heirlooms from the countryside of Queen Anne.
What created this apparently sudden interest in butterflies around 1690? Until James Petiver began to collect and draw them, it seems that butterflies did not even have names. At any rate, none of the first books to illustrate butterflies, by Thomas Moffet, or Christopher Merret or Martin Lister, had any names for them. Yet by Petiver’s death in 1718 a fashionable interest in butterflies and moths had grown up – sufficient at any rate for the artist Eleazar Albin to find a long list of aristocratic subscribers for his expensive art book on the subject. And this time they did have names; not necessarily those we call them by today but good English names that everyone could use. People, evidently, had started to talk about butterflies.
Why was that? Was it increased leisure? Or the availability of coffee houses where people could meet and, stimulated by caffeine and tobacco, talk their heads off? Perhaps one answer is that more men and women than before were reading and thinking for themselves. They had broken through the ‘received wisdom’ of the Church. The works of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) were popular and people were impressed by his portrayal of an ideal society dedicated to discovery and the pursuit of knowledge. When the Royal Society was formed by Royal Charter in 1663, its declared purpose was ‘to improve natural knowledge’ by discussion and experiment. So one of the great discoveries of the Enlightenment might have been intelligent conversation. Quite suddenly, it seems, the natural world was found to be interesting. Perhaps the best word for it is ‘biophilia’, Edward Wilson’s new-minted word meaning a love of nature. By taking an interest in the natural world not simply as it was presented to them but through observation and method, people found that nature engaged their feelings as well as their minds. With that came a desire to incorporate the ‘productions of nature’ into their homes in the form of gardens, menageries and collections. For the great English naturalist John Ray (1627–1705), ‘biophilia’ took a particularly exalted form in a wish, far ahead of his time, to look for order amid the apparent chaos of nature. For lesser mortals it took the form of the curio cabinet. While few could aspire to the wisdom of Bacon or the curiosity of Ray, anybody with a minimum of resources could collect shells or fossils – or even butterflies.
Butterflies were pretty, they could be captured easily enough and, unlike some insects, their colours did not fade after death. People were also intrigued and charmed by their complicated life stages, and especially by the seemingly miraculous ‘transformation’ from caterpillar to winged butterfly. But at the beginning there was nothing to help them. There were no clubs or societies where experience and knowledge could be shared. There were no identification guides, indeed no worthwhile books at all unless your pocket could extend to leather-bound volumes in French or Dutch. The would-be English naturalist was hardly better off than a castaway on an unknown island.
What seems to have got things going was John Ray’s plan, in the 1690s, to write a book about the natural history of insects to match his published volumes on animals and plants. This was necessarily a long-term project and by then Ray was past his prime, getting on in years and in poor health. Fortunately he could count on the help of his family and neighbours, and on a wider circle of educated acquaintances in Oxford and London, as well as certain rural schoolmasters and fellow members of the cloth. Such, for example, was John Morton who caught him a White Admiral ‘in Essex not far from Tolbury’ in 1695. Another was the Reverend Mansell Courtman who hit the jackpot that same year by capturing a ‘large black butterfly with wings marked with white’, probably a female Purple Emperor.8
Some of Ray’s helpers were men of standing. Among them are a famous botanist (Plukenet), two physicians (Samuel Dale and David Kreig), a distinguished garden designer (Tilleman Bobart), a silk-pattern designer and artist (Joseph Dandridge), a silk trader (Charles DuBois), an apothecary (James Petiver), a clergyman (Adam Buddle) and an Eton schoolmaster (Robert Antrobus). Apart from Ray himself, at least three – Plukenet, Petiver and Kreig – were Fellows of the Royal Society. Many of them were botanists for whom butterflies had an understandable fascination. Ray himself was primarily a botanist. So was Petiver, whose neglected day job was to manage the physic garden of the Society of Apothecaries. A knowledge of plants and gardening was useful when it came to searching for the eggs and caterpillars of butterflies and rearing them on plants in pots or in water. Work like this turned them into observers while their heightened sense of curiosity made them naturalists, even before that word had been invented.
With so many like-minded enthusiasts about, it was only a matter of time before some of them formed their irregular meetings into something more substantial. Being Englishmen they did what came naturally and formed a club – the first entomological society in history. But because entomology then barely existed as a science, they called themselves something else. They became the Society of Aurelians.
During his years of exile in Berlin in the 1930s, Vladimir Nabokov wrote a short story about a dealer in butterflies. This dealer was down on his luck. His life felt empty and boring; his work didn’t interest him and his marriage was on the rocks. His one dream of escape was to go abroad on a collecting trip, but he couldn’t afford it. In the end he managed to finance an expedition by swindling a customer but on the day of departure he suffered a fatal stroke. Even so, the all-knowing narrator informs us, his life was not a complete failure. The man had reached a state of happiness where his inner world could compensate for the wretchedness of his earthly existence. In his mind he was already in those far-off lands finding ‘all the glorious bugs he had longed to see’.9 The man’s inner journey echoed the metamorphosis of insects, taking him from an inert, pupa-like condition to the transcendent state symbolised by the butterfly.
In typically cryptic fashion, Nabokov chose to call his tale ‘The Aurelian’. Aurelian is not a familiar word today, even among entomologists. Its literal meaning is ‘the golden one’. The analogy is with the chrysalis – another word meaning gold – of Red Admirals and certain other butterflies whose pupal cases are dappled with gold or silver spots. By calling themselves Aurelians these Georgian naturalists were making a form of self-identification with butterflies. We do not know exactly when the Society of Aurelians was formed, for all the records are lost, but it was flourishing in London in the 1730s and ’40s. It met at the Swan tavern at Cornhill in the heart of London on a narrow passageway thronged with booksellers and coffee houses. Many of its members also met at the nearby Temple House where they drank their coffee and talked about the natural world.
The Aurelians were all men; in that age women were not permitted to be members of gentlemen’s clubs although there were certainly women who were interested in butterflies. The names of some of the members were listed in a later book about butterflies and, interestingly, the best-known of them were not ‘scientists’ but artists, designers and poets. The president and probable founder was Joseph Dandridge (1664–1746), a leading silk pattern designer and amateur artist. He was among the first to paint realistic images of birds, insects and spiders and was much admired by his fellow Aurelians for his knowledge and expertise. Another leading member was Henry Baker (1698–1774), a self-made man and amateur poet who was also a pioneer in therapy for the deaf. His other passion was for the microscope. His book The Microscope Made Easy, first published in 1743, brought the pleasures of miniature worlds to prosperous London drawing rooms. He was a true man of the Enlightenment, a founder of the Society of Arts, a gardener credited with introducing rhubarb to Britain, and the sometime editor of a weekly, The Universal Spectator.10
Another prominent member was James Leman (1688–1745), also a London silk manufacturer and pattern designer, and a liveryman of the Company of Weavers. His textile designs borrowed from natural patterns in nature, particularly wild flowers, in a way that prefigures William Morris. Silk, of course, comes from a silkworm, the caterpillar of a moth. Leman’s colleague and fellow Aurelian, Peter Collinson (c.1693–1768), was also in the textile business, a trader in flax, hemp, silk and wine. It was on one such trade-promoting journey to the New World that Collinson made a pioneering collection of American butterflies. Later on, this wealthy and long-lived Quaker corresponded with Linnaeus over the ordering of insects.11 His collection was one of those purchased by Sir Hans Sloane and hence left to the British Museum – and to the awaiting bonfires of Dr Shaw.
Thomas Knowlton (1691–1781) represented another prominent Aurelian vocation: he was a garden designer. Over his long career he created important gardens in Oxford, at Eltham in Kent and at Canon’s Park at Harrow, now buried under suburban streets, as well as the still-extant garden of the Earl of Burlington at Londesborough in the East Riding. Knowlton worked for William Sherard, Oxford’s Professor of Botany and very likely his interest in wild plants led to a similar interest in butterflies and other insects.12 He was probably an associate of Tilleman Bobart, another garden designer who preceded him at Canon’s Park and who supplied butterflies and moths to both Petiver and Ray.
It seems to have been the usual practice for all these early collectors to donate specimens to the common collection, held, along with the society’s books and documents, at the Swan. It deeply impressed the young artist Benjamin Wilkes with its ‘Specimens of Nature’s admirable Skill in the Disposition, Arrangement and contrasting of Colours’. Wilkes himself was admitted to the society and it is mainly through his eyes that we see the Aurelians at work and at leisure in their London setting. He praised the society and its works in the introduction to his master work, The English Moths and Butterflies, published in 1749 – shortly after the society had ceased to exist.
It came to a premature end in dramatic fashion. On the night of 25 March 1748, a fire broke out at a periwig maker’s in Exchange Alley and quickly swept through the Cornhill district of the City. A hundred houses went up in flames, catching people asleep in their beds, as well as revellers in Cornhill’s many public houses. The Aurelians were enjoying a late-night sitting at the time, perhaps all slightly drunk after dining at the tavern. It was New Year’s Eve by ‘Old Style’ reckoning – a night for sitting up late. Years later, Moses Harris recalled what happened next:
The Society was then sitting, yet so sudden and rapid was the impetuous course of the Fire, that the Flames beat against the Windows, before they could get well out of the Room, many of them leaving their Hats and Canes; their Loss so disheartened them that altho’ they several Times met for that Purpose, they never could collect so many together as would be sufficient to form a Society.13
And that was the end of the world’s first entomological society. There was no time to save the society’s books, records or collections, nor what was intriguingly referred to as its ‘Regalia’. The entire archive and collection was consumed at a stroke. At length a second and then a third Society of Aurelians sprang from the ashes of the first, but neither lasted very long. Internal dissension and apathy – perhaps the novelty was wearing off – caused both of the new societies to fold inside a few years. Their direct successor in the nineteenth century was the more modern-sounding Entomological Society of London. The change in name symbolised a deeper cultural change. In the eighteenth century butterflies had belonged to the artists: engravers, watercolourists, pattern designers, poets. In the nineteenth and henceforth, the study of butterflies was taken over by amateur scientists. They had become part of the new science of entomology.
Meanwhile butterfly collections were getting bigger and bigger. In the early days most collectors had been content with a short series of butterflies of each species: a couple of males and a female, and perhaps one mounted upside down to show the undersides. But by now the fashion was for a long series, perhaps even an entire drawerful of the same species. Collectors rarely explained why they wanted so many examples. One obvious reason, common to all kinds of collecting, was peer pressure and competition: the biggest collections were seen as the best. It was comparable to a game bag – and some collectors of the Victorian era were as fond of shooting grouse and pheasant as they were of pursuing butterflies and moths. Another reason was that Victorian collectors were obsessed with ‘varieties’; that is, forms of a butterfly whose wing patterns differed from the norm. Naming these became a kind of pseudo-science, and one collector, Henry Leeds, invented a complicated method of names which amounted to a new language, including such tongue-ticklers as ‘ab. Infra-semi-syngrapha-grisea-lutescens’ – which must have needed a label bigger than the butterfly!14
Variety collecting was sometimes derided as the entomological equivalent of stamp collecting: simply amassing different kinds for the sake of it. It was only in the twentieth century, with the discovery of genetics, that the significance of all these ‘aberrant’ forms began to be understood. Professor E. B. ‘Henry’ Ford (1901–88) had been a keen butterfly collector from boyhood. With his father, he kept a colony of Marsh Fritillaries, a butterfly which displays exceptionally variable colours and patterns, under close observation for nearly twenty years. He discovered that the butterfly’s numbers fluctuated from year to year and that the varieties were most frequent when it was enjoying a good year. This provided Ford with a moment of supreme insight. Variation in wing pattern allows a species ‘to adjust itself to its environment more rapidly than it would otherwise do, and enables us to examine actual instances in which an evolutionary change takes place in nature’.15 In other words, butterfly varieties showed how evolution works, not by slow, imperceptible degrees as Darwin had thought, but right in front of our eyes. Ford’s work on butterflies revealed that evolution is happening all the time, out there in the woods and fields. The genes that govern the patterns on a butterfly’s wing are passed down from one individual to the next, generation after generation, through interactions that we call genetics. A species is constantly readjusting itself to its environment: to changing weather, changes in predation or changes to its habitat. Without this year-by-year capacity to adapt, no species could survive for long.
Of course the butterfly does not ‘know’ this, any more than we knew it until Henry Ford came along with his butterfly net. But the butterfly’s genes ‘know’ it. The transference of genes by inheritance, from one generation to the next, is the function of all life on earth. Every species, from a Marsh Fritillary to a blue whale, is the custodian of its genes, the immortal part of every species including our own. It is fitting that butterflies were one of the conveyers of this fundamental scientific truth. For butterflies have been seen by some, from the ancient Greeks onwards, as the poetic equivalent of genes: the embodiment of the soul. I will return to this topic in Chapter 9.
Amassing a full range of variation was therefore another reason why butterflies were collected in large numbers – though doubtless most collectors were more interested in the rarity of ‘varieties’ than in their contribution to science. Fortunately collectors could and did share their observations and exploits in one of a thriving number of journals: the Entomologist’s Annual, the Entomologist’s Monthly Magazine or the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer. A twentieth-century collector, Baron Charles de Worms, routinely described his entomological travels which, in 1937, took him on an ‘on the whole successful tour of the British Isles’. His field attire was typical of many insect collectors: an old tweed jacket, a couple of tattered old pullovers and a satchel bulging with nets and boxes. When chasing the Purple Emperor he carried a pocketful of ripe blue cheese which he would spread over gateposts in the hope of luring the butterfly, notorious for its love of smelly products, down from the treetops. An earlier generation sometimes wore cork-lined top hats in the field. They were useful receptacles for pinned insects. One collector even absent-mindedly kept his bottles and boxes in his hat, only to have them spill out whenever he raised it to a lady.
Victorian collectors were obsessed with the appearance of their butterflies. They must be set with mathematical precision and without the smallest blemish, and, in the case of moths, with two little forelegs poking out as though the moth was about to crawl away. They were displayed in rows like soldiers on parade with a thread of black cloth dividing one line from the next. Sometimes, to save on space, the butterflies overlapped one another so that the effect was not so much a row of individuals as a coloured river of wings and scales running from the camphor cell at the top of the drawer to the brass handle at the bottom.
Only fresh, perfect specimens were admitted to the cabinet. That meant, of course, that most butterflies were perfectly safe from the collector’s attentions since their wings become faded and tattered very quickly. Gone was the Georgian idea of arranging butterflies in geometric or kaleidoscopic patterns (which strangely prefigured the butterfly work of Damien Hurst). That kind of frivolity would have appalled a Victorian collector who was, above all, deeply serious.
Many nineteenth-century collectors regarded themselves as scientists and without a reference collection there could be no science worthy of the name. Conservation was not then a concern even though the morality of collecting large numbers of rare butterflies was occasionally raised in entomological journals. That issue grew and became polarised in more recent times in an argument epitomised by two novelists with sharply differing opinions on the subject: John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov. But before rehearsing what their argument was about, let us go hunting butterflies in a much earlier era: out into the fields of medieval Brabant in the company of the biographer of the Black Prince, Jean Froissart.