My first butterfly book was the The Observer’s Book of Butterflies. Although it was part of a children’s series – the little books were cheap enough to buy with pocket money – the text was bone dry and as solemn as a sermon. Just occasionally the author made some remark that seemed to have strayed in from outside. Such was his disclosure that the last Large Copper in England had been ‘taken’ by a Mr Wagstaffe (what a rotter, you thought). Another stray remark mentioned a certain Lady Glanville whose will had been disputed on the grounds that she collected butterflies – which was seen as a clear sign of madness. ‘Entomology was not much thought of at that time,’ chuckled the Observer’s Book man. ‘Those who collected butterflies were apt to be regarded by their friends as – well, just a wee bit daft.’
She stuck in my mind, this entomological martyr who lent her name to one of our rarest and most beautiful butterflies, the Glanville Fritillary. Today, the chequered Glanville Fritillary is confined to the Isle of Wight where it flies on broken ground in sight of the sea in May and June. And if you miss it then, you can find its black, spiky caterpillars during the summer holidays, basking or feeding on their surprisingly common food plant, ribwort plantain. Many naturalists will know the butterfly, but the eponymous Lady Glanville is much more elusive. The best-known short account of her was written long after her death by Moses Harris in his famous book, The Aurelian. In eighteenth-century language, crowded with what we would regard now as misspellings, Harris presents her story as a kind of morality tale: of a noble woman of enquiring mind traduced by her ignorant relations whose reputation was rescued in the nick of time by Men of Science:
‘This Fly [i.e. the Glanville Fritillary] took its Name from the ingenious Lady Glanvil [sic], whose Memory had like to have suffered for her Curiosity. Some Relations that was disappointed by her Will attempted to set aside by Acts of Lunacy, for they suggested that none but those who were deprived of their Senses would go in Pursuit of Butterflies. Her Relations and Legatees subpoenaed Dr Sloane and Mr Ray to support her Character. The last Gentleman went to Exeter, and on the Tryal satisfied the Judge and Jury of the Lady’s laudable Inquiry into the wonderful Works of the Creation, and established her Will.’1
To this Harris could only add that Lady Glanville was also remembered as a gardener who specialised in irises, one of which was still known as ‘Miss Glanvil’s Flaming Iris’. On this telling, then, the story had a happy ending. It seems that John Ray had taken the fast coach all the way from Chelmsford to Exeter to save a lady from shame and at the same time convince the court that an interest in butterflies was not only sane but a praiseworthy contribution to scientific enquiry.
Unfortunately it isn’t true. By the time Harris had got hold of it, the tale had become garbled. John Ray was in no position to intervene in a dispute over the will because by then he was dead; he died in 1705, four years before Lady Glanville’s own death. The other person mentioned in Harris’s story, Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), was certainly alive, and you could imagine him flourishing Ray’s Wisdom of God as proof that a devotion to insects and natural history was a sign of learning and even piety, and not madness. But nowhere do Sloane’s preserved papers mention a subpoena of the kind mentioned by Harris. Whatever the truth of the matter, it did not involve Ray, nor, in all probability, Sloane either.
By chance, two letters from Lady Glanville were found preserved among the papers of James Petiver in the Natural History Museum archive.2 She had signed the longer of the two as ‘E. Glanvile’ and Petiver evidently believed that her first name was Elizabeth. In the 1960s, this set off a researcher, Bill Bristowe, on a wild goose chase to trace someone of that name in the parish archives. He failed to find any Elizabeth Glanville but did discover an Eleanor or Elinor Glanville living in the right place at the right time. She was an heiress of considerable property in the West Country but was not a titled ‘Lady’. That confusion probably came about from the practice of eighteenth-century writers of beginning nouns with a capital letter; she was a ‘lady’, not a ‘Lady’. She was born Elinor Goodricke in Yorkshire in 1654, had been twice married and was mother to eight children. During the latter part of her life she lived at Tickenham Court, a few miles inland from Clevedon, near Bristol. The house still stands, an austere stone edifice with a medieval hall and a Tudor parlour, although the formal gardens where Mrs Glanville tended her irises are long gone. It was, and still is, a wonderful area for wildlife. Each day Elinor could walk down the hill to the flowery meadows of the Gordano Valley or ride through the coppiced ash-woods that line the overlooking ridge.
What survives of Elinor’s letter – the writing has faded and two pages are lost – suggests that she wrote as she spoke, conversationally, rather breathlessly, and not bothering much with punctuation or paragraphs. The letter concerned a box of pinned insects which she was sending to Petiver, care of the Swan tavern in Cornhill (later, you may recall, to be the headquarters of the Society of Aurelians). She was anxious about the carriage and wanted to give detailed instructions to ensure its safe arrival. She hoped to send a second box from Wales, then an unknown hunting ground, ‘wch a friend has this somer got for me and promist to send’. She feared, modestly, that her bugs were unlikely to excite Petiver very much; it was all common stuff, she supposed. She mentioned her difficulty in keeping her specimens from the ravages of ‘mites’ and a ‘whit crusty mould wch when I came to clean [them] broke al to peeces’. It is clear that the two enthusiasts were collaborating, Elinor by collecting insects from entomologically unknown parts of England and Wales, and Petiver by helping her to name them and featuring the new ones in his catalogues. Elinor Glanville comes across as deeply interested, slightly scatty and duly modest in her dealings with a Fellow of the Royal Society. In a second, shorter letter, she mentions a gentlewoman who was sailing to Virginia and who had promised to send her ‘some fine Insects’ from there. Like Petiver, she was interested in butterflies wherever they came from.3
By good fortune we also have a letter from Petiver’s side. Evidently a friendship had grown up between the two and ‘Madam Glanville’, as Petiver calls her, had entrusted him with the care of her wayward son in London, possibly as his apprentice. This was proving no easy task. ‘Madam we must make the best of a bad Markett,’ warned Petiver. The boy had been disruptive. He had repudiated her friend’s guardianship and disappeared. Petiver suggested having him ‘cryed by the City Cryer’ but was loath to undertake such drastic measures without her consent. He feared that the boy might have fallen into bad company and regretted that he had shown ‘noe Obedience to yu’.4 Was this the same prodigal son who later disputed his mother’s will and tried to ruin her reputation?
In revealing these glimpses of the real Elinor Glanville, Bristowe also threw light on the famous disputed will. Elinor’s marriage to Richard Glanville, her second husband, had been unhappy. Glanville seems to have been an unscrupulous and perhaps violent man; he once levelled a pistol at her and threatened to blow out her brains. He had, it seems, tried to lay his hands on her fortune by circulating stories of her supposedly eccentric activities and forcing their children to sign affadavits against their own mother. But Elinor had retaliated by turning her property over to trustees while retaining the right to direct her own affairs. In her will she bequeathed the estate to her cousin, Henry Goodricke, reserving only some small legacies for her children, and nothing at all for Richard Glanville. She died at home in 1709, aged about 55. The disputation case was brought by her eldest son Forrest but was heard not at Exeter (so Harris got that wrong too) but at the assize court in Wells three years later. Nor does it seem that the outcome was the happy one of entomological legend. The ‘wrong’ people won. Forrest had sought to prejudice the jury – all of whom, of course, were men – with witness accounts of his mother’s supposedly disreputable behaviour. Nosy neighbours testified how she would dress ‘like a gypsey’ and wander out of doors ‘without all necessary cloaths’. One described in detail how she would spread a sheet beneath the bushes and, with two apprentice girls, beat the boughs with a long pole ‘and catch’d a parcel of worms’. By such means twelve good men of Wells were convinced that Elinor must indeed have been out of her wits. Forrest, who also asserted that his mad mother believed in fairies, and considered that he, her eldest son, had been turned into a particularly wicked one, thereby had his way. The will was set aside and the children came into their inheritance.
Elinor Glanville was staying in Lincoln sometime in the 1690s, perhaps on the way to visit her Goodricke relations in Yorkshire, when she caught the butterfly that now bears her name. Lincoln and the Isle of Wight are a long way apart and it seems as though the Glanville Fritillary was much more common and widespread 300 years ago – a reminder that there is nothing new in climate-induced changes of distribution. Elinor sent specimens of the butterfly to Petiver asking him to name it. It was new to him too and he called it the Lincoln Fritillary. Later on Petiver caught the same butterfly near Dulwich and promptly renamed it the ‘Dullidge Fritillary’. Exactly when the name was changed to Glanville Fritillary is uncertain but it was already current by 1748 when an artist called James Dutfield made a beautiful print of the butterfly under that name together with its plantain food plant and its caterpillar.5 It has been known as the Glanville Fritillary ever since: the only British butterfly to bear the name of a British naturalist.
The image of a lonely, eccentric woman beating the branches for caterpillars while her neighbours peeped from the bushes is tempting and amusing but it is probably misleading. We know so little about Elinor Glanville that we are free to make of her what we will. The writer Fiona Mountain certainly did in her 2009 novel, Lady of the Butterflies, ‘a dramatic tale of passion, prejudice and death by poison, of riot and rebellion, science and superstition, madness and metamorphosis’. But the real Elinor was mistress of her own affairs, able to order her estate as she wished, and with the means to maintain it. For her, the pursuit of entomology may have been a form of emancipation. Nor was she really alone in her pursuits. She was cousin to Adam Buddle, the butterfly-collecting vicar of Fambridge, and was on terms of trust and affection with James Petiver who clearly saw nothing disreputable about a lady taking a keen interest in butterflies. He and John Ray both had the highest regard for her work. Although she published nothing that has survived she is known to have compiled one of the first local lists of insects, for the Bristol area, and her collection, according to Petiver, ‘sham’d us all’.6 A few of her butterflies are said to survive among the Sloane collection in the Natural History Museum.7
One more extract from Elinor Glanville’s letters reminds us of how easy it must have been to be taken in by frauds or practical jokes in those early days. ‘I rejoice to find by yr Catologue,’ she wrote excitedly to Petiver, ‘[that] you have got Mr Charlton’s blistered butterfly it being my perticular favorit. I fear none of mine wil deserve to be put in yr tables. I wish I could procure you such curiositys.’ What was this ‘Charlton’s blistered butterfly’? By chance it still exists and it is indeed a ‘curiosity’. Petiver regarded this novel butterfly as a new species related to the Brimstone and described it as such. ‘It exactly resembles our English Brimstone Butterfly,’ he noted, ‘were it not for those black spots and apparent blue Moons on the lower wings … it is the only one I have yet seen.’8 It had been presented to him by ‘my late worthy friend Mr William Charlton a little before his Death’. Even when no more spotted and mooned Brimstones were discovered, later authorities were sufficiently impressed with it to provide the butterfly with a formal scientific name: Papilio ecclipsis – the Moon Butterfly. They were all deceived. The mischievous Mr Charlton had carefully painted the spots on to the wings of a normal, male Brimstone. It took half a century for someone to spot the fakery. When the deception was pointed out, the deceived and angry curator, Dr Shaw, ‘indignantly stamped the specimen to pieces’.9 Fortunately someone had made copies of the Moon Butterfly and they survive to this day in the collection of the Linnaean Society where they are known as the Charlton Brimstones. And happily, Elinor Glanville’s box of – as she supposed – worthless insects contained something much more interesting. They included the first-known specimen of the Green Hairstreak, the only British butterfly whose wings are truly green – and a lovely velvet-green at that. We could easily have had a Glanville Hairstreak too.
By the early 1700s, botany, and by extension, natural history, was already a respectable, even fashionable, pursuit for upper-class women. At the very apex of society, Mary Capel Somerset, the dowager Duchess of Beaufort (1630–1715), dedicated the long years of her widowhood to painting or sewing images of flowers and butterflies. She seems to have found a sense of peace in the natural world at the end of a long and turbulent life. She used her great wealth and influence to gather tender and exotic plants from all over the known world, from China, the East and West Indies, and North America, to fuss over in her hothouses at Badminton. She also spent long hours pressing and drying plants for her herbarium, hiring artists to paint the choicest specimens and herself preserving their likenesses in needlework. In similar fashion she commissioned butterfly paintings and lent her support to that struggling artist of insects and spiders, Eleazar Albin. And according to Richard Bradley, her friend and the founder of the University Botanic Garden at Cambridge, the Duchess also reared butterflies and moths in her glasshouses. She had, it was said, ‘bred a greater variety of English Insects than was ever rightly observ’d by any one Person in Europe’.10
Badminton House and Elinor Glanville’s Tickenham Court are only a day’s ride apart. In country-house terms, the Duchess and ‘Lady’ Glanville were practically neighbours. They also had acquaintances in common, notably Petiver and Sir Hans Sloane who were both among the Duchess’s suppliers of seeds and plants. We know about Mary Somerset’s interest in butterflies from a few offhand remarks and from the survival of some of her paintings and needlework. Quite likely there were other wealthy widows in the West Country whom history has passed over, collecting and breeding butterflies, and stitching their likenesses on to tapestries. Titled women were prominent among the subscribers to Albin’s Natural History of English Insects. Was there another centre of entomological excellence, not in the great institutions of Oxford and Cambridge, nor the taverns and coffee houses of London, but one based in the drawing rooms and glasshouses of England’s West Country mansion houses?
The eighteenth century was the heyday of the curio cabinet, a time when anyone with sufficient leisure and resources could cram their homes with natural curiosities such as shells, fossils, stuffed animals and bird’s eggs. As we have seen, most butterfly collections of the period were part of a wider arrangement of ‘the productions of nature’, sometimes including busts of the philosophers for extra gravitas. The greatest of all these collections belonged to Margaret Cavendish-Bentinck, Duchess of Portland (1715–85). She was the daughter and only surviving child of Edward Harley, second Earl of Oxford, a wealthy bibliophile, collector and patron of the arts. He had learned the foremost lesson of his age, which was to stay out of politics. Margaret’s grandfather had shown where that could lead: impeachment and a cell in the Tower of London on a charge of treason.
Some say the collecting bug is inheritable; that there is such a thing as a ‘collecting gene’. If so, Lady Margaret, the future Duchess of Portland, had it too. She was Daddy’s girl. She accumulated yet more precious objects and manuscripts, but above all she loved nature. Her particular passion was for shells.11 She was also a passionate botanist and gardener and, perhaps inevitably, she added insects, particularly butterflies and moths, to her quotidian interests. Few have been able to indulge their tastes as thoroughly as the Duchess of Portland. Like her father, she inherited one fortune and then, at the age of 19, married into another. Her husband died young and so, once the burdens of being a wife and mother were past, the Duchess was able to devote the twenty-three years of her emancipated widowhood to her ‘beauties’: her collections, paintings and books.
There are many formal portraits of the Duchess but they seem to present us not with one woman but several. In an early one, a miniature, she has a comely heart-shaped face with hair curled back from a broad, intellectual forehead; in another her face is long and haughty with those languid doe-eyes so admired at the time. In a third she poses in a simple green dress with a black feather in her hair. In the best-known portrait, painted when she was about 30, she is dressed to the nines in silks and jewels but seems impatient, as though looking forward to getting back to her salon. The plainest is perhaps the one as she saw herself, a marble bust in the antique manner with simply dressed hair parted over that high, intelligent brow as if she were a poetic Muse or one of the Graces, keeper of the temple of knowledge.
Margaret Bentinck shared the mindset of the day which was to catalogue the productions of nature as fully as possible. Her grand ambition was to create a palace of ‘works of art and vertu’, including at least one specimen of every animal, plant and insect known to exist. This Noah’s Ark of objects filled the public rooms of her country seat at Bulstrode, near Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire. A jungle of living plants and ferns thronged the glasshouses and spilled over into the gardens outside, all ordered in the classical manner. There was an American Garden for New World exotic blooms as well as an aviary, a private zoo and a shell grotto she had built with her own hands. Her silver dessert service was inspired by entomology, the handles of her spoons and fruit knives creeping and crawling with gleaming silver-gilt bugs. By the time of her death in 1785, the Portland collection of natural objects, and art inspired by natural objects, was a many-splendoured thing, perhaps the finest ever made by a private individual at least until the advent of Lord Rothschild and his famous museum at Tring.
But almost immediately after her death, the Duchess’s palace of wonders was broken up, auctioned off to pay the electioneering expenses of one son and the drinking and gambling debts of another. The sale took thirty-eight days to complete.12 The house itself was sold a few years later, fell into neglect and was duly demolished. You might say the wonders of Bulstrode lived and died with her. Her shells and butterflies were sold on and scattered among lesser collections in Britain and Europe, never to be seen in public again, and, bit by bit, thrown away as so much junk. The only way collections can survive the decades is to stay intact.
To Margaret Bentinck, collecting was a means to an end. Her specimens were not so much stored objects as a library of conversation pieces. As her friend and fellow bluestocking Mary Delany remarked, the primary aim of her collection was to enlarge the mind: the house and all belonging to it was in effect ‘a noble school for contemplation’. It was open on application to visitors, and they came in large numbers. The Duchess valued intellect above social position. Among those she persuaded to join her establishment as curators and in-house men of learning was the genial botanist Daniel Solander, who took over the plant collections and became drawing master to her children. She also recruited another notable botanist, John Lightfoot, author of the first flora of Scotland, as her chaplain and librarian. Thomas Yeats, a leading London collector, became her curator of insects while the artist William Lewin was recruited to paint her birds and their eggs, and perhaps also some of her butterflies for his Papilios of Great Britain – the first work devoted wholly to British butterflies. Her patronage extended through correspondence to a wider circle of botanists, naturalists and writers, including the Halifax naturalist James Bolton who sent her specimens of lichens and fungi. Bulstrode became known as the Hive, a metaphor for the Duchess’s industry but equally appropriate to her passion for insects.
One of Margaret Bentinck’s many correspondents was the famous Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau was a keen botanist. The two of them collected plants together in the Peak District in 1766 and corresponded for several years, exchanging specimens and books, identifying plants and enjoying a mutual regard. Indeed on Rousseau’s side it might have gone further than regard. ‘I know one somewhat savage animal,’ he purred, ‘who would live with great pleasure in your menagerie, in awaiting the honour of being admitted one day as a mummy in your cabinet.’13 His service as a ‘herborizer’ or plant collector was, he wrote, hers to command, while modestly conceding that her knowledge of plants was greater than his. Rousseau was the kind of person who could hardly pick a flower without turning it into philosophy. He saw closeness to nature as the touchstone for human happiness since, so he taught, the primitive state leads to greater gentleness and content – in short, everything a truly rational society should strive for. It was decadent civilisation that had led to wars and social injustice; the simple life was by comparison peaceful and virtuous. Hence, botany too was a virtuous occupation for it brought us face to face with nature, and nature, unlike humankind, could never lie. To him it was obvious that country life was healthier than that of the city just as the simple-living Roman Republicans were more virtuous than Rome under the emperors, or, for that matter, the kings and emperors of his own time. Nature, he preached, was good for us because ‘it detaches us from ourselves and elevates us to its author’, the ‘author’ being, of course, the Creator. ‘It is in this way, Madam, that natural history and botany have a use for Wisdom and Virtue,’ he told the dowager Duchess of Portland.14
This pleasant correspondence, flattering to both parties, came to an abrupt end when the Duchess innocently sent the philosopher a book about propagating and growing exotic plants. She had supposed Rousseau to be as interested as she in new ways of propagating coffee beans, pineapples and rubber trees. But, as she was to find out, the philosopher’s view on such things was above all moralistic. He objected strongly to the importing of exotic plants on the grounds that it ‘deforms nature’. Just as man would never be free until he had shaken off the chains that enslaved him, so plants too ought to be ‘domination-free’. Rousseau’s idea of ideal gardening would be close to the present-day idea of a wild garden, informal and full of simple plants that grow locally or, at the very least, have not had their naturalness bred out of them. He returned the book.
Margaret Bentinck’s title, if not her name, lives on in the famous Portland Vase, now one of the treasures of the British Museum, and also – and she would have appreciated the compliment just as much – in a small, pretty moth with greenish speckled forewings, the Portland Moth. The heyday of Bulstrode and its treasures is remembered, more tangentially, in a second, equally pretty moth, the Pease-Blossom, a single violet wing of which was found in a spider’s web there (I once set unbelieving eyes on it, still preserved in the national collection). This shred of wing, for ever divorced from its body, became a long-running entomological joke. ‘Where can I take the Pease-Blossom moth?’ ‘Look for it in the spider’s webs at Bulstrode!’
When it came to gender relations – though he generously made an exception of the Duchess – Rousseau’s ideas were no more enlightened than those of the age which he spent his life castigating. A woman’s place, he insisted, was in the home, preferably in the boudoir or the kitchen. Women, believed Rousseau, have no capacity for abstract thought, and especially not in the sciences. Their natural sphere was in practical matters. He feared that unless women were domesticated, and constrained by modesty and a commensurate sense of shame, they would tyrannise men and make their husbands’ lives a misery. ‘Given the ease with which women arouse men’s senses … men would finally be their victims,’ he warned.15 Mankind should shake off social constraints and return to a state of nature – but women should stay in the kitchen.
Eighteenth-century English society had fixed ideas about what was and what was not appropriate. A moderate scientific education – for the few women for whom it was available – was acceptable since the alternative, the Classics, was closed to them as an exclusively male preserve. Chemistry, for example, was regarded as a fit occupation for ladies partly because it was seen as analogous to cooking.16 Similarly, botany was open to women as well as men, because cultivating and arranging flowers were among the approved pastimes – and also because botany, eighteenth-century style, was scarcely distinguishable from gardening. Flowers, it was conceded, lay well within a woman’s capacities. The clergy allowed that nature study, too, was virtuous and open to women because, as John Ray had preached, it was conducive to religious feeling. Anyone drawn to flowers and butterflies must surely love the works of the Creator.
In this sense butterflies were seen as part of ‘botany’ and especially since rearing them involved ‘gardening’ in the potting and growing of food plants for the caterpillars. But even so there were limits. Rearing butterflies had appropriate connotations of childcare as well as gardening and so was an acceptable occupation. So were drawing, painting and embroidering butterflies. But killing them for a collection was not. One reason why shell collecting was so popular among enlightened women was that shells could be gathered without necessarily killing the animal inside. It was all right for a man to go out with his gun or his hounds and be praised for his manliness, but women were supposed to be gentler. The Duchess of Portland enjoyed searching for snails and shells by lakes and the seashore but there is no evidence that she chased butterflies. Her butterflies seem to have been acquired by purchase, gift or exchange.
A woman was not only limited to the ‘gentler’ aspects of natural history but there were also restraints on how knowledge could be acquired. Philosophical works, such as Ray’s History of Insects, were unsuited to female minds. Instead, perhaps frustrated by their exclusion from science and philosophy, women set themselves the task of writing books attuned to their own sensibility and experience. Writings for women turned on family and conversation, of the sort that they might enjoy at home or among close friends. The Duchess of Portland was herself a member of a circle of intelligent women known as the Bluestockings who met for serious conversation in salons and drawing rooms, hoping thereby to ‘establish women’s intellectual independence in a socially acceptable form’. A Quaker writer, Priscilla Wakefield, specialised in this epistolary approach to science, seeing it as ‘blending instruction with amusement’.17 Hence, for example, she introduced the habits of bees by way of a dialogue between Clarice, a well-educated country woman, and her enlightened gentleman friend, Eugene. In this conversation Clarice is anxious that an interest in insects might be incompatible with her responsibilities as a woman and young mother. Eugene makes haste to reassure her that bees are an entirely appropriate subject for they, too, are good mothers, and do not their busy lives echo the economy of the household? The two of them agree to spend some time together after dinner, talking about bees, walking in the garden and observing the hives. Even so, warned Miss Wakefield, such knowledge was dangerous; ladies should use it with discretion. Parading your education in company was vulgar and a sign of ill-breeding. So keep it to yourself.
Given such constraints it is perhaps surprising to find that fully a quarter of the hundred or so persons listed as subscribers or ‘encouragers’ to Benjamin Wilkes’s English Moths and Butterflies, published in 1749, were women. And some of them did more than subsidise. Wilkes singled out a Mrs Walters who was renowned as a breeder of rare moths and, by implication, a supplier of source material for his pictures. It seems that, already by then, women had gained a reputation for their expertise in rearing butterflies and moths which surpassed the efforts of men. In this, as in much else to do with rearing, women held the advantage.
As the story of Elinor Glanville demonstrates so well, women who interested themselves in butterflies and other insects could face social ostracism. In the resolutely masculine atmosphere of the Victorian age, they were excluded from participation in the new entomological clubs and forbidden to write papers for their journals. Hence women were unable to write up their discoveries under their own name. That is why we do not hear much about one of the best Irish entomologists, Mary Bell (1812–98): she was unable to publish her original discoveries about water bugs and dragonflies (she was the first to discover that water bugs could sing like grasshoppers). Her brother Richard got the credit instead.18
Fortunately, women could and did write books. Laetitia Jermyn (1788–1848), the self-styled ‘Fair Aurelian’, produced what became a standard text, The Butterfly Collector’s Vade Mecum (or ‘ready reference’). In 1848 Maria Catlow published a Popular British Entomology that was successful enough to be reprinted twice. Yet both authors felt it necessary to write in a style befitting a woman: which in Jermyn’s case required long, tedious digressions into poetry and moral philosophy, and in Catlow’s a prettified dumbing-down that limits its usefulness.19
As for rearing butterflies and moths, maternal solicitude reached its height in the quiet work of Emma Hutchinson (1820–1906), the only other person whose name is preserved in a British butterfly, in her case the golden midsummer form of the Comma known as var. (variety) hutchinsoni. Emma was the wife of the vicar of Grantsfield near Leominster in rural Herefordshire, and one of her few publications concerned what was, and what was not, proper entomological behaviour for a lady. Rather than collecting butterflies, like men, she suggested that women study their ‘habits’. They should rear them through each stage of their life cycle and carefully note each change of skin and difference in form. It was not quite proper for a vicar’s wife to procure eggs and caterpillars herself, but Emma could at least raise plants for those brought to her by various (male) helpers and keep them supplied with fresh food. She bred one small, drab moth, the Pinion-spotted Pug, through countless generations from 1866 to the end of her life, supplying all the collectors of the day with specimens. But the species she is associated with above all others is the Comma. The Comma butterfly is common enough today, but in the nineteenth century it was regarded as a rarity and at one time seemed to be in danger of dying out. The one place you could be confident of finding its spiky, brown-and-white caterpillar was on the leaves of the bines in Herefordshire’s hop yards. She blamed the practice of burning the bines after the harvest for the growing scarcity of the butterfly. In perhaps the first attempt to conserve a British butterfly, Emma reared generations of Commas and sent boxes of caterpillars to correspondents in the hope that releasing the butterfly would safeguard the species. Hundreds more went ‘to gladden other naturalists in their collections’.20
By breeding the Comma year on year Emma Hutchinson was the first to realise that it is double-brooded and that the two generations are different. The bright golden-orange form of the butterfly, easily mistaken for a fritillary, appears from caterpillars reared in the spring, and the darker form from those reared later in the year. Emma deduced, correctly, that it was day length that decided which form, dark or golden, would emerge; the golden one enjoyed the balmy days of high summer while the darker, less conspicuous generation is the one that needs to pass the winter undetected and emerge from sleep in the spring. Acknowledgement, of a sort, came when the Natural History Museum accepted her collection of butterflies while her notebooks and records, too, have been preserved in the library of the Woolhope Naturalists’ Field Club.
A different kind of emancipation marked a trio of fearless, intrepid lady travellers and collectors: Margaret Fountaine (1862–1940), Evelyn Cheesman (1881–1969), and Cynthia Longfield (1896–1991). All three were of independent means and none of them ever married, so they were free to do more or less as they pleased, and to travel where and when they wished. They were also lucky enough to live through a time when the going was good: a golden age of exploration and discovery when steamships, railways and modern roads were opening up distant parts of the world for the first time. It was the time when Lord Rothschild and other wealthy patrons were financing collecting expeditions to remote places and gorgeous new species of butterfly were being described almost daily. For these women, travel offered fulfilment and freedom from the suffocating constraints of home.
Evelyn Cheesman wanted to be a vet but was unable to train at the Royal Veterinary College because it did not admit women. Instead she got a job at London Zoo’s insect house – though even that meant bending the rules; she was the first-ever woman on the staff. Thereafter she embarked on a series of solo expeditions to Papua New Guinea, the New Hebrides and other tropical islands of the Pacific, braving leeches, tarantulas and malaria to collect insects for the Natural History Museum. A small, skinny woman, generally dressed in a mackintosh and sackcloth trousers, she was not interested in home comforts. Encounters with alleged cannibals and incestuous tribes merely aroused her scientific curiosity. Like her contemporary, Freya Stark, she defrayed her expenses partly by writing travel books. By the end of her travelling career she had donated 70,000 insect specimens, many new to science, to the museum. The least they could do was to name several of them after her.21
Cynthia Longfield – aka ‘Madam Dragonfly’ – was from a landed Irish family with a great house at Castlemary in County Cork. Perhaps her emancipatory moment came when Irish revolutionaries burned the house down. She too decided to venture riskily into some of the wilder corners of the world that looked interesting for insects: the South Pacific, Brazil’s Mato Grosso, and the interior of Australia, not to mention a six-month solo expedition to Uganda. Her great passion, the abiding love of her life, was for dragonflies. Hitherto insect collectors had never bothered much with dragonflies because, unlike butterflies or beetles, their colours fade after death. Like her friend Evelyn Cheesman, Cynthia Longfield collected for the Natural History Museum, packing each delicate object between wadding in airtight boxes and sending them off by bearer before the heat and damp destroyed them. Unlike Cheesman, she had no great talent for writing and accounts of her exploits are largely confined to professional journals. But her popular book on British and Irish dragonflies helped to nurture interest in living dragonflies and inspired other, more ecologically minded pioneers such as Norman Moore and Philip Corbet, to specialise in dragonflies. Today, like butterflies, these lovely insects are firmly in the spotlight and have their own society and recording scheme. They have become, par excellence, the birdwatcher’s insects, the ones you watch with binoculars. Cynthia Longfield lived to see the formation of the British Dragonfly Society in 1983, living another eight years to reach the grand old age of 96.22
The best-known of the three is Margaret Fountaine although most of her fame is posthumous. ‘To the reader – maybe yet unborn – I leave this record of the wild and fearless life of one of the “South Acre Children” who never grew up, and who enjoyed greatly and suffered much,’ she wrote at the head of the journal of her travels which she kept for sixty years (South Acre, near Norwich, was her family home).23 After her sudden death while catching butterflies in Trinidad she left her large collection to the Norwich Castle Museum along with a locked japanned box which, on her instructions, was not to be opened until forty years later. When the time came and it was duly opened and inspected, the box was found to contain her journal, including a full account of her travels with her faithful dragoman, the Syrian Khalid Neimy, her ‘dear and constant friend’. It was their intimacy, regarded as shocking at the time, which was probably the reason why Fountaine had embargoed the journal. Highlights from it were turned into a best-selling book, Love Among the Butterflies, although anyone hoping for a tale of illicit passion in exotic places must have been disappointed. The event that impelled Fountaine’s wanderings was a broken heart; she had been rejected by a man she hardly knew but had decided he was the ‘One and Only’. Her relationship with the already-married Khalid Neimy was apparently more like brother and sister.
When Norman Riley, the museum’s curator of insects, met her in 1913 he expected to find what he ungallantly described as ‘a well-worn battleaxe’. Instead he found a tall, pale, shy, attractive woman with an air of frailty and melancholy. Slightly more self-conscious than Evelyn Cheesman (but only slightly) she chased butterflies in a man’s checked cotton shirt with a long, striped cotton skirt, both with extra pockets sewn on, topped off with a pair of cotton mittens. She sustained herself on her travels with nips of brandy from her flask. A graceful retirement was never what she had in mind and she got her wish. She died with her butterfly net in her hand, aged nearly 80, one hot day on a mountainside in Trinidad.
