Mary Orr, Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History (London: Anthem Press, 2024) 294 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1083998-609-3
The last two decades have seen an almost exponential advance in our knowledge and understanding of women’s many contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European science. Building on groundbreaking works in the 1990s by Ann Shteir, Barbara Gates, Londa Schiebinger and others, and indebted also to important reassessments of how exactly science was done in a ‘pre-professional’ era (by James Secord and others), a wave of recent scholarship has greatly increased the roll-call of women known to have participated in the scientific activities of their day. That scholarship has also allowed us to see more clearly the agency and authority some women were able to exercise in science, and the substantive contributions they made to the advancement of contemporary scientific knowledge. In many cases, as the editors of the recent Palgrave Handbook of Women in Science Since 1660 (2021) point out, these were women widely respected in their own lifetimes for their scientific accomplishments; it was subsequent historiography which occluded and marginalised them, in a process akin to the ‘Great Forgetting’, as Clifford Siskin puts it, of women’s literary achievements across the same period.
One of the most remarkable women whose achievements were obscured in this way is surely Sarah Bowdich (or in later life, after her second marriage, Sarah Lee). With her first husband, Thomas Edward Bowdich, she conducted extensive scientific researches in West Africa in the late 1810s and early 1820s, visiting firstly Cape Coast and secondly Gambia. Between these two African ventures, the Bowdichs studied natural history in Paris, becoming friends and close associates with such scientific luminaries as Georges Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt. These connections stood Sarah in good stead when in 1824 Thomas Edward died, during their second African trip. It then fell to Sarah to find a means of supporting the couple’s three young children. To this end she developed a long-running, multi-stranded career that in various ways built on and extended her scientific expertise. She wrote natural-historical anecdotes for the Magazine of Natural History, and short stories with a West African focus for literary annuals such as Forget Me Not and Friendship’s Offering; she published educational textbooks such as her Elements of Natural History (1844); and in The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (which appeared in instalments between 1828 and 1838), she produced a groundbreaking work of ichthyology, adorned with lustrous illustrations which amply demonstrate Sarah’s considerable talents as an artist and scientific illustrator. Then in the final phase of her career, she principally wrote educational fiction for children, again mostly with an African setting and laced throughout with natural historical information and anecdotes.
Prior to the recent wave of recovery research outlined above, Bowdich’s many accomplishments had not been completely forgotten. However, literary scholars and historians of science generally relegated her to a merely ancillary role in the scientific enterprise – as the illustrator and populariser of other people’s science, so to speak, rather than any sort of researcher herself. However, the inadequacy of this understanding of Sarah Bowdich’s achievement has been comprehensively demonstrated by a series of richly researched journal articles and book chapters, stretching back almost twenty years now, by Mary Orr. The volume under review here continues this longstanding retrieval of Bowdich’s legacy. Remarkably, its nine chapters do not reprint or duplicate any of Orr’s prior articles but instead contain wholly new material – a testament both to Bowdich’s productivity and Orr’s diligent archival sleuthing.
The book is organised into three sections. In the first section, ‘Canvassing Cuvier’, Bowdich’s important connection to the eminent French natural historian Georges Cuvier is a loose organising thread, although the chapters also spiral off productively to address a range of related topics and debates. Chapter 1 focuses on the published account of the Bowdichs’ second expedition to Africa, Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo (1825), and more specifically on the 1826 French translation which was augmented by additional notes by both Cuvier and Humboldt. Positioning Cuvier as ‘expert respondent and first commentator’ (36) on the volume’s zoological findings, Orr demonstrates the scientific significance of what was brought back and the sophistication both of Bowdich’s fieldwork and of her subsequent analysis of her discoveries. Additionally, Orr argues that Cuvier mis-attributed some of the new fish species identified by Bowdich, with the result that her first-naming of these species has never received due recognition among taxonomists; here the chapter offers a complex but illuminating analysis of ongoing occlusions around gender in both historical and current taxonomical systems.
Chapter 2 addresses Bowdich’s greatest scientific accomplishment, her sumptuously illustrated Freshwater Fishes of Great Britain. This is a volume on which Orr has written previously; here she concerns herself chiefly with tracking the book’s reception and influence in French science, while also again demonstrating the sophistication of its application (and sometimes adaptation) of Cuvier’s contemporaneous advances in ichthyology. Then the final chapter in this section discusses Bowdich’s Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (1833), a posthumous tribute to her mentor which for many years was the most authoritative work on the Frenchman in English; here Orr situates Memoirs in the recognised French tradition of the éloge, or scientific encomium usually written by a peer researcher, while also drawing out various aspects of the growing institutionalisation and professionalisation of both French and British science.
The second section, ‘Harnessing Humboldt’, explores the many lines of influence and exchange between Bowdich’s work and that of the great German explorer and natural historian, Alexander von Humboldt. In Chapter 4, Orr reads the Gambia sections of Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo as a ‘pioneering (Humboldtian) survey report’ (xx) that both follows Humboldt in attempting a holistic overview that combined natural and cultural geography yet also extends Humboldt by transposing techniques developed in South America into a very different West African setting. In Chapter 5, attention turns to Bowdich’s Stories of Strange Lands and Fragments from the Notes of a Traveller (1835), and more specifically, to the expansion of the notes accompanying these stories and fragments when they were gathered together for publication in book form (having been previously published in periodicals). The expanded versions, Orr observes, are more assertive about Bowdich’s own activities and achievements in West Africa – a shift in self-presentation which Orr reads as Bowdich ‘creatively reset[ting] her authority in pioneering natural-history making independently of its French Muséum frames’ (110). Then Chapter 6 focuses on The African Wanderers (1847), one of the earliest Anglophone novels with a West African setting, and a text which on Orr’s reading critiques and rejects many of the premises and ideologies of more conventional imperial adventure stories and Robinsonades, to offer instead ‘a fictional translocation of Humboldtian principles’ (133).
The final section, ‘Opening Access to Expert Natural History’, addresses Bowdich’s work as a science educator and communicator – roles sometimes seen by historians of science as secondary to groundbreaking scientific research but which were nevertheless, as Orr points out forcefully at the start of Chapter 7, central to both Cuvier’s and Humboldt’s conceptualisation of the scientific career. The chapter then looks at Bowdich’s highly accomplished work as a scientific illustrator, addressing the various media Bowdich worked in while also arguing that in her visual art as in her fiction, Bowdich’s non-conformist, Unitarian upbringing led her to critique and subtly subvert the period’s more conventional, hierarchical assumptions about race and gender. Chapter 8 considers Bowdich’s very successful textbook, Elements of Natural History (1844), stressing the sophistication and originality (in an Anglophone context) of its grounding in ‘”continental” (Cuvierian and Humboldtian) comparative natural history’ (181). Then Chapter 9 principally discusses Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Animals (1852) and its companion volume on birds, reptile and fish (1853), with Orr making a spirited case for the scientific importance of anecdotes as ‘vehicles of pithy, noteworthy yet untechnical information’ (194), and as a form much-used by prominent male scientists of the era and also increasingly valued in modern scientific research (as reflected in a recent editorial in the scientific journal Behaviour that promotes anecdotes for the ‘qualitative, rich observation’ [qtd 204] they offer). A final coda to the chapter reads the late children’s novel Sir Thomas (1856) as a text offering a more pronounced critique of colonialism than Bowdich’s earlier work.
The book is in places densely written and somewhat difficult to read. This reflects partly the technical scientific detail Orr necessarily goes into, for example as she addresses complex taxonomical debates. Yet it is also sometimes the result of Orr’s otherwise laudable aim of not repeating material from her earlier publications on Bowdich. Several chapters here are essentially pendants to earlier pieces and really need to be read alongside those predecessors; elsewhere, the book might have benefitted from additional introductory, ground-laying sections establishing, for example, a clearer biographical narrative. These issues, however, do not lessen significantly Orr’s remarkable scholarly achievement in this volume. Equipped not only with its nine main chapters but also with nine substantial appendices and numerous inset tables of data, the book is likely to become a important resource and reference-work, that can be mined productively both by researchers looking specifically at women’s participation in early nineteenth-century science and also by scholars concerned more broadly with the development of, and connections between, French and British science in this period.
Carl Thompson, University of Surrey
