Within the Eighties, a shell assortment that included specimens from Captain Prepare dinner’s remaining voyage was unintentionally thrown right into a skip and believed misplaced perpetually. However a lot to the enjoyment of scientists, final week it was rediscovered protected and sound and donated to English Heritage.
Her title won’t have made the headlines, however the lady who initially collected the shells, Bridget Atkinson (1732-1814), made a major contribution to pure historical past within the 18th century.
Atkinson was one among many ladies fascinated with shells at the moment. It was a pursuit that drew in each aristocratic and center class fanatics. Amongst them had been well-known collectors, such because the thinker and poet Margaret Cavendish and cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, the elite homeowners of the shell-encrusted home A la Ronde, in Exmouth.
Gathering shells was a typical previous time in Enlightenment Britain. This was a interval by which elite girls had been turning into more and more within the sciences, and so they pursued its disciplines with wild enthusiasm.
That is demonstrated within the recognition of books similar to Newtonianism for Girls by Francesco Algarotti. Revealed in 1737, the e-book was a bestseller and reprinted many occasions because the 18th century progressed.
Botany and pure historical past had been deemed notably acceptable autos for ladies’s mental curiosity. Girls engaged in these practices had been inspired to gather specimens, create shows and research associated literature, typically written by feminine authors.
Consequently, the early nineteenth century noticed the publication of varied pure historical past books written by girls, similar to The Conchologist’s Companion by Mary Roberts (1824), a sequence of letters on the properties of varied forms of shell.
Atkinson’s assortment
Whereas Atkinson wasn’t uncommon as a lady gathering shells, the extent of her acquisitions units them aside from many different collections of the interval. She acquired as many as 1,200 shells all through her lifetime, with many sourced from far-flung areas throughout the globe.
Atkinson was from a rich and genteel, however not aristocratic, household, and because of this, she is just not as effectively generally known as different shell collectors of the time. However, her assortment consists of a lot of essential specimens of endangered and guarded species. Many had been amassed from her connection to George Dixon, an armourer on Captain Prepare dinner’s third and remaining world voyage.
Whereas her surviving correspondence reveals her to be a less-than-perfect author, Atikinson’s experience in pure historical past led to her turning into the primary feminine honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1813. Girls had been nonetheless deemed ineligible for full membership till 1877.
Atkinson’s assortment doesn’t merely replicate the scientific pursuits of a curious particular person. A research of their acquisition reveals a broad, even world, system at play. A variety of her shells had been gifted to Atkinson by the networks of the British empire.
A number of members of Atkinson’s household had been employed in imperial roles. Her son and brother-in-law had been each part of the mercantile colonising forces of the East India Firm, and the latter even owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. This implies the Atkinson household had been direct beneficiaries of the enslavement of Black women and men within the Caribbean.
Atkinson used these connections to her benefit, writing to her kinfolk residing overseas to ask for shells and even imploring household buddies to do the identical. In 1796, her buddy Mary Yates wrote to her son John, who then lived in Virginia to move on Atkinson’s request for “snail shells picked off the bottom …the bigger the higher”.
Conveyed by the very routes and mechanics of the British empire, Atkinson’s collections are indivisible from the broader historical past of colonialism. That is one thing that future shows of the shells will inevitably have to deal with.
The historical past of Atkinson’s assortment
Regardless of their apparent significance in the present day, Atkinson’s shells haven’t all the time been handled with reverence. The gathering was handed down by numerous generations of the Atkinson household earlier than ultimately being acquired by Newcastle College within the Nineteen Thirties (then generally known as King’s Faculty). It was on this time that the shells had been misplaced.
Having been discarded right into a skip, an eagle-eyed marine zoologist named John Buchanan rescued them from obscurity. Going by his belongings after his dying, his household found the gathering and donated it to English Heritage.
This isn’t an uncommon story. Seen as trifling pursuits and trivial pursuits, an absence of curiosity in girls’s collections of shells, each decorative and scientific, has led to many examples being misplaced over the centuries.
The nice sale of Margaret Cavendish’s assortment in 1786 is a typical instance. Her shells and corals from Britain, Italy and the Indian Ocean had been all positioned all on the market, alongside these collected for ornamental functions. Like Atkinson’s assortment, Cavendish’s shells included specimens from Prepare dinner’s travels. However even this essential affiliation didn’t save them from being scattered broadly.
As Atkinson’s shells reveal, the gathering of those lovely pure objects crossed continents, informed vivid histories of imperialism and established girls’s important position within the growth of pure historical past as a self-discipline. Their forthcoming show at Chester’s Roman Fort and Museum will make sure that they proceed to inform these tales lengthy into the long run.
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Freya Gowrley doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their tutorial appointment.