Appendix 9: Named Expert Provenance For Anecdotes of Animals (1852)

Appendix 7: West African Travel Accounts Informing The African Wanderers (1847)

When the Bowdichs set out from Madeira for Sierra Leone via the Gambia in 1822, European scientific knowledge of its flora and fauna was sparse and hence highly sought after. Anna Maria Falconbridge's journal account of 1794, Two Voyages to Sierra Leone during the Years 1791-2-3 […], offers rare insights into what travelogues term the ‘habits and customs’ of the colony and its hinterlands. Posterity places this widow of a surgeon to slaving ships firmly on the side of anti-abolition. Her descriptions provide incidental glimpses, however, of generic species of flora and fauna that also testify to the necessarily piecemeal work of European science in Sierra Leone and the wider West African region:

By contrast, the Bowdichs envisaged their independently-funded scientific exploration of Sierra Leone from Freetown as a primary endeavour, markedly different from economic, commercial, educational or religious civilising mission, and from colonial ‘garden’ and acclimatisation projects above. Their four-year training under Cuvier, Humboldt and others at the Paris Muséum therefore included their published translation of the most recent travel accounts to West Africa, such as Gaspard Mollien's Travels in the Interior of Africa (see Appendix 1A). It augmented their knowledge of the region accrued from their own earlier sojourn and account of the ‘habits and customs’ of Ghana and the Gabon in T. Edward Bowdich's Mission to Ashantee (1819), to confirm where they could fill the missing gaps in scientific knowledge ahead of departure for Sierra Leone.

In ‘canvassing Cuvier’ and ‘harnessing Humboldt’, Sarah's remarkable book-length pub-lications from 1825 have clearly demonstrated in chapter studies thus far how she crea-tively developed their different (world-leading) expertise and parallel scientific priorities – in the Muséum; in the intercontinental field respectively – for optimal contribution to leading natural history endeavour outside its many bars to women on both sides of the Channel. The leanest period for her scientific contributions after the last numbers of the Fresh-Water Fishes (1838–1839) and publication of Elements of Natural History (1844) then starkly stands out. It coincided with the final illness and death of Sarah's mother as Donald deB. Beaver has clarified, but his DNB entry cannot then explain how she ‘entered on her most prolific period of writing […] (both fiction and non-fiction), for both children and adults’. Sarah's natural history expedition ‘in forty-four British Fishes’ (Chapter 2) had no (commissioned) field project at home to replace it. How was her new work in natural history after 1839 inspired and fostered by experts and leading peer communities as the constant benchmark for her contributions since 1825?

Chapters in this final part address both the ‘gap’ that is 1839–1844 and its pivotal impor-tance for the ‘most prolific’ last decade of Sarah's work(s) in natural history. The enduring significance of both Cuvier and Humboldt as her ‘French’ mentors and models lay also in their common cause for world natural history-making, namely to enhance its under-standing in two interconnecting ways. First was their unwavering commitment to science pedagogy and wider public dissemination of new scientific knowledge, in order to inspire newcomers besides informing experts. Among Cuvier's many functions as the Chair in Comparative Anatomy at the Paris Muséum were his public lectures and demonstrations, with women in these audiences. His famed reconstructions of extinct fossil creatures from a single tooth or bone that demonstrated his new classifications of vertebrate life forms were one with his curation of the Galleries of Comparative Anatomy and Palaeontology for expert and general public understanding. In the second part of her Memoirs, Sarah had accounted for his ‘pedagogical’ publications (also listed in its bibliography of Cuvier's many works) as summed up in the ‘Tableau Elémentaire, and the two editions of the Règne Animal, as different stages of the same work, and, with the Fossil Remains, and Natural History of Fishes, as the results of his discoveries in comparative anatomy.

The introduction drew attention to the visibly minor place of the Gambia on the inside title page of the Excursions, as ‘supplementary, separated, accidental, niche, unimportant […] in its interest’ (p. 17). Indeed, the full title of the work (EM, EMFr) lists the Gambia almost as an afterthought, like the similar place it occupied in Sarah's explanatory preface:

As noted in the introduction (p.15), Sarah produced her sole-authored publications in natural history from 1824 at several Camden addresses in close proximity. Her consistent geographical and intellectual vicinity also to London natural science collections and societies was among the ironies of women's lack of presence within them. As explored in the earlier chapters, the scientific authority, resourcing and substance of Sarah's work was manifestly empowered by her French mentors and Paris Muséum connections. Yet to situate the story of her publications from the 1840s onwards always outside the activity of London science creates a history ‘from below’, or from ‘outside’ that occludes where and how Sarah's work maintained and developed its pioneering edge concomitantly within British and London scientific contexts. Her Memoirs of Baron Cuvier (1833) was indicative of her acknowledged place between its bars. Her Fresh Water Fishes of Great Britain also acknowledged in William Yarrell (1784–1856) an expert British, London-based contemporary in natural history similarly working outside ‘gentleman science’. This chapter therefore turns to the multiple evidence for Sarah's expert knowledge of, and contributions to, specifically London-based British natural history as the locus of her more interestingly concentric command of its fields.

Sarah's single-sentence dedication of the first edition of her Elements of Natural History to ‘Richard Owen Esq. F. R. S. Professor of Anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons’ is therefore key to resituating her larger place, and hitherto invisible contributions, at the epicentres of British and London natural science pursuit. By 1844, Owen's reputation and publications as the ‘English Cuvier’ were clearly established through his major publication on ‘the Pearly Nautilus’ (1832), and his 1837 Hunterian annual lecture series for informed general publics on comparative anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons. In consequence, Sarah's concise dedication calls for a major rereading:

When Tedlie Hutchison Hale wrote to The Field on 14 January 1888 to keep her mother's ‘venerable name from oblivion’ as the author of the ‘rare’ Fresh-Water Fishes discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 56), she was also correcting the initial correspondent's larger assumption: a woman's could not have been the pen (or pencil) of a work on Fishes/of science. Sarah's ‘venerable name’ was therefore doubly important to Tedlie, both as distinct from her father's and with regard to ‘Cuvier’. In the next sentence of her letter, she supplied even rarer report of her late mother's own views on her contributions to natural history: ‘The work by which my mother most wished to be remembered was her “Memoir (sic) of Cuvier,” published by Longman, now, unfortunately, out of print.’ In light of Chapters 1 and 2, Sarah's ‘Rare Book’ needs no linking to Cuvier. Her Memoirs of Baron Cuvier was no lesser a rarity, however, whether in 1833, 1888 or when digitisation restored it to open access to its original plural readerships, including ‘experts’ thanks to its modern University Press reedition. As a book ‘of enduring scholarly value’ in the Cambridge Library Collection's electronic reprint of 2014, this ‘biography […] remained the authoritative work in English on the most distinguished scientist of the age’. Almost more importantly in its day and today, Sarah's work appeared within a year of Cuvier's death in 1833 in three different imprints with major French, United States and English presses recorded in Appendix A. Why had the now open access Memoirs of Baron Cuvier/Mémoires du Baron Georges Cuvier not attracted more than footnote interest in twenty-first century studies of Cuvier in French and English? To right the potentially larger omissions concerning the French edition for French history of science and scientific biography, my first reappraisal in 2020 of the unprecedented ‘Mistress Lee’ on its cover put the case for the work's singular importance. Rare was the woman (in France) penning science in 1833 or the (first) biography of an eminent French ‘savant’ (man of science) such as Cuvier; even rarer that she was British. Rarest of all, was Sarah's skilful reattribution to Cuvier in her Memoirs/Mémoires of the very paradigm that he had perfected in respect of other major ‘savants’ (m. pl), the Éloge scientifique (official encomium by a peer to the eminent life and major scientific accomplishments of the deceased).

The first chapter revealed the magnitude of Sarah's foundational contributions to knowledge and naming of West African natural history new to European science in the Excursions (EM; EMFr). The publication of her achievements under her own name on both sides of the Channel also set her pioneering work in the field at the forefront of the new specialist Paris Muséum discipline of world ichthyology, alongside botany, ornithology and malacology. The imprimatur of both Cuvier and Humboldt on the 1826 edition only further affirmed Sarah's applications of their highest scientific standards for the period. The Excursions are then the more towering in their testimony to her overcoming of almost insurmountable personal and scientific loss. If her husband-‘instructor’ (EM, 173) in scientific field exploration overseas and her fish specimens were irreplaceable, the published text more clearly exposed Sarah's own irreplaceable independent scientific acumen. The strengths of her earlier self-determinations in natural history addressed in the introduction (pp. 14–15) and glimpsed in Chapter 1 in her preparation in 1824–1825 of the Excursions using Paris Muséum resources (p. 34) had once again overcome her untimely personal, financial and scientific straits. In little more than one year after her return to London, the proceeds of the Excursions could repay her ‘sympathizers’ and further support her family. But the same dilemma that Sarah faced in 1824 confronted her anew. How could she continue her independent work in natural history as a widow with three young children to support?

Sarah's solution was simple, because unwavering in her remarkable ‘continuance of the voyage’ of natural history endeavour in the words of the inside title page of the Excursions (Figure 0.1 and Figure 1.1). Her resolve also crystallised its larger venture. Her inventive and pragmatic new departure in 1824 was to make London (Britain) the ‘overseas’ for her ongoing French natural history work. Sarah was already employed in Banks's Library as Cuvier's aide naturaliste in all but name, to verify fish drawings for his Histoire naturelle des poissons, as his peer in French ichthyology. As a Briton and a woman in its domain, she was also unprecedented among its Muséum experts and overseas ‘correspondents’. To invert gain (London) for loss (Paris, the Gambia/Sierra Leone) in this way was also an entrepreneurial, creative and strategic move for a nonconformist widow making her living by her pen and pencil in Britain in 1826.

As the introduction outlined and contra Donald deB. Beaver, Sarah resourced both her young family and her continuing work in natural history after 1824 by publishing original stories commissioned by Rudolph Ackermann's Forget Me Not and Thomas Pringle's Friendship's Offering (see Appendix 1), the two most important of Britain's new Gift Books. At first sight her Stories of Strange Lands and Fragments From the Notes of a Traveller in 1835 was therefore little more than a money-spinning reprint. Its collection of ten of the ‘Stories’ and four ‘Fragments’ in the above-named Gift Books even adhered to the chronology from 1826 to 1833 of their first appearance. Indeed Sarah's prefatory rationale for the 1835 collection specified that ‘[m]any fruitless enquiries have been made for them, as the first are out of print; and many questions asked, and explanations demanded, by those who have read them; and to satisfy all, I have gathered them together, and added such notes and remarks as would tend to their elucidation’ (SSL, xiii). Yet several had been reprinted in this period, often in the first volume of newcomer reviews in the burgeoning print market discussed in Chapter 2 (p. 53–54). ‘Story VI, Samba’, and ‘Fragment V, The Voyage Home’, are not traceable to them, however. Rather Edward Moxon, a new entrant publisher of major writers and poets including Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861), saw the reputational gains precisely in ‘reissuing’ Sarah's already-published ‘West African’ stories and fragments’ for what they ‘added’ not only quantitatively but also qualitatively. The entirely new West African material of ‘Story VI’ and ‘Fragment V’ included their strikingly choric ‘Notes to Ditto’ also figuring for those preceding them on the contents page placed, unusually, at the end of the volume. In effect, the original Gift Book version in each case saw supplementation by at least a further third through its respective ‘Notes’. These also concealed five interleaved plates, to which chapter 7 returns, unmentioned on the inside title page. Their descriptions are again found only at volume end in the table of contents. Moxon's edition of the Stories of Strange Lands therefore aligned with the original Gift Book format with selected illustrations, by now including Sarah's own as integral to its new material.

Appendix 1: Publications Authored by Sarah Bowdich Then Lee, 1825–1856

This first study of the major contributions by Sarah née Wallis, Mrs T(homas) Edward Bowdich, then Mrs R(obert) Lee (1791–1856) to new knowledge of natural history has focused on her book-length publications concerning West Africa, including its preparations in the field for her undertaking of The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain. The nine chapters and their lessons therefore bring to serious critical attention Sarah's multiple contributions to cross-Channel natural history-making in her published works from 1825 until her death. They also inspire the recuperation of other women in the first half of the nineteenth century at work and publishing in science in at least two language cultures. Chapter findings individually and collectively, as gathered together below, then only magnify the main questions of this book. Why and how, indeed, has Sarah remained so firmly in the blind spots of expert Anglophone and Francophone critical inquiry in the disciplines covered in the introduction, and despite gender, transnational and interdisciplinary lenses? Her works plainly added to major discipline fields, and in the case of (modern) ichthyology and anthropology were in their vanguard. The imprimaturs of Cuvier and Humboldt affirmed their first-ranking, original qualities. Sarah's works also eminently proved the rule that a woman could exist, thrive and regularly publish (expert) natural history in the period. But her corpus also demonstrated why the best modern (inter-)disciplinary inquiry in the history, geography and cultures of nineteenth-century British, French and European science will fail to accommodate its expertly multi-genre, intermedial hybridity. Set assumptions govern and determine who and what constitutes ‘serious’ contribution to science of the period, also informing science and its histories today. The introduction highlighted the benchmarks that consolidate scientific endeavour in the first half of the nineteenth century by which Sarah cannot be seen. They are modelled by ‘genteel’ and national(istic) standards compounding the (professionalised) thrall of modern discipline distinctions imposed retrospectively upon ‘serious’ natural history and earlier ‘naturalists’ as its makers in consequence. The nine chapters individually and together challenge modern critics to pay much closer attention to pre-1850 context(s) for broad-church natural history on the one hand, and on the other hand to the latter's foundational basis for ‘new’ nineteenth-century scientific specialisms, such as ichthyology, anthropology and ethnography in which Sarah was a remarkable forerunner irrespective of her sex.

• • Ethmalosa fimbriata : Fowler, 1928 a : 38 | Hornell, 1929 : 1 | Fowler, 1936 a : 175 | Cadenat, 1947 : 28 | Steven, 1947 : 1 | Blanc, 1948 : 45 | Brown, 1948 : 563 | Cadenat, 1950 a : 127 | Lozano-Rey, 1950 : 7 | Postel, 1950 : 49 | Salzen, 1958 : 1388 | Doutre, 1959 : 513 | Postel, 1959 : 230 | Longhurst, 1960 a : 276 | Longhurst, 1960 b : 1337 | Gras, 1961 : 575 | Monod, 1961 : 506 | Boeseman, 1963 : 5 | Longhurst, 1963 b : 1 | Watts, 1963 : 235 | Longhurst, 1964 a : 686 | Daget & Iltis, 1965 : 47 | Whitehead, 1967 a : 86 | Whitehead, 1967 b : 585 | Daget & Stauch, 1968 : 25 | Reizer, 1968 : 229 | Zei, 1969 : 105 | Boely & Elwertowski, 1970 : 182 | Reizer, 1971 : 85 | Scheffers, 1971 : 1 | Scheffers et al., 1972 : 1 | Scheffers, 1973 : 1 | Fagade & Olaniyan, 1974 : 248 | Albaret & Gerlotto, 1976 : 113 | Gerlotto, 1976 : 1 | Leveque & Paugy, 1977 : 13 | Daget, 1979 : 59.

• • Meletta senegalensis : Valenciennes, 1847 : 370 (junior synonym) | Whitehead, 1967 a : 86 (junior synonym) | Whitehead, 1967 b : 588 (junior synonym).

• • Harengula forsteri : Valenciennes, 1847 : 299 (junior synonym) | Whitehead, 1967 b : 587 (junior synonym).

• • Alausa dorsalis : Valenciennes, 1847 : 418 (junior synonym) | Dumeril, 1858 d : 264 (junior synonym) | Whitehead, 1967 b : 589 (junior synonym).

• • Alausa aurea (non Steindachner) : Dumeril, 1858 d : 264 (junior synonym).

• • Alausa platycephalus : Bleeker, 1863 a : 123, pl. 26, fig. 2 (junior synonym) | Günther, 1868 : 438 (junior synonym) | Boeseman, 1963 : 5, pl. I, fig. 1 (junior synonym) | Whitehead, 1967 b : 590 (junior synonym).

• • Clupea dorsalis : Günther, 1868 : 438 (junior synonym) | Steindachner, 1870 b | Steindachner, 1870 e : 566 (junior synonym) | Dambeck, 1879 : 414 (junior syno-nym) | Boulenger, 1905 g : 187 (junior synonym) | Ehrenbaum, 1915 : 20 (junior synonym) | Kahsbauer, 1962 : 159 (junior synonym).

In light of the ‘“Accounts” of Direct Encounter’ discussed in Chapter 8, Sarah's generic classification of both her Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Animals (1852) and Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Birds, Reptiles and Fishes (1853) as ‘anecdotes’ was doubly unam-biguous. These companion volumes overtly adopted the term that she had strategically deployed in the revised Elements (ENH2), to replace the synonymous ‘amusing and instructive original accounts’ of its first edition. ‘Anecdotes’ therefore provided ‘proofs of sagacity or affection’ in the animals concerned and ‘proofs’ of the tellers’ expertise: ‘[f]ew of them exist in any other publication, unless they have been copied from this work’ (ENH2, iii–iv). Sarah's phrasing therefore exemplifies the first and second definition of ‘anecdotes’ in the OED: ‘1. Secret, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history. 2. The narrative of an interesting or striking incident or event’. Because many of the same underpinning expert authorities for the Elements (ENH; ENH2) informed her Anecdotes (AnecA; AnecBRF) as Appendices 8 and 9 clearly demonstrate for the first time, their names similarly endorsed the scientific objectives and expertise of her double-volume Anecdotes, yet also question its novelty. Its reader already familiar with the Elements (ENH; ENH2) in 1852–1853 or today might reasonably suppose that Sarah simply deleted its drier ‘textbook’ components and remixed the ‘anecdotes’ that she had already used in it for the same animal. The Anecdotes (AnecA; AnecBRF) were then adroit abridgements – the clearly reduced coverage of mammals in the first volume – and simple supplementation, for example concerning ‘reptiles’ in the second. On closer inspection (also clarified by comparing Appendices 8 and 9), Sarah's Anecdotes (AnecA; AnecBRF) offer no reheat of the anecdote materials used in the Elements (ENH; ENH2). Rather, the major importance of ‘anecdotes’ lies in their careful ‘selection’, as Sarah states in her three-page preface to the two-volume Anecdotes states in 1852 (reformatted in Figure 9.1 ). As this chapter sets out, expert (natural) selection seriously raises the stakes for the genre of the scientific anecdote itself in her pioneering hands in 1852–1853, and hence for natural science communication today.