by Linda Lear
But sometime between the wet summer of 1895 at Holehird on Windermere and the spring of 1896, Beatrix ceased being interested in fungi solely as an aesthetic pursuit. She had gathered young forms of the Boletus granulatus in a wood of ‘scotch fir and larch’, noting in her letter to McIntosh, who was studying the source of the larch canker, that they were ‘very slimy & had yellowish milky drops on the spores and stem’. Using her new microscope, she drew the spores of toadstools that formed on tiny club-shaped cells called basidia. Could these spores germinate, she wondered? How did they live over the winter, and in what form did they reappear? Few mycologists at the time had given that question any thought. Beatrix speculated that the spores must germinate. Investigating that premise, she quietly made the transition from collector and illustrator to amateur mycologist. Once again she needed a mentor, and, in particular, she needed to talk to the mycologists at Kew.73
5
Discoveries
The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, or ‘Imperial Kew’, as it was known in some Victorian circles, was not then a garden where the public was welcome to admire floral displays, ponder rare cycads, or stroll the winding paths of a historical landscape. Indeed the public was barely tolerated within Kew’s gates, and admitted only on specific days and for limited times. Kew was then, and is now, primarily a scientific institution dedicated to research in taxonomy, anatomy, cytology and conservation. It was then, but is no longer, an enthusiastic agent of imperial expansion, central to discovering and developing the natural resources of the Empire. Kew’s directors since its founding in 1841 understood their mission was not only to further botanical research, but also to shape commerce through the acquisition and propagation of economically viable crops.1
Throughout the nineteenth century, as the world’s environment deteriorated, an increasingly large part of Kew’s resources went to documenting existing plants, reducing the rate of their destruction, conserving what they could. Although Kew botanists were by mid-century part of the upper echelon of the English science establishment — which included the British Museum, the Natural History Museum and, to a lesser extent, the Oxford—Cambridge university axis — Kew’s pragmatic usefulness to the Empire set it apart. The professionals at Kew moved in a different political orbit from the others. By the end of the century, both the new science of botany and the professionals who directed the economy in plants were resident at Kew.2
Kew’s professional staff was a tight circle of scientists, related by family and patronage. William Turner Thiselton-Dyer assumed the directorship in 1885. An expert on the tropical plants of Africa, he promoted research in plant physiology and pathology and strengthened the Gardens’ importance to the Empire. He turned the languishing Jodrell Laboratory at Kew into the best botanical laboratory in Europe. In his spare moments, Thiselton-Dyer indulged a penchant for landscaping at Kew that included chivvying the Princess Royal off the grass when necessary. Scholars wishing to do research at Kew made application to the director’s office for a ticket of admission. These were given for specific periods or for specific projects. Student research tickets to the Library and Herbarium were also available for limited periods upon recommendation from two scientists of standing, and approval of the director.3
Thiselton-Dyer (he began hyphenating his name in 1891) was also the first director to have a degree from Oxford. His ambition was nothing less than to ‘reorder the British system of colonial botanic gardens’ and to make Kew the centre of the ‘new botany’ in service to a reinvigorated imperialism. He was a slight man, with a thin face, prematurely white hair, a small moustache and goatee, and the manner of a martinet. Very much an authoritarian and an autocrat in style and personality, he favoured uniforms for the staff as a mark of professional status and a means of imposing order. He even had an inspector’s uniform made for himself with epaulets, gold buttons, and a gold-crested military-style hat. The journeymen-gardeners were compelled to wear blue serge suits with grey flannel shirts and turned-down collars. The garden staff included three women, recruited under pressure in 1896 from the Horticultural College for Women at Swanley in Kent, who were compelled to labour in brown knickerbockers, woollen stockings, waistcoat, jacket and peaked cap, a costume guaranteed not to distract their male colleagues.4
The other important player in the interlocking world of Victorian botanical science was the Linnean Society of London, the premier society for the promotion of natural history. It was founded in 1788 as the repository for the collection of the great Swedish naturalist Linnaeus, and occupied the handsome Burlington House in Mayfair. The Linnean was the first specialist scientific learned society founded after the Royal Society. Its mandate included maintaining a research library, holding meetings to benefit its elected fellows, and publishing scholarly papers. It attempted to hold the amateur naturalist, the gentleman scholar and the emerging professional in a social institution promoting their common interests.5
Society protocol was strictly observed. Until 1904 all scholarly papers were delivered to the president, who, in turn, laid them before the elected fellows to decide which should be presented at the general meeting of members and invited guests. Customarily, invited papers were read by the general secretary of the Society, or sometimes the president, who exercised the right to edit those papers as he saw fit. A summary or short précis was then laid before the membership to be read and commented upon by those who were interested in the topic. The decision to publish a paper was made by the Council of Fellows after comments were received from the membership and two designated referees. Very few of the papers that were read at meetings were ever published. Society meetings were held strictly to one hour, and usually no more than one paper would be presented. Frequently meetings also included a brief presentation of exhibits or the demonstration of experiments. Membership of the Linnean was exclusively male, and only men were allowed to attend meetings, to have access to the library or to subscribe to Society publications. Although the question of the admission of women was raised periodically, it had almost no support until 1905 when women were reluctantly allowed to become members.6
Through a combination of cultural and political forces coalescing at the end of the nineteenth century, these elitist institutions of learning increasingly defined themselves as organizations exclusively for the promotion of the professional scientist. The professionalization of science in general, and of the natural sciences in particular, was part of an effort to exclude those without formal education, and to elevate a scientific elite. Amateurs and those generalists without degrees or formal training, particularly women, were increasingly excluded from this new scientific dialogue.7
These trends filtered down to public places such as museums, zoos and gardens where natural science was displayed. Department heads, known as ‘keepers’, within museums like the Natural History Museum, the British Museum and at Kew jealously guarded their increasingly specialized turf. Beatrix Potter broke in upon this swirling amalgam of scientific change, redefinition, elitism and misogyny; a naive, curious, but determined amateur mycologist intent on gaining a hearing for her theories of symbiosis and hybridization. Considering the success that other women botanists had enjoyed in both illustration and publishing before her, Beatrix’s experience raises questions that are at least as much to do with gender and the politics of professionalism as with the merits of her scientific experiments or the presentation of her theories.8
During the autumn and winter of 1895 Beatrix spent an increasing amount of time drawing fungi under the microscope. Her objectives had changed from simply assembling a collection of watercolours and photographs to discovering how fungi reproduced. Certain that she could germinate some spores herself, she wanted to study the environment in which they germinated, discover whether or not conditions were the same for each species, what the spawn of each consisted of, and whether or not she could reproduce it more than once. She never articulated a final purpose for her experiments, other than the pleasure of discovery.
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p; Initially Beatrix had wanted to go to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew to speak with someone about the classification of some fungi that puzzled her. Frustrated with the lack of expertise displayed by George Murray, the Keeper of Botany at the museum, she sought someone who knew more. By 1896, however, her confidence was such that she wanted specifically to ask the Kew cryptogamist and Principal Assistant of the Herbarium, George Massee, if he knew how fungi reproduced and, more importantly, if he had ever germinated the spores of any of the higher fungi himself. But in order to get an appointment with Massee, she needed a recommendation from a well-known scientist, and a student ticket.9
It is curious that after so many years of research and drawing at the Natural History Museum no one on the staff had offered to provide her with the recommendation for Kew, or that Beatrix had not herself asked either Murray or the librarian in the botany department, Miss Annie Lorraine Smith, who was herself interested in mycology, particularly lichens. Either one could have easily put her name forward. Clearly this favour was one Beatrix would have asked of Sir William Flower if she had ever been successful in speaking with him. She felt the museum atmosphere intellectually stifling, and she was admittedly shy about initiating conversation, but she did not seem to know how to go about it. ‘I wonder why I never seem to know people,’ she wrote, not long after being rebuffed by Flower. ‘It makes one wonder whether one is presentable. It strikes me it is the way to make one not.’ As a consequence Beatrix was forced to seek a sponsor and references elsewhere.10
The most logical person to effect her desire for a student ticket was her distinguished uncle, the chemist Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe. Now retired from parliament, Roscoe had been named Vice Chancellor of the University of London, and was busy supervising important new research in public sanitation at the Lister Institute. Although Roscoe was not himself a botanist, he came from a family of renowned botanists and botanical artists. His grandfather, William Roscoe, among other accomplishments, was the first president of the Liverpool Royal Institution, a founder and promoter of the Liverpool Botanical Garden, and, like Edmund Potter, a merchant patron of the arts and sciences. He was also the author of a renowned volume of botanical illustration, Monandrian Plants of the Order Scitamineae (1824–9), and the author of the popular children’s verse. The Butterfly’s Ball and the Grasshopper’s Feast (1807), which Beatrix admired. It is hard to imagine she was not also familiar with the elder Roscoe’s botanical work, as his biography had been in the Leech library at Gorse Hall.11
Uncle Harry, as he was known, quite naturally took an interest in Beatrix’s scientific painting just as he had taken pleasure at her earlier efforts at selling her holiday cards. She had asked her uncle about getting a ticket to Kew several times, but Roscoe, however well intentioned, was busy. In February 1896, when Rupert was stricken with kidney stones, an ailment that he had endured for some years, and which required quantities of morphine to relieve, Roscoe called on him almost daily. So when Uncle Harry was laid up with the gout late that same month, Beatrix returned the kindness, and once again asked for a recommendation to Kew. Afterwards she wrote in happy anticipation, ‘Says I, he will give me a note to Mr Thiselton-Dyer.’ But once again, Roscoe forgot.12
In March, however, Uncle Harry invited the Potters to visit his country home, Woodcote, a rather remote estate but in pretty country near Horsley in Surrey. Beatrix was enormously pleased as she had not been invited there before. ‘To Woodcote,’ she wrote, ‘to stay with the Roscoes, which I enjoyed much, being splendid weather and the visit too short for friction.’ While at Woodcote, Beatrix found the exotic-looking black fungus known as witches’ butter (Exidia glandulosa) on a dead piece of log encrusted with lichens, and made a painting of it. In this congenial setting she also made several microscopic drawings, and enjoyed discussing microscopy with Uncle Harry, who advised her on laboratory techniques and gave her equipment not easily available to the amateur. Beatrix found Woodcote a conducive place in which to work, and looked forward to returning.13
Finally, in May, after another house call on Rupert, Roscoe had a ‘sudden fit of kindness of conscience’ and proposed taking Beatrix to Kew himself the following day to see the director. The next morning the two set out by train for Kew where Beatrix intended both to get a student research ticket and to show the director her drawings. ‘I think he [Uncle Harry] rather wanted to see Mr Thiselton-Dyer,’ Beatrix wrote later, ‘but he was most exceeding kind.’14
The enterprise was burdened by poor choices from the outset. Beatrix, an amateur who had never contributed so much as a note to a botanical journal, belonged to no field-club, and was totally unknown to the Kew Herbarium staff, began her quest for information at the top: a move not conducive to enthusiastic response from the professional staff. Moreover, she came on the arm of Sir Henry, one of the most highly regarded of British scientists, but a man not without significant political and scientific enemies, who was undoubtedly oblivious to the adverse effect his sponsorship might have on his niece’s desire for an objective assessment of her research. All Beatrix wanted was a student ticket so that she could look at materials in the Herbarium, and time to show her illustrations of the germination of the spores of the agarics to Massee. But as Sir Henry’s niece and protégée, Beatrix was presented as no ordinary student. Roscoe introduced her to five of the most important botanists at Kew, one of whom Beatrix describes looking as if he had ‘been dried in blotting paper under a press’, before finally finding Massee.15
Beatrix thought George Massee a ‘very pleasant, kind gentleman, who seemed to like my drawings’. He was an attractive man with soft, open features and masses of dark curly hair, who had been the first president of the British Mycological Society and was now second in command of the Herbarium. He was a protégé of the prolific cryptogamic botanist and contributor to Science-Gossip, M. C. Cooke, and had been somewhat tainted by that association after Cooke fell out of favour at Kew. Massee was naturally something of a rebel and a romantic. His appraisal of Beatrix’s drawings must have been cursory, for she reports no other comment than a polite one.16
Beatrix and Uncle Harry returned to the director’s office where Thiselton-Dyer received them. Beatrix described him as ‘a thin, elderly gentleman in summery attire, with a dry, cynical manner, puffing a cigarette, but wide awake and boastful’. She showed him her drawings and thought he was ‘pleased’ with them, though she did notice that he was ‘a little surprised’, but he made no substantive comment. He authorized her student ticket, after which he proceeded to ignore her completely. Since Uncle Harry was suddenly afraid they would miss the train, the three marched off across the Gardens to the station, Roscoe and Thiselton-Dyer in the lead, talking animatedly, while Beatrix trailed behind, indulging in a forgotten peppermint, noticing as she tagged along two of the young women gardeners in ‘knickerbockers tying up flowers’.17
Beatrix later insisted that she was not resentful that the director did not speak more to her, since she was already tired, but took satisfaction when she ‘shot in one remark which made him jump, as if they had forgotten my presence’. They had, of course. Although she was then near her thirtieth birthday, a fully mature woman who had brought scientific drawings to discuss, she got the ‘amusing feeling of being regarded as young’.18
Beatrix’s version of events is a notable exercise in Victorian denial. Her coded account gives the impression that she passively acquiesced in the gentlemen’s dismissal of her, as well as in their trivialization of her scientific drawings. She had most assuredly been ignored, but she had also been patronized and infantilized. Her response had been to assume the typical Victorian air of frailty, a sort of instant neurasthenia. Her written account focuses on the little victories of the outing: she had been introduced at ‘Imperial Kew’, and she had acquired a coveted student ticket! ‘I got home without collapse,’ she wrote, ‘a most interesting morning’.19
A month later, Beatrix returned to Kew on her own, specifically to see Massee. She was aware
of his diminished reputation, noting that ‘it is rather the fashion to make fun of him’, an attitude she could only have picked up from the staff at the Natural History Museum, but she thought it refreshing to have a conversation with anyone who has ideas, ‘even if they are not founded on very sufficient evidence’. She found Massee enthusiastic about the ‘funguses he was growing in little glass covers’. He boasted to her ‘that one of them had spores three inches long’. Beatrix found his experiment inconsequential, but not his effort or dedication, writing: ‘I opine that he has passed several stages of development into a fungus himself — I am occasionally conscious of a similar transformation.’20
On 26 June Beatrix returned to Kew again to show Massee more drawings. He suggested that she confine herself to examining one division of fungi, and recommended the pezizas, or cup fungi, as they had not been drawn as much as the agarics. It was good advice, but given for the wrong reason as neither Massee nor Beatrix knew then that the agarics were among the most difficult and unpredictable division to germinate, a quality much lamented by later mycologists.
Talking with Massee at Kew was far preferable to working with the reticent staff at the museum, but Beatrix continued to go there to work on the insect lithographs she was making for Morley College. The printing was going well, but her drawing was impeded by the inability of the entomologists to give her any real assistance. Beatrix judged them not even ‘half sharp’, and provided a classic description of the new breed of museum professional, describing them as ‘less well informed than an ordinary person on any subject outside their own, and occasionally to regard it with petulance’. So far, she was unimpressed with the natural science establishment.21
