A VICTORIAN LADY’S PASTIME
The Victorian era saw an explosion of scientific discovery, led by enthusiastic and adventurous gentlemen, while women were archaically excluded; ‘protected’ from the dangers of animal science and the inappropriate realm of botany, which referenced the sexual parts of plants.
Barred from scientific institutions, such as the Royal Society and the Linnean Society of London, a few determined Victorian ladies managed to slip through a loophole in social etiquette and acceptability, which seemed to permit the pastime of collecting and pressing seaweed. They opened the floodgates to this exciting, nay daring, new hobby.
The practice was not without restrictions, however. Ladies were advised to be chaperoned, with a steadfast male arm to steady them over precarious rocky shores. Field guides issued advice on appropriate and socially acceptable attire. Pioneering seaweed collector Margaret Gatty, author of
British Sea-Weeds, published in 1848, devoted an opening section of her book to dressing appropriately. Cumbersome dresses and petticoats were socially required, but Gatty highly recommended the wearing of men’s boots for practical purposes. Gatty became a self-taught seaweed expert, identifying, pressing and drawing more than 80 specimens found on British shores, and while she spurred on women across the country to add seaweed pressings to the widespread occupation of scrapbooking, she also created an historic record of the science of the sea.
Both the author George Eliot and Queen Victoria enjoyed this increasingly popular pastime, and a folder of the Queen’s pressings, gathered on regular visits to her home Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight, remain intact at Windsor Castle. Against a tide of male-dominated pioneers, Victorian female botanist and photographer Anna Atkins surfaced.
In 1843, she published what is widely considered to be the first book to be illustrated with photographic images, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, containing images of seaweed that Anna had taken herself as the first female photographer. Not only were they a real technical achievement, but the blue print images were incredibly beautiful.