PUBLIC LECTURE: Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) - the Arts of Pioneering in Nineteenth-Century Natural Science

A public lecture by Professor Mary Orr, Professor of French, University of Southampton, UK.

The website of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences offers a rare glimpse of Sarah’s exquisite drawings and her life devoted to natural science:

‘Sarah Bowdich (1791-1856) was one of the more remarkable women in natural history in the 19th century. One of the earliest European women to visit tropical West Africa, she was the first woman to discover and systematically describe new species of plants and fish. She and her husband (R. Lee) studied in Paris, where Cuvier and Humboldt acted as their scientific mentors. She published 20 books, among them the rare and beautiful Fresh Water Fishes of Great Britain. It was published in 12 fascicules each with four plates hand-colored in watercolor and gold and silver foil over a 10-year period. The technique was especially effective for recreating the metallic shimmer of fish scales. It took this long, according to her daughter, because “My mother … having three children to support by her pen and pencil, could not afford to devote all her time to this one work, which accounts for the length of time it was in completion.” Each fish was painted from life and the accompanying text displays a thorough knowledge of ichthyology. Fewer than 100 copies of the book survive.’

From this synopsis, it would be reasonable to expect numerous books about Sarah’s work, particularly when the existence of women in early nineteenth-century natural science is as extraordinary as these achievements. Surprisingly, no such books exist and feminist scholars have only just begun to include Sarah in their bio-bibliographies.

This lecture will showcase the many ways in which Sarah is an even more extraordinary pioneer than this outline suggests, particularly in the domains which are erroneously accounted for here, or not mentioned at all. How for example did she come to write about the natural history of Australia? And why does it matter that we know so little about her many contributions to nineteenth-century natural science?