On This Day 210 Years Ago
Just two weeks since her last letter of 8th March, Ellen again wrote to Dawson Turner, botanist and banker of Yarmouth, Norfolk, England. Ellen had recently turned 26 years old, her birthday was on 17th March (St Patrick’s Day).
She had received a letter from Dawson Turner (the letter has not survived) in which he tells of the death of his youngest child, Katherine, born in the previous year. This is the Turners’ fifth child to die, of ten children born so far.
As with the last news post with the letter of 8th March, you can choose either to read the letter of 23rd March 1811 HERE first, or go through the notes about some of its themes before you read the letter itself.
‘Living in the extreme of retirement’
After being at school between Dublin and Donnybrook, Ellen had stayed on in Dublin, living in the household of Dr Whitley Stokes, Professor of Physic (Medicine) at Trinity College Dublin, so she would have had something to measure her ‘retirement’ in Ballylickey against. She has been back home in Ballylickey since 1804, we think, maybe earlier. Dr Johnson’s Dictionary (1775) defines retirement as 1. Private abode, secret habitation, 2. Private way of life.
Engraving of a liverwort
William Jackson Hooker was a very accomplished botanical artist as well as botanist and he did his own illustrations for his book on liverworts, British Jungermanniae. It was a seriously large and expensive book. It was folio size (470 x 294mm) which is just above A3 and there was a page of drawings for each plant. Hooker drew and painted them, and they were then engraved and printed, and each one hand painted in watercolour. Yes, each drawing, in each copy of the book, was hand painted, as was the way with all colour illustrations in botany books of the time. Many botany books had very few (if any) colour illustrations, whereas a few large and expensive ones specialised in having ample illustrations. In Ellen’s view, there was little value in having a book on botanical classification without an illustration of each species.
The book, British Jungermanniae, was issued in parts (from 1812 to 1816). In 1811, some engravings were ready. Dawson Turner sent one of Jungermannia pusilla to Ellen as a gift. Above is the engraving from the book. Plate 69. It is available to view at https://archive.org/details/Britishjungerma00Hook/page/LXIX./mode/2up
‘My thoughts of the arrangement of Fuci’
Dawson Turner was a leading botanist, a member of the Royal Society and the Linnean Society. He was a friend of Norfolk botanist, James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society and editor of English Botany. Dawson Turner was in regular correspondence and meetings with many other leading figures of his day.
He had for some years been working on his own large and expensive botany book on one huge genus of seaweeds, Fuci, with ample illustrations (mostly by William Jackson Hooker and a few by Ellen Hutchins) titled Historia Fucorum.
Anne Secord, Affiliated Research Scholar, Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge has researched and written on Dawson Turner. She takes up the story:
“Turner’s delay in completing the work was due to extreme difficulty of arranging seaweeds into some sort of classificatory order. Ellen Hutchins was possibly the only person to whom Turner could confess how hard he was finding this. It is through their correspondence that we learn that Turner paid Hutchins the compliment of asking whether she had ever considered the question. ‘If you have’, he confessed, ‘you will in the highest degree oblige & serve me by a communication of your ideas. Tell me how to distribute the British species, & I shall have such a foundation as I can easily build my system upon.’”(See HERE for more by Anne Secord on Ellen’s story and the correspondence between her and Dawson Turner.)
In a letter of 9th November 1810, Ellen had responded to Dawson Turner’s request, and she wrote:
‘You ask me if I have ever thought on the arrangement of the submersed Algæ [seaweeds including Fuci]. I used to amuse myself with conjecturing what your future arrangement may be, but found it a subject greatly beyond my power of seeing into & that one day’s experience generally contradicted that of the former. My views must be very confused & my opinion of little value, yet as you ask me I venture to tell you what I have thought, supposing that even the conjectures of a person who is out of the way of being prejudiced by other people’s opinions may interest you & that if I have chanced to see any part of your system it would give you pleasure.’
She went on to give a long and detailed account of how she thought the submerged seaweeds should be regrouped. This letter of Ellen’s has survived, and it’s such a shame that we don’t have Dawson Turner’s response to her. Seaweeds were not properly understood, and the groupings into species have been significantly altered over time (indeed it continues now). As far as we know, no study has ever been made of Ellen’s views expressed in the letter of 9th November 1810 and in smaller comments in many other letters, or of the place they have in the history of understanding seaweeds.
Her 9th November 1810 letter is cross-hatched or over-written, meaning that she has filled the page with writing, then turned it sideways and written over it with a second page of writing. This has made it very difficult to read. The Ellen Hutchins Festival organised the transcription of the letter (along with all the others that had not previously been transcribed by Professor Michael Mitchell for his Occasional Paper for Glasnevin). We are able to make these transcriptions available to researchers interested in studying them (with the agreement of the Wren Library, Trinity College Cambridge, where Ellen’s letters are held).
‘I do not forget shells’
Ellen collected shells as well as plants, and found at least two new species. Very early on in their correspondence, Dawson Turner had offered to send Ellen shells ‘if you collect the British species’. His offer was for ones ‘from his different correspondents’ as the shore at Yarmouth he explained did not produce any. (In a later letter he described it as ‘this horrible sandy flat’.) Ellen replied on shells that she had ‘collected such as I could for my good friend and instructor in botany, Doctor Stokes of Dublin.’ In early 1810, Dawson Turner wrote:
‘I have hardly left myself room to thank you in the name of my daughter for your kind offer of shells: she has so few, and so few means of collecting, that for any British or foreign she would be much obliged to you.’
Ellen, it appears, was collecting shells for Dawson Turner’s eldest daughter, Maria (1797-1872).
Read Ellen’s letter of 23rd March 1811 HERE.
Madeline Hutchins
Researcher on Ellen and her great-great-grandniece