How sweet … a kind friend’s letter
On this day 210 years ago, 7th December 1812, Ellen Hutchins wrote to Dawson Turner, beginning “How sweet a preparation of the medium of life is a kind friend’s letter!”
By 1812, they had been corresponding for five years and a strong and deep friendship had developed between them. The letter covers many topics — from the botanical ones of seaweeds, freshwater algae and liverworts, to Turner’s youngest daughter, Ellen, and featuring Napoleon and Lord Byron on the way. It is a delightful piece of writing.
Some notes are useful to explain period details, plants/algae and people. Either read these first, or go straight to the letter Here.
Blister
Ellen wrote that she had “taken a blister from her side, where I had for a long time past a fixed pain.” In the early 1800s it was a common medical practice of placing a caustic substance, such as mustard powder (known as a blister) against the skin causing blistering. This was thought to help restore balance in the body and benefit the organ beneath the blister.
Your little Ellen
Dawson Turner had named his daughter born in July 1811 after Ellen and made her the child’s godmother.
Conferva dissiliens
This is a freshwater green alga, but names have changed so much, it has not been able to be identified. Ellen spent five days admiring it through her microscope. She had a great appreciation of beauty as well as admiration for the wonders of botanical science. There is a whole world of magnificent detail out there only visible through a hand lens, microscope or by enlarging images of plants and algae with a mobile phone’s camera. Maybe five minutes is more realistic for most of us, but this is time well spent.
Vaucher
Vaucher (1763 – 1841) was a Swiss botanist “who is remembered for his research involving the developmental history of algae. In his 1803 treatise Histoire des Conferves d’eau douce, he described the process of conjugation in certain algae as a distinct sexual process. The phenomena of conjugation is a means of fertilization that takes place in green algae such as Spirogyra.” www.dpedia.org
Ellen had tried to source Vaucher’s book herself from Dublin without success and she asked Dawson Turner if he could send her a copy, which he kindly did.
Dillwyn’s plates
Lewis Dillwyn, botanist, of Swansea in Wales, had in 1809 completed publication of his major work, British Confervae, on what was then a huge genus of marine and freshwater algae, now sub divided into many genera. As with Dawson Turner’s great work on the Fuci, another huge genus of marine algae (seaweeds), the book featured a drawing (plate) of each species. Ellen was a fervent believer in the necessity of having a detailed and accurate drawing as well as the description. (Hist. Fuc. was an abbreviation of the impossibly long title of Turner’s book.)
Jungermanniae
These are liverworts, close cousins of mosses, which were being studied by William Jackson Hooker, a botanist of the same age as Ellen. He was also supported and helped (what we would now call mentored) by Dawson Turner. Hooker was preparing material for his huge book, British Jungermanniae, and Ellen supplied a significant number of new and rare species to him.
Naming names and research values
The Jungermanniae mentioned are named after leading botanists, Charles Lyell and James Townsend Mackay. Ellen wrote “was I not a desperate blunderer about J. Lyelli.” Here she is accepting a mistake she made and is willing to revise her view in the light of further evidence. In a list of core values of researchers compiled in 2016 by the scientific journal, Nature, this is seen as an important one. I recently contributed to an article hosted on RTÉ Brainstorm which compares Ellen’s qualities as a researcher with the list from Nature. https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2022/0920/1324401-ellen-hutchins-ireland-first-female-botanist-ucc-eri/
Southey and Byron
Robert Southey was made Poet Laureate in 1813. He was closely associated with Coleridge. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Southey
A few years ago I found Ellen’s copy of Byron’s Childe Harold, it having been on the bookshelves of various Hutchins family members over the 210 years.
Two Psyches
These are written about by Dawson Turner in a letter of 8th October 1811:
“This same partner of mine [from the bank] published a few years ago a short poem, that I should be very glad to have an opportunity of sending you, a translation of Apuleius’ story of Cupid and Psyche, so unlike that by your late beautiful countrywoman* that it is impossible to compare them. One of his stanzas, where Psyche led by her curiosity, sees Cupid naked in the bed, appears to me singularly happy & as singularly just; for all preceding authors had represented the god as a mere child, & have painted him so, even tho’ he was then married. My friend says
“Not such a young and frolic child,
“As poets feign, or sculptors plan;
“No, no, she sees, with transport wild,
“Eternal beauty veil’d in man.”
*Mrs Tighe https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Notable_Irishwomen/Mrs._Tighe
Dawson Turner, a married man, was writing to Ellen, a single woman!
The 1812 letters
Ellen’s letters to Dawson Turner, all seventy of them, were carefully bound into big volumes of Dawson Turner Correspondence, alongside letters from some major ‘names’ of the day and are held in the Wren Library at Trinity College Cambridge. We are confident that we have all those she wrote to him that survived the postal system and reached Great Yarmouth. On the other hand, we don’t have all the letters that Dawson Turner wrote to Ellen. Fifty have survived and are held by the Library and Archives of Kew Gardens but only one of these is from 1812, dated 23rd February. It is clear from Ellen’s letters that she received many more.
Another On This Day post like this one will be made for 16th December and before the end of the year, I will post a transcription of all the 1812 letters. The transcription of all the 1811 letters can be accessed Here. Earlier ‘On This Day’ posts with notes on letters in early 1811 start Here.
Read the letter Ellen wrote on 7th December 1812 Here.
Madeline Hutchins
Researcher on Ellen Hutchins and her great-great-grandniece
7th December 2022