This 18th-century shell collection, saved from a skip, tells a story of empire, explorers and women’s equality

Within the Eighties, a shell assortment that included specimens from Captain Prepare dinner’s remaining voyage was unintentionally thrown right into a skip and believed misplaced perpetually. However a lot to the enjoyment of scientists, final week it was rediscovered secure and sound and donated to English Heritage.

Her title won’t have made the headlines, however the lady who initially collected the shells, Bridget Atkinson (1732-1814), made a big contribution to pure historical past within the 18th century.

Atkinson was certainly one of many ladies all for shells at the moment. It was a pursuit that drew in each aristocratic and center class fans. Amongst them have been well-known collectors, such because the thinker and poet Margaret Cavendish and cousins Jane and Mary Parminter, the elite homeowners of the shell-encrusted home A la Ronde, in Exmouth.

Accumulating shells was a typical previous time in Enlightenment Britain. This was a interval wherein elite girls have been changing into more and more within the sciences, they usually pursued its disciplines with wild enthusiasm.

That is demonstrated within the reputation of books similar to Newtonianism for Girls by Francesco Algarotti. Printed in 1737, the e-book was a bestseller and reprinted many instances because the 18th century progressed.

Botany and pure historical past have been deemed significantly acceptable automobiles for ladies’s mental curiosity. Girls engaged in these practices have been inspired to gather specimens, create shows and research associated literature, usually written by feminine authors.

Because of this, the early nineteenth century noticed the publication of varied pure historical past books written by girls, similar to The Conchologist’s Companion by Mary Roberts (1824), a sequence of letters on the properties of varied sorts of shell.

Atkinson’s assortment

Whereas Atkinson wasn’t uncommon as a lady accumulating shells, the extent of her acquisitions units them other than many different collections of the interval. She acquired as many as 1,200 shells all through her lifetime, with many sourced from far-flung areas throughout the globe.

Atkinson was from a rich and genteel, however not aristocratic, household, and in consequence, she will not be as properly generally known as different shell collectors of the time. However, her assortment contains plenty of vital specimens of endangered and guarded species. Many have been amassed from her connection to George Dixon, an armourer on Captain Prepare dinner’s third and remaining world voyage.

Whereas her surviving correspondence reveals her to be a less-than-perfect author, Atikinson’s experience in pure historical past led to her changing into the primary feminine honorary member of the Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne in 1813. Girls have been nonetheless deemed ineligible for full membership till 1877.

Atkinson’s assortment doesn’t merely replicate the scientific pursuits of a curious particular person. A research of their acquisition reveals a broad, even international, system at play. Quite a few her shells have been gifted to Atkinson by way of the networks of the British empire.

A number of members of Atkinson’s household have been employed in imperial roles. Her son and brother-in-law have been each part of the mercantile colonising forces of the East India Firm, and the latter even owned sugar plantations in Jamaica. This implies the Atkinson household have been direct beneficiaries of the enslavement of Black women and men within the Caribbean.

Atkinson used these connections to her benefit, writing to her relations residing overseas to ask for shells and even imploring household pals to do the identical. In 1796, her buddy Mary Yates wrote to her son John, who then lived in Virginia to cross on Atkinson’s request for “snail shells picked off the bottom …the bigger the higher”.

Conveyed by way of the very routes and mechanics of the British empire, Atkinson’s collections are indivisible from the broader historical past of colonialism. That is one thing that future shows of the shells will inevitably have to deal with.

The historical past of Atkinson’s assortment

Regardless of their apparent significance at this time, Atkinson’s shells haven’t at all times been handled with reverence. The gathering was handed down by way of numerous generations of the Atkinson household earlier than ultimately being acquired by Newcastle College within the Nineteen Thirties (then generally known as King’s School). It was on this time that the shells have been misplaced.

Having been discarded right into a skip, an eagle-eyed marine zoologist named John Buchanan rescued them from obscurity. Going by way of his belongings after his dying, his household found the gathering and donated it to English Heritage.

This isn’t an uncommon story. Seen as trifling pursuits and trivial pursuits, an absence of curiosity in girls’s collections of shells, each decorative and scientific, has led to many examples being misplaced over the centuries.

The nice sale of Margaret Cavendish’s assortment in 1786 is a typical instance. Her shells and corals from Britain, Italy and the Indian Ocean have been all positioned all on the market, alongside these collected for ornamental functions. Like Atkinson’s assortment, Cavendish’s shells included specimens from Prepare dinner’s travels. However even this vital affiliation didn’t save them from being scattered broadly.

As Atkinson’s shells reveal, the gathering of those lovely pure objects crossed continents, informed vivid histories of imperialism and established girls’s very important position within the improvement of pure historical past as a self-discipline. Their forthcoming show at Chester’s Roman Fort and Museum will be sure that they proceed to inform these tales lengthy into the long run.

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