A Naturalist’s Notebooks

Abstract

A Naturalist’s Notebooks Beth Fowkes Tobin (bio) This essay uses a set of notebooks written by the naturalist Dr. Richard Pulteney (1730–1801) to explore how notebooks, as a paper-based technology, operated in the world of Enlightenment natural history. Eighteenth-century notebooks, ranging from the homemade to the commercially available, were basically sheets of paper stitched together, characterized by blank pages offering themselves up to users to fill with whatever struck them as important enough to remember.1 Notebooks were used in a variety of social settings, sharing much in common with artists’ sketchbooks, poets’ commonplace books, traveller’s journals, ladies’ pocketbooks, and diarists’ memorandum books in that these book-like objects were designed to be a repository for the user who could store, manage, and retrieve data, usually in the form of words, numbers, or images. In general, a notebook’s appeal depended on its portability and flexibility as an archiving tool, and it often dealt with data that was in process, preliminary and contingent rather than polished and finished. Notebooks were effective means of storing data, but their social uses could extend beyond their utility as memory-keeping and data-retrieval devices to operate in the world in powerful ways. Notebooks, designed to manage information, circulated as material objects within the social world of natural history, and as such they were used to forge ties between naturalists, amateurs and professionals [End Page 131] alike, and to establish expertise and authority within these circles in late Georgian Britain. I first came across Pulteney’s notebooks several years ago in London’s Natural History Museum when I was researching Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, and her relationships with other naturalists, including Pulteney. They corresponded regularly for over fifteen years, working with each other as they catalogued their shell collections. When these lovely little booklets were delivered to my desk at the museum’s Zoology Library, I fell in love with them at first sight. (fig. 1) Their size—small enough to fit in one’s hands comfortably—made me want to pick them up. But what captured my attention (and heart) was their handmade materiality: stitched down the middle with thick thread, one bound with marbled paper, another with sturdy blue paper, another with cream. The interiors—made of cast off paper, including an old printed lease and an advertisement for cocoa—were endearing. I data-mined these notebooks, using them to find evidence to prove that Duchess of Portland did not just buy all her shell specimens; she had gathered many of her English shells herself along the Dorset coast. Two summers ago, I returned to the library to clear up a few queries about the duchess, and I found myself requesting these notebooks again even though I did not have a particular reason for doing so other than wanting to see them again. As I stood over them, handling them, admiring them, I felt that these notebooks were important in and of themselves, not as carriers of information only, but as entities unto themselves. To access their significance as material objects, we need to “make them talk,” as Bruno Latour has written, referring to the problem of how to recover the agency that objects (Latour’s “non-human subjects”) possess in their assemblages with humans. More specifically, we need to ask what these notebooks did for Pulteney.2 This essay begins with a description of the notebooks as data management devices and moves to a discussion of how this capacity for storage was used by Pulteney to navigate the socially complex world of Enlightenment natural history. Dr. Richard Pulteney, a physician, was one of the founding members of the Linnean Society, a well-respected amateur botanist, and author of a volume on Dorset’s natural history and two books promoting the Linnaean system of classification.3 Though a minor figure in the pantheon of British [End Page 132] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. One of Dr. Richard Pulteney’s handmade shell notebooks. © The Trustees of the Natural History Museum, London. [End Page 133] naturalists, Pulteney was well connected within the Enlightenment world of natural history, corresponding with Sir Joseph Banks...