George Lyell and Frederick Parkhurst Dodd: authority and expertise in nineteenth-century Australian entomology

Abstract

This article focuses on the correspondence and careers of two lepidopterists, George Lyell and F. P. Dodd. Drawing on Dodd’s unpublished letters to Lyell during the late nineteenth-century rage for butterflying, it examines how private acquisition gave way to the professional activity of collecting and, in Lyell’s case, the eventual gifting of a large and significant collection of moths and butterflies to the National Museum of Victoria from 1932 through to 1946. The article also examines how issues of authority and expertise were measured and contested among collectors in this period.