‘Revolutions in Botany: Nation, Gender and Education in the French Translation of Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany (1796)’

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In 1801 a new botanical work appeared on French booksellers’ shelves. Entitled the Flore des jeunes personnes (Flora for Young People ), it swelled the ranks of both popular and more academic texts on the science of botany that were appearing in ever swifter succession on the francophone book markets towards the end of the eighteenth century. 1 But the Flore des jeunes personnes was no home-grown product. Rather, it was a translation by Octave Segur (1778-1818) of the immensely popular Introduction to Botany (1796) by the British Quaker writer Priscilla Wakefield (1750-1832). Segur’s French rendering of Wakefield’s work, like the original, set out in twentyeight letters the guiding principles behind Linnaean botany, with eleven engraved plates at the back illustrating the twenty-four classes underpinning this system. Its appearance did not go unnoticed by the French critical press, and it was reviewed to some acclaim both in obviously scientific and more literary journals. The Journal General de la Litterature de France (General Gazette of Literature in France ) even bestowed on it the dubious accolade of being accessible to “the simplest of minds,” given its relative brevity and avoidance of complex scientific terminology (Rev. of Flore des jeunes personnes 164). A year later the Flore had gone into a second edition and a third appeared in 1810. 2 Segur’s translation of Wakefield’s work was not only taken up in French literary and scientific journals. It was also mentioned by the Genevan botanist Auguste de Candolle in the bibliographical supplement to his Regni vegetabilis systema naturale (1818-21). But the popularity shared by the English and French editions of Wakefield’s