‘The Botanical Writings of Maria Graham’

Abstract

The early nineteenth-century traveller and author, Maria Graham (1785-1842) came of age during this period of growing interest in botany and it continued to be a central interest throughout her lifetime, forming a significant element within her writing and shaping her activity when travelling. Her involvement in plant collecting and her active participation in the international network of collectors organised by William Jackson Hooker, Professor of Botany at Glasgow University and later Director of Kew Gardens, shed light on the participation of women in scientific activity during the first few decades of the nineteenth century. I demonstrate for example, that Graham is important in challenging misconceptions about women’s ‘botanising’ being confined to their local area. Whilst this is true for the majority, especially in the eighteenth century, there were exceptions, and a few British women, mostly (although not exclusively) colonial and diplomatic wives, whose particular circumstances enabled them to travel further afield, botanised as part of the imperial project in the early nineteenth century. The ease and simplicity of use of the Linnaean system for classifying and naming plants, coupled with the publication of British translations and adaptations of Linnaeus, many of them aimed specifically at a female audience, helped to make the study of botany increasingly popular among British women. So too did the expansion of the British Empire and the growing number of travellers and explorers who returned to Britain with plant specimens and drawings. It has been argued that “natural history in general, and Linnaean botany in particular, [was] the dominant epistemological paradigm . . . of the period” in relation to travel writing (Leask 47). Johannes Fabian gives the example of Linnaeus’s 1759 Institutio Peregrinatis (scientific instructions for travellers) as evidence of “the roots of the new science of travel in natural-historical projects of observation, collection, and classification, and description” (8); Roy Bridges asserts that “the three voyages of James Cook [between 1768 and 1779] set the pattern of government demanding scientific investigation as part of a search for precise and accurate information whether or not this pointed to economic opportunities” (55); and Mary Louise Pratt has claimed that: [i]n the second half of the eighteenth century, whether or not an expedition was primarily scientific, or the traveller a scientist, natural history played a part in it. Specimen gathering, the building up of collections, the naming of new species, the recognition of known ones, became standard themes in travel and travel books. (27)