Seaweed collecting was one of the natural history ‘crazes’ in nineteenth-century Britain. Both popular pastime improving the minds and bodies of sea-side vacationers and emerging branch of science, the study of marine botany particularly attracted many women from various social backgrounds. While women had limited if any access to scientific institutions, many of them penned popular science works, teaching communities of ‘amateur’ women and children how to observe, collect, preserve and display marine botanical specimens. The popularity of the genre at mid-century was exemplified by such works as Elizabeth Anne Allom’s The Sea-Weed Collector (1841), Isabella Gifford’s The Marine Botanist (1848), Anne Pratt’s Chapters of the Common Things of the Sea-Side (1850), Margaret Gatty’s British Sea-Weeds (1863) and Louisa Lane Clarke’s The Common Seaweeds of the British Coast and Channel Islands (1865). This presentation will examine the type of instructions these popular science books circulated and show how women’s sharing of their natural history practices helped them promote their scientific expertise, especially in local marine flora.

Laurence Talairach is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès and associate researcher at the Alexandre-Koyré Center for the History of Science and Technology (Paris). Her research interests cover medicine, natural history and British literature in the long nineteenth century. She is currently co-PI of a CNRS International Emerging Action project (WOMNH-19, 2024–25), with Associate Prof. Linda Andersson Burnett (Uppsala University, Sweden), which aims to re-evaluate nineteenth-century British women’s contributions to natural history. She is the author of 5 monographs and has edited several collections of articles on the interrelations between science and literature and the popularisation of science in the nineteenth-century.

Image credit: Plates from Margaret Gatty's British Sea-Weeds (1863). Public Domain.