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Teaching Your Grandfather that Eggs Suck
I've had occasion in these pages to reflect with melancholy ambivalence on my family connection to Francis Galton - but this week brought to light another connection to another rather dubious Francis, albeit the link is not in this case familial.
In the roll of causes and activities that were considered respectable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are now very much not, eugenics probably tops the list; but also present is the collecting of birds' eggs. In my attempt to build a small library of Butler productions, I recently bought a copy of great-great-uncle Arthur's British Birds, Their Nests and Eggs, published in six volumes in the mid 1890s. I've left the armchair in shot, to give a sense of scale:
I do like that quintessentially 1890s lettering, don't you? The illustrations within are mostly line drawings, by Frohawk, but he also provided several full colour plates of various birds' eggs:
Of course, there's nothing wrong with a scientific book providing this kind of information. This is a book of facts about birds, right, not a collector's manual? I'm far from having read the whole text, but so far I haven't caught Uncle Arthur with his hand in a nest - however, his disarmingly conversational descriptions, full of personal reminiscence as they are, reveal him as an avid trapper and breeder of wild birds, which is hardly much better.
What really struck me, though, was the inscription at the front of my copy:
The recipient, Francis C. R. Jourdain, was at this time a mere curate, and had as yet published nothing on ornithology, but that would change within a couple of years of reading Arthur's book. Of course, I'm not claiming that the shells fell from his eyes on that occasion, although the volumes contain numerous memoranda of errata in what I assume is Jourdain's hand, and I think we can say that he read the work with close attention.
From around 1899 to his death in 1940 he would be an ornithologist of renown - though with a reputation for ill temper that earned him the title Pastor Pugnax, so Wiki tells me. With Lord Rothschild, he founded the British Oological Association, renamed in his honour at his death as the Jourdain Society. In an age when stealing eggs had ceased to be seen as a respectable hobby for either scholars or schoolboys this organisation became notorious, and a police raid at a Society dinner in the mid-1990s led to six convictions. What a difference a century makes!
I'm not sure who the giver, Frances Jourdain, was. Wife? Sister? Not his mother - she was Emily, apparently. His siblings were quite a distinguished lot, it turns out. Among the rest, I'll just mention Margaret Jourdain, who besides her personal achievements became the partner of Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of my favourite mid-century English novelists. Does anyone else read her now?
Admittedly, inspiring Francis Jourdain to steal eggs probably isn't in the same league, morally speaking, as inspiring the Nazis to practise eugenics. But it does continue a rather sinister trend. To quote one of my favourite lines in Compton-Burnett (the speaker is a young child, the subject a hen), “Perhaps it ought not to do a thing that ends in dying."
In the roll of causes and activities that were considered respectable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but are now very much not, eugenics probably tops the list; but also present is the collecting of birds' eggs. In my attempt to build a small library of Butler productions, I recently bought a copy of great-great-uncle Arthur's British Birds, Their Nests and Eggs, published in six volumes in the mid 1890s. I've left the armchair in shot, to give a sense of scale:
I do like that quintessentially 1890s lettering, don't you? The illustrations within are mostly line drawings, by Frohawk, but he also provided several full colour plates of various birds' eggs:
Of course, there's nothing wrong with a scientific book providing this kind of information. This is a book of facts about birds, right, not a collector's manual? I'm far from having read the whole text, but so far I haven't caught Uncle Arthur with his hand in a nest - however, his disarmingly conversational descriptions, full of personal reminiscence as they are, reveal him as an avid trapper and breeder of wild birds, which is hardly much better.
What really struck me, though, was the inscription at the front of my copy:
The recipient, Francis C. R. Jourdain, was at this time a mere curate, and had as yet published nothing on ornithology, but that would change within a couple of years of reading Arthur's book. Of course, I'm not claiming that the shells fell from his eyes on that occasion, although the volumes contain numerous memoranda of errata in what I assume is Jourdain's hand, and I think we can say that he read the work with close attention.
From around 1899 to his death in 1940 he would be an ornithologist of renown - though with a reputation for ill temper that earned him the title Pastor Pugnax, so Wiki tells me. With Lord Rothschild, he founded the British Oological Association, renamed in his honour at his death as the Jourdain Society. In an age when stealing eggs had ceased to be seen as a respectable hobby for either scholars or schoolboys this organisation became notorious, and a police raid at a Society dinner in the mid-1990s led to six convictions. What a difference a century makes!
I'm not sure who the giver, Frances Jourdain, was. Wife? Sister? Not his mother - she was Emily, apparently. His siblings were quite a distinguished lot, it turns out. Among the rest, I'll just mention Margaret Jourdain, who besides her personal achievements became the partner of Ivy Compton-Burnett, one of my favourite mid-century English novelists. Does anyone else read her now?
Admittedly, inspiring Francis Jourdain to steal eggs probably isn't in the same league, morally speaking, as inspiring the Nazis to practise eugenics. But it does continue a rather sinister trend. To quote one of my favourite lines in Compton-Burnett (the speaker is a young child, the subject a hen), “Perhaps it ought not to do a thing that ends in dying."