Teaching Your Grandfather that Eggs Suck

[steepholm]

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."

Comments

[jadelennox]

Every time you make one of these posts I'm so in awe of just having, not just any family history at all, but so much recorded works. Obviously part of this is the standard plaint of the Ashkenazi, but your family is also so interesting.

Don't complain too much about the bird eggs. Whenever white Americans can trace their family histories, they inevitably discover that at least one ancestor owned at least one slave. Perhaps this is not a PETA-approved statement, but a little nest-robbing seems fine, in comparison! (A convenient side effect of having no traceable history is that I don't know if anyone in my ancestry sucked! It's unknowable!)

[nancylebov]

There are white Americans whose forebears came here after slavery was pretty much ended.

[jadelennox]

Indeed, I was speaking hyperbolically. I am a white American, as well, and my grandfather came to America less than a century ago. And there are some white Americans whose ancestors were here before abolition whose families never owned slaves, although that turns out to be much more rare than people think.

[nancylebov]

I hate that sort of hyperbolic talk. For good or ill, I'm not going into detail about what I think of people who engage it.

[calimac]

I had thought the original statement was not hyperbolic, but limiting whites to "old-time" whites, e.g. mostly Anglo-Saxons, and not including the likes of Southern and Eastern Europeans (including most of the Jews) who arrived between the 1870s and 1920s and consequently could not have owned slaves, or even the likes of the Irish, who began arriving in numbers in the 1830s, but who lived mostly in northeastern cities and did not own slaves either.

In that limitation, it would indeed not be very hyperbolic, as I've noted of those who've traced their ancestry. Indeed, if they had ancestors who were northern states gentry in the 18th century, they too may well have owned slaves. For instance, one does not think of President Martin Van Buren, born near Albany, New York, in 1782, as a slave-owner, but he was one.

[steepholm]

I'm very happy to lend you my family to be interested in! And delighted you find them so. I'm very lucky in that so many of them did leave works behind, which in these internet days can be found and researched without too much effort (though at some expense).

[larryhammer]

I haven't actually read any Compton-Burnett, but she's on my radar of someone to eventually try.

[steepholm]

I do recommend her.

[calimac]

All I know of Ivy Compton-Burnett is the strangely comic, or comically strange, anecdote - told by Kingsley Amis in his memoirs - of the time Philip Toynbee visited to interview her. Amis alludes to Margaret Jourdain, but not by name, IIRC he calls her a "paid companion," which seems doubtfully true.

[steepholm]

Very doubtfully, I'd say. Not that Jourdain was particularly rich, but she was a pretty eminent person in her field, that of furniture history and design. From DNB:

It was her knowledgeable and authoritative contributions that helped transform Country Life from a relatively lightweight, romantic magazine into what Walter Runciman called 'the keeper of the architectural conscience of the nation' (Spurling, Secrets of a Woman's Heart, 90). She spearheaded a shift in taste away from Victorian ostentation, fussiness, and clutter to an earlier simplicity and severity. In Furniture in England from 1660 to 1760 (1914), together with its companion volume on decoration, she was the first to rediscover English Palladian design, to insist on the importance of historical context, and to rehabilitate the virtually forgotten William Kent (her monograph, The Work of William Kent, appeared in 1948). [...] In the furniture world she had, in the words of Ralph Edwards, keeper of the Victoria and Albert Museum's woodwork department, 'few rivals and no superiors' (private information). Edwards was one of a whole generation of young men, trained by Margaret in the 1920s and 1930s, who went on to fill major posts in the national museums, the National Trust, and the great London auction houses. Younger women whose careers blossomed under her guidance included Joan Evans, Freya Stark, and Ivy Compton-Burnett.

But Amis was never one to shy away from lazy sexist assumptions.

[lilliburlero]

I got a bit excited there because Francis's eldest sister was Eleanor Frances Jourdain of the Moberly-Jourdain Incident, and she used Frances (Lamont) as a pseudonym in An Adventure. But the DNB gives his wife's name as Frances Emmeline (they married in 1896), so I think it's probably her?

[steepholm]

I think you must be right. I have to admit that I had some difficulty seeing the middle initial as anything but a G., but luckily she also bought him Volume 2 a few months later. Here, it does seem at least possible that an E is intended, but I have to say that in a family with such an abundance of Franceses more clarity would have been helpful.

[ashlyme]

This is the kind of book I'd lust after - but I could never condone the hobby. I'd be much happier poring over lushly-coloured plates than stealing eggs from their nest. At best I'd bring home abandoned shells found by chance. Thanks for sharing this with us. I need to explore some Compton-Burnett, it seems.

[steepholm]

I highly recommend Compton-Burnett.