Posted on Thursday 1 November 2007
The Scientific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1765-1820, edited by Neil Chambers, Pickering & Chatto (London: 2007), 6 vols. Reviewed by Lynn Glyn.
When the 25 year-old explorer Joseph Banks set off with James Cook on HMS Endeavour in 1768, with a personal retinue of assistants, draughtsmen and servants, he could hardly have foreseen that t
his would be the beginning of a career that would place him firmly at the centre of the Scientific Establishment for the next 50 years. Banks’s education at Eton and then Christ Church, Oxford, had prepared him for a privileged lifestyle as heir to estates in Lincolnshire and Derbyshire, but his early taste was for botany and the rigours of travel in pursuit of plants, animals and almost every other sort of observation that could be gathered abroad. By the time of his return with Cook, Banks had amassed unprecedented Pacific collections of natural history and ethnography, and having settled in London in 1778 he was unanimously elected President of the Royal Society, Britain’s oldest and leading philosophical society. Alongside the presidency of the Royal Society, he was a trustee of the British Museum, to which he channelled an endless array of specimens, and was an influential member of the Board of Longitude.
In this scholarly edition of Banks’s massive and scattered correspondence on science, Neil Chambers has assembled a remarkable collection of over 2,200 previously unpublished letters to and from a man whose contacts in the intellectual world of his day were almost certainly unrivalled. A prodigious task in its own right, what these letters show is how virtually no scientific enterprize of any note took place without Banks’s patronage or involvement. He developed links with government figures, naval commanders, naturalists, colonial officials, travellers, industrialists, inventors, philosophers and diplomatists, indeed with almost anyone and everyone who in some way or other shared his voracious interest in learning. This new edition of his Scientific Letters reveals the dazzling breadth and depth of his correspondence in all these fields, and will undoubtedly prove an indispensable resource for those studying not only Banks’s career but also the progress of discovery in the period as a whole. Among the multifarious activities in which Banks engaged were lightning-conductors (Benjamin Franklin), astronomy (William Herschel and the discovery of Uranus), the triangulation project that led to the creation of the Ordnance Survey, industry (the inception of gas-lighting in London), the miners’ safety-lamp (Humphry Davy) and the creation of the Royal Institution and the Rumford Fireplace (by Count Rumford).
What the edition also shows is Banks’s political impartiality and the detachment that led to his becoming a trusted advisor (and later Privy Councillor) to King George III and unofficial director of the King’s pet project of the royal gardens at Kew, while his diplomacy and generosity towards foreign philosophers ensured that the interests of science and natural philosophy were not neglected during the wars with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France. This, as might be imagined, was no small achievement on his part given some of the feelings aroused by war, but Banks was also clever enough to see the importance of engaging government support for his projects by demonstrating the usefulness of science to the state. For example, he gave advice on American wheat imports that were infested with a weevil, or used Royal Society expertise when considering a new system of weights and measures. In this guise he appears the hard-headed practical man of business and public affairs, but, significantly, he never actually held public office. His skill in keeping science centre-stage in the period is therefore all the more remarkable.
Selected not only from a wide range of under-exploited archives but also judiciously chosen for what they reveal of the man himself, the letters in Chambers’s edition bring to life Banks as an intimate friend, affectionate brother (his sister, Sarah Sophia, was also a great collector but of coins and calling cards), contemplative philosopher, and fair-minded employer and confidant. There are letters in which he apologizes for the humble fare offered to a visitor to his Soho Square home, with its treasure-trove of books and plant specimens; in which he discusses the post-mortem dissection of his good friends Daniel Solander and Edward Gibbon, or describes in serious scientific detail the new-fangled invention of tinned food. Banks the writer appears as a warm and generous individual, always forthright but never unkind or inconsiderate. The man that emerges from this edition is not only one of the giants of the Enlightenment but also someone recognizably human in his curiosity and enthusiasm for the pursuit of knowledge.
Lightly annotated, including valuable integral diagrams and tables, with a lucid introduction and an extremely useful and comprehensive Calendar (citing all known manuscripts of each letter featured), as well as giving a biography of all the correspondents themselves, these volumes will be an invaluable guide for any reader interested in furthering their understanding of eighteenth century networks of science and communication. They look forward, too, towards the next series of Banks volumes currently being prepared by Chambers, The Indian and Pacific Correspondence of Sir Joseph Banks, 1768-1820, (also 6 vols, Pickering & Chatto). No doubt these will expand on some of the themes already dealt with here, particuarly those linking science, exploration and empire. The prospect of letters on the famous voyages of James Cook, on the Bounty mission under William Bligh (which Banks organized), and on the great first circumnavigation of Australia by Matthew Flinders does much to whet the appetite. With the Scientific Letters Chambers has produced a remarkable work for which future historians of science and culture will certainly be grateful.