ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Story of a Victorian Fern Album

• In Event: Plant Humanities 2 - Rethinking Scientific Collections: Herbaria and Exsiccata

English Abstract

This paper uses a study of a Victorian fern album held within the collections of a university biological sciences department to reflect on collections-based research in the Plant Humanities. Such albums were bound volumes containing specimens of ferns, whose reproductive mechanism and ancient origins fascinated Victorians. Like all albums, they were assemblages, in this case of paper and parts of plants, arranged in a format close to, but not quite that of, a herbarium specimen. Titled “Darjeeling ferns”, the album contains 51 pages of specimens, their large gold, brown and silvery fronds carefully arranged for aesthetic effect, with clumps of orange-brown moss on the stipes. Each page has a label indicating genus, species and patria, the latter in every case being Sikkim, in the Eastern Himalayas. Historians have so often associated Victorian albums with the domestic sphere that it is easy to forget that albums were made and used in many different contexts, including within institutions of government, science, commerce, education and empire. Albums typically prompt a double set of historical questions: about the contexts in which their contents were made or collected, and also about the moments in which they were re-assembled, about their logic and mobility as a re-collection. Historians also need to consider the plurality of album functions and the challenges this poses for their curation as archives – were fern albums books for the library, specimens for the herbarium, objects of education, or keepsakes for the home? Or could they be all of these things?

Author

• Felix Driver, Royal Holloway University of London