ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The Life-History of the Pencil: Women and Graptolithology in the Field and the Museum, 1890–1923

• In Event: Old Collections, New Stories:  Doing Natural History Humanities in Cambridge and Beyond

English Abstract

During the Easter holidays of 1890, Cambridge geology students – men and women – descended upon the Lake District. One rainy day confined them to Keswick’s museums, where they learnt about the ‘the Life-History of the Pencil’, but the students were in the region to discover not its graphite but its graptolites. These benthic or planktic invertebrates, resembling pencil scratches, had recently become the most important fossils for correlating Lower Palaeozoic strata. Investigating the Lake District’s little-known Skiddaw Slate graptolites promised to help harmonise the ages of strata stretching from Sweden to Quebec to Victoria’s Bendigo goldfields. Students collecting graptolites to present to Cambridge’s Woodwardian Museum contributed to this global project of rationalisation and economic utility. 

A graptolite’s rough age could often be identified in the field, but precise identification was specialised. Translating a tiny, ambiguous specimen into a published proxy for the use of stratigraphers across the world taxed judgement, eyesight, and illustration technologies. To understand how this Palaeozoic writing was made legible, my paper focuses on two Cambridge-trained graptolithologists: Gertrude Elles (1872–1960), a Scot whose career began with the Skiddaw Slates in the 1890s and climaxed with magisterial studies of graptolite evolution in the 1920s, and Ethel Shakespear, née Wood (1871–1946), illustrator of their famous multi-part Monograph of the British Graptolites (1901–1918). Building on scholarship about scientific seriality and engaging with fossil collections hitherto examined almost exclusively by scientists, I will show how Elles and Wood wrestled with the challenges of making graptolites into scientific objects.

Author

• Richard Fallon, University of Cambridge