In which Anna and Judith travel back to the degenerate world of Eighteenth-century London. Expect user-focused content and design, a performance in rhyming verse and a little gin.
When Elizabeth Blackwell’s husband ends up in a debtor’s prison, she thinks writing and illustrating her own book will save the day, but it’s a mammoth task.
Elizabeth was the first British woman to author a herbal (a comprehensive book that readers could use to identify medicinal plants). Here’s volume one of her finished book, A Curious Herbal, published in 1737:
And here’s Volume 2:
Connect with Anna & Judith
Find more information and images at the Bookshapers website.
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Useful links
See Elizabeth’s letter of introduction to Hans Sloane at the British Library.
‘A Curious Herbal as Material Witness’ at the Linnean Society.
‘Will the Real Elizabeth Blackwell Please Stand Up?’ at NYBG.
Recorded by Anna Faherty and Judith Watts. Edited and produced by Anna Faherty.
Incidental music: Concerti Grosso, Opus 3 No 2 in B-flat major, composed by George Frideric Handel in 1734 and performed by The London Baroque Orchestra. Available at Wikimedia Commons.
Sound effects: The sound of the typewriter came from tams_kp on freesound.org.
Theme music: Folk guitar music track from Dvideoguy on freesound.org | Typewriter sound effect from tams_kp on freeounds.org | Print shop sound effect from ecfike on freesound.org
Introduction
There’s this traditional idea of a writer or artist as someone tormented by their artistic genius, but what if you need to become a writer in order to overcome some challenging personal circumstances? You’d need to focus less on artistic perfection and more on satisfying your readers.
Phenomenal, actually, that she would do all of that. In spite of her husband…
Who she definitely should have left in prison.
Welcome to Bookshapers, the show that explores curious stories about the people and technology behind what we read.
This episode: Botanica Blackwellia.
I’m Anna Faherty.
And I’m Judith watts.
We’re both publishers and writers. And we both share a nerdy fascination in the fine print of how books are written, made, marketed and read.
Anna
So you don’t know anything about what we can talk about today, which is exciting.
Today, Judith, we’re boldly going further into the past than we’ve gone before.
Judith
Which century?
Anna
Well we’re going back to 1734, in London,
Judith
I’m excited!
Anna
And let’s imagine for the purposes of this podcast that you’re married to a man who, after working as a printers “corrector” (what we’d call a proofreader today), set up as a printer himself. And he’s based, like many other printers, on the strand. And he’s got some business printing books.
Are you proud of him?
Judith
I think I’m very proud of him. I think I might hope that he might have a demise so that I could join in as well.
Anna
Well, he does have somewhat of a demise, but not quite what you’re hoping for maybe. Unfortunately, your hubby doesn’t belong to the Stationers’ Company.
Judith
Ahh.
Anna
What do you think that means?
Judith
Well, I think that the Stationers’ Company were all powerful. I think, around that time, still, they had all the monopoly on the printing. So, I would imagine my hubby would be having to hide and run.
Anna
Well, yes, because the Stationers’ Company was a sort of guild in London at the time, and thanks to a royal charter that they had… They had, as you said, a monopoly. They held the exclusive right to print books at that time. If you weren’t a member, you were basically doing something very naughty.
He also hadn’t served the required printing apprenticeship, which I think took about four years.
Judith
So do you have to become like a master of printing then?
Anna
I think in order to belong to the Stationers’ Company, perhaps you had to have done the apprenticeship. But either way, you needed to have done the apprenticeship, and you needed to be a member of the Stationers’ Company, and he’s neither.
So, he’s taken to court, and he’s found guilty of basically operating as a printer without having served that apprenticeship. He’s fined 40 shillings, which is about getting on for £500 today, and he can’t pay it. So he ends up in a debtors prison, bankrupt.
Judith
That’s shocking punishment for the crime of printing. What was he printing?
Anna
Just ordinary books. There’s no… There’s no sedition or anything going on.
Judith
Severe punishment.
Anna
Yes. So he’s just breaking the trade laws. And, as you say, he was punished for being entrepreneurial to some extent.
So you’re probably not so proud of him now, are you?
Judith
Not feeling proud of him now…
Anna
Yeah. And what’s worse, if you’re in this scenario, is that you’re left at home, a woman without a functional husband, but one that’s still alive. In London in 1734. And for context, that’s about 80 years before the period depicted in everyone’s go to historical reference for the 18th century: Bridgerton.
Judith
Well, there’s some printing going on in Bridgerton. Printing of pamphlets…
Anna
Indeed, with Lady Whistledown. So women are involved in printing at that point. It’s a whole monarch earlier, actually, than Bridgerton. Because George the Second, England’s last German-born king, is on the throne. And London – it’s one of the largest cities in Europe. It’s a bustling trade centre, but it’s also a squalid disease-ridden place, with thieves lurking in every shadow. And you’re a woman alone.
There’s a fantastically titled book called Disorderly Women in 18th Century London, which I’m sure you’d love to read.
Judith
I would.
Anna
And in that the author describes London at the time as “the degenerate heart of the nation”.
In our scenario, Judith, you’ve no money, you’ve got a small child. You’re living in the degenerate heart of a nation. What are you going to do to make ends meet?
Judith
Well, the first thing that would come to mind for me would be to work with my body – to be involved in sex work of some kind. Well, I think given that I expressed an interest in whatever my husband was doing, that I actually might want to creep into wherever his workshop was, and fire up the letterpress and just do something to make money.
Anna
I love the idea of you creeping into kind of a disused printers.
This is, I should say, the real-life predicament that a 35-year old woman named Elizabeth Blackwell found herself in. I should point out that she’s not the more well-known woman named Elizabeth Blackwell, who, about a century later, became the first woman to earn a medical degree in America. But our Elizabeth Blackwell, when I thought about it, I thought she’s probably got three options, two of which you’ve said.
Interestingly, women at that time were permitted to carry on their husband’s printing businesses if the husbands died. And I find that fascinating because they obviously hadn’t served the required apprenticeship. But somehow they’re allowed to do that.
Judith
I do think that’s, I can see that, well, it’s an important thing. In as much as I know there were many more women working in the industry at that time than we actually think there are. And that’s just because they’re not recorded, their businesses would have continued on as their husbands’ names. So actually yet again, women not recorded as working in the industry.
Anna
Yes, familiar story there.
But in this scenario, Elizabeth’s husband was neither dead nor licensed by the stationers. So, his printshop had been closed down and she couldn’t run it. She couldn’t creep in.
Option two, maybe she became a sex worker. And that was obviously a potentially lucrative option at the time. And the Strand, where Alexander’s printshop had been based, was known as a place where streetwalkers congregated. So she was in the right place, but there’s no evidence she got involved in sex work.
And thirdly, I thought she might have got caught up in some way in the gin trade.
Judith
Oh.
Anna
Because there weren’t many ways in which a woman could be economically independent at the time.
Judith
So how do you get caught up in the gin trade? Although that might be an aside.
Anna
Well, it’s a good aside, though. Gin wasn’t as unusual as it might sound because at the time, London was in what’s been called the Gin Craze.
Judith
Ooh.
Anna
Gin was the drink of choice for everyone: for the urban poor, for skilled workers and even for women.
Judith
Gin was also the choice of Florence Nightingale, I think, for patients.
Anna
Oh well, it’s got lots of purposes, and lots of benefits. And for the first time in London gin meant that women participated in casual drinking. But gin changed women’s lives in more ways than one because it created economic opportunities, like selling and even distilling. And unlike printing, you didn’t need to be part of a guild, at least at that time, to participate in the gin trade.
Judith
So you didn’t need a licence?
Anna
Exactly. So at a period in history when there were very few opportunities for women, making or selling gin was a real opportunity to make some money for women. But again, even though it sounds exciting, there’s no evidence that Elizabeth went around Hawking gin.
Luckily, she had four things going for her, which I think many other women at the time wouldn’t have had. So firstly, she was the daughter of a painter, and may have received some education or instruction in art, even if it was an informal education.
Secondly, she had some useful connections in London societies, so she was quite privileged in a way, or at least she was connected with people who were connected with other people.
Thirdly, she was interested in botany, an acceptable, even admirable pursuit for well to do women.
And, as we’ll learn, she had a practical entrepreneurial streak.
So any clue now of what Elizabeth did to raise herself and her husband out of poverty?
Judith
Painting? Painting. If she was the daughter of a painter, that there’ll be some artwork in there.
And I’m understanding now that she was actually quite privileged and she was not destitute in the way that I was thinking and she would have had some potential childcare and that she could sit at an easel or whatever else was popular at the time. Etching?
Anna
I think all of the above are part of what she did. But, even though I would never say that writing a book would be the first thing I’d do as a way to pay off my debts, or my spouse’s debts, that’s what Elizabeth does. But it’s an illustrated book.
Judith
Well, I’m really surprised by that. And I suppose I’m just thinking… now, just about now, how not lucrative writing a book can be.
Anna
And what surprises me about this is that she doesn’t write the sort of book that other women were writing at the time. So women obviously weren’t writing lots. A lot of the books that exist from that time are written by men, but they did produce novels, plays, pamphlets, as you say, or religious essays,
Judith
Yes, things about warning against prostitution.
Anna
She doesn’t write any of those kinds of books. She writes a very different sort of book and to understand the choice she makes, we need to go back to her childhood.
So in the preface of the book she ended up writing, she says that from a young age she had drawn painted or embroidered any flower that struck her fancy, and when she walked through fields as a child, she says, she was curious to find out about the great beauty and variety of wild plants and flowers. She looked up these wild plants in books, she tells us, but found the illustrations within them “too small and confused to be instructive”.
Judith
That’s quite inspiring.
Anna
I’m not sure if it’s true or a tale she’s sort of spun for marketing, but she says that before husband ended up in prison, she’d already planned to spend her life creating a reference book that provided information about plants. So that’s a book known as a “herbal” at the time. And she wanted her herbal to have far better illustrations than those in the other books she’d seen. So her illustrations, as she puts it would be “finished with exactness”.
Judith
Just so inspiring, that she would want to do that. And just from that curiosity. Solving a problem.
Anna
Yes, in fact, she calls her book, A Curious Herbal.
Going back to this idea of whether this is the right thing to do to get yourself out of poverty. And I mean, as you say, she’s privileged, but I think she is poor… herbals might not sound like bestsellers. But some say that at the time, they were almost as popular as Bibles.
Judith
Is that because people were using them much more practically to produce medicines?
Anna
Yes, I think so. So, you know, if you think about a Bible being something that everyone had in their house at the time (everyone who was literate), then I think herbals were similar, like everyone had one. And I think they’re popular for two reasons. So one is that there’s just a general trend at the time for books that capture and organise knowledge. So chambers Cyclopedia, published a few years before and it wouldn’t be long before Samuel Johnson began work on his English dictionary. So there was a bit of a kind of trend and a craving for capturing knowledge and organising it in book form. But herbals had, as you say, a practical use that those encyclopaedias didn’t have.
Judith
And I like that idea that it’s one of those few books as well that… I mean, I grew up in a house without that many books, but there were probably 10 books. And one of those was a kind of directory of the English countryside so that you could identify flowers and trees alongside a book about antiques.
Anna
It’s like those little Observers’ books of trees, I’ve got one over there on my shelf, and things like that. So herbals have this practical use, because they were used by physicians (what we’d call doctors today), and also by apothecaries (so as you suggest people who produced medicines), and there were plenty of herbals about in the 1700s because plants were then the only way really to treat most ailments. As historian Penelope hunting puts it, “people thought every plant possessed the potential to cure something”. So having a reference source in your house, or as a doctor in your practice, that let you access information about plants and what they were used for was vital if you wanted to stay healthy.
Judith
That actually makes total sense because I did go on a gin-making course but we did our own foraging of the herbs and botanicals that we put in the gin on the banks of the River Thames. And I totally believe in now, the healing powers of plants…
Anna
And the gin!
Judith
And the gin. And how to tell the dangerous ones as well.
Anna
Yes, that’s true. And obviously, a lot of today’s modern medicines are made from plants.
So, for instance, at the time, if you had a cough, or were spitting blood, you might take the pulp of the rose briar fruit. If you had internal bleeding, you might drink nettle juice, which I would have thought would just make it worse. If you experienced melancholy or madness, you might take a tincture, which is made by combining the flowers of St. John’s Wort with concentrated alcohol.
Judith
Excellent. Well, they all sound preferable to leeches.
Anna
Absolutely. And actually that last example I gave – St. John’s wort – is still used today as a herbal alternative to antidepressants. But, of course, listeners don’t take my word for it. And please do take professional advice if you’re seeking any mental health medication.
Elizabeth’s aim was unusual to say the least because while tinkering with botany was socially acceptable for women, no British woman had ever written a herbal before.
Judith
I find that really hard to believe given the role of women and witchery and kind of potions and lotions…
Anna
Well, I think it was totally acceptable for especially less well to do women to hold some knowledge in this area… think of yeah, old wives tales of herbal remedies and things like that, that were passed on by women through oral tradition. But it wasn’t professionalised. They weren’t able to hold and use that knowledge in a professional sense because they weren’t the physicians or the apothecaries.
And overall, I think there’s a sort of distinction about what women were thought capable of in botany. So they were thought capable of collecting things and observing them and documenting things. But their brains were not developed enough to allow them to indulge in mentally taxing botany. So they couldn’t do any of the complex thinking, to analyse and interpret what they found. They were just allowed to collect them and make sort of pressed flowers and things like that.
Judith
So they couldn’t do anything with the text… So she was illustrating this herself? Because there’s such skill in that to get the proportions of any plant, right.
Anna
Yes. So botany was socially acceptable, writing was socially acceptable, illustration was socially acceptable. But she kind of did all of these things. And she did them in a way that was new and different.
As an example, there’s a German illustrator and naturalist called Maria Sibylla Merian. And she had published hand painted engravings of garden flowers about six years before, but these were intended as decorative templates for ladies to use when embroidering or printing silk. So they were very different to what Elizabeth was doing, because she was creating something that was going to be an instructional guide that documented the complete lifecycle of a plant and that helped people find and identify the plants, and then help them understand which plants they would use to make which medicines. So it was a completely different use of that illustration, and completely new for a woman to do. And the idea for me is quite striking that a woman would write a book that professional men would use to support their practice was, I think, quite unheard of.
Judith
It’s fascinating, cos it, I’m thinking now about the level of skill involved, because I bought a book about edible plants for the illustrations after my foraging course, because they said there are various apps, but they’re so not accurate enough and you really, really need to know your stuff. And you really need to be able to identify things really clearly from the visual appearance of them, so that you’re not taking your life in your hands.
Anna
So if you were in the 1700s, I think you’d have bought Elizabeth’s book.
Judith
I would have bought Elizabeth’s… exactly would have bought Elizabeth’s book.
Anna
Because the illustrations, unlike the ones by this German illustrator, who did them for you to sort of copy and make into nice samplers or cushions or whatever, she was doing them so that you could find the right plants and know what you were finding.
So she had this dream that she wanted to devote her life to making a herbal but, of course, hubby’s antics kind of got in the way, so when her husband was as she diplomatically puts it “deprived of employment”, i.e. he was in prison, she decided to pursue her dream, but she had to do it at an accelerated pace. And in order to do that she needed access to plants and access to knowledge about them.
Judith
Okay, so I’m thinking where did she go and get that. Where does Kew Gardens fit into that or any of the other national gardens?
Anna
So, of course, you do have Botanic Gardens, but there is somewhere else that’s more specific to the medicinal stuff.
So one of the first things Elizabeth does is to move. And she takes lodgings in Swan Salk in Chelsea, which at the time, was a village on the outskirts of London. You know where this is going now…
Judith
I do!
Anna
Because those rooms were opposite the Chelsea Physic Garden.
Judith
Oh, yes!
The physic garden was, and still is, the obvious place to find all the plants Elizabeth needed to include in her book. It had been set up about 60 years before by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries – another kind of institution of professional men – and it served as a sort of outdoor classroom for apothecaries where the raw materials for medicines were grown and you could go to learn about which plants were for which ailments. And at the time, it had at least 900 plant specimens, and many were from overseas.
They included cedar trees from the Lebanon, the cinchona tree from Peru, whose bark is a source of quinine, Chilean strawberries, a greenhouse full of plants from foreign climes, like orange trees, olive trees and American aloe, a Barbadian pepper, Jamaican mimosa, Indian jasmine, pomegranates, prickly pears, pineapples, ginger, yuccas, geraniums. All these specimens came from what were called herbarising expeditions.
Judith
Wow, that’s around the world in Chelsea
Anna
It is around the world. But these expeditions didn’t all go to exotic places. Some plants were gathered from places like Hampstead, Eltham and Hounslow. Which were, of course, a bit more wild than they are today.
It sounds like your foraging was really a herbarising expedition on the Thames.
Judith
I think it was an expedition. Yes. And we had to wait for the tide to go out as well because that revealed all sorts of other interesting things.
Anna
So you were, you have been, a herbariser
Judith
A herbariser, yes.
I’ve never been to the physic garden.
Anna
This is good reason to go.
Judith
I know I’ve had it on my list to do.
Anna
And it is an amazing resource for anyone documenting medicinal plants. But as you might expect, obviously anyone can go today, but as you might expect at the time, women weren’t usually allowed in. So Elizabeth needs to find a way in. And this issue of gaining access to Chelsea Physic Garden weirdly formed the central narrative in a play written in 1922. It’s a short piece written in rhyming verse and it’s set at the Physic Garden and I thought we could act an extract out, Judith.
Judith
Brilliant.
Yes, let’s.
Anna
You be Elizabeth. I’ll be the Director of the garden, Isaac Rand, who stops Elizabeth from entering. It’s just a short piece. You might want to read it in your head first and then adopt a character and then we can read the piece together.
Judith
I’m ready!
Good Dr. Rand,
I am in a flutter
To see those trees whose name you utter.
My forehead puckers.
What are yuccas?
And cabbages on trees? You quiz!
The banyan tree.
What can that be?
Dear Doctor? I must sweetly tease
To see such curiosities.
Anna
Madam, such things are not for you, who are a woman
Judith
Ah. Too true.
Anna
Read brilliantly read by the way. As the play carries on, Rand tells Elizabeth that the head gardener, Philip Miller, would be furious if she went into the garden and Elizabeth’s response goes like this.
Judith
Now why should a great man be furious
Because a little woman’s curious?
All men are curious to see
The things that rare and novel be.
Their curiosity demands
The trees be bought from foreign lands.
Then gentleman like Mr. Miller
write books on them and gain much siller.
Some coloured pictures I must make
To sell for my dear husband’s sake.
Of money, I have such great need.
My curious herbal must succeed.
Anna
Excellent. That sounds like something straight out of Bridgerton.
It’s a great play, obviously.
In real life Elizabeth overcomes this obstacle to get in by asking a friend who’s a physician to introduce her to the garden director Isaac Rand and luckily for her Rand seems to enjoy sharing his knowledge and he’s keen to spread information about the garden’s plants beyond this sort of closed shop of the apothecaries,
Judith
So she didn’t have to resort to dressing up as a… a bloke.
Anna
No, I think what she does is she uses her illustrations to impress the great and the good and she also enlists the help of the King’s physician, Richard Mead, and of Hans Sloane. So he’s an eminent physician and naturalist and more importantly, in this context, he was a collector. And he’d travelled to the Caribbean in 1687, he brought over 1000 plant specimens back with him, most notably, the cacao plant. He’s often called the inventor of hot chocolate, though he probably learned about the drink while in Jamaica. He was a society physician and president of both the Royal Society and the Royal College of Physicians. So his reputation was, shall we say, substantial. It’s also worth saying his collection of objects, coins and books was also substantial and when he died, it formed the basis of what’s now the British Museum.
Judith
So she must have charmed him with her very skilful drawings.
Anna
But in order to get him on board, she secured a letter of introduction to take with her. And I think I might get you to read that letter.
Judith
Yeah, I like the way he describes her as “she is a very ingenious person who drew the specimens of the dispensatory plants”.
Anna
I do think it’s very interesting that he calls her a very ingenious person, this mutual contact who is a doctor. Why does he say person and not woman? I wonder if he’s kind of trying to get Sloane to overlook her gender in some way.
Judith
That would make sense. The person. Yes. Not. Not woman.
Anna
Yeah. So she turns up on his doorstep with this letter, and asks him to sign a proposal she’s written for her book. The sort of thing that was published in order to generate subscriptions ahead of publication. So she’s got this plan that she’s going to produce 500 illustrations, but she needs some encouragement, i.e. some financial backing, I think, in order to do it. And so if Sloan had agreed to sign this proposal, then he’d be endorsing the book even before it was published. And that is something that the king’s physician Richard Mead and Isaac Rand of the Physic Garden both did.
Judith
And important to have an advance, for her to be able to do that.
Anna
Absolutely. But unfortunately, Sloane won’t sign. But he does allow Elizabeth to draw his exotic specimens. In fact, he is probably keen for her to do this because he wanted his collection and therefore his already substantial reputation to be shared more widely. And because he gave her permission to draw those, then Elizabeth could include a dedication to him in the book thanking him for his support.
So anyway, she goes to all these efforts to get access to information and be able to work on the book. And at the end of the play that we acted out earlier, Elizabeth does indeed show her drawings to Miller, the head gardener at Chelsea, and he responds. So you’re taking on a new character, now, Judith. You’re being the grumpy head gardener who doesn’t want to let her in. But he sees her pictures, and this is what he says,
Judith
Delightful. taken to the life.
Madam, I see more than a wife.
I see an artist of great skill.
I beg you draw what trees you will.
Anna
Ah, that’s a good happy ending, isn’t it? That is pretty much the end of the play. It’s a very short play.
So thanks to all these contacts. Elizabeth is, in real life not just in the play, able to draw illustrations of plants from life. And she then engraves them and she colours the finished prints, three jobs, usually done by three specialist craftspeople: the drawing the engraving and the colouring.
Engraving in particular is a really skilled and laborious task. So you need to draw an illustration on paper, you then transfer that design to a Copper plate as a mirror image, and then you gouge lines into the copper using a sort of chisel. And obviously if you make a mistake, at any point, you need to scrap your work and start again.
Judith
There’s such complexity in engraving, I, it was something when I was studying history of publishing, I could not get my head around the process. And it had lots of lovely names. What was the…?
Anna
Intaglio.
Judith
Intaglio. But I couldn’t quite, whereas I could understand how text was printed on different using different processes, I really struggled to see yeah, how how the etchings actually happened.
Anna
Yes. And it’s something that people again probably had apprenticeships for and trained for for many years. And then that was their sole job, to be an engraver. And yet she is engraving her own drawings. So that’s amazing.
But then she also needed to get information about the plants. So she got access by getting access into Chelsea Physic Garden, she solved the problem of how is she going to make these things by engraving them herself. But she also needed to have the information because although she wanted her herbal to have this, these more exact illustrations, she needed to have information about the plants, which she wouldn’t have had knowledge herself. So she actually used another recently published herbal, with permission as a reference. And it was a book that had text but no illustrations. But while she took some information from it, she wrote her version in a much more accessible style.
Judith
Was it in English?
Anna
It was in English. So it’s successful because it’s in English but then it’s in very readable English. But let’s look at some pages.
Judith
Yes.
Fantastic.
Anna
So this is volume one of her two volume, Curious Herbal.
Listeners, you can find a digital copy of the entire book in the notes of this episode published on our website, bookshapers.co.uk.
Judith
Fantastic.
The script is very beautiful.
Anna
So the script had also been engraved. It’s not printed using letterpress, is it? It looks… what does it look like? It looks like handwriting?
Judith
Handwriting but it’s a yes. But actually is there’s a real clarity to it. It’s beautifully and carefully done. So the fact that you said the text is more accessible to people but also the typography in a way is accessible to people even though it’s not type.
Anna
Yes. And what I can’t work out is whether she engraved the text as well or whether someone else did do that. I know that she engraved the illustrations but either way, yes, it’s, it’s a very beautiful thing to read as if you’re reading to someone’s handwritten notes. She must have handwritten it, and then somebody must have engraved it.
Judith
I think it’s beautiful because the beginning, say, of the introduction has a really lovely etched, engraved floral garland, and a kind of bucolic countryside view. And then it’s really beautifully laid out with numbers and bullets, so it’s just feels really easy to access. So we’re looking at the dandelion, and then the poppy. What’s fascinating is, the colour is… In fact they’re so beautiful that these are the ones now that you see people kind of selling in vintage shops that you can then put on your walls in your contemporary kitchen. But they’ve got this very elegant colours of the leaves. Very real.
Anna
Yeah, and so of course, all that colour is hand coloured.
Judith
And all the parts beautifully labelled. So you can see the root and the flower and the stamen and all the different parts. They’re really, really detailed and just very, very beautiful.
Anna
So I think this was part of her exactness as she wanted to show the same plant at different stages in its lifecycle so you could recognise it not just from one image.
The other thing that she does is she uses common names as well as Latin names and as well as English names.
Judith
Yes. So she does with the dandelion and the poppy. Yes, so we get the full, the full picture.
Anna
And I think the dandelion has another name that she uses.
Judith
Ah… I’m just looking that’s is it the piffa bed?
Anna
Piss abed
Judith
Ah the piss abed. I think I’ve heard it referred to that before.
Anna
I don’t quite understand why. But clearly, that’s its common name.
So obviously, you haven’t seen every other herbal in the 1700s. But if you were summing up what you take away from that as a book, what would you say about it?
Judith
That it’s expertly drawn, and coloured. That it’s very lifelike. That it’s accessible, well organised, easy to read, I would buy this!
Anna
You probably can buy a copy of it and like a facsimile version.
Yeah so if I was writing the blurb for this, like even at the time, I think I’d hone in on number of key features. So they include the fact that each plant is illustrated, and the fact that she included these close ups of blossoms and fruits, so it was really easy to identify what you’re looking at. It’s written in English… you refer to it being numbered, it’s written in this concise and accessible bullet form. So it’s not the lengthy prose of the book that she sourced the information from. So…
Judith
So it’s really easy to get the information at a glance, because she’s got these lovely little subheadings of the plant names, and then very clear text underneath and a little underline. It’s just it’s excellent. It’s what I’d ask people to put in, in a book design now.
Anna
Yes, totally, because each entry follows this consistent structure. So there’s the name of the plant, there’s a short description about it, there’s information about where it grows, which will again help you identify it, the time of flowering, and its medicinal uses. And there are alternative names for every plant, like the piss abed for the dandelion. And its indexes are in English and Latin. And also it has these new world plants like tomatoes, tobacco, and cacao plus tea and spices from Asia.
I really like what she did, because she thought about her market and produced content that worked for the people who were going to end up using the book. So it’s not a work of art, even though as you say, people might put some of those pictures on the wall. And you can buy some of the pages, reproductions of them, on eBay as prints. And it’s also not designed to display her skills as an artist, or to showcase her botanical expertise, because instead it’s a practical reference. It’s a really useful reference book that will help satisfy readers’ needs.
I feel like it’s a bit like what I do. I’m not the most eloquent writer, but I write what my audience needs. And I don’t have lofty artistic writerly ambitions getting in the way. But I feel that it was probably quite a novel approach at the time because other herbals were written by sort of men of distinction and they were eager to demonstrate their knowledge or to cement their authority.
Judith
But also that it’s exactly the kind of thing that you would want now, you know. I walk through Bushy Park and I still struggle with some of the trees and their seeds and some of the flowers and I actually this is the kind of thing you don’t want them the beautiful art with an impression kind of layered on top of it. What you want is something that helps you recognise…
Anna
Yes it’s not very portable, that’s the only thing I would suggest. You couldn’t really have it in your pocket.
With that in mind, it’s worth commenting on the publishing approach, because that also made the herbal somewhat affordable to non-specialists, because her illustrations were released in instalments.
Judith
Oh. In a magazine or in book form?
Anna
In book form, they were what were called numbers or fascicles. And each instalment had one page of text and four pages with illustrations on them.
Judith
So it was a bit like a partwork now where you’d kind of bundle them together, hopefully, you’d look forward to the next…
Anna
Yes
Judith
…letters of the alphabet.
Anna
Yeah, very like a modern-day part work except the difference is that you bought all these instalments and then you arranged the binding at the end. So you don’t get the free binder that you can get with the partwork. And so that means that every copy of it that’s around now is slightly different, because they’ll have different binding. But also you can put your own things in with it. Maybe you didn’t get all the, all the fascicles. So you’ve got some missing or you may be bound them in a different order. So it’s like they are finished books that you can still see today, but they’re all slightly individual.
So this publishing in instalments strategy meant printers could save on initial capital, because they’re not taking the risk of printing the whole thing upfront. And authors could receive income without having to wait until they finish writing the book, which is clearly key for Elizabeth in her circumstances. It’s still common practice today, not even in the partwork thing, if you think about people writing in instalments on say, Medium or Substack. Or even producing a serial podcast.
So she produced one of these fascicles every single week for over two years.
Judith
That’s incredibly… a lot of hard work.
Anna
Yeah, I mean, the finished thing is huge. But that also meant she could earn quite a lot of money because each instalment costs one shilling each for black and white or two shillings for colour. Obviously, that’s twice the price. But that kind of reflects the fact that the illustrations had to be hand coloured.
Judith
And if you’re interested, you’d probably really want a colour as well. So depending, you know, even if your budget was tight,you’d hopefully splash out on it.
Anna
Yeah, saved up your pennies for it. And it was a great book. Bruce Madge who works for the British Library says that it’s only bettered by a book called Medicinal Botany, which published about 50 years later.
British Library also tell us that Elizabeth marketed the book herself. And they say “she showed herself an adept businesswoman striking mutually advantageous deals with booksellers that ensured the financial success of the herbal”.
Judith
I’m sure she found interesting ways of making sure that they got to people.
Anna
She was doing what, what publishers expect authors to do today, which is to do some of the marketing for their own, own books, as well as the publisher.
So anyway, it was a success, a financial success, and she could pay her husband’s debtors and release him from prison.
Judith
I might have left him there. Although it did encourage her to really focus on this and put everything into it, so…
Anna
It was kind of an opportunity that may not have arisen, but also I think she may have done better to leave him there. Because sadly, even when he was released, the couple still struggled. And the difference now when they got into financial difficulty, again, was that Elizabeth had this successful book, and I suppose it was their only valuable asset. So when they needed money, again, they sold some of the rights to the book.
Judith
Nooo.
So did they have the rights, though?
Anna
They had the rights. I’m using the word they because Elizabeth couldn’t really own the rights to her own book, because in a legal sense, copyright or intellectual property is like real physical property. A piece of intellectual property, like an image or a book is something you own and can sell, like a house or a piece of land. But at that time, women couldn’t own property. So a woman I think, couldn’t own the copyright in her own work.
Judith
Wow. Because I know that copyright was difficult for anybody – for men as well just in terms of the printers owning the copyright rather than the actual author, but I’d never thought about the book as being property in that way. Oh my goodness.
Anna
And so when they sold the rights, they sold it in bits just when they needed a bit more money so first Alexander sold some rights because he could claim ownership and then later he signed a power of attorney that enabled Elizabeth to act on his behalf to sell the rights in her own book.
Alexander signed his affairs over to Elizabeth because in 1742, he moved to Sweden, as you do, but he fared even worse there than he had in London. Overall, I have to say he doesn’t come out of this story very well. He’s variously described as a self styled doctor, a handsome rascal, and my favourite from the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who called him a bold atheistic ignoramus.
Judith
Not a good attribute to him at all. But did she go on and write anything else or this was her one hit wonder and dream, you know, Opus?
Anna
We’re not aware that she wrote anything else, but she was loyal to her ignoramus husband. So while she was still receiving some royalties, she would send a portion of them to him in Sweden, until he was executed for supposedly plotting against the Swedish king.
Judith
Extraordinary.
Anna
So compared with Alexander, who we know is some kind of rascal and repeatedly got into trouble, we know next to nothing about Elizabeth’s personality, and we don’t know anything about what happened to her next.
So it feels like she was this smart, diligent, practically skilled and business savvy woman. And she was called ingenious, as we saw earlier in that letter. And Carl Linnaeus, the guy who called her husband an ignoramus called her Botanica Blackwellia, a name that uses his own two-word classification for naming plants. But we don’t really know what happened next.
She lived for another 10 years, but we don’t really know how she spent her time. We think all her three children had died. And it’s just not clear where she lived or how she paid the bills.
Judith
Well, I’d never heard of her. And I really wish I’d known more about her. And I think you’re right, that the personality, though, comes through in the tenacious ability to make this happen, and support herself against all the obstacles. And also just, you know, again, the level of skill, she must have been a great all rounder.
Anna
Definitely. I mean, I think the herbal itself is… is a heroic undertaking. It’s massive and detailed. And just, you know, today, a publisher, if they were going to create a book like that wouldn’t have one person…
Judith
I was just thinking that you’d have a whole team of people.
Anna
But she also overcame the male-centred society at the time. And she managed to sell copies of this comprehensive book to male professionals. And she knew how to use men to give her work that authority and support that she needed, which you might still say, is needed in some fields today for women. So overall, a curious herbal enabled people who wouldn’t otherwise have been able to gain access to specimens in Chelsea Physic Garden like other women to see these plants and access knowledge about them,
Judith
A job well done.
Yeah, it’s like ta concept of widening access to collections that many cultural institutions still haven’t worked out how to deal with that. I think many writers today could learn a thing or two about how to share information in a form that makes it accessible to others. As you said, the layout is something you might like to see today. And I think it’s a really good example of something you always talk about Judith, which is making your book fit for purpose rather than aiming for perfection.
Judith
Absolutely. And this is fit for purpose. This is just incredibly useful.
Anna
Yeah. So she even writes herself that the pressure to produce an instalment every week meant her illustrations weren’t as exact as she would have liked. And also, she says that the structure, the order in which these plants are introduced in the book was dictated by which plants she could get access to draw, not how she would have ideally arranged things in a more sort of considered way.
Judith
Are there any images of her? I just wondered if there was a little engraving of Blackwellia?
Anna
So this is the only picture I’ve managed to find, but I’m not sure when it was engraved or how realistic it is. I feel like it might have been engraved a bit later?
Judith
Fascinating. She it looks like a woman of her time. But she has a very determined expression. It’s interesting though, so she could actually be in the next Shondaland story because…
Anna
Yes, oh my god, Shonda, if you’re listening, please feature Elizabeth Blackwell in your next series of Bridgerton. That would be amazing.
Judith
That would be fantastic.
Anna
So we’re coming to the end of our episode. Having discovered this story… apart from wishing that you knew about it, what reflections might you have?
Judith
I mean, just phenomenal, actually, that she would do all of that. In spite of her husband,
Anna
Who she definitely should have left in prison.
Judith
If you have that passion and see an opportunity and to look at, you know, like, what, what problem are you solving, but also in a very resourceful, practical way where you actually need to do it to put food on the table. So that you’re being very ingenious, and very entrepreneurial…
Anna
Yeah, I think she’s showing all the qualities of an entrepreneur, which is like you have a great idea. She had the idea from her own personal experience, that the books that were out there were lacking. You can imagine it on a on a Kickstarter site, you know, I,
Judith
Yes.
Anna
I wanted to find this out. And I looked at all the books, and none of them had this. And so this is why I’ve come up with this idea. So she had the idea, but lots of us have great ideas for things, but we never get them off the ground. She then had the other side of being an entrepreneur, which is the practical way of making these things happen and overcoming all the obstacles and getting, again, like Kickstarter, getting other people on board to share your passion and to share a desire to fulfil that need.
Judith
In my time I’ve had lots of wonderful creative ideas and things that might but I then don’t go on to do them, which she went to do the research, she was meticulous about it. In fact, she had to fight, you know, through obstacles to get to do the research. So completely hats off to her for doing that.
Anna
Yeah. So though I should say to anyone listening, I still wouldn’t recommend publishing a comprehensive reference book single handedly, as a get rich quick scheme today.
Judith
No.
Anna
I think that’s probably time for us to wrap things up and go to our local gin palace to kind of celebrate.
Judith
Indeed. We must go and see if we can recognise some of the botanicals in it.
And I would love to be in a carriage ride.
Anna
Carrying some little samples. Yes, for her. I would do that. And we could even have a little gym while we’re at it.
End narration and credits
To discover more curious people who write, make, market and read books, follow Bookshapers, wherever you get your podcasts.
You can follow us on X (or Twitter) at Bookshaperspod, and Instagram at Bookshaperspodcast. There’s also additional information about this and other stories on our website: Bookshapers.co.uk.
This episode was recorded by Anna Faherty and Judith Watts and edited and produced by Anna Faherty.
The incidental music for this episode is Concerti Grosso, Opus 3 No 2 in B-flat major
composed by George Frideric Handel in 1734 and performed by The London Baroque Orchestra. You can find it at Wikimedia Commons.
And our theme music combines folk guitar from Dvideoguy, a typewriter sound effect from tams_kp and a print shop effect from ecfike (e c f i k e), all available at freesound.org.
Thanks for listening. Tune in again soon.
