GOSSE, Philip Henry. Actinologia Britannica. A History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals.

Gosse’s Pinnacle as Illustrator and Naturalist

GOSSE, Philip Henry. Actinologia Britannica. A History of the British Sea-Anemones and Corals. London: John Van Voorst. 1860.

8vo. Original dark green cloth, title within gilt banner with a design of corals to spine and upper board; pp. xl, 362, [2 (advertisements)], 12 plates (of which 11 chromolithographs by William Dickes), numerous engravings in the text; small stain to upper board, internally extremely bright; a handsome copy.

First edition, published three years after his disastrous anti-evolutionary Omphalos, of the first detailed investigation of British corals and sea-anemones.

This is the only edition in book form, although it had previously been issued in twelve parts that differ from the final version, mainly in the brevity of the descriptions. The keen reception of the parts issue, the first detailed survey of its subject – and, until at least the 1980s, the only work to illustrate the British corals – led to a large initial print run of 4,000 copies of the book. It proved to be a slow seller, but nonetheless it retained its reputation as Gosse’s most important work.

Although Freeman and Wertheimer complain that he did not ‘pay enough attention to the internal comparative anatomy of the sea-anemones’, rendering some of his classifications unsatisfactory, the book displays his talents for observation, description, and analysis without any hint of the religious dogma that crippled his attempts to engage in the evolutionary debate. It also shows him at the height of his powers as an illustrator; the plates are simultaneously meticulous, accurate and, partly due to the work of the printer Dickes, eerily beautiful. The production of the book was itself a ‘major advance in natural history book illustration intended for the mass market’ (ODNB).

Provenance: front pastedown with the bookplate of Sir Henry Wade Deacon, 1852–1932, Lancashire industrialist and educationalist, Pro-Chancellor of the University of Liverpool from 1930 to 1932. Wade Deacon High School in Widnes is named after him.

Freeman and Wertheimer 108, binding variant a; Freeman 1390.

SKU: 2125971