HANHAM, Frederick (editor). Natural Illustrations of the British Grasses.

With 62 Original Botanical Specimens

HANHAM, Frederick (editor). Natural Illustrations of the British Grasses. Bath: Binns and Goodwin. 1846.

Folio. Original publisher’s plum velvet, upper board central green gilt morocco lettering-piece within gilt lozenge, with brass fastening clasp; pp. [2], xx (recte xxiv), 130, [2 (publisher’s advertisements)], with half-title and 62 leaves of mounted botanical specimens within printed decorative borders; rubbed and scuffed with loss to corners and spine ends, joints split but firm; specimens occasionally loose or wanting with occasional offsetting; but generally a good copy; contemporary morocco presentation bookplate to front pastedown, ‘To Thomas France Esqr. Marley Hall. In testimony of the esteem and gratitude of a friend. 1848.’

First edition of this striking example of Victorian botanical publishing, with 62 original specimens of British grasses mounted within the text, one of only 100 copies issued, this copy sumptuously bound in velvet.

An ingenious and highly unusual contribution to Victorian botanical publishing, Natural Illustrations of the British Grasses sought to replace the conventional engraved botanical plate with the plant itself. Frederick Hanham (1806–1877), of Bath, was a medical practitioner and amateur botanist, later publishing a botanical guide to the trees and shrubs of Bath’s Royal Victoria Park (1857). Here he makes the case for the superiority of the specimen over its representation, arguing in his preface that carefully preserved plants must be of greater interest to the botanist and lover of nature than engravings, since there are qualities which ‘the pencil can never show’. The accompanying text combines botanical description with discussion of the properties and uses of the grasses, and is interspersed with ‘instructive and appropriate extracts from the best authors’, including Boyle, Cowper, Wordsworth, and Mary Howitt.

The production of the work was a feat of extraordinary labour. Hanham records that 62,000 plants were collected and prepared, with a further half as many apparently required to allow for unsuccessful specimens. The collecting involved extensive travel and was frequently carried out in bad weather; he characterises the undertaking as involving ‘no slight or ordinary anxiety and exertion’. For only 100 copies, each containing 62 specimens, this represents a remarkable quantity of plant material gathered, dried and mounted by hand.

The finished volume was consequently an expensive luxury production, advertised at £2 2s as a ‘splendid volume in small folio’ intended for the library of the connoisseur, the agriculturist and the drawing-room. Its unusual method of illustration, however, presented considerable practical difficulties. ‘[T]he plants were difficult to fix securely into the books, were often fragile, and prevented the book from closing properly even when they were guarded in’ (Wakeman, pp. 65–66).

The book belongs to a small but important tradition of nineteenth-century ‘specimen books’, in which the boundary between herbarium and printed volume was deliberately blurred. Hanham’s achievement is especially striking for the sheer scale of its production and for the decision to preserve the plants with their natural structure intact rather than reduce them to pictorial representations. Natural Illustrations of the British Grasses was available in blue moiré silk for £3, morocco for £3 12s, and velvet, as here, for £3 8s; the luxurious velvet binding is comparatively rare.

See Wakeman, Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution (1973).

SKU: 2126340