PRATT, Anne. The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns, of Great Britain, and their allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails.

Botany for the Masses

PRATT, Anne. The Flowering Plants, Grasses, Sedges, and Ferns, of Great Britain, and their allies the Club Mosses, Pepperworts, and Horsetails. Frederick Warne and Co. [1870s.]

Six volumes bound in three, 8vo. Contemporary half green morocco with marbled sides, spines with gilt raised bands, tools and lettering, marbled endpapers, silk place-markers, edges gilt; vol. I: pp. viii, 266; vol. II: pp. viii, 355, [1]; vol. III: pp. x, 410; vol. IV: pp. viii, 328; vol. V: pp. viii, 368; vol. VI: pp. x, 319, [1]; with 314 coloured lithograph plates and one monochrome plate; a little bumping to extremities, a little foxing, plates generally clean, very good.

New expanded edition of the standard Victorian work on British flora, instrumental in raising public interest in the topic, by Anne Pratt (1806–1893), arguably the most successful female botanist of her time.

Pratt’s target audience was those with no experience of botany, and though she briefly outlines Linnean classification at the beginning of the work, her approach is far more accessible than the traditional scientific treatise, with references to literature and folklore. The illustrations are the author’s own work. Being a woman and a self-taught botanist she has not been taken seriously by the botanical establishment. For instance, Blunt and Stearn disparage her mix of ‘easily digested science with miscellaneous romantic flower-lore’. They also suggest that her highly attractive illustrations ‘no doubt owe a good deal to the artists of the firm of W. Dickes and Co. who redrew them on the stones’, conveniently ignoring the fact that this speculative criticism could be made of any artist who does not do their own engraving.

Flowering Plants was first published in five volumes in 1855–66 by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. The pioneering use by Dickes under licence of George Baxter’s affordable system of colour printing, using a steel key plate and wooden coloured blocks to build each image, meant that the book could be produced relatively cheaply. It was thus made accessible to a broad audience and became the standard Victorian work on British flora, running to many editions and inspiring a generation of amateur botanists.

Blunt & Stearn, The Art of Botanical Illustration (1994), p. 276.

SKU: 2122117