Erasmus Darwin

She dedicated the work to Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (aunt of her pupil Lady Caroline Lamb ), who blooms the sweetest flow'r in Britain's isle. She explained its genesis in an advertisement (dated 23 May...

The poem on the goddess Flora, with which CS prefaces this book, is clearly a response to Erasmus Darwin 's Botanic Garden, 1789-91, which she called one of her favourite books. But the little...

The chapter headings quote a range of canonical or contemporary writers, including Shakespeare , Milton , Pope , Thomson , Goldsmith , William Mason , John Langhorne , Burns , Erasmus Darwin , Edward Young

This book appeared, like her next, as by a Lady; the British Library copy (filmed for Eighteenth Century Collections Online) has a manuscript note identifying the author on the printed testimony of Erasmus...

She was a keen concert-goer (partly, no doubt, because of her involvement with the musician John Saville ). She attended music festivals at both Manchester and Birmingham. She also enjoyed keeping pets...

On 24 August 1795Erasmus Darwin and Sir Brooke Boothby wrote a joint letter to Maria Jacson in praise of Botanical Dialogues, which they had read in manuscript. They even expressed the hope that...

AD 's art and her gender made her a kind of tourist attraction. She complained of being teazed and tired to death with the number of persons coming to see her work, and making crass...

The Anti-Jacobin, while acknowledging that FAR had avoided Darwin 's faults as far as possible, wished she had not followed him at all. The Poetical Register, however, found her work elegant, and that...

MEJ became a keen and knowledgeable botanist who carried out her own experiments (into the function of nectar, for instance) and made coloured sketches of plants. Erasmus Darwin praised her coloured drawing of the Venus...

FAR , a schoolteacher by profession in the early nineteenth century, published mostly with instruction in mind. She began with a textbook on botany (designed to sanitize that topic after the work of Erasmus Darwin

AS , living at a distance from London, was nevertheless a woman of letters, of the later eighteenth century and just beyond. She staked her claim to fame firstly on her poetry (though she was...

MRM 's letters regularly indulge in analysis of books. She comments on works by both men and women, in English and French, and her opinions shift a good deal with age. She reacted with horror...

MR 's own twenty poems include prefatory verses as editor, written for the occasion. She prints work by the late Henrietta O'Neill (the well-known Ode to the Poppy), Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (St...

Shteir notes that the teachings of Tournefort as well as Linnaeus are invoked. Wakefield expounds Linnean taxonomy, using as her examples such native British plants as would be easy for amateur botanists to observe around...

AS published through Joseph JohnsonMemoirs of the Life of Dr. Darwin , chiefly during his residence at Lichfield, with Anecdotes of his Friends, and Criticisms on his Writings.