LEE, SARAH EGLONTON WALLIS BOWDICH

(b. Colchester, England, 10 September 1791; d. Kent, United Kingdom, 23 September 1856),

natural history.

The first European woman systematically to collect plants in tropical West Africa, Lee can be credited with the discovery and description of six new genera and two new species of plants, in addition to six new species of fish. She also established a productive career as author of a dozen articles and five books on natural history, illustrator of another three, plus sixteen books for children or young adults, mostly fiction. Sarah Bowdich Lee was acknowledged for her achievements in natural history by her contemporaries with a Civil List Pension and inclusion in the Dictionary of National Biography, one of very few women to be so honored.

Background and Early Career . Sarah Eglonton Wallis was the daughter of an heiress and a well-to-do Nonconformist merchant; she enjoyed a largely privileged childhood until her father went bankrupt in 1802. The family moved to London, and nothing is known of her adolescence, except that she was almost certainly tutored. In 1813, Sarah married Thomas Edward Bowdich, who soon thereafter became a junior officer in the Africa Company, and was sent to Cape Coast Castle in tropical West Africa in 1815. In 1816 she independently sailed to Cape Coast, only to find that her husband had temporarily gone back to England. She decided to stay, and wait for his return.

Dazzled by the light and color of Africa, and enchanted by the exotic plants and animals, especially parrots and monkeys, Sarah became fascinated with her surroundings. Although she did not then realize it, her stay in Africa had catalyzed a passion for natural history that would become the central theme of her life.

The Bowdichs returned to England in 1817, but by April 1819 had moved to Paris, so that Thomas could study the natural sciences he needed in order to become an African explorer. Sarah worked and studied along with Thomas; both became familiar with Baron Georges Cuvier, who was their virtual mentor, giving them the use of his personal library. To support themselves, the Bowdichs translated French natural history into English. Sarah illustrated a number of texts abridged from Cuvier’s work: Mammalia, Conchology, Ornithology.

In 1821, she produced and illustrated Taxidermy, a successful volume whose sixth and last edition was issued in 1843. During their Paris stay she was elected a member of the Wetterauische Gesellschaft für die Gesamte Naturkunde, in Hanau (now in Germany). In July 1822, the Bowdichs set out on their second African expedition, stopping at Madeira and doing natural history for a year before continuing to the Gambia, where Thomas caught fever, and on 10 January 1824 died in his wife’s arms.

Natural History Writing and Illustrating . On returning to England, Sarah had to find a way to support her three children, which she finally did both by writing and by a second marriage in 1826, to Mr. Robert Lee. But first she edited and published Thomas’s last manuscript, Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo, to which she added a botanical and zoological appendix. Soon after, she was persuaded to write stories about Africa for R. Ackermann’s Forget-Me-Not, to which she contributed nearly every year until 1844.

Meanwhile, again probably through Ackermann, she began the project that eventuated in Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (1828–1838), a book produced for fifty subscribers, with hand-colored watercolor paintings of fish, drawn from life in the most precise and careful detail. As late as the 1950s, a curator of cichlid fishes at the British Museum of Natural History would note her surprise at the scientifically valuable contents of Fresh-Water Fishes, a book she had at first taken to be little more than a collection of pretty paintings. It would take Lee eleven years and more than three thousand paintings to complete the book

for her fifty subscribers, among whom were Roderick Impey Murchison and John Herschel.

In addition, between 1829 and 1831 she wrote twelve articles for John Claudius Loudon’s newly created Magazine of Natural History, sending reviews from Paris, and offering original articles and comments, several of them signed only as “B.” Several of her original articles were included in the Royal Society’s Catalogue of Scientific Papers 1800–1863.

Lee traveled frequently between London and Paris, often conveying messages or running errands for some of the eminent men of science, amongst them Cuvier, Robert Brown, and Charles Babbage. In addition to these and her subscribers, she was well acquainted with a number of prominent scientists, including Alexander von Humboldt, Richard Owen, and Cuvier’s collaborator, Achille Valenciennes.

For Cuvier, she traced a number of sketches of fish, particularly those of Johann Forster and Sydney Parkinson, deposited in Sir Joseph Banks’s library. Cuvier would later acknowledge her help in more than twenty different places in his and Valenciennes’s classic and encyclopedic Histoire naturelle des poissons. She also gave him some of her original sketches of fish from St. Jago, made on her second voyage to Africa.

An accomplished artist, Lee painted many pictures of plants and flowers, in addition to fish and mollusks. In general, she painted painstakingly accurately, with little embellishment. Her paintings of plants from Gabon are so faithful that one can easily determine their genus, if not immediately the species.

As the 1830s progressed, Lee turned from original and creative natural history to more didactic and entertaining forms. After 1840 she published what were essentially two introductory textbooks in natural history and botany, for adolescents or (young) adults: Elements of Natural History and Trees, Plants, and Flowers. Two other books turned out to be very popular: Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals, and Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes. In all, she wrote twenty books in her lifetime. Largely for her later didactic and popular works on natural history, but also in part for her earlier achievements, Lee finally received a Civil List Pension in 1854, an award relatively rarely given to scientists, still more rarely to women, and almost never to women in recognition of their own achievements.

Lee is among the ranks of the earliest female travelers to Africa. She did not just travel there, but made novel observations in natural history. Her discoveries in natural history, like her paintings, attest to a keenly observant eye, and a style devoted more to scientific realism than interpretive license. So, too, with her literature, even including her fiction, whose natural history content is often annotated with explanatory footnotes.

Although recognized by her contemporaries for her excellence, Lee gradually disappeared from the history of science. Perhaps her career was too fragmented, or the demands of rearing a family prevented her from establishing and maintaining a salient identity. Nonetheless, her story is illuminative of what was possible for an intelligent, capable, and determined woman in early-nineteenth-century Britain.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

WORKS BY LEE

Taxidermy. Initially attributed to T. E. Bowdich. Paris, 1821.

As edited. Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo, by Thomas Bowdich. London: G. B. Whittaker, 1825.

The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain. London: R. Ackermann, 1828–1838.

Elements of Natural History. London: Longman, 1844. Anecdotes of the Habits and Instinct of Animals. London: Grant and Griffith, 1852.

Anecdotes of the Habits and Instincts of Birds, Reptiles, and Fishes. London: Grant and Griffith, 1853.

Trees, Plants, and Flowers. London: Grant and Griffith, 1854.

OTHER SOURCES

Beaver, Donald de B. “Writing Natural History for Survival, 1820–1856: The Case of Sarah Bowdich, later Sarah Lee.” Archives of Natural History 26, no. 1 (1999): 19–31.

Bowdich, T. E. An Analysis of the Natural Classifications of Mammalia. Illustrated by Sarah Bowdich. Paris, 1821.

———. Introduction to The Ornithology of Cuvier. Illustrated by Sarah Bowdich. Paris, 1821.

———. Elements of Conchology. Illustrated by Sarah Bowdich. Paris, 1822.

Cuvier, G., and A. Valenciennes. Histoire Naturelle des poissons. 22 vols. Paris, 1828–1831.

Mabberley, D. J. “Edward and Sarah Bowdich’s Names of Macaronesian and African plants, with Notes on Those of Robert Brown.” Botánica Macaronésica 6 (1978): 53–66.

Strickrodt, Silke. Those Wild Scenes: Africa in the Travel Writings of Sarah Lee (1791–1856). Cambridge, MA: Galda + Wilch Verlag, 1998.

Donald de B. Beaver