Archives of natural history 42.2 (2015): 197–210 Edinburgh University Press DOI: 10.3366/anh.2015.0305 # The Society for the History of Natural History www.euppublishing.com/journal/anh Joseph Sidebotham: vicissitudes of a Victorian collector LAURENCE M. COOK School of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PT, United Kingdom (email:
[email protected]). ABSTRACT: Joseph Sidebotham (1824–1885) was a Manchester cotton baron whose natural history collections are now in the Manchester Museum. In addition to collecting he suggested a method for identifying and classifying Lepidoptera and investigated variation within species as well as species limits. With three close collaborators, he is credited with discovering many species new to Britain in both Lepidoptera and Coleoptera. A suspicion of fraud attaches to these claims. The evidence is not clear-cut in the Lepidoptera, but a possible reason is suggested why Sidebotham, as an amateur in the increasingly professional scientific world, might have engaged in deceit. KEY WORDS : Manchester – nineteenth century – collections – British records – entomology – Lepidoptera. INTRODUCTION In the early twentieth century the Manchester Museum received a donation of Lepidoptera and another of Coleoptera assembled by Joseph Sidebotham, a Manchester business man (Logunov 2010, 2012). They are good examples of Victorian private entomological collections. A scan through the drawers raises questions as to how the collector came by the specimens and why some species appear to have been of particular interest. Joseph Sidebotham (Figure 1) was born in 1824, son of the owner and manager of a cotton mill on the river Tame near Hyde, then in Cheshire and now part of Greater Manchester.