Scientific Artistry of the Lister Sisters Beth Fowkes Tobin Applauds a Book on a Gifted Family of Early-Modern Naturalists

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attention of the national Counter superpowers purportedly lurking in every Hubbard’s gift for the hard sell was intelligence Corps, which suspected a leak one — once they had gone through an pivotal, and Nevala-Lee’s portrait of him as from the Manhattan Project; swathes of ‘auditing’ process and emerged as ‘clears’ — a paranoid narcissist and skilled manipula- the personnel at the project’s site in Los gripped Campbell, and he helped Hubbard tor is scathing. However, Campbell is also Alamos, New Mexico, were science-fiction to market his 1950 book Dianetics. Nevala- sharply scrutinized for his role in midwifing fans. Campbell was aggressively and unleashing Dianetics. Heinlein interviewed by an intelligence agent, and Asimov were repelled by what Cartmill’s personal correspondence they saw as an uncritical embrace of was put under surveillance, and quackery, and took refuge in newer, Astounding came close to having its often more lucrative markets. The mailing privileges revoked. After book’s final chapters detail the steady the war, Campbell often cited the decline of the magazine into a second- incident to demonstrate the genre’s rank publication, and Campbell (who prophetic nature — its capacity to died in 1971) into a reactionary crack- project a convincing fictional future pot with racist views. from known scientific facts. Although much of the story out- Indeed, the unprecedented tech- lined in Astounding has been told nological advances of the war fuelled before, in genre histories and biogra- ARCHIVE/ALAMY PICTURE GRANGER HISTORICAL the public taste for science and tech- phies of and memoirs by the princi- nology, in turn raising the cultural pals, Nevala-Lee does an excellent job status of science fiction. The late of drawing the strands together, and 1940s and 1950s were a boom time braiding them with extensive archival for the genre. That boosted the stock research, such as the correspondence of Astounding, which came to spe- of Campbell and Heinlein. The result cialize in stories of nuclear conflict is multifaceted and superbly detailed. and crisis. It also led to the rise of The author can be derailed by trivia competing titles such as Galaxy and — witness a grisly account of Hein- The Magazine of Fantasy & Science lein’s haemorrhoids — and by his Fiction, as well as an expansion of the fascination for clandestine love affairs science-fiction book market. Camp- and fractured marriages. He also bell’s talent began to be poached. gives rather short shrift to van Vogt, Nevala-Lee carefully traces the one of Campbell’s most prominent rifts that developed in the core group, discoveries and a fan favourite dur- largely prompted by Campbell’s ing Astounding’s acme, whose work increasing fondness for pseudo has never since received the attention scientific ideas such as the Dean it deserves. drive (proposed by inventor Norman These quibbles aside, the book is a Dean, who claimed it could produce Astounding Science Fiction’s cover for May 1947. rich, gripping cultural and historical thrust without a reaction — in viola- study of how a small cadre of talents tion of the laws of motion). Lee argues that a lingering messianism at in a minor commercial genre became some More generally, Campbell had always the heart of science fiction — its “persistent of the most influential figures of the second been obsessed by the possibility of a truly dream of an exclusive society of geniuses” half of the twentieth century. ■ scientific psychology, which he believed — helped to propel Hubbard’s movement, would have predictive power along the lines which became Scientology. Numerous sci-fi Rob Latham is the editor of The Oxford of the fictional science of psychohistory in authors embraced Dianetics, submitting to Handbook of Science Fiction and Science Asimov’s Foundation series. So when Hub- auditing or even becoming trained auditors; Fiction Criticism. For 20 years, he was a bard, in the late 1940s, shared ideas that A. E. van Vogt briefly abandoned his writ- senior editor of the journal Science Fiction later became his ‘self-help system’ Dianetics, ing career to run a chapter in Los Angeles, Studies. Campbell took the bait. Hubbard’s vision of California. e-mail: [email protected]

NATURAL HISTORY Scientific artistry of the Lister sisters Beth Fowkes Tobin applauds a book on a gifted family of early-modern naturalists.

etween 1685 and 1692, Martin Lister Susanna. How these drawings and etchings recover the story of how Lister’s daughters — a noted British physician and came into being in an era that excluded learnt to draw and etch scientifically accu- naturalist — published Historiae women from formal scholarship is metic- rate natural-history illustrations. Records of BConchyliorum, a significant study of ulously shown in Martin Lister and his women’s scientific work from this time are molluscs filled with hundreds of beautiful Remarkable Daughters. scant; naturalist and illustrator Maria Sibylla illustrations of all known shells. The illus- Historian Anna Marie Roos marshals Merian’s spectacular drawings of Surinam’s trators were Lister’s daughters Anna and her considerable talents as a researcher to insects are among the rare surviving examples.

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As Roos relates, Susanna and Anna as a physician to London’s elite, popular particularly eager to purchase a reissue. Lister were in their teens when their father travel writer and vice-president of the Royal Roos describes the archival afterlife of enlisted their services as illustrators for Society. He was the first serious arachnolo- Anna and Susanna’s works and equipment, his ambitious project. They spent nearly gist and conchologist in Britain, and an complete with tales of treasures lost and a decade working on it, an amazing feat expert on viticulture. He also dabbled in found. The copperplates, thought to be lost, noted by Lister’s friend Edward were rumoured to be housed in tea Lhwyd, naturalist and keeper of chests at Oxford, until Roos tracked the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, them down in the Bodleian Library. UK. In teaching his daughters how The colour plates in Roos’s book to draw, Lister also taught them are gorgeous, especially those from how to see animal and plant speci- the notebooks and sketchbooks, mens as a scientist would. He may their beauty heightened by their

WELLCOME COLL./CC BY 4.0 COLL./CC BY WELLCOME have sat with his daughters while ephemerality. Martin Lister’s draw- they drew the shells, to point out ing of a strawberry finch reveals a characteristics key to classification. skilled illustrator who “performed a (As he noted in another context, type of embodied empiricism”. Even such supervision was important more stunning, some of the repro- to ensure that “the excellent artist duced illustrations are juxtaposed did not merely … express his own with photographs of the very shells personal conception”.) they depict. Roos thus showcases a Lister also instructed Susanna material legacy central to the his- and Anna in etching and engraving, tory of how early-modern scientific skills rarely taught to women at the books were produced. time, because they were viewed as Martin Lister and his Remark arduous and dangerous. Engraving able Daughters is lucid and on demanded physical strength to cut occasion surprisingly funny. Most the surface of the copperplate; etch- of the time, Roos keeps her narra- ing, the use of hazardous nitric acid tive threads meshed, interweaving to dissolve away the metal. the separate achievements of father The Lister sisters may have been and daughters with the trajectory of the first women to use microscopes their opus. But I wished for less bio- in producing images — for Histo graphical detail on Martin Lister’s riae Conchyliorum and to accom- youth and education. (This material pany letters published in the Royal is readily available in Roos’s 2011 Society’s journal, Philosophical monograph Web of Nature.) Those Transactions . Two of these, on eager to learn about Anna and wood grain and salt crystals, were Susanna and their scientific and authored by the pioneering Dutch Two engravings of shells from Historiae Conchyliorum. artistic legacy will be delighted scientist and microscopist Antonie by the final two chapters and the van Leeuwenhoek. Anna may also have chemistry, pharmacology and mathematics, photographs of their artwork. learnt to dissect specimens. Annotations in and contributed to theories about the age of As for their personal lives, details are her notebook indicate as much, and among Earth through his study of fossilized shells. scarce; but Roos has scrounged a few her original drawings for the Listers’ opus Roos places Lister at the centre of the tantalizing titbits. After their epic stint is a “depiction of a brachiopod gill and dis- movement towards observational empiri- on the book ended, Susanna married one sected mollusc penises”. Anna also drew cism in studying the natural world, as the Gilbert Knowler, becoming his third wife. illustrations of the bodies of living snails for nascent discipline shifted in focus from Less is known about Anna, but Roos has the final volume — an innovation that would exotica to a more systematic gathering of uncovered the possibility that she married not be repeated until the mid-eighteenth data, locally and globally. Active in many John Bristow in 1701 against her father’s century, when French conchologists turned scientific networks, he had contacts rang- wishes, which would explain why she was their attention to the ing from local York engravers, chemists not mentioned in his will. Yet, however rich mollusc itself, instead and printers to luminaries such as natural- the biographical detail on Martin Lister, the of its shell. ist James Petiver, physician and collector sisters’ exquisite scientific contribution tells Roos portrays these Hans Sloane and naturalist John Ray, all a story of its own. extraordinarily tal- of whom delivered specimens, drawings, Roos is to be congratulated on recovering ented young women books and advice (see H. Nicholls Nature an important episode in the intertwined as beneficiaries of 545, 410–411; 2017). Sloane, for instance, history of art and science in the early-mod- their polymath father, lent the Listers Jamaican shells for their ern period, the history of scientific-book whose indefatigable work. production and the hidden role of women curiosity about the Roos also explores the Listers’ later legacy, in the history of science. ■ natural world drove Martin Lister and in particular the republication of Historiae his achievements, and his Remarkable Conchyliorum in 1770, allowing broader Beth Fowkes Tobin is professor of English who gave his daugh- Daughters: The access to an authoritative work. Emanuel and women’s studies at the University of Art of Science in ters unusual latitude the Seventeenth Mendes da Costa, author of Elements of Georgia in Athens, and has published widely in pursuing the art and Century Conchology (1776) and British Conchol on eighteenth-century British natural science of conchology. ANNA MARIE ROOS ogy (1778), complained to a friend that the history, including the books The Duchess’s Nearly half the book is Bodleian Library Listers’ volumes were “very scarce” and not Shells and Colonizing Nature. a biography of Lister (2018) to be found in booksellers’ shops; he was e-mail: [email protected]