Smart on Orr (2024)

Sarah Bowdich Lee is due for a revival. During her lifetime, Bowdich Lee and her first husband, Thomas Edward Bowdich, spent four years studying under Georges Cuvier at the Paris Muséum. After Paris, Sarah and Thomas travelled (with their children) on a scientific expedition to Madeira and what was then British West Africa, where Thomas and one of their children died. On her return to England, Bowdich Lee faced the personal challenge of providing for her remaining children, and the professional challenge of dealing with the loss of the notes and specimens collected in West Africa. A polyglot, illustrator, and prodigious writer, Bowdich Lee co-authored texts on taxidermy, ichthyology, and conchology; she solo-authored scientific texts, travel narratives, natural history fiction, and a memoir of Cuvier; and she helped popularize principles of classification through textbooks and anecdotes. Her expertise was recognized by Cuvier and Alexander von Humboldt, two of the scientific luminaries of her day. Why aren’t we talking about her more?  

In this study, Mary Orr convincingly shows that Bowdich Lee deserves attention as a scientist, notably for her classification of fishes of Western Africa; and as a writer, for her innovative use of hybrid genres. Pioneering Perspectives is not a biography of this extraordinary woman, but rather a first-rate scientific cultural history that situates Bowdich Lee within the natural history (or science) of her time, analyzes her contributions, and examines the forms through with she disseminated her information.

Bowdich Lee produced a vast and varied corpus. Orr has faced this organizational challenge by dividing her study into three parts: “Canvassing Cuvier,” “Harnessing Humboldt,” and “Opening access to Expert Natural History.” Each part includes three chapters that focus on a specific discipline and specific works. Part one, for example, explores Bowdich Lee’s work on ichthyology in Excursions dans les Iles de Madère et de Porto Santo (1826, first published in English in 1825 as Excursions in Madeira and Porto Santo) and The Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (1828–1838). The nine appendices give valuable information on publication and classification, as well as a taste of Bowdich Lee’s writing. 

The introduction unpacks the mystery of Bowdich Lee’s invisibility in current scientific and critical literature. Orr postulates that in many ways Sarah Bowdich Lee was an outsider: her gender, her religion (as a Unitarian, she was a non-conformist) and her middle-class origins pushed her to the margins. (As Orr points out, cultural histories tend to give pride of place to women travelers who moved in more exalted circles, such as Mary Kingsley.) In addition, Bowdich Lee occupied the intersection of British and French scientific frameworks. Thus, a cross-cultural approach is needed to reveal her contributions. Orr comments, “[t]he key to Sarah’s significance is therefore in her intercultural enlargement of natural history-making before 1860” (5). This quote also reflects Orr’s decision to refer to the author as “Sarah,” since she published as both “S. Bowdich” and “Mrs. Lee.” The introduction is important reading for anyone interested in natural history before 1860. Gender studies scholars will be interested in how Orr parses out scientific co-authorship and addresses the question of the signature. 

The well-documented chapters highlight different aspects of Bowdich Lee’s skills as a scientist and as a writer. I found “Canvassing Cuvier” (part one) to be particularly strong in its portrayal of Bowdich Lee’s legacy to the subdiscipline of ichthyology. Orr argues persuasively that Bowdich Lee’s contributions have not received proper recognition, since her discoveries were attributed to “Bowdich” and not “S. Bowdich.” These three chapters are outstanding in their interweaving of context, taxonomy, and narrative. They clearly show the overlapping of Bowdich Lee’s scientific eye and narrative I. Chapter one enters into some detail on classification, showing Bowdich Lee’s (and Orr’s) mastery of taxonomy. 

In “Harnessing Humboldt,” Orr argues that Bowdich Lee’s outsider status gave her a more nuanced perspective on human cultures of Gambia and Sierra Leone. A fervent abolitionist, Bowdich Lee was not an apologist of the “mission civilisatrice.” Orr’s accent in this part is less on Humboldt’s comparative plant geography, and more on ethnology and Humboldt as model for the scientific traveler. It would have been interesting to have more information on Bowdich Lee’s relationship to Humboldt. Orr shows how Bowdich Lee integrated field observations into The Notes of a Traveller (1835), a collection of stories, and her novel The African Wanderers (1847), creating a hybrid genre of natural history travel fiction.   

Part three presents Bowdich Lee’s contributions to “citizen science.” Orr examines Elements of Natural History (1844, 1850) to argue that Bowdich Lee was at the forefront of scientific pedagogy and also was a “foremost scientific illustrator” of her time (154). For Orr, Elements was no mere copy of Cuvier’s Règne animal (1829–1830): Bowdich Lee cited the most recent authorities, drawing from British and French scientific circles. Part three ends with Bowdich Lee’s use of the anecdote as an effective form for science communication—the best way to convey accurate knowledge and to engage a broad readership. In this part, as in chapter two, one wishes that the publisher had included colored plates, so that the reader might fully appreciate the artistry of Bowdich Lee’s illustrations. 

In short, Orr brilliantly demonstrates that Sarah Bowdich Lee engaged with the science of her time—“canvassing” Cuvier and “harnessing” Humboldt—and also crafted hybrid narrative forms to convey her observations. Bowdich Lee deserves recognition for her role in the “invention of nature” in the pre-Darwinian period. This fine study adds to previous scholarship that recuperates women’s contributions to science, such as Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram’s Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science 1789–1979 (1987); or, more pertinently for French Studies, Martine Watrelot’s edited volume George Sand et les sciences de la vie et de la terre (2020). As Orr remarks in her conclusion, Bowdich Lee offers a model for women in STEM(M) and presents the intersection of Arts and Sciences—a timely reminder for us today.