This project explores shell collecting in late eighteenth-century Britain as a complex social practice and as a form of Enlightenment scientific activity. Shell collecting in the Enlightenment reached its peak in terms of enthusiasm and popularity when Captain James Cook returned to England in the 1770s with shells from the South Pacific. These new, exotic, and rare shells were much desired objects as collectors and naturalists sought to add specimens from the Pacific to their already existing collections of European, Caribbean, and South Asian shells. The methods by which these shells were collected were multiple and complex, involving honorific gift-giving, patron/client hierarchies, commercial exchanges, loans among friends, spectacular auctions, embarrassing swindles, and felony. This project examines the intersection of natural history collecting with the voyages of discovery by focusing on Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, the Duchess of Portland, and her shell collection, which was the largest and finest in England, if not all of Europe. This study reconstructs the culture of shell collecting in this era, focusing on the scientific networks in which the Duchess participated, the methods by which she amassed her collections, and the techniques that she used to classify and display her collection. In the process of tracing the Duchess's activities, this study will also illuminate the collecting practices of England's provincial amateur naturalists as well as London's scientific elite and will reveal the tensions between connoisseurship and professional expertise, the linkage between sociability and science, and the role of gender and class in the production of scientific knowledge. This study is based upon the examination and analysis of archival materials in the form of naturalists' letters, state correspondence, ships' logs, museum guides, and sales catalogs, which are located mostly in Britain, namely, in the British Museum, the British Library, the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, the Linnean Society, University of Nottingham, the Royal Society, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.
Intellectual Merit. Too often natural history collecting has been dismissed as an exercise in privilege and connoisseurship. In particular, shell collecting, perhaps because of its emphasis on aesthetic presentation of objects, has been largely overlooked as scientific praxis. This study will suggest that collectors of natural history specimens were ultimately exploring the tension between order and variety in nature as they struggled to classify and catalog their collections according to Linnaean taxonomy. These activities were at the heart of the Enlightenment project of bringing system and order to bear on nature. Most importantly, this project works to restore women as agents in the production of knowledge about nature by documenting in detail the duchess's activities as a collector and classifier of natural history specimens and by examining her relationships with various scientific communities in Britain.
Broader Impacts. The results of this research will be disseminated in museum displays on women and natural history, in public presentations as well as at academic conferences, and in university courses on women and science and seminars on collecting and material culture. Results will be published as articles in refereed scholarly journals, and as a book addressed to both general audiences interested in natural history, collecting, and Cook's voyages as well as specialists in history of science, women's studies, history of Pacific exploration, museum studies, and material culture studies.
