Henry Seymer and his Natural History Books

While cataloguing the Society’s Manuscript Sequence (MS), I came across several books that had once belonged to Henry Seymer. What first caught my attention was how much he had added to them, from handwritten notes to colouring in illustrations.

The MS sequence is a varied collection of material accumulated by the Linnean Society, including manuscripts, artwork, diaries, notebooks and correspondence, as well as books such as these. Nearly all of these papers belonged to Fellows, however Seymer is an exception to this as he died before the Linnean Society was founded. 

To catalogue the items properly, I first needed to find out more about Seymer himself. As well as putting together a biographical description for the catalogue, this research helped me to understand the material better and how it related to his interests.

Henry Seymer lived at Hanford House, in Dorset, and had a keen interest in natural history. He was particularly interested in insects and shells, although his collections also included minerals and fossils. He was also a horticulturalist and corresponded with several naturalists, including Richard Pulteney, Dru Drury and Thomas Pennant (The Seymer Legacy, p6). The Society also holds letters from Henry Seymer to his friend and fellow naturalist Richard Pulteney, catalogued as MS/238.

One of the most useful sources I came across during my research was The Seymer Legacy (2005), by R. I. Vane-Wright and Harold W. D. Hughes. The book brings together information about Seymer and his family, drawing on his diaries and correspondence, as well as the natural-history paintings produced by Seymer and his son, Henry Seymer Junior (1745–1800).

Seymer’s correspondence also gives us an idea of how important books were to his natural-history interests. In a letter to his friend Richard Pulteney in December 1768, he asked to borrow several natural-history works, promising that they would remain in his “dirty little room”, where nobody else in the family was likely to disturb them (The Seymer Legacy, p23).

The first of the works is Seymer’s copy of Georg Wolfgang Knorr’s Les délices des yeux et de l’esprit, now catalogued as MS/455a–b. Knorr was a German naturalist and engraver, and this illustrated work was entirely on shells, which was one of Seymer’s particular interests.

Seymer had built up an extensive shell collection at Hanford. According to an account written by Aylmer Bourke Lambert, he used agents in London to acquire specimens and received material through his contacts with other naturalists and collectors (The Seymer Legacy, p6). Some specimens were even connected with Captain Cook’s voyages (The Seymer Legacy, p224).

The Society holds six parts of Knorr’s work across two volumes. Both were interleaved, meaning that additional blank leaves had been inserted between the printed pages which Seymer used for notes

The Society holds three bound volumes of Dru Drury’s Illustrations of Natural History (MS/456a-c). The first contains the text of volumes I and II, with little or no handwritten annotation, while the second contains the illustrated plates from these two volumes. The third contains both the text and plates of volume III. Seymer and Drury knew one another through their shared interest in insects and corresponded regularly. According to The Seymer Legacy, Seymer purchased an uncoloured copy of Drury’s first volume in 1770 and coloured most of the illustrations himself, often working from actual insect specimens (The Seymer Legacy, p277). The plates in the second volume were coloured by Moses Harris, although Seymer made a few alterations of his own (The Seymer Legacy, p278). All three volumes contain Seymer’s bookplate, and their spines are lettered Drury’s Exotic Insects.

Following Seymer’s death in 1785, his collection of shells, insects, minerals, fossils and natural-history drawings was sold at auction in Covent Garden, beginning on 8 February 1786 and continuing for a further thirteen days. (The Seymer Legacy, p. 242)

The Knorr and Drury volumes show two of Seymer’s main interests, but they also tell us something about how he studied natural history. His handwritten notes, corrections and colouring are still there, alongside the work of other naturalists. Both works were presented to the Linnean Society by Major Vivian Seymer in November 1931. Nearly a century later, they remain useful not only for understanding Seymer and his interests, but also for seeing how natural-history books were used and studied in the eighteenth century.

Nida Shah, Assistant Archivist