94
Children was privy to the groundbreaking results of
Talbot’s experiments in photogenic drawing almost from
their fi rst announcement at the Royal Institution on 25
January 1839. He was a member of the Committee of
Papers that met to consider the publication of Talbot’s
“Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing” and
he chaired The Royal Society’s meeting at which Talbot
delivered the details of his invention. In correspondence,
the two men discussed Talbot’s process and, receiving
samples of Talbot’s calotypes in 1841, Children reported
that he and Atkins would soon try out the new paper
negative photography. That year Children purchased a
camera for Atkins from Andrew Ross, but both his and
Atkins’s success with the instrument is uncertain. No
known calotype prints by Children or Atkins survive.
It is likely that father and daughter found a more
fruitful source for their scientific experimentation
with Talbot’s use of plants in his photogenic drawings.
Refl ecting Talbot’s botanical example and possibly his
desire to produce such a volume, Anna Atkins recorded
specimens of seaweed with photograms in her seri-
ally-published work entitled British Algae: Cyanotype
Impressions (1843–1853)—what many scholars have
acknowledged as the fi rst photographically-illustrated
book. Rather than using Talbot’s technical methods,
however, she employed Sir John Herschel’s cheaper
and more permanent photographic procedure of the
cyanotype.
Atkins quickly took up the cyanotype process in 1842
after Herschel, a wide-ranging scientifi c researcher and
family friend, sent to Children his recently published
paper containing the blueprint procedure. Coating her
paper with a mixture of ferric ammonium citrate and
potassium ferricyanide and exposing the dried paper to
light for a brief period of minutes, Atkins could utilize
fi ne specimens of “Ptilota sericea” and “Himanthalia
lorea” as negatives which, when contact printed under
the pressure of glass (or between sheets of mica?), would
produce photograms of striking white images against a
rich ground of Prussian blue. Intent on the information
of size, shape, structure, and degree of transparency
conveyed by each labeled example, she would have
found the blueprint medium an appropriate and effective
one for delineating the delicate “fl owers of the sea.” Ad-
ditionally, the photographic process was conducive for
producing multiple prints of the same specimen. With
it, Atkins assembled more than a dozen copies of British
Algae which she presented to scientifi c colleagues and
institutions throughout Great Britain.
Atkins loosely based the organization and classifi -
cation of British Algae upon that of William Harvey’s
1841 Manual of British Algae, announcing in her preface
that “I have intentionally departed from the systematic
arrangement that I might give specimens of very vari-
ous characters as a sample.” The three-volume work—
originally issued serially in 13 parts between 1843 and
1851—was to contain 14 pages of text and 389 pages
of captioned plates. These parts, when rearranged into
volumes between 1851 and 1853, included title pages,
indexes, and an appendix that the books’ recipients could
order according to Atkins’s inserted instructions.
With few references to the locations of collection for
her specimens and no indication of the species’ status
in Harvey’s color-coding system of red, green, and
olive-green groups, British Algae did not present an
entirely scientifi c case study. As Carol Armstrong has
argued, however, although Atkins’s project lacked in
rigorous method, it demonstrated that she enjoyed the
freedom to work “at the outer limits of the patriarchal
conduct of normal science” in a way that might be seen
to problematize “the system of positivist classifi cation
and the apparatus of the illustration” that would domi-
nate much of the scientifi c literature of the 19th century
(See Further Reading). The beauty and uniqueness of
her publication continued to impress photographic prac-
titioners and students of botany despite the fact that, by
the 1850s, other books using drawn specimens, dried
and mounted specimens, or images produced by Alois
Auer’s nature printing technique had rendered Atkins’s
work obsolete.
Halting publication for a year upon her father’s death
in 1852, Atkins authored a Memoir of John George
Children, Esq., and then fi nished the fi nal volume of
British Algae in October 1853. With the decade-long
project completed, she continued to make cyanotype
photograms in collaboration with her close friend, Anne
Dixon. Between 1852 and Dixon’s death in 1864, the
two women produced three presentation albums: Cya-
notypes of British and Foreign Ferns, Cyanotypes of
British and Foreign Flowering Plants and Ferns, and
an unnamed third album (with the possible assistance
of Herschel’s daughter, Isabella Herschel) featuring
photograms of botanical specimens, feathers, and lace
such as “Peacock,” “Emu,” and “Papaver rhoes”.
Atkins died at Halstead Place on 9 June 1871.
Meredith Key SolesBiography
Anna Atkins was born Anna Children on 16 March 1799
in Tonbridge, Kent. Although her mother, Hester Anne
Holwell, died of lingering complications from childbirth
in 1800, Atkins shared a close bond with her father,
John George Children. She married John Pelly Atkins,
a county sheriff, railroad promoter, and Jamaican cof-
fee plantation owner, in 1825. Atkins published British
Algae: Cyanotype Impressions between 1843 and 1853.
Interrupting this project for a year after her father’s
death, she produced a Memoir of John George Children,
Esq. (1853). In collaboration with her childhood friend,