93
of the Photographic Society also encouraged the status
of photography. They treated the medium as an art by
critiquing the pictures as if they were paintings being
shown at the Royal Academy. The Athenaeum did more
than simply report on the latest inventions and exhibi-
tions: it was an important space in which photography
was disseminated and debated.
The Athenaeum’s coverage of photography declined
markedly after the early 1860s. Partly, this was due
to the increasingly literary and artistic bent of the
journal: scientifi c meetings were no longer reported to
the same degree as they were in the previous decades.
The decrease in the number of articles also refl ects the
changing status of the medium itself. As photography
became an increasingly commercial medium in the late
1850s and early 1860s, the Athenaeum lost interest in
both its aesthetic or scientifi c value. Its review of the
1864 exhibition of the Photographic Society disappoint-
edly noted that it was “the smallest and least interesting
of the series.” The Athenaeum came to an end in June
1911 when it was merged with the Nation. However,
any serious engagement with photography had ceased
several decades earlier.
John Plunkett
See Also: British Journal of Photography;
Photographic News (1858-1908); Daguerre,
Louis-Jacques-Mandé; Talbot, William Henry Fox;
Herschel, Sir John Frederick William; Mayall, John
Jabez Edwin; Claudet, Antoine-François-Jean; and
Hunt, Robert.
Further Reading
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, The Papers of a Critic; Selected from
the writings of Charles Wentworth Dilke. With a biographical
memoir by his grandson, Charles Wentworth Dilke, London:
John Murray, 1875.
Francis, John Collins, John Francis; Publisher of the Athenaeum:
A Literary Chronicle of Half a Century, London: Bentley and
Son, 1888.
Marchand, Leslie, The Athenaeum; a Mirror of Victorian Culture,
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1941.
Seiberling, Grace and Carolyn Bloore, Amateurs, photography
and the mid-Victorian imagination, Chicago: Chicago UP &
International Museum of Photography, 1986.
Spurgeon, Dickie A., “The Athenaeum,” British Literary Maga-
zines: The Romantic Age 1789– 1836 , ed. Alvin Sullivan,
Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983: 21–24.
ATKINS, ANNA CHILDREN (1799–1871)
British amateur botanist and photographer
Atkins was born Anna Children in Tonbridge, Kent, on
16 March 1799. The only child of John George Children
and Hester Anne Holwell, she shared close familial and
working relationships with her father after her mother’s
death in 1800. John Children was a scientist who held
positions as Assistant Librarian and Keeper in the de-
veloping British Museum and as Fellow and Secretary
of The Royal Society. He served as Vice President of
the Botanical Society of London, to which Atkins was
elected a member in 1839. Children’s and Atkins’s af-
fi liations helped expose them to the newest in scientifi c
discoveries and facilitated her experiments with photog-
raphy beginning in the early 1840s.
Before undertaking these experiments, however,
Atkins demonstrated her skill as a draftsman of sci-
entifi c specimens. In 1823 she illustrated Children’s
translation of Lamarck’s Genera of Shells, making 256
drawings. These images and the lithographed views of
Wooton Church, Warwickshire (published by Charles
Hullmandel), and Halstead Church and Halstead Place,
Kent, which she produced after her marriage to John
Pelly Atkins in 1825, reveal an attention to detail and
artistic ability later exhibited in her photographic work
with botanical specimens and other objects. When Chil-
dren retired to the Atkins’s home at Halstead Place in
1840, he and Anna Atkins tried their hand at producing
photogenic drawings and calotypes—works in two new
photographic processes announced by Henry Fox Talbot
in 1839 and 1841, respectively—and she adopted Sir
John Herschel’s 1842 method of the cyanotype.Atkins, Anna and Anne Dison. Gleichenia Immerse (Jamaica).
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © The J. Paul Getty
Museum.