neW roles for naTure^135nature was also collected, for in the new industrial world acquisition as much
as production were key social priorities. Fragments of the natural world
became possessions, just as the study of nature required the acquisition of
the right kinds of equipment. Knowledge of plants and birds might itself, in
effect, be traded, in the form of publications but also as informal exchange;
it became a form of social capital.
Nature did not necessary benefit from all the interest shown in it. The
Wardian case was especially suitable for the preservation of ferns, which
were collected with such enthusiasm that some areas became denuded of
the rarer species, to the consternation of many naturalists. Attractive but
infrequent species like forked spleenwort (Asplenium septentrionale) and
royal fern (Osmunda regalis) were particularly badly affected.^119 Byfield
quotes one disappointed description of a fern-hunting trip to Devon: ‘all the
available tresses of maidenhair fern have been shorn away’.^120 Orchids and
even some rare bryophytes and lichens were reduced through indiscriminate
collecting.^121 The progressive extension and elaboration of the rail network
brought large numbers of collectors to the coast, some sections of which were
likewise denuded, or so contemporaries believed, of molluscs and seaweeds.
Among the artisan botanists, sometimes trading rare plants for a profit to
wealthy collectors, it was not unknown for an entire stock of plants to be
dug up in order to maintain a monopoly. In 1812 George Caley, a Middleton
farrier, described how he searched in vain for specimens of the green-winged
orchid (Orchis morio) at a particular spot, later learning that it ‘had used
to grow in great plenty where I had been looking for it and that the day
before a person had gathered all the flowering plants he could meet with to
prevent people from getting up the roots’.^122 The most poignant legacy of
the Victorian fascination with natural history, however, are the collections
of stuffed birds which can often still be found quietly mouldering away in
the more remote recesses of country houses, accompanied by cases of birds’
eggs. The bearded tit was almost brought to extinction by collecting; species
like the Dartford warbler, already comparatively rare, were threatened,
either because individuals were shot to be stuffed, or because their eggs
were collected, or both.^123
Whether all this marks an ‘improvement’ in attitudes towards nature is
a moot point. The frenetic and violent attempts at pest control discussed
in the last chapter, however vicious and misguided, were at least the work
of people under constant threat from nature, attempting to protect their
livelihoods and their families. There were, however, important shifts in
popular attitudes to some animals. Cruel sports already had their critics in
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The city of Chester banned bear-
baiting as early as 1596; around the same time Sir John Davies castigated
this activity, together with cock-fighting, as ‘filthy sports’; while Samuel
Pepys at the end of the seventeenth century thought that they provided ‘a
very rude and nasty pleasure’.^124 Such attitudes became more widespread as
industrialization proceeded, however, and culminated in the establishment,