Women and Botany in 18th and Early 19th-Century England

Withering, William. A Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Growing in Great Britain with Descriptions of the Genera and Species According to the Celebrated Linnus..., with an Easy Introduction to the Study of Botany. Shewing the Method of Investigating Plants, and Directions How to Dry and Preserve Specimens. Birmingham, Printed by M. Swinney, for T Cadel and P. Elmsley... and G. Robinson... London, 1776.

William Withering, 1741-99, was chief physician at the Birmingham General Hospital and author of this book, an outstanding work of its period on plants growing in Britain. Our copy is a first edition. Withering was also author of a 1785 book on the medicinal uses of foxglove (digitalis), and Botanical Sketches of the Twenty-four Classes in the Linnean System, with Fifty Specimens of English Plants,..., 1801.

Botanical Arrangement..., a handbook of plant classification written with women readers in mind, introduces the Linnean system; it was very popular and had many editions. It is a book that Dorothy and William Wordsworth acquired in 1801. Dr. Withering belonged to the Lunar Society of Birmingham, a group of gentlemen who met from 1775-the 1890s to discuss projects at the nexus of science and technology; other notable members were Erasmus Darwin, Josiah Wedgwood, and Matthew Boulton.