A Treatise on the Blood.]]> John Hunter]]> Books]]>
Both brothers were great collectors: William’s donations to Glasgow University formed the basis of their Hunterian Museum, while John’s collections survive in London at the Royal College of Surgeons.]]>
[Anon.]]]> Manuscripts]]>
Mrs John Hunter]]> Books]]> Matthew Baillie]]> Books]]> A Series of Plays appeared in 1798, it caused a stir. Who was the author of this striking work? Some thought it must be the leading writer of the day, Walter Scott. The author was revealed in the third edition as Joanna Baillie (1762-1851), a niece of John and William Hunter. While her uncles and brother Matthew explored human anatomy, Joanna explored the varieties of human passions.]]> Joanna Baillie]]> Books]]> Series of Plays, suggests their closeness and perhaps points to the influence of his medical studies on her own analyses of human nature.]]> Joanna Baillie]]> Books]]> The Botanic Garden: ‘The Loves of the Plants’, a versification of Linnaean classifications, and ‘Economy of Vegetation’, a reflection on contemporary scientific theories. Darwin incorporated extensive scientific learning into his poetry and in the accompanying notes. His insights into natural history and evolutionary thought anticipated the theory of natural selection of his grandson, Charles Darwin.]]> [Erasmus Darwin]]]> Books]]> George Richmond]]> Portraits]]> Charles Darwin]]> Manuscripts]]> On the Origin of Species (1859). With his botanist son Francis (1848-1925), he co-authored The Power of Movement in Plants. In addition to his research on botanical genetics, Francis Darwin published Rustic Sounds and Other Studies in Literature and Natural History (1917), a series of essays that reflected the influences of his family.]]> Charles Darwin (assisted by Francis Darwin)]]> Books]]> Political Justice (1793) argues for the inevitable progression of humanity towards governance through reason, and this perspective strongly influenced the political views of his future son-in-law, the poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley.]]> William Godwin]]> Books ]]> A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is a founding text of modern feminism. In the decade leading up to this monumental work, Mary helped establish a school for girls and wrote the conduct book Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), and the novel Mary: A Fiction (1788). In all of these works, she argued that women deserved rational educations and greater individual rights in order to be better wives and mothers. But her opportunity to put this philosophy into action was short lived. She died just days after giving birth to her second daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin.]]> Mary Wollstonecraft]]> Books]]> Frankenstein (1818), shows the influence of both her parents’ thinking. Percy’s The Cenci uses the lurid story of a sixteenth-century Italian family to address a central human dilemma: should a moral individual employ violence to overthrow tyranny?]]> Percy Bysshe Shelley]]> Books]]> Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Mrs Shelley]]> Books]]> [Anna Barbauld]]]> Books]]> John Aikin]]> Books]]> ___]]> Books]]> Evelina (1778), only after it became successful, and even then he approached it ‘with fear & trembling,’ wondering whether 'she c[oul]d write a book worth reading'.]]> Charles Burney]]> Books]]> Evelina (1778), was written in secret. She told only her brother and sister about her plans to publish her own work. She disguised her handwriting to prevent printers from associating the work with the Burney family.]]> [Frances Burney]]]> Books]]> Memoirs (1820) Richard wrote, ‘[Maria] is my pupil, my literary partner, and my friend’. Richard influenced Maria’s novel writing. As a teenager, she recorded her father’s stories about an imagined Irish family, later reworking them into her novel Patronage (1814).]]> Maria and R. L. Edgeworth]]> Books]]> The Scottish Chiefs (1810), which offered a romantic retelling of the William Wallace narrative, predated Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels. The work was especially popular in the United States, as evidenced here by an illustrated 1856 edition from New York.]]> Jane Porter]]> Books]]> The Scottish Chiefs (1810), was still popular in the United States long after it was first published, as shown here in this Classics Illustrated comic from 1950.]]> Jane Porter]]> Books]]> The Scottish Chiefs, highlights the family’s fascination with military heroism.]]> Robert Ker Porter]]> Books]]> Sir Edward Seaward’s Narrative was a surprise success in 1831. Jane Porter claimed that this Crusoe-style tale was based on an actual, eighteenth-century manuscript lent to her by a friend of the family. Early reviewers assumed that Jane was the actual author and praised her knowledge of the Caribbean. In fact, it was the work of her elder brother, the Bristol doctor William Ogilvie Porter (1774-1850), who had spent part of his youth working in the West Indies.]]> William Ogilvie Porter. Edited by Miss Jane Porter]]> Books]]> William Wordsworth]]> Books]]>