Uncouth maybe, but not a cad
David Edelsten
THE BIRD MAN by Isabella Tree Ebuty Press, £14.99, pp. 246, ISBN 071262158X In Milan just before Easter I stumbled on a stack of lithographs from John Gould's Birds of Britain, on a piazza bookstall. Top of the pile was his Great Crested Grebe: the parent bird carries its young pickaback. I have Gould's typically robust sketch of this group of chicks, no doubt done beside the Thames; he was a famous angler.
You see Gould's images everywhere, they never seem to go out of favour. As well as being one of the greatest naturalists of his age, he was one of its most successful iconographers, yet we have a sadly incomplete picture of Gould the man. Before this, there was no biography.
Born into poverty at Lyme, in Dorset, in 1804, he received only rudimentary schooling. His father's success as a gardener, however, took the family to Windsor, where, as a teenager, John became adept at stuffing and mounting birds. Employment with the new Zoological Society followed, and a career of quite extraordinary entrepreneurial success as a naturalist, ornithologist and publisher. By the age of 40 he was a Fellow of the Royal Society and the world authority in his field: his output was colossal, his books are almost priceless.
His life was a sad one. Widowed at an early age, he was left with six children, two of his three sons dying before he did, in 1881. His only grandchild, my grandmother, lived out her latter years in the house where my boyhood was spent amidst living echoes of 'Grandfather Gould', and where I am still surrounded by the evidence of his tireless genius.
If far from faultless, this book is indispensable. Isabella Tree's chapters on the Darwin connection and on Gould's Australian trivets are tours de force. The shame is that, although she does full justice to his achievements, almost from the first sentence of her introduction she seems to be obsessed with denigration of a character that she evidently finds unsympathetic. Her slighting and snide description of his marriage, as being one merely of convenience, is pure supposition and would not disgrace a gossip column. She stoops even to suggesting that he worked his young wife (and invaluable illustrator) to death: when she says that he 'faced the loss of his wife with remarkable fortitude' we know exactly what she means. And she shows not a hint of sympathy for the predicament of the young widower with six small children and a way to make in the world. Gould was certainly a hard man, made enemies, and attracted a great deal of jealousy, but Tree seems all too ready to make common cause with his detractors, many of whom were patently social, artistic or science snobs.
Gould's own artistic ability or lack of it has long been debated. No one questions that he masterminded the production of the illustrations in his books, but could he draw? You will have already guessed which side of the argument our biographer espouses — he had 'little natural aptitude for drawing', was 'no draughtsman'. I, who am not qualified to dispute the point, however have a finished watercolour of woodcock chicks, certainly his work, which is one of the loveliest things I own.
Had Isabella Tree berated Gould for not anticipating 'animal rights', she would have been following a style honoured by many a modern biographer; rather, and somewhat quaintly, she picks up the cudgels left lying around by his contemporaries. Lady Franklin, the Governor's wife, a great friend to the Goulds, their host in Tasmania, in the privacy of her diary laughs at the farouche manners of this 'entirely uneducated man': his biographer invites us to join in the snigger. One is reminded of Emma Woodhouse decrying the 'clownishness' of Robert Martin.
This attractively produced book is a strange but not unhappy mixture — much of the research is impressive, but the style journalistic. She pogos, I almost wrote 'effortlessly', from otiose adjective to superfluous adverb, snatching in passing at any handy cliché. An enjoyable and informative read, it is an excellent, indispensable guide to what John Gould did, if no help at all in telling us who he really was. The Bird Man certainly does not deserve to be remembered as a 'cad', as some catchpenny copywriter would have it on the dust-jacket.
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