We don’t need Tolkien’s fantastically horrifying Shelob or his monstrous spiders of Mirkwood Forest to remind us that people find arachnids—even at their natural sizes—among the most fearsome creatures of the natural world. So in the spirit of spooky late October fun we've dug out a few creepy crawlies from The Natural History of Spiders and Other Curious Insects (1736), by 18th century painter and water colorist Eleazar Albin (d. 1742?).
Page through this entomological rarity, and you’ll make the acquaintance of over 180 spiders, most from England but some also from other corners of the world (South Africa, the Philippines, Suriname, among others). You won't learn their names though. Drawing from his own "ocular observation" (probably in good part via various private specimen collections), Albin provides accounts that detail the shape, color, size, and sometimes behavior of each spider depicted, but does not attempt to sort out species identification. To Albin's time, the art of taxonomy was, after all, a very young science still. Proceed to the chapter-like appendices — penned by physician Richard Mead and famed natural philosopher Robert Hooke — you get up-close-and-personal views of tarantulas, scorpions, and, somewhat incongruously, a range of fleas and lice associated with a variety of birds. The inspiration for this intriguing if somewhat discomfiting volume, as declared by author Albin in his introductory notes: A desire to provide a reliable account of the spider species that would “instruct our understanding and gratify our commendable curiosity.” Thanks to this work, and his earlier treatise, The Natural History of English Insects (London, 1720), Albin has been recognized by at least one team of science historians as "one of the great entomological book illustrators of the 18th century." (Salmon, et. al., quoted in Wikipedia).
Figure 173: A spider from the Cape of Good Hope. “These foreign large spiders have ten legs besides the forceps, all our English spiders having but eight. They are said to spin a web so strong between the branches of the trees as is able to intangle the humming-birds, which they kill and devour.” [Note: Albin mistakes two of the spider’s appendages, the short pedipalps on either side of the jaws at the top, for legs. By definition of course, spiders are 8-footed creatures].
So how did Albin—whose first paying job was that of teacher of painting and drawing in the bustling city of London—come by his success as an early pioneer of English science illustration? One lucky break came when the young artist’s life path crossed with that of Joseph Dandridge, a successful fabric pattern designer who was also respected as an amateur botanist, entomologist and collector. As Dandridge (himself a talented if possibly time-strapped illustrator) relied on Albin to render some of the choice caterpillars and other specimens gathered during expeditions across the English countryside, their collaboration provided the artist with access to a widening circle of British intellectuals, aristocrats and other wealthy patrons who would eventually become paying subscribers for several ambitious natural history projects of his own. Ultimately, Albin had five illustrated natural history works to his name, which in addition to Spiders and Insects, included, A Natural History of Birds (1731) , Natural History of English Songbirds (1737), and The History of Esculent Fish (published posthumously in 1794) , —no shabby life achievement.
Among others, the Empress of Russia. Taking care to include a celebrity-studded subscriber list in his introduction to Spiders, Albin was clearly not above stoking some 18th century FOMO as part of his marketing strategy.
While clearly adept at tapping into the wealth of England’s upper crust to make his work possible, Albin was not one born with a silver spoon in his mouth. The specific date and place of his birth are unclear, but he appears to have been born in Germany and come to London as an immigrant in either his child- or early adulthood. In London, he ended up with a large family to support (ten children in all), and their residence on Golden Square, SoHo, "next ye Green Man near Maggots Brew House," was likely not conducive to forging easy connections with the city's monied class. Yet a large family also provided some important resources. Albin's daughter, Elizabeth, and possibly his son (or son-in-law) Fortin contributed some of the lovely artwork in Albin's volumes. And according to at least one contemporaneous natural historian (James Petiver), Albin was known to use a surprisingly effective secret ingredient in mixing up the pigments for his artwork: boys' urine. No shortage of that agent in a household with five boys!
Spider no. 178: “The back, belly, legs and feelers of this large Spider were of a yellowish brown, with marks of a darker shade of the same color; its forelegs were longer than any of the others; its feelers were oddly sloped like claws of a lobster, with which it would lay hold of any thing it had a mind to.”
Albin beat some considerable odds in the unforgiving social environment of 18th century England to achieve respect as a natural history illustrator in his lifetime, but there’s a murky side to his story as well. In the late 1960's, some intrepid sleuthing by British science writer W. S. Bristowe yielded a troubling discovery: It appears that the spider illustrations in Albin's 1736 work were essentially copies of an unpublished set of "delicately executed and often excellent" illustrations by Albin's mentor Joseph Dandridge, which were found tucked away in the archives of the British Museum. Bristowe takes Albin severely to task (to the point possible with someone who’s been dead over 200 years) for failing to include even a hint of attribution to Dandridge's work is in his Spider volume. Now to be fair, Dandridge was very much still alive and kicking — "far from being in his dotage" as Bristowe puts it — when Albin published Spiders, and Albin's appropriation appears to have elicited none of the justifiable outrage one might have expected from his mentor or any of his other contemporaries. At least not anything that's been recorded in the history books.
And for your frontispiece, why not a put portrait of the author riding a fine horse among an array of mites, scorpions, tarantulas and other spiders!? One can’t, of course, help wondering about he inspiration behind this composition. An eccentric sense of grandeur ? A surreal sense of humor? Or maybe a need to express some wry commentary on the way this particular project had taken over the author’s life? Your guess!
Regardless of the specific story behind his Spider work, it’s clear that Albin labored greatly in life to achieve the results he did. Perhaps Joseph Dandridge felt sorry enough for hard-toiling Albin—and appreciated his zeal for the natural history project enough—to cut his erstwhile mentee a generous break and forgive him his piracy; perhaps Dandridge owed Albin some kind of intellectual debt stemming from their years of collaboration; or perhaps Albin contributed to Dandridge's original spider drawings in ways that he himself had not yet been able to acknowledge.
We may never know the full story behind this apparent act of 18th century intellectual property theft. But it's a good cautionary tale in the month of October in any case. While the entomologically unenlightened among us may still find spiders profoundly scary creatures, there's nothing like a cry of plagiarism to send shivers of horror into both the halls of academia and the world of publishing. And almost surely, that is a very good thing.
Albin, Eleazar. A Natural History of English Insects. 1720
Bristowe, W. S., "The Life and Work of a Great English Naturalist: Joseph Dandridge," Entomologist's Gazette, Vol. 18, No. 2 (April 24, 1967), pp. 71-89
Bristowe, W. S., "More About Joseph Dandridge and His Friends James Petiver and Eleazar Albin," Entomologists Gazette, Vol. 18, Nos. 3 & 4, pp. 197-201.
Osborne, Peter (2004): "Albin, Eleazar (d. 1742?)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press.
Weiss, Harry B., "Two Entomologists of the Eighteenth Century--Eleazar Albin and Moses Harris," The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 23, No. 6 (Dec., 1926), pp. 558-564
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Dandridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eleazar_Albin
