Provincial Piety & the Parson Naturalist

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Anglican Beginnings & Evangelical Zeal

By the time George Eliot had begun Middlemarch, she had arrived at a point in her spiritual journey where she was in equal parts sceptical of religious dogma and reverent towards the concept of faith as a whole. She came to this position after being raised in the parish of Chilver’s Coton, in a rural Anglican congregation and following a period of passionate evangelism in adolescence.

Exhibit 52 – Chilvers Coton Church, Nuneaton, by Thomas Wakeman, (1919), Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery. Eliot attended the church in her childhood and it was the inspiration for the fictional Shepperton church in ‘Scenes of Clerical Life’.

Mary Ann was born into a conservative Church of England family. In 1828, while away at Mrs Wallington’s Boarding School in Nuneaton, she grew close to her teacher Maria Lewis, a fervent evangelist who acted as her religious mentor. Over the next ten years, in her teens through to her twenties, Mary Ann was increasingly drawn to evangelical Christianity. She became an impassioned reader of religious writings which she would discuss, in detail, in her correspondence with Miss Lewis.

This hardback music book, housed at Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery, was owned by George Eliot in these years, (the paper is watermarked 1834 when Mary Ann would have been a teenager). Lovingly inscribed with the musical notations of her favourite hymns, the book is indicative of the depth of her commitment to Christianity in early adolescence.

Page from a music manuscript. Shows lines with musical notes.

Exhibit 53 – Music book owned by George Eliot, (c. 1830), Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery.

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Handwritten on the inside cover is an inscription signed by her partner, George Henry Lewes, that reads ‘The hymns were probably copied by her as favourites, in her younger days.’

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Exhibit 53 – Music book owned by George Eliot, (c. 1830), Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery. Text reads: ‘Hymn 13th’.

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Exhibit 53 – Music book owned by George Eliot, (c. 1830), Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery. Text reads: ‘Easter Hymn’.

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Exhibit 53 – Music book owned by George Eliot, (c. 1830), Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery. Text reads: ‘Morning Hymn‘.

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Exhibit 53 – Music book owned by George Eliot, (c. 1830), Nuneaton Museum & Art Gallery. Blessed Be Thy Name Forever by James Hogg.

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In her youth, (much like her heroine Dorothea Brooke, whose spiritual maturation underpins Middlemarch’s plot), her ‘excessive religiousness’ often took the form of performative piety. Letters to Miss Lewis penned in this period (1836–41) are laden with self-aggrandizing proclamations in which a young Eliot dramatically denies herself ‘earthly pleasures’ and ardently apologises for her egotism. In one letter, dated 16 March 1839, she even denounces the concept of fiction in its entirety; proceeding to question its moral value, and judging those who find amusement in ‘the adventures of some phantom conjured by fancy’.

As Eliot’s hunger for knowledge grows, the religious fervour expressed in these letters steadily becomes entangled with other intellectual and scientific interests. In one particularly evocative passage, penned with characteristic gravitas at the age of 19, she conflates geological stratification with cumulative learning. Her mind, ‘never of the most highly organized genus’, has become overwhelmed with information — like ‘a stratum of conglomerated fragments’ (be it ‘a jaw and rib of some ponderous quadruped, [or] a delicate alto-relievo of some fernlike plant’). Conscious of the fact that ‘a single word’ could be enough to set one adrift from ‘the veil’ of scripture and ‘give an entirely new mould to [one’s] thoughts’, she hopes, at least, that amongst such reading ‘some spiritual desires [had] been sent up, and spiritual experience gained’ (Letters 1: 29).

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Religious Emancipation at Rosehill

Eliot’s estrangement from Christianity was hastened by her friendship with the Bray family and by her growing interest in the work of progressive thinkers like Ludwig Feuerbach and David Strauss, both of whom probed the origins of the Bible and rejected the concept of an all-knowing, divine creator. Eliot renounced her faith in the 1840s, persuaded by such scholarship, and by geological advances in science that — contrary to biblical scripture — suggested the earth was several-hundred-million years-old.

As she got older, Mary Ann’s evangelical fervour waned, and with it the influence of Miss Lewis. In November 1841, she set out with her neighbour Elizabeth Pears to visit Rosehill, the Unitarian home of Charles and Caroline Bray. Here, Mary Ann found an erudite circle of freethinking friends who advocated for social reform, welcomed philosophical debate, and openly questioned the tenets of orthodox Christianity. As her friend, Mathilde Blind later wrote:

‘In intercourse with [those at Rosehill] she was able freely to open her mind, their enlightened views helping her in this crisis of her spiritual life; and she found it an intense relief to feel no longer bound to reconcile her moral and intellectual perceptions with a particular form of worship.’

The Brays were frequently joined by Caroline’s brother, Charles Hennell a fellow Unitarian, who, in 1838, penned an Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity. An influential work that posited Christianity ought to be ‘regarded as a system of elevated thought and feeling’, and sought to liberate the Bible from the supernatural ‘fables’ surrounding its origin.

Ultimately, in an episode she later dubbed ‘The Holy War’, Mary Ann renounced her faith and ceased attending church, to the chagrin of her family. Laying out her beliefs in a frank letter to her father, she wrote the following:

‘I regard those writings as histories consisting of mingled truth and fiction, and while I admire and cherish much of what I believe to have been the moral teaching of Jesus himself, I consider the system of doctrines built upon the facts of his life . . . to be most dishonourable to God and most pernicious in its influence on individual and social happiness’ (Letters 1: 128).

Exhibit 54 – A Daguerreotype photograph of Charles Hennell, Eliot’s friend and the author of An Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838), Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

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Open book showing the inner pages. The right hand page has the following text. The Life of Jesus, critically examined by Dr David Friedrich Strauss. Translated from the fourth German edition.

Exhibit 55 – Sara Hennell’s copy of the Translation of Strauss (1846), translated by George Eliot and Rufa Brabant, Coventry Archives.

From the late 1820s (when Middlemarch is set) through to the early 1870s (when it was published) religious doubt was exacerbated by historical criticism of the Bible. Scholars sceptical of divinity argued that the Bible ought to be approached as a historic manuscript, rather than as an infallible guide to spiritual salvation or as a conduit for the Holy Spirit. As Middlemarch’s Will Ladislaw notes, in a thinly veiled slight towards Causabon’s academic endeavours, ‘the Germans have taken the lead in [these] historical inquiries’.

George Eliot (in the years before she was known as such) was integral to importing this contentious discussion from Germany to Britain. Eliot translated Das Leben Jesu by David Friedrich Strauss from German into English in the 1840s, continuing the work of Rufa Brabant, who married her friend Charles Hennell. The translation (The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined) took Eliot two years and she received £20 for the work, though neither Eliot nor Brabant were credited in the resulting publication.

Strauss’ argument further chipped away at the great fissures of uncertainty already erupting in Europe as a result of scientific works that undermined the story of Genesis, (like Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology). Just as geologists observed the perceivable, continuous changes in the Earth’s crust to posit an age for the Earth, Strauss approached the miracles of the Bible from an empirical point of view. His conclusion — that evidence suggested such stories were allegorical rather than literal — was highly controversial. Eliot’s translation was dubbed by Lord Anthony Ashley Cooper (the Earl of Shaftesbury) ‘the most pestilential book ever vomited out of the jaws of hell’ (Mead 31).

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Exhibit 56 – Statuette of Christ owned by George Eliot. Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

This statuette stood in George Eliot’s study at Bird Grove in Foleshill where Eliot lived with her father in the 1840s. According to Rosehill confidante Cara Bray, the figure was a source of spiritual solace to Eliot in the months she was translating Strauss’ The Life of Jesus. Writing to their mutual friend Sara Hennell, Bray recalls that Mary Ann lamented she was so ‘Strauss sick’ from ‘dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion’ that ‘only the sight of her Christ-image and picture [had] made her endure it’.

Her next theological translation, Ludwig Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums (1841), proved much more harmonious with her humanist beliefs. Both Feuerbach’s work and Eliot’s translation, The Essence of Christianity (1854), argued that humanity’s conception of God, in reality, is just a collective projection of the best aspects of human nature; of our capacity to love and sympathise with each other.

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In the course of this crisis of faith, Mary Ann became a close friend of the evangelical Sibree family. John Sibree was an Anglican minister at Vicar Lane Chapel in Coventry. Eliot was particularly close to his daughter, Mary and his son, John. Both Rev. Sibree and his wife were aggrieved to hear that Eliot had lost her faith. Mary Sibree describes an emotional scene in which a young Mary Ann anxiously said to Mary’s mother: ‘Now, Mrs. Sibree, you won’t care to have anything more to do with me’. Though they were initially accepting of Eliot’s perceived defection from Christianity (Mrs Sibree replied ‘On the contrary, I shall feel more interested in you than ever’) the couple went on blame her for their son, John giving up his plans to follow his father into the Church (Cross 1: 119).

According to Mary Sibree, Eliot’s shift in beliefs was gradual and did not stem from any one influence. Initially, her discussions with Mary’s father were heated. During a vehement debate that lasted two hours Mary ‘vividly remember[s] how deeply [Eliot] was moved, and how, as she stood against the mantelpiece during the last part of the time, her delicate fingers, in which she held a small piece of muslin on which she was at work, trembled with her agitation’ (Cross 1: 236). This heat, however, soon gave way to a calm confidence in her views.

Exhibit 57 – Rev. John Sibree, (1795-1877), Minister at Coventry, (1834), National Galleries of Scotland.

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‘His religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship…’

The Rev. Edward Casaubon is described as being ‘a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety’ and is rich enough to employ a curate (Mr. Tucker) to do practically all the parish work at Lowick. He spends his days in a well-stocked library sifting through a seemingly endless supply of material for his theological magnum opus, grandiosely dubbed his ‘Key to All Mythologies’. This sprawling work of ‘religious history’ occupies his every waking moment. Even his belief in ‘the Christian hope in immortality’, the narrator tells us, seemed ‘to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies.’
We are told that Dorothea ‘looked as reverently at Mr. Casaubon’s religious elevation above herself as she did at his intellect and learning’. She is overjoyed in the early days of their marriage when he responds to her outward ‘expressions of devout feeling’ ‘with an appropriate [bible] quotation’. But beyond his scholarly ambitions, his faith has little impact on the lives of those around him and Dorothea is disappointed to find that he is generally indifferent to the plight of his fellow man.

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Provincial Piety

Though Eliot remained sceptical of religion she agreed to resume attendance at Holy Trinity Church in Coventry, where her father Robert acted as a churchwarden’s assistant, until his death in 1849. The egotism that often underpins evangelical fervour is a major theme in Middlemarch.

Eliot’s attendance at church did not constitute active worship. This was a known fact among the congregation. According to Mary Cash (née Sibree), Eliot could not help but dwell on ‘how much easier life would be to her, and how much better she should stand in the estimation of her neighbours, if only she could take things as they did […] and conform to the popular beliefs without any reflection or examination’ (Cross 1: 358). She could not help but be struck by the inherent hypocrisy of those ‘professing and calling themselves Christians,’ and would comment to Miss Sibree on the inappropriate tone of their conversation: ‘often frivolous, sometimes ill-natured’. She was acutely conscious of ‘the apparent union of religious feeling with a low sense of morality among the people’; ‘on the part of Christians to avoid the very appearance of evil’, and to prioritise superficial devotion over moral action (Cross 1: 358).

Exhibit 58 – St Michael’s and Holy Trinity Churches from the North East, Coventry by David Gee, (1849), The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

In Middlemarch, the character of Nicholas Bulstrode — a sanctimonious evangelist with an unscrupulous past — provides us with a detailed portrait of a man whose outward piety stands at odds with his private morality. Bulstrode rationalises his desire to ‘gain as much power as possible’ in Middlemarch by insisting ‘that he might use it for the glory of God’. Delving into the inner conscience of such an individual, the narrator wryly notes that much ‘inward argument’ and ‘spiritual conflict’ accompanied Bulstrode’s careful consideration of ‘what God’s glory required’. It is in the ‘spiritual interests’ of the new hospital’s patients, Bulstrode insists to Dr Lydgate, that the Rev. Camden Farebrother be relieved from his clerical duties and replaced by the zealous Rev. Tyke.

As an outsider to rural life, Lydgate has little understanding of the degree to which parochial and provincial affairs intersect, and thus of the sheer impossibility that he ‘could have no opinion on such matters’ and ‘nothing to do with clerical disputes’.

Exhibit 59 – The interior of St. Michael’s Church, Coventry by David Gee, (1849), The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum.

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Dorothea’s Pathway from Puritanism

At the start of the novel, Dorothea is described as having an intensely ‘religious disposition’. Hoping that her marriage will provide an outlet for this fervour, she imagines that Causabon will be as instructive as Milton’s ‘affable archangel’, and that his labyrinthine ‘Key to All Mythologies’ will serve as a ‘great harvest of truth’, like the work of a ‘modern Augustine’. In the opening chapter, she disclaims any interest in wearing her mother’s jewels, (intimating she is above such vanities), and even rejects a pearl cross on the grounds that she would never relegate such a symbol of devotion to the category of trinket. As her sister Celia notes, ‘there was a strong assumption of superiority in this Puritanic toleration’. The latent hypocrisy in Dorothea’s lofty ideals is made all the more apparent when she attempts to find an excuse to instead take the finest ring and necklace on offer, and justifies her delight in these ‘fragments of heaven’ by conflating them with ‘her mystic religious joy’. Her sister’s innocent query as to whether Dorothea will actually wear said jewellery is met with the haughty reply that she ‘cannot tell to what level [she] may sink.’
Dorothea’s loss of faith in her marriage is paralleled with her estrangement from conventional Christianity: she ‘ceases to pray to a God who no longer has any meaning, just as she ceased to believe in the husband she thought she was going to marry’. As the novel progresses, however, her uncompromising fundamentalism is tempered with pragmatism: she learns to observe, gather evidence and listen to those around her before offering advice and, ultimately, to funnel her sympathetic impulses into more practical endeavours.

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Secular Spirituality

In her lifetime, George Eliot was known and idealised as a moral guide for the modern age. Her loss of religious faith resulted in a renewed belief in the goodness of humanity. Readers of Middlemarch are encouraged to widen their capacity for heartfelt compassion by using fiction as a vehicle for sympathetic understanding.

Eliot’s renunciation of religion is often a surprise to modern readers. Her fiction is peppered with impassioned narratorial asides in seeming accordance with the teachings of Christianity. In Middlemarch, as in many of her novels, she is concerned with both the religious lives of her characters and, more pressingly, with furthering her readers’ capacity for sympathy.

For many of her contemporaries Eliot’s works ranked not as novels but as ‘second Bibles’ (Letters 6: 340). Middlemarch begins in 1829, the year of The Catholic Emancipation Act, a momentous piece of legislation that separated church and state and overruled extant laws that forbade Catholic participation in parliament. Even in a provincial town like Middlemarch, men and women were forced to grapple with the concept of an increasingly secular society in the decades to come. Those who welcomed such changing times were eager to cultivate an ethical code apart from orthodox Christianity. Both Eliot’s fiction and her public persona provided, for many, an answer to the question of how they might express religious impulses in this new age of reason.

Middlemarch, more so, perhaps than any other novel in Eliot’s oeuvre, acted as a kind of secular scripture to fill this spiritual void. Middlemarch’s narrator, all-seeing and ever-sympathetic serves as a kind of moral conscience for readers, pointing out the importance of imaginatively engaging with the lives of our fellows, as well as drawing our attention to the peculiarities of the human condition. As Eliot herself put it, writing in 1868, her books were ‘deliberately, and carefully constructed’ to help her ‘readers in getting a clearer conception and a more active admiration of those vital elements which bind men together and give a higher worthiness to their existence’ (Letters 4: 472).

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1849

2023

Exhibit 60 – St Michael’s and Holy Trinity Churches from the North East, Coventry by David Gee, (1849), via The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum vs a photograph of the ruins of St Michael’s (c. 2023), Holy Trinity is obscured on the right by the porch of the new cathedral, via Aaron Law.

Can you take a picture of modern Coventry that corresponds with a painting from the past? You can visit our Google Map to find an approximate location of the artist’s vantage point and post your photo on Twitter under the hashtag #FindingMiddlemarch. Photographs posted may feature in later parts of the exhibition.

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The Parable of the Pier Glass

Most of the characters in Middlemarch are characterised as inherently egotistical. Casaubon, for example, — who ‘dreams in footnotes’ — is so single-minded in his scholarly quest that Mrs Cadwallader suspects a drop of his blood under a slide, would reveal ‘all semicolons and parentheses’. For Eliot, this tendency towards self-absorption is an essential and tragic facet of what it means to be human.
Eliot’s parable of the pier-glass, appearing in chapter 27, provides us with an optical metaphor to illuminate this observation. When a shiny surface meets with a light source any scratches that are revealed on its exterior — irrespective of their actual placement — will appear to orbit around the light source. As Eliot explains, ‘these things are parable’ — just as the candle ‘produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement’ of scratches, to Rosamond Vincy providence seemed to have arranged Fred’s illness and Mr. Wrench’s mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity to court one another.
Middlemarch‘s narrator uses the domestic example of a pier-glass (or mirror), to explain the optical illusion at the centre of her metaphor, an example Rosamond herself might have come across. But this phenomenon is observable in a wide range of circumstances. We might recognise it best by recalling the web of abrasions that can appear on the surface of a car’s paintwork in direct sunlight.
Like the parables of the bible, Eliot’s tale uses a simple, evocative narrative to illuminate a more abstract or complex moral lesson. Notably, she enlightens her reader by drawing their attention to a scientific phenomenon that they can themselves objectively observe; an amoral example that — on the surface — does not warrant ethical consideration. Borrowing a literary device from religious tradition and then resting it upon a scientific principle opens up an opportunity for Eliot to meaningfully engage with her readers, irrespective of their existing beliefs.

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‘Mr. Farebrother, like another White of Selborne’

Rev. Camden Farebrother’s role in the wider plot of Middlemarch is as a foil for other, more egoistical characters. We mainly see him through the eyes of Tertius Lydgate — an idealistic young doctor, that, fatally, thinks of others as satellites to his own reality. During their meetings, Eliot associates Farebrother’s ardent interest in insects and natural history with his capacity to observe and connect with his fellow man.

Throughout Middlemarch, Farebrother is equally invested in the entomological and anthropological specimens his parish provides. Intimately acquainted with his congregation, as one might be with the affairs of a beloved drawing-room terrarium, he trains his ‘quick grey eyes’ on the goings-on of man, woman, and beetle with comparable enthusiasm: boasting of having made ‘an exhaustive study of [the district’s] entomology’ (‘do look at these delicate Orthoptera!’), while speaking of his parochial duties as though they are entomological practices — ‘I prepared her for confirmation—she is a favourite of mine’.

In contrast, despite his scientific interest in anatomy, Lydgate looks upon Farebrother’s mounted insect collection with polite indifference in much the same way he expresses disdain for ‘trivial Middlemarch business’. Instead, he is captivated by a glass jar containing a pickled ‘anencephalous’ (i.e. brainless) monster, a somewhat showy curiosity through which Eliot foreshadows his shallow relationship with Rosamond.

In the course of their meetings, Lydgate continues to display his ignorance and dismissal of provincial matters, glibly saying that ‘all country towns are pretty much alike’ despite Farebrother’s warning him ‘we Middlemarchers are not so tame as you take us to be’.

Black and white photograph of a seated man. He is wearing glasses, a white shirt and dark jacket. The photograph is in a gold mount and a red velvet cover.

Exhibit 61 – A stag beetle from the Coleoptera collection at the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery. In Middlemarch, Rev. Farebrother is a passionate naturalist, gripped by the beetle mania of the 1830s.

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Exhibit 62 – Charles Darwin’s beetle box at the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology, (c. 1828-31), photograph by Emőke Dénes.

Farebrother’s entomological collection would have been kept in a similar manner, according to Lydgate, ‘the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed in exquisite writing’. In many ways Charles Darwin lived the life of a parson naturalist, following in the footsteps of his mentor Rev. John Stevens Henslow.

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The Parson Naturalist

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the parson naturalist gradually became a familiar fixture of the English countryside. Middlemarch’s Camden Farebrother was likely inspired by many such men. One candidate, the parson naturalist William Thomas Bree, was based in the village of Allesey a short walk from Eliot’s Foleshill home.

Parson-naturalist Gilbert White was perhaps the most ardent advocate of localised science. His Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789) was so beloved to Victorian culture it was long held to be the fourth-most published book after the Bible, the works of Shakespeare, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Fashioning themselves after the fabled Gilbert White of Selborne — who called upon ‘stationary men’ to pay more ‘attention to the districts on which they reside’ — parsons of the early nineteenth century published prolifically on the botany, geology, and entomology of their immediate locality. Parishioners, in turn, routinely referred to their attending curates as ‘the Gilbert White of our neighbourhood’, just as Middlemarch’s narrator refers to Farebrother as ‘another White of Selborne.’

Joining the clergy at this time was, in many ways, ‘the high road to scientific authority’ (O’Connor 16). Gentlemen’s sons called upon to enter the church usually alighted on a “pet department” of natural history during their time at university, interleaving lessons of Latin or Greek with elective geological classes, botanical rambles, or butterfly hunts. As Patrick Armstrong explains in his study of the parson-naturalist, ‘the tradition of the parson-naturalist [was] a distinctively English one, and to some extent, a distinctively Anglican one’ (177). Anglican clergymen, unlike Catholic priests, were not isolated from their neighbours by a vow of celibacy and could thus better cultivate scientific environs within their home.

Cloistered to the ecclesiastical encumbrance assigned to them, such men were perfectly situated for specialised, longitudinal research. Indeed, Farebrother’s rootedness to his provincial locality is presented as a distinct advantage to his work rather than a hindrance. He boasts of having made ‘an exhaustive study of the entomology of [his] district’ and is on the road to doing the same with the ‘fauna and flora’. Like Charles Darwin who cultivated an extensive correspondence network from Down House in Kent, Farebrother is able to keep his finger on the pulse of scientific discovery, even from a small town like Middlemarch. His entomological friendships allow him to harness the observations of like-minded men from further afield. Indeed, he already knows ‘a good deal’ about Lydgate long before he meets him, having harnessed this network to directly correspond with a man who shared Lydgate’s apartment in Paris.

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‘Filling our Bottles and Souls at Once…’

George Eliot would have been very familiar with the tradition of the parson naturalist. In the spring of 1856, with an eye ‘to fill [their] bottles and souls at once’, Eliot and her partner, George Henry Lewes, joined a ‘delight of unnumbered amateurs’ foraging for marine specimens along the Devonshire coastline (Letters 2: 313; Lewes Seaside Studies 115). Here, Eliot honed her increasingly precise naturalist’s eye: observing and taxonomizing those she met as surely as she did her marine specimens. Inextricably connecting her awakening as an author with her growth as a naturalist, she writes in her journal of ‘never before [having] longed so much to know the names of things’ and links this ‘desire’ to a ‘tendency that is now constantly growing […] to escape from all vagueness and inaccuracy into the daylight of distinct, vivid ideas’ (272). During this time, she became personally acquainted with the Reverend George Tugwell, a Devonshire marine naturalist who believed that natural history could ‘raise the mind to a habitual love of the great Maker’ (3). Tugwell acted as their guide and Eliot described him as ‘a charming little zoological curate’, a ‘delightful companion on expeditions [and] really one of the best specimens of the clergyman species’ (Letters 2: 256, 253).

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Willam Thomas Bree (1786-1863)

From 1841 until 1849 Eliot lived at Foleshill in the north of Coventry just four miles (or an hour’s walk) away from Allesley, where the parson naturalist William Thomas Bree was a rector from 1822 until 1863. Notably, Bree served on the trustees of the Bedworth charity alongside Robert Evans (Eliot’s father).

Bree specialised in the study of butterflies and is repeatedly cited in J. O. Westwood’s British Butterflies (1841). He is also responsible for identifying a number of rare plants in rural Warwickshire, having contributed to both Thomas Purton’s Midland Flora (1817-20) and Hewett Cottrell Watson’s New Botanist’s Guide (1835).

Like Farebrother, Bree was dubbed the Gilbert White of his locality:

‘Every little circle of systematics has its idol, its aristocrat – every village its Gilbert White. Allesley, if our memory do not deceive us, has its Rev. W. T. Bree… who is invariably spoken of as “the amiable naturalist” by all his fellow contributors to the Magazine of Natural History’ (The Monthly Magazine, 1833, 214).

Exhibit 63 – The Rev. William Thomas Bree (1786-1863), ambrotype photograph, (c. 1853-60), from the private collection of Michael Mead-Briggs.

According to Rev. F. L. Colville, writing in Warwickshire Worthies (1870), Bree was a man of ‘unvarying kindness’ who habitually tried to make others ‘feel in the beauties of nature’, and was always ready to ‘satisfy an enquiring mind’ (51).

His son William Bree (1822-1917) was also a parson-entomologist, (based in Northamptonshire from 1847-1863 and succeeding his father as rector at Allesley in 1863).

In 2004 the butterfly collection of the Bree family was discovered in a garage in Coventry. Miraculously, despite likely having been stored for decades in subpar conditions, the specimens survived undamaged. Much of the collection has been kept safe in boxes that resemble large folio books, corked and glazed inside, covered with leather and styled as different volumes of British Entomology.

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