In the summer of 1833, Mary Ann Jackson, a fifteen-year-old clergyman’s daughter in the English Midlands, took the first of five annual journeys to search out and gather plant specimens from different habitats in England and Wales. Over these years, she collected and cataloged more than 1,500 species, from the woods and mountains of the Midland districts, to the rocks and shores of the northern counties.

The fruit of Jackson’s work was a book published in 1840, The Pictorial Flora; or British Botany Delineated, made up of 131 plates of plant illustrations—lithographs created by Jackson herself. She intended The Pictorial Flora to serve as a handy and affordable alternative to more expensive and elaborate botanical plate books then available.

The NYPL's Pforzheimer Collection recently acquired a superb copy of The Pictorial Flora, one whose illustrations are delicately hand-colored by an unidentified early owner. Only about 20 copies of the book are available in libraries worldwide; it seems that most (like the one at the New York Botanical Garden), if not all others, are uncolored.

 

Because the author identifies herself only as "Miss Jackson" on the title page, there has long been some confusion about the identity of the woman responsible for The Pictorial Flora. Some bibliographers identified her as the popular botanical writer Maria Elizabetha Jacson—but that Miss Jac[k]son died 10 years before the author of The Pictorial Flora signed its preface.

It doesn't help that the title page of our Miss Jackson’s only other known book—the ambitious Specimen Flora (1847), each copy of which was issued with about 100 actual plant specimens pasted in—only names its compiler as "the author of The Pictorial Flora." When we exhibited one of our two copies of the exceedingly rare Specimen Flora in a 2016 exhibition, we had only enough information to credit the book to "Miss Jackson."

Recently, I uncovered more biographical details about Miss Jackson, creator of The Pictorial Flora and Specimen Flora. Born in the market town of Woodstock in Oxfordshire in 1819, Mary Ann Jackson was the child of the Rev. Stephen Jackson and his wife, Ellen Sarah, née Benson. Mary Ann appears to have spent her earliest years in Sheldon in Warwickshire, where her father served as curate-in-charge.

The Rev. Jackson died when Mary Ann was nine; soon after, she began spending much time at the Birmingham home of her older half brother, Edward White Benson. A chemist, and a fellow of the Royal Botanical Society of Edinburgh, it was likely he who encouraged Mary Ann’s early interest in plants. She helped care for her infant nephew, his father’s namesake and a future Archbishop of Canterbury.

By March 1839, when she dates the preface to The Pictorial Flora, Mary Ann was living in the cathedral city of Lichfield. There in December of 1842 she married a widower, Charles Allen Chavasse (1799-1863), one of a family of prominent Midlands surgeons. Dr. Chavasse had traveled widely; his letter to the editor of The Lancet in 1853 mentions his experience with cholera treatments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, "especially in India and California." Together the Chavasses had one son, Charles Herbert, born in 1846.

Mary Ann Chavasse apparently published no further works after Specimen Flora was released by Longman & Co. on February 12, 1847. She survived her husband and son, and spent the last thirty-odd years of her life as a lodger with the family of a master plumber in Bristol. She died in 1915, aged 95.