Our latest exhibitions Curious Minds looks into the relationship between two 18th Century naturalists and friends Thomas Pennant and Gilbert White.
About forty pages into Gilbert White’s Natural History of Selborne the reader will come across the word ‘you’. This ‘you’, however, is rather elusive – ‘when you were recently in town’; ‘your journey to Scotland’; ‘your’ British Zoology. We know, of course, from the opening pages, that the addressee is the Welsh naturalist and travel writer, Thomas Pennant (1726-1798). But he cuts a very indistinct figure in a vivid cast of honey buzzards, pet toads, hedgehogs and torpid swallows. Indeed, readers of White’s classic Selborne are often surprised to learn that Pennant is one of the two correspondents whose letters to White shape the book – he is certainly not as well-known now as he would have been in 1789.
Returning to the original correspondence, and drawing on the Thomas Pennant collections at the Natural History Museum and some wonderful illustrations, ‘Curious Minds’ introduces Pennant’s work and explores the relationship between the two men through their words, images and examples of the specimens they exchanged and discussed. What emerges is an energetic, engaging conversation between naturalists full of critical curiosity about the world around them. They are part, as Anne Secord has put it, of a ‘community of investigators’ engaged in a ‘continuous process of collaboration’.
Our exhibition is itself the product of a collaboration between the AHRC-funded Curious Travellers Project, the Natural History Museum, and Gilbert White’s House and Garden. We warmly invite all visitors to come and take part in this fascinating eighteenth-century conversation.
The Curious Travellers project explores travel and tourism in Britain and Ireland in the late C18th and early C19th. It does so through the writings of the Flintshire naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726-1798), and of others who followed in his footsteps. Focused primarily on tours of Scotland and Wales, the project has been funded in two phases by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and is supported by numerous partners. It is a collaboration between The University of Wales Trinity St David, Glasgow University and the Natural History Museum: you can learn more about our project team here. Our website provides access to our digital editions and other resources, blogs and events.
Pennant’s Tour in Scotland 1769 and Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides 1772 (published 1771-76), and his Tours in Wales (1778-83) played a foundational role in in the birth of tourism in Scotland and Wales. Providing ‘national descriptions’ of the cultural, economic and environmental condition of both countries, they also represent the first extensively illustrated documentation of Scotland and Wales. The tours influenced many contemporary writers and travellers, and offer a major, and still largely untapped, resource for modern scholarship. Although reprinted over the years, they have never been properly edited. Curious Travellers 2 will provide free, searchable, digital editions of these texts.
A cluster of associated projects include work on Pennant’s specimen collections at the Natural History Museum; planned exhibitions at Greenfield Valley Heritage Site and the Gilbert White House Museum; a crowdsourcing project exploring the richly illustrated copies of Pennant’s tours at the National Library of Wales; research into Pennant’s extraordinary ‘imaginary tour’, the ‘Outlines of the Globe’ and his early tour of Ireland; two creative commissions involving schools and other forms of community engagement.