Victorian Science Anne Pratt, Hopkins, and a Theology of Nature

Now virtually unknown, Anne Pratt (1806-1893) remains an important Victorian illustrator, naturalist, and popularizer of science, whose Wild Flowers (1852) made a strong impression on Queen Victoria.While Pratt's works addressed a largely female audience, their generic appeal, reflecting her profound botanical knowledge and astute insights into flower study, had an ever broader reach into the general public. Pratt authored over twenty books, among them Chapters on the Common Things of the Sea-Side (1850), which saw four editions in ten years. Hopkins was given a second edition as a gift for his tenth birthday. Though he nowhere acknowledges Pratt but for an obscure reference in a letter to his mother, a precocious Hopkins would have found in Chapters the keen attention to nature he would later observe in Ruskin. Pratt's study would have been an important precursor for Hopkins's detailed observations of nature in his journals, diaries, and notebooks. Especially pronounced are their attempts to connect the beauty in nature to a benevolent Creator and a natural theology in which everything in nature, to use a Hopkins expression, "speaks and spells" Christ. In their theology of the aesthetics, the divine plays in "ten thousand places."