George Bentham's Handbook of the British flora: from controversy to cult

Abstract

George Bentham's Handbook of the British flora sold steadily for almost a century from its publication in 1858 to the relatively inexperienced for whom it was explicitly intended, thanks to full descriptions, dichotomous keys and a lengthy exposition of botanical terminology. But in using it as a vehicle for his controversially broad conception of species, and in aggressively dismissing in the preface the validity of much work by those who, unlike him, had long investigated that flora critically, Bentham provoked lasting hostility to the book among the more advanced. The continued buoyancy of its sales after Bentham's death owed less to limited revisions by Sir Joseph Hooker than to the dying-off of its competitors and the addition of W. H. Fitch's line-drawings of every species, the colouring-in of which became popular as a substitute for collecting specimens. The book's aggregate approach in its taxonomy, however, had a divisive effect on the field botany community, a situation ended in 1952 by the Flora of the British Isles of A. R. Clapham, T. G. Tutin and E. F. Warburg and its subsequent associated volumes.