William Curtis was born January 11, 1746 in England. His father
was a tanner and member of the Society of Friends. At age fourteen,
young Curtis apprenticed to his grandfather, a local apothecary,
next door to the Crown Inn. The ostler of that hotel, an amateur
naturalist with good knowledge of Gerard's and Parkinson’s
herbals, befriended the young teen and took him along on herb-walks
through the countryside.
After completing his apprenticeship, Curtis moved to the City
of London, where he qualified as an apothecary and purchased a
practice. However, his heart was never really in the business
and his passion for natural history soon became his ruling interest.
Selling the apothecary business in 1771, Curtis bought an acre
of land at Lambeth Marsh and established his London Botanic Garden.
He simultaneously began publication of a series of papers on various
entomological subjects. In 1773, Curtis was appointed the Demonstrator
of Botany at the Chelsea Physic Garden.
Although he held that job until 1777, Curtis was preoccupied with
other, more personal projects, mainly the publication of his Flora
Londinensis. In it, Curtis proposed to describe and illustrate
plants growing within a ten-mile radius of London. But the combination
of non-exotic native plants and Curtis’ failure to meet his
publishing schedule slowly proved lethal. He labored over the
publication until 1798, when the project finally was scrapped
due to a lack of subscribers. Curtis’ own innovative approach
to plants and publishing often proved his undoing. Continually
initiating new projects, Curtis repeatedly pushed earlier commitments
to a back burner, where they were soon ignored or abandoned.
If Curtis could focus his attentions on a sufficiently promising
project, there was a huge potential clientele waiting. The British
Empire’s on-going expansion was taking English citizens to
every corner of the globe and radically heightening their awareness
of Nature's diversity. Plants and animals from throughout the
world were shipped home to England to be introduced to a fascinated
public there. While only the wealthy could personally collect
exotic animals, plants were far more accessible. Gardens and conservatories,
both public and private, were incredibly popular. With species
ranging from hardy to delicate, these hothouses and outdoor gardens
required increasingly specialized care for their precious contents.
(As gardening was raised to an ever more glorious art, the profession
of gardener grew in status, becoming one of the few truly upwardly-mobile
trades in England.)
Whether people gardened hands-on or consulted with their garden
staff, there was a growing appetite for information on every variety
of flora. To help fuel this burgeoning popular interest, Curtis’
friends proposed a new magazine, something with far more glamorous
(and less limited) subject matter than London's homebred plant-life.
On February 1, 1787, William Curtis launched the Botanical
Magazine. With a stated mission of portraying “the most
Ornamental Foreign Plants,” each monthly issue contained
three hand-colored engravings with literate accompanying text.
Wrapped in blue paper and priced at one shilling, Botanical
Magazine’s first issue sold 3000 copies, a respectable
number for its era. The Botanical Magazine was an instant
and enduring success.
The
name was changed to Curtis’s Botanical Magazine following
Curtis’ death in 1799 and still later it became The Kew
Magazine, the name under which it is still published. Although
rival publications appeared during Curtis’ lifetime—The
Botanical Register, The Botanical Cabinet, The Botanic
Garden and the British Flower Garden—none of them
had the staying power of the magazine he’d founded. Curtis
found the best illustrators—Sydenham Edwards, James Sowerby,
William Kilburn were the main artists for the magazine’s
first 28 years. John Curtis, Francis Bauer, William Jackson Hooker
and William Herbert are among the later contributors.
