Leonard Jenyns - Darwin's lifelong friend
A BRLSI limited edition book

Edited by Professor Ian Wallace and designed by Jude Harris

From an 1889 original in the BRLSI library
LEONARD JENYNS, described by Jerom Murch as Darwin's lifelong friend, was an eminent Victorian scientist with many talents including Botany, Zoology and Meteorology. He became a distinguished naturalist and was a major figure and innovative thinker ahead of his time.

See a sample of pages from the printed book

THE BATH ROYAL LITERARY AND SCIENTIFIC INSTITUTION
Our Limited Edition book "Leonard Jenyns - Darwin's lifelong friend" was published in September 2005. The book is based on the works, life and times of one of the Institution's most distinguished members: eminent Victorian scientist and outstanding naturalist, Leonard Jenyns, 1800 - 1893.

A second edition of Leonard Jenyns - Darwin's lifelong friend will be available from mid-November onwards. The book has the same content but isfinished in a full colour binding, unlike the embost and silvered blue bookcloth of the first edition. The book's cover is illustrated to the right.

“I have no hesitation in commending the book to all who have an interest in the history of British natural history. The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution are to be congratulated in enabling the life of Leonard Jenyns to be brought into proper perspective and appreciated in this way.”
K.H. Hyatt, The London Naturalist (2005)

“This book is beautifully produced […] and ought to be in any natural history library.”
F. Nigel Hepper, Journal of the Kew Guild (2006)

Click here to read the full review from the Kew Bulletin

Rev. Leonard Jenyns (1800-1893)

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LEONARD JENYNS is a worthy subject for our second book. The new volume includes the following material, much of it rarely seen or published, and some of it uniquely reproduced for the first time from the Institution's collections.

The life of the eminent Victorian naturalist Leonard Jenyns was closely entwined with that of his lifelong friend, Charles Darwin. In 1931 Jenyns turned down the opportunity to accompany Captain Fitzroy as the ship’s naturalist on the famous voyage of the Beagle – an opportunity which then fell to the young Darwin with world-changing consequences. After his return Darwin entrusted his old friend – in his words, “the most punctual and faithful of men” - with the onerous task of cataloguing the collection of fishes he brought back on the Beagle. When Darwin’s ideas on the nature of evolution proved highly controversial following publication of On the Origin of Species, he derived strength from the support which Jenyns afforded him, writing “Your going some way with me gives me great confidence that I am not very wrong.”

The selection of documents and illustrations reproduced in this volume, many of them previously unpublished or long out of print, include Jenyns’s autobiography Chapters in My Life and a representative sample both of his scientific writings and of his correspondence with other leading naturalists of the day, including Darwin, J.D. Hooker, and J.S. Henslow. Illuminating essays by Jack Meadows, Roger Vaughan, and Robert Randall place his life and work in their historical context. The Library and the Herbarium which Jenyns presented to the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution are described in substantial appendices. The volume also includes thumb-nail sketches of Jenyns’s main collaborators, an alphabetical list of his correspondents, a selected bibliography, and a comprehensive index.

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A foreword by Roger G. Jenyns of Bottisham Hall, the great-great-great nephew of Leonard Jenyns.
Professor Jack Meadows, author of "The Victorian Scientist", assesses Jenyns's place in the development of science in the 19th century.
Roger Vaughan, a former Keeper of the Collections at the BRLSI, contributes a critical overview of Jenyns's life, achievements and links with the Institution.

The book is a quality, hardback Limited Edition, under the BRLSI imprint, of c. 380 pages, size 24cm X 17cm, with more than 30 illustrations. It will be printed on 100gsm white paper, cased in cloth-covered boards, with gold blocking on spine and front, with woven head bands, plus ribbon marker

TO ORDER
If you would like to subscribe to this Limited Edition book: Leonard Jenyns - Darwin's lifelong friend, the cost is £18 per copy. Post and packing is extra.
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POSTSCRIPT

Our first Limited Edition book in 2003, Memoirs of William Smith- author of the "Map of the Strata of England and Wales" reprinted a biography published in 1844, plus expert contemporary comment by Professor Hugh Torrens. This edition was closed at 600 copies, which were all sold. However, in view of the demand, we produced a small run-on of the text which was bound later in a simpler but still attractive form in hardback. We still have a few copies of this left, price £18, click here for more details