Delicate aquatints. First edition of this uncommon and attractive work illustrated with ten delicate aquatints by the Dalziel Brothers. The present copy bears a gift inscription to a woman, Mary Aurelia Rafford Walker, dated in the year of publication.

Seaweed collecting, alongside other natural history hobbies, was a popular occupation during the Victorian era. Inspired by religious sentimentality and the Romantic Movement's reverence for nature, it was considered a wholesome way for women to engage with the outdoors, and functioned as an accomplishment indicating one's suitability for marriage and family life. Popular guides such as this one proliferated, also offering women a route to authorship and semi-professional scientific standing.

The author of the present volume, Louisa Lane Clarke (1812-1883), was the wife of a country parson and began her career as a travel and guidebook author. But she is better known 'for her later botanical work popularizing microscopy. Her first book of this nature, The Microscope (1858) was published in successive editions into the 1880s. Her The Common Seaweeds of the British Coast and Channel Islands (1865), published the year after her husband's death, plangently invokes the seaside as a place where "[we are] soothed if by sorrow or illness we have suffered"' ('Louisa Lane Clarke, Women's Travel Writing, 1780-1840: A Bio-Bibliographical Database, the University of Wolverhampton).

First edition; 8vo; aquatint frontispiece and 9 plates, 4-page publisher's ads at rear, contemporary gift inscription to the front free endpaper, some light spotting and dulling of the contents, particularly the early leaves; original blue cloth blocked in gilt with a seaweed design to the upper board, brown coated endpapers, all edges gilt, front hinge cracked, spine darkened and rolled, cloth rubbed with wear at the corners and ends of spine, a few small spots and marks to the cloth, a very good copy; 140pp.

Freeman (British Natural History Books), 715.