Seaweed is not an obvious thing to build a photographic revolution on. But in October 1843, a botanist called Anna Atkins published the first part of a book called Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, and it has a fair claim to being the first book illustrated with photographs. It was made, more or less, by laying wet seaweed on paper and leaving it in the sun.
An iron tonic, and a better idea
The cyanotype process came from Sir John Herschel in 1842, and it is gloriously low-tech. Paper is brushed with two iron-based chemicals, one of which Herschel borrowed from the medicine cabinet, where it was sold as an iron tonic. Dried in the dark, the paper turns a faint yellow-green. Put something on top of it, leave it in sunlight, rinse it in water, and everything the light touched turns a deep Prussian blue. Everything the object shielded stays white. Engineers later used the same trick to copy their drawings, which is where the word "blueprint" comes from.
Atkins, whose father and husband both moved in Herschel's circle, saw something else in it. Seaweed is miserable to draw accurately, all fine fronds and tangled filaments, so she skipped the drawing. She laid the specimens straight onto the paper, exposed them, and wrote each label out by hand. By 1853 she had made hundreds of plates, and sent the book out in instalments to what she called her botanical friends. Very few copies were ever made, which is why surviving ones are now treasured by libraries and museums.
The other way to keep a seaweed
Atkins preserved seaweed as an image. Most Victorians preferred to keep the actual weed, and they did so in enormous numbers. Seaweed collecting took hold in the middle of the century, helped along by the seaside holiday, the railways, and a generation of women who were largely shut out of formal science but could do a great deal with a pair of boots and a jam jar.
The best known is Margaret Gatty, a children's author who was sent to Hastings in 1848 to recover her health and came home with a lifelong obsession. She met the Irish algae specialist William Henry Harvey on the beach there, and went on to write British Sea-Weeds, a book good enough that professionals took notice. She also complained, in print, about what a long skirt does to a person scrambling over rocks, which seems entirely fair.
Floating it onto the page
The method was simple and a little theatrical. You gathered specimens after a storm, rinsed off the sand, then floated each one in a dish of water, where it spread back out like it had in the sea. A sheet of thick paper was slid underneath, and you lifted it out with the frond still arranged on it. Seaweed is naturally gelatinous, so as it dried it stuck itself to the page without any glue. Some collectors went further and arranged fronds into little pictures.
Albums were made as presents, swapped between friends, and donated to charity sales. One collector sold hers to buy blankets for the poor of her parish. They are quietly rather moving things now, faded, labelled in careful handwriting with a place and a date.
Needs no glue
We kept coming back to that detail while drawing the set. A postcard needs a stamp to get anywhere, and a seaweed needs nothing but a bit of paper and a bit of patience. Our British Seaweed Postcard Set is ten A6 cards, each with one seaweed, its common name, its Latin name, and a line about where to find it: dulse, bladderwrack, sea lettuce, oarweed, and six more. They are the sort of thing you could send to a friend, or tuck into a nature journal, which is not far off what an album was. If you'd rather have one for the wall, there's A Spotter's Guide to Seaweed, and a single Seaweed card for the beachcomber with full pockets.
