Audubon's Elephant: The Story of John James Audubon's Epic Struggle to Publish The Birds of America

  • Duff Hart-Davis
Weidenfeld & Nicolson: 2003. 192 pp. £18.99 (to be published in the US by Henry Holt next April)

Audubon in Edinburgh: And his Scottish Associates

  • John Chalmers
National Museums of Scotland: 2003. 240 pp. £30
Huge undertaking: this yellow-billed cuckoo was life-sized in John James Audubon's Birds of America. Credit: NATIONAL MUSEUMS OF SCOTLAND

John James Audubon's enormous Birds of America books (1827–38) could not be printed and published in his native United States — the skills available to produce a book of this size were available only in Europe. So Audubon travelled to Britain, first to Liverpool and then on to Edinburgh, bringing with him his astonishing portfolio, which was big enough for all of the birds to be portrayed life-sized. Audubon in Edinburgh and Audubon's Elephant both focus on how the resulting extraordinary volumes of Birds of America, which now sell for millions of dollars, were produced. And they tell how Audubon recruited subscribers to fund the printing of successive volumes, a process that took more than a decade. It is a romantic story.

Audubon's volumes stand a metre tall — the title of Hart-Davis's book refers to the size of the format, double elephant — and his work is marvellous, but is it science? Or is it, in fact, a white elephant? This question in part lay behind Audubon's rows with George Ord of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and the eccentric traveller, squire and naturalist Charles Waterton in England, who considered him a charlatan. Clearly, Audubon was not that, even if his tales from the wild frontier about wildlife, ancestry and adventures improved in the telling. In line with the maxim “What's hit is history, but what's missed is mystery”, Audubon slaughtered masses of his beloved birds in order to mount them convincingly and paint them.

Huge tomes sold in small editions are not the stuff of serious ornithology. This made Audubon's alliance with the Scottish naturalist William MacGillivray so important, although in print Audubon hardly seems to have done him justice. MacGillivray did the dissections and got the science right in the volumes of text, Ornithological Biography, that were published to accompany the plates. William Swainson had been in line for this job but had stuck out for fairer terms and broken off negotiations. Swainson was a leading illustrator and author of books on zoology, but his trinitarian (or quinarian) taxonomic system was coming to be seen as a speculative straitjacket on nature, and the book would have been poorer had it been saddled with it.

Audubon's life until 1826 had been a series of failures culminating in rows in Philadelphia where the memory of Alexander Wilson, his predecessor as America's leading ornithologist, was assiduously kept fresh. But despite his detractors, Audubon was elected to several scientific societies, including the Royal Society. The books by Hart-Davis and Chalmers both tell the tale of how this frontiersman, for whom English was a second language, managed to break into the scientific community through his energy, enthusiasm and sheer talent as a painter.

Finding friends and admirers in Liverpool, Audubon went to Edinburgh with more confidence. There he ignored advice to publish in a small format, and met William Lizars, who was to do some exquisite plates for William Jardine's series The Naturalist's Library. Lizars engraved and printed Audubon's plates and coloured them by hand — this was by necessity variable, and was a frequent source of complaint from the subscribers who sponsored the work. After producing a few of these, Lizars, faced with a strike and overstretched, was happy to give up.

Audubon, by then in London, found that Robert Havell and his son (also Robert) would do the job at a lower rate, and they ended up doing almost all of the plates.

Audubon's was one of the last great books to be illustrated with engravings, as Swainson and others perfected the cheaper method of lithography. Each volume generally contained, unsystematically organized, some plates of one or two big birds, and some of several smaller ones. But Audubon struggled to maintain enough subscribers, as some died or fell away as the work progressed. Even so, he triumphed, even in the United States, to which he returned several times.

Audubon's Elephant and Audubon in Edinburgh both recount his eventful history. But whereas Hart-Davis has produced a compact, elegant and readable biography, Chalmers' less-organized volume is focused as much on Edinburgh and its scientific world as on Audubon.

The size of Chalmers' book works better with Audubon's plates — the bigger the better, as he intended. And whereas Hart-Davis reprints only Audubon's pictures, Chalmers has also included many by other contemporary artists, so that we can compare their work and get a real feeling for Audubon's achievement. This also reveals the demands placed on anyone depicting nature at a time when Charles Darwin was a student.

Although most of the plates were printed in London, Audubon hated the bustling, foggy metropolis, but loved Edinburgh. Chalmers puts across a vision of that city and its medical institutions when Wordsworth's line “We murder to dissect” was being put into practice by Burke and Hare. The book places Audubon securely within the science of his time.