Moving to London in 1807 following the death of his wife and subsequent bankruptcy, the Liverpool-born architect and sculptor George Perry began to pursue a career in natural history. Initially supported by his friend William Roscoe, Perry had delivered a course of natural history lectures in Liverpool in 1805, perhaps inspired by the botanical course delivered in the town in 1803 by Sir James Edward Smith, founder of the Linnean Society.
Perry was an abolitionist and appears to have found little support for his work in Liverpool due to this. In lists of the specimens he consulted for his natural history studies, none were from Liverpool collectors.
In London, Perry joined a circle of naturalists that were increasingly noticing flaws with the dominant classification system introduced by Carl Linnaeus in the 1730s and popularised from the late 1750s (Systema Naturae). Working with shells and fossils, they began to notice that the Linnaean system was restrictive and that new ideas from French naturalists including Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Georges Cuvier offered better forms of classifying such specimens. These ideas were controversial in Britain. The scientific establishment had come to rely on Linnaeus’s system and discounted the new French theories, especially as the two nations were at war.
Published in 1811, Conchology, or the natural history of shells was Perry’s attempt to introduce a new classification system for shells and the marine creatures that occupied them inspired by the ideas of Lamarck. Originally planned as a two-volume work, the book was illustrated with aquatints, the only study of shells to do so. Perry also hoped to draw the attention of his readers to the beauty of shells to serve as inspiration to artists and architects.
The work drew criticism from fellow conchologists who attacked Perry’s rejection of Linnaeus. It was also an expensive tome, priced at £16 16s, which likely further limited its influence. Despite a brief resurgence in the 1820s as French ideas finally came to be accepted by British naturalists, Perry and his work is little known today.