Thomas Pennant’s British Zoology was the most comprehensive study of British fauna available in the final decades of the eighteenth century. This copy has been interleaved with additional notes by George Allan of Darlington (1736-1800).

Pennant was one of the most influential naturalists in mid-eighteenth-century Britain. Born in Wales to a wealthy family, he travelled the country gathering information and publishing summaries of the natural history and antiquities of various locations.
In 1761 he published anonymously the first edition of British Zoology, a folio volume with 132 plates of birds and animals found in Britain. The work was well received by his fellow naturalists and earned Pennant a position as Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767.
Despite its reception, the book did not sell well initially, but thanks to the shrewdness of his publisher, Benjamin White, the Zoology was followed in 1768–9 by a popular and greatly expanded second edition consisting of three volumes and printed in the smaller, more affordable, octavo format. Its success led to a third edition being published in 1770 with a fourth following six years later. The fourth edition included an extra volume with descriptions of shells, molluscs and crustaceans and was made available in both octavo and a larger quarto format.

This quarto set of the fourth edition was added to extensively between 1791 and 1796 with additional notes and illustrations by the antiquarian George Allan of Darlington. Allan’s set started as a transcript of the interleaved copy compiled by his friend Marmaduke Tunstall (1743-90) in the 1780s. Tunstall’s manuscript notes have survived, albeit detached from the printed text, and are now part of the Blacker Wood Natural History Collections at McGill University Libraries (QL255 T9 1780z). The extent of Allan’s additions has caused the books to be expanded to eight volumes. Contemporary followers of Pennant referred to this process of extra-illustrating their own copies of his works as ‘Pennantising’, after his own well-publicised practice of doing the same when preparing for new editions. Both Allan and Tunstall were prolific collectors of natural history specimens and were regular correspondents with Pennant.

Tunstall had bought much of his collection in London in the 1770s, which he kept in a museum at his home, Wycliffe Hall in the North Riding of Yorkshire (now part of County Durham). The collection included examples of botany, ornithology, entomology, molluscs, corals, geology, antiquities, anthropological material and scientific instruments. He also maintained a comprehensive library.
Tunstall’s museum was sold following his death in order to repay debts probably accrued in the process of building it and which amounted to over £22,000. It initially passed to his half-brother William Constable of Burton Constable near Beverley, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. He died within a year of his inheritance, not before putting the estate up for sale and probably disposing of some part of the collection. The estate then passed to his nephew Edward Sheldon Constable, who continued the sale. Allan purchased part of his friend’s ornithological collection in 1791, paying £700 for the birds. The remainder of the museum was sold at Christie's in London in May 1792, with the bulk of the library being sold at York the same year. However, his successors recognised the importance of many of Tunstall’s manuscript notes on natural history and antiquities and these were kept back from the sale, remaining at Wycliffe until another sale in 1899.
The birds remained in situ for several months after Allan’s purchase. In August 1791, Thomas Bewick visited the house to study them for his History of British Birds (1797–1804, see RCINs 1055617-8). On encountering Tunstall’s interleaved copy of the British Zoology, Bewick noted in a letter to Ralph Beilby: ‘What a treasure would his remarks be of to us – we wou’d nead [sic] but little besides to enable us to give a new Histy of Birds if we cou’d get the lot of them’

That December, when Allan visited Wycliffe to arrange the transfer of the birds to their new home in Darlington, he came across the same volumes and wrote to Bewick that he would send him a selection of watercolours of birds ‘the same size you mean to give them’. These birds are duplicated between the transcript in the Royal Library and Tunstall’s notes at McGill. It seems that Allan had decided to make his transcript around this time, and requested Bewick send him some illustrations; these have been pasted into the first volume ‘Quadrupeds’ (RCIN 1055659). He looks to have worked on the first volume for much of 1792, but in the spring of 1793, Tunstall’s manuscript was borrowed by Pennant, who used some passages to inform his own notes in preparation for a fifth edition. Pennant’s books are now in the Natural History Museum in London and contain several remarks on the books (Z MSS PEN).

Allan looks to have had Tunstall’s notes returned to him by 1794 and the set was largely complete by 1796, with Allan starting to add his own remarks to the pages around that time. Following Bewick’s publication of his Land Birds in 1797 and its immediate success, Allan wrote to the artist of his being in ‘raptures’ at seeing the cuts and sent him his interleaved copy of ‘Water Birds’ (RCIN 1055652) and offered the loan of the other books on birds of which ‘I am not in much want…tho’ I am daily peeping into them’. Bewick made full use of the loan and included several of Allan and Tunstall’s remarks in his Water Birds (1804). The volume remained with Bewick for over a decade, being returned to Allan’s library in 1810, a decade after his passing.

Allan maintained a printing press at Darlington and printed several limited runs of books and pamphlets of local antiquarian interest (see RCIN 1077558). Many of Tunstall’s notes and extracts consist of anecdotes, observations or colloquial names of wildlife that are often peculiar to the North-East of England. Allan may have intended the transcript to be printed - perhaps at the suggestion of Pennant himself – maybe as a tribute to Tunstall’s conscientious efforts. Allan had printed several of Pennant’s anonymous pamphlets in the 1770s and 1780s. However, it is likely that the project was abandoned on the success of Bewick’s works and after Allan’s stroke in 1797 that left him unable to work for several months.

When compiling his notes, Tunstall made significant references to Pennant’s Arctic Zoology (1784-5), John Latham’s General Synopsis of Birds (1781-5) and Gilbert White's Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). Allan traced additional plates and found newspaper articles that Tunstall had quoted from in his manuscript. Many of the additional illustrations are by Bewick, Francis Barlow or Wenceslaus Hollar. They include Bewick’s print 'The Chillingham Bull', which had been printed for Tunstall in 1789 and Ralph Beilby’s 'Whitley Large Ox', printed the same year and requested by Allan in his letter of December 1791. The four bird volumes also contain several watercolour vignettes of species and coloured plates taken from Eleazar Albin's Natural History of English Song-birds (1737).

On Allan’s death in 1800, the entirety of his collection passed to his eldest son George (1767–1828), before being sold for £400 to the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne (commonly known as the Lit. & Phil.) in 1822. According to the younger Allan’s remarks to George Townshend Fox’s Synopsis of the Newcastle Museum (1826), the interleaved British Zoology was supposed to be transferred with the collection but had been sold accidentally by Sotheby’s. The whereabouts of the books is unknown until their acquisition for the Royal Library in November 1873.

Information on Marmaduke Tunstall’s collection and its subsequent history taken from L. Jessop, ‘The Fate of Marmaduke Tunstall’s Collections’, Archives of Natural History (1999) 26 (1) pp. 33-49. A full list of the extra-illustration and Allan's notes in this volume is available via the Royal Library.