In 1766, the apothecary William Curtis travelled to London from Hampshire to set up business. While successful, he was more interested in the plants and insects found in the garden of his home in Bermondsey. Selling his share to his assistant, Curtis, still in his late 20s, soon devoted his life to the study of the natural world. By 1772, he had been appointed Praefectus Horti and Demonstrator to the Society of Apothecaries at the Chelsea Physic Garden.
Following the poor sales of his highly praised survey of London plants Flora Londoniensis (1777-87), Curtis set about producing a horticultural magazine with the aim to inform the general reader about ornamental and exotic plants. Believing that the public were little interested in large folio volumes of common wildflowers, he instead decided that a smaller octavo work focusing on brightly coloured garden flowers would be more attractive.
Issuing the first part of The Botanical Magazine; or the Flower-Garden Displayed in February 1787, the work was an instant success. The 3,000 copies, sold at one shilling each, contained three coloured engravings ‘drawn from the living plant’. These initial illustrations may have been drawn by Curtis himself but over the following years prominent flower painters such as William Kilburn (1745-1818), James Sowerby (1757-1822) and Sydenham Edwards (c. 1769-1819) were involved in producing the plates. The price and number of plates issued in each part fluctuated, but it was issued regularly, with around 45 plates snapped up annually by avid gardeners.
On Curtis’s death in 1799, his friend John Sims took over the management of the magazine, renaming it Curtis’s Botanical Magazine, the name by which it is commonly known among botanists today. Edwards left the magazine in 1815 and the artists William Herbert and John Curtis were responsible for many of the plates until William Jackson Hooker took over both writing and illustration from 1826. Under Hooker’s control, the magazine became connected intimately with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew where Hooker served as Director from 1841. Despite some gaps in production in the twentieth century, Curtis’s Botanical Magazine remains in print today, the longest running botanical periodical in the world.
The Royal Library’s collection of Curtis’s Botanical Magazine covers the early years of the periodical’s existence. Containing the first 50 volumes (1787-1823) in 31 books, they were uniformly bound in red goatskin during the reign of Queen Victoria.