Trespassing Tigresses and "Pig-Headed Celts": Corresponding beyond Class Boundaries, from Scotland to Calcutta

Between 1862 and 1879, 291 letters were exchanged between the most celebrated nineteenth-century naturalist, Charles Darwin (1809-92), and self-taught, working-class gardener, John Scott (1836-80). Scott was a foreman at the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens when he first wrote Darwin to point out an error in The Fertilisation of Orchids (1862). Darwinism was controversial in 1860s Edinburgh, particularly at the Gardens. However, Scott infiltrated the Garden’s lectures, appropriated their microscopes, and, by virtue of Scott’s low social class, could sneak from his bothy on the edge of the gardens into its hothouses on Sundays, to perform observations and experiments. Scott not only provided specimens for Darwin, but, from a garden intended for economic botany, he also engaged in theory. The price for Scott’s trespasses was his job. Through Darwin’s patronage, Scott became curator of the Calcutta Botanical Gardens. Scott challenged the borders of spaces physically, temporally, and theoretically inaccessible to a man of his station. His instrument was the letter. Yet correspondence also reveals the limitations to Scott’s trespasses. In this paper, I seek to find an analytical bridge between the situatedness and the mobility of Scott and his science. By taking the letter itself as a spatial entity, one co-constructed – quite literally in dialogue – by sender, recipient, and their respective networks, I explore how Scott functioned as a mediator of social and scientific hierarchies. I argue that whilst Scott’s status may seem to defy stable definition, it was simply constructed and perceived differently by different correspondents and their respective contexts.