Abstract

When the illustrious geologist William Buckland (1784-1856) took up Oxford’s Readership of Mineralogy in 1813, he found the University’s selection of rocks, fossils, and minerals “sparse and piecemeal”. In contrast, the 1889 annual report on the state of the collections (from which this talk takes its title) decried how decades of unfettered collecting begun by Buckland had resulted in an intractable hodgepodge of boxes and baskets entirely filling the basement corridors of the University Museum. Using specimens still in Oxford’s ‘Buckland Collection’, this talk charts how the collections’ rapid expansion and the dire need for organisation this brought created opportunities for women, especially in curatorial capacities. At a time when women were still barred from Fellowship of the Geological Society of London, this paper argues that women – and particularly two late nineteenth-century museum assistants, Maud Healey and Hannah Byrne – exploited the opportunities offered by the low-paid curatorial posts men typically turned down to make scientific statements. Particularly, this paper analyses how these women reinterpreted specimens originally collected by William Buckland, demonstrating that these women subtly re-wrote geological legacies through their meticulous labelling, identification, and research. To fully understand these Buckland specimens, I argue, we must recognise that this collection is as much the ‘Hannah Byrne Collection’ and the ‘Maud Healey Collection’ as the ‘Buckland Collection’