Charles Murray Adamson:
A Victorian Naturalist

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Introduction
‘How interesting and amusing it is to watch the habits of some of our common birds’, so wrote Charles Murray Adamson (1820-1894) in Another Book of Scraps, his second collection of essays about natural history published in 1882. For Adamson, this ‘interesting and amusing’ pursuit was not confined to observation. As the drawings below illustrate, Adamson also sketched what he saw.
Adamson’s drawings can be viewed as products of a fertile environment in which academics and talented amateurs attempted to understand and record the natural world. It is also possible to view Adamson’s work as a continuance of a tradition of natural history representation that, in the north east of England, can be traced to the pioneering work of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828).
Bewick’s finely detailed wood engravings illuminated A General History of Quadrupeds (1790), History and Depiction of Land Birds (1797) and History and Depiction of Water Birds (1804). Each of these volumes contain descriptions of animals and birds accompanied by Bewick’s wood engraved illustrations. 
‘To the ornithologists of his day Bewick was a hero,’ (Uglow, 2006, p.396) and his work provided a foundation for further natural history research during the nineteenth century. Central to these developments were Albany Hancock (1806-1873) and his brother John (1808-1890). John, a noted taxidermist, and Albany, a specialist in marine animals, were instrumental in the establishment of the Natural History Society of Northumbria in 1829. Later in the century the brothers were founder members of the Tyneside Naturalists’ Field Club and provided the impetus for the construction of a museum dedicated to natural history in Newcastle (the Hancock Museum, named for the brothers and now called Great North Museum: Hancock).
Adamson was part of this milieu of investigation and discovery. He was, together with the Hancock brothers, a founder member of the Tyneside Naturalists’ Field Club in 1846. Away from family life and his work as a solicitor it is evident that most of his time was taken up with studying nature. Through close observation and diligent research he became, as Marshall Hall (2005, p.20) notes, ‘such an authority on birds that he was frequently consulted about the habits of different species and had his observations published in the correspondence columns of The Field.’
Much of Adamson’s writing on nature (and on birds in particular) was published in Sundry Natural History Scraps (1879), Another Book of Scraps (1882), Studies of Birds (1881) and Some More Illustrations of Wild Birds (1887). All but the first of these contain lithographic reproductions of Adamson’s depictions of birds. These prints were taken from original drawings (such as the works shown below) that Adamson had produced on his various ornithological expeditions.
Ornithology, studying and drawing birds in their natural habitats, was Adamson’s central preoccupation; it was his life’s work. As he wrote in Another Book of Scraps (p.7), ‘Of all the various branches of Nature’s works, I like birds the best; and to like one branch in particular is almost enough for one person to attend to in a lifetime.’
 
Further Reading
Hall, Marshall (2005), The Artists of Northumbria, Art Dictionaries
Uglow, Jenny (2006), Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, Faber and Faber

Charles Murray Adamson’s first two publications can be viewed here via the University of Pennsylvania’s website.
Further information about the work and history of the Natural History Society of Northumbria can be found here.
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Charles Murray Adamson: A Victorian Naturalist