Maria Elizabetha Jacson

Somersal Hall, Derbyshire, home of the Jacson sisters from 1808

Maria and Frances were two of five surviving children of the Anglican rector of Bebington, Cheshire, the Rev. Simon Jacson (1728–1808), and his wife Anne Fitzherbert (c. 1729 – 1795), the oldest daughter of Richard Fitzherbert of Somersal Herbert in Derbyshire. The family had been landowners and clergy in both Cheshire and Derbyshire since the early seventeenth century.[1] Their elder brother Roger (1753–1826) succeeded his father as rector in 1771, after which the family moved to Stockport (1777–87), Cheshire and then Tarporley in the same county, where her father became rector. Although their sister, Anne (d. 1805) married, both Maria and Frances remained single, and looked after their father after he was widowed in 1795 and suffered from failing health till his death in 1808.[2][3]

While they were at Tarporley, the family became worried about their other brother Shallcross (died 1821), also an ordained priest, who had taken to drink and horse-racing. The need to pay off his debts was the spur for the sisters to turn to writing. On their father's death in 1808, they had to find a new home and accepted an offer made by their Fitzherbert cousin, Lord St Helens (1753 – 1839) to lend them Somersal Hall, a partly Tudor home in Somersal Herbert, Derbyshire for life.[2] The Hall was the ancestral home of the Fitzherberts and when Frances Fitzherbert died (1806), the inheritance passed to her nephew Roger Jacson, who sold it, but was then repurchased by Lord St Helens, descendant of a different line of Fitzherberts.[4] Shallcross's problems resurfaced, with debts totalling £1760. Francis paid these off with her earnings from two further novels and with help from Roger and Maria. Shallcross died in 1821. The Jacson children were cousins to Sir Brooke Boothby, at nearby Ashbourne and a member of the Lichfield Botanical Society which brought them into contact with Enlightenment culture through Erasmus Darwin and other contemporary writers on science, as well as the literary circle of Anna Seward at Lichfield, Staffordshire.[5][2][3][1]

In 1829, while the sisters were staying with friends at Chelford in Cheshire Maria became suddenly ill, with a fever, and died on 10 October 1829 leaving her sister desolate.[3]

Title Page, Sketches 1811

Iris Xiphium, from Sketches

Maria Jacson showed early signs of gifts in relation to botany, through drawing, horticulture and plant experiments. Darwin describes a drawing she made in 1788 of a Venus fly-trap, stating that she was "a lady who adds much botanical knowledge to many other elegant acquirements".[1] Maria Jacson, who was part of the first generation of women science writers,[2] is known for her writings on botany. Her publisher placed a commendation by both Darwin and Boothby ("so accurately explaining a difficult science in an easy and familiar manner")[6] amongst the prefaces to her first book, Botanical Dialogues (1797) written at the age of forty two, which was well received.[notes 2] Darwin also recommended Maria's work in his Plan for the Conduct of Female Education of that year;[2][4]

But there is a new treatise introductory to botany called Botanic dialogues for the use of schools, well adapted to this purpose, written by M. E. Jacson, a lady well skilled in botany, and published by Johnson, London.[7]

However the book did not pass beyond a first edition, possibly because it was too advanced for the young audience for whom it was intended.[1]

For this reason she reworked the material into a more adult format in Botanical Lectures By A Lady (1804).[1] She described the latter as follows "a complete elementary system, which may enable the student of whatever age to surmount those difficulties, which hitherto have too frequently impeded the perfect acquirement of this interesting science".[8]

She was familiar with the Lichfield Botanical Society's translation of Linnaeus' System of Vegetables (1785), for which she intended her Botanical Lectures as an introduction, but in a society that disapproved of female education, and in particular the new sexual classification of plants, she trod warily between the Linnaeans and contemporary propriety.[9][5] She completed three books on Linnaean botany and plant physiology and a fourth on horticulture. Her Florist's Manual went into several editions.[2] In her writing she faced two important obstacles, the backlash against educated women[10] as typified by Richard Polwhele and his hostile satirical poem The Unsex'd Females (1798)[11] and the moral concerns of a society that felt that such a delicate matter as the sexual reproduction of plants was inappropriate matter for 'female modesty'[12] to be exposed to. Her sexual politics is evident in her resistance to Linnaeus' primacy of male sexual features in his classification system,[notes 3] emphasising that the female pistil is of equal importance to the male stamen.[13]

Given the constraints on women writers of the times her books were published anonymously 'by a lady' but the introduction of Botanical Lectures is signed with the initials M.E.J.[8] At the very end of the third edition (1827) of Florist's Manual, appear the words "Maria Elizabeth Jackson, Somersal Hall, Uttoxeter, Staffordshire."[14] Since this contains a number of errors, it is possible it was added by the publisher. The first edition ends with "M.E.J., Somersal Hall".[15] Her earlier writing was very much under the influence of Darwin,[2] however her Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life (1811), marked a new independent direction, which she illustrated with her own drawings.[2]

Her appreciation of the constraints placed on women writers was apparent, even in her first book, where she wrote that women must

avoid obtruding their knowledge upon the public. The world have agreed to condemn women to the exercise of their fingers, in preference to that of their heads; and a woman rarely does herself credit by coming forward as a literary character.[16]

She carefully ascribes the norms she describes as those of the 'world' rather than herself, but steps back from challenging them, by advising her daughters of the dangers of being known for what you know.[13]

• Botanical Dialogues 1797
• Botanical Lectures By A Lady 1804 (revised edition of Dialogues, for a wider audience)
• Sketches of the Physiology of Vegetable Life 1811
• A Florist's Manual 1816