A year ago, when I stepped away from full-time, ongoing employment, I set out to write a book about Joseph Banks, or something in that area, or era. I started reading, and I read everything about Joseph Banks I could get my hands on. I will not be writing a straight-ahead biography about Joseph Banks: that has been done, several times. I have read 10 books about Banks in the last year about which more, anon.
Who is Joseph Banks (1743 to 1820) and why would anyone, never mind a small crowd, write a book about him? Let me answer the second question first – Banks corresponded widely, with scientists, in an era when science was evolving to something we recognize. He knew everyone – so if you understand his network, you have a good grip on what happened in a fascinating time. I don’t understand his network, yet.
The person? Here is a super-condensed bullet-point version:
Banks was a wealthy, adventurous young Englishman who served as botanist on Cook’s first voyage around the world, notably stopping in Tahiti, and an avid collector of botanical and zoological specimens.
Banks became famous on returning to England, let it go to his head, sowed a bushel of wild oats (the Jane Austen phrase “a sad rake” applies, and they were contemporaries, Banks and Miss Austen (1775-1817.)) Banks married well and invited his sister to live with them; the household of three lasted their lifetimes.
Banks was president of the Royal Society for forty years (1780-1820), corresponded with everyone who was anyone in science, and often met with them in London.
Banks was on good terms with King George III, who was interested in agriculture; among other things, Merino sheep were brought to Britain by the interest of the King and the efforts of Banks.
Kew Gardens shows Banks’s influence, as do botanical gardens all over the world – where there were British (and in 1800 there were British in a lot of places), there was often a Banks protégé.
Banks advocated strongly for the penal colony at Botany Bay (he is the botanist for whom it was named) and is more or less claimed by the Australians as one of the founding fathers
Banks didn’t publish and was not regarded so much as a scientist, but as a well-placed friend of scientists. We need well-placed friends, that is for sure.
The stories are worth telling on their own, as good stories are. What interests me is his situation at the center of the British Enlightenment. He corresponded with everyone. Everyone includes some of the early chemists: Joseph Priestly, Antoine Lavoisier, and Humphrey Davey. He was an avid supporter of both William and Caroline Herschel, a brother-and-sister team of astronomers, and knew Benjamin Franklin.
There has been an increase in interest in Banks recently, not least in Australia – the Australians take a proprietary interest in him. The two books I would most recommend, of the ten I’ve read, are Grantlee Kieza’s Banks, 2020 and John Gascoigne’s Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture 1994. Both were written by Australians and published in Australia, but Amazon had no trouble getting copies to me in southern New Hampshire.
Grantlee Kieza worked as a sports journalist, and his writing has zest and is well-paced. For a who-was-this-guy fun read, Kieza’s Banks would be the best choice.
I first learned about Banks in Patrick O’Brien’s Aubrey-Maturin novels, which kept me company over many tedious long drives for family business. Nothing like swashbuckling, derring-do adventure for staying awake on the road. O’Brien wrote a biography of Banks, and I was excited and then disappointed. I know he can write with vigor, and there is plenty of material in Banks’s life. The book dragged a little – stick with Kieza, I say, and I say it sadly. I wanted O’Brien’s book to be better.
For a more serious, scholarly look at Banks’s role in the center of the scientific world, John Gascoigne’s book Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment is best. Gascoigne is Professor Emeritus at the University of New South Wales and his book reads like the work of a professor. Thorough, and interesting, it does not have the zest of a sportswriter. Arguably, this is the best guide to why Banks matters. I likely have more to say about this – the second half of the book could be three books (Banks was busy) and unpacking might be called for. I chose the image, the front of Joseph Smith’s biography of Banks, because it shows the older well connected and influential Banks.
The graph below is a look at the interest level in Banks in the two centuries since he died in 1820. I have notes on each of them below. Is there room for more on Banks’s influence on science, in say, 2026? I think so.
Brief reviews of individual books
Grantlee Kieza. Banks. Sydney NSW: HarperCollins Publishers Australia, 2020.
The book covers the life of Banks in chronological order, while Kieza includes some delightful details (the origins of the work “strike” for a labor action, importation of marijuana) it is the pace of the prose and a certain humor that makes this book so readable. If you are only going to read one biography of Joseph Banks, read this one. I’ve read ten of them by now, and this was the most fun. Here is Kieza on the interactions of the British with indigenous people:
“On two occasions, local warriors attacked the Dolphin from canoes, hurling stones from their slingshots. As was their custom in delicate diplomatic negotiations of the times, the British immediately opened fire.”
The book is well balanced – there is a chapter on the time the people of the Endeavor, including Banks, spent on Tahiti. Some books, still as fascinated as the British public was in the late 18th century, spend half the words on Tahiti. There is also a decent amount about Banks’s settled life, in the center of the scientific world of his day. That chapter feels less lively as if the author felt duty bound (as he is) to include this material, but it did not fire his imagination.
Musgrave, Toby. The Multifarious Mr. Banks: From Botany Bay to Kew, The Natural Historian Who Shaped the World. New Haven ; London: Yale University Press, 2020.
Toby Musgrave has a PhD in garden history and is an active garden consultant and independent scholar living in Denmark.
The word multifarious comes up about Banks often, and not just in this work. This very recent biography starts with the family, noting that they run Whig, politically. Banks stayed out of politics as much as he could but was more conservative. Banks owned a lot of land. The biography is solid, exploring various aspects of Banks’s personality – which was imperious, generous, and very class-conscious in some ways and not at all in others. His youthful “sad rake” years are dealt with, and his mature life as well. As usual, fewer pages on the settled mature life than the exploring and sad rake parts of his life.
The author's deep knowledge of gardening history comes through in his descriptions of the gardens at Kew, which Banks was key in supporting and broadening. Familiarity with gardens gives him a unique ability and enthusiasm in tracing all the Kew-trained gardeners sent out to collect plants and start botanical gardens in South Africa, Ceylon, and Jamaica. It’s a great story. The transfer of plants, of which Banks was a strong advocate, including sugar cane, cotton, tea, and breadfruit from one part of the British Empire to another is also well-described.
There is a chapter on his influence on the wider world of science that is promising, but the author falls into the “tell it rather than show it” trap here and the chapter is sometimes just a list, not a story.
Richard Holmes. The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science. First Edition. New York: Vintage, 2010.
Reviewed elsewhere on this substack. Of all the books described here, this is probably the easiest one to find. Holmes uses Banks as a through line to tell a variety of stories. I read a library copy in southern New Hampshire.
Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
John Gascoigne, emeritus professor of history at the University of New South Wales, has written several books about Joseph Banks. Banks advocated strongly, and persuasively for the establishment of the penal colony at Botany Bay and maintained an interest in the colony. He is regarded as one of the Founding Fathers of Australia. Banks is an interesting figure, and you don’t have to be Australian to want to know more, but it feels particularly appropriate an Australian professor in NSW would write this book about Banks and the British Empire.
Banks was a landowner in 18th-century Britain and a man of his time and class. This book focuses on JB’s very practical few of botany – how can it be used to help us. “Us” being Britain, and particularly the land-owning class. Maybe it’s ok if it helps humanity in general, but that wasn’t the focus of Banks’s thinking, although Gascoigne throws Francis Bacon's quote “the relief of man’s estate” in liberally, Banks was more of a patriot than a humanitarian. Some of Banks’s correspondence shows a certain admiration of authoritarian governments because they can get things done.
The Corn Law debate. The Corn Law would have allowed imported grains (corn = grain) in Britain. The landowners, knowing this would depress prices, lobbied hard against importing. The industrialists and their workers lobbied hard in favor of the corn laws, so poorly paid workers could afford to eat. The landowners argued Britain needed to be self-sufficient in food, and the industrialists should pay their workers enough to be able to afford grains raised in Britain. The loss of the American colonies in the late 18th century and the Napoleonic Wars caused concern about the need for self-sufficiency.
If you read the history of the Corn Laws you most likely won’t see Banks’s name. He was behind the scenes, a lobbyist of sorts. He wrote letters to everyone and met influential people socially often at his house. But he kept out of sight as much as he could and never ran for Parliament. This was likely his personal preference, but also in support of his 40-year role as President of the Royal Institute of Science; to work with everyone he had to (publicly) side with no one.
Breadfruit transplanted to Jamaica, tea transplanted from China to India, fine Merino wool-bearing sheep in England and Ireland, and cotton to India. All these Banks attempted, although not all succeeded. Banks was very clear that the role of a colony was to increase the well-being of the mother country. He was unambiguous about that, not interested in the well-being of the colonial peoples. He was personally a kind and generous man, but policy-wise, clear on his priorities.
The book is dense, although quite readable, no one would call it “rollicking” as other books about Banks have been. It is not so academic that one feels it is written for other professors, it feels like it was written for the general public, by someone who has confidence in the public’s ability to cope with dense text.
Gascoigne, John. Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Another book by the same NSW professor. This one focuses on the English Enlightenment – Banks was in the middle of it. He spends some time explaining to modern readers how science worked before there were industries and formal grant agencies. There was no formal training – science and engineering were not professions, and there were no degrees in these fields. Broadly, two sets of people came together: curious hands-on builders and curious gentlemen – known with varying degrees of mocking as “virtuosi” – who collected and traveled. Banks was in the latter category, although he was on friendly terms with talented people of both groups.
Gascoigne highlights the natural confluence of “improving” interest between landowners and nascent industry, and the falling away of that confluence under the shocking events of the French Revolution which he describes as having a general dampening effect on English intellectual life; interest subsided in anything new that might “revolutionize” anything.
The English were, according to Gasgoigne, more empirical in this period than German or French scholars, who were more likely to put a structure or theory on information – the English tended to collect. Banks fits into this mold as a collector rather than a theorizer. This may be a natural outgrowth of the coming together of virtuosi and practical builders in Britain. On the Continent, there were academic posts supported by governments: support was less systematic in Britain.
The book is dense, although quite readable, no one would call it “rollicking” as other books about Banks have been. It is not so academic that one feels it is written for other professors, it feels like it was written for the general public, by someone who has confidence in the public’s ability to cope with dense text.
O’Brian, Patrick. Joseph Banks: A Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Patrick O’Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturin novels of naval adventures (the movie Master & Commander was based on the first two books) wrote a biography of Joseph Banks. I first encountered the name Joseph Banks in one of these novels when Stephen Maturin, surgeon and naturalist, calls on him in London. Mr. O’Brian can write, that we know. The biography is less amusing, perhaps appropriately since there is very little internal dialog and equally little swashbuckling. O’Brian’s name makes this book a little easier to find in North America.
The biography takes us from the first Banks progenitor to rise to some prominence, through the epoch-making journey with Cook around the world to Tahiti and Australia. These stories are told with great zest: some of the sailing descriptions – of being stuck on the Great Barrier Reef – read like the Aubrey/Maturin novels. Banks returned a hero and met everyone, including the King, had a very painful episode of hubris which resulted in Banks refusing to sail on Cook’s next voyage. This story, too, is told with verve and sympathy.
O’Brian is determined to tell the truth as he sees it, but not happy when our hero does things of which one disapproves – you can hear him sigh when he says, several times, I’m writing a biography, not a hagiography.
Banks was president of the Royal Society for 40 years and maintained connections with the wider world of science. This part of the story moves quickly over very busy decades, giving an overview. It is not written with so much of the verve and sympathy shown in earlier aspects of Banks’s life. It is probably the most important part of Banks’s life, for the wider world of science, for good and ill. It might have been more interesting if told in more detail.
Lyte, Charles. Sir Joseph Banks : 18th Century Explorer, Botanist and Entrepreneur. London: David & Charles, 1980.
This book is a little harder to find – my copy, removed from a university library in Wales came to me by way of anybook.biz. Written in 1980 (incredibly, that is 44 years ago) this book is one of the earlier contributions to the recent interest in the career of Joseph Banks. It’s a solid work, pretty easy to read. The amount of text devoted to the trip on the Endeavor with Captain Cook – the trip that made Joseph Banks a famous, celebrated, man of his times – takes more pages than his later life. Banks was extremely influential in his later life, but maybe that’s not as appealing as the voyage to the South Pacific. Lyte does spend more time than most on the troubles Banks had in his home county of Lincolnshire, which illustrates his firm membership in the landed class very clearly but skips entirely the tangled circumstances in Lincolnshire that prompted Banks to turn down the order of Bath the first time. Lyte includes, with some glee, I think, caricatures, cartoons, and verses making fun of JB that were published in his lifetime. The index is weak, but overall a nice read.
Cameron, Hector Charles. Sir Joseph Banks, K.B., P.R.S.; the Autocrat of the Philosophers. London, Batchworth Press, 1952.
Available online at http://archive.org/details/sirjosephbankskb0000came. Written in 1952, this biography of Joseph Banks is surprisingly readable. The subtitle “Autocrat of the Philosophers” suggests a critical stance, which is not borne out in the text. Cameron doesn’t soften the occasionally dictatorial, domineering behaviors of Banks, but he does not neglect the more charming, enthusiastic, man of science either. It is a nice, taut survey, organized by topic not chronologically. That might be a little disorienting if you do not already know the basic outline.
Smith, Edward. The Life of Sir Joseph Banks. Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 1911.
My copy was printed in 2002, but is a reproduction of the 1911 book. The language of the book feels mannered 110 years after its writing, but it grew on me and I didn’t notice it after a little while. Smith quotes extensively from letters, which is a good way to get a feel for Banks personally.
I don’t think this biography was particularly reliable in interpretation, or for that matter in selection of stories to tell and not tell. One of Banks’s points of view that did not age very well was his full-throated support of Captain Bligh (of the Bounty, as in the Mutiny of). Smith joins that chorus, which is a little uncomfortable. Smith takes at face value Banks’s position that he stayed out of politics. He never ran for office, but Banks was active behind the scenes as other works make clear. In reference to Banks’s correspondence with an admiral who was contemplating marriage with his long-term mistress (Hamilton and Emma, for those who know the story) Smith says “Banks belonged to a class of persons whose propriety was unimpeachable…” Smith is either protesting too much or not paying attention.
unknown author. Sir Joseph Banks and the Royal Society: A Popular Biography, with an Historical Introduction and Sequel (Classic Reprint). London: Forgotten Books, 1884.
Written 60 years after Banks’ death, barely within living memory. Banks was not popular towards the end of his term as the President of the Royal Society, which was coterminal with his life. I expected a book written 60 years later to be a little bit of a hatchet job, which this is not. It is a respectful, genial description of the topic, with liberal quotes from letters. The book is readable for moderns, it feels mannered and formal to us, but easily understood. If you can read Jane Austen this will be no trouble.