CHAPTER XXV
AUDUBON'S LETTERPRESS AND ITS RIVALS
Settlement in London—Starts on canvassing tour with his wife—Change of plans—In Edinburgh—Discovery of MacGillivray—His hand in the Ornithological Biography—Rival editions of Wilson and Bonaparte—Brown's extraordinary atlas—Reception of the Biography—Joseph Bartholomew Kidd and the Ornithological Gallery—In London again.
On the 1st of April, 1830, Audubon and his wife sailed from New York in the packet ship Pacific, bound for Liverpool, where they landed after a voyage of twenty-five days. Upon returning to London the naturalist found that upon the 18th of the preceding March he had been elected to membership in the Royal Society, an honor for which he felt indebted to Lord Stanley and his friend Children, of the British Museum; after paying the entrance fee of £50, he took his seat in that body on the 6th of May. The painting of pictures was at once resumed to meet his heavy expenses, but towards the end of July he started with Mrs. Audubon on a canvassing tour, in the course of which his plans suddenly were changed so that London did not see him again for nearly a year.[381] On this journey they touched at Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, York, Hull, Scarborough, Whitby, New Castle, and Belford, to visit the Selbys, and on the 13th of October reached Edinburgh, where they were soon comfortably settled in the naturalist's old lodging place, the house of Mrs. Dickey, Number 26, George Street.
Audubon was now ready to begin the text of his Birds of America, to be called Ornithological Biography, which is often referred to as his "Biography of Birds." This work, which was eventually extended to five large volumes of over three thousand pages, was published at Edinburgh from 1831 to 1839. He had made crude beginnings with this in view as early as 1821, and on October 16, 1830, he wrote: "I know that I am not a scholar ..." but, "with the assistance of my old journals and memorandum-books, which were written on the spot, I can at least put down plain truths, which may be useful, and perhaps interesting, so I shall set to at once. I cannot, however, give scientific descriptions, and here must have assistance." To supply this need, as we have seen already, he had earlier applied to William Swainson, but the negotiations with that naturalist were soon broken off, and led to a sharp and acrid discussion upon the authorship of the work itself.[382]
By a rare stroke of genius or good fortune, Audubon chose for his assistant a young Scotch naturalist, William MacGillivray, who had been introduced to him by another naturalist, James Wilson, soon after he reached the Scottish capital. MacGillivray agreed "to revise and correct" his manuscript at the rate of two guineas per sheet of sixteen pages, and in the latter part of October, 1830, they set to work. We shall soon have occasion to speak more fully of his debt to this estimable Scotchman,[383] and will only add here that a better trained or more competent helper than MacGillivray could hardly have been found in Great Britain or elsewhere.
MRS. DICKIE'S "BOARDING RESIDENCE," 26 GEORGE STREET, EDINBURGH, WHERE AUDUBON OCCUPIED APARTMENTS AND PAINTED AND WROTE IN 1826-27 AND 1830-31. A LARGE PUBLIC BUILDING NOW OCCUPIES THE SITE.
After a photograph in possession of Mr. Ruthven Deane.