Varieties, 1757
John Hill grew out of obscurity to become one of the most prominent and controversial botanists of the 18th century, accredited with popularising the Linnean system but often forgotten in the review of great botanical works.
Little is known of his early life. Born around 1716/7 he was later apprenticed to an apothecary, attending lectures at the Chelsea Physic Garden sponsored by the Worshipful Company of Apothecaries, and travelled the country collecting plants which he assembled into sets and sold by subscription, later making the acquaintance of Sir Hans Sloane and gaining employment as a garden and collection designer for the Duke of Richmond and Lord Petrie.
Finding botany largely unprofitable he turned to work as an actor, appearing at the Haymarket and Covent Garden with rather disparaging reviews, briefly served as a regimental surgeon and then issued a re-working of Theophrastus’s History of Stones. This treatise brought him much admiration from eminent Fellows of the Royal Society, and he became editor of the British Magazine writing prolifically on all manner of subjects.
In 1751 Hill joined the London Advertiser and Literary Gazette as the highest paid journalist of his time. He wrote a daily letter, The Inspector, through which he gained celebrity and stoked controversy amongst his scientific peers particularly those eminent Fellows of the Royal Society some of whom he designated as little more than ‘butterfly hunters’, ‘cockle shell merchants’ and ‘medal scrapers’. Not surprisingly his candid critiques failed to gain him fellowship of the Royal Society and he resorted to a further campaign of criticism bringing him greater conflict but certainly elevating the general interest in botany as no Fellow had done. Regardless, Hill lost his lucrative writing post and then turned his hand at being a herbalist. Preparing remedies and writing on medicinal benefits, he was soon earning vast sums of money and again enjoying his notoriously extravagant lifestyle much to the irritation of his detractors.
From August 1756 to October 1757 Hill began issuing a weekly series on practical and ornamental plants for the kitchen and garden, Eden or a Compleat Body of Gardening, intended as a companion piece to his A Compleat Body of Husbandry. Both of these works were issued under the pseudonym of Thomas Hale and received good reviews from a number of unsuspecting Fellows undoubtedly to Hill’s delight. With contributions from himself and various artists, each plate usually consisted of six plants organised by season with a later edition including twenty plates of individual plants. Although critical of the works of Carl Linnaeus it is here that he begins the introduction to England of the science of identifying, naming and classifying organisms. As with most of his works its was immensely successful.
At the end of the 1750’s Hill came under the patronage of the Earl of Bute who encouraged him in the production of his monumental The Vegetable System. Disastrously, after its launch in 1761, Bute was unexpectedly appointed prime minister, causing him to lose interest and cease funding. Hill felt honour bound to persist with the project as advertised; he completed 26 folios with some 1600 plates but died in 1775 exhausted and impoverished.
In his lifetime Hill divided opinion and brought much disdain upon himself but the success of his works and his contributions to the study of botany cannot be diminished; as one historian suggested, he was simply born ‘fifty years too soon’.
