George Bentham (1800–1884): the life of a botanist's botanist

George Bentham (1800–1884) is seen as a pre-eminent botanist whose prodigious output was in part connected with his freedom from obligations other than his work and his legal background. The first 25 years of his life were spent in a variety of circumstances, the Bentham family being widely connected with European society; Bentham had no formal education. After some years of uncertainty as to his career, he married in 1833 and spent the rest of his life on taxonomic botany, producing some of the classic works of the nineteenth century. As a person, Bentham seems to have been rather shy and diffident about receiving honours. In the 1850s both he and his colleagues questioned his status as a botanist: was he an amateur or not? He was active in a number of institutions (the Horticultural, Zoological and in particular the Linnean societies, where he was president 1862–1874), although he generally preferred to follow others when trying to institute change. His manifest achievements as a botanist can only be understood when we clarify how he and other nineteenth century botanists saw the relationship between “natural” classifications and their taxonomic work, which they often treated as some kind of convention.