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  • Published: 7 November 1997
  • ISBN: 9780099736004
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $25.00

Charles Waterton 1782-1865

Traveller and Conservationist




Charles Waterton was the first conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialisation. During his lifetime he was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements and his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he turned his park into a sanctuary for animals and birds. As an explorer he learned to survive in the tropical rain forests of South America without a gun or the society of other white men. He was an authority on the poisons used by South American Indians and a taxidermist of note. The huge public that read his books included Dickens, Darwin and Roosevelt. Since his death the memory of Waterton's personal eccenticities has flourished, while the originality of his ideas and work has often suffered. Using his surviving papers, Julia Blackburn has redressed the balance in a biogr aphy that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.

  • Published: 7 November 1997
  • ISBN: 9780099736004
  • Imprint: Vintage
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 256
  • RRP: $25.00

About the author

Julia Blackburn

Julia Blackburn is an author and scriptwriter whose radio plays include A Good Death, Betsy and Napoleon, The Need for Nonsense and The Spellbound Horses.

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Praise for Charles Waterton 1782-1865

Julia Blackburn is an astute and gifted biographer...Her style is economical, and where appropriate graceful; always lucid, sometimes poetic, never gushing...Her book will intrigue and enthral

Spectator