Little Gidding

"Quite possibly this solution was at the prompting of Lister's wife, appalled at the prospect of so many years of devoted labour by her husband coming to nought in the end through the prohibitive cost of setting so huge a work in type. Certainly it was she, together with at least one of their daughters (researchers interpret the evidence differently as to how many of those were involved), who took upon themselves the immense task of producing the nearly 1,000 engravings, from their own preliminary sketches, a task to which they must have sacrificed considerably more than their leisure hours during the seven years that the first and main instalment was in production. 'I doe not wonder your workw[omen] begin to be tired,' a concerned Edward Llwyd wrote to Lister from Oxford as the work was nearing completion in 1692, 'you have held them so long to it' -- though the image of Lister as an ever-hovering taskmaster that those words conjure up is probably misleading: the others more probably took part contentedly, of their own volition. though it has been far from unusual over the years for naturalists to enlist the services of their wives and children for searching and collecting (as Ray was doing in that very same period in connection with the Historia insectorum), instances of a family conveyor belt for producing illustrations must be very rare by comparison. In one respect, however, the Listers were to be outdone by the early 19c Baxters: many of the plates for British Phaenogamous Botany, a long-running part-work by their father, the curator of the University Botanic Garden at Oxford, were produced not only by his daughters but by a daughter-in-law as well." (Allen 2010 56-7)