Eccles Centre Writer-in-Residence, Sheila Rowbotham, writes:

I came across the Denton family from Wellesley, Massachusetts while reading the manuscript journals of Helen Tufts at Smith College. In the 1890s she was friendly with the two younger Dentons, William and Carrie. They were part of a radical circle intent on questioning both politics and social conventions. The archivist at Wellesley College, Jane A. Callahan kindly sent me an article by Beth Hinchcliffe on the Dentons’ extraordinary collection of butterflies.

She relates how William Denton senior lost his teaching post in England in the revolutionary year of 1848 because of his heretical views. Upon migrating to America, he threw himself into the anti-slavery movement. The anti-slavery cause gathered many other emancipatory aspirations around it and he met the woman who would become his wife, Elizabeth Foote, when he escorted her to safety from a furious crowd, outraged because she was working as typesetter and wearing bloomers. The couple travelled around the country lecturing on geology and natural history collecting minerals, fossils and butterflies. As the children grew older they accompanied their parents doing magic lantern shows to illustrate the talks.

In 1881 William went on a three year trip with two of his sons, Sherman and Shelley, to Australia, New Zealand, Tasmania, dying of jungle fever in 1883 when he tried to explore New Guinea alone.

It was enterprising Sherman who worked out how to preserve butterflies on a plaster mount covered with glass and they were soon exhibiting in the United States and in Europe. In 1900 the Dentons’ butterflies won the gold medal at Paris Exhibition, the Parisian couturier Worth designed gowns inspired by the butterflies, and they influenced the American Arts and Crafts pioneer, Elbert Hubbard. When Queen Victoria died, Shelley Denton was asked to apply his skill to preserving the flowers on her coffin.

This summer I went to do research in the Labadie collection at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and there I learned more of the fascinating Dentons. Elizabeth Denton was interested in spiritualism, William junior and his companion and later wife May C. Hurd, were friendly with the early birth control campaigners Josephine and Flora Tilton. The Dentons were so remarkable that their contemporaries were quite unable to fit them into any known category. Neighbours would say that there were three kinds of folk in Wellesley, the good the bad and the Dentons.

Carrie Denton proved to be the unorthodox one; surrounded by non-conformists and free lovers, she struck out for propriety. When she and the lover of Flora Tilton, Archibald Simpson, were both old in 1943, he teased her for asking searching questions about his relationship with Flora in the 1890s.’You were conservatively moral and didn’t approve’. Carrie might well have observed that if you were born a Denton you did not yield to the opinion of others. After all had not William Denton senior edited The Social Revolutionist in 1856 which stood for ‘a free press, resting on a free soil’.

[S.R.]