Isabella Bird: writer, photographer and naturalist

Isabella Lucy Bishop, née Bird, was born on 15th October 1831, the year before the Great Reform Act, which extended male suffrage in the UK, while offering nothing to women.

A writer, photographer, naturalist and traveller, Isabella was the daughter of The Reverend Edward Bird (1793-1858), whose first curacy was in Boroughbridge, Yorkshire and his second wife, Dora (Dorothy) née Lawson (1803-66). Her uncle was the civil servant Robert Merttins Bird (1788-1853) whose work took him to Bengal – a career that, perhaps, helped instil a sense of wanderlust in his young niece. Isabella’s paternal grandmother was a cousin to the abolitionist William Wilberforce.

The Author's First Ride in Perak, 1883. Isabella Bird and two others on an elephant in a swamp in Perak, Malaya. Image: Library of Congress Her childhood was itinerant as the family moved wherever her father’s curacies took it. In 1834, the Birds arrived at the rectory in Tattenhall, where the cleric had been given the living of St Alban’s Church by his cousin, Dr John Bird Sumner, Bishop of Chester. Isabella’s sister, Henrietta was born that year.

It seems the elder of the Misses Bird spoke up for herself from an early age and there is a charming story that at the age of six, she reprimanded the member of parliament for South Cheshire, Sir Malpas de Grey Tatton Egerton, who she accused of trying to win her father’s vote in a forthcoming election by complimenting him on his elder daughter.

In 1842, the family upped sticks again and moved to Birmingham after the Reverend Bird resigned from St Alban’s due to his trenchant views on Sabbath observance. A frail child, whose home schooling included botany, a subject beloved of her father, Isabella was encouraged to enjoy the open air, and learned to ride. She developed a passion for reading and her first publication came when she was aged just 16 – a tract in which she debated the relative merits of protectionism versus free trade.

A page from Isabella Bird's book, Korea and Her Neighbours, 1898 From 1854, when she would have been in her very early 20s, Isabella began her travelling on the recommendation of doctors who advised that a bracing sea voyage would be beneficial to her health. She duly sailed to the United States, her letters home eventually forming the basis for her first book, An Englishwoman in America (1858), published by John Murray III (1808-92). A year later, Murray produced Charles Darwin’s famed On the Origin of Species (1859). Murray and Isabella became lifelong friends. She left England again in 1872, visiting Canada and the United States, including the Rocky Mountains (in 1873), and would eventually go on to visit all of the Sandwich Islands (modern-day Hawaii), Australia, Yezo (Japan), Persia (today’s Iran) and Kurdistan. She became quite the celebrity, featuring in magazines and journals.

The Rockies inspired Isabella to write her fourth book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains (1879),based on letters home to her sister, originally been published in The Leisure Hour magazine.

Clock tower in Tobermory built with funds donated by Isabella Bird in memory of her sister Henrietta who died of typhoid fever in 1880. Image: Funyug Further travels followed from 1878, taking in Japan, China (she was the first woman to travel up the Yangtze), Korea, Vietnam, Malaya and Singapore. In 1880, her sister died of typhoid fever. Isabella sponsored the building of a clock tower in Tobermory on the isle of Mull her memory.

In February 1881, Isabella married the Edinburgh surgeon John Bishop. After his death in 1886, she studied medicine and resumed travelling, this time as a missionary, arriving in India in 1889. In conjunction with Fanny Jane Butler, an English doctor working in India, Isabella would found the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinagar in modern-day Kashmir in memory of her departed husband who had left a legacy for this purpose.

Her journeys took in the Tibetan borderlands, Persia (Iran), Turkey, Kurdistan and Armenia, accompanied by a medicine chest supplied by Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), the American pharmaceutical entrepreneur whose company would eventually form part of GlaxoSmithKline, and who married Syrie Barnardo, the daughter of Thomas Barnardo.

St Alban's Church, Tattenhall. The Bird family moved to the village in 1834 where Isabella's father had been granted the living by his relative the Bishop of Chester Peter I. Vardy Isabella Bird was, by now, a household name and duly became the first woman Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society in 1892 and the first female to address that august body. She was asked to address a House of Commons committee about Kurdistan and the persecution of Christians there. Her last significant journey was in 1897 when she travelled to China and Korea once more. She managed a further trip to Morocco, her wanderlust undimmed, and visited Tattenhall in October 1898 to speak at the Barbour Institute.

Isabella Bird wrote more than two dozen books about her travel. She died on 7th October, 1904, in Edinburgh a week or so shy of her 73rd birthday and was buried in the city’s Dean Cemetery. She had been planning another trip to China.

In December 2022, almost 120 years after the death of the intrepid Victorian traveller, a BBC television programme – Trailblazers: A Rocky Mountain Road Trip – saw Ruby Wax, Emily Atack and Spice Girl Mel B retrace her footsteps.

My home in the Rocky Mountains - illustration from Isabella Bird's book A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains, 1879. Image: Library of Congress CHRONOLOGY