Mordecai Cubitt Cooke


Mordecai Cubitt Cooke was an English botanist and mycologist who was, at various points, a London schoolteacher, a Kew mycologist, curator at the India Museum, journalist and author. Cooke was the elder brother of the art-education reformer Ebenezer Cooke and father of the book illustrator and watercolour painter William Cubitt Cooke.

Early life and education

Mordecai Cubitt Cooke was born on 12 July 1825 at the village shop and post office in Horning, Norfolk to Mary, postmistress and village herbalist, and Mordecai Cooke, village shopkeeper. His maternal grandfather was William Cubitt, who was schoolmaster in Neatishead, Norfolk. Cooke was the eldest of eight children and initially attended the village dame-school.
Between the age of ten and thirteen he was taught by his uncle, James Cubitt, a Baptist minister, in Ilford then Stratford upon Avon. He then attended a commercial school at Neatishead for a year before taking up a five year apprenticeship with a wholesale draper in Norwich.

Career

In 1844, Cooke moved to London to be a clerk in a law firm, but his chief interest was botany. His aunt Naomi Treen, a teacher at a Pestalozzian primary school encouraged him to take up teaching. He taught natural history at Holy Trinity National School, Lambeth from 1851, where he set up a school museum and pioneered new natural history teaching methods. He wrote for School and the Teacher magazine and helped to found a museum for London teachers. In 1859 he earned a first class in botany in the first examination for teachers run by the Department of Science and Art. He left teaching after this, around the same time that his first child with his step daughter was born. He worked part time roles and published books before working as a curator at the India Museum at India Office from 1862 - 1880. He founded the Society of Amateur Botanists in 1862.
In 1879, when the botanical materials in the India Museum were moved to the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Cooke went with them. He received a Victoria Medal of Honour from the Royal Horticultural Society in 1902 and a Linnean Medal from the Linnean Society of London in 1903. He claimed to have gained several honorary diplomas for his work, mainly with fungi: MAs from St. Lawrence University in 1870 and Yale University in 1873, and a doctorate from New York University though these claims are disputed. Cooke's life and work are comprehensively documented in a biography by distant relative Mary P. English.
Cooke joined Edward Step in publishing the magazine Hardwicke's Science-Gossip: A Monthly Medium of Interchange and Gossip for Students and Lovers of Nature from 1865 to 1893. From 1870 to 1890 he edited several exsiccatae and exsiccata-like works, one of them the series Fungi Britannici exsiccati a M. C. Cooke collecti, Series I starting with 1865 and another Fungi Americani exsiccati with Henry William Ravenel.
From 1872 to 1894 Cooke also edited Grevillea, a monthly record of cryptogamic botany and its literature, a periodical devoted to mycology. He was a founder of the Quekett Microscopical Club in 1865, in response to a request in Science-Gossip, and a founding member of the British Mycological Society.
It has been suggested that Cooke's description of the perceived distortions of the size of objects while intoxicated by the fungus Amanita muscaria, in his books The Seven Sisters of Sleep and A Plain and Easy Account of British Fungi, inspired the passage in Lewis Carroll's 1865 popular children's storybook Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice grows or shrinks on eating parts of the mushroom.
He is honoured in the naming of Cookeina, which is a genus of cup fungi in the family Sarcoscyphaceae, which was found in 1891.

Personal life

Cooke married Sophia Elizabeth Biggs on 4 January 1846. They had no children but Sophia's two-year-old illegitimate daughter, Annie Elizabeth Thornton Biggs grew up in their household. Cooke fathered three sons and a daughter with his step daughter Annie, the first being born when she was only seventeen. In 1871 Annie married Cooke's step-second cousin, John Quincey Cubitt, but four years later had returned to Cooke, with her daughter by Cubitt. Two more sons and a daughter were born to Annie and Cooke, but she left him c.1890, taking with her daughter with Cubitt's and Cooke's two youngest sons with her. Cooke provided her with an allowance and she remained in touch with the family. Sophia remained with her husband throughout this period, living from 1870 at 146 Junction Road, Kentish Town and dying in 1897.
Cooke died on 12 November 1914 in Southsea, Hampshire, in his daughter's home. He was buried in Islington Cemetery with his wife, Sophia. His headstone is carved with a clump of toadstools. He left £813, 15s. 6d. in his will.

Selected works

  • , Gutenberg copy, 2019
  • A Manual of Structural Botany: for the use of classes, schools, & private students... with upwards of 200 illustrations by Ruffle
  • A Manual of Botanic Terms... with illustrations
  • Index Fungorum Britannicorum. A complete list of fungi found in the British Islands to the present date, etc.
  • *Handbook of British Fungi, with full descriptions of all the species and illustrations of the genera
  • Report on the Gums, Resins, Oleo-Resins, and Resinous Products in the India Museum, or produced in India. Prepared under the direction of the Reporter on the Products of India
  • Report on the Oil Seeds and Oils in the India Museum, or produced in India. Prepared under the direction of the Reporter on the Products of India
  • The Myxomycetes of Great Britain, translated from the Polish of J. T. Rostafinski
  • Clavis Synoptica Hymenomycetum Europaeorum, with L. Quelet
  • Fungi Americani exsiccati with Henry William Ravenel
  • Mycographia, seu Icones fungorum. Figures of fungi from all parts of the world, drawn and illustrated by M. C. Cooke
  • British Fresh-Water Algae. Exclusive of Desmidieæ and Diatomaceæ, etc.
  • Fungi Australianai, reprinted from Grevillea
  • British Desmids. A supplement to British Fresh-Water Algae, etc.
  • Introduction to Fresh-Water Algae with an enumeration of all the British species... With thirteen plates, etc.
  • Handbook of Australian Fungi
  • Vegetable Wasps and Plant Worms. A popular history of entomogeneous fungi or fungi parasitic upon insects... with... illustrations
  • Romance of Low Life amongst Plants. Facts and phenomena of cryptogamic vegetation
  • Handbook of British Hepaticae, etc.
  • Down the Lane and back, in search of wild flowers. By Uncle Matt
  • Through the Copse. Another ramble after flowers with Uncle Matt
  • Around a Cornfield, in a ramble after wild flowers. By Uncle Matt
  • Across the Common, after wild flowers. By Uncle Matt
  • Introduction to the Study of Fungi: their organography, classification, and distribution. For the use of collectors
  • Object-Lesson Handbooks to accompany the Royal Portfolio of Pictures and Diagrams
  • Introduction to Fresh-Water Algae
  • Fungoid Pests of Cultivated Plants
  • ''Catalogue and Field-Book of British Basidiomycetes up to and Inclusive of the Year 1908''