Born in Norwich, the elder brother of Charles Morgan (see above). Interested himself in natural history at an early age, particularly insects, and became friendly with Richard Walker, a local naturalist, and later the author of Flora Oxiensis, by whom he was much influenced, and with Dr (later Sir James) Edward Smith and with the Hooker family. The young Hooker (later Sir W.J.) is known to have helped Curtis with the naming of insects. At school he also became friendly with Henry Browne, whose mother had a collection of Lepidoptera, which Curtis is known to have studied. At the age of sixteen he was placed in a lawyer's office in Norwich as a clerk where he first made the acquaintance of Simon Wilkin, and also met Kirby, Spence, Burrell and other well-known Norwich entomologists.
At the same time as pursuing his interest in insects Curtis also spent time drawing and colouring engravings, and after four years left the lawyer's office to launch himself on a career as an entomologist and engraver. In this enterprise he was assisted by Wilkin who was a printer and into whose house at Costessy Curtis moved in 1812. There he had access to a fine library of entomological literature and a good collection. The two men founded an entomological Society which included some twenty members, and it was at this time that Curtis determined to write and illustrate the British Entomology, being Illustrations and Descriptions of the Genera of Insects found in Great Britain and Ireland, the work for which he is best known.
While living with Wilkin, Curtis took up employment with a printer at Bungay called Edwards. He also undertook the plates for Kirby and Spence's An Introduction to Entomology (1816-), the first volume of which records the authors' debt to Wilkin for presenting them with Curtis's plates, and to Curtis "whose intimate acquaintance with the subject has enabled him to give to the figures an accuracy which they could not have received from one less conversant with the science." Sometime between 1817 and 1819 Curtis moved to London after a sojourn at Barham with Kirby where he appears to have first met William Macleay. It was Macleay who introduced him shortly after his arrival in London to the Linnean Society for which he did illustrations of insects in the Transactions. These included three plates for the well-known Century of Insects by Kirby, depicting forty five insects, mainly Coleoptera. It was at about this time that Curtis married for the first time and had two children, Edward John, born on 20 March 1821 and Elizabeth, born in 1826. His second marriage took place on 27 June 1860 to Matilda Bliss by whom he had two further boys, Robin, born on 14 April 1861, and Henry Alexander, named after his godfather A.H.Haliday, born in the following year.
While living in London Curtis undertook a number of entomological collecting trips. In July 1825 he travelled to Scotland with J.C.Dale by steampacket. They had introductions to Sir Patrick Walker and to Sir Walter Scott, and were so successful in their collecting that they were able to add thirty new species to the British list. They returned overland, spending much of the time walking. Dale lived at Glanville Wooton, Sherborne, Dorset, which Curtis frequently visited and which acted as a base for further explorations to the New Forest, Isle of Portland, etc.. In 1830 he travelled to France via Jersey, and in the autumn of 1833 he spent a month with Lord Malmesbury in Ireland, when he visited his friend A.H.Haliday. In July of the following year he was in Scotland again, this time with Haliday, and in 1835 he returned to Ireland for the late summer and early autumn.
During this time Curtis continued with the onerous task of writing, illustrating and publishing his British Entomology (dedicated to Lord Malmesbury). The first number appeared on 1 January 1824 and publication continued for fifteen years, four plates and two pages of text appearing on the first day of each month. The finished work amounted to 193 issues with 770 plates during the production of which Curtis was never once late. He had originally conceived the work as a translation of Latreille's Genera Crustaceorum et Insectorum which he planned to call the Illustrated Genera of Insects, but the number of new species described increased so rapidly that he decided to confine it to the genera of British Insects alone. From 1829 he was obliged to increase the number of copies being produced, and he started to reprint earlier parts. (R.E.Blackwelder, ”The dates and editions of Curtis's British Entomology”, Smithsonian Misc. Collection, 407.5, 1947, gives details).
Shortly after the first parts of the British Entomology appeared, J.F.Stephens announced his intention to publish The Illustrations of British Entomology, and the first plate of his work appeared on 1 June 1827. The two men started as friends, Curtis' first illustration was of Cicindela sylvicola in Stephens' collection, and Stephens' artist was Curtis' brother Charles Morgan. There was, however, a limited market for such publications, and although both aimed at the collector, who tended to be wealthier than the scientist, considerable rivalry inevitably developed. One result of this was that Curtis started to pay more attention to species as opposed to genera after plate 150 had appeared.
To accompany the British Entomology Curtis also produced a Guide to the arrangement of British Insects, 1829, which served the added purpose of being arranged so that it could be cut up for use in cabinets. Of the 15,000 insects listed in the first edition Curtis had some 5,500 in his own collection. A second edition appeared in 1837. From 1841 Curtis began a series of articles in the Journal of the Royal Agricultural Society on various insect pests which proved so popular that they were published in 1860, three years after completion, as a separate volume titled Farm Insects. The volume was successful not only because it was one of the first to be written for the farmer by a scientist in a readily comprehensible format, but it was also relatively cheap, it had good clear illustrations which facilitated identification, and it was arranged by crop rather than by insect family. As a result of its publication it has been said of Curtis that ‘he pretty well invented the subject of ‘economic entomology’’ (George Ordish, John Curtis and the Pioneering of Pest Control, 1974, p.79).
Curtis’s entomological work was cut short by bad sight. A letter pasted into my copy of his British Entomology addressed to John Aspinall Turner and dated Jan. 1856 begins ‘My sight is so feeble that I can only write you a few lines’ and a cutting from a newspaper pasted to it announcing his death states that he had lost his sight ‘from the frequent use of the microscope in his entomological inquiries’. At the time of becoming blind he was granted a Civil last pension of £100 subsequently increased to £150
After his death Curtis' collection of insects was purchased from his widow by the Victorian National Museum in Melbourne, Australia. J.J.Walker, 'Some notes on the Lepidoptera of the "Curtis" Collection of British Insects' in EMM., 40, 1904, p.187 recorded: 'his collections were probably shipped to Australia not later than the beginning of 1864, as the records of the Victorian National Museum show that a sum of money was remitted to Mrs Curtis in payment for them on July 2nd of that year. These collections are contained in five mahogany cabinets, four at least of which, containing the British insects of all Orders, are of the celebrated Standish make; the fifth, tall cabinet of fifty drawers, is appropriated to a general collection of exotic insects. A very fine forty drawer cabinet contains the Lepidoptera, the Coleoptera occupy another of twenty drawers, and two others of twenty four drawers each contain the remaining orders. These Collections are in precisely the same state as when they were received at Melbourne, nothing having been added to or taken from them since their arrival in the Museum. All the insects are set in the old style, low down on the pins...the legs of the beetles, nearly or quite touching the paper...the great majority of the Coleoptera are pinned, though as previously stated they are almost entirely free from that worst of cabinet pests, verdigris'. Curtis' manuscript register, or catalogue of the whole of the British collection accompanied the collection and 'is contained in four volumes of quarto size. It is very closely and neatly written in a clear but minute hand on alternate pages and the writing is unfortunately much faded in parts. It contains notes, in some instances very copious, on nearly every species, embracing localities, dates of collecting, and other items of interest' (Useful information about references by Curtis to specific localities in Hampshire and Dorset is contained in S.C.S.Brown, 'Notes on some Hants and Dorset localities mentioned by John Curtis in his British Entomology', EMM., 92, 1956, p.308).
Apart from the collection mentioned above, the types of the 'Descriptions of the insects collected by Capt. R.P.King in the Survey of the Straits of Magellan', which Curtis published in Trans.LSL., 17-19, 1837-1845, with A.H.Haliday and F.Walker, and which he appears to have retained in his own collection, passed to the NHM in 1863. In addition, a subsidiary collection of insects was sold on 8 July 1863 at Stevens' auction rooms for £100, and it was also this auctioneer who sold his library comprising some 700 volumes (the catalogue is in the British Museum) on 8 June in the same year. Curtis' own copy of the British Entomology is now in the library of the RESL where his manuscript entomological diary is also housed. The latter is a large octavo book bound in leather. Each page is devoted to a day of the year and each day contains observations on plants, insects, etc.. Curtis seems to have made up the diary after the event for the dates are not consecutive and the entries appear to be in a chronological jumble. The volume is particularly interesting for revealing both the extent of his travels and also the number of insects which were sent to him from all over the world. Smith (1986) records that there is MS material in the HDO including: letter to Westwood, 1830; economic and taxonomic notes with annotations by Westwood, including notes for 16 Reports on the insects injurious to agriculture and the British Entomology, original drawings and paintings, letter from G.Passerini of 1854 (purchased by Westwood from Mrs Curtis in 1863); and letters to J.C.Dale, 1819-62. She also records that the third meeting of the Norwich Entomological Society was held at Curtis’s house on 4 December 1810 and that the Minutes are in the HDO. The HDO also holds insects from Curtis, but Smith does not refer to beetles being present.There is a diary covering the period 1840-1854 which includes a letter from W.Nicholson re Bruchus granarius, and 47 letters dated 1830-1862, from various addresses in London, to J.C.Dale in the RESL library (Pedersen, 2002, pp.45, 54). Finally, it is worth noting that the 770 original drawings for the British Entomology, after being purchased at the auction by J.O.Westwood, were being offered for sale by a London bookseller in January 1911 (C.D.Sherborn and J.H.Durrant, 'Note on John Curtis' British Entomology', EMM., 47, 1911, p.85) from whom they were purchased by Lord Rothschild who presented them to the NHM. Ordish, op. cit., gives a full bibliography both of Curtis' own writings and of references to him. Curtis was FLS from 1822 and President of the RESL from 1855-1857, He was also an honorary member of the Societe entmologique de France. (MD 4/02, 12/21)