The writer and publisher of the first book on British beetles. Martyn has been much confused with Thomas Martyn (1735-1825), the Cambridge botanist, whose interests were equally wide ranging. In sorting out who did what the reader is recommended to look at DNB and Thomas Wilkinson, ‘John Abbot’s London Years’, part IV, ERJV., 98, 1984, p.273. Martyn is recorded to have been born in Coventry, but by 1770 he was established in London as a well-known dealer in natural history specimens. It was he who was responsible for sending John Abbott to America. Wilkinson (1984) mentions a letter amongst Dru Drury’s correspondence detailing Martyn’s payment to Thomas James of New York in 1772 for a shipment of insects, indicating that he already had contacts there. Later Martyn’s business had grown to the extent that he was able to purchase for 400 guineas two thirds of the shells brought back by Captain Cook on his last expedition.
To further his natural history interests Martyn set up in 1786 at 26 King Street, Covent Garden. ‘at very great expence... an Academy of youths... possessing a natural genius for drawing and painting, to be cultivated and exerted under his immediate and sole direction’ in delineating objects of natural history. Details of the school are contained in the Preface to the second edition of The Universal Conchologist, one of the publications of the Academy which had first appeared in four folio volumes in 1784. Martyn demanded very great accuracy from his artists and ‘it has been deemed requisite, in a variety of instances, to make six or ten duplicate paintings of some of the more difficult subjects... before one could be obtained which the author judges sufficiently accurate to adopt for an original’. This applied in particular, apparently, to The English Entomologist exhibiting all the Coleopterous Insects found in England, including upwards of five hundred different Species, the Figures of which have never before been given to the Public... Drawn and Painted after Nature, arranged and named according to the Linnean System. which he published in 1792/3, for he states: ‘In the work on English insects particularly, very great expense, as well as disappointment, was incurred through the obstinacy or carelessiness [sic] of the artist employed to etch the figures; who was too vain for his own judgement, or too frugal of his labour, to follow with due accuracy the drawings prepared for him: this rendered his whole performance, which he had twice attempted, altogether unserviceable, and gave occasion to introduce this additional branch of business [etching] into the academy’. (For bibliographic information about the volume see H.B.Weiss, ‘Thomas Martyn’s English Entomologist’, Journal of the New York Entomological Society, 46, 1938, pp.321-325; T.Wilkinson, ‘A bibliographical description of Thomas Martyn’s The English Entomologist (1792)’ (ERJV, 90, 1978, pp.263-64); and the same author’s ‘The date of Thomas Martyn’s The English Entomologist 1792 or 1793’ (ibid., 93, 1981, p.135)).
The English Entomologist appeared in both English and French editions (my copy, in a contemporary binding, has both the English and French texts included). In the preface to the volume Martyn makes clear that ‘all imaginable care has been taken, not to admit the figure of any one insect into this work, where the least doubt remained of its being a native of this country’, but does not state whose insects were the source of the illustrations, the implication being that they were his own. Although Martyn clearly states in The English Entomologist that it would be followed by two further volumes covering Hemiptera, Hymenoptera, and Neuroptera (2) and Diptera (3), these appear never to have been produced. The only other entomological publication which he published was Psyche: Figures of non descript Lepidopterous Insects in 1797, only 12 copies or less of which were printed (see Lisney, p.xiv), although he did publish a volume on spiders in 1793 and another on plants in 1795. Apart from his natural history activities Martyn also wrote political tracts and was involved in promoting hot air balloons, publishing Hints of Important Uses to be Derived from Aerostatic Globes in 1784.
Apart from the sources mentioned above see also W.H.Dall, ‘Thomas Martyn and the Universal Conchologist’ in Proc.U.S. national Museum, 29, 1908, pp.415-432; H.B.Weiss, ‘Thomas Martyn, conchologist, entomologist and pamphleteer of the eighteenth century’ in American Collector, 3. 1926, pp.57-62, and , on his Psyche, Journal of the Society for the History of Natural History, 12 (2), pp.213-17. A major collection of his works including a copy of the English Entomologist on vellum and paper with a portrait of Martyn borne aloft by an eagle which had belonged to William Beckford and H. Bradley Martin, was sold by Sotheby's on 8 May 2002. (I am grateful to David Oram for pointing this out to me). (MD 2/04, 12/19)