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Desperately Seeking Graham
While working on the update of Quercus in Trees and Shrubs Online (in collaboration with Allen Coombes) I often disappear down rabbit holes in search of information on the people who named oak species, or after whom species were named. One such case involved Quercus grahamii, which has been recently salvaged from synonymy, where it had sat for decades under Q. acutifolia (you can read the full story here). Quercus grahamii has been in IOS news lately, as the host tree of a newly discovered species of gall wasp, coincidentally named after the aforementioned Allen Coombes.

George Bentham described Q. grahamii in his Plantas Hartwegianas, a book published in between 1839 and 1857, in which he enumerated and described specimens sent back from Mexico to London by Theodor Hartweg, a German botanist (1812–1871). Hartweg had been engaged by the Horticultural Society of London to collect plant material in Mexico. In his publication, Bentham included notes on a set of Mexican specimens that had been presented to him some years earlier by "G.J. Graham, Esq., a gentleman whose name must be well known to horticulturists, from the number of handsome Mexican plants he was the means of introducing to this country." Bentham mentions a dozen oak specimens collected by Graham, most of them either previously described by others or described by Bentham from Hartweg's specimens. One, however, seemed new to him, Graham's specimen No. 326, collected in 1830, which Bentham described and named in his honor (Bentham 1839–1857).

So who was this gentleman named Graham? One can quickly discover that George John Graham (1803–1878) went to Mexico in 1827 to report on mines and collected seeds and plants while there. He gathered plant material near Mexico City and in the mining districts of Tlalpujahua, Michoacán and Real del Monte, Hidalgo. But it is harder to come across any further details.

The main source of biographical information on Graham is an article by James Britten in the Journal of Botany, British and Foreign (Britten 1905), reporting on a gift of some of Graham's specimens to the National Herbarium. The specimens, including an isotype of Q. grahamii, had been gifted by Mrs. Howgrave Graham, probably G.J. Graham's daughter-in-law, who provided biographical details reported by Britten. According to Mrs. Howgrave Graham, George John Graham was an intimate friend of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, to whom he sent many letters from Mexico. Mill was a keen botanist, having been introduced to the subject as a boy by George Bentham (Pearce 2006). Graham and Mill collaborated in forming "a collection of English plants, which, however, has not been preserved." His correspondence with Mill on botanical matters seems to have likewise vanished. However, a reference to Graham in one of Mill's letters gives an indication of the esteem in which Mill held his plant collector friend. Writing to a contact in New Zealand who had sent him ferns, he thanks him and adds: "Any other plants would be interesting as well as ferns,–all is fish that comes to my net, and there may be among plants picked up indiscriminately in a new country, as many and as interesting nondescripts as there were in Graham's Mexican collection" (Mill 1989).

Mill is said to have learned his botany from George Bentham, whose father, the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, was a close friend of Mill’s father, the economist James Mill. We can see thus the possible root of the connection between George John Graham, John Stuart Mill’s friend, and George Bentham, his mentor. Mill’s friendship with Graham dated to when they were both young economists and part of a group who in the 1820s cultivated and propagated utilitarian principles and became known as the “philosophical radicals” (Stephen & Lee 1894). Mill was particularly close to Graham and another young man, John Arthur Roebuck, and he spent a great deal of his social time and intellectual life with them. They were referred to as the “Trijackia” (Jack is a common nickname for John, and Graham was known as John rather than George). But these friendships were strongly disapproved of by his father, and according to Roebuck this may have been in part because Graham and he were poor (Roebuck 1897). Mill expressed his independence by continuing to enjoy the company of his friends, who had been barred from Mill’s parents’ home (Capaldi 2004). Mill and Graham are known to have enjoyed many walks in the countryside together, presumably involving some level of botanizing. One such walk was a 10-day walking tour of Sussex, undertaken from July 20–30, 1827, presumably not long before Graham’s departure for Mexico (Mill 1989). Graham was present at the dinner party in 1830 where Mill met his future wife (married to someone else at the time); it is said this relationship was the cause of the dissolution of the “Trijackia” (Hayek 2015).

Graham was a barrister-at-law and on his return to England became an official assignee of the Court of Bankruptcy. In his autobiography, Mill described Graham as "a thinker of originality and power on almost all abstract subjects" (Mill 1874). He must also have been interested in political economy, as in 1831 he was collaborating with Mill on an essay on that subject. The essay was never published (Miller 1963). Why did he go to Mexico to report on mines? For now I can only speculate. A family connection to a Mexican mine owner? Due diligence on investments in Mexican mines? A study on the application of the law of diminishing returns to mining (a subject that interested Mill, see Mill 1909, p.188)? It must have been a weighty reason from him to spend two years there. I wonder if he knew he was following in the hallowed footsteps of Humboldt, who had visited the silver and gold mines in Michoacán and Hidalgo only a few years earlier in 1803.
The disconcerting fact about the George John Graham rabbit hole is that there is a fork in it. At some stage, the scholarly research involving John Stuart Mill confused our oak collector (1803–1878) with Major George Graham (1801–1888), Military Secretary of Bombay from 1838 to 1830, Registrar-General of Births, Deaths, and Marriages from 1838 to 1879, and fourth son of Sir James Graham, baronet, of Netherby in Cumberland. Many researchers seem to have taken the wrong fork: a footnote in Volume XII of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill identifies Mill’s friend as “George John Graham (1801-1888), a member of JSM’s Utilitarian Society; in 1838 became Registrar General of Births and Deaths” (Mill 1963); in Volume XVI of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek, Hayek on Mill – The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings, a footnote states: “George John Graham (1801– 1888) probably had become acquainted with Mill about the same time but in 1830 had only just returned from five years’ service as Military Secretary of Bombay. He became Registrar-General of Births and Deaths in 1838” (Hayek 2015). I wrote to Dr. Sandra Peart, who edited the 2015 edition of Hayek's book, to ask her about the issue, and she replied that I "may well have found a mistake in the literature . . . something important". While it would be unlike Friedrich Hayek to have made such a mistake, he may be the source of the error (his book was originally published in 1951) (S. Peart pers. comm.).

According to a record in the 1871 Census of England and Wales, the right Graham (from our perspective) was born in Burnley, Kent. However, according to James Britten, supposedly quoting Mrs. Howgrave Graham (see above), George John Graham “was born at Brampton, Cumberland, in 1803.” The nagging problem is that Brampton, Cumberland is 14 miles from Netherby, Cumberland, the likely birthplace of the wrong Graham (Major George Graham), born in 1801. Why would Mrs. Howgrave Graham have given the wrong birth place for her father-in-law, coincidentally the seat of an aristocratic family? Or was it Britten who first took the wrong fork?


Britten states that for the last three decades of his life, Graham lived at East Lodge, Enfield Chase, in north London, and this is confirmed by contemporary publications related to Graham's work as a barrister (e.g. this notice in The London Gazette, January 18,1876). Another notice in The London Gazette (October 18 1867), related to his position in the Court of Bankruptcy, gives his address as 25, Coleman Street, which must have been his business address. However, he died in Belinda House, in the village of Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, on New Year's Day, 1878, and is buried in Ventnor Cemetery. Perhaps he died while on holiday? Belinda House seems to have been some sort of boarding house: the Russian novelist Turgenev lived there in 1860, after he was evicted from the place where he had been staying for "excessive smoking" (Ventnor Town Council 2024). Graham's estate amounted to "under £7,000", which apparently would have been worth about £1,000,000 ($1,200,000) today.

Bentham named seven other plant species in honor of Graham, among them Salvia grahamii, now a synonym of S. microphylla.

Works cited
Bentham, G. .1839-1857. Plantas Hartwegianas :imprimis mexicanas adjectis nonnullis Grahamianis enumerat novasque. London: G. Pamplin. [link]
Britten, J. 1905. Graham's Mexican Plants. Journal of Botany, British and Foreign 43 317–318. [link]
Capaldi, N. 2004. John Stuart Mill – A Biography. Cambridge University Press. [link]
Hayek, F.A. 2015. The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek 16 Hayek on Mill: The Mill-Taylor Friendship and Related Writings. Edited by S.J. Peart. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [link]
Mill, J.S. 1874. Autobiography. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer. [link]
Mill, J.S.. 1909. Principles of Political Economy. Edited by W.J. Ashley. London: Longmans, Green and Co. [link]
Mill, J.S. 1963. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XII - The Earlier Letters 1812-1848 Part I, Edited by F.E. Mineka. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [link]
Mill, J.S. 1989. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVI - Journals and Debating Speeches Part II. Edited by J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [link]
Mill, J.S. 1989. The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXXI - Miscellaneous Writings. Edited by J.M. Robson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. [link]
Pearce, N.R. 2006. John Stuart Mill’s botanical collections from Greece (a private passion). Phytologia Balcanica 12:2 149–164 Institute of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Research at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. [link]
Roebuck, J.A. 1897. Life and Letters of John Arthur Roebuck. Edited by R.E. Leader. London: Edward Arnold.
Stephen L., and S. Lee. 1894. Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Vol 37: Masquerier – Millyng. London: Elder Smith & Co. [link]
Ventnor Town Council. 2024. "Famous Residents". www.ventnortowncouncil.gov.uk [link]