ABSTRACT
Of collecting as a propensity peculiar to humans, the novelist John Fowles had little good to say.1 Among collectors great and small, his most forceful rebuke was saved for those whose habit it is to acquire things from the natural world. In one sense at least, Fowles’ criticism was well directed. He could write from personal experience. As a child he had been an avid butterfly collector. Thinking these boyish days long gone and enjoying the spread of middle age, the sight of a rare Monarch butterfly prompted in him an uncontrollable urge to give chase. Shocked (albeit in a most writerly manner), he found himself racing not towards the fragile quarry but instead towards a ‘continent of buried memories’ and the ‘whole series of blind attitudes to nature’ which the passion for collecting had fostered in him.
