Late on the night of 25 March 1748, a fire sweeping though the Cornhill district of the City of London destroyed the Swan tavern in Exchange Alley, forcing a group of gentlemen in an upper room to flee for their lives. ‘So sudden and rapid was the impetuous Course of the Fire, that the Flames beat against the Windows, before they could well get out of the Room, many of them leaving their Hats and Canes,’ reported the Entomologist’s Weekly Intelligencer, for whom this was a big story, as the gentlemen thus forced to flee were the members of the Society of Aurelians, the first entomological society established in Britain.

It was not only their meeting room that was destroyed, but also the society’s records and collections, library and regalia, so that we know little in detail of their activities. We know enough about the Aurelians, however, to recognise that their enthusiasm for insects – in particular butterflies – was driven at least as much by aesthetic delight as by scientific curiosity. The very name of the society, with its glamorous classical sound – so much more attractive than ‘entomologist’ or ‘lepidopterist’ – suggests as much, as does the fact that so many of the members of the society were painters, printmakers and textile designers.

One of them, the painter Benjamin Wilkes, recalled attending a meeting of the Society of Aurelians, where ‘he first saw such Specimens of Nature’s admirable Skill in the Disposition, Arrangement and contrasting of Colours as struck him with Amazement’. He joined the society, and went on to create one of the beautiful illustrated books that are the great legacy of the Aurelians – English Moths and Butterflies (1749), a volume full of fine hand-coloured copper engravings of butterflies, moths and plants, brought together in attractively arranged compositions.

These books were published by subscription, aristocratic patrons paying for individual plates to be dedicated to them. Many of the subscribers were women, for in the 18h century entomology was a fashionable interest among aristocratic ladies. One third of the plates in Moses Harris’s The Aurelian (1766) – the most attractive of all the Georgian butterfly books – are dedicated to ladies, though, needless to say, they were not allowed to join the Society of Aurelians. Still less were they encouraged to go chasing butterflies, a pursuit that was considered wildly unladylike, or even a clear sign of insanity. When, in 1709, her disgruntled elder son disputed the will of Eleanor Glanville (after whom the Glanville Fritillary is named) he did so on the grounds that she was clearly insane to go around chasing after butterflies. The will was duly overturned, and the son inherited.

The Aurelians represent the first phase of serious interest in butterflies, and it was driven by appreciation of their beauty as much as scientific curiosity about the different species and their life cycles. But why did it take until the 18th century for butterflies to attract serious attention? Why did even Shakespeare, a poet who was very much alive to the beauties of nature and knowledgeable about flowers, birds and other animals, make no mention of butterflies, beyond a couple of generic references? Why were butterflies seen as little more than emblems of frivolity?

Partly, the explanation is practical: unlike many plants and animals, butterflies had no obvious utility and posed no potential danger, so there was no need to inquire further into their various kinds. Also, in the medieval Christian world view, butterflies had no place except as emblems of frivolity and idleness. While many birds and animals – the dove, goldfinch and pelican, the lion and the lamb, and more – had symbolic significance and an assured place in Christian iconography, butterflies appear only in marginal doodles decorating medieval manuscripts, where they flutter about unseriously, attracting the interest only of frivolous idlers. Once again, why would anyone wish to know more about these creatures?

Oddly, this Christian world view ignored an older, deep-seated parallel symbolism that associated butterflies with the soul (in Greek both are denoted by the word Psyche). It seems an obvious association – the butterfly in all its glory emerging from the dead-seeming chrysalis like the soul escaping the body – and yet Christianity ignored it. Butterflies only appeared on church monuments and gravestones at the time of the Greek Revival, when they were obviously a nod to the Ancients. However, the association between the butterfly and the liberated soul has persisted to this day, when a single symbolic butterfly is often released at funerals.

The Aurelians had brought butterflies out of their undeserved obscurity, lavishly illustrated their beauty, and even made them fashionable. The books they created were, however, prohibitively expensive, and butterfly enthusiasts were still few and far between. All that was to change in the 19th century as interest in nature became more scientific, with the likes of the Linnaean Society (founded 1788) and the Entomological Society of London (1833) taking over from the Society of Aurelians – and then, in Victorian times, the emergence of butterfly collecting as a popular pursuit, with men and boys from all walks of life (and the occasional woman) flocking into the countryside with their nets and collecting bags. This ‘golden age’ of collecting, enabled by the growing railway network, improved roads and the ubiquitous bicycle, continued into the early years of the 20th century.

Before the industrialisation of agriculture, the traditional patchwork countryside of England was alive with an abundance of butterflies that we can scarcely imagine today: a collector in the New Forest in the 1890s talks of swarms ‘so thick that I could scarcely see ahead, and indeed resembled a fall of brown leaves’. It was common for collectors to take hundreds of specimens in a day, and many proudly sent records of their mind-boggling hauls to the entomological magazines. Few thought that collecting, even on such a scale, would have any serious impact on butterfly numbers, such was their abundance. However, as the 20th century went on and butterfly numbers began to go into decline, it gradually became apparent that they needed protecting and conserving.

The decline continued, and continues to this day, to the point where, in 2024, a ‘butterfly emergency’ was declared. So, after the age of collecting came the age of conservation, with the camera replacing the butterfly net and killing bottle, and serious efforts being made to save both good butterfly habitat and particular vulnerable species. It is telling that the representative body of British butterfly enthusiasts today is not a convivial group of aesthetes like the Society of Aurelians but a hard-working pressure group named simply for what it does – Butterfly Conservation.