Seth Lister Mosley was one of those great Victorian social radicals who by the latter years of the nineteenth century were doing so much to transform life in Britain’s towns and cities. Born into a working-class family and with little formal education, he became a pioneering naturalist and populariser of science – and can fairly be described as an early exponent of environmentalism.

Widely known as a taxidermist , illustrator, naturalist, journal editor and newspaper columnist, his life-long ‘mission’ was to establish a museum in his home town of Huddersfield, and in 1922 he became the first curator of the Tolson Memorial Museum. One hundred years on, the museum is currently celebrating its centenary.

Now, supported by a grant from the Society for the Study of Labour History, Huddersfield Local History Society has published a life of this pioneering environmentalist titled Nature’s Missionary: Seth Lister Mosley: Naturalist, Museum Curator and Mystic 1848-1929. The book is the product of decades of research into local working men naturalists by historian Alan Brooke, and is illustrated with numerous colour plates.

As Huddersfield Local History Society’s chair Cyril Pearce comments: ‘Alan’s work successfully places Mosley within the complex scientific, religious and political context of his time, and in doing so paints an unerringly accurate portrait of a complex man’. Often radical and rarely conformist, Mosley’s views on areas such as religion, women’s equality, environmentalism and conservation challenge many assumptions about Victorian and Edwardian society.

The book was launched at the Tolson Memorial Museum on 12 November, 2022) at 12.00.

Nature’s Missionary: Seth Lister Mosley, Naturalist, Museum Curator and Mystic 1848-1929, by Alan Brooke (264 pages, paperback, in-text illustrations, 16 pages of full colour plates, £15.00, ISBN 978-0-9929841-5-1) is available from bookshops and from Huddersfield Local History Society.