The Victorians’ appetite for books and for collecting specimens from the natural world fed the frenetic activity in what has been called the Gould factory. The next year, Elizabeth died of puerperal fever following childbirth, leaving six children. The Goulds voyaged to Australia from 1838 to 1840 and worked on their last joint book, The Birds of Australia. The couple’s diligent toil was also a learning experience, one in which Elizabeth acquired, through Lear, the techniques needed for drawing birds on stone printing plates. Gould’s albums were in imperial folio format (22 inches by 15 inches). The first work Gould and Elizabeth collaborated on was the massive A Century of Birds fromthe Himalaya Mountains, which was issued in parts between 18. As the Goulds began raising a family, Elizabeth helped her husband with drawings of birds. She had a solid grounding in music, art, and languages. In 1829, Gould married Elizabeth Coxen, a well-bred governess. The job came with a salary of one hundred pounds, a hefty income for a young man at the time. By the time he was twenty, Gould was capitalizing on the booming trade and interest in taxidermy, which soon led to an appointment as curator and preserver to the Zoological Society of London’s museum. He would collect natural specimens and bird eggs and sell the treasures to boys at Eton. Toucans / courtesy Special Collections, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansasīorn in Dorset in 1804, Gould became adept as a child at egg-blowing and taxidermy.

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