When Elizabeth Gaskell was starting to write her life of Charlotte Brontë in 1856, she copied into her manuscript a snippet from the Quarterly Review: ‘Get as many anecdotes as possible. If you love your reader and want to be read, get anecdotes!’ In Chapter 1, I described how nineteenth-century authors of eccentric biography – many of them struggling hacks eager to compile new books from old material with a minimum of editorial input – took to the newspapers, scissors in hand, to collect snippets of text which they could use in their publications. Anecdotes were the perfect material for this endeavour. Discreet, circumscribed narratives, they could be cut and pasted at will. They could stand alone or alongside other anecdotes, but required little or nothing by way of contextualization, serving to evidence each character's alleged eccentricity through simple accumulation. As a unit of biographical narration, the anecdote is central to the history of science and eccentricity.

Anecdotes feature not only in eccentric biography, but also in many of the other types of source upon which this book has drawn: newspaper reports, autobiographical sketches, discovery accounts, travel narratives, book reviews, visiting accounts, reminiscences, and local histories. Anecdotes are perfect for sharing: readers of anecdotes can readily share in the writer's satisfactions, disappointments and surprises because anecdotes narrate events in terms not, necessarily, of what actually happened, but of what should have happened, what people might generally have agreed would have been most fitting for the occasion. For example, we don't, in reality, know whether Julia Byrne's anecdotal tourist, discussed at the end of the last chapter, ever existed, let alone whether he ever made it to Walton Hall to see Waterton ride around his estate on the back of a cayman. But we do know that stories like this have been told and retold about Martin, Hawkins and Waterton since their lifetimes, and constitute much of what we remember about them today. These anecdotal and seemingly rather trivial narratives are the building blocks of the stories we tell ourselves about science, eccentricity and our past.