Frances Chickering’s Cloud Crystals

Frances Chickering, Cloud Crystals: A Snowflake Album, 1864, Book, Photo by me

Introduction

Serving as not just a scientific wonder, Frances Chickering deems snowflakes as nature’s way of revealing a higher design, etched delicately in ice. In her Cloud Crystals: A Snowflake Album, she reflects on the formation of snowflakes and their divine geometry. While Chickering focuses mainly on snowflakes, she includes writing excerpts that discuss winter and its divine qualities. Chickering meticulously represents the shapes of the snowflakes on illustrated plates in the brown ink. She represents the snow not only as a scientific phenomenon but also as a divine manifestation of nature’s intricate beauty. With detailed illustrations and reflections, she captures the elegance of snowflakes, blending meteorological observation with Romantic and theological interpretations of winter’s presence. This interpretation gains further significance when considered within the historical context of Chickering’s authorship: in a time when female voices in literature were often marginalized, her ability to articulate such complex reflections underscores not only her literary talent but also her defiance of societal norms. Thus, the sophistication of her subject matter and her authorship mirror each other as delicate yet resilient in a world that overlooks their value.

Frances Chickerings Cloud Crystals: Description and Overview

Chickering’s work is a hardcover book with the title Cloud Crystals: A Snowflake Album written on the front cover. The cover has four impressions of snowflakes pressed into it. Over time, the cover has come to be worn down, as the spine is not holding together firmly and the pages are browned on the edges. When opening the book, the restated title is accompanied by the description “collected and edited by a Lady.” Additionally, the first couple of pages have the author’s preface and the table of contents. The table of contents consists of a number of excerpts from various famous English writers within poetry and prose, and also some of Chickering’s original works. Embedded within this literature are plates of snowflake forms printed in dark brown and white ink. Chickering writes that “all these forms were copied from actual observation during the last five or six years,”¹ so they were observed sometime between 1859 and 1864. The book is 158 pages long. 

Within her work, Chickering blends scientific observation with spiritual reverence to underscore the purpose and beauty of some of the smallest elements of nature, snowflakes, through a close examination of their divine symmetry and intelligent design. Highlighting the symmetrical beauty of snowflakes, art historian David Summers has explored the evolution and significance of bilateral, rotational, and translational symmetry within art, nature and design. Specifically, the rotational symmetry of art can be defined as “reflection with respect to a centre and a number of axes, as in a snowflake.”² Furthermore, Summers explains that beyond the aesthetics, symmetry relays a symbolic meaning in cultural and religious traditions. Specifically, Summers writes that “an image identified with the central axis is evidently unique and iconographically ‘central,’ just as images made by reflection with respect to the same centre are evidently ‘peripheral’ and subordinate.”³ Chickering meticulously observes this natural structure and even says herself that “respecting the angles, little can be said by the present writer; beyond the well-known rule for this part of the divine geometry, dividing the circle into six parts, thus giving to all the figures six sides or rays, with six angles of sixty degrees each.”⁴ Eventually, by underscoring the symmetry of snowflakes as evidence of divine order, Frances Chickering challenges the nineteenth-century separation of science and spirituality, asserting that meticulous natural forms reflected a higher intelligence. In doing so, she participated in a broader tradition of natural theology while subtly asserting a woman’s authority to interpret both scientific phenomena and spiritual truths. In his “Reconceptualizing Religion, Magic, and Science,” sociologist Rodney Stark argues that science and religion are not inherently in conflict because they address fundamentally different realms. As science is confined to the empirical world, religion pertains to the nonempirical. Stark suggests that religion is most effective when it focuses on nonempirical matters, thereby avoiding contradiction with scientific findings. Stark writes that “scientific theories are abstract statements about why and how some portion of nature fits together and works. However, not all abstract statements, even those offering explanations, qualify as scientific theories, otherwise theology would be a science.”⁵ Thus, he claims research is integral to science. Moreover, observation, as Chickering embarks on herself, is necessary to make certain assumptions about nature, and especially something as spectacular as snowflakes. Through the snow crystal’s divine form, Chickering bravely harnesses the purpose of religion and science: “to provide explanations.”⁶ Thus, Chickering not only bridges the divide between science and spirituality but also boldly asserts her intellectual presence in a male-dominated field.

Historical Significance

By publishing her book in 1864 as a woman, Frances Chickering made a bold intellectual and scientific statement, defying the gender norms of her time. Through asserting a woman’s place in scientific observation, authorship, and even philosophy, Chickering transcends fields overwhelmingly dominated by men in the nineteenth century. To contextualize the social and gender norms at this time and how impressive it was for Chickering to publish this, I have drawn upon Carolyn Karcher’s “Reconceiving Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Challenge of Women Writers.” Karcher critiques the traditional literary canon for marginalizing nineteenth-century American women writers. She argues that these authors have been unjustly excluded due to prevailing stereotypes that depict them as overly sentimental or prudish. Karcher contends that such characterizations overlook the complexity and diversity of women’s literary contributions during this period. Karcher claims that, while scarce, “women writers produced some of the nineteenth century’s most intellectually serious, politically radical, and artistically innovative prose.”⁷ Additionally, she writes that most works women writers preferred to publish during this time were in the social or romance genre. ⁸This reveals that, going against the norm, Chickering was bold to publish a book in a genre that intersects scientific observation and artistic expression. While Chickering did not write political prose like the women Karcher writes of, she strayed from the genres that women during this time wrote about and even entered a male-dominated domain such as scientific research. This reflection reveals why Chickering may not have published her book with her own name but, rather, with “collected and edited by a Lady” instead. Therefore, she asserts anonymity but also breaks gender normative boundaries by publishing a book as a woman. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, Chickering offers more than an artistic or scientific catalog of snowflakes, but a nuanced combination of natural beauty, divine design, and feminine intellect during a time of gender expectations. By documenting the symmetry of snowflakes, she elevates them beyond mere meteorological curiosities into emblems of spiritual meaning and intelligent design. Simultaneously, Chickering’s authorship, anonymous yet assertive, defies nineteenth-century gender expectations by entering male-dominated spheres of science, literature, and religious philosophy. In conversation with Chickering’s bold actions, within Chapter 2 of her Immeasurable Weather, environmental studies scholar Sara Grossman explores how white women contributed vital yet overlooked labor to nineteenth-century meteorology in the United States. She highlights how their inclusion in science was shaped by gender barriers and “while women were able to address this seemingly open scientific network, their efforts to become part of this community were met with resistance and sometimes erasure.”⁹ In relation to Chickering, Grossman’s analysis reveals that her scientific research of snowflakes was even more radical for a woman to do during this time. Yet, as evident with her publishing of the book, Chickering was able to break through the social and gender norms of this time that Grossman touches on. Thus, Cloud Crystals: A Snowflake Album becomes not only a tribute to snowflakes but also a quiet yet powerful statement of women’s capacity to contribute meaningfully to intellectual and spiritual discourses.

Footnotes

1. Frances Chickering, Cloud Crystals: A Snowflake Album (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1864), 10. ↩︎
2. David Summers, “Symmetry,” Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed May 2025. https://www-oxfordartonline-com.amherst.idm.oclc.org/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000082766. ↩︎
3. Summers, “Symmetry.” ↩︎
4. Chickering, 12. ↩︎
5. Rodney Stark, “Reconceptualizing Religion, Magic, and Science,” Review of Religious Research 43, no. 2 (2001): 105. ↩︎
6. Stark, 111. ↩︎
7. Carolyn L. Karcher, “Reconceiving Nineteenth-Century American Literature: The Challenge of Women Writers,” American Literature 66, no. 4 (1994): 782. ↩︎
8. Karcher, 784 ↩︎
9. Sara Grossman, Immeasurable Weather: Meteorological Data and Settler Colonialism from 1820 to Hurricane Sandy (Duke University Press, 2023), 59. ↩︎