Some years ago, I found one of these white-spotted variants in Fermyn wood and wrote about it on here. While investigating, I found and translated the
original description of bialbata
Guy Padfield pointed me to a comprehensive
monograph about Vanessids, which describes various aberrations and also states : "Specimens ...... showing any slight difference from the "normal" have received names
ad infinitum. These names serve no useful purpose and all are excluded from our formal nomenclature or synonymized.....".
Collecting aberrations was something of a Victorian obsession. The name 'Tutt' often arises in this context and he wrote a massive series of books on lepidoptera, which I find extremely heavy going. Tutt seems to have been a rather 'difficult' person; a schoolmaster who enjoyed stating his own ideas in great detail while being very reluctant to listen to those of others. He did, however, produce some interesting early photographs of butterflies.