Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-21T06:30:02.620Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

INTRODUCTION: WHY VICTORIAN NATURAL HISTORY?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2007

Barbara T. Gates
Barbara T. Gates
Affiliation:
University of Delaware
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

VICTORIANS WERE IN LOVE WITH natural history. David Allen describes their passion as a series of crazes – over geology, over shells, and over ferns, as in pteridomania (mania over ferns) – to cite just a very few examples. Lynn Merrill, on the other hand, delineates a more comprehensive, cultural romance, one extending over many years. Whatever we choose to call this love, we are still in the process of discovering just how deep and lasting it was. Like many love affairs, it was marked at first by a blush enthusiasm and fascination with otherness. This was followed by curiosity and a rage to risk self in the quest to know more about the other – and sometimes, as a result, by ridiculous missteps. Think of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes sloshing around at the seashore, ill-equipped but determined to find out enough to write about what they were trying to capture and study. Or recall Mary Kingsley out in Africa in a canoe propelled by several Congolese, tumbling out of the boat but saving her trusted copy of Albert Günther's 1880 Introduction to the Study of Fishes, tenacious in her desire to bring back labeled specimens to the British Museum of Natural history. Earlier, in a similarly resolute quest to record birdlife, John and Elizabeth Gould globe-trotted to the extent that they put Elizabeth's life and their growing family at risk. And people like explorer/naturalist Thomas Bowdich died of fever for their fervor over natural history, in Bowdich's case as he worked to detail facts about specimens in Porto Santo, off the coast of West Africa. Bowdich left a wife to fend for herself and their family via her own study of natural history, and one result was Sara Bowdich Lee's beautifully illustrated Fresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain (1828). The romance with nature certainly cut across class and gender barriers. Stonecutter Hugh Miller could lose himself as easily in geological pursuits as could Charles Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell and Marianne North's passion for plants may well have matched or exceeded that of Kew's famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker.

Type
EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN NATURAL HISTORY
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , September 2007 , pp. 539 - 549
Copyright
© 2007 Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Alberti Samuel J. M. M. 2005: “Objects and the Museum.” Isis 96 559– 71.Google Scholar
Allen David Elliston. 1996. “Tastes and Crazes.” Cultures of Natural History. Ed. Jardine Secord, and Spary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Allen David Elliston. 1969. The Victorian Fern Craze. London: Hutchison
Barber Lynn. 1980. The Heyday of Victorian Natural History, 1820–1870. London: Jonathan Cape
Brightwen Eliza. 1909. The Life and Thoughts of a Naturalist. Ed. W. H. Chesson. Intro. Edmund Gosse. London: T. Fisher Unwin
Buckley Arabella. 1879. Life and Her Children: Glimpses of Animal Life from the Amoeba to the Insects. London: Edward Stanford
Buckley Arabella. 1883. Winners in Life's Race: or, the Great Backboned Family. London: Edward Stanford
Cantor Geoffrey and Sally Shuttleworth, eds. 2004. Science Serialized: Representation of the Sciences in Nineteenth-Century Periodicals. Cambridge: MIT Press
Cook Eliza. 1869. The Poetical Works. London: Frederick Warne
Fyfe Eileen. 2004. Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science and Publishing in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Gould John. The Birds of Australia. 7 vols. London: 1840– 48.
Huxley Thomas Henry. 1893. “On the Educational Value of the Natural History Sciences.” 1854. Collected Essays. 9 vols. London: Macmillan
Huxley Thomas Henry. “On the Study of Biology.” 1876. Collected Essays. 9 vols. London: Macmillan 1893.
Jardine N., J. A. Secord, & E. C. Spary, eds. 1996. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Johnson E. D. H. 1966. The Poetry of Earth: A Collection of English Nature Writings. New York: Atheneum
Krasner James. 1994. The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative. New York: Oxford UP
Lee Sara Bowdich. 1843. Taxidermy; or, The Art of Collecting, Preparing and Mounting Objects of Natural History. London: Longman, Brown, Greene, and Longmans
Lewis C. S. 1960. Studies in Words. Cambridge: Cambridge UP
Lightman Bernard. 2000: “The Visual Theology of Victorian Popularizers of Science: From Reverent Eye to Chemical Retina.” Isis 91 651– 80.Google Scholar
Merrill Lynn L. 1989. The Romance of Victorian Natural History. Oxford: Oxford UP
Rothfels Nigel, ed. 2002. Representing Animals. Bloomington, Indiana UP
Rothfels Nigel 2002. Savages and Beasts: the Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP
Secord Anne. 2003: “Botany on a Plate: Pleasure and the Power of Pictures in Promoting Early Nineteenth-Century Scientific Knowledge.” Isis 93 28– 57.Google Scholar
Secord James. 1981: “Nature's Fancy: Charles Darwin and the Breeding of Pigeons.” Isis 72 162– 86.Google Scholar
Secord James. 2000. Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. Chicago: U of Chicago P
Twining Elizabeth. What Can Window-Gardens Do for our Health? Ladies Sanitary Association. London: S. W. Partridge, n.d.
Wagenknecht Edward. 1954. The Cavalcade of the English Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Wood J. G. 1858. Common Objects of the Country. London: G. Routledge
Wood J. G. 1861 Common Objects of the Microscope. London: Routledge, Warne, and Routledge.