Ex omnia conchis? Edward Onslow Ford and the problem of Victorian ‘animalier’ sculpture

Abstract

What does it mean to rethink the imbrication of sculpture and literature in Britain at the nineteenth-century fin de siècle from a post-humanist or critical animal studies perspective? And what might happen if we braid together Victorian sculptor Edward Onslow Ford (1852–1901) with a range of long-nineteenth-century literary–scientific authors and more recent theorists concerned with questions of species? This article considers Ford’s St George and the Dragon Saltcellar and Snowdrift (both c.1901) in relation to an eclectic group of long-nineteenth-century texts, ranging from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s A Vindication of Natural Diet (1813–15) and Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33), through Thomas Henry Huxley’s essay ‘On a Piece of Chalk’ (1868) to Robert Hunt’s A Descriptive Guide to the Museum of Practical Geology (1877) and Sándor Ferenczi’s Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality (1938). It does so in order to make the claim that we need to consider both geology and animality whenever we consider stone sculpture in Victorian Britain and beyond.