LITERARY HISTORIES OF THE NATURAL HISTORICAL BOOK

Abstract

Inspired in part by thecoincident bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the sesquicentennial ofThe Origin of Speciesin 2009, scholars have been hard at work these last ten years writing substantial histories of nineteenth-century natural history and geology. These histories include exceptional books by scholars trained primarily in literary studies: Cannon Schmitt'sDarwin and the Memory of the Human(2009); Daniel Brown'sThe Poetry of Victorian Scientists(2013); and Gowan Dawson'sDarwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability(2007). With a few notable exceptions, however, the books I was invited to review here are written mostly by historians of science. And yet they are no less literary for that. All are marked by a tacit, pragmatic adoption of actor-network theory; by the extraordinary resources of the Darwin Correspondence Project and online databases of British periodicals; and often, too, by glossy illustrations. Further, nearly all of these histories share a methodological investment in what we call the history of the book, including all the economics of publishing (formats, sizes, fonts, prices, print runs, reviews, sales, generic conventions) and a political and heuristic stake in popularization and the general reading public. While Darwin (and Lyell, Herschel, Hooker, Huxley, and Spencer) remain at the center of the discussion, the empirically-minded history-of-the-book approach and investment in everyday readers reconstructs and legitimates a robust popular science that was engaged with, but not subordinate to, and often more liberal than the elite science of the X Club, the Royal Society, and other exclusive institutions. With the help of museums, lectures, tour guides, and other natural scientific literature, everyday readers produced their own knowledge of evolution, stratigraphy, speciation, animal emotion, and the sex life of plants.