Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, by Will Abberley

Abstract

Reviewed by: Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination by Will Abberley Jonathan Smith (bio) Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination, by Will Abberley; pp. viii + 308. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020, $99.95. Will Abberley's Mimicry and Display in Victorian Literary Culture: Nature, Science, and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination examines a closely related set of natural phenomena having to do with animal appearance and behavior and their resonances in Victorian fiction and cultural criticism. Victorian naturalists were fascinated by what Abberley calls "adaptive appearance," physical traits that enabled animals to blend in or stand out (2). Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection, which famously proposed that the striking coloration of many male animals had evolved to attract mates, has of course received considerable attention from literary scholars. Abberley instead primarily focuses on crypsis, the ability of some creatures to fool predators by blending in with their habitats or mimicking less tasty or more dangerous species. Mimicry was an important characteristic for evolutionists, who seized on it as another strange element of the natural world that natural selection was best equipped to explain. Accounts of crypsis were prominent in the popular natural history writing of Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Russel Wallace, and others, and the concept became a surprisingly common presence in fiction and criticism alike into the early twentieth century. Abberley charts the varying appropriations and interpretations of crypsis in literary culture from roughly 1860 to 1910, concentrating on figures with a demonstrated interest in the biological phenomena of mimicry, camouflage, and display. Following an introduction laying out the book's concerns, Abberley offers six chapters. The first focuses on issues of evidence and representation in scientific discussions of crypsis in the nineteenth century. The next three address the uses of crypsis in the work of Charles Kingsley, Grant Allen, and Thomas Hardy, respectively. The final two chapters examine crypsis's relevance to questions of individuality versus collectivism in late-century literary and cultural criticism and its relevance for women and Jewish people at the turn of the century. These chapters consider the work of Leslie Stephen, Theodore Watts-Dunton, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde in the one instance, and of Israel Zangwill and Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the other. In his conclusion, Abberley considers the implications of his study for recent and longstanding issues in critical theory. Mimicry and Display adds to the growing catalogue of scholarship that demonstrates the wide cultural impact of what might seem a fairly precise and limited [End Page 124] scientific phenomenon. Crypsis captured the Victorian and Edwardian imaginations, not least for the moral and philosophical issues it raised. Naturalists writing about mimicry relied on claims about appearance and perception—and anthropomorphic projections of the naturalists' own perceptions onto other animals—at a time when science increasingly regarded such evidence as subjective and unverifiable. Like Benjamin Morgan in The Outward Mind: Materialist Aesthetics in Victorian Science and Literature (2017), Abberley highlights the importance of embodied experience and the perceptions of nonhuman animals for key Victorian scientists. Recounting how they had been fooled by the similarity between two species, or how they had failed to see an animal directly before them, or had mistaken a plant or animal for something else, Bates and Wallace attempted to reproduce the experience in their readers, in the process highlighting their assumption that others, whether humans or animals, were similarly deceived. This element of deception raised inevitable moral qualms for the Victorians, with opprobrium heaped just as readily on the gullible or careless victim of deception as on the weak and crafty deceivers taking advantage of the traits of their stronger and more honest counterparts. For the Anglican Kingsley, deception in nature was problematic because nature was also meant to reflect the moral lessons of Christian teaching. That it also pointed to the value of science, which for Kingsley reinforced rather than undermined evidence of the divine, nonetheless created risks of its own. The Kingsley chapter is shorter and somewhat sketchier than the others, and its argument largely reframes what we already know about the tensions within his...