Polar expeditions and the quest for celebrity

Abstract

John Pringle Nichol (1804–1859), a Scottish Romantic astronomer, educator, and social reformer, used visual representations to develop and communicate key elements of his theory of evolution as a universal principle. Examining four of the diverse representations that appeared in Nichol’s popular science books between 1846 and 1850 reveals the rich possibilities of evolutionary imagery prior to the emergence of more dominant forms of representation in the wake of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). The abstract and schematic nature of many of Nichol’s visual representations—which included line diagrams and imaginative, mythic imagery (the latter developed in collaboration with the Scottish Romantic artist David Scott)—made them apt vessels for his Romantic evolutionary concepts, because a single image could simultaneously represent features of evolution across multiple domains, reflecting the Romantic concept of the unity of nature and the myriad analogies between its constituent parts. All of the images embodied narrative in one form or another and required use of the imagination in the act of interpretation. Many of the images facilitated the viewer’s ability to conceptualize unobservable or only partially observable features of evolutionary change. Even as these visual representations acted as tools of perspective, insight, and clarity, they also helped to generate new ambiguities, such as a fundamental tension between teleology and contingency.