The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain, by Amy M. King

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain by Amy M. King Emma Mason (bio) The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain, by Amy M. King; pp. xii + 297. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2019, £75.00, $99.99. In a recent online forum exploring the connections between nineteenth-century religion and ecology, a participant asked to which Victorian theologians we might turn in our research and discussions. While modern theology offers a rich field of commentators on ecology and environment, from Norman Wirzba to Catherine Keller, their nineteenthcentury predecessors are largely unfamiliar to literary critics. As my own current work and that of Josh King and Karen Dieleman shows, the period abounds with sermons on creation and nature, from Catholic, Anglo-Catholic, Evangelical, and Dissenting theologians alike. But Amy M. King's outstanding new book, The Divine in the Commonplace: Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain, answers the question in a different way by turning to natural history as a source not only of realism and science but also of reverent theological reflection. For King, natural history's scientific observations and descriptions of the everyday and commonplace comprise a reverent empiricism through written acts of devotion that "illustrate or celebrate what is already believed through revelation (primarily scripture)" (90). Drawing on writers such as Gilbert White, Mary Mitford, James Drummond, Philip Gosse, and Charles Kingsley, she suggests that their writing exemplifies God in nature by using the same representational strategies employed by realist novelists like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Anthony Trollope. By putting into conversation nineteenth-century natural historians and novelists, King makes the pioneering and entirely convincing claim that English provincial realism is theological. Read through religion, the "unexceptional and quotidian world" of realism and its representation of the ordinary come alive when we recognize this narration's "reverence for the wonder of God's creation" (25). Habitual pleasure becomes religious meditation, as both the novel and natural history are structured by long, attentive passages venerating the minutiae of what Drummond called the "apparently trifling, a moss, or seaweed, an [End Page 299] insect, or a shell" (qtd. in King 27). Reminding readers of the false dichotomy between religion and science imposed by modern critics, King carefully defines empiricism as at once verifiable and material as well as reverent and faithful. In a series of captivating chapters, she reveals that to ignore reverence in the knowledge-making of nineteenth-century history and science is to miss the significance of theology's obsession with the common and unexceptional in long-form prose. While natural history is broadly defined by King, she focuses on seashore studies as a discrete subgenre that guides her choice of reverent natural histories and produces some of the book's most compelling analyses of tide pools and aquaria. Studying female algologists like Anna Atkins and Mary Wyatt and seaside essays by Gosse and G. H. Lewes, as well as Eliot and Gaskell's "embedded" seaside ecologies (223), King rethinks English realism through an extended poetic narrative style that is, contra Franco Moretti, not "decorative" but serious, protracted, and still (qtd. in King 69). Stillness is a key term, describing the formal weight of a narrative that lingers and dilates rather than pushing forward toward narrative closure. Gilbert White, for example, is read as a slow and mindful observer of the particulars of Selbourne village because he believed that God intended him to vigilantly watch over it. His enchanting passage on cobwebs, suspended in the air and netted across the ground, is matched by King's wonderful concept of "ever-dilating description," in which she marries the infinite, meditative discernments of her writers to their deft, sharp, and critical realist commentary (65). Local and common objects are subjects not of wonder (an "aesthetic of first sight or the exceptional") but of repeated, familiar, everyday contemplation heightened by the microscope and made divine by a recognition of their recurrence and prevalence (108). King's subjects are not collectors on the hunt for unique specimens, but naturalists searching for systems, laws, and divinity. Gosse is especially compelling in...