Victorian Natural Science and the Seashore

2015 ◽  
pp. 437-457
Author(s):  
Amy M. King
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Scientific Culture ◽  
Empirical Observation ◽  
Victorian Period

Victorian natural science is not something separate from culture and social life, but integral to Victorian literary culture broadly defined. This is particularly important to the Victorian period because it was during the nineteenth century that the professionalization of science occurred; at the same time a vibrant popular science existed. Natural history is part of a broader landscape of scientific culture in the nineteenth century beyond the poles of the ‘scientific naturalists’ such as Charles Darwin and the Anglican ‘gentlemen of science’. A particular nineteenth-century version of natural theology persisted at least until mid-century and even as late as the 1870s, manifesting especially in popular natural histories. One specific genre was the seashore natural history, in which there is a blend of empirical observation and theology, especially in the work of Philip Henry Gosse.

Re-inventing the Ashmolean. Natural history and natural theology at Oxford in the 1820s to 1850s

2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-406 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARTHUR MACGREGOR ◽  
ABIGAIL HEADON
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Research Priorities ◽  
Science Museum ◽  
History Of ◽  
Extensive Body ◽  
Significant Figures ◽  
Almost All

During the period of the successive keeperships of John Shute Duncan (1823–1829) and his brother Philip Bury Duncan (1829–1854), the collections of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford were comprehensively redisplayed as a physical exposition of the doctrines of natural theology, specifically as propounded by William Paley. The displays assembled by the Duncans, overwhelmingly dominated by natural history specimens, were swept away with the opening of the University's new Natural Science Museum and with them went almost all recollection of an extraordinary chapter in museum history. From largely unpublished records in the Ashmolean, the Duncans' achievement is here reconstructed. The primary evidence is provided by contemporary reports prepared for the Visitors of the Museum and by surviving texts from the Duncans' museum labels. Additional perspectives are provided by an extensive body of correspondence from the collectors, explorers and others who contributed specimens to the new displays: their texts illuminate aspects of contemporary preoccupations with classification, broader research priorities, and problems associated with collecting, preserving and transporting specimens, as well as shedding light on individual exhibits which they contributed to the Museum. These correspondents include a number of significant figures in the nineteenth century history of natural history, including Andrew Bloxam, N. A. Vigors and William Burchell.

Victorian Pain

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Ablow
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Victorian Literature ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Harriet Martineau ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Natural Philosophers ◽  
First Time

The nineteenth century introduced developments in science and medicine that made the eradication of pain conceivable for the first time. This new understanding of pain brought with it a complex set of moral and philosophical dilemmas. If pain serves no obvious purpose, how do we reconcile its existence with a well-ordered universe? Examining how writers of the day engaged with such questions, this book offers a compelling new literary and philosophical history of modern pain. The book provides close readings of novelists Charlotte Brontë and Thomas Hardy and political and natural philosophers John Stuart Mill, Harriet Martineau, and Charles Darwin, as well as a variety of medical, scientific, and popular writers of the Victorian age. The book explores how discussions of pain served as investigations into the status of persons and the nature and parameters of social life. No longer conceivable as divine trial or punishment, pain in the nineteenth century came to seem instead like a historical accident suggesting little or nothing about the individual who suffers. A landmark study of Victorian literature and the history of pain, the book shows how these writers came to see pain as a social as well as a personal problem. Rather than simply self-evident to the sufferer and unknowable to anyone else, pain was also understood to be produced between persons—and even, perhaps, by the fictions they read.

The Legacy of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’

2019 ◽  
pp. 156-195
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Medical Student ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Evolutionary Theory ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The City

The penultimate chapter looks at the longer-term impact of the efflorescence of evolutionary speculation in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh on later generations of natural historians. First it examines the evangelical reaction against progressive models of the history of life and its role in the eclipse of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians.’ Next it examines to the evolutionary theory proposed by Robert Chambers in his anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) to assess its possible debt to the Edinburgh transformists of the 1820s and 1830s. Finally it turns to the important question of the possible influence of the ‘Edinburgh Lamarckians’ on Charles Darwin during his time as a medical student in Edinburgh in the years 1825 to 1827, during which period he rubbed shoulders with many of the key proponents of evolutionary ideas in the city.

Nineteenth-century paleontological art in the Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria: Between demystification and mythologization

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel ◽  
Mathias Harzhauser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Hard Core ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Natural History Museums ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Cultural Traditions ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Systematic Paleontology

ABSTRACT The nineteenth century was the dawn of scientific and systematic paleontology. The foundation of Natural History Museums—built as microcosmic “Books of Nature”—not only contributed to the establishment of this new discipline but also to its visual dissemination. This paper will take the metaphor of the “book” as a starting point for an examination of the paleontological exhibition at the Natural History Museum in Vienna. In keeping with “Natural Theology,” the earliest natural science museums in Britain were designed as expressions of the medieval idea of the “Holy Book of Nature.” Contrary to this, the Natural History Museum Vienna, opened in 1889, wanted to be a nonreligious museum of evolution. Nevertheless, the idea of the “book” was also influential for its design. According to the architects and the first director, it should be a modern “walk-in textbook” instructive for everyone. The most prominent exhibition hall in the museum is dedicated to paleontology. The hall’s decorative scheme forms a unique “Paleo-Gesamtkunstwerk” (Gesamtkunstwerk: total piece of art). The use of grotesque and mythological elements is a particularly striking feature of the hall’s decoration and raises the question of how this relates to the museum’s claim to be a hard-core science institution. As it was paleontology’s task to demystify the monsters and riddles of Earth history systematically, it seems odd that the decorative program connected explicitly to this world. This chapter sheds light on the cultural traditions that led to the creation of this ambiguous program that oscillates between science and imagination.

Science and popular education in the 1830s: the role of theBridgewater Treatises

1992 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 397-430 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Topham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Popular Education ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Economist ◽  
Best Sellers ◽  
The Creation

As is widely known, theBridgewater Treatises on the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as Manifested in the Creation(1833–36) were commissioned in accordance with a munificent bequest of the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, the Rev. Francis Henry Egerton (1756–1829), and written by seven leading men of science, together with one prominent theological commentator. Less widely appreciated is the extent to which theBridgewater Treatisesrank among the scientific best-sellers of the early nineteenth century. Their varied blend of natural theology and popular science attracted extraordinary contemporary interest and ‘celebrity’, resulting in unprecedented sales and widespread reviewing. Much read by the landed, mercantile and professional classes, the success of the series ‘encouraged other competitors into the field’, most notably Charles Babbage's unsolicitedNinth Bridgewater Treatise(1837). As late as 1882 the political economist William Stanley Jevons was intending to write an unofficialBridgewater Treatise, and even an author of the prominence of Lord Brougham could not escape having hisDiscourse of Natural Theology(1835) described by Edward Lytton Bulwer as ‘thetenthBridgewater Treatise’.

Exaptive translations between biology and architecture

2014 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-166 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris L. Smith ◽  
Sandra Kaji-O'Grady
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Similar Content ◽  
Self Similar

‘Translation’ is dealt with in this paper as a descriptor of the transformation that occurs as a concept, structure, image or notion is appropriated from one discipline to another. This understanding of translation as process or movement, rather than a field of overlap between disciplines, is facilitated by the work of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Foucault considers disciplinarity as the structural demarcation of knowledge and information (discourse) and the demarcations that are disciplined by knowledge. This understanding may be expressed as: disciplines as a disciplining. Foucault rejects the idea of disciplines as bounded self-similar content, arguing instead that disciplinarity lies in the framing of logics applied to content. The disciplines in question are considered in their contingency and temporality yet are not entirely bound by them. Thus, a coherent and organised discipline such as biology dates from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Before then its subject matters either were comprehended within other disciplinary frameworks (natural history) or were considered outside science itself (natural theology). In The Order of Things (1966), Foucault groups several naturalists, including Buffon (French eighteenth century) and Darwin (British nineteenth century), as belonging to the same ‘discourse’ or discursive family. Separating disciplinarity from the origin of ideas and time of writing fosters the productive translation of concepts, images and artefacts between disciplines.

Science at the Seaside

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi ◽  
John Plunkett
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Marine Biology ◽  
Popular Science ◽  
Charles Kingsley ◽  
Surrounding World ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Tourist Development ◽  
Leisure Pursuit

This chapter argues that the scientific and imaginative appeal of the Devon coast in the mid-Victorian period played a key role in the development of popular science and, more particularly, marine biology. It also played an important part in the tourist development of resorts such as Ilfracombe and Torquay. The publications of Philip Henry Gosse, Charles Kingsley, George Tugwell, and George Henry Lewes, among others, helped to encourage a fascination with the littoral space of the seashore, and the exotic creatures that could be found there. As a leisure pursuit, natural history combined pleasure, curiosity, and spectacle with an enlightenment desire to better understand the surrounding world. The popularity of seaside science was given a further boost by the refinement of the marine aquarium by Gosse; their domestic display became a fashionable craze of the 1850s.

scholarly journals Towards a methodology for analysing nineteenth-century collecting journeys of science and empire, with Charles Darwin's activities in Tierra del Fuego as a case study

2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 399-420
Author(s):  
Janet Owen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Historical Geography ◽  
Tierra Del Fuego ◽  
Alfred Russel Wallace ◽  
Fresh Insight ◽  
Insight Into

The interests of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace in natural history and evolution took them to remote parts of the globe on hazardous, multi-sensory journeys that were ultimately about collecting. This paper introduces a methodology for exploring these complex experiences in more detail, informed by historical geography, anthropology, textual analysis and the geo-humanities. It involves looking for evidence of the richly stimulating and often challenging sensory dynamics within which they collected and connected data, observations, images, specimens, memories and ideas. Darwin's exploits in Tierra del Fuego are examined as a case study, with a particular focus on the collection of ‘Fuegian’ body paints in 1833. This type of analysis provides a fresh insight into the multi-sensory entanglement of encounter with people and place involved in the collecting process. It helps us to understand better the experiences that shaped what was collected and brought back to Britain, and the personal observations associated with these collections that sowed the seeds for Darwin's work on the origin of species.

From Design to Dissolution: Thomas Chalmers' Debt to John Robison

1979 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Crosbie Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Present Note ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Major Transition ◽  
Victorian Science ◽  
Design In Nature

The claim that the nineteenth century was a period of major transition for the relation between theology and natural science has become a historical truism. With its implications for the design argument and the doctrines of divine providence, Darwin's theory of evolution has rightly attracted the attention of scholars of Victorian science. Yet so much emphasis not only on Darwin himself, but on the life sciences generally, has tended to obscure some important issues concerning the relation of theology to natural science in the first half of the nineteenth century. As John Brooke has argued recently, natural theology in this pre-Darwinian period was far from being an essentially static, autonomous, and monolithic set of presuppositions about the existence of design in nature, but was, for various reasons, in a fragmented and disordered state. The general aim of the present note is to suggest some further dimensions to historical debates about the nature of natural theology, and in particular to emphasize the need for an examination of the physical sciences as well as the life sciences in this period.

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