The natural history review (1854–1865)

2012 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-269 ◽  
Author(s):  
Miguel DeArce
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Undergraduate Student ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Editorial Team ◽  
Editorial Committee ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
John Tyndall ◽  
Joseph Hooker

The natural history review was a quarterly founded in 1854 by Edward Perceval Wright, then an undergraduate student of zoology at Trinity College Dublin. Its first editorial committee (1856–1860) held traditional views of natural history. By 1860 The natural history review had failed, ostensibly for lack of subscribers, and Wright put it in the hands of Thomas Henry Huxley who, together with Joseph Hooker, John Tyndall and others, was then looking for a vehicle to disseminate the agenda of what Huxley later called “scientific naturalism”. Against advice from his friends, Darwin, Lyell and Hooker, Huxley accepted the editorship, preserving the title but giving The natural history review a new direction by replacing the former editorial team with some of his like-minded colleagues. Extant correspondence between several of these comprises dozens of letters in which The natural history review (1861–1865) was discussed. By the end of 1862 Huxley had given up on it, but the periodical survived until July 1865 with Hooker at the head. Throughout this second series, Charles Darwin exercised an unofficial, effective, and to today's eyes, ethically questionable editorial role. The natural history review ceased publication under Hooker in 1865. Competition from other publications, the lack of a clear purpose and the prevalence of ideology over business sense in the editor-in-chief were the likely reasons for its repeated failures.

Essay reviews: Cataloguing for Empire

1994 ◽  
Vol 48 (2) ◽  
pp. 309-311
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Comparative Anatomy ◽  
Active Role ◽  
Natural History Museum ◽  
Fossil Species ◽  
History Museum ◽  
Thomas Henry Huxley ◽  
Richard Owen ◽  
The Many

Richard Owen, The Hunterian Lectures in Comparative Anatomy. May and June 1837 . Edited with an Introduction by Phillip Reid Sloan. Natural History Museum Publications, 1992. Pp. xii + 340, £37.50 hardback, £15.95 paper. ISBN 0-565-011065, 0-565-011448 Jacob W. Gruber and John C. Thackray, Richard Owen Commemoration: Three Studies . Historical Studies in the Life and Earth Sciences No. 1. Natural History Museum Publications, 1992. Pp. x + 181, £29.95. ISBN 0-565-01109 Over the last 10 to 15 years it has become increasingly clear that an astonishing proportion of Victorian natural history and comparative anatomy revolved around the enigmatic figure of Richard Owen - so much so that when the centenary of his death came around in 1992, the commemorations willingly spread themselves over several days and a great diversity of scientific themes. Owen’s life and work thoroughly embraced the industrious spirit of the nineteenth century. In his time he was renowned as Britain’s most gifted anatomist, as a public lecturer, a palaeontologist, taxonomist and philosopher on natural history topics, and, in another more concrete sense, as the man who brought the Natural History Museum in South Kensington into existence. He catalogued John Hunter’s collection while curator at the Royal College of Surgeons, dissected rare animals from the zoo, invented dinosaurs, classified a succession of gigantic fossil species from the outposts of empire, wrote memoirs on the pearly Nautilus, Australian marsupials, the Archaeopteryx , the aborigines of the Andaman Islands, the gorilla and the dodo, took an active role in London’s scientific society, received a shower of medals, including the Royal Medal in 1846 and the Copley in 1851, went to the opera, played chess with Edwin Landseer, visited the Queen at Osborne, and ended up with a knighthood and an attractive grace-and-favour residence in Richmond, known as Sheen Lodge. Yet in spite of being such a man of parts, Owen was not liked. Thomas Henry Huxley hated him and never ignored an opportunity to fight. Charles Darwin lost his temper over a review of the Origin of Species and never talked to him again. Antonio Panizzi did his best to prevent him splitting up the British Museum’s collections. It is one of the many achievements of these two books, published to coincide with the centenary, that Owen’s pugnacious, self-aggrandizing character and famous slipperiness under pressure emerge, not quite sanitized, but as the kind of ambitious qualities that were needed to get things done.

scholarly journals John Stanley Gardiner, 1872-1946

1947 ◽  
Vol 5 (15) ◽  
pp. 541-553 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
English Literature ◽  
The Other ◽  
Natural History Society ◽  
Future Career ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
School Career ◽  
Sixth Form

John Stanley Gardiner was born 24 January 1872, in Belfast, the younger son of the two children of the Reverend John Jephson Gardiner of Trinity College, Dublin. His father became Rector of Black Torrington, in Devonshire, a pleasant country village with a nearby trout-stream where the young Gardiner acquired an early love of fishing which remained with him throughout his life. Here he also became a reasonably good shot which proved of value to him when on his expeditions abroad, whether for the collection of specimens or for food. There is no record of his first schooling which begins with his entry in January 1885 to Marlborough College. Here, although he won a prize for English literature and one for science and a laboratory prize, he did not have an outstanding school career in the strict scholastic sense and did not reach the sixth form. On the other hand it was at Marlborough that the seeds of his future career as a zoologist were sown, as is shown by the steady stream of notes, observations and papers read, labelled J. S. G., in the Reports of the School Natural History Society which he joined in 1887, in which year he won the ‘Stanton’ prize for ornithology and also compiled a list of the birds of the district. In 1888 he was elected a member of the committee of the Society.

INTRODUCTION: WHY VICTORIAN NATURAL HISTORY?

2007 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 539-549 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara T. Gates
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
George Eliot ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
British Museum ◽  
The Other ◽  
Mary Kingsley ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
Gender Barriers ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Joseph Hooker

VICTORIANS WERE IN LOVE WITHnatural history. David Allen describes their passion as a series of crazes – over geology, over shells, and over ferns, as in pteridomania (mania over ferns) – to cite just a very few examples. Lynn Merrill, on the other hand, delineates a more comprehensive, cultural romance, one extending over many years. Whatever we choose to call this love, we are still in the process of discovering just how deep and lasting it was. Like many love affairs, it was marked at first by a blush enthusiasm and fascination with otherness. This was followed by curiosity and a rage to risk self in the quest to know more about the other – and sometimes, as a result, by ridiculous missteps. Think of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes sloshing around at the seashore, ill-equipped but determined to find out enough to write about what they were trying to capture and study. Or recall Mary Kingsley out in Africa in a canoe propelled by several Congolese, tumbling out of the boat but saving her trusted copy of Albert Günther's 1880Introduction to the Study of Fishes, tenacious in her desire to bring back labeled specimens to the British Museum of Natural history. Earlier, in a similarly resolute quest to record birdlife, John and Elizabeth Gould globe-trotted to the extent that they put Elizabeth's life and their growing family at risk. And people like explorer/naturalist Thomas Bowdich died of fever for their fervor over natural history, in Bowdich's case as he worked to detail facts about specimens in Porto Santo, off the coast of West Africa. Bowdich left a wife to fend for herself and their family via her own study of natural history, and one result was Sara Bowdich Lee's beautifully illustratedFresh-Water Fishes of Great Britain(1828). The romance with nature certainly cut across class and gender barriers. Stonecutter Hugh Miller could lose himself as easily in geological pursuits as could Charles Darwin or Sir Charles Lyell and Marianne North's passion for plants may well have matched or exceeded that of Kew's famous botanist, Sir Joseph Hooker.

Racine Lighting Beckett

2016 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-242
Author(s):  
Cal Revely-Calder
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Trinity

Critics have recently begun to pay attention to the influence Jean Racine's plays had on the work of Samuel Beckett, noting his 1930–31 lectures at Trinity College Dublin, and echoes of Racine in early texts such as Murphy (1938). This essay suggests that as well as the Trinity lectures, Beckett's later re-reading of Racine (in 1956) can be seen as fundamentally influential on his drama. There are moments of direct allusion to Racine's work, as in Oh les beaux jours (1963), where the echoes are easily discernible; but I suggest that soon, in particular with Come and Go (1965), the characteristics of a distinctly Racinian stagecraft become more subtly apparent, in what Danièle de Ruyter has called ‘choix plus spécifiquement théâtraux’: pared-down lighting, carefully-crafted entries and exits, and visual tableaux made increasingly difficult to read. Through an account of Racine's dramaturgy, and the ways in which he structures bodily motion and theatrical talk, I suggest that Beckett's post-1956 drama can be better understood, as stage-spectacles, in the light of Racine's plays; both writers give us, in Myriam Jeantroux's phrase, the complicated spectacle of ‘un lieu à la fois désert et clôturé’. As spectators to Beckett's drama, by keeping Racine in mind we can come to understand better the limitations of that spectatorship, and how the later plays trouble our ability to see – and interpret – the figures that move before us.

Are We Doing Diversity Justice? A Critical Exchange

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-119
Author(s):  
Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi ◽  
Emma Penney
Keyword(s):  
Trinity College ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Irish Literature ◽  
Critical Race ◽  
Roundtable Discussion ◽  
Literary Value ◽  
Irish Studies ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
Race Analysis

This critical exchange is based on a conversation between the authors which took place during the Irish University Review Roundtable Discussion: Displacing the Canon (2019 IASIL Conference, Trinity College Dublin). As authors we give first-hand accounts of our experience writing, editing, and teaching in Ireland, attempting to draw out concerns we have for the future of Irish literature and Irish Studies that specifically relate to race. The conversation here suggests that race directly impacts what we consider valuable in our literary culture. We both insist on decentring universalism as a governing literary critical concept and insist on the urgent application of critical race analysis to the construction of literary value systems in Ireland.

Poetry and Science: William Wordsworth and his Irish Friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth, c. 1829

Romanticism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-101
Author(s):  
Brandon C. Yen
Keyword(s):  
Literary History ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
Trinity College ◽  
Bodleian Library ◽  
Trinity College Dublin ◽  
The Relationship

Through hitherto neglected manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin, the Bodleian Library, and the Wordsworth Trust, this paper explores the relationship between William Wordsworth and his Irish friends William Rowan Hamilton and Francis Beaufort Edgeworth around 1829. It details the debates about poetry and science between Hamilton (Professor of Astronomy at Trinity College Dublin and Royal Astronomer of Ireland) and Edgeworth (the novelist Maria Edgeworth's half-brother), in which Wordsworth was embroiled when he visited Ireland in the autumn of 1829. By examining a variety of documents including letters, poems, lectures, and memoirs, a fragment of literary history may be restored and a clearer understanding may be reached of the tensions between poetry and science in Wordsworth's poetry, particularly in The Excursion, and of the Irish provenance of a memorable passage in ‘On the Power of Sound’.

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