The Charles Darwin — Joseph Hooker correspondence: an analysis of manuscript resources and their use in biography

1978 ◽  
Vol 8 (PART_4) ◽  
pp. 351-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
JANET BROWNE
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Joseph Hooker

Mind the step: did Hooker's judgement clinch Darwin's disenchantment?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Partridge
Keyword(s):  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Marine Invertebrates ◽  
Theory Development ◽  
Step Change ◽  
Primary Research ◽  
Research Activity ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Causal Force ◽  
Joseph Hooker

The decade from 1844 to 1854 in which Charles Darwin first published two books and then studied barnacles for the final eight years has long been a puzzling digression from the development of his theory of evolution. This essay proposes that it was a conjunction of two quite different activities: a three-year pause initiated to assess and hopefully finalize the editorial completion of his 1844 Essay for publication, followed by a step-change decision to redirect his primary research activity in late 1847. A disenchantment hypothesis is proposed; it presents the step-change decision as a consequence of weighing up the accumulated unencouraging prospects for species-theory development in competition with the emergence of promising projections associated with a broad study of marine invertebrates. Recognition of the triumph, as Darwin initially saw it, of his Essay, followed by years of hostile inputs, opens this new route to understanding this decade. Within it Joseph Hooker emerges as a significant causal force. Many of the customary ‘postponement’ explanations of this digression can be integrated with this pause-and-step-change explanation, whereas explanation of the interval as a gap due to a pre-planned activity cannot, and is revealed to be seriously faulty.

Mary Elizabeth Barber, Some Early South African Geologists, and the Discoveries of Diamonds

2003 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Cohen
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
South African ◽  
Charles Darwin ◽  
Eastern Province ◽  
Sheep Farmer ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
Scientific Papers ◽  
Contemporary Artist ◽  
Natural Historian ◽  
Joseph Hooker

The second generation of those Britons who had emigrated to the Cape Colony of South Africa in 18201 included a number of people who had transcended the basic requirements of establishing a subsistence among the relatively inhospitable social, economic, and agricultural climate of their new homeland. They became interested in the scientific study of the nature of their surroundings and in their spare time became keen amateur natural historians, geologists, archaeologists, and ethnologists. Those more intrepid amongst them sought to explore the unknown interior and in the process discovered the vast mineral wealth of the country, in particular diamonds, gold, and coal. This article seeks to show how one small group of people based around Grahamstown in the Eastern Province of the colony were involved in some of these discoveries, and especially the early discovery of diamonds in the Transvaal. Most of the group were connected in some way with Mary Elizabeth Barber (1818-1899), the daughter of a British gentleman sheep-farmer who arrived in South Africa in 1820. She became a well-known contemporary artist, poet, and natural historian, corresponding with several leading British scientists such as Sir Joseph Hooker and Charles Darwin. Her scientific papers were published, amongst others, by the Linnean Society of London, the Entomological Society of London, and the South African Philosophical Society.

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.

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.

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