Abstract
As Philip Henry Gosse highlights, surprise, wonder and expectation partake of the Victorian naturalist’s work as he discovers terra incognita and unknown species — even in England. The naturalist’s quest, close to that of the knight of romance, seems to inhabit a fantastic world where magical spells may be cast at any time. Gosse’s Romance of Natural History (1860) makes explicit how, as unknown natural specimens were discovered in England, brought back from foreign countries, or even revealed by the microscope, nature constantly flirted with the impossible and the marvellous. His popular science book epitomizes how naturalists and natural history writings emphasized the endless possibilities and bizarre forms of nature, clothing the natural world with wonderful and fanciful garbs paradoxically as naturalists and scientists unveiled its secrets. As this book will underline, the rhetoric and images of Victorian natural history permeated Victorian culture, and Philip Henry Gosse’s Romance of Natural History is a significant case in point to start our survey of the narratives that popularizers of natural history were offering readers at the time. The title of Gosse’s book makes explicit how natural history was seen as fraught with imaginative potential, nature looking like ‘the enchanted imaginings of an author in a medieval romance’, in Lynn Merrill’s terms.2
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Notes
Philip Henry Gosse, The Romance of Natural History (London: James Nisbet & Co., 1860), pp. 271–2.
Lynn L. Merrill, The Romance of Victorian Natural History (Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 13. Gosse’s book was originally entitled The Poetry of Natural History.
Fairy painting drew heavily upon Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Tempest, two plays which particularly emphasized the way fairies were related to nature and the forces of nature (Christopher Wood, Fairies in Victorian Art (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2000), p. 13). In addition to Fuseli and Blake, Carole G. Silver mentions David Scott’s Puck Fleeing Before the Dawn (1837), Richard Dadd’s Puck, Robert Huskisson’s The Midsummer Night’s Fairies, Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s Oberon Watching a Mermaid (1883), Edwin Landseer’s Titania and Bottom and John Simmons’s oil paintings and watercolours of Titania as major fairy paintings derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. John Stothard, Francis Danby, Henry Thomason or Joseph Severn contributed Shakespearian fairy paintings as well (Carole G. Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 19–20, 215). Victorian fairy painting changed after 1850, freeing itself from literary influences.
The microscopic quality of Victorian fairy painting is most exemplified by Richard Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke (1855–64). The painting presents an unknown territory, and its variations on the fairies’ size construct the little people as a new species to be catalogued. Moreover, the fairies merge with the natural world, the grass in the foreground giving the viewers the impression that the painter’s brush has provided them access to an invisible universe, as if seen through a microscope: among fairies, elves and gnomes of different sizes, a dragonfly plays the trumpet, a gnat acts as coachman. Aligned with insects, the little people’s diversity is evaluated as if by a naturalist. Though many will argue that Victorian fairy paintings, like Dadd’s The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke and its play with various sizes, entail a dream-like atmosphere, their sometimes disorientating effect is nevertheless in keeping with the politics of observation of the time. As Merrill argues, the use of the microscope in Victorian England was likely to produce ‘a disoriented sense of fragmentation… a loss of unity… Too many details signal a failure of meaning, a collapse of unity, the death of hope’ (Merrill, Romance of Victorian Natural History, p. 123). This dark aspect of the Victorians’ obsession with microscopic vision permeates Dadd’s fairy paintings, perhaps to suggest the tensions brought about by scientific development and its dangers, while simultaneously playing upon the nostalgia for a lost natural world threatened by extinction because of pollution and massive urbanization. Indeed, it is significant to note here that Victorian fairy painting illustrates how Victorian art in general could mediate between scientific and popular culture. Natural history illustrations in popular science books and paintings uncannily echoed one another, and undoubtedly showed the interchange between science and art throughout the period: the painters linked to fairy painting looked at nature not so much with an artistic eye but with a scientific eye, offering a microscopic realism and scientific accuracy in their depiction of fairy lands. Natural historians’ highly visual prose appealed to Victorian artists eager to experiment with perspective and to take their viewers into invisible realms beyond the reach of human perception. The journeys to some unknown worlds that Victorian fairy painting offers look like expeditions to worlds invisible to the naked eye and which only the artist’s paintbrush can reveal, recalling the period’s attempt at giving shape (and reality) to an invisible world which science and technology were daily revealing to the public. The precise and minute realism of Victorian fairy painters (or ‘microscopic optics’ (W. F. Axton, ‘Victorian Landscape Painting: A Change in Outlook’, in U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (eds), Nature and the Victorian Imagination (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), pp. 281–308 (288)), directly spurred by the pre-Raphaelite movement, committed to the faithful description of the natural world, capitalized on the vision of nature as a source of wonder and astonishment: their fairies’ resemblance to insects and animals allegorizes the Victorians’ vision of nature, its secrets, mysteries and wonders. Furthermore, Victorian fairy painters’ insights into more folkloric and rural lands, especially Fitzgerald’s fairy banquets and funerals, for instance, cannot fail to recall both scientific and anthropological studies of the time. The (sometimes random) cruelty at stake in many Victorian fairy paintings, though enabling the artists to evade censorship and add sadomasochistic and erotic elements on the canvasses, could be read as revelatory of anxieties related to life’s competitiveness and the struggle for life, or even the way in which savage elements of folktales seen after 1859 were deemed examples of primitivism and less evolved cultures, primitive races of mankind. These are aspects developed in Nicola Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
A typical example might be Michael Aislabie Benham’s pamphlet, A Few Fragments of Fairyology, Shewing its Connection with Natural History (Dunhelm: Will, Duncan and Son, 1859), which tries to connect fairy slippers, stones (Encrinites and Entrochi), butter (Tremella mesenterica), pipes (smoking pipes), cups, cauldrons, elf locks, elf shots (flint), fairy children (changelings — in fact often idiots) with nature.
Bown traces the rise of fairies in popular science works as early as in Hugh Miller’s The Old Red Sandstone; or, new walks in an old field (Edinburgh: John Johnston, 1841);Bown, Fairies in Nineteenth-Century Art and Literature, p. 106.
See Silver, Strange and Secret Peoples. As ideas of cultural evolution developed and fairies and fairy tales were increasingly associated with primitive civilizations, the symbolic value of fairies was used in a multitude of contexts. See Caroline Sumpter, ‘Making Socialists or Murdering to Dissect? Natural History and Child Socialization in the Labour Prophet and Labour Leader’, in Louise Henson, Geoffrey Cantor, Gowan Dawson et al. (eds), Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 29–55, for an analysis of how science and politics were allied.
Rev. J. G. Wood, Common Objects of the Country (London: Routledge, 1858), pp. 1–2, qtd in Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 189.
Aileen K. Fyfe, Science and Salvation: Evanglical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 2.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, North Carolina, and London: Duke University Press, 1993), p. 44.
John Cargill Brough, The Fairy Tales of Science: A Book for Youth (London: Griffith and Farran, 1859), p. iii.
Charles Kingsley, ‘How to Study Natural History’, Scientific Lectures and Essays (London, Macmillan & Co., 1880), pp. 287–310 (291).
John Henry Pepper, The Boys’ Playbook of Science (London: George Routledge & Sons, (1860) 1881), p. 2
Charles Kingsley, ‘Address to Boys and Girls’, The Boys’ and Girls’ Book of Science (London: Strahan & Co. Limited, 1881), p. vii.
Lyn Barber, The Heyday of Natural History: 1820–1870 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1980), p. 15.
See Peter Hunt et al. (eds), Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 13.
Sarah Fielding’s The Governess, or Little Female Academy (1749) was a novel meant to instruct and entertain little girls. Mrs Teachum, the governess, has established a school for nine girls. The novel contains embedded fairy tales, which are told by the children and which the governess systematically rephrases in moral terms. She warns her pupils against fairy tales and dismisses the magical elements of the story.
Sarah Trimmer (1741–1810) was an author of children’s books who launched Family Magazine (1788–9), which contained moral tales and sermons. She also wrote on education; her Guardian of Education (1802–6) directly addressed parents and governesses and warned them about the qualities or dangers of newly published children’s literature. Likewise, Mary Sherwood (1775–1851) disliked fairy tales. When she re-edited Sarah Fielding’s The Governess in 1820, she deleted the two fairy tales. What is highly significant, as Hunt explains, is that the ‘women writers who dominated the children’s market at this time were themselves heavily involved in education’ (Hunt et al. (eds), Children’s Literature, pp. 54–5). Hannah Moore, Anna Barbauld, Mary Sherwood, Sarah Trimmer or Mary Pilkington either managed schools or were governesses. See also Aileen K. Fyfe, ‘Reading Children’s Books in Late Eighteenth-Century Dissenting Families’, Historical Journal 43.2 (2000), pp. 453–73.
Charles Kingsley, Madam How and Lady Why; or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children (New York: Macmillan & Co., (1870) 1888), p. viii. Kingsley also mentions it in his preface to The Boys’ and Girls’ Book of Science, ‘Address to Boys and Girls’, p. vii. Among Victorian popularizers of science, the story influenced John Ruskin (1819–1900), Jane Loudon (1807–58), Gideon Algernon Mantell (1790–1852) and Phebe Lankaster (1825–1900).
See Aileen Fyfe, ‘Tracts, Classics and Brands: Science for Children in the Nineteenth Century’, in Julia Briggs, Dennis Butts and M. O. Grenby (eds), Popular Children’s Literature in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 209–28 (209). Fyfe also adds that Evenings at Home was one of the very few science books for children which did not only use science as a means of teaching religious lessons.
David Elliston Allen, The Naturalist in Britain: A Social History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, (1976) 1994), p. 123.
Richard Noakes, ‘The Boy’s Own Paper and Late-Victorian Juvenile Magazines’, in Geoffrey Canton, Gowan Dawson, Graeme Gooday et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 151–71 (155).
Madam How and Lady Why appeared in serial form in Good Words for the Young in 1869, and was dedicated to Kingsley’s son Grenville Arthur and to his schoolfellows at Winton House. See Charles Kingsley, Words of Advice to School-Boys by Charles Kingsley, Collected from Hitherto Unpublished Notes and Letters of the Late Charles Kingsley, ed. E. F. Johns (London: Simpkin & Co., 1912).
Charles Kingsley, Glaucus; or, the wonders of the shore (London: Macmillan & Co., (1855) 1890), p. 1.
Francis O’Gorman, ‘Victorian Natural History and the Discourses of Nature in Charles Kingsley’s Glaucus’, Worldviews: Environment, Culture, Religion 2.1 (April 1998), pp. 21–35 (22).
Jonathan Smith, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 61.
Carlo Ginsburg, Clues, Myth, and the Historical Method (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), p. 103.
Jonathan Smith, Fact and Feeling: Baconian Science and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994), p. 4.
George Henry Lewes, The Foundations of a Creed, 2 vols (London: Trübner, 1874–5), vol. 1, sections 14, 61, 62;qtd in Smith, Fact and Feeling, p. 20.
James Krasner, The Entangled Eye: Visual Perception and the Representation of Nature in Post-Darwinian Narrative (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 5.
Amanda Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species: Apes, Savages and Humans in Scientific and Literary Writing of the 1860s’, Journal of Victorian Culture 4.2 (Autumn 1999), pp. 228–51 (242).
Daniel Wilson, Caliban: The Missing Link (London: Macmillan & Co., 1873), p. 8, qtd in Hodgson, ‘Defining the Species’, p. 242.
T. H. Huxley, ‘Science and Morals’ (1886), Collected Essays, vol. IX: Evolution and Ethics and other essays (Bristol: Thoemmes, (1886) 2001), p. 146, qtd in Tess Cosslett, The ‘Scientific Movement’ and Victorian Literature (Brighton: Harvester Press;New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1982), p. 32.
This essay was included in the third volume of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (London: John Murray, Thomas Tegg & Son, (1825–6) 1838).
Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, The Annotated Alice, ed. Martin Gardner (London: Penguin (1871), 2001), p. 251.
Charles Kingsley, The Water-Babies, a Fairy Tale for a Land Baby (London: Penguin, (1863) 1995), p. 74. All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text.
The engraver Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) was most famous for his life-like illustrations and descriptions of rural English life, notably in A General History of Quadrupeds (1790) and A History of British Birds (1797–1804). See Jenny Uglow, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (London: Faber and Faber; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006).
The Hippocampus controversy began in Oxford in 1860 with the Wilberforce-Huxley debate over humankind’s relationship to monkeys. This was followed by more and more dissections of primate brains by British surgeons and anatomists in search of the hippocampus minor. Huxley’s opponent was in fact Owen more than Wilberforce: both men published their attacks in the Natural History Review (Huxley) and the more conventional Annals and Magazine of Natural History (Owen), their fight being furthered during the 1861 BAAS meeting, when a paper on du Chaillu’s collection was discussed. The controversy climaxed during the 1862 BAAS meeting in Cambridge. See Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology Without Darwin, a Revised Edition (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, (1994), 2009), pp. 192–208.
Charles Kingsley, ‘Speech of Lord Dundreary in Section D, on Friday Last, on the Great Hippocampus Question’, Charles Kingsley: His Letter and Memories of His Life; Edited by His Wife, vol. 3, pp. 145–8 (London: Macmillan, 1901), qtd in Rupke, Richard Owen, p. 221.
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© 2014 Laurence Talairach-Vielmas
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Talairach-Vielmas, L. (2014). From the Wonders of Nature to the Wonders of Evolution: Charles Kingsley’s Nursery Fairies. In: Fairy Tales, Natural History and Victorian Culture. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137342409_2
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