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This chapter examines how the Georgian scientific enterprise permeated early children’s literature. The development of children’s literature from the second half of the eighteenth century, climaxing in the highly entertaining works published by John Harris at the turn of the nineteenth century, coincided with the discovery, analysis and description of new and sometimes surprising creatures, mostly coming from the New World. Thus, this chapter provides a survey of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century children’s literature in order to show how the children’s books of the period reflected Enlightenment Britain, its growing scientific knowledge about the natural world and the non-European species regularly brought back to Britain and kept in menageries.

In ‘Gruesome models: European Displays of Natural History and Anatomy and Nineteenth-Century Literature’ Laurence Talairach-Vielmas explores the process in which from the second half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century, medical museums opened their doors throughout Europe and anatomical models circulated between Italy, Germany, France and England, serving to educate professional medical audiences and thrilling lay audiences keen on freaks and fairs. The chapter argues that the popularisation of anatomy and the circulation of anatomical models and modellers, exhibitions and anatomists throughout Europe was reflected in nineteenth-century literature, from Gothic novels to realistic narratives and even children’s fiction. Looking at the impact of the material culture of medicine upon the literary field, Talairach-Vielmas examines the relationship between literature and the European anatomical culture by exploring nineteenth-century narratives from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) in the first decades of the nineteenth-century to Charles Dickens’s fiction in the 1860s, analysing novels alongside travel guides and journal articles which demonstrate how the specific example of anatomy influenced the literary culture.

Scientists often claim that science is necessarily non-metaphorical and that scientific knowledge is poles apart from imagination. However, there is a long-standing debate on metaphors and analogies in science. This essay will raise the issue of the dual or unstable position of metaphorical language in scientific theory, focussing on the giant beasts that fascinated the Victorians and were spectacularised and sensationalised throughout the nineteenth century in shows, public lectures, popular science books and novels. Throughout the nineteenth century, works of popular science and scientific essays were full of structural metaphors and analogies that attempted to give shape to creatures that were extinct. Analogies were thus essential to scientific reasoning and Palaeontological discourse. Yet this type of metaphorical language was used in different ways: on the one hand, it served the authors’ and publishers’ commercial ambitions; on the other, it aimed to promote the scientific validity of an emerging d...

From the eighteenth century and throughout the Victorian period wild animals were recurrently exhibited in Britain. Locked up behind bars in zoological gardens or menageries, these exotic animals entertained children and adults from all social classes just as they emblematized the global expansion of the British empire. But the Victorians particularly assigned meanings to the wild skins that were exhibited throughout the country, as Ann C. Colley’s Wild Animal Skins in Victorian Britain argue...

Throughout the nineteenth century, geological and paleontological discoveries created many sensations. Increasing evidence of a primeval world unsettled beliefs about the origins of the Earth and of mankind. Rewriting the history of the earth strongly impacted not only scientific knowledge but also the economic and cultural life of the nation, as Adelene Buckland’s Novel Science: Fiction and the Invention of Nineteenth-Century Geology explains. Geology was not new in the nineteenth century bu...

As argued in the Introduction, as early as in ancient times the term ‘nature’ was polyvalent, indifferently used to define the natural world and human nature alike. In the nineteenth century, the ‘natural historical way of knowing’, to draw upon John Pickstone’s phrase again, implied the breaking down into pieces of natural specimens and humans alike, as naturalists, scientists or medical professionals looked for ‘regularities’,3 recurrently comparing humans to machines to understand function. Moreover, because of the old and enduring association of women and nature, with the onset of the Scientific Revolution the mechanization of the world-view and the attendant increase in mechanistic models aimed at explaining nature saw women as disorderly beings that needed to be controlled, restructuring them in a way as machines. The reordering of the world through the machine metaphor – as an image of the power of humans and technology to control nature and human life – redefined reality. As Carolyn Merchant argues, ‘[r]ational control over nature, society, and the self was achieved by redefining reality itself through the new machine metaphor’.4 Since bodies were seen as marvellous machines made up of different pieces, the Scientific Revolution saw the making and popularization of automata, contraptions often defined as wonderful, all the more so because many of them came from the East.5

Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany and the Representations of Nature, edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill, is a volume which derives from a conference held at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library and entitled “Visions of Empire”. Although the conference and the hardback publication that followed are not recent, the fresh publication of the collection in paperback fully deserves a review. This engaging book deals with representations of nature and tackles the significance...

After his fascinating The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (1997), Andrew Cunningham offers us a new study of anatomy, The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe. This time, Cunningham looks at how anatomists contributed to the creation of anatomy as a discipline in the long eighteenth century, the “Enlightenment” being a time when the discipline flourished as never before or since. Thus anatomy, throughout t...

Much social activism went on in the Victorian period, and quite a few social reformers were women. These female social reformers were even fictionalized and satirized, as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House (1854), Dickens’s obsessive philanthropist who focuses so much on Africa that she forgets to look after her house, children and husband. Florence Nightingale was one of these activists. The nurse who became famous for her involvement in the Crimean War was a highly significant Victorian public figu...

Tabitha Sparks’s The Doctor in the Victorian Novel: Family Practices looks at the trajectory of the figure of the doctor in Victorian literature, examining its evolution from the mid-1820s to the turn of the century. For Sparks, the doctor is, indeed, both a barometer of the evolution of the medical profession and of the Victorian novel. It is, in particular, through the variations of the marriage-plot that Spark traces the impact of the medical figure, oscillating between an index of social ...

The 19th century certainly knew how to appeal to the sensibilities of the British public, marketing sensation and making the audience’s hair stand on end and their flesh creep. At the time when geology and paleontology emerged as new scientific disciplines, scientists particularly took pains to popularise their theories and finds through dramatic mises-en-scenes. Though 19th-century geologists contributed to the popularisation of their discipline through public platforms (whether in the shape...

It is a daunting task to review one of Martin Rudwick’s books. A former palaeontologist, Martin Rudwick is the author of many books, among which The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Palaeontology (1972), The Great Devonian Controversy: The Shaping of Scientific Knowledge among Gentlemanly Specialists (1985), Scenes from Deep Time: Early Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (1992), Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes (1997), The New Science of ...

We often have the feeling today that children are turned into voracious consumers even before they leave their cradles. In fact, as Dennis Denisoff’s edited collection, The Nineteenth-Century Child and Consumer Culture, points out, the targeting of young people by consumer culture started decades before, at a time when the definition of the child was changing and consumer culture boomed, modelling identity and children in need of influence and control. As Denisoff’s introduction underlines, n...