How do we approach an age that, increasingly, feels unanchored from our emotional present? Why do the outsized passions and curious habits of the past, often evade faithful restoration? As we take what has been termed a ‘material turn’[1] in Victorian studies, appraising an object’s function has become secondary to uncovering an object’s emotional afterlife. We are still interested, for example, in a fossil’s paleontological value, but are perhaps more eager to learn that they were routinely licked by enthusiastic geologists tongue-testing for mineralisation. Our concern with the affective capacity of an object has led to an intersection between the study of materiality and the burgeoning field known as the ‘history of emotions.’
“The Invisible World,” a frontispiece for a chapter on microscopy in The Fairy Tales of Science (1859)
Fitz-James O’Brien (1828-1862) was an Irish-American Civil War soldier and one of the forerunners of the Science-Fiction genre. His primary literary connection was with Harper’s Magazine – a periodical that he contributed to – in prose and verse- over sixty times. He likewise wrote for the New York Saturday Press, Putnam’s Magazine, Vanity Fair, and The Atlantic Monthly. To the latter he sent “The Diamond Lens” in 1858.
“The Diamond Lens” tells the tale of Mr. Linley, a man who has had an obsession with microscopy from childhood. He forges a new microscope lens with a diamond of one hundred and forty carats that has been submitted to electro-magnetic currents to rearrange its atoms. Beneath his new microscope he sees an enchanted realm of minuscule beauty. Common mildew becomes “enchanted gardens, filled with dells and avenues of the densest foliage and most astonishing erdure, while from the fantastic boughs of these microscopic forests hung strange fruits glittering with green, silver, and gold”. Such a descriptive passage would have been familiar to the Victorian reader by 1858.
Common Objects of the Microscope, by Rev. J Wood. (1880 edition.)
Charles Kingsley, for example in 1846 saw “in the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit,’ a tiny animalcule amid a fairy-land of inexhaustible wonders”. Such fervour frequently elicited ridicule, the Quarterly Journal of Science, Literature, and Art, for example, explains to us that a man who observes ‘a drop of stinking ditch-water or the amorous passions of worms and ants’ is likely to be regarded as ‘a puny, pitiful, pedant, whose passions and amusements were of a childish and even degrading complexion’. Unsurprisingly, children’s books of the era habitually married science or natural history with such a fairyland. Works like John Cargill Brough’s The Fairy Tales of Science: A Book for Youth (1859), or Arabella Buckley’s The Fairy-Land of Science (1878).
‘Monster Soup’ a droplet of water from the River Thames.
Fitz-James O’Brien’s tale takes this convention a step further – into the genre of romance. His microscopist witnesses a ‘form’ moving slowly through the glades of a prismatic forest; ‘at last the violet pennons that trailed nearest to me vibrated; they were gently pushed aside, and the form floated out into the broad light.’ In this forest he sees what appears to be a ‘female human shape.’ Linley clarifies that when he say human, he ‘mean it possessed the outlines of humanity; but there the analogy ends.’
I can not, I dare not, attempt to inventory the charms of this divine revelation of perfect beauty. Those eyes of mystic violet, dewy and serene, evade my words. Her long, lustrous hair following her glorious head in a golden wake, like the track sown in heaven by a falling star, seems to quench my most burning phrases with its splendors. If all the bees of Hybla nestled upon my lips, they would still sing but hoarsely the wondrous harmonies of outline that inclosed her form.
Breathless with gazing on this lovely wonder, Linley withdraws his eye from the microscope: gazing with disbelief at ‘the colorless drop of water’ which imprisoned ‘this beautiful being.’ He bestows her with the name Animula. (A name derived from the word animalcule – a generic term for a microscopic animal.) Presumably Animula -with her ‘enchanting curves’, ‘earnest gaze’ and ‘delicate hands’- quite transcends the alien animalcules traditionally observed under the microscope. She has no tentacular protuberances, and does not wear a ring beating cilia around her person. Though her golden glow does suggest she may be bioluminescent.
Animalcule. A Microscopic View of the different Animalcules. Lower Center: London, Published as the Act directs, 12th Novr. 1796, by J. Wilkes
By the time Animula disappears amid the opaline forest Linley’s ‘daylight had vanished’. Tempering the paranoia that he has ‘suddenly gone blind’ he frets that Animula had ‘obeyed the summons’ ‘of a lover or husband’ and wishes he could ‘pierce the mystical walls that so inexorably rose to separate’ them.
With a bitter cry of anguish I fled from the room, and flinging myself on my bed, sobbed myself to sleep like a child.
After having a good cry Linley returns to his study at daybreak. Subsequently, in a passage bizarrely charged with voyertistic desire, the microscopist looks upon Animula as though she is a water nymph attempting to seduce a grecian hero.
I found the sylph bathing, as it were, with an expression of pleasure animating her features, in the brilliant light which surrounded her. She tossed her lustrous golden hair over her shoulders with innocent coquetry. She lay at full length in the transparent medium, in which she supported herself with ease, and gamboled with the enchanting grace that the nymph Salmacis might have exhibited when she sought to conquer the modest Hermaphroditus.
“Join me in my water droplet, you colossus peeping Tom!” Waterhouse Hylas and the Nymphs Manchester Art Gallery 1896
As the hours go by Animulas grows ‘thin and haggard’ – ‘her features contracted, and she writhed, as if with some internal agony.’ After racking his brain ‘for the solution of this mystery’ Linley looks ‘down on the stage of the microscope.’ Only to find that ‘the water droplet had vanished.’
The awful truth burst upon me; it had evaporated, until it had become so minute as to be invisible to the naked eye; I had been gazing on its last atom, the one that contained Animula — and she was dying!
Like Ayesha, the immortal sorceress of H. Rider Haggard’s gothic fantasy She (1887), Animula’s limbs ‘shrivel up into nothings’: her eyes are ‘quenched into black dust’ her lustrous golden hair discolored’.
The slide work of James Neville (1840-1900)
Coming to terms with the fact that his unquenchable curiosity has killed his beloved, the microscopist promptly faints.
Fitz-James O’Brien ends his tale by informing us that his protagonist becomes known as ‘Linley, the mad microscopist’. He lives on the charity of young men who for ‘love of a joke’ invite him to lecture on optics – their laughter competing in his head with his ‘ghastly memories’, ‘the shapes of death’ which gripped his ‘lost Animula’.
The orchid mantis, (Hymenopus coronatus) is renowned for its visual resemblance to an orchid in bloom. Its pink heart-shaped mid-and hind-legs are semi-opalescent and resemble delicate petals. Naturalists have puzzled over the orchid mantis since the early 19th century. Mr S. E, Peal of Assam (in correspondence with Dr Anderson) describes the deceptive resemblance: “I have just captured a little rose-pink Mantis that simulates a blossom beautifully”. Six months later he observed a second “beautifully white (wax-white) and larger than the previous pink one.” The travel writer James Hingston (in his 1879 account of wanderings in the Orient) also encountered the ambush predator:
Ophelia ready to ambush.
Ophelia the perfect model in her fairy dell.
I am taken by my kind host around his garden, and shown, among other things, a flower, an orchid, that catches and feeds upon live flies. It seized upon a butterfly while I was present, and enclosed it in its pretty but deadly leaves, as a spider would have enveloped it in network.
Alfred Russell Wallace first suggested that the orchid mantis’s ‘aggressive mimicry’ was a predatory strategy in 1877 when he recounted a story by British politician Sir Charles Dilk. In 1868 Dilk, while travelling through Indonesia, was shown a praying mantis that resembled a pink orchid flower. Wallace (1889) suggested that the appearance of an orchid with four petals and a broad labellum could be mimicked by the mantis’ four legs and broad abdomen, whereas the head and thorax of the mantis resembled the column of an orchid flower. In his 1889 book Darwinism Wallace describes the orchid mantis:
A beautiful drawing of this rare insect, Hymenopus bicornis (in the nymph or active pupa state), was kindly sent me by Mr. Wood-Mason, Curator of the Indian Museum at Calcutta. A species, very similar to it, inhabits Java, where it is said to resemble a pink orchid. Other Mantidae, of the genus Gongylus, have the anterior part of the thorax dilated and coloured either white, pink, or purple; and they so closely resemble flowers that, according to Mr. Wood-Mason, one of them, having a bright violet-blue prothoracic shield, was found in Pegu by a botanist, and was for a moment mistaken by him for a flower.
Alfred Russell Wallace and drawing of nymph of “Hymenopus bicornis in active pupa stage” by James Wood-Mason.
The orchid mantis was later featured in a number of books and articles on animal coloration (Wallace 1877; Wood-Mason 1878; Wallace 1889; Poulton 1890). America author Mary Ellen Bamford (1857-1946) featured the orchid mantis in the sequel to her children’s book The Look-About Club (1887.) Bamford’s series documented “the curious live things” found by a precocious group of young girls smitten with natural history.
The Look-About Club (1887.)
Papa told me some funny things about the mantis. He said that in Java there is a kind of pink mantis that, when it sits still, looks just like a pink orchid-flower. Papa said that this mantis likes to eat butterflies, and the butterflies suppose that the mantis is really a flower, and so they come near it and are caught.
According to the Papa of The Look-About Club the mantis is “of so divine a nature that to a child who asks it its way, it points it out by stretching out one of its legs, and rarely or never makes a mistake.” Chatterbox (a weekly British paper containing stories for children, published in the 19th and 20th centuries) likewise supposes in 1894 ‘that the unwary insects take the Mantis for an orchid and walk into a living grave.’
By the end of the century Wallace’s theory was taken as indisputable fact. L N Badenoch, for example, pays homage to the orchid mantis in True Tales of the Insects under the subtitle ‘alluring colouration and aggressive mimicry’ :
Colour, form, and attitude all conspire, in an inimitable manner, to produce the resemblance. Of the meaning of the resemblance there can be no doubt. Insects seem attracted to the mantis, as insects to flowers ; they settle upon it, and are instantly captured.
Alfred Russell Wallace’s initial theory has only recently (Hanlon & Rashid: 2013) been further investigated. The assumption that the orchid mantis’ morphology functions as a form of mimicry implies that the orchid mantis is cognitively misclassified as an orchid. However researchers recently concluded that the shape and color features of the orchid mantis’ body does not converge upon a specific flower. Using spectrometry to measure their overall coloration geometric morphometric techniques, researcher’s concluded that the mantis was seen by its prey as an approximation of various flowers. They have also been proven to attract more pollinators (per hour) than a number of control stimulus flowers. ( Hanlon et al: 2014) This predatory strategy ensures that the mantis does not discriminate its prey – attracting all manner of pollinators – into its waiting jaws.
Bamford, M. E., & D. Lothrop & Company. (1887). The Look-About Club, and the curious live things they found. Boston: D. Lothrop Co.
L. N. Badenoch, True Tales of the Insects, Dutton, 1899.
‘Coloration and morphology of the orchid mantis Hymenopus coronatus (Mantodea: Hymenopodidae)’, J.C. O’Hanlon, D. Li and Y. Norma-Rashid, Journal of Orthoptera Research, Vol. 22, No. 1 (2013), pp. 35-44.
J.C. O’Hanlon, G. I. Holwell, M.E. Herberstein; Predatory pollinator deception: Does the orchid mantis resemble a model species?, Current Zoology, Volume 60, Issue 1, 1 February 2014, Pages 90–103.
In The Entomologist’s Dream (1909) by Edmund Dulac an entomologist – in a state of near collapse – bears witness to an ominous kaleidoscope of butterflies that envelop his bedroom in a mantle of blue chaos. The insect-collector’s beloved specimens have escaped: struggling from their skewers and shattering their glass-fronted prisons. (It is left up to viewer to determine whether they seek freedom or vengeance.)
The work is an illustration for Le Papillon Rouge (the red butterfly) by Gerard d’Houville, a tragic love story published in L ‘Illustration, Numero de Noel 1909 the French news and art magazine. (In the tale an entomologist plunders his collection, in a state of moonlit delirium, incensed with his failure to capture a blood red butterfly for his lady love.)
A sense of anxiety pervades the practice of entomology – the use of chloroform, killing jars and other lethal devices leaving many naturalists with a sense of guilt.
The killing jar was an ordinary glass preserving can, with a small lump of cyanide of potassium, covered by a thin layer of plaster. An entomologist was instructed to arrange the insect, once dead, in ‘a natural position’. Killing jars habitually resulted in a slow death for the imprisoned insect – it was difficult to settle upon a formula that would result in death swiftly without damaging the insect’s fragile carcass. In the midst of searching for such a ‘sweet spot’ an entomologist was often faced with specimens that were prone to spontaneous resurrection.
Much of the literature in the late 1840s ruminated upon the question of entomological suffering. Naturalists made use of insects to contemplate hierarchies of pain: paying special attention to cases of insect decapitation. One naturalist, for example, was shocked to see that a dragonfly he had just pinned through the thorax still clutched a struggling fly in its forelegs – and proceeded to eat it.
Similarly, George Henry Lewes affirmed that ‘an insect pinned to the table will continue to eat and a headless fly or worm will writhe and twist if touched.’
Imagining the horror of a man eating under such circumstances, many entomologists of the age (gladly) concluded that an insect was not capable of experiencing emotional trauma as we do. (Though they might ‘learn’ to avoid stimulus associated with sustained tissue damage.)
If we classify pain as an emotional response (a conscious experience) -does the question of insect pain hinge upon the concept of insect emotion? How on earth could we determine if an insect’s experience is intertwined with ‘anthropomorphic’ factors like mood, personality, disposition, or motivation?
(Hit me up with any other examples you have of ‘entomological anxiety’.)
To be kept up to date on new posts from The Cabinet of Curiosity subscribe by WordPress or follow me on Twitter @rosalindmwhite.
Welcome poverty!..Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end! – Mr. Micawber
Wilkins Micawber from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1854) is known for his resourcefullness, optimism and adaptability.
“His clothes were shabby but he had an imposing shirt-collar on . . . And a quizzing-glass hung outside his coat – for ornament, I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it and couldn’t see anything when he did.
Welcome poverty!..Welcome misery, welcome houselessness, welcome hunger, rags, tempest, and beggary! Mutual confidence will sustain us to the end! – Mr. Micawber
Wilkins Micawber from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1854) is known for his resourcefullness, optimism and adaptability.
“His clothes were shabby but he had an imposing shirt-collar on . . . And a quizzing-glass hung outside his coat – for ornament, I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it and couldn’t see anything when he did.
The noted naturalist, and populariser of the aquarium, Philip Henry Gosse extended Micawber’s sense of reckless buoyancy to the character of the hermit crab in his domestic aquarium.
The Bernhard crab or hermit crab, much like Mr Micawber is in the habit of frequently changing his residence. As the hermit crab grows it finds a new shell to live in. they often make use of the discarded shells of other animals.
Here is Gosse’s amusing anecdote:
This Bernhard Crab in the front, so leisurely pushing away the sand before him with his broad, flat claws, quietly enjoys the meal he finds, undisturbed by fears of a failing supply. There is less of enterprise than complacency in his character, and I call him Micawber, for he is always expecting “something to turn up.”
Twice since March has he changed his coat, and thrown off his tight boots and gloves for new ones. The disrobing seemed to give him little trouble, though he sat dozing at the door of his cell some hours after, as though fatigued by the unusual effort.
Dickens himself makes metaphorical use of the hermit crab in Our Mutual Friend (1864) in reference to John Rokesmith, a character who sheds his old life and takes on a new identity.
‘The natural curiosity which forms the sole ornament of my professional museum,’ he resumes, ‘hereupon desires his Secretary–an individual of the hermit-crab or oyster species, and whose name, I think, is Chokesmith–but it doesn’t in the least matter–say Artichoke–to put himself in communication with Lizzie Hexam.’
___
See Philip Henry Gosse, The Aquarium: an unveiling of the wonders of the deep sea (1854).
Throughout the nineteenth-century the mania for seashells steadily swelled; they featured on Christmas cards, and adorned countless keepsakes, jewellery, and furniture. The Gradgrind nursery in Charles Dickens’ Hard Times is equipped with a “little conchological cabinet, a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical cabinet”, whilst, inspired by works of natural history, men and women scoured the seashore for conchological specimens. Conchology, unlike other branches of natural history such as zoology or mineralogy was easily accessible to everyone, and did not require specialist equipment. It also had the added bonus of including inanimate specimens that were not subject to disease or decay.
The Conchologist / G. Spratt del. ; Printed by G. E. Madeley ; Pubd by C. Tilt, Fleet Street.
George Spratt’s composite caricature of ‘The Conchologist’ offers a personification of the craze – a woman, fashioned from shells of marine life, is depicted scanning the sea-side for her kin: her basket is filled with sprigs of seaweed and various tide pool treasures. Her rather ineffectual sun-bonnet looks to be crafted from the soft-bodied bell of a jellyfish, while a quasi-vulval cowry shell, disturbingly enlarged, makes up the lower half of her body.
The Shell Grotto in Margate, is perhaps the most impressive example of conchological worship. In 1835 an architectural love letter to the humble shell was uncovered by a man and his son attempting to dig a duck pond. The son, falling from a hole in the ground, recovered from his tumble to find a chamber ‘papered’ with an exquisite tapestry of shells. The chamber was connected to a labyrinthian passage similarly shrouded with cockles, whelks, mussels and oyster shells forming intricate mosaics. We still do not know how, or why the grotto came to be nor who is responsible for its creation.
Victorian women made use of their collection in various handicraft projects. Many put together imitation bouquets: using various miniature shells to create the desired flower.
Soon enough collectors, having exhausted the beaches of Britain, took to harvesting more impressive shells from overseas. An army of merchants, catering for the increasing demand, set up shop in London.
The name of the global oil company “Shell” is, oddly enough, a reminder of the victorian love of conchology.
In 1833 one Marcus Samuel opened such a shop selling shells, curios, and other trinkets to natural history enthusiasts. By 1851 Marcus was described in the census as a ‘shell merchant’ and was listed as proprietor of ‘The Shell Shop’ in Houndsditch. He later formed the ‘Shell Transport and Trading Company.’ In 1882 his son (Marcus Junior) while travelling in the Caspian Sea, saw a potential for exporting oil from the region. He commissioned the world’s first purpose-built oil tanker and named the tanker the Murex, Latin for a type of snail shell, as a nod to the company’s beginnings. The first logo (1901) was a mussel shell, but by 1904 it was replaced with a scallop shell.
I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (2.15.1)
In an academic world where we are accustomed to reading multiple works in tandem, where we have to juggle disparate eras, genres, and styles, the opportunity to spend an entire week alone with a single novel is as rare as it is rewarding. This year, for the first time in 36 years, the organisers of Dickens Universe chose to illuminate a single work outside of Dickens’ oeuvre. The spotlight was torn from Charles Dickens and refocused onto his contemporary, George Eliot: zooming in on her meticulous study of provincial life, the once infamous Middlemarch. The chosen text provided us with a sample frame teeming with microscopic particulars and idiosyncratic details – revealing a work that through its focused myopia became known for its expansive influence.
The keynote papers each morning provided us with a centre of illumination with which to interpret Middlemarch: our thoughts and discussions arranging themselves, like the scratches of Eliot’s pier glass, in a series of concentric circles around each speaker’s provocative thesis. The cumulative effect of this was that each of us emerged at the conference’s close with a Venn diagram of overlapping interpretations of the novel that orbited around a constellation of different arguments.
My own thoughts centred around the concept of Middlemarch as text that, as Ruth Livesey put it, ‘flickers between particularity and universalism.’ Alongside Ruth’s talk on the middleness of Middlemarch, Summer Star’s examination of the significance of multitasking in Middlemarch as well as Helen Michie’s paper detailing the value of mid-page lexical forays helped me to foster new ways of thinking about my own work. Helen Michie’s paper, alighting on words such as ‘pilulous’ and ‘privacies,’ demonstrated how to refocus a text through the prism of a single word. – A methodology that yields surprisingly nuanced results and which, I hope, will inform my own research practice.
As Eliot Universe progressed it began to feel as though we had developed our own Middlemarch-esque microcosm, within the web-like redwood forest of Santa Cruz. As cohorts dining and dorming together we embraced a curious pseudo-provinciality. We adopted the same preoccupations: from how to pronounce various character’s names, to the oft heard question – is George Eliot funny (yes!). We shared a sense of collective disorientation, (‘are you lost too?’), and embarked on countless mutual quests (whether to find the Wi-Fi signal, bus stop, or a way to get into the cafeteria early.) Daily afternoon teas, ‘Post-Prandial Potations’, and graduate parties soon resembled Middlemarch’s whispering gallery, so a-buzz was the Eliot Universe hive-mind. Each of these informal events afforded us with the opportunity for countless fruitful discussions, as well as a healthy dose of gossip. Whilst the various workshops encouraged us to pool our collective tips, resources and teaching horror stories.
At times, Dickens Universe feels rather like an exercise in placing academia under the microscope. The occupation can be observed in all its sprawling intensity – as the week progresses, and stories of past and present ‘universes’ are shared between meals, there is a sense that any barriers between the professor and the student have been broken down. It is hard to articulate the nature with which Dickens Universe manages to dispel the hierarchal nature of academia – where other conferences have not. So, I will do as Eliot might, and provide a small anecdote, from which the whole can be expanded. – A quote from renowned Victorianist George Levine, spoken on the last day of Eliot Universe – ‘If you want to get the Ladislaw backstory straight, I recommend Schmoop.”
If you find yourself, much like Eliot’s Lydgate, struggling to escape the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, less the Universe swallow you whole. Then it is important to remember that it is quite impossible to do everything, and take some time to yourself and enjoy Santa Cruz. I myself did as Eliot would and ran away to explore the wonders of the shore at the aquarium – enjoying the opportunity to hold a starfish, stroke a sea anemone, and let time dilate within an undulating jellyfish’s watery whirl.
Dickens Universe, at its core, encourages us to emerge from the Californian redwoods and see the world beyond our own institutions, allowing us to learn from students and staff across the globe. So that we begin to perceive the larger web of scholarship, our own place in it, and how incalculably diffusive it has the potential to be.
An eager student of both the arts and the sciences Beatrix Potter’s childhood was equally enchanted by the discovery of a fairy grotto or a hibernating hedgehog. She drew her own versions of countless fairytales including Cinderella, SleepingBeauty, and Alice’sAdventuresinWonderland and discovered to the world of fairy ‘under the tyranny of [her] cross old nurse’, Anne Mackenzie, who introduced her to ‘witches, fairies and the creed of the terrible John Calvin’. Though the ‘set of fairy tales in thin volumes’ that she dreamt of writing did not come to pass, Potter’s love of combing the countryside for fungi and fairies alike can still be detected in much of her work.
One of her early sketches depicts Cinderella’s iconic pumpkin carriage driven by a pair of smartly dressed mice, each of whom are painstakingly attaching a harness to a fleet of chubby bunny rabbits. The rabbits idly blink their eyes and lick their paws as though quite unaware of the job at hand and liable to forgo their newfound duty under the influence of a ill-placed lettuce patch.
Potter uses a similar technique in her retelling of the little old woman who lived in a shoe – who is, of course, recast as a mouse.
You know the old woman
who lived in a shoe?
And had so many children
She didn’t know what to do?
I think if she lived in
a little shoe-house-
That little old woman was
surely a mouse!
John Everett Millais, the Pre-Raphaelite painter famed for art that entwined the mythic and the natural at a microscopic level (see detail of Ophelia above) was impressed by Beatrix’s drawings as a child, stating, ‘plenty of people can draw but you and my son Johnny have observation.’ Beatrix herself disclosed how her love of detail began in childhood recalling that she could ‘remember quite plainly from the age of one and two years old; not only the facts, like learning to walk, but places and sentiments – the way things impressed a very young child.’
In a letter to Bertha Mahoney Miller, Potter further articulated her desire to make for herself ‘a fairy land amongst the wild flowers, the animals, fungi, mosses, woods and streams, all the thousand objects of the countryside’ and knit together ‘that pleasant unchanging world of realism and romance, which in our northern clime is stiffened by hard weather, a tough ancestry and the strength that comes from the hills’.
Beatrix’s manifesto to unite realism and romance is most explicitly attempted in a little known story named The Fairy Caravan. First published in 1929, it is one of Potter’s later books. And was, by Beatrix’s own admission, never intended to be published at all:
Through many changing seasons these tales have walked and talked with me. They were not meant for printing; I have left them in the homely idiom of our old north country speech. I send them on the insistence of friends beyond the sea.
The story came to her as she walked alone in her beloved Lake District.
In a soft muddy spot on the old drove road I had found a multitude of un-shod footprints, much too small for horses foot marks, much too round for deer or sheep. I wondered were they foot marks of a troupe of fairy riders, riding down old King Gait into Hurd Wood and Hallilands – away into Fairyland and the blue distance of the hills. … The finding of those little fairy foot steps on the old drove road first made me aware of the fairy caravan.
Beatrix’s love of the minute is woven into the narrative of The Fairy Caravan. In the story a miniature travelling circus, drawn by a pony and a highland terrier performs for the animals they pass on their travels, the magic fern seed woven in their hair shielding them from the eyes of humans.
Beatrix’s frequent visits to the Natural History Museum to study the insects demonstrates her ability to reap both a fantastical and factual harvest from nature. Her meticulously detailed microscopic studies, wrought with a dry brush as fine as a cat’s whisker, detail the minute beauty of the most fragile of specimens and convey her wish to see the phantasmagoric realm of fairyland and the realistic wonder of natural history in one vision.
The artist Cicely Mary Barker, best known for her Flower Fairies series has also been likened to Beatrix Potter in the botanical accuracy of the plants and flowers amidst which the fairies dwell. the Victoria and Albert Museum has set up a gorgeous virtual gallery comparing their work. As the V&A notes ‘both were strongly influenced by what Potter described as the Pre-Raphaelites’ ‘niggling but absolutely genuine admiration for copying natural details’.
In 1842, Charles Darwin relocated to the English countryside where he would spend the next seventeen years working on his magnum opus, The Origin of Species.
There he adopted a surprisingly relaxed routine. The following schedule, provided by Francis Darwin, summarises a typical day in his father’s life.
7 a.m. Rose and took a short walk, followed by breakfast.
8a.m. Worked in his study; he considered this his best working time.
9:30 a.m. Went to drawing-room and read his letters, followed by reading aloud of family letters.
10:30 a.m Return to study, the end of his working day.
12 noon Walk, starting with visit to greenhouse, then round the sandwalk, the number of times depending on his health, usually alone or with a dog.
12:45 p.m. Lunch with whole family, which was his main meal of the day.
3 p.m. Rested in his bedroom on the sofa and smoked a cigarette, listened to a novel or other light literature read by ED [Emma Darwin, his wife].
4 p.m. Walk around sandwalk followed by clearing up matters of the day
6 p.m. Rested again in bedroom with ED reading aloud.
7.30 p.m. Light high tea while the family dined. In late years never stayed in the dining room with the men, but retired to the drawing-room with the ladies.
10 p.m. Left the drawing-room and usually in bed by 10:30, but slept badly.
Darwin’s strategy is one of crafted self-possession. He prioritises domestic comfort, time with the family, rambles in the country, and immersing oneself in the sensory world over hard-lined intellectual endurance. His emotional discipline is built on positive rather than negative reinforcement.
Moreover, it likely that this approach was adopted in an effort to maintain both his mental and physical health. As Scott Stossel notes in My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind Darwin’s wellbeing was psychosomatically wed to his work.
Observers going back to Aristotle have noted that nervous dyspepsia and intellectual accomplishment often go hand in hand. Sigmund Freud’s trip to the United States in 1909, which introduced psychoanalysis to this country, was marred (as he would later frequently complain) by his nervous stomach and bouts of diarrhea. Many of the letters between William and Henry James, first-class neurotics both, consist mainly of the exchange of various remedies for their stomach trouble.
But for debilitating nervous stomach complaints, nothing compares to that which afflicted poor Charles Darwin, who spent decades of his life prostrated by his upset stomach.
However this modus operandi not only safeguarded Darwin’s health but also fostered a deep emotional connection with his research.
The personal intimacy intertwined with Darwin’s ‘entangled bank’ resonates within the lucid flow and appreciative tone of his argument.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner.
There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Darwin resists an algorythmic, automatic, or breakneck approach; the symbiotic pleasurehe takes in both his writing and research is tied with his ability to take a moment, breathe, and witness the world in a wider dimension.
This consciousness of place, evolving from a sharpening of vision, and a slowing down of time is a method that can be applied to both natural history and to writing.
If your writing is made up of non-stop, frantic, action with no breathing space at all, then – instead of accelerating your work – you can just create a confusing muddle of disparate ideas.
In a letter to H.W Bates in 1861 Darwin provides a plan for dredging your thoughts out of this primordial soup. Lamenting the sting of labouring ‘very hard and slowly at every sentence’, he admits he sometimes finds style ‘a great difficulty’. His advice to fellow floundering writers is as follows:
I find it a very good plan, when I cannot get a difficult discussion to please me, to fancy that some one comes into the room, & asks me what I am doing; & then try at once & explain to the imaginary person what it is all about.— I have done this for one paragraph to myself several times; & sometimes to Mrs. Darwin, till I see how the subject ought to go.— It is, I think, good to read one’s manuscript aloud.
He also suggests that a writer should power through their piece briskly in order to construct a kind of skeleton argument; noting ‘it is good I think to dash “in medias res”, and work in later any descriptions of country or any historical details which may be necessary.’
Darwin, unsurprisingly, encourages writers to work with (rather than against) the natural selection process. Adam Gopnik in Angels and Ages: A Short Book about Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life explores Darwin’s strategy for adapting his argument to different environments. Short of growing gills, or developing the ability to camouflage, Gopnik describes Darwin’s power to create ‘a book that is one long provocation in the guise of being none.’ Gopnik notes that the habit of “sympathetic summary,” what philosophers now call the “principle of charity,” is essential to all the sciences and traces the the heart of Darwin’s rhetorical power with his ability to preemptively defend his ideas.
A counterargument to your own should first be summarized in its strongest form, with holes caulked as they appear, and minor inconsistencies or infelicities of phrasing looked past. Then, and only then, should a critique begin. This is charitable by name, selfishly constructive in intent: only by putting the best case forward can the refutation be definitive. The idea is to leave the least possible escape space for the “but you didn’t understand…” move. Wiggle room is reduced to a minimum.
All of what remain today as the chief objections to his theory are introduced by Darwin himself, fairly and accurately, and in a spirit of almost panicked anxiety — and then rejected not by bullying insistence but by specific example, drawn from the reservoir of his minute experience of life. This is where we get it all wrong if we think that Wallace might have made evolution as well as Darwin; he could have written the words, but he could not have answered the objections. He might have offered a theory of natural selection, but he could never (as he knew) have written On the Origin of Species. For The Origin is not only a statement of a thesis; it is a book of answers to questions that no one had yet asked, and of examples answering those still faceless opponents.
Darwin rhetoric not only predicates an opposing argument but inhabits it with all the fidelity and spirit of one who truly holds such an intellectual position. The survival of his thesis is won on the field of intellectual empathy, within the privacy of his own work, rather than through an indelicate fight to the death played out in the public arena.
Thus, Darwin teaches us that, in an effort to make sure that your work does not go the way of the dodo – and become usurped by an argument better suited to the wider intellectual climate – it is worthwhile to adapt your methodology and anticipate arguments in order to survive.
In the spirit of this philosophy, I think it is important to remember that such advice is worthless if you do not possess the tenacity to actually write the damn thing – intellectual stagnation, masquerading as perfectionism, is an all too common affliction of writers and researcher’s alike – Darwin himself after all did take over two decades to produce Origin, in equal parts due to academic ambivalence and an eight year sojourn to study barnacles.
Sandlewalk Wood by Simon Kregar (2012)
Scott Stossel, My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind (London William Heinemann, 2014)
Charles Darwin On the Origin of Species, (Oxford Classics, 2008)
[ illustrations ‘Cold Wind’ & ‘Fake it till you make it’ by Rovina Cai]
As the only Victorian medical student at the time to graduate without having experimented on a single animal, a theosophist, who believed in knowledge of God through spiritual ecstasy, a spiritualist who communed with Anne Boleyn, (her supposed ancestor), and a proponent of animal and women’s rights who fiercely denounced vivisection – Anna Kingsford, traversed all manner of Victorian debates. She is, however, surprisingly absent from academic scholarship.
As a child Anna spent her time in her father’s library, alternately conversing with flowers or with fairies; she was a ‘born seer…seeing apparitions and divining the characters and fortunes of people.’ Her psychic abilities became linked from a young age to her kinship with animals. Deborah Rudacille notes that as a child, Kingsford enjoyed foxhunting, until one day she had a vision of herself as the fox.
Anna Kingsford 16 September 1846 – 22 February 1888
In order to escape unwanted suitors, when she was twenty-one she married her cousin, an Anglican clergyman named Algernon Kingsford, on the condition that she would continue to lead a fully autonomous life. Rereading their early courtship letters later in life she bemusedly notes ‘they are full of declarations that my chief reason for marrying was to be independent and free!’ Shortly after her marriage, after dreaming of a visit from Mary Magdalene, Kingsford converted to Catholicism. Her husband respected her independence and supported her in her choices, as well as in her later conversion to theosophy – on the grounds that it promoted gender equality.
In these years of spiritual conversion, Kingsford became a feminist and vegetarian; in 1872 she bought The Lady’s Own Paper, and took up work as its editor, becoming acquainted with the famous writer, feminist, and anti-vivisectionist Frances Power Cobbe.
In 1873 Anna enrolled for medical study in Paris in order to acquire the scientific knowledge to argue against vivisection and advocate a vegetarian diet. Her final thesis, L’Alimentation Végétale de l’Homme, was on the benefits of vegetarianism, published in English as The Perfect Way in Diet (1881).
‘Grand Show of Prize Vegetarians’ by John Leech Punch (1852)
Kingsford wrote to her husband in 1874:
Things are not going well for me. My chef at the Charité strongly disapproves of women students and took this means of showing it. About a hundred men (no women except myself) went round the wards today, and when we were all assembled before him to have our names written down, he called and named all the students except me, and then closed the book. I stood forward upon this, and said quietly, “Et moi aussi, monsieur.” [And me, Sir.] He turned on me sharply, and cried, “Vous, vous n’êtes ni homme ni femme; je ne veux pas inscrire vôtre nom.” [You, you are neither man nor woman; I don’t want to write your name.] I stood silent in the midst of a dead silence.
In 1877, After listening to one of her instructors, Dr. Claude Bernard, exhorting slowly baking live animals to death in order to study body heat, Anna, flew from her seat, labeled her teacher ‘Murderer!’ and refused to return to the classroom. Sickened by Parisian animal experimentation, (she wrote of ‘trying vainly to shut out the piteous shrieks and cries which floated incessantly towards [her] up the staircase’ at night) Anna arranged for private tuition and refused to dissect a single animal. In an effort to ‘root this curse of torture’, she habitually volunteered herself for dissection so that the doctors would leave the animals alone.
Soon after her exchange with Dr. Claude Bernard, Anna records feeling as though she became ‘a spiritual thunderbolt’ who, with all her might, willed the doctor dead. Soon after this episode, and after fainting from the extent of her fury, Kingsford wrote to Maitland (her confidante and later biographer) of the doctor’s sudden death:
‘Woe be to the torturers! I will make it dangerous, nay, deadly, to be a vivisector. It is the only argument that will affect them. Meanwhile, thank God the head of the gang is dead!’
Spellbound by her extrasensory powers, Kingsford set her sights on Dr. Paul Bert, ‘the most notorious of the vivisecting fraternity’, a doctor known for keeping all who slept by his laboratory awake with the cries of semi-dissected animals. After Dr. Bert died in November 1886 Kingsford wrote again of her triumph:
I have killed Paul Bert, as I killed Claude Bernard; as I will kill Louis Pasteur, and after him the whole tribe of vivisectors – it is a magnificent power to have, and one that transcends all vulgar methods of dealing out justice to tyrants.
Fortunately for Louis Pasteur, Kingsford’s psychic homicide ‘took from [her] nervous force’; after being caught in rainstorm (whilst investigating Pasteur’s laboratory) Kingsford developed pneumonia, and later tuberculosis. She died on February 22, 1888 spending her final days, according to her friend Sir Richard Burton, ‘suffering in mind and soul’ ‘at the sights and sounds connected with Parisian vivisection.’
Maitland, Edward, Anna Kingsford: Her Life, Letters, Diary and Work, 2 Vols. (Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2003)
To be kept up to date on new posts from The Cabinet of Curiosity subscribe by WordPress or follow me on Twitter @rosalindmwhite.
he takes in both his writing and research is tied with his ability to take a moment, breathe, and witness the world in a wider dimension.
