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March 26, 2008
Fact checking Richard Conniff’s March story on the natural history craze in 1770s London, “That Great Beast of a Town,” did something that nothing in my prior education was able to do: it made me fall in love with the 18th century.
As an English major I’d always thought of it as a century of Whigs in wigs; of ornate political oratory and Pope-ish poetical pomposity (pssst—Pope’s a lot better than I thought he was); a century enamored of Reason, and for just that reason, casting a long dark shadow which—if you looked again—was a pool of blood under the guillotine. Americans, having gotten the bright side of that bargain, might owe a debt of gratitude to the revolutionary 18th century, but in literature it seemed reactionary—a long, formal dry spell between the Renaissance and the Romantics that only began to break with Blake.
But if the century was a period of retrenchment for the English language, Conniff shows that for science, it was an electrifying leap forward—literally, since electricity both in the sky and in the bodies of living creatures was a subject of intense interest. The arrival in London of four preserved electric eels (actually knifefish, Electrophorus electricus) from Suriname, and later of several live ones, attracted a cast of characters who embodied the vitality and contradictions of science at this early stage, when it was not quite yet a specialized profession but still a hands-on aristocratic hobby and popular craze.
- John Hunter was a Scotland-born, self-educated anatomist and pioneering surgeon who dissected live animals and cadavers stolen from graveyards by hired gangs of body snatchers (there was no other way to get them) in his driven quest to understand the body. With his own personal menagerie and museum, and a house divided between his wife’s salon in front and a virtual abbatoir in the rear, he was the likely model for both Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Doolittle. Hunter’s biographer, Wendy Moore (The Knife Man), wrote, “The [latter] theory is supported . . . by a letter from Hunter when asked for his view by Edward Jenner on a patient . . . his reply was, ‘I believe the best thing you can do is to do little.’”
- John Walsh was a genteelly born member of Parliament who got interested in natural history in India while making his fortune in the administration of the East India Company. He later communicated with Benjamin Franklin about his experiments on the European torpedo fish or ray, a milder shocker than the eel—experiments that “influenced later work on animal electricity by the likes of Henry Cavendish, Alexander von Humboldt and Michael Faraday and . . . Galvani’s research into the role of electricity in nerve and muscle physiology,” which was not only the precursor of neurophysiology, but led Alessandro Volta to invent the battery, “in imitation of the electric organ of the torpedo fish.”
- Sir Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander, good friends, had been the naturalists on the expedition of Captain Cook’s Endeavour to South America, Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia (1768–1771). Banks, born to wealth, was a botanist, patron of science, devotee of the new Linnaean classification system, and president of the Royal Society for over forty years. Solander was Swedish-born, a student of Linnaeus dispatched to London as a sort of scientific missionary. Solander stayed, finding London’s cosmopolitan bustle and lifeline to the naturalist’s treasure trove of empire more congenial than the austere university town of Uppsala.
- Sir Ashton Lever, a member of the landed gentry from Manchester and a compulsive collector of curiosities, compiled an astonishing and goofy museum, the “Holophusicon.” In an early tremor of the coming split between scientific enthusiasts and professionals, Joseph Banks, one gossip wrote, “hated Sir Ashton Lever and therefore hates his collection," organized as it was along Ripleyan (as in “Believe It Or Not”), not Linnaean, lines.
- George Stubbs, a scientist-artist, anatomist and one of the greatest animal painters of all time, may be the most amazing of all. The son of a Liverpool tanner, the largely self-taught Stubbs made his living doing horse and dog portraiture for the nobility, but also painted wild animals in commercial and private menageries every chance he got. He was a friend of Banks, who commissioned him to make the first depiction of a kangaroo from a skin and skull brought back from Australia, and of Hunter, many of whose exotic animals he painted by request. Among his greatest achievements are his painstaking anatomical studies of the horse and his comparison of the eerily similar structures beneath the skins of chicken, tiger, and man. While most scientists of the 18th century believed in what we would call intelligent design—they called it natural theology—Stubbs and Hunter, who also focused on comparative anatomy, were definitely teetering on the Darwinian brink.
It was probably England’s empire, together with its native mercantile empiricism, that made London the cradle of natural history. As Richard Conniff writes, new wonders were being brought back from the Americas, India, and the South Pacific, almost demanding new ways of thinking to encompass them. Yet what a small world of London cognoscenti confronted that big world. One of George Stubbs’s most famous paintings is a life study of a powerful tigress that had been a gift to the fourth Duke of Marlborough from Lord Robert Clive, the Governor of Bengal (whose private secretary for a time had been John Walsh). Stubbs’s painting was exhibited at the Society of Artists of Great Britain in 1769, in the same building where a twelve-year-old boy named William Blake was just then taking drawing classes. Blake scholar Kathleen Raine suspects that Blake’s “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright” was that tigress, sprung from Stubbs’ canvas into the forming artist’s brain.
Monsters on Maps: You can glimpse 16th- and 17th-century European fantasies of the New World on the Web page of historian of cartography Surekha Davies.
Blemmys
Early illustrated maps were not navigational tools, but visual encyclopedias. Often described in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as mirrors or theatres, they provided rulers, merchants and scholars with information about the peoples, commodities and natural history of distant lands.
The Natural History of Selborne: Journals of the 18th-century naturalist Gilbert White, who called London “that great beast of a town.” Till Harry Potter came along, this was the fourth most published book in English:
In the 219 years since its publication, The Natural History of Selborne has never been out of print [in an] almost Biblical number of editions and translations — White is especially big in Japan . . . . White has the strange power to make natural historians of his readers.
The online version is organized according to today’s date. He’s a marvelous observer:
- March 31, 1769 — Small flights of snow. . . .
- March 31, 1771 — The face of the earth naked to a surprising degree. Wheat hardly to be seen, & no signs of any grass: turneps all gone, & sheep in a starving way. All provisions rising in price. Farmers cannot sow for want of rain.
More on George Stubbs. The online magazine Slate posted a nine-part illustrated introduction to his life and work, on the occasion of last year’s Frick Museum exhibition on the bicentennial of Stubbs’ death.
(Annie Gottlieb) |
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