The Romance of Victorian Natural History

The nineteenth century is frequently referred to as the golden age of the amateur naturalist. This study focuses on how the enthusiasm for natural history in the 19th century produced characteristic ways of conceptualizing and visualizing the world--especially the Victorian fascination with particulars-- as frequently seen in Victorian poetry, fiction, history, and textual studies. Arguing for natural history as an influential literary genre, Merrill examines the language and recurrent motifs in Victorian and some American natural history texts-- metaphors of keen vision, preoccupation with scale, and motifs of microscopes, museums, and collecting--and surveys the works of Philip Henry Gosse, Charles Kingsley, Hugh Miller, and John Burroughs.