Article Excerpt
TO THE MAJORITY OF LITERARY SCHOLARS, THE FIELDS OF ROMANTIC LIFE science remain, along with their speculative import for future inquiry, subjects at once peripheral, discrete, and arcane. Published work on romantic life science by literary scholars even in recent years has been constrained, understandably, by the need to address the canonical writers and their somewhat familiar scientific associations--to Wordsworth's reading of Erasmus Darwin on the senses and his use of geometric symbols; to Coleridge's evocations of German natural philosophy and his interest in Blumenbach's theory of race; to Blake and prevailing theories of generation; to Byron, Cuvier and the catastrophists' obsession with revolutionary chaos; to the Shelleys, Davy's chemistry, Erasmus Darwin's botany, and vegetarianism; to Mary Shelley, monstrosity and obstetrics; to Keats, brain physiology and radical medicine. (1) Surely romantic life science deserves more, and more ranging, attention from us? And surely there could be many more studies of the literary consequences of this fertile science as we address an expanded canon? This essay, with collegial exhortation, will survey those subjects and avenues in the fields of romantic life science that can be mined, fruitfully, in future literary and cultural studies of the period. It will propose topics that are broadly philosophical as well as those that are specific to a given science; it will note exemplary but neglected work from the 1990s and earlier decades that remains both useful and seminal, along with primary bibliographical sources that can support future work; it will also attempt to shift the focus of inquiry away from the canonical and anglocentric to the pioneering scientific ideas shared by English and European life scientists of the period, and to the unexplored cultural concerns engendered by their speculations and propositions concerning life.

The Romantic Conception of Life (2003) by Robert J. Richards, with its wide-ranging and original discussions of the subject, is an ideal place to begin further study. Greg Garrard's 1997 essay, meanwhile, serves as an exemplary piece on the broad and speculative implications for the romantic period of botanical natural history detail. Impossibly titled "An Absence of Azaleas: Imperialism, Exoticism and Nativity in Romantic Biogeographical Ideology," Garrard's essay is an ingenious evocation of the social and political implications of the humble but originally exotic rhododendron in Britain. Brought to England from Asia (purportedly) in 1763 as a curious shrub, cultivated at Kew Gardens that soon-to-be "synecdoche of empire" among other "exotics" from British trading places, hybridized and introduced into the British countryside of Cumberland and Snowdonia during the romantic period, the rhododendron is now considered an alien junk weed (in all its nine hundred varieties!) by English Heritage gardeners; it is at once too native to English soil and not British enough in its origins; a harmful consequence of experiments in colonial hybridity, it is something to be rooted out or "clensed" from the Lake District. (2) Natural historian Carl Linnaeus deserves first blame here for he, first, sought to grow bananas, coffee and other tropical fruits in frigid Sweden, and lusted for coconuts that would sprout in Nordic air--as he declared, "should coconuts chance to come into my hands ... it would be as if fried Birds of Paradise flew into my throat when I opened my mouth." In Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (2000) Lisbet Koerner traces how Linnaeus sought to feed Sweden's peasants and advance his nation's natural history and gustatory empire through the agriculture of exotic fruits. Koerner's research is useful in its implications here because British natural historians followed Linnaeus' example in exotic cultivation, and they specifically used his theory of gradual acclimatization in alien environments for their own experiments in adaptation. (3)

Linnaean trials of acclimatization were preceded, of course, by the easy transportation of living plants between parallel geographies and conducive climates by the botanists of the Portuguese and Spanish empires. Tobacco and red chili plants from the Americas, and peanut and sweet potato tubers from Africa, brought to the Moghul court in sixteenth-century India by the Portuguese, found an immediate home in the subcontinent and soon came to flourish as "native" plants and indispensable agricultural products of the country to later generations and conquerors. The pineapple, "discovered" in 1513 in South America by "stout Cortez" and brought to Europe as the most succulent of exotic fruits, also found cultivation through Portuguese husbandry in the orchards of Madras and a favored place on the Moghul emperor Jehangir's breakfast table (4)--even as it began its inexorable passage from mere gustatory delight to become that symbol of fertility and connubial bliss used to decorate the bedposts of Victorian Britain. The stories of the cotton seed, the rubber plant, the Asian poppy flower, and the quinine tree (like the stories of breadfruit and sugarcane), stories which began in earlier centuries and then came to have special import in a romantic and increasingly imperial Britain, have yet to be written. Also yet to be traced in broad literary and cultural terms are the passages of botanical forms such as these between Britain's colonies, their movement from exotic wonder to useful colonial product, and from fond hybrid to noxious import, each according to the shifting political and social (and medical) imperatives of empire and its aftermath.

The cargo of the H.M.S. Bounty--whose mutinous crew found poetic immortality in Byron's tale of utopian ambiguity and Englishmen homesick in paradise (The Island, 1823)--was an uprooted forest of breadfruit trees from Tahiti. These trees, carefully bound and watered and far more valuable than any human cargo, were intended for transplanting and cultivation in the Caribbean islands, and they stand as substance and symbol of a widespread romantic familiarity with the practices of inter-colonial acculturation by contemporary botanists and natural historians. When Sir Joseph Banks became President of the Royal Society in 1778, he made his office the official repository of exotic specimens from South America, Asia and Africa; he actively solicited from travelers like Alexander von Humboldt and missionaries like Reginald Heber those specimens of rare exotic life intensely poisonous plants, brilliant tropical mollusks, giant Pacific clams, iridescent geiger-tree beetles, deadly electric eels--culled dead or alive, and then disseminated these remarkable items among British laboratories and gardens for study and cultivation. Kew Gardens, under Banks's supervision between 1772 and 1820, served as a botanical clearing house and advanced laboratory for the thousands of new plants arriving in Britain during each shipment cycle. Banks's journal of the trip to the South Pacific on the H.M.S. Endeavour with Captain Cook 0768-71) and his Florilegium or survey of the plants collected (often by stealth) during that voyage, continue as a resource to be mined for issues of acculturation and transport during the romantic decades that followed (5) Banks's archives and correspondence from his years at the helm of the Royal Society, meanwhile, serve as an even larger treasury of literary consequence: they are a largely untouched resource on contemporary literary and scientific friendships and cultivations, even as they mark a pattern of political exchanges and imperial adaptations and expansions during the romantic period. The singular and hermaphroditic aloe plant that blooms unloved to transfix an entire society in Maria Edgeworth's 180I novel Belinda, and the prickly pineapple that functions like a fertility grenade altogether too hot to handle in Amelia Opie's 1805 novel Adeline Mowbray--two small examples from hardly canonical works--might not have existed to work their literary charm and stand as colonial markers and cultural portents without Banks's actual and voracious cultivation of exotic botanical life from across the globe wherever Britain could and would rule.

Susan Minter's recent history of the Chelsea Physic Garden (The Apothecaries' Garden, 2000) can serve as a useful supplement to similar literary and cultural inquiries of botanical and natural history. Minter, in 1991, was the first woman to be appointed Curator of the London apothecaries' teaching physic garden, which was founded in 1763; her book is both thorough as a history of the living botanical pharmacy and suggestive in its social and cultural anecdotes of the garden's growth and participation in political upheavals over the years. In the Chelsea Garden's plantings of medicinal botanicals gathered from forests and fields across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, in the biological methods that its gardeners used to crossbreed and acclimatize seedlings, in the inventive devices developed to transport living plants of chemical "interest" between gardens and continents (like the ingenious "Wardian Glass" used for plants transported on ship-deck), (6) and in the extraordinary growth of the garden's working laboratory during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we can find the multivalent signposts of British explorations, social demarcations, economic policies, and colonial expansions. And, because a furtive and somewhat silly sexuality is never far from the language and observations of botany, we can also find revealing traces of the prevailing sexual politics of exclusion. As, for example, when the natural historian William Smellie in the Encyclopedia Britannica of 1804 described the metaphors of Linnaean botany as more indelicate than those of Monk Lewis and the "most obscene" romance writers of the period; or when the most reverend Richard Polwhele, in his The Unsex'd Females (1798), described Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of Plants (1789) as an audacious Jacobin tract that fostered dangerous and immodest desires in young ladies.

To the subject of sexual poetics and sexual politics in the romantic period addressed by Ann Shteir (Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science, 1996) and others (7) can be added the more focused issue of gender exclusions to botanical medical knowledge. Minter tells us that for the first century of the Chelsea Physic Garden's existence women were not permitted access to it. In 1870, when this restriction was removed to facilitate a study of botany now deemed a domestic science suitable for the female mind (especially the botany of culinary and aromatic herbs), the archival and planting areas devoted to medical substance and exotic cultivation were kept off-limits to women visitors and remained exclusive masculine ground until well into the twentieth century. Charlotte Lennox, in her 1790 novel Euphemia, describes the ridicule reserved for those women who would cross the barriers and seek empirical medical knowledge of plant and animal: the botanist, Lady Cornelia Classick, is ridiculed as an unchaste and "scientific ... Diana of our forests"; the biologist, Miss Sanford, is called an "Amazonian" "military" doctor, a female shaman, or shameless shaman, of the Amazon forest. Both women scientists are characterized by the male characters in Euphemia as unnatural examples of female selfhood--at once mannish, immodest, lesbian, too-fond of an implicitly lascivious bareback tiding, and given to serpentine lurkings in the woods. (8)

Colin Pedley's 1990 essay on William Blake's "The Tyger," and contemporary zoological descriptions and engravings of tigers, is another fine example of how the detailed specifics of a romantic life science--this time, romantic biology or zoology--can open up inquiry into a broad spectrum of subjects for literary scholars. Pedley evokes Thomas Bewick's description of the Indian tiger as bloodthirsty and wantonly cruel in his General History of Quadrupeds (1790), and Buffon's "natural" history of the creature as bloodthirsty and cruel but also untamable, irrational, unnatural, and deformed (in Smellie's translation, Buffon's Natural History, General and Particular, 1780). He notes that the accompanying illustrations to these texts largely match the pose (but not the smile) of Blake's engraving to propose that Blake uses their popular example and pictured subject to advance a different and distinct sublime, and fearful, symmetry in nature, even as the poet rejects these naturalists' hierarchical theology and moral disparagement of alien creatural forms. (9) In the pre-evolutionary thinking of Buffon and others, horses could be taught, tamed and made useful by enlightened man, but tigers were distinctly "other" and definitely beyond the moral and rational pale. in the evolutionary thinking of romantic scientists and artists, the boundaries of the rational were ever fluid and elastic, as much between the animals as between the human genders.

The inspiration--and challenge--of alien and exotic zoologies suddenly available during the romantic period, complete with drawings and colored engravings, is a huge subject with a potentially vast interdisciplinary interest. The naturalist and antiquarian Thomas Pennant, for example, who published a British Zoology in 1766 and an Arctic Zoology in 1784, began compiling material for his lengthy Indian Zoology (1790) as early as 1769; he used a vast array of published and oral firsthand accounts, and shared his materials with friends. For example we find Anna Laetitia Barbauld, whose brother was a close friend of Pennant's, using conversational notes of Pennant's material for her poem, "India" (180I). (10) Pennant's sources were traditional ones, like Buffon's natural history of quadrupeds, but also contemporary reports of sports-hunting in the Bengali Sunderbans published in popular London journals, as well as first-hand accounts of unusual creatures published in Asiatick Researches, the working journal of the Asiatick Society of Calcutta. Sir William Jones, well before he formulated his concept of Sanskrit as an originary language and used a romantic biological concept to diagram the special connections and diversities of the Indo-European languages, had fostered these zoological and botanical studies by Asiatick Society members and their Indian advisers. Jones himself contributed new entries to existing species lists and cultivated seedlings of unknown type for later shipment to Kew Gardens; and he was particularly interested in those animals and plants--slow-motioned lemurs, sensitive cave ferns, altruistic vultures, hermaphroditic cats--that defied the classifications of Linnaeus and Buffon, undid the order of prevailing types, and revolutionized the very possibility of abstract classification by actual variety. (11) The new romantic science of comparative zoology, drawn and defined by physiological evolutionists like William Lawrence (with some help from Blumenbach and Bichat) (12) was altered and expanded immeasurably by exotic contributions such as these--with inevitable and large cultural consequence for the natural history of man, and for the disintegration of this history, in an imperial age, into false and unnatural histories that used notions of stagnation, retardation, degradation, and devolution to distinguish others from ourselves.

We might stop and consider here the anarchic implications--at the very moment when romantic scientists seek to define their particular brand of new life sciences like biology and zoology, to delineate the ecologies of these sciences, and to establish the particular perspective and discourse for each that will distinguish them from more general eighteenth-century sciences like natural philosophy and theoretical (Galenic) medicine (13)--of the sheer volume of distracting and complicating substances arriving at the London docks from abroad to challenge all attempts at clarification and specialization. Prime Minister William Pitt's husbandry of British interests abroad from 1784 on brought, among many other consequences, a plethora of exotic goods delivered by the shipload to British shores, goods destined indiscriminately for laboratories, gardens, travelling exhibitions, village fairs, and fashionable houses across Britain. In the year 1794 alone, as records at the Museum of the Docklands in London show, three thousand six hundred and sixty-three ships from foreign ports docked in London with a total tonnage of 620,000 units. The West India docks, built at the turn of the century to receive the goods of empire soon had godowns filled to capacity, and a new and more capacious East India dock was built in 1803 to meet the ever-expanding needs of colonial tonnage. Over one hundred East India Company ships plied the seas between Britain and Asia annually by the start of the nineteenth century, a tenfold increase over the ten ships sent to India and China each year in the early eighteenth century. (14) Cargo lists of the period itemize not just edenic and peculiar fruits and plants, but songbirds and hummingbirds, big cats and tiny simians, mongoose pups and bandicouts--some alive in cages, others preserved or stuffed--and an unassorted diversity of skin, fur, teeth, skeletons, and fossils, from southeast Asia, south America, China, and north Africa. It was enlightened to have the prevailing classifications of nature challenged and expanded by reported encounters of greater diversity abroad. It was quite another (and revolutionary) matter to have an overwhelming volume of unassimilated--and inassimilable--oddities and unknowns bury all familiar and preconceived classification.

The curiosity or virtuoso cabinets popular in aristocratic houses during the later eighteenth century soon burgeoned in size to hold the goods brought back from Cook's South Pacific and Clive's India, and the romantic era soon saw not only large private museums like John Hunter's, but large institutional museums intended for public showings. When Sir Ashton Lever liquidated his collection known as the Leverian Museum in 1806, the stuffed and preserved items on auction included sixteen hundred cases of birds, a baby elephant, a Tahitian dog, twenty-five serpents, five sea monsters, an eleven-foot swordfish, the heads of two South Pacific chieftains, and a roomful of monkeys posed at human tasks. William Bullock purchased most of these items at the auction in order to combine them with the contents of his own Liverpool Museum for future exhibition at his London Museum and Egyptian Hall under construction in Piccadilly. Visitors to Bullock's Museum, which opened in 1812 with holdings touted in its printed guide as "upwards of Fifteen Thousand Natural and Foreign Curiosities [and] Antiquities," (15) included all the major romantic figures from Walter Scott to Jane Austen; and in 1820 when Benjamin Robert Haydon exhibited his Christ's Triumphal Entry into Jerusalem at the Museum's Egyptian Hall, the painting appeared amid what remained of the assorted creatures and hybrid dioramas of Bullock's unnatural histories.

As public interest and the venues for seeing amalgamated collections of "natural and foreign curiosities" grew, so also did the availability of spillover items from these collections for use as piquant decorations--at once real and seemingly unnatural--for the drawing-rooms of romantic and pre-Victorian Britain. In Susan Ferrier's 1818 novel, Marriage, Mr. Shaggs the decorator offers Lady Juliana "some uncommon elegant articles" picked just for her tastes from "a set of fresh commodities just cleared from the custom-house," ".jars, teapots, mandarins, sea-monsters, and pugdogs." These imported curios procured for the London society ladies to quarrel over are china reproductions of exotic creatures at once monstrous and cute, and they come complete with fictitious provenances: a frog of Turkish agate from the seraglio of a widowed Sultana, a Chinese cripple from a mandarin's collection of beggars, a "set of puggies" from an Indian temple that are uglier and sillier than their British lapdog counterparts. Zoological commodities like these follow in perspective the English abigail's characterization early in the novel of Lady Juliana's Scottish in-laws as "a set of Oaten-toads"--oat-eating toads of unknown provenance and hybridity, or small Hottentots in a dark but northern land. All these are signposts to remind us that Ferrier's entire novel is cast as a natural history of Englishmen and Scotsmen, biologically-driven misalliances, and the female Anglo-Scot crossbreeds who are born of mixed marriages and live to rue with high cultural anxiety the complexities of their hybrid condition) (16)

"Mr. Godwin is at best but a mongrel, or an exotick; he is grafted upon the stock of a Condorcet, and of the French rabble on French ground; but he has not even the raciness of that teeming soil," Thomas James Mathias declares in his Fourth Dialogue of The Pursuit of Literature (1794-97). (17) Mathias' biological metaphor for an unacceptable political hybrid mixes with righteous Tory glee curiosities of romantic life science with prevailing definitions of what might be mongrel, or exotic, or racy. His satirical exploitation of the slippage between biological labels and popular biases joins and highlights the romantic era's fascination with monstrous creations of all stripe. At the start of the nineteenth century every major scientific collection had a special and much viewed area devoted to lusus naturae or the unusual, sportive, malformed, or imperfect conceptions of nature. Two-headed geese, double-mouthed puppies, three-legged chickens, five-headed mice, and eight-legged pigs could be found in every natural history collection and traveling freak show, even as the medical centers of London and Edinburgh held teaching collections of fetal oddities, congenital malformations and pathological tumors that demonstrated to the students of life those occasions of a too-fertile or deranged variety in nature. Romantic monster-making, especially as it applies to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and other works of fictive difference, has been well served by scholars over the years, but the very large subject of profound accident or misconception in nature, in all its political, ethical, visual, and imaginative implications and uses, has only barely been addressed. (18)

Helen, the rational heroine of Maria Edgeworth's novel of that name (1834), thinks clearly to the point of rash misconception, and she uses "a sort of intuitive perception" to comprehend the world of men that takes its cue from the classifications of human natural history: "as Cuvier could tell from the first sight of a single bone what the animal was, what were its habits, and to what class it belonged, so any person early used to good company can, by the first gesture, the first general manner of being, passive or active, tell whether a stranger, even scarcely seen, is or is not a gentleman." (19) In a 1994 essay Heinz-Joachim Mullenbrock makes a case for the treatment of history as contemporary natural history in Walter Scott's novels, (20) and this approach can be extended, certainly, as we trace elements from Scottish Enlightenment theories (especially those of Lord Kames) of the history of man in the later novels, and follow intriguing suggestions that Scott may well have anticipated later European "human scientist" novelists like Balzac and Zola. Edgeworth and other women historical novelists of the romantic period, perhaps because of their re-examination of traditional or male history, carry even more potential on this subject through their conscious engagement with the issues of natural history,...