The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium, and: Fathoming the Ocean: The Discovery and Exploration of the Deep Sea (review)

In his 1851 novel Moby-Dick Herman Melville wrote that "to landsmen in general, the native inhabitants of the seas have ever been regarded with emotions unspeakably unsocial and repelling" ([Barnes and Noble, 1994] 275). The ocean, to Melville, was anti-human as well as unknown and unknowable, an "everlasting terra incognita" made up of "numberless unknown worlds" that even a celebrated champion of new worlds like Christopher Columbus sailed over in complete ignorance, only "to discover his one superficial western one." Ironically, Melville was affirming the mysteries of the watery deep in an age otherwise determined to unveil them: all around him he was witnessing a massive change in sentiment regarding the ocean world, which made the sea more familiar and increasingly domesticated, turning it into a scene of popular entertainment and scientific study. Both books under review here chart the rise of interest in the submarine world during Victorian times by examining two different but related phenomena. Bernd Brunner's The Ocean at Home addresses the invention and conceptual development of the aquarium, while Helen M. Rozwadowski's Fathoming the Ocean focuses on the scientific exploration of the underwater world, which eventually led to the establishment of modern disciplines such as oceanography and marine zoology.

The aquarium, Brunner reports, required three separate "seeds" to be conceptually possible in the nineteenth century: first, the "demystification of the deep sea" (15), which until then was "a place of great fear" (9), believed to be barren and lifeless; second, the systematic collecting of marine objects such as shells, corals, and underwater plants in renaissance-style "cabinets of wonder" or display cases; and third, the keeping of "pet fish," a tradition with roots in ancient times that became popular in Japan from c. 1500 and even earlier in China, where goldfish were kept in small bowls and tanks from the tenth century onwards. The neologism "aquarium" was coined in 1854 by Philip Henry Gosse, who suggested that its salt and freshwater varieties be distinguished from the "vivarium," a tank for snakes and amphibians. As a concept, the aquarium proved so compelling that the word took hold immediately in the Victorian imagination, though the initial fascination with home aquaria in the 1850s—accompanied by the founding of aquarist societies and magazines in Europe and the US—quickly died down, only to flare up again later in the century in the form of large public aquaria that could be found in most European capitals and many US cities.

Just what was (and is) the source of that fascination? An aquarium is an entirely artificial construct, based on the idea that submarine life can be recreated in a closed tank as a tiny and self-contained ecosystem, thus making accessible a mysterious (and perhaps forbidden) world beyond the reach of humankind. The notion appealed to Victorian nature enthusiasts, fostered the belief that the ultimate conquest of nature is possible, and allowed a brief glimpse of the eternity of creation. Today the trade in tropical fish is big business, and largely an environmental disaster. In his last chapter, Brunner briefly touches on the commercial imperative behind the continued attraction of the aquarium in the west, but on the whole his book is dedicated less to critical questioning than to factual summaries and ample illustrations. The incessant classifying and ordering of a seemingly chaotic nature, for instance, as well as the aestheticization of fish and other marine organisms, put on display behind glass panes and thus encouraging the voyeuristic gaze at the exotic, surely suggest links with other Victorian activities in the imperial arena—but such wider cultural contexts are never explored in this book.

In Fathoming the Ocean, Rozwadowski concerns...