Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (review)

Illustration is a tricky business. Literally meaning to bring to light, the traditional sense of illustration as exemplification affirms its formal property as a visual, mimetic, or dramatic mode of presentation, often but not always existing with reference to the written word. But does an image intensify or attenuate the rhetorical power of a text by illustrating the object of study, making present what was absent? This is an oft-debated question, which contains the assumption that everything can be illustrated and brings the complexity of the relation of image to word into sharp relief. It is also the underlying question of Jonathan Smith's interesting new book, which documents the problems Charles Darwin faced in trying to find a visual register to express his evolutionary theory. Drawing on some of Darwin's lesser-known works on barnacles (1851), orchids (1862), climbing plants (1865), flowers (1877), and worms (1881) as well, of course, as On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Smith carefully explores the correspondences between the written texts and the many images chosen to illustrate them. The difficulty of giving shape to an abstraction like the theory of natural selection was, he contends, a basic but not insurmountable problem: "how could natural selection, a concept almost by definition impossible to illustrate directly, be illustrated, especially when the existing visual conventions of the natural sciences were associated in varying degrees with conceptions of species fixity?" (1). The solution, it seems, was to manipulate and modify the traditional presentational modes of natural history, pushing against fixity by employing illustrations to capture transformative acts of violence and reproduction in man, animals, and plants and thereby strengthen the claims for natural selection.

Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture is a lavishly illustrated book, and fittingly so, from the glorious front cover featuring Philip Henry Gosse's "The Plumrose Anemone" to the variety of animal and botanical illustrations—ninety-seven in all. It offers a fresh perspective on Darwin by juxtaposing insights into the publishing history of his books with interpretations, often compelling, of the images used to accompany the texts. And yet it is not only a book about Darwin but also John Ruskin, who figures prominently in six of the seven chapters as the major authority on Victorian visual culture and prominent antagonist to Darwin's naturalization of aesthetics within the framework of evolutionary theory. Hugely influential work on word and image in science (by Martin Rudwick, Bruno Latour, Simon Schaffer, and Steven Shapin) as well as on Darwin and literary culture (by Gillian Beer, George Levine, and James Krasner) forms the ballast for Smith's account of "the aesthetic threat of Darwinism" (91); while W. J. T. Mitchell's notion of "imagetexts" provides the theoretical gloss because, Smith says, an illustrated text is "a composite, synthetic work" but never a seamless one: "when gaps or ruptures emerge between textual and visual representation, the imagetext becomes an 'image/text'" (2).

If the slippage from "imagetext" to "image/text" is the focus of the book, then a phrase borrowed from Seamus Heaney, "seeing things," indicates its stake. Smith seeks "both to describe things and to account for them in some larger scheme" (19), which may not sound ambitious, or ideologically informed, but it is certainly sincere. Ruskin is Darwin's limit case, and so Smith shows that the strong disagreement between the two men about natural and sexual selection turns on the question of whether visual language can render the issues of class and propriety more commonly found in verbal form. Chapters 2 through 4 (on barnacles, birds, and plants respectively) are, to my mind, the most successful in conveying the visual challenge of representing an abstract concept like natural selection. There is a lightness of touch in the close readings of barnacles as emblems of morals and...