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Introduction
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
introduction My interest in the home aquarium was spawned by deprivation. My parents would not let me have one, and the reason for this deprivation was excess. The aquarium was too much: too much mess, money, space, and time. It was too watery, too chemically, too much a potential replication of too many ›ushy good-byes to bleached and bloated gold‹sh found belly-up in countless bowls. It was too much like the microscope , the telescope, the chemistry set, the specimens for dissection bobbing in their formaldehyde-‹lled baggies—enthusiastically enjoyed until they weren’t any longer, demanding storage space, posing disposal problems . And my parents were right. Excess and aquaria1 are intimately linked. In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, where the tank was ‹rst popularized as a hobby and home accessory, it became a full-blown craze, inspiring middle- and upper-middle-class families to head to the shore in droves, buckets and trowels in hand, to stock the latest “rustic adornment for homes of taste.”2 Coastal “rock pools were pounced on and stripped of their inhabitants.”3 That aquarium craze ended in a national version of precisely what my parents had feared. Neglected tanks stunk up genteel parlors before being emptied and relegated to storerooms where they took up space, reproachful reminders of time, effort, and money wasted. In stark contrast to other British natural history mania involving ferns, shells, and seaweeds, however, the tank never completely disappeared . David Allen posits that “[u]nlike the ferneries . . . aquaria were not expressive of Victorianism: they bore no burden of symbolism that dictated that they should vanish once that symbolism lost its force.”4 Allen is partly correct, but he stopped short. As the tank expanded geographically across the Atlantic and chronologically to the present, it is not its lack of symbolic ‹xity but, rather, its remarkable visual and rhetorical mutability that accounts for its enduring popularity. This book examines the cultural work of the American home aquarium from 1850 through 1970 by probing its productive elasticities.5 The tank drew on the perceptual logics and plots of the shop window, the theater, the panorama, and literal and ‹ctive travels to become an amalgam of all of them. Aquarium texts—for general readers and, later, for dedicated hobbyists —used recurring tropes, humor, and the odd anthropomorphic potential of tank residents to offer more than just information about the pragmatics of maintenance. The home aquarium’s uncanny ability to draw on multiple, even competing visual and textual logics is central to its cultural work. It is an emblematic product of modernity, one using elements of exploration, technology, science, and a commitment to rigorous observation to contain anxieties spawned by industrialization, urbanization, changing gender roles, and relations with the global south. The tank is all the more potent a cultural actor for its innocuousness. Framed as a mere toy, a decorative frill, or an enthusiasm for children or eccentrics , it operates as a practice of everyday life, at the intersection of work and play. It was one of a number of tools used by the middle class, especially middle-class men, to carve out a seemingly neutral and, for this reason, restorative personal and social space, out of the public sphere yet replete with potential for a selective sociality of hobbyists. The tank was a personal water world that allowed aquarists to feel, paradoxically, both larger through their mastery of “lower” beings and smaller through communion with the glories of nature. It was a place of revelation, fascination, and rejuvenation not because it exempted its enthusiasts from the tides of modernity but because it contained them in a glass box. Aquariums enabled hobbyists to manage and even seemingly resist the challenges of profound historical changes by using the very logics and products of those changes to construct private refuges against public dilemmas. These challenges were immense. The birth and rise of the home aquarium detailed in this book coincided with a series of cultural shocks that irrevocably altered the American landscape: the Civil War; increasing urbanization and demographic diversity; the changing nature of work; shifting class, gender, and moral relations; accelerating globalization and imperial entanglements; even the size of the buildings Americans inhabited and the types of vehicles that carried them there. As Walter Lippmann observed in 1914, near the midpoint of the period covered here, “The modern man is not yet settled in his world. It is strange to him, terrifying , alluring, and incomprehensibly big.”6 Almost seventy years later, Marshall...