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Chapter 3: The Toy of the Day: American Aquarium Writing, 1850–1915
- University of Michigan Press
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chapter 3 the toy of the day: american aquarium writing, 1850–1915 It could not be expected that such a novelty would long escape the vigilant gaze of American enterprise. —henry butler, The Family Aquarium; or, Aqua Vivarium The American home aquarium predates the Civil War. News of the Ward Case and its watery relative appeared in an eclectic range of American periodicals in the early to middle 1850s, nurturing a “domestic” aquarium practice in multiple senses of the term. These writings, along with the ‹rst commercial public aquariums in Boston and New York, increased awareness suf‹ciently to support the publication of two books devoted to the hobby in 1858. From this point forward, aquarium writing developed along two parallel tracks to appeal to two interrelated constituencies: one internal , for dedicated hobbyists; the other external, aimed at reaching new audiences. The hope was to turn the latter into the former. Like their British counterparts, American aquarium texts proved that the hobby was remarkably adept at containing seemingly contradictory aspects of emerging modernity and remarkably useful for illuminating relationships between nature , domesticity, and mid-nineteenth-century consumer culture. This chapter examines American aquarium writing in its ‹rst formative seventy-‹ve years. It begins with a brief discussion of articles introducing the tank to American readers. Next, it turns to Henry Butler’s The Family Aquarium and Arthur M. Edwards’s Life Beneath the Waters. These two books are especially important, not because of their longevity—many later writers either did not refer to them at all or represented them inaccurately —but because they offer a rhetorical template for the hobby that persisted unexamined like a collective unconscious almost to the present. In contrast to the disparate articles that came before, Butler and Edwards both pay requisite obeisance to British forebearers but make speci‹cally Ameri84 can claims for the hobby. They operate within larger currents of American art and public discourse and set the tank into a complex relationship in which the city and nature mutually construct one another. They establish the tank as (and for) the family and constitute its residents as pets. And they present the hobby as an explicitly commercial practice, at the intersection of urban entertainment, retail infrastructure, and a managerial ethos, expanding its promiscuous and seemingly irreconcilable af‹liations. Thus, the tank held the howling sea, the theater, happy families, virtuoso acrobats, tenants of good repute, and prisoners, as well as the unassailable good taste of its cultivated manager/owners. This crucial period in the tank’s development established the larger discursive patterns that enabled its cultural work. After the Civil War, the aquarium operated alongside increasingly professionalized American science and, still later, discourses of progressivism extolling nature study as a personal and social antidote to a range of modern ills, from effeminization to the tenement house. The aquarium accommodated each of these discourses and, in so doing, reached new consumers and consolidated communities of dedicated hobbyists. As in its British incarnation, the tank continued to demonstrate an uncanny rhetorical capaciousness during this period, one that functioned not to resolve the contradictory attributes imputed to it but to demonstrate that industrial modernity itself required these contradictions to persist unresolved. a new delight American aquarium writing in the early 1850s was literally Gossean. Many of the articles in popular magazines and journals of this period were reviews of Philip Henry Gosse’s books, particularly Rambles of a Naturalist on the Devonshire Coast (1852) and The Aquarium (1854). Others quoted from these books so extensively that they might as well have been reprints. This was as true of articles written by and for Americans as of those reprinted from British sources and appearing in publications like the Albion and the Eclectic Magazine of Foreign Literature Gosse’s books were so in›uential that they became interchangeable with actual aquariums, offering the same pleasures and decorative potential: one periodical reported, “[M]any of our readers will doubtless get the volume [The Aquarium] for themselves, and, independently of its other merits, they will ‹nd it a ‹tting ornament for the drawing-room table.”1 Reprints of British articles emphasized the glories and rigors of natural history, often as part of a larger natural theology: “What a change from the temper of two generations since, when the naturalist was The Toy of the Day 85 [34.236.152.203] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 03:59 GMT) looked on as a harmless enthusiast, who went ‘bug hunting,’ simply because he...