In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture
  • Martha Lucy
Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. By Jonathan Smith (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006) 349 pp. $100.00

How did Charles Darwin present his theory of natural selection visually? Why did he use the images that he did? These are not the usual questions about Darwin, whose masterwork, The Origin of Species (1859), contains only a single illustration. But for Smith, this very lack of visual content in The Origin becomes a point of departure for understanding the contested role of the image in nineteenth-century scientific debate, and, more broadly, for assessing how such imagery resonated in the wider culture.

Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture is a rich, compelling study that reflects a growing interest across disciplines in the imagery of science. In recent decades, Rudwick and others have addressed the visual component of scientific writing, and in art history and cultural studies, science illustration has begun to receive attention as an important part of an era's visual culture.1 Smith's book is a major contribution to this growing sub-field, not just for its subject but for its approach to the imagery. Science illustration is too often treated as background, Smith argues, as merely illustrative of the theory; he aims to rescue science illustration from this ancillary status, seeing the visual as a place of content rather than just a "re-packaging" of "textual statements" (34). The book is much concerned with the relationship of the visual to the textual, and the way that words and images function together to produce meaning.

Appropriately, Smith's focus is not the Origin but rather those of Darwin's writings that rely heavily on illustration: his Monograph (a massive two-part study on barnacles published 1851–1854), his botanical books, and The Expression of the Emotions (1871), for example. The chapters are arranged according to the different lifeforms that Darwin investigated throughout his career: barnacles, birds, plants, faces, and worms. Smith describes how these lifeforms were key to Darwin's articulation of his theories before turning to a discussion of Darwin's struggle with the imagery. How, he asks, could Darwin begin to illustrate a theory for which no visual language existed?

Importantly, in answering this question, Smith does not treat Darwin's imagery in isolation but as part of a larger, complex visual network comprised of cartoons, exhibitions, photography, fine art, and natural- history [End Page 598] illustration. His primary interest is Darwin's negotiation of this enormous semiotic network, his skillful tweaking of conventions— particularly those of science illustration, which came loaded with pre-existing meanings. Darwin's illustrations do not descend like an avalanche crushing everything in its wake, suddenly and entirely transforming the imagery of science; they are much more subtle, the product of the rigid systems within which Darwin was working.

Smith shifts lenses frequently within each chapter, moving from the narrowly scientific meanings of various illustrations to their broader resonances within the wider culture. He approaches science illustrations as saturated with culturally bound notions, particularly about gender and sexuality. One fascinating chapter reveals what is at stake, culturally, when Darwin illustrates the sexual anatomy of barnacles; another, on Darwin's bird illustrations, deconstructs the relationship between images of male plumage display and Victorian sexual politics.

Smith's attempt to measure Darwin's effect on Victorian visual culture is slightly uneven. In some chapters, painting has either absorbed or rejected Darwinian ideas; in others, aesthetic theory (he looks closely at the writings of John Ruskin) or caricatures of Darwin himself. Taken individually, these analyses have much to offer—the discussions of Ruskin in particular—but as a whole, they are too incongruent to form an overall picture of Darwin's influence on Victorian visual culture and tend to dilute Smith's argument. In the end, the strength of Smith's book lies not in its discussion of Darwin's effect on visual culture, but in its careful examination of Darwin's place in visual culture—how he negotiated the realm of the image during an explosively visual nineteenth century.

Martha Lucy
The Barnes Foundation

Footnotes

1. See, for example, Martin J. S...

pdf

Share