The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium (review)

The nineteenth-century aquarium served several paradoxical purposes. Most obviously, it allowed water animals and plants to live (more or less) on land. It opened the most mysterious and inaccessible environment to casual inspection. It appealed to—and sometimes appeased—the divergent curiosities of scientific investigators, amateur collectors, and observers simply in search of entertainment. It could enhance cozy domesticity or offer a thrilling glimpse of the sublime perils of the oceanic deeps. Aquariums continue to fulfill most of these functions, and they have also maintained the Victorian trajectory of technical improvement. The most elaborate modern aquariums are enormous and can be modified to simulate a variety of freshwater and marine environments. (The fragile and artificial nature of these environments, no matter how realistic they seem to human observers, was demonstrated by the mass death of the inhabitants of the Aquarium of the Americas in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.) In The Ocean at Home, Bernd Brunner tells how these elaborate devices for storage and display evolved.

Most of Brunner's account focuses on the nineteenth century, the period when workable aquarium technology was developed and when aquariums enjoyed their first flush of popularity. But he traces their origins to several earlier periods. In the eighteenth century, he claims, superstitious dread of the sea began to give way to sublime appreciation and scientific investigation (although he acknowledges that some mystery and dread persisted, as evidenced by the popularity of books such as Jules Verne's 20,000 Leagues under the Sea). Brunner links the desire to possess and display aquatic organisms to the passion for collecting that derived from early modern cabinets of curiosity. Finally, he places aquarium fish in a tradition of pet-keeping that echoes practices recorded as long ago as classical antiquity and as far away as medieval China. Few of these early piscine captives survived long, and, beginning in the late seventeenth century, European naturalists searched for ways to enhance their survival. A series of improvements, including the adaptation of the simple but effective technology of the Wardian case (devised for transporting plants) and the use of industrially manufactured glass, meant that, by the mid-Victorian period, even relatively modest homes could display small but well-stocked aquariums.

One reason that many inhabitants of such homes desired to maintain these fascinating yet time-consuming devices resulted from another widespread Victorian phenomenon: the craze for examining and collecting the plants and animals that lived on the margins of the sea. This enthusiasm was stoked by popular natural-history writing, especially that of Philip Henry Gosse (to whom Brunner devotes an entire chapter), and it led to several further ichthyological developments. Serious amateur aquarists formed societies and founded specialist magazines, following the pattern of amateurs in other branches of natural history. They joined professional naturalists in debating the relative merits of freshwater fish as opposed to marine fish, or (once the transportation of tropical fish became fairly reliable) of exotics as opposed to indigenous European or American species. The general public in Europe and North America also showed persistent interest in viewing captive live fish. By the late nineteenth century, large aquariums had been constructed in many major cities, either as part of established zoos or as free-standing tourist attractions.

In addition to telling its story, The Ocean at Home offers readers a chance to understand why Victorian observers found fish so appealing. The book is attractively designed, with numerous illustrations, some in color, and a lot of white space on each page. The presentation also signals that its target audience does not consist primarily of professional historians, a signal that is amplified by the text. Brunner's account is descriptive and anecdotal rather than analytic. He slips easily from time to time and place to place without much regard for chronology or cultural context. There is an extensive bibliography, but no index. The author draws on an impressive range of material, but...