Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture (review)

When he attacked Charles Darwin, John Ruskin was not above flippancy. In an Oxford lecture, Ruskin imagined attaching a hair-brush to a millwheel so that its bristles would be blown flat like birds' feathers after aeons of flight; and in Proserpina, he speculated about an alternative direction for evolution, wondering what the human race would be like if blushing young maidens had held a baboon-like predilection for blue noses when selecting their male partners. Ruskin's was just one amongst the many critical voices that have been obliterated from conventional Darwinian eulogies, which were narrated retrospectively by victors in the prolonged debates about natural selection. But dramatic tales of instantaneous conversion are now being replaced by scenes of bitter conflict: although 2009 will be celebrated world-wide as the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, historians (unlike fund-raisers) no longer depict 1859 as a definitive turning-point when progressive science dealt a death-blow to reactionary religion. In his latest absorbing book, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture, Jonathan Smith provides a valuable addition to the substantial literature of Darwinian reappraisal by imaginatively deploying imagery to provide novel and illuminating analyses of Darwin's background, reception and influence.

Inspired by the theoretical approach of W.J.T. Mitchell, Smith does not focus exclusively on Darwinian images, but instead analyses how they interact with texts. As he puts it, Darwin's 'pictures could only be worth a thousand words through his spending thousands more in elucidating them' (16). In some ways parallelling Gillian Beer's exploration of Darwin's verbal metaphors, Smith examines how Darwin's visual choices affected and also responded to Victorian life and society by considering a wide diversity of imagery – caricatures, photographs and oil paintings as well as diagrams and illustrations in scholarly publications. As Darwin strove to persuade his readers that his innovatory ideas were valid, he combined rather than supplemented words with pictures, a rhetorical strategy that obliged him to make important decisions about style and colour, about size and orientation, about captions and textual references, about engravers and photographers.

Smith's contents page immediately reveals a surprising omission –On the Origin of Species. Darwin's most famous book contains only one illustration, a diagram he designed to explain how distinct species can evolve from a single common ancestor over many many generations. Presented by Smith as a thought-experiment, this assembly of dashed and solid lines, of letters and numbers, is probably the clearest example of how Darwin integrated visual and verbal arguments. Nevertheless, Smith devotes the bulk of his book to a convincing demonstration that Darwin exerted similarly strong control over his apparently more straightforward representations, although he concentrates on analysing the published image, not on the behind-the-scenes discussions between Darwin and his collaborators, such as engravers and photographers. Smith's book itself exemplifies the reciprocal bonding of verbal and visual arguments that he is exposing; regrettably, Smith says little about the restrictions imposed by publishers on Darwin's ambitions, yet his own analyses would have been articulated more powerfully if colour had not been restricted to the dust-jacket.

Disappointingly, although this book claims to subvert triumphalist accounts of Darwin, its structure is dictated by Darwin's personal preoccupations rather than by broader aspects of Victorian culture. To cope with Darwin's voluminous output, Smith has marshalled his own copious information into five of Darwin's interests – his barnacles, birds, plants, faces and worms. Within each of these topics, Smith starts by examining Darwin's work, and then explores its connections both with a larger Victorian theme (including the seaside and sexual selection, but concentrating on aesthetics) and also with another author (often Ruskin, but sometimes Philip Gosse, John Gould or Charles Bell). Like Ruskin and other Victorian authors, Darwin devoted great effort to making his texts and illustrations mutually reinforcing, yet Smith is particularly concerned with breakdowns in such symbiotic relationships, which – like all clashes – are...