Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770-1870 (review)

Establishing the nature diary's formation as a genre is the valuable goal of Mary Ellen Bellanca's Daybooks of Discovery: Nature Diaries in Britain, 1770–1870, which she accomplishes with thoroughness and clear knowledge of her subject. As Bellanca conceives it, the nature diary includes any diaries or notebooks that contain a substantial amount of information about the natural world, that have a record-keeping aspect, and that are structured by the day. The category takes in many kinds of prose stylings, from the proto-scientific journals of Gilbert White and Charles Darwin's diary aboard the Beagle to the more personal ruminations on nature in the diaries of Dorothy Wordsworth or John Clare.

By focusing on this particular kind of nature-writing, Daybooks of Discovery avoids the pitfalls of working in a long period during which nature-writing in many forms flourished. Even so, the book sometimes reads like an archival excavation, with too few moments that reflect in depth on the literary merit of this genre; one wishes for more formalist readings of the nature diaries themselves, though the quotations and readings she provides are wonderfully evocative and suggest that Bellanca's book will open up additional work on this genre of nonfiction prose. Indeed, the particular merit of Daybooks of Discovery is that it firmly establishes the genre of nature diaries as worthy of serious inclusion within the increasingly neglected field of nonfiction Victorian prose. The vibrancy of these texts—especially Dorothy Wordsworth's nature journals, Emily Shore's amateur naturalist writing, George Eliot's "Recollections of Ilfracombe" (1856), and Gerard Manley Hopkins's journals—demand that we read and teach them, and it is Bellanca's study that illuminates this and clears a path to do so.

Daybooks of Discovery cuts a broad swath when one considers that the study begins with two chapters on Gilbert White, but not with his iconic natural history The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). Instead, Bellanca focuses on the nature journals he kept in preparation for the later composition of Selborne; thus, Bellanca's study charts a hundred years from White's nature diary—begun New Year's Day, 1768—to Hopkins's journals from 1866 to 1875. The nature diary, Bellanca suggests, had been coalescing as a form as early as the 1730s. Although county histories had prevailed for a hundred years before White's writing, she identifies White's particular contribution as his distinctive stylistic departure from the natural history of the Renaissance through to the seventeenth century.

Part of the University of Virginia's series "Under the Sign of Nature/Explorations in Ecocriticism," Daybooks of Discovery is rhetorically less invested in period distinctions of Romantic or Victorian than in the theoretical rubric of ecocriticism. Alan Rauch's Useful Knowledge (2001) and Lawrence Buell's The Environmental Imagination (1995) justly figure behind Bellanca's study, and Barbara Gates's work (especially Kindred Nature [1998]) is an acknowledged model for the cultural work this study performs. The result is a fresh account of one way that science and literature intersected and shared a discursive domain. In firmly establishing its generic distinctiveness, Bellanca's study refuses simply to chart how the nature journal provides raw material for the literary—a move one has come to expect, in particular, in studies of authors who produced other recognizably literary texts. Here instead the marvelous journal writings of Eliot and Hopkins are given their literary due and contextualized within the larger generic contours of nature diaries. Some allusion, perhaps, to the larger oeuvre of these writers would have been well placed, but in the case of Dorothy Wordsworth's journal one is grateful for the attention it receives without recourse to its relation to her brother's poetry.

There is much to admire in each of the chapters. Bellanca's attention to the nineteenth-century "cult" of Gilbert...