Chapter 1 - Pictures of Nature

Summary

This chapter claims that two events marking the beginning and end of the decade—the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species—signal a continued interest in natural historic practices of classification, observation, and visualisation. Rajan argues more specifically that texts like On the Origin of Species and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette combine eighteenth-century practices of observation and description with contemporary modes of visualisation that were popularized through optical technologies like the stereoscope. While it has become customary to view Victorian visual technologies as breaking from the epistemological assumptions of early modern philosophy and science, Rajan demonstrates that accurate and vivid description in natural history and realist fiction in fact demanded a synthesis of competing epistemologies. The work of Darwin and Brontë thus allows us to trace a methodological overlap between nineteenth-century literature and science and reassess received intellectual histories of visual culture.