We revere Turner, and rightly so. But why has the name of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, as inspired in engineering as Turner in painting, as influential in nineteenth-century history as any person in the arts, slipped so far from public memory? I do not know the full answer to this conundrum, but the myth of inexorability in discovery, ironically fostered by science as a source of putative prestige, has surely contributed by depicting scientists as interchangeable cogs in the wheel of technological progress—as people whose idiosyncracy and individual genius must be viewed as irrelevant to an inevitable sequence of advances.
Art and science are different enterprises, but the boundaries between them remain far more fluid and interdigitating, and the interactions far richer and more varied, than the usual stereotypes proclaim. As a reminder of both overlaps and differences, I recently read the first issue of Scientific American—for August 28, 1845, and republished by the magazine to celebrate its 150th anniversary.
Scientific American was founded by Rufus Porter, a true American original in eccentric genius and entrepreneurial skill. Porter had spent most of his time as an itinerant mural painter, responsible for hundreds of charming and primitively painted landscape scenes on the interior walls of houses throughout New England. Yet he chose to start a journal devoted primarily to the practical side of science in engineering and manufacturing. In fact, the initiating issue features, as the main article, a story about the first landing in New York of “the greatest maratime [sic] curiosity ever seen in our harbour”—none other than Brunel’s second ship, the Great Britain. “This mammoth of the ocean,” Porter writes, “has created much excitement here as well as in Europe . . . During the first few days since her arrival at New York, she has been visited by about 12,000 people, who have paid 25 cents for the gratification.”
If an artist could initiate a leading journal in science, if Turner could greatly enhance his painted sunsets by using a new pigment, iodine scarlet, just invented by Humphrey Davy of the Royal Institution, a leading scientific laboratory founded by Count Rumford in 1799, then why do we so consistently stress the differences and underplay the similarities between these two greatest expressions of human genius? Why do we pay primary attention to the artist’s individuality, while constantly emphasizing the disembodied logic of science? Aren’t these differences of focus mostly a matter of choice and convention, not only of evident necessity? The individuality of scientists bears respect and holds importance as well. I do accept that we would now know about evolution even if Darwin had never been born. But the discovery would then have been made by other people, perhaps in different lands, and surely with dissimilar interests and concerns—and these potential variations in style may be no less profound or portentous than the disparity between such artistic contemporaries as Verdi and Wagner.
I do not deny that the accumulative character of scientific change—the best justification for a notion of progress in human history—establishes the major difference between art and science. I found a poignant reminder within a small item in the first issue of Scientific American. An advertisement for daguerreotypes on the last page includes the following come-on: “Likenesses of deceased persons taken in any part of the city and vicinity.” I then remembered a book published a few years ago on daguerreotypes of dead children—often the only likeness that parents would retain of a lost son or daughter. (Daguerreotypes required long exposures, and young children could rarely be enticed to sit still for the requisite time—but the dead do not move, and daguerreotypists therefore maintained a thriving business, however ghoulish by modern standards, in images of the deceased, particularly of children.)
No example of scientific progress can be less subject to denial or more emotionally immediate than our ever-increasing ability to prevent the death of young people. Even the most wealthy and privileged parents of Turner and Brunel’s time expected to lose a high percentage of their children. As Brunel built his railways and Turner painted, Darwin’s geology teacher, Adam Sedgwick, wrote to a friend about the achievements of his young protégé, then sailing around the world on the Beagle, and therefore in constant medical danger, far from treatment in lands with unknown diseases: “[He] is doing admirable work in South America, and has already sent home a collection above all price . . . There was some risk of his turning out an idle man, but his character will now be fixed, and if God spares his life he will have a great name among the naturalists of Europe.” A concerned mentor would not need to fret so intensely today—a blessing from science to all of us.
I previously quoted the beginning of Colonel Calverly’s recipe for a heavy dragoon, and will now close with the end:
Beadle of Burlington—Richardson’s show—
Mr. Micawber and Madame Tussaud!
We know Mr. Micawber from David Copperfield, and Mme. Tussaud for her wax statues. “Richardson’s show” puzzled me until I found the following entry in my 1897 edition of Chambers’s Biographical Dictionary: John Richardson, 1767–1837, “the ‘penny showman’ from Marlow work house who rose to become a well-to-do travelling manager.” But who, or what, is the Beadle of Burlington?
I fell in love with Gilbert and Sullivan at age twelve, and have therefore been wondering about that Beadle for forty years (not always actively, to be sure!). Then, six months ago and to my utter delight, I ran right into the Beadle of Burlington when no subject could have been farther from my mind. I was walking down an early-nineteenth-century shopping arcade, just off Piccadilly in London, on my way to a meeting at the Royal Institution, where Humphrey Davy had invented Turner’s new pigment. Lord George Cavendish founded the Burlington Arcade in 1819 “for the gratification of the public” and “to give employment to industrious females” in the shops. Lord George established firm rules of conduct for people moving through the arcade—“no whistling, singing, hurrying, humming, or making merry.” Such decent standards have to be enforced—and so they have been, ever since 1819, by a two-man private security force, the Beadles of Burlington. Traditions must be maintained, of course, and the Beadles still wear their ancient garb of top hat, gloves, and coat with tails.
I looked at one of the Beadles in all his antiquated splendor, and I saw that he held both hands clasped behind his back. So I moseyed around to his other side (no hurrying) to find out what he might be holding—and I noted a cellular phone in his gloved hands. Technology and tradition. The old and elegant; the new and functional. The Fighting Temeraire and the steam tug. Art and science. The prophet Amos said, “Can two walk together, except they be agreed?”
3
SEEING EYE TO EYE, THROUGH A GLASS CLEARLY
WE LAUGH AT THE STUFFINESS OF VICTORIAN PRONOUNCEMENTS, AS TYPIFIED by the quintessential quotation from the woman who gave her name to the age—the Queen’s reaction to an imitation of herself by her groom-in-waiting (as stated in the regal first person plural): “We are not amused.” Yet we (that is, all of us poor slobs today, not her majesty alone) must also admire the unquestioned confidence, in matters both moral and material, of our Victorian forebears, especially from the ambivalent perspective of our own unsure and fragmented modernity.
In a popular book of the mid-1850s, Shirley Hibberd (an androgynous name, but male in this case, as for most publically eminent Victorians), praised the acme that his age had achieved, not only in larger affairs of state, but in the domestic tranquillity of homes as well:
Our rooms sparkle with the products of art, and our gardens with the curiosities of nature. Our conversation shapes itself to ennobling themes, and our pleasures take a tone from our improving moral sentiments, and acquire a poetic grace that reflects again upon both head and heart.
Hibberd argues for an intimate tie between happy homes and triumphant governments, for “our domestic life is a guarantee of our national greatness.” But how shall such purity and edification be achieved on the home front? Hibberd appeals to the concept of taste:
A Home of Taste is a tasteful home, wherein everything is a reflection of refined
thoughts and chaste desires . . . In such a home Beauty presides over the education of the sentiments, and while the intellect is ripened by the many means which exist for the acquisition of knowledge, the moral nature is refined by those silent appeals of Nature and of Art, which are the foundations of Taste.
Since Hibberd was a nature writer by profession, and since I am quoting from his most famous work, titled Rustic Adornments, readers will not be surprised by his primary prescription for domestic improvement: the enhancement of good taste by cultivated displays of living things. “The Rustic Adornments of the household,” Hibberd asserts, “embrace the highest of its attractions apart from the love which lights the walls within.” Hibberd could not have been more sanguine about the beneficial moral effects of an interest in natural objects: “It would be an anomaly to find a student of nature addicted to the vices that cast so many dark shadows on our social life; nor do I remember among the sad annals of criminal history, one instance of a naturalist who became a criminal, or of a single gardener who has been hanged.” (So much for the Bird Man of Alcatraz!) Moreover, an interest in nature defines both our tranquillity and our prosperity—no strife or ignobility please, we’re British!
It is because we are truly a domestic people, dearly attached to our land of green pastures, and shrubby hedgerows, and grey old woods, that we remain calm amid the strife that besets the states around us, proud of our ancient liberties, our progressing intelligence, and our ever-expanding material resources.
But nature has always been “out there” for our edification on her turf. The greatest advance of his age, Hibberd argued, lay in the invention of devices—rustic adornments—that allowed home-dwellers, even of modest means in highly urban settings, to cultivate nature within domestic walls. Hibberd’s book contains successive chapters on all forms of indoor natural display, from fern cases to aviaries to floral arrangements. But he devoted his opening chapter to the great craze that defined his decade of the 1850s—the establishment of marine aquariums in almost any home coveting a cachet of modernity. “I commence,” Hibberd writes, “with the Aquarium, which, for its novelty, its scientific attractions, and its charming elegance, deservedly takes the first place among the Adornments of the House.”
Aquariums seem so humble in concept and so common in occurrence—a staple of your dentist’s office or your kid’s bedroom—that we can hardly imagine an explicit beginning, or a concept of original excitement and novelty. In fact, the aquarium had a complexly interesting and particular birth during the mid-nineteenth century, and then enjoyed (or endured) one of Victorian Britain’s most intense crazes of popularity during a definite interval in the 1850s. I do not, of course, claim that this invention marks the first domestic display of aquatic organisms. The owner of any respectable Roman villa could look down upon the animals in his fishpond. Similarly, the simple bowl had allowed, also since classical times, the contemplation of a fish or two in the more direct, edge-on, eye-to-eye orientation (through glass, or some other transparent medium that did not always come easily or cheaply before the last few generations).
But these precursors are not aquariums in the technical sense, for they lack the defining feature: a stable community of aquatic organisms that can be viewed, not from above through the opacity of flowing waters with surface ripples, but eye-to-eye and from the side through transparent glass and clear water.
A fishbowl presents a temporary display, not a stable community. The water quickly goes foul and must be changed frequently (engendering the amusing and frustrating problem, so well remembered by all childhood goldfish enthusiasts, including yours truly, of netting your quarry for temporary residence in a drinking glass while you change the water in his more capacious bowl—a process that can keep Grumpy the Goldfish going for a while, but surely cannot sustain a complex community of aquatic organisms). The concept of an aquarium, on the other hand, rests upon the principle of sustained balance among chemical and ecological components—with plants supplying oxygen to animals, fish eating the growing plants, and snails (or other detritus feeders) scavenging the wastes and gobbling up any algal film that might grow on the glass walls. Western science did not discover the basic chemistry of oxygen, respiration, carbon dioxide, and photosynthesis before the late eighteenth century, so the defining concepts scarcely existed in a usable way before then. The aquarium represents but one of many practical results for this great advance in human knowledge. To quote Shirley Hibberd again: “The Aquarium exemplifies, in an instructive manner, the great balance of compensation which, in nature, preserves the balance of equilibrium in animal and vegetable life.”
A few naturalists, before the invention of the aquarium, had managed to keep marine organisms alive for considerable periods in indoor containers—but only with sustained and substantial effort (entrusted to domestic servants, and therefore reflecting another social reality of the times). For example, Sir John Graham Dalyell, a Scottish gentleman with the euphonious title of Sixth Baronet of Binns (and a day job as a barrister to enhance the alliteration), maintained marine animals in cylindrical glass vessels during the early nineteenth century. But he kept only one animal in each jar and had to change the water every day, a job allocated to his porter, who also lugged several gallons of sea water from nearby ocean to baronial home at least three times a week. Sir John did enjoy substantial success. His hardiest specimen, a sea anemone named “Granny,” moved into her jar in 1828 and survived until 1887, long outliving the good baronet and several heirs who received this lowly but hardy coelenterate as a legacy that may not have been entirely welcome.
(The history of aquariums has spawned a small but thorough literature. I read this story of Sir John in an excellent article by Philip F. Rehbock, cited in the bibliography to this book. I also benefited from Lynn Barber’s general book, published in 1980, The Heyday of Natural History, 1820–1870. But I have relied mostly on two primary sources from my personal library: Shirley Hibberd’s Rustic Adornments, second edition, 1858; and the classic work by one of the greatest Victorian naturalists, The Aquarium, by Philip Henry Gosse, second edition, 1856.)
In a similar story, recounted by all major sources on the origin of aquariums, Mrs. Thynne, a lady of means, brought some corals from Torquay to London in 1846 “for the purpose of study and the entertainment of friends” (again quoting Shirley Hibberd). “A stone jar was filled with sea-water; the madrepores [corals] were fixed on a large sponge by means of a needle and thread. They arrived in London safely, and were placed in two glass bowls, and the water changed every other day. But the six gallons of water brought by Mrs. Thynne was now exhausted and must be used again. She here devised means to freshen it for second use.” We now switch to Mrs. Thynne’s own account, and to another statement about the source of actual work in homes of leisure:
I thought of having it aerated by pouring it backwards and forwards before an open window, for half or three-quarters of an hour between each time of using it. This was doubtless a fatiguing operation; but I had a little housemaid, who, besides being rather anxious to oblige me, thought it rather an amusement.
In later experiments, Mrs. Thynne did add plants to approximate a natural and sustaining balance, but she never abandoned her practice (or her housemaid’s effort) of aeration by hand, and thus never built a truly self-sustaining aquarium: “I regularly placed seaweed in my glass bowls; but as I was afraid that I might not keep the exact balance required, I still had the water refreshed by aeration. I do not know from which, or whether it was from both causes, that my little flock continued to thrive so much, but I seldom had a death.”
Interestingly, the key discovery that led to the aquarium of the 1850s did not arise directly from experiments with marine organisms, but by creative transfer from another technology for rustic adornment that had spawned an even more intense craze during the 1840s—the Wardian case for growing and sustaining plants in small, “closely glazed cases.” Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a London surgeon by profession, began his experim
ents in the late 1820s. By enclosing plants in an almost airtight glass container—a “closely glazed case” in his terminology—Ward learned how to encourage growth and avoid either desiccation or fouling of the air, all without human input or interference. The moisture transpired by plants during daylight hours would condense on the glass and drip back down to the soil at night. So long as the case remained sufficiently sealed to prevent escape of moisture, but not tight enough to preclude all movement of gases in and out (so that oxygen could be replenished and carbon dioxide siphoned off), the Wardian case could sustain itself for long periods of time.
Dr. Ward’s invention provided far more than a pleasant bauble for moral enlightenment in Hibberd’s settings of domestic bliss, for the closely glazed case played a key role in Victorian commerce and imperial expansion. Plants in Wardian cases could survive for months at sea, and distant transport became practical for the first time (for species not easily cultivated from seed). In her 1980 book, The Heyday of Natural History, Lynn Barber writes:
The directors of Kew Gardens began to plan even more large-scale movements of plants . . . Literally millions of plants were ferried to and fro in Wardian cases, [and] they eventually succeeded in establishing tea as a cash-crop in India (from China) and rubber in Malaya (from South America), thus adding two valuable new commodities to the British Empire’s resources. Kew’s Wardian cases were probably one of the best investments the British Government has ever made, and in fact they were only very recently superseded by the use of polythene bags.
On a humbler, yet massive, scale, Wardian cases also became a fixture in almost every British home of approved taste. Although many kinds of plants could be grown in such cases, a passion for ferns—so spectacular as a social fad that the epidemic even received a latinate description as Pteridomania, or the fern craze—swept Britain in the 1840s. When this mania inevitably subsided, the technology of Wardian cases remained, ready to be utilized for the next enthusiastic bout of rustic adornment—the aquarium craze of the 1850s.