text:
Pens and Needles
Reviving Book-Embroidery in Victorian England
By Jessica Roberson
March 21, 2018

Fashionable in the 16th and 17th century, the art of embroidering unique covers for books saw a comeback in late 19th-century England, from the middle-class drawing room to the Arts and Crafts movement. Jessica Roberson explores the bibliomania, patriotism, and issues around gender so central to the revival.

There are few more pleasing accupations [sic] for the skillful fingers of a lady,” wrote the Victorian librarian William Salt Brassington in his A History of the Art of Bookbinding (1893),  “than that of embroidering a book-cover”.1
Initially a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century practice of decorative embroidery on religious texts or presentation copies for royalty, embroidered books were a lavish alternative to leather bindings that allowed for the individualized ornamentation of bookish exteriors. This practice of ornamented bookbinding enjoyed a surge of popularity as a handicraft in the nineteenth century. In a variety of publications, from magazines to histories of bookbinding and collecting, middle-class Englishwomen were encouraged to ply their needles within an explicitly patriotic historical tradition.
The British Museum acquired a number of early modern embroidered books in the initial bequest of the Old Royal Library by George II in 1757, shortly after its founding. At the end of the nineteenth century, innovations in photography and printing allowed that collection, as well as select examples held at other British institutions such as the Bodleian and the South Kensington Museum, to be reproduced in book form and introduced to a broader readership. The first to treat the embroidered book individually was Cyril Davenport’s English Embroidered Book-bindings, published in 1899 as part of a series titled The English Bookman’s Library.
Davenport’s volume reproduces images of fifty-two books, some in color but most in half-tint black and white. The plates and their accompanying descriptions are organized first according to fabric type — canvas, velvet, or satin — and then chronologically. Working from original photographs, Davenport tinted some and added embellishments to others for better visual effect. One color print is of a beautiful copy of Christopherson’s Historia Ecclesiastica, owned by Queen Elizabeth I. The three volumes are bound in matching deep green velvet and are delicately embroidered with the royal coat of arms, Tudor and York roses, and a scattered field of small pearls. A colored photograph of one volume serves as the frontispiece to Davenport’s book, and he admits to doctoring the photograph in order to restore some of the missing pearls.
As the series title implies, this book — which functions mostly as a portable paper exhibit of early modern embroidered bindings — participates in a century-long enthusiasm for masculine bookishness. A wave of book-madness, referred to by contemporaries with the delightful term “bibliomania”, swept the men of England’s upper classes at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The “bookman” emerged from this frenzy of book buying and selling as a stock character of the later part of the century, a figure invested (perhaps to an extreme) in the bodies of books. As scholar Phillip Connell has suggested, this interest in books also served as a patriotic attempt to establish a national literary heritage in Britain.2
The English Bookman’s Library represents a body of late-Victorian book-historical writing that is invested in reproducing and displaying the holdings of national institutional libraries as both collectibles and as models for the contemporary fine press movement. The short series, which also included H. R. Plomer’s A Short History of English Printing (1900), and W. Y. Fletcher’s English Book Collectors (1902), emphasized a historical trajectory that culminated in the work of presses such as William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, best known for producing elaborate editions inspired by illuminated manuscripts. As series editor Alfred W. Pollard writes in his “General Introduction”, this is a “new series of books about books, exclusively English in its aims”, and seeks to fill in the gaps of book history at a time when, as he “boldly” says, “the book-work turned out . . . by the five or six leading printers of England and Scotland seems to [Pollard], in both technical qualities and the excellence of taste, the finest in the world”.3 In other words, the series is intended to shore up this claim of primacy in modern fine press printing.
However, Davenport’s entry on embroidered bindings is unique in its explicit invitation to women to participate in their revitalization.
“Many book-covers have been embroidered during the last few years in England by ladies working on their own account,” he writes, suggesting that his book and its instructions offer an opportunity for women who have, he implies, been embroidering books simply for their own amusement, to join the larger national history he evokes.4 This invitation supports a broader cultural investment in revitalizing England’s artistic reputation, shared, for example, by writers like Brassington: “at the present time a taste for the old kinds of embroidery is being fostered by people who desire to see England again famous for her needlework as she was in the thirteenth century”.5
“Fancy-work”, or domestic handicrafts from flower pressing to needlework, flourished during the nineteenth century as a rapidly growing middle class relegated more and more women to exclusively domestic spaces. The products populated the famously cluttered Victorian sitting room: embroidered pillows and footstools, embroidered accessories and furnishings, terrariums, and taxidermy on display. However, for many women, embroidery and other crafts were also a source of supplementary income. Crafts were sold and exchanged at local markets and charity bazaars; other times embroidery work was outsourced to women working from home, creating a silent workforce. Needlework also served as a mode of personal and artistic expression that often inhabited the social spaces of the home, circulating in surprising ways.
Calls for women to resume book-embroidery echo this complicated place of handicraft in Victorian culture, both reinforcing the idea of the “domestic sphere” and at times challenging assumptions of female passivity. Brassington, Davenport, and other male contemporaries frequently couched their pitches for such a revival within gendered frameworks of labor. One author, in a short article for The Bookworm, condescendingly suggests that “an outlet for skill at once useful and ornamental might be found in working book-covers instead of slippers and antimacassars”.6 Engaging in needlecraft played into expectations of delicacy and decoration as complementary, rather than dominant, modes of art — and the art of book embroidery could be seen as essentially confining women to the exteriors of books. Yet Davenport’s definition of the embroidered book as needlework designed explicitly “for the purpose of adorning that particular book,” and not haphazardly recycled, also invites his presumably female reader into the interior.7
In this framework book-embroidery requires intellectual engagement with a text, and careful attention to the historical examples which, Davenport claims, can be “advantageously studied” by interested craftswomen.8 The embroidered book thus offered Victorian women a unique surface for bridging handicraft and literary history. Moreover, Davenport consistently couches his descriptions of the bindings in their connection to English institutions and historical figures, revealing a persistent thread of patriotic historicism. In taking up book -embroidery, the average middle-class Englishwoman joined the company of queens.
One of Davenport’s chief examples is a manuscript of The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul, copied out by the hand of then-Princess Elizabeth and potentially covered and decorated by her as well. The manuscript was a gift to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, and features the queen’s initials surrounded by hearts-ease flowers. Davenport writes this book into a patriotic domestic history that blends writing and embroidery, emphasizing the relatively amateur quality of the work — not likely to be the work of a hired professional — which aligns with expectations of amateur expertise applied to Victorian women’s needlework.
Another example from the royal collection is a 1578 edition of The Epistles of St. Paul, held by the Bodleian and much described by nineteenth-century authors of books on embroidery and book-binding. It also belonged to Queen Elizabeth and contains a note in her own hand. As Davenport transcribes it, it is a melancholy but beautifully worded sentiment:
I walke manie times into the pleasant fieldes of the Holy Scripture, where I plucke up the goodlie greene herbes of sentences by pruning, eate them by reading, chawe them by musing, and laie them up at length in the hie seat of memorie by gathering them together, so that having tasted thy swetenes I may the less perceive the bitterness of this miserable life.9
The book’s embroidery is also attributed to the queen. On both covers are legends in Latin, surrounded by gold cord. Davenport acknowledges that, like the previous example, there is no absolute proof of the queen’s hand in making the cover. However, he argues, its simplicity points to it being of amateur, rather than professional, origin. Including Elizabeth’s meditation on reading with her books reinforces a national history bound up in reading, writing, and embroidery. It also illuminates a late nineteenth-century urge to express emotion through that same entanglement of the written word and material culture.
The most significant examples of embroidered books emerged from the anti-industrial Arts and Craft Movement, which flourished in Britain between 1888 and 1920. Exemplified by William Morris, whose Kelmscott Press is briefly mentioned in Pollard’s introduction to The English Bookman’s Library as the preeminent contemporary example of fine book making in England, the Arts and Crafts Movement sought to elevate the materials and work of craftsmen — and craftswomen.
Morris’ daughter May was an influential and important designer and embroiderer who exhibited, taught, and wrote about embroidery extensively. Though only twenty-three, she took over management of the embroidery division of her father’s company in 1885 and ran it until his death in 1896.
One of May Morris’ contributions to the first Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, held in London in 1888, was an embroidered book cover. In the catalog it is described as a “silk-embroidered cover for ‘Love is Enough’”, a book of her father’s poetry.10 Morris embroidered at least a few other book covers. The University of Manchester has a copy of The Tale of King Florus and Fair Jehane bound by May Morris in orange silk with a design of two birds under a tree. Morris, like her father and Davenport, was particularly interested in looking to earlier periods for inspiration. In Decorative Needlework (1893), she describes the medieval and early modern periods as the height of artistic embroidery. Her work, too, is motivated by a desire to revitalize a patriotic tradition. The embroidered book offers an engagement with aesthetic and literary history: the embroidered cover, worked by hand, becomes a literal interface between craft and the text.
The Victorians saw a return to intimate connections between individual hands and books as an antidote to the emerging mass media, in a way that resonates with our own twenty-first century sensibilities. Referring to some of the same early modern examples enshrined in print a few years later by Davenport, the author of an article in Cassell’s Family Magazine for 1894 laments that “Books were treasures in those times; now they are so innumerable that they are tossed about anyhow by half of their owners.”11 Creating beautiful embroidered covers, the article suggests, can reassuringly set apart a favorite volume, and show books the attention they deserve. As collections of innumerable texts can be easily stored and retrieved on digital devices, we too have to reconsider how and why we value books. As the history of book-embroidery makes visible, craft has a great deal of generative potential for reimagining that relationship.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Jessica Roberson


text:
Mistress of a New World
Early Science Fiction in Europe’s “Age of Discovery”
By Emily Lord Fransee
October 11, 2018

Considered by many one of the founding texts of the science fiction genre, The Blazing World — via a dizzy mix of animal-human hybrids, Immaterial Spirits, and burning foes — tells of a woman’s absolute rule as Empress over a parallel planet. Emily Lord Fransee reflects on what the book and its author Margaret Cavendish (one of the first women to publish using her own name) can teach us about empire, gender, and imagination in the 17th century.

It is the middle of the seventeenth century and a Bear-man is helping an empress attempt to examine a whale through a microscope. After this task is found to be impossible, a group of Worm-men explain how creatures can exist without blood and how cheese turns to maggots. In her turn, the empress scolds an assembly of Ape- and Lice-men for their pursuit of tedious and irrelevant knowledge, such as the true weight of air, and commands they instead get busy with “such Experiments as may be beneficial to the publick”. Armed with such knowledge of the natural world and equipped with the resources of her vast dominions, she then sends flocks of Bird-men and navies of Fish-men to a parallel planet to make war on and conquer her many enemies.
Such are the links between life, learning, and power within The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World, a piece of prose fiction published in 1666 by the “Thrice Noble, Illustrious, and Excellent Princesse the Duchess of Newcastle”, better known as Margaret Lucas Cavendish. The narrative blends utopian fiction, imperialist travelogue, and natural history to tell the story of a “young Lady” who is kidnapped from her homeland but soon escapes to a new and mysterious land filled with human-animal hybrids. On arrival she is made empress and quickly establishes societies of natural philosophy, funds theater and the arts, and destroys her enemies with fire and fury.
The plot is often convoluted, with descriptions of military invasion or discussions with fantastical chimeras interspaced with short lessons on lenses or lectures on the nature of solar eclipses. Yet there is much that can be learned from Cavendish’s Blazing World, including the way it sheds historical and literary light on conceptions of gender, natural philosophy, political theory, theology, and the life of the author herself in seventeenth-century Europe. For example, in the emphasis on the stability of a realm in which everyone —- from the lowest Flea-man to the highest Emperor —- knows and respects their place in the natural hierarchy, we can see echoed Cavendish’s Royalist sympathies. Histories of feminism have also mined Cavendish’s works, as they reveal the ways in which she saw her own position limited within a society shaped by both gender and class. However, less examined is the way that the narrative illuminates the history of seventeenth-century European imperialism, and how ideas about power, race, and conquest related to those of gender and knowledge.
In considering the imperialist resonances of The Blazing World, it is helpful to start with Cavendish herself, an aristocratic philosopher poet whose reputation was divisive while she was still alive. A brief look at her published works indicates the range of her intellectual interests: poetry collections, a play entitled A Comedy of the Apocryphal Ladies, and scientific works such as Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1666), the latter of which originally included The Blazing World as an appendix of sorts. She was the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society, where the all-male assembly protested her very presence. Of her visit, Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary that she was a “good comely woman; but her dress so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing.”1 Her unusual wardrobe was a frequent focus of society commentary, cropping up again in English writer John Evelyn’s recollection of a visit to the Duchess that left him “much pleased with [her] extraordinary fanciful habit, garb, and discourse”, as well as her “extravagant humour and dress, which is very singular.”2 Her “singular” clothing choices played with conceptions of gender as well: her penchant for masculine waistcoats contrasting with one notable incident in which she addressed the audience at one of her husband’s plays while wearing a self-designed dress based on ancient Cretan costumes that left her breasts “all laid out to view.”3
While her intellectual achievements were distinctive in and of themselves, Cavendish’s iconoclastic behavior maintained her reputation as an eccentric contrarian, earning her the nickname of “Mad Madge”.  After meeting her in London, for example, one contemporary described her conversation as “airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books, aiming at science, difficulties, high notions, terminating commonly in nonsense, oaths, and obscenity.” During their time together, Margaret reportedly claimed a place among the intellectual greats, declaring that “if the schools did not banish Aristotle, and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they did her wrong, and deserved to be utterly abolished.”4 This characterization of Cavendish as an idiosyncratic and unseemly egotist was echoed many years later in A Room of One’s Own, where Virginia Woolf describes her writings as a “vision of loneliness and riot . . . as if some giant cucumber had spread itself over all the roses and carnations in the garden and choked them to death.”5
The Blazing World provides a semi-autobiographical counterpoint to this characterization, not only in the insertion of Cavendish herself as a wise and respected character, but also in her depiction of the main protagonist the Empress as an intelligent woman whose ambition enables her to thrive in the isolated world that she rules absolutely. From this perspective, the self-important dilettante who forces her unwanted opinions onto others transforms into a besieged heroine who champions her own independence and intellect in a society that fails to appreciate her achievements. Lengthy passages describing intellectual life within the Blazing World take on greater significance when seen as critiques of the tediousness and limits of Cavendish’s own experiences within the male-dominated “learned society” of her day, as well as reflect her advocacy of self-expression and freedom from revision (she once wrote that she had “neither Room nor Time for such inferior Considerations” as “Mending or Correcting” her writings.)6
The Blazing World also fits into a larger body of speculative and proto-science fiction works of seventeenth-century natural philosophy, imagined terrestrial and cosmic voyages that sketched out new conceptions of the operation of life and the universe. Even in post-Copernican Europe, such speculation could be seen as dangerous and heretical. In 1600, Italian astronomer Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake for his claim that the universe was infinite and contained innumerable worlds, essentially killed for arguing in favor of free imaginative speculation in the service of knowledge.7 By the mid-seventeenth century, imaginative works about the operation of the universe became more widespread (and less hazardous to publish) as men such as Johannes Kepler, Francis Godwin, and Cyrano de Bergerac used cosmic voyages and utopian narratives to consider humanity’s place and significance in time and space.
In a context of ongoing religious reformation, many of these narratives centered on theological questions such as the primacy of Christ’s Earth-bound sacrifice in a potentially infinite universe, as narrators describe meetings with a variety of “exotic” beings from human-animal hybrids to moon people to the political elite of advanced utopias. Such confrontations raised questions about who (or “what”) could or could not be saved within a Christian worldview. This preoccupation with fictionalized “otherness” was of course intimately related to  European efforts to map, colonize, and profit from various regions of the globe.  Such a context gives significance to plot points that might otherwise seem bizarre or inexplicable. Read in connection with the violent history of European conquest in the Americas, for example, theological discussions about whether or not lunar beings could be saved from damnation become reworkings of contemporaneous debates about the fate of “unsaved heathens” living in the “New World”.8 With a consistent emphasis on exploration and alterity, such speculative fiction can be understood as the literary imaginary of imperialism, often (although not always) appearing as a celebration of scientific advancement in the service of conquest in imagined new locations.
In many ways, The Blazing World is similar to other speculative works from the seventeenth century, particularly in this connection between imagined and real “new worlds”. In his loving dedication, Cavendish’s husband William Newcastle makes this connection explicit, describing his wife’s narrative as a fictionalized “Fancy” made of “Nothing, but pure Wit” that mirrored the “discoveries” of Columbus, who “found a new World, America ‘tis nam’d”. However, unlike many of her contemporaries, Cavendish creates a new world in which the “discoveries” are made by a woman. Within her own realms of “Fancy”, the Empress is free from the gendered limits of the author’s own world — she acts as she wishes and her people adore her all the more for it. Indeed, throughout the narrative of The Blazing World, the female characters are celebrated for their political, territorial, and intellectual conquests, even (or especially) when they entail great violence.
Shortly after our introduction to the unnamed female protagonist, she “discovers” a new land when she is “forced into another World” that is joined to her own near the North Pole. Alone and fearful for her life in this strange new place, she is rescued by a large assembly of Bear-men who carry her to their city of underground caves. She quickly becomes the subject of reverence, as “both Males and Females, young and old, flockt together to see this Lady, holding up their Paws in admiration” and decide to “make her a Present to the Emperor of their World”. On their journey to the royal city where the “Imperial Race” is said to dwell, she meets up with the other indigenous subjects of the Blazing World, including Fox-, Geese- and Bird-men, Satyrs, and “men of a Grass-Green Complexion”. The newcomer learns the local language and observes remarkable technologies, including a ship powered by the “extraordinary Art” of a “certain Engin” which operated by drawing in and expelling a “great quantity of Air” that could act as a motor and cut a path of tranquility through rough waters.
Upon her introduction to the royal court, the outsider’s beauty and radiance convinces the Emperor that she is “some Goddess” to be worshipped, wed, and crowned. The Emperor seemingly brushed aside,  the woman now has “absolute power to rule and govern all that World as she pleased”. To exemplify her new station, the now-Empress dons an impressive outfit of bejeweled clothing and accessories that make use of local natural resources to better reflect her political power. Along with a “Rain-bow” colored diamond-encrusted “Buckler, to signifie the Defence of her Dominion”, she also wields a “Spear made of white Diamond, cut like the tail of a Blazing Star, which signified that she was ready to assault those that proved her Enemies.” Making quick use of her new authority, the Empress establishes “learned societies” to ensure that all of her animal-human subjects “followed such a profession as was most proper for the nature of their Species”, be that philosophy, astronomy, chemistry, physics, politics, mathematics, oration, or architecture. Natural hierarchies are thus maintained and every Satyr and Fox-man knows their own place in the cosmic order.
Following a lengthy account of reform (and counter-reform) of intellectual life within her vast dominion, the Empress turns to religious and spiritual matters, collaborating with “Immaterial Spirit” beings to create her own “poetical or Romantical Cabbala” and, in the process, summoning the soul of the Duchess of Newcastle Margaret Cavendish to act as her personal scribe. Although the two are from different “Home Worlds”, the two authorial ciphers soon become close friends in the Blazing World, particularly due to their shared ambitions for glory and power. The Duchess (as the character of Margaret Cavendish is referred to in the narrative) soon becomes upset that she has no empire to call her own, leading the two to discuss how she might acquire such a dominion. After deciding that “terrestrial” conquest will not suit her needs, the Duchess is advised by the Immaterial Spirits to simply write her own “Coelestial World . . . for every human Creature can create an Immaterial World fully inhabited by Immaterial Creatures, and populous of Immaterial subjects . . . and all this within the compass of the head or scull”. In creating her own world according to her own rules, she may enjoy her power “without controle or opposition”, making “what World you please” that can be altered and enjoyed without limits.
However, their joyful celebration of the possibilities of speculative fiction are cut short when the Empress learns that the place of her birth has come under attack. Mobilizing the vast intellectual and material resources of her new dominion, she vows revenge and promises “all the assistance which the Blazing-World was able to afford”. To most efficiently mobilize troops, the Emperor suggests that the Immaterial Spirits might be able to inhabit the bodies of their dead foes. The Empress, however, argues that such a thing would “never do” as they’d struggle to acquire so many corpses in the first place, and besides, in the rough and tumble of battle, they’d simply “[moulder] into dust and ashes, and so leave the purer Immaterial Spirits naked”. An army of the walking dead ruled out, it is decided, upon the Duchess’ suggestion, that the Bird-men and Fish-men will lead the vanguard, taking to the sky and the sea to initiate the attack. Giants (the architects of the Blazing World) are commissioned to devise new modes of water transport in the form of golden “Ships that could swim under Water” and better bring their troops to battle. Worm-men are sent out to amass huge amounts of “fire-stone”, a “Greek fire” type of material that burned when wet and therefore could not be quenched.
The invasion is a violent success. After establishing the king of her former homeland as the “absolute Master of the Seas, and consequently of that World”, the Empress watches for any sign of dissent, punishing those who try to escape payment of tribute by bringing “fire [to] all their Towns and Cities” and warning those who would cross her that “if they continued still in their Obstinate Resolutions, that she would convert their smaller Loss into a Total Ruin.” After pulling the ships back underwater and returning to the Blazing World, the Empress and Duchess content themselves with their works and deeds, secure in their ability to express their intellect and broadcast their political power.
Depictions of conquest in spectacular and science fiction remained popular with European audiences from the seventeenth century onward. Haunted by imperialism as they are, these stories can act as a useful tool for understanding how such ideologies have shaped the past and present. At the same time, works like The Blazing World do have their limits in this respect, as most reflect very little on the perspectives of those forced into colonial subjecthood. In more recent years, indigenous futurism and other postcolonial science fiction have changed this situation, as writers, filmmakers, and artists use the genre to critique the history and legacies of imperialism.9 While science fiction and empire are historically linked, the relationship is flexible and ever-changing.
The imperialist presence in Margaret Cavendish’s Blazing World itself is not a simple one. Her drive, through the character of the Empress, to conquer and exert power in her imaginary realm — this “New World” all of her own — seems a response to real-world limitations she encountered as a woman in the seventeenth century, albeit ones specific to the privileged world of a Duchess. If imperialist ideology inhabits the genre of science fiction in the imagining of interstellar frontiers of masculine swagger, we see here it takes a more unexpected form — a speculative domain for a woman to express her otherwise bridled will, where she is not forbidden from the most learned scientific societies but instead creates them. Indeed, she encouraged others, particularly elite European women, to create their own fictional realms to fit their desires, be that the expression of thwarted political power or securing respect for one’s intellectual scientific prowess. In this, the character of the Empress mirrors that of the author, whose preface asserts her to be “as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be”, and whose creation of worlds means that “though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second; yet, I will endeavor to be, Margaret the First: and, though I have neither Power, Time nor Occasion, to be a great Conqueror, like Alexander, or Cesar; yet, rather than not be Mistress of a World, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made One of my own.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: October 11, 2018

author: Emily Lord Fransee

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/


text:
The Life and Work of Nehemiah Grew

By Brian Garret
March 1, 2011

In the 82 illustrated plates included in his 1680 book The Anatomy of Plants, the English botanist Nehemiah Grew revealed for the first time the inner structure and function of plants in all their splendorous intricacy. Brian Garret explores how Grew's pioneering "mechanist" vision in relation to the floral world paved the way for the science of plant anatomy.

Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712) is best remembered for his careful and novel observations on plant anatomy, for his role in the development of comparative anatomy and as one of the first naturalists to utilize the microscope in the study of plant morphology. His most lasting work, containing his observations and impressive illustrations, is most certainly his early work The Anatomy of Plants begun as a philosophical history of plants published in 1682. Although Grew continued to publish throughout his life, especially on the chemical properties of various substances, all but the The Anatomy have fallen into obscurity.
Grew was a doctor by profession, receiving his degree from the university of Leiden in 1671. He was the son of a nonconformist and supporter of parliament, who was briefly imprisoned while his son gave lectures to the Royal Society and dedicated his books to the King. Nehemiah had little of his father’s political inclination, although he inherited some of the latter’s nonconformist religious views. He practiced medicine in London where he met John Wilkins (1614-1672), one of the founders of the Royal Society, who was likely attracted by the younger man’s opinions. Wilkins was impressed and he recommended Grew to the Royal Society for membership. Grew later served as secretary to the society, along with Robert Hooke (1635-1703), the infamous virtuoso and inventor. Like Hooke, Grew utilized the microscope for his investigations into plant anatomy. Along with Marcello Malphigi, Grew is remembered for establishing the observational basis for botany for the next 100 years.
As Grew acknowledged, Wilkins’ encouragement was crucial to his work, both intellectually and financially. Having been made a member under Wilkins’ influence, he was engaged by the Royal Society at 50 pounds a year to research plant anatomy. But getting actually paid was another matter and Grew had to plead with the society to receive what he was due. In his later life he practiced medicine in London and Coventry. Throughout the 1670’s Grew wrote short pamphlets on botany (often in Latin) and in 1680 translated and compiled them together under the title The Anatomy of Plants. He published a number of minor essays in the Transactions of the Royal Society, for example, “The description of an . . . Hummingbird” and “Some observations touching the Nature of Snow.” In 1681 he published The comparative anatomy of stomachs and guts, packed full of curious observations. 1683 saw the publication of New Experiments and useful observations concerning sea water made Fresh and in 1697 his Treatise of the nature and Use of Purging Salt contained in Epsom and such other waters. In his last work, Cosmologia Sacra (1701), Grew turned to philosophy and theology in order to demonstrate “the Truth and Excellency of the Bible.”
In many ways a contemporary review best sums up the significance of Grew’s scientific work, since much of that significance is obscure today:
In general, it is noted by our Author, that it will here appear, that there are those things which are little less wonderful within a Plant than within an Animal; that a Plant, like an Animal hath Organical parts, some whereof may be called its Bowels; that every Plant hath Bowels of divers kinds, containing divers liquors; that even a Plant lives partly upon Air, for the reception whereof it hath peculiar Organs. Again, that all the said Organs, Bowels, or other parts are as artificially made, and as punctually for place and number composed together as all the Mathematical Lines of a flower or Face; that the Staple of the Stuff is so exquisitely fine, that no Silkworm is able to draw so small a thred; that by all these means the ascent of the Sap, the Distribution of the Air, the Confection of several sorts of Liquors, as Lymphus, Milks, Oyls, Balsoms, with other acts of Vegetation, are all contrived and brought about in a Mechanical way.*[Philosophical transactions, 1675]*.
The significance for this 17th century reviewer is the ‘Mechanical way’ and Grew’s Organ-ism; that plants possess organs and structure. It wasn’t certain before the 17th century that plants had much internal structure in which distinct parts or organs played distinct roles. It was often thought, especially during the Renaissance, that the external shape of a plant was a clue or signature to its use, but whether there was anything resembling organs in plants was contested. A generation earlier, in his Of Bodies (1644), virtuoso (and all-round blow-hard) Sir Kenelm Digby (1603-1665) downplayed the existence of distinct organs in plants. However, Grew’s detailed observations established without a doubt that plants were analyzable into functional and morphological units, reinvigorating a tradition that went back to Theophrastus.
Grew is remembered for his detailed descriptions of plant anatomy and with him we see the beginning of modern comparative anatomy. He was guided by the idea that there may be similarities of function between animals and plants and this led him to look for equivalent organs in each. He thus believed in the circulation of sap, on analogy with William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood in animals, and he believed in a form of respiration in plants. Although the recognition of plant sexuality was old, Grew is remembered for noting the stamen as the male organ of the plant and pollen as seed. He also noted the prevalence of little bladders, or “cells” as Hooke had coined the term, especially in the parenchyma tissue (a term we have retained from Grew). Many of Grew’s observations were diachronic, putting emphasis on the development of the plant and its structures. The growth of a plant he deemed to be a function of sap circulating through the tissue, carrying and adding material to the plant. His observations on the bud of the flower revealed the complicated folding of the unexpanded leaves, something that had not been previously seen with the naked eye.
Grew’s mechanism consisted in his adherence to observations and his avoidance of explanations invoking vital forces, signatures, sympathies and antipathies. Also to be avoided was the direct hand, intervention, or guidance by God. Instead the mechanist looks for natural or secondary causes for the phenomena and the laws that govern them. Grew invokes no “occult” or hidden forces, although he offers a great deal of “wild” chemical speculation in his botanical and medical studies. The mechanistic project was a deliberate attempt to offer explanations of phenomena in terms that were “corporeal”, material or physical, however these difficult terms were to be interpreted. The mechanical philosophy allowed the researcher to think much like an engineerhow to make available materials do the task that is desired. The engineering image was also theologically acceptable: God is the engineer who constructed the mechanisms of nature and as such nature can be seen as “artificial”, the product of God’s industry. As natural philosophers (or scientists) we can uncover how these artifacts are constructed and how they function, by analogy with discovering how a machine, such as a clock, is constructed and functions.
Grew published his philosophical and theological views late in life in his Cosmologia Sacra: or a Discourse of the Universe as it is the Creature and Kingdom of God. In his last book Grew argues for a number of doctrines. He divides the natural causes within the universe into vital and corporeal components. Living and cognitive creatures have their origins in a Vital Principle, distinct from matter, yet bodies are necessary for the existence of Life. Life, being “more excellent” [p.34] than mere physical motion, requires an “Excellent, and so a distinct Subject, to which it belongs. And therefore something, which is Substantial, yet Incorporeal”.  Grew’s vitalism was not uncommon for the time, especially among the doctors, and reflects the neo-Platonist heritage found in many influential naturalists such as John Ray (1627-1705). But Grew revealed his sympathies for nonconformist religious thought in his account of miracles. Grew asserts a form a Deism: that once God has created the world in accordance with His laws, God has no further need to interfere. God acts through the world only through secondary, that is, natural causes (which includes the vital, incorporeal principle of Life). God does not act directly upon natural events but brings them about by other natural events. Miraculous events are merely those events which are rare and for which the cause is unknown; but they are not caused directly by God “. . . every Miracle is effected in the Use of some Second or Natural cause: Yet to make it a miracle, it is requisite, that this cause be unknown to us“ [p. 195].
The denial of miracles supports Grew’s dominant theme: that the universe reveals the existence and wisdom of God in its design and structure. The deist view sits happily with mechanist perspective. Everywhere a doctor looks he can see the remarkable living machinery of the body; how organs grow to their proper and useful places. Grew took it that the teleological features of the universe revealed the wisdom of its construction. The idea was an old one but had recently gained ground in Robert Boyle’s discussion A Disquisition About Final Causes. Grew was not as careful as the skeptical alchemist and saw many of the world’s wonders as designed for the sake of Man, although he took it that the internal structures of plants were for the benefit of plants. The incredible usefulness of the Coco plant, the silkworm and of iron, indicate that the universe is well suited to Mankind. But the argument from design is often ridiculed as an argument from poor design, when one reflects on the hardships of life and the immorality of Men. Grew is not daunted by such reflections:
The most Exorbitant Phancies and Lusts of Men, illustrate the Beauty of God’s Creation. One man makes all his thoughts and Pleasures, to centre in Meats and Drinks; Another, in Musick; a third, in Women; or some other Sense or Phancy so as to think of nothing else. Which, as it shows the infirmity of human nature; so the Plenitude and Perfection of the World, in being fitted, so many ways, to Beatifie Men, would they know discreetly how to use it. And the same Lust and Phancies, are many other ways turned to Good. *[p.104]*.
Grew made his observations independently but simultaneously with Marcello Malphigi, in what might be considered a case of independent co-discovery, an interesting phenomenon in the history of science. Most famous is the co-discovery of natural selection by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace. But if Grew and Malphigi’s work counts as co-discovery it is in a very different way from that of Darwin and Wallace. Arguably, the co-discovery in plant morphology was a result of technological advances due to the invention of the microscope and was somewhat non-theoretical. Darwin and Wallace, however, discovered a law of nature, making significant theoretical advances in addition to their remarkable observations. But of course, without the meticulous work by the pioneers of botany, fruitful theory would not have arisen. Thus Nehemiah Grew must be remembered for his pioneering role in the establishment of modern botany.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: rian Garret


text:
Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno

By Frank Key
January 31, 2011

The poet Christopher Smart — also known as "Kit Smart", "Kitty Smart", "Jack Smart" and, on occasion, "Mrs Mary Midnight" — was a well known figure in 18th-century London. Nowadays he is perhaps best known for considering his cat Jeoffry. Writer and broadcaster Frank Key looks at Smart's weird and wonderful Jubilate Agno.

“My poor friend Smart shewed the disturbance of his mind, by falling upon his knees, and saying his prayers in the street, or in any other unusual place...” Concerning this unfortunate poet, Christopher Smart, who was confined in a madhouse, [Dr Johnson] had, at another time,  the following conversation with Dr Burney . . . “I did not think he ought to be shut up. His infirmities were not noxious to society. He insisted on people praying with him; and I’d as lief pray with Kit Smart as any one else.”James Boswell, The Life Of Samuel Johnson, LL.D.
Dr Johnson thought his friend should not be confined, but ‘society’ thought otherwise, and Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was incarcerated in St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in Bethnal Green, London and then in Mr Potter’s private madhouse between 1757 and 1763. He died, eight years later, in debtor’s prison. These private miseries overshadowed the reputation he had gained as a poet and contributor to periodicals. He was a prolific writer, in both Latin and English, and five times won the Seatonian Prize, awarded to a Cambridge graduate for the best poem on “the perfections or attributes of the supreme being.” A Song To David, the major work published in his lifetime, was not well-received, however, and until Robert Browning championed it a century later, Smart was more or less forgotten.
It was not until 1939 that his masterpiece, written during his confinement in St Luke’s, was first published. Jubilate Agno is one of the most extraordinary poems in the English language, and almost certainly the reason we remember Christopher Smart today. It has been described as a vast hymn of praise to God and all His works, and also as the ravings of a madman. Indeed, that first edition was published under the title Rejoice In The Lamb : A Song From Bedlam, clearly marking it as a curio from the history of mental illness. It was W H Bond’s revised edition of 1954 which gave order to Smart’s surviving manuscript, restoring the Latin title Jubilate Agno, bringing us the poem in the form we know it today.
Christopher Smart never completed the work, which consists of four fragments making a total of over 1,200 lines, each beginning with the words “Let” or “For”. For example, Fragment A is all “Let”s, whereas in Fragment B the “Let”s and “For”s are paired, which may have been the intention for the entire work, modelled on antiphonal Hebrew poetry. References and allusions abound to Biblical (especially Old Testament) figures, plants and animals, gems, contemporary politics and science, the poet’s family and friends, even obituary lists in current periodicals. The language is full of puns, archaisms, coinages, and unfamiliar usages. Dr Johnson famously said “Nothing odd will do long; Tristram Shandy did not last”. Jubilate Agno is, if anything, “odder” than Sterne’s novel, and perhaps we are readier to appreciate it in the twenty-first century than when it was written.
One section, much favoured by anthologists, gives some of the flavour of the work.  ※※Indexed under…Catscalled Geoffrey
For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry.For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer.For he rolls upon prank to work it in.For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself.For this he performs in ten degrees.For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean.For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there.For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended.For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood.For fifthly he washes himself.For sixthly he rolls upon wash.For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.For eighthly he rubs himself against a post.For ninthly he looks up for his instructions.For tenthly he goes in quest of food.
Here we have an example of what one could call Smart’s “encyclopaedic” style, his passion for listing and enumerating. And whereas the description of his cat is fairly straightforward, other passages in the poem are deeply obscure, seeming to emerge from some private store of reference. It has been suggested that, in his confinement, Smart had access to just six books: the King James Bible; Ainsworth’s Latin Thesaurus; Salmon’s guide for London pharmacists (in Latin); Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary; and Hill’s Useful Family Herbal and History of Plants. The modern reader cannot hope to grasp every reference and allusion scattered within the poem, but Smart’s language is exact and exquisite, with a musicality that becomes hypnotic.
For a DREAM is a good thing from GOD.For there is a dream from the adversary which is terror.For the phenomenon of dreaming is not of one solution, but many.For Eternity is like a grain of mustard as a growing body and improving spirit.For the malignancy of fire is oweing to the Devil’s hiding of light, till it became visible darkness. For the Circle may be SQUARED by swelling and flattening. For the Life of God is in the body of man and his spirit in the Soul. For there was no rain in Paradise because of the delicate construction of the spiritual herbs and flowers. For the Planet Mercury is the WORD DISCERNMENT. For the Scotchman seeks for truth at the bottom of a well, the Englishman in the Heaven of Heavens.
As that last line perhaps indicates, one of the great joys of Jubilate Agno is in its sudden dislocations and unexpected diversions. The “my cat Jeoffrey” passage is justly famous, but the poem is cram-packed with similar wonders, and must be read in full to appreciate its inimitable genius.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 31, 2011

author: Frank Ke


text:
Emma Goldman’s “Anarchism Without Adjectives”

By Kathy E. Ferguson
January 12, 2011

In 2011, over 100 years after the publication of her seminal Anarchism and Other Essays, the writings of Emma Goldman entered the public domain. Kathy E. Ferguson, Professor of Political Science and Women's Studies at the University of Hawai'i, provides an introduction to Goldman's life and her particular brand of anarchism.

Emma Goldman was a well-known radical critic of capitalism, the state, religion, patriarchy and colonialism during the fertile political years at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries.  For over a half century, she articulated an anarchist vision of a strong, free, self-creating individual within an egalitarian, participatory society. While anarchists are often dismissed as the lunatic fringe of the Left, Goldman presented anarchism as the most practical approach to human liberation. She emphasized concrete and creative anarchist activities, including cooperatives, radical schools, labor actions, and publications, which showed anarchism in action.
Goldman was born in Kovno, Lithuania, into an economically insecure Jewish family. Her brief formal education was enhanced by exposure to nihilist revolutionaries and Russian radical literature. Immigrating with her sister to the United States in 1885, she settled originally in Rochester, New York. Like many young people of her generation, she was galvanized politically by the trial and execution of several young anarchists who were framed for the killing of police at the Haymarket riots in Chicago in 1886. She subsequently moved to New York City and joined the anarchist movement, rapidly rising to become one of the best known speakers in the lively radical landscape of the time. She was arrested countless times – legend has it that she took a book with her to her own lectures so she would have something to read in jail – and served three terms in prison: one year for urging unemployed workers to “take bread,” a few weeks for providing information on preventing conception, and two years for opposing conscription during World War I. After her third prison term, she and her comrade Alexander Berkman, along with 247 other radicals, were sent into exile to the newly-formed U.S.S.R. Initially supporting the Bolsheviks, she soon came to view the Communist Party as the murderers of the revolution. She and Berkman left Russia and eventually settled in the south of France. Goldman continued her lecturing and writing in Europe, England, and Canada; she strongly supported the anarchist revolutionaries in Spain in the 1930s, and was still an active speaker, writer and agitator when she died following a stroke in 1940.
Strongly influenced by Peter Kropotkin’s communist anarchism, Goldman also integrated strands from Mikail Bakunin’s militant revolutionary practice, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s mutualism, and Max Stirner’s radical individualism, helping to create what many anarchists of Goldman’s generation called “anarchism without adjectives.” For anarchists, capitalism is a system that robs workers, intellectuals, artists, and peasants of their productive, creative labor, transferring both profit and control of labor to owners. Organized religion supports this theft by teaching adherents to defer to authority and hope passively for reward in the next life.  The state uses organized violence to protect owners, suppress workers, and mobilize people’s loyalties and sense of home into a vicious, narrow patriotism that justifies and energizes war, which in turn furthers the profits and power of the capitalist class and its allies. Colonialism calls on the religious mandate of “civilizing” and converting the rest of the world to justify seizing the resources of less well-armed societies for global capitalist expansion. Schools undermine children’s natural curiosity and turn students into automatons regurgitating the orthodoxies they are taught.
Into this sweeping critique of established authority, Goldman introduced the aesthetic sensibility of the American romantic movement, Nietzsche’s spirit of rebellion, and her own unique feminism. From Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau she absorbed a poetic, sensuous individualism. Like many other anarchists of her day, she emphasized the centrality of radical art, poetry, literature and drama to the emergence of free individuals. She was one of the first anarchists to become enthusiastic about Nietzsche, embracing him as a catalyst for a spiritual transvaluation of values. While she scorned the women’s suffrage movement, seeing any effort to reform rather than transform society as a useless distraction from more radical goals, she developed a revolutionary feminism that anticipated many themes prevalent in the later women’s movements. She focused her feminism on women’s bodies, demanding that women control their own reproduction, find their own sexual autonomy, claim equality in relations with men, and work with men to overthrow the prevailing authorities and create new relations of equality and freedom.
Goldman published several of her key essays in her book Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) as well as her journal Mother Earth, published from 1906-1917. Additionally, she gave many thousands of lectures and wrote enormous numbers of letters to other anarchists and to a range of other progressive figures, including Rebecca West, John Dewey, Jack London, and Bertrand Russell. Her ideas on theater were published in The Social Significance of Modern Drama (1914) and her analysis of the rise and fall of revolution in the Soviet Union in My Disillusionment in Russia (1922). Her best known writing is probably her influential autobiography Living My Life (1931), in which she crafts the story of her lifelong political activism.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 12, 2011

author: Kathy E. Ferguson


text:
A Few Words about F. Scott Fitzgerald

By Scott Donaldson
September 26, 2011

In most countries around the world, 2011 saw the writings of F. Scott Fitzgerald enter the public domain. Scott Donaldson, author of the biography Fool For Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald, explores the obscuring nature of his legend and the role that women played in his life and work.

With Fitzgerald as with no one else in American literature save Poe, the biography gets in the way. Never mind that F. Scott Fitzgerald is the author of one exquisite short novel as perfect as anything in our literature and of another longer, more chaotic novel of tremendous emotional power. Never mind that he has written a couple of dozen stories that by any standard deserve the designation of “masterful.” Ignoring those legacies, much of the general public still tends to think of him in connection with the legends of his disordered and difficult life, and to classify him under one convenient stereotype or another. So diminished in stature, Fitzgerald becomes the Chronicler of the Jazz Age, or the Artist in Spite of Himself, or — most prevalent stereotype of all — the Writer as Burnt-Out Case: a man whose tragic course functions as a cautionary tale for more commonsensical aftercomers. His saga offers an almost irresistible temptation to sermonizers, overt or concealed. It is not right to ride on top of taxicabs or disport oneself in the Plaza hotel’s fountain, not right to drink to excess or abuse a “lovely golden wasted talent.” Go thou and do otherwise.
This warning usually remains implicit, of course. It is not the homily but the tale of star-crossed lovers that commands attention — handsome brilliant erratic Scott married for good or ill to beautiful willful unstable Zelda. There is an arresting poignancy in the way the two of them — Scott more than Zelda, perhaps — considered the alternatives and chose the sweet poison. Somehow, in the repeated retellings of this tale, the Fitzgeralds have come to stand for a kind of generic nonspecific glamour, now sadly departed. In 1980 the opening party for an exhibit of Fitzgeraldiana at the National Portrait Gallery drew an enormous crowd determined to celebrate a vanished past. The band played Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman numbers from the 1940s, the decade following Fitzgerald’s death. A few women attempted flapper costumes, but for the most part the clothes were as anachronistic as the music. One chap, aiming for colonial elegance, danced in a pith helmet. The details that mattered so much to Fitzgerald, a man precisely in tune with his times, mattered very little to those come to the party to memorialize his legend. Zelda and Scott, Scott and Zelda — they are fixed so securely in the collective mind as lovable reckless youths for whom it all went disastrously wrong that it has been difficult to set that image aside and concentrate on the work that established him as one of the major literary artists of the twentieth century.
Henry James, himself a biographer as well as a novelist, understood that the entire truth about anyone could never be told. “We can only take what groups together,” he said. What most grouped together in Fitzgerald’s work and life, I came to realize over several decades in the classroom and five years of intensive research, was an overweening compulsion to please. He wanted to please other men, but did a poor job of it. His Princeton classmates considered him over-inquisitive and frivolous. Zelda’s father thought him unreliable. Ernest Hemingway, the closest of friends in the mid-1920s, eventually came to regard him with something like scorn. Fitzgerald was far more successful in pleasing women. Readers of his fiction might expect as much, for he is one of our more androgynous writers, with a rare capacity to put himself in the place of characters of either sex. “All my characters are Scott Fitzgeralds,” he acknowledged. “Even my female characters are feminine Scott Fitzgeralds.” The set of instructions Fitzgerald drew up, at 18, for his younger sister Annabel provides convincing evidence along these lines. In this remarkable document he coached his sister in the finer points of attracting boys: how to groom herself, how to dance, what to talk about, how to flatter. And the androgyny is everywhere evident in the stories and novels, too, which is probably why most female college students are attracted to his fiction.
Equipped with this sensitivity, Fitzgerald played the game of courtship well. As a youth he was a notoriously successful flirt. “I’ve got an adjective that just fits you,” he would tell a dancing partner early in the evening, and then withhold the laudatory word to build up her expectations. He was good-looking, and at ease in the company of girls. He listened to them as few other boys did, and made it clear that he cared tremendously what they thought of him. Later, as a married man, he continued to woo women. He couldn’t help it. He needed their approval, which is to say their love and adoration. Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald may have been the most important woman in his life, but she was not and could not be the only one.
Fitzgerald suffered a tremendous setback when Ginevra King of Lake Forest, north of Chicago — one of the wealthiest and most beautiful debutantes of her day — spurned him in order to marry a young man of her own class. The rejection devastated Fitzgerald, even as it supplied him with the basic subject matter of much of his fiction. There are probably more characters in his stories and novels modeled on Ginevra than on Zelda Sayre, who caught him on the rebound. By altering the circumstances of the plot, Fitzgerald played variations on the age-old theme of the battle of the sexes.
What is unusual about Fitzgerald’s treatment of this theme is its escalation — in the work as in the life -- from the courting game of his adolescence to the fierce battle of his young manhood to the outright war of his maturity. Perhaps, we are inclined to think, Amory Blaine will not suffer unduly from his jilting by Rosalind Connage in This Side of Paradise (1920), Fitzgerald’s first novel. But Gatsby dies for Daisy in his 1925 masterpiece, and Dick Diver is stripped of his vitality and tossed aside by Nicole and her family in 1934’s Tender is the Night. In Fitzgerald’s fictional treatment of the war between the sexes, it is almost always the man who ends up defeated. By repeatedly depicting the downfall of his male figures, Fitzgerald was imagining what might well have happened (had not Zelda been afflicted with schizophrenia) and also — it seems to me — excoriating himself for his weaknesses. Tender, in particular, is a novel about the enervating effects of charm. Compelled to please everyone around him (and particularly women), Diver dissipates away his life’s work and his usefulness as a human being. The real Fitzgerald, like his invented protagonist, came to despise himself for this “fatal pleasingness,” a self-disgust that characteristically emerged under the influence of alcohol. Drinking runs like an inner malaise through Fitzgerald’s life and that of many of his male characters. His triumph came in the last years of his life, when — supposedly down and out in Hollywood — he cast aside this obsession, quit drinking, and went back to being what he called “a writer only.”
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 26, 2011

author: Scott Donaldson


text:
Lewis Carroll and The Hunting of the Snark

By Edward Wakeling
February 22, 2011

In 1876 Lewis Carroll published by far his longest poem - a fantastical epic tale recounting the adventures of a bizarre troupe of nine tradesmen and a beaver. Carrollian scholar, Edward Wakeling, introduces The Hunting of the Snark.

Although best known as the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871), Lewis Carroll — the pen-name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a mathematical lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford — was also an avid reader and writer of poetry. He greatly enjoyed the poems of Victorian writers such as Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Christina Rossetti. His own poems were varied — some just humorous nonsense, some filled with hidden meanings, and some serious poems about love and life. Probably his best known is called “Jabberwocky,” with its opening line of “’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves . . .”, and its many invented words, some that have now entered the English language, such as “chortle” and “galumph”. Such nonsense verse is as popular now as it was when first published. His more serious poetry, it must be admitted, is generally inferior to his humorous verse and often over sentimental. Between 1860 and 1863 he contributed a dozen or more poems to College Rhymes, a pamphlet issued each term to members of Oxford and Cambridge universities, and which, for a time, he edited. In 1869, he compiled a book of poems, many of which he had already published elsewhere but now issued in revised form, together with one main new poem, which gives its title to the book, Phantasmagoria.
One particular poem stands out from all the others that Carroll wrote. It has inspired parodies, continuations, musical adaptations, and a wide variety of interpretations. It is an epic nonsense poem written at a time when Carroll was struggling with his religious beliefs following the serious illness of his cousin and godson, Charlie Wilcox, who eventually died from tuberculosis. Although the poem concerns death and danger, it is filled with humour and whimsical ideas. Strangely, it was written backwards. After a night nursing his cousin, Carroll went for a long walk over the hills near Guildford, and a solitary line of verse came into his head — “For the Snark was a Boojum, you see!” The rest of the stanza, the last in the poem, came to him a few days later. Over a period of six months, the rest of poem was composed, ending up as 141 stanzas in 8 sections that Carroll called “fits.”
The poem concerns a quest by a crew sailing to catch a mysterious creature called a Snark. Each member of the crew has an occupation beginning with the letter “B” — Bellman (the Captain), Baker, Banker, Barrister, Billiard-Marker, Boots, Bonnet-Maker, Broker, and Butcher, accompanied by a Beaver. Their maritime map is an absolute blank. They reach an island, and the hunt for a Snark begins. But the quest is fraught with danger because although Snarks are not in themselves harmful, those that are Boojums are ferocious and will kill. The question that naturally arises is “does the poem have a meaning?” Carroll denied that he meant anything in particular — the poem was all nonsense — but that did not stop people asking him, and it inspired others to give it their own meaning. To some extent, the poem is about the relationships that emerge among the crew, and the interaction between this motley bunch of characters. All behave in odd ways, some have close-shaves, and one completely vanishes — caught by a Boojum.
The poem was entitled The Hunting of the Snark with the subtitle, An Agony in Eight Fits. Carroll originally intended it as a set of verses to be included in another of his children’s stories, but it grew too long and became a book in its own right. He published it on 1 April 1876 — the date chosen with care. However, many of his presentation copies to friends are dated 29 March. Although issued in a pictorial buff coloured cloth, he had copies bound in red, blue, green, and white cloth, all with gold decoration, to give away to his friends and family. The book was dedicated to one of his friends, Gertrude Chataway, and a dedicatory acrostic poem that introduces the book embodies her name as the first word of each stanza, Gert, Rude, Chat, Away, and also the first letter of each line.
Accompanying the poem were illustrations by Henry Holiday (1839-1927), artist, sculptor, stained-glass designer, and book illustrator. He drew nine illustrations for the book; a tenth illustration depicting a Snark was rejected by Carroll — he wanted the creature to remain unimaginable.
The poem owes a debt to “Jabberwocky” — some of the invented words from these verses reappear in The Hunting of the Snark and Carroll explains their derivation in his Preface, such as frumious being a portmanteau word based on “fuming” and “furious.” Some of the creatures also make a second appearance — the vicious Jubjub bird and the terrifying Bandersnatch.
The poem was very popular — it was reprinted many times. In Carroll’s lifetime, over 20,000 copies were sold. The poem was incorporated into Carroll’s compendium of humorous poetry entitled Rhyme? and Reason? (1883). Since then it has been illustrated by a variety of artists and translated into many languages, and the book rarely goes out of print. People are known to memorise and recite the poem. Some people form Snark Clubs. There is a timeless nature about the verses that make it as relevant today as it did in 1876.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 22, 2011

author: Edward Wakeling


text:
Aspiring to a Higher Plane

By Ian Stewart
September 19, 2011

In 1884 Edwin Abbott Abbott published Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, perhaps the first ever book that could be described as "mathematical fiction". Ian Stewart, author of Flatterland and The Annotated Flatland, introduces the strange tale of the geometric adventures of A. Square.

Edwin Abbott Abbott, who became Headmaster of the City of London School at the early age of 26, was renowned as a teacher, writer, theologian, Shakespearean scholar, and classicist. He was a religious reformer, a tireless educator, and an advocate of social democracy and improved education for women. Yet his main claim to fame today is none of these: a strange little book, the first and almost the only one of its genre: mathematical fantasy. Abbott called it Flatland, and published it in 1884 under the pseudonym A. Square.
On the surface — and the setting, the imaginary world of Flatland, is a surface, an infinite Euclidean plane — the book is a straightforward narrative about geometrically shaped beings that live in a two-dimensional world. A. Square, an ordinary sort of chap, undergoes a mystical experience: a visitation by the mysterious Sphere from the Third Dimension, who carries him to new worlds and new geometries. Inspired by evangelical zeal, he strives to convince his fellow citizens that the world is not limited to the two dimensions accessible to their senses, falls foul of the religious authorities, and ends up in jail.
The story has a timeless appeal, and has never been out of print since its first publication. It has spawned several sequels and has been the subject of at least one radio programme and two animated films. Not only is the book about hidden dimensions: it has its own hidden dimensions. Its secret mathematical agenda is not the notion of two dimensions, but that of four. Its social agenda pokes fun at the rigid stratification of Victorian society, especially the low status of women, even the wives and daughters of the wealthy.
Flatland’s inhabitants are triangles, squares, and other geometric figures. In the planar world’s orderly hierarchy, one’s status depends on one’s degree of regularity and how many sides one has. An isosceles triangle is superior to a scalene triangle (all sides different) but inferior to an equilateral triangle. But all triangles must defer to squares, which in turn defer to pentagons, hexagons, right up to the pinnacle of Flatland society, the Priestshood. Referred to as ‘circles’, the priests are actually polygons with so many sides that no one can distinguish them. The sons of squares are usually pentagons, the grandsons hexagons, so there is a general progression along the greasy pole (there is no ‘up’ in Flatland).
But what of the wives and daughters? Flatland’s women are mere line segments, actually very thin triangles, whose social standing is zero. Their intelligence is little greater. They are required by law to wiggle from side to side so that they can be seen, and to emit loud cries so that they can be heard, because a collision with a woman is as fatal as one with a stiletto. Abbott took a bit of stick from some of his female contemporaries, who failed to appreciate his irony. But we know from his own life, including his daughter’s education, that he did a lot to improve the status of women and to ensure they received the same level of education as men.
Abbott wasn’t particularly good at, or keen on, mathematics, but his book tackled an issue of great interest in Victorian times, the notion of four (or more) dimensions. This idea was becoming fundamental in science and mathematics, and it was also being invoked in areas like theology and spiritualism, because an invisible extra dimension was just the place to locate God, the spirit world, or ghosts. Charlatans like the American medium Henry Slade were exploiting conjuring tricks to claim access to the Fourth Dimension. Legitimate hyperspace philosophers were speculating about the role that additional dimensions might play in illuminating the human condition.
Flatland approaches this topic by way of a dimensional analogy, widely used ever since, and not entirely Abbott’s own invention. The difficulties facing a three-dimensional Victorian attempting to grasp the geometry of four dimensions are similar to those facing A. Square attempting to grasp the geometry of three. Among Abbott’s sources for this analogy were frequent social encounters with eminent scientists such as the physicist John Tyndall, whom he met at George Eliot’s house in 1871. Tyndall may have told Abbott about the work of Hermann von Helmholtz, who gave public lectures on non-Euclidean geometry using the image of an imaginary two-dimensional creature living on a mathematical surface. Another likely source is the outrageous Charles Howard Hinton, who wrote his own book about a two-dimensional world in his 1907 An Episode of Flatland: How a Plane Folk Discovered the Third Dimension.
Abbott’s mathematico-literary legacy is a series of Flatland spin-offs: Dionys Burger’s Sphereland, Rudy Rucker’s short story ‘Message Found in a Copy of Flatland’ and his novel The Fourth Dimension, Alexander Keewatin Dewdney’s The Planiverse, and my own Flatterland. But what he was really trying to tell his readers was more subtle. Just as a humble square can transcend his plane world and aspire to the Third Dimension, so the women and the lower classes of Victorian England could transcend the confines of their stratified society and aspire to a higher plane of existence. More than 120 years later, it is a message that has lost none of its urgency.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 19, 2011

author: Ian Stewart


text:
100 Years of The Secret Garden

By Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina
March 8, 2011

The year 2011 marked the 100th anniversary of the children's classic The Secret Garden. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, author of Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of The Secret Garden, takes a look at the life of Burnett and how personal tragedy underpinned the creation of her most famous work.

“With regard to The Secret Garden,” Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote to her English publisher in October 1910, “do you realize that it is not a novel, but a childs [sic] story though it is gravely beginning life as an important illustrated serial in a magazine for adults . . . . It is an innocent thriller of a story to which grown ups listen spell bound to my keen delight.”  The “thriller of a story” made its first appearance that fall in The American Magazine, but appeared as an actual book a year later.
Now, as the novel is celebrated during its centennial year, it’s fascinating to go back and see the modest beginning of a book that is repeatedly cited as one of the most influential and beloved children’s books of all time. Yet Burnett would be astonished today to learn that she is known primarily as a writer for children, when the majority of her fifty-three novels and thirteen produced plays were for adults.
When Burnett sat down to write the story of an orphaned girl sent from India to the Yorkshire moors, where she helps herself and others find redemption and health by reviving a forgotten garden, she composed it not in the north of England but in her new home on Long Island. Born in 1849 and raised in Manchester, England into a middle class family, she moved as a teenager to Tennessee when her widowed mother decided they should emigrate at the end of the Civil War. Although they were poor, Burnett was delighted at giving up the grit and smoke of a factory city for the stunning landscapes of eastern Tennessee. In America she soon began to publish her romantic stories in some of the most popular magazines, eventually becoming hugely famous when she published her sixth novel, Little Lord Fauntleroy, in 1886. From the first her work had never been turned down by any publisher, but with Fauntleroy she became, and remained, the highest paid woman writer of her time, churning out books and stories with great regularity. Despite the enormous success of Fauntleroy, and later of A Little Princess, most of her novels and plays were not for a juvenile audience.
By this time a married mother of two living in Washington, DC, she capitalized on her English background in most of her work. Over the years, England remained an active and important part of her life. She crossed the Atlantic no fewer than thirty-three times over her lifetime, often living abroad for a year or two at a time. At the same time, she maintained homes in Washington, and later in New York, and doted upon her very American sons, even when her marriage to their father broke down and through some surprisingly long absences from them.
Two life-changing events contributed to the genesis of The Secret Garden, which was written late in her life. The first was the death of her sixteen-year-old son Lionel, who became increasingly ill in Washington while she was living away. Her husband, Dr. Swan Burnett, wrote her urgent letters about their son’s failing health, but it was not until the diagnosis turned out to be tuberculosis that she rushed home to take Lionel on a desperate circuit of European spas. When he died in her arms in Paris at the end of 1890, she was completely devastated. For years she threw herself into starting and supporting a clubhouse for boys in London, and in spoiling her remaining son, Vivian.
The second loss was that of her beloved home Maytham Hall in Kent, in southern England, which she had leased for ten years. In 1908 the leaseholder decided to sell the grand house, and Burnett was forced to leave the home where she had spent the happiest months of each year, after shedding her abusive second husband. There she cultivated extensive gardens, held parties, and tamed a robin as she wrote outdoors at a table in a sheltered garden. Both the robin and the gardens made their way into The Secret Garden.
With the loss of Maytham Hall, Burnett returned to America where she built adjoining houses for herself and her sister Edith, and for Vivian and his family in Plandome, on Long Island. She returned for several long sojourns to England, and spent her winters with Edith in Bermuda. In both Bermuda and Plandome she threw herself into gardening, with the help of gardeners, designing extensive gardens that produced award-winning blooms. Roses were her favorite, and her trademark, just as they were for Lilias Craven in The Secret Garden.
Every year Burnett published a book in time for the Christmas market, and in 1910 she found herself intrigued by the thought of a sallow and unlikeable little girl, her disabled cousin, and a strong nature-loving boy and his benevolent mother. Always taken with her own writing — she often declared that they “came” to her rather than being invented, and she could sometimes be found reading her own books on a stairway, with evident pleasure — she wrote to her publisher that “I love it myself. There is a long deserted garden in it whose locked door is hidden by ivy and whose key has been buried for ten years. It contains also a sort of Faun who charms wild creatures and tame ones and there is a moorland cottage woman who is a sort of Madonna with twelve children — a warm bosomed, sane, wise, simple Mother thing.”
Burnett loved the combination of the gothic and the natural worlds, and the ability of children to understand and appreciate them in everyday life. In this new story, she was able, whether she recognized it or not, to recover from her two enormous losses. Unlike her son Lionel, Colin Craven is restored to health at the end of the novel. And unlike Maytham Hall, the gardens at Misselthwaite Manor continually bloomed. When Burnett died in 1924, her friends helped erect a memorial to her in Central Park, consisting of a fountain surrounded by gardens and reading benches. Their prescient choice of The Secret Garden for the fountain sculpture surprised the public, for it was, at the time, one of her lesser known and appreciated books, but they knew these were things that were close to the author’s heart.
Although it sold well enough at first, The Secret Garden lapsed into a kind of near oblivion for many decades. Critics ignored or disparaged it, even at a time when children’s literature began receiving more and more critical and scholarly attention. It was the children, along with librarians, who saved it, passing on the book to readers and friends, and creating a special place in their hearts for the story. By the 1960s, its fortunes began to revive, and when the book went out of copyright in 1986, dozens of illustrators and publishers rushed to reproduce it.
As we celebrate 100 years of The Secret Garden, the book has never been more popular or influential. Whole shelves in bookstores carry its many editions, and it has been translated into nearly every known language. Children around the world continue to love the story of the children who, with the help of nature and positive thinking, bring the world back to life. As Burnett said to a friend, “I know quite well that it is one of my best finds.” Children and adults one hundred years later, still agree.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina


text:
Was Charles Darwin an Atheist?

By John van Wyhe
June 28, 2011

Leading Darwin expert and founder of Darwin Online, John van Wyhe, challenges the popular assumption that Darwin's theory of evolution corresponded with a loss of religious belief.

The religious views of Charles Darwin, the venerable Victorian naturalist and author of the Origin of Species (1859) never cease to interest modern readers. Bookshops and the internet are well-stocked with discussions of Darwin’s views and the implications of his theory of evolution for religion. Many religious writers today accuse Darwin of atheism. Some popular proponents of atheism also enlist Darwin to their cause. Even while Darwin was still alive there were widely varying descriptions of his religious opinions — which he kept mostly private. In 1880 the Austrian writer Ernst von Hesse-Wartegg visited Darwin at his home, Down House, in Kent. The coachman who drove Hesse-Wartegg from the train station at Orpington opined of the famous Mr. Darwin: “Ha es en enfidel, Sar — yes, an enfidel — an unbeliever! and the people say he never went to church!”. The passage quoted here was actually marked in Darwin’s copy of this German newspaper (the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt) — no doubt it amused Darwin as much as the German attempt to capture the Kentish accent through phonetic spelling.
Other commentators were more generous in their interpretations of Darwin’s religiosity. The modern myth of a timeless conflict of science and religion was far from the reality experienced by Victorian readers who first turned the pages of Darwin’s Origin of Species and Descent of Man (1871). It is now widely forgotten that the scientific debate over the theory of evolution was over within twenty years of the publication of Origin of Species. Yet how could that be given that the Victorians were, by and large, far more religious than people generally are today and the scientific evidence for evolution was far less complete than it is now? The explanation is that for very many Victorians the choice was not between God and science, religion or evolution, but between different notions of how God designed nature. It was already widely accepted that fixed natural laws (or secondary laws) had been discovered that explained natural phenomena from astronomy and chemistry to physiology and geology. Darwin, it was believed, had simply discovered a new law of nature designed by God. And it seems this was how Darwin himself viewed at least part of the religious implications of his evolutionary theory. This also makes it all the more understandable that Darwin was buried by the nation in Westminster Abbey in 1882.
A few of Darwin’s private letters referring to religion were published near the end of his life and more after his death. These have been very widely quoted in the voluminous discussions of Darwin’s religious views. Searching for other material which might have bearing on the question of his religious views, I turned to Darwin Online, an online repository of Darwin‘s corpus where it is possible to search the works by key term. Putting in terms like ‘atheist’ and ‘atheism’ I found what seems to be a previously unknown discussion of this question by Darwin himself. The passage occurs in Darwin’s lengthy 1879 “Preliminary notice” to the English translation of Ernst Krause’s biography of Darwin’s freethinking paternal grandfather, the poet and physician Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802). Darwin addressed the question of whether his grandfather was an atheist:
Dr. Darwin has been frequently called an atheist, whereas in every one of his works distinct expressions may be found showing that he fully believed in God as the Creator of the universe. For instance, in the ‘Temple of Nature,’ published posthumously, he writes: “Perhaps all the productions of nature are in their progress to greater perfection! an idea countenanced by modern discoveries and deductions concerning the progressive formation of the solid parts of the terraqueous globe, and consonant to the dignity of the creator of all things.” He concludes one chapter in ‘Zoonomia’ with the words of the Psalmist: “The heavens declare the Glory of God, and the firmament sheweth his handiwork.”
He published an ode on the folly of atheism, with the motto “I am fearfully and wonderfully made,” of which the first verse is as follows:—
1.Dull atheist, could a giddy danceOf atoms lawless hurl’dConstruct so wonderful, so wise,So harmonised a world?
It is curious that this passage has not been noticed before. If Charles Darwin argued that his grandfather’s frequent published “expressions” about a creator meant he was not an atheist, it is possible to put Darwin’s own writings to the same test. By searching his published writings on Darwin Online for “creator” one can quickly see the life-long use that Darwin made of this language.
The first occurrence is in his first book, Journal of Researches (first edition of 1839, based on his Beagle diary) now known universally as The Voyage of the Beagle referring to an excursion in Australia:
A little time before this I had been lying on a sunny bank, and was reflecting on the strange character of the animals of this country as compared with the rest of the world. An unbeliever in every thing beyond his own reason might exclaim, “Two distinct Creators must have been at work; their object, however, has been the same, and certainly the end in each case is complete.”
The term does not appear in Darwin’s published writings again until the first edition of Origin of Species (1859) and the many different editions and rewordings that followed until 1872.
Darwin next used the term in his following book on the pollination adaptations of orchids in 1862:
This treatise affords me also an opportunity of attempting to show that the study of organic beings may be as interesting to an observer who is fully convinced that the structure of each is due to secondary laws, as to one who views every trifling detail of structure as the result of the direct interposition of the Creator.
This shows Darwin’s position very clearly. Even more informative are the concluding paragraphs of Variation of Animals and Plants (1868), one of his clearest and most powerful expressions of his theory of natural selection:
Some authors have declared that natural selection explains nothing, unless the precise cause of each slight individual difference be made clear. Now, if it were explained to a savage utterly ignorant of the art of building, how the edifice had been raised stone upon stone, and why wedge-formed fragments were used for the arches, flat stones for the roof, &c. and if the use of each part and of the whole building were pointed out, it would be unreasonable if he declared that nothing had been made clear to him, because the precise cause of the shape of each fragment could not be given. But this is a nearly parallel case with the objection that selection explains nothing, because we know not the cause of each individual difference in the structure of each being.
The shape of the fragments of stone at the base of our precipice may be called accidental, but this is not strictly correct; for the shape of each depends on a long sequence of events, all obeying natural laws; on the nature of the rock, on the lines of deposition or cleavage, on the form of the mountain which depends on its upheaval and subsequent denudation, and lastly on the storm or earthquake which threw down the fragments. But in regard to the use to which the fragments may be put, their shape may be strictly said to be accidental. And here we are led to face a great difficulty, in alluding to which I am aware that I am travelling beyond my proper province. An omniscient Creator must have foreseen every consequence which results from the laws imposed by Him. But can it be reasonably maintained that the Creator intentionally ordered, if we use the words in any ordinary sense, that certain fragments of rock should assume certain shapes so that the builder might erect his edifice? If the various laws which have determined the shape of each fragment were not predetermined for the builder’s sake, can it with any greater probability be maintained that He specially ordained for the sake of the breeder each of the innumerable variations in our domestic animals and plants;— many of these variations being of no service to man, and not beneficial, far more often injurious, to the creatures themselves? Did He ordain that the crop and tail-feathers of the pigeon should vary in order that the fancier might make his grotesque pouter and fantail breeds? Did He cause the frame and mental qualities of the dog to vary in order that a breed might be formed of indomitable ferocity, with jaws fitted to pin down the bull for man’s brutal sport? But if we give up the principle in one case,—if we do not admit that the variations of the primeval dog were intentionally guided in order that the greyhound, for instance, that perfect image of symmetry and vigour, might be formed,—no shadow of reason can be assigned for the belief that variations, alike in nature and the result of the same general laws, which have been the groundwork through natural selection of the formation of the most perfectly adapted animals in the world, man included, were intentionally and specially guided. However much we may wish it, we can hardly follow Professor Asa Gray in his belief “that variation has been led along certain beneficial lines,” like a stream “along definite and useful lines of irrigation.” If we assume that each particular variation was from the beginning of all time preordained, the plasticity of organisation, which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as that redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and, as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will and predestination.
Then in 1871 Darwin addressed the subject of religion in the Descent of Man:
Belief in God—Religion.—There is no evidence that man was aboriginally endowed with the ennobling belief in the existence of an Omnipotent God. On the contrary there is ample evidence, derived not from hasty travellers, but from men who have long resided with savages, that numerous races have existed and still exist, who have no idea of one or more gods, and who have no words in their languages to express such an idea. The question is of course wholly distinct from that higher one, whether there exists a Creator and Ruler of the universe; and this has been answered in the affirmative by the highest intellects that have ever lived.
And in the conclusion to the second volume Darwin wrote:
He who believes in the advancement of man from some lowly-organised form, will naturally ask how does this bear on the belief in the immortality of the soul. The barbarous races of man, as Sir J. Lubbock has shewn, possess no clear belief of this kind; but arguments derived from the primeval beliefs of savages are, as we have just seen, of little or no avail. Few persons feel any anxiety from the impossibility of determining at what precise period in the development of the individual, from the first trace of the minute germinal vesicle to the child either before or after birth, man becomes an immortal being; and there is no greater cause for anxiety because the period in the gradually ascending organic scale cannot possibly be determined.
Darwin himself was not entirely consistent in the language he used to describe his beliefs. And of course his views changed over the course of his life. Starting in 1876 he began writing a private autobiography for his children and grandchildren. In it he mentioned the change in his religious views. A gradual scepticism towards Christianity and the authenticity of the Bible gradually crept over him during the late 1830s — leaving him not a Christian, but no atheist either; rather a sort of theist. To be a ‘theist’ in Darwin’s day was to believe that a supernatural deity had created nature or the univerise but did not intervene in the course of history. Darwin used the term in one famous passage in the autobiography:
. . . the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.
This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time, as far as I can remember, when I wrote the Origin of Species; and it is since that time that it has very gradually with many fluctuations become weaker.
At other times he used the term ‘agnostic’ — a word coined and made fashionable by the naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley. In an 1879 letter, written around the same time as the autobiography and first published in Life and Letters, he writes:
In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state of mind.
Given the paucity of evidence, and the ambiguity of the statements that do remain, we will probably never be able to completely refine our definition or understanding of Darwin’s religious views. But that is not to say that there are some things that cannot be known. One point is abundantly clear, all the surviving evidence contradicts the assertion that Darwin was an atheist.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: John van Wyhe