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Picturing Don Quixote

By Rachel Schmidt
April 6, 2016

This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Miguel de Cervantes, author of one of the best-loved and most frequently illustrated books in the history of literature — Don Quixote. Rachel Schmidt explores how the varying approaches to illustrating the tale have reflected and impacted its reading through the centuries.

Four hundred years ago, on April 23, 1616, Miguel de Cervantes died. In the prologue to his posthumously published The Trials of Persiles and Sigismunda, he poked fun at his upcoming death and the little literary fame he achieved in his lifetime. As the aging author rode a nag on the road to Toledo, a student catching up to him from behind hailed him with these words, “Yes, yes, this is the complete cripple, the completely famous and comic writer, and lastly, the delight of the muses!” Cervantes could not accept this faint praise, and replied, “That is an error into which many of my uninformed admirers have fallen. I, sir, am Cervantes, but not the delight of the muses or any of the other foolish things that you have mentioned.” Cervantes finished the prologue by taking leave of his readers: “for I am dying and hope to see you soon, happy in the life to come!”1
The literary fame Cervantes gained in his lifetime was for writing Don Quixote de la Mancha. The book tells the story of Alonso Quijano, a country gentleman whose limited estate has been eaten away by the costs to both his purse and mental stability caused by his non-stop consumption of chivalric romance. Proclaiming himself the knight errant Don Quixote de la Mancha in an age when knights no longer exist, he sets off, accompanied by the peasant Sancho Panza, to right imaginary wrongs, only to meet with beatings by those who consider him at best a madman, if not a fool. After being taken home in a cage by his neighbors at the end of Part One, Don Quixote hits the road again in Part Two, this time to encounter readers of his previous misadventures, including a duke and duchess who turn the would-be knight errant and squire into court entertainment.
Published in 1605, Part One gained sufficient popularity to inspire translation into English by Thomas Shelton, probably by 1612, and into French by Cesar Oudin by 1614, as well as a spurious continuation from 1614 by the pseudonymous Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda. Already having begun Part Two (published in 1615), Cervantes reacted against Avellaneda’s sequel by changing his characters’ route and taking angry swipes at the impostor. Nonetheless, the generic identity and even the intent behind his beloved work had bothered the author from the beginning. In Part One’s prologue, an unnamed friend advises Cervantes, who struggles with writer’s block, that his goal be “demolishing the ill-founded apparatus of these chivalric books, despised by many and praised by so many more, and if you accomplish this, you will have accomplished much.” What is more, reading Don Quixote was to “move the melancholy to laughter, increase the joy of the cheerful, not irritate the simple, fill the clever with admiration for its invention, not give the serious reason to scorn it, and allow the prudent to praise it.”2
Whatever Cervantes’ initial idea, in the course of the last four hundred years, Don Quixote has embarked on a journey in the world imagination that has taken the literary character far beyond its original conception. The book illustrations of Cervantes’ Don Quixote would play a decisive role in this — not only transforming the image of Don Quixote and his loyal servant Sancho Panza but also  giving life to the image of Cervantes himself.
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Seventeenth-century images emphasized the title character’s pompous folly as well as the often rough-and-tumble action of many episodes. The windmill scene, in which Don Quixote mistakes for giants the technology that grinds the grain produced in the semi-arid Manchegan landscape, became immediately iconic. The first representation of the scene appears in a Frankfurt edition of 1648, in which the windmill sail stabs Don Quixote.
The frontispiece to the 1687 London Hodgkin edition also captures important motifs of early visual interpretation. The presence of the windmill identifies this otherwise English countryside as the setting for Don Quixote’s adventures, as it already did in the title page to the 1620 London Blount edition (see the second image featured above). In the foreground Don Quixote proudly wears the basin that he has claimed from a bewildered barber as Mambrino’s helmet, while Sancho, dominated by a beer belly, wears a dunce’s cap. Aldonza Lorenzo, the peasant Don Quixote names as his sweetheart when Sancho pushes for information about the imaginary Dulcinea, feeds pigs in the background.
The iconographic tradition has already diverged from the novel in significant ways. In the text Sancho is described as having long shanks, but illustrators show him with the abundant belly that his name implies (Panza meaning “belly” in Spanish). The comic opposition of the short, fat peasant to the tall, lean would-be knight errant — a juxtaposition never developed by Cervantes — emerges early in book illustrations. Here the fictitious nature of the beautiful, virginal Dulcinea stressed by Cervantes remains unchanged, as the illustrator depicts Cervantes’ joke concerning a husky peasant woman who had the best hand for salting pork in all the neighboring countryside.
In the eighteenth century major changes came to the interpretation of Don Quixote, accompanied by a reappraisal of Cervantes. The advent of deluxe editions containing biographies of the author as well as abundant engravings, including illustrations of the episodes with allegorical frontispieces and maps, transformed the funny book into a monumental tome fit to take its place beside classics such as Homer, Dante and Horace on the learned reader’s bookshelf.
The 1738 London Tonson edition, published in Spanish and patronized by Lord Carteret, constitutes a monumental project. It boasts Gregorio Mayans y Siscar’s biography of Cervantes as well as two portraits of Cervantes, one presenting him as a sensitive man of letters and another as the allegorical hero Hercules Musagetes. The first, designed by William Kent and engraved by George Vertue, emphasizes the writer’s dignity, hiding the hand maimed at the Battle of Lepanto and framing him in drapery and books in a Gothic architectural setting. Cervantes clearly controls his characters, Don Quixote and Sancho, astride their mounts in a vaulted niche behind him.
The allegorical portrait of Cervantes as a muscular Hercules, designed by John Vanderbank and engraved by Gerard van der Gucht, stands in sharp contrast.  The author turns his back on the viewer and the pleading Muses, takes a club and a mask from a beckoning satyr, and strides toward Mount Parnassus to rid it of the monsters of knight errantry that occupy it.
The meaning of the illustrations must have seemed somewhat slippery and unstable, for a certain Dr John Oldfield found it necessary to write accompanying explanations. The mask, which sports a heavy brow and craggy nose very similar to that of Don Quixote in the edition’s episodic illustrations, is “the proper implement for accomplishing [Cervantes’] end, viz. those of raillery and satire.”3 Whereas earlier commentators insisted on Cervantes’ parody of the popular literature of knight errantry, Oldfield and Mayans now attribute to the author satiric intent, clothing him in neoclassical attire. For Mayans, the literature of knight errantry is nothing less than barbaric, perpetuating the rule of brute power that followed the fall of Rome. Cervantes’ satirical attack on chivalric romance becomes, then, a defence of reason and, even, civilization.
In visual terms, elevating the novel to another genre translates to illustrating episodes that show Don Quixote not only as a fool, but also as a man of learning. In this sense, alternative narratives emerge in the illustrations. For example, Cervantes pokes fun at Don Quixote as his character discourses — before puzzled, illiterate goatherds — on the lost Golden Age when trees gave freely of their fruit and maidens rode untouched across the wilderness as virginal as the mothers who gave them birth. Not only does the would-be knight errant mangle the classical topic, but he does so for an audience who has no idea what he is talking about. When Vanderbank encapsulates this episode in its climactic moment according to the norms of history painting, a very different vision emerges.
The goatherds listen raptly, as a youth presents his muscular back to the spectator but turns his head in respectful attention toward the distinguished Don Quixote. This setting of the central character, using the surrounding crowd to pull in the viewer’s eye, is seen in works such as Velázquez’s The Surrender of Breda. Indeed, the only person who ignores Cervantes’ madman is Sancho, who guzzles his wine bottom right. The visual neoclassical vocabulary fails to capture Cervantes’ irony, nor is it deemed fitting within the larger project of canonizing the novel Don Quixote to revert to depicting scenes of physical humor or of Don Quixote’s madness. In fact, this edition does not depict the infamous windmill scene at all.
Although the 1780 Madrid Ibarra edition, patronized by the Real Academia de la Lengua, complements the 1738 London Tonson edition in its canonizing impulse, certain components demonstrate how the language of neoclassicism, both visual and critical, can give way to a sentimental reading of the novel in which Don Quixote emerges as a hero. In his analysis of the novel, Vicente de los Ríos notes glimpses of wisdom within the character of Don Quixote, and observes that when not dealing with issues of knight errantry, the madman always behaves as an educated gentleman. Among the several illustrators whose drawings were engraved for this monumental edition, José del Castillo ventured into a heroic vocabulary. In an illustration of Don Quixote’s beating by mare herders engraved by Pedro Pascual Moles, Castillo grants the fallen character dignity and strength, as he offsets the brutish beating by the two peasants with his outstretched shield.
His profile is strong, middle-aged, and handsome; his gaze valiant. Even the compositional curve formed by his attackers and the tree behind them is anchored by the firm Don Quixote at their feet. All this, of course, illustrates a violent encounter occasioned by an event perhaps more comic than dignified: the randy nag Rocinante’s unwelcome sexual advances upon the mares.
With the advent of mass-produced editions containing vignettes and full-page illustrations in the nineteenth century, comic and sentimental images often coexisted in the same volume. In the 1818 London Cadell edition Robert Smirke designed two quite different illustrations, both referring to Don Quixote’s penance in the Sierra Morena, in which the would-be knight errant took off his pants and performed acrobatic feats as proof of his devotion to Dulcinea. One is a full-page illustration, engraved by Francis Engleheart, showing Don Quixote seated half-naked atop a mountain peak, which has been interpreted as evidence of a “Romantic” reading of the novel.
The other illustration, an accompanying vignette, clearly participates in the older, comic tradition as it shows Don Quixote upside-down with bare legs akimbo and Sancho Panza in the background, aghast at his master’s shamelessness.
The production of vignettes along with full-page illustrations (already seen in deluxe editions) allows for a multiplicity of visual interpretations of Don Quixote side by side in the same edition.
In his illustrations for the 1863 Paris Hachette edition, Gustave Doré took advantage of the diversity of the iconographic traditions to create a visually exuberant and even contradictory vision of Cervantes’ novel. The French illustrator carried the sentimental tradition to its extreme, seeing not only Don Quixote as the hero he believed himself to be but also seeing the world from his perspective. Granted new technical capacity to explore dark tones through wood engraving, Doré reveled in depicting night scenes, wringing from them their lugubrious ambient qualities. In the illustration engraved by Longacre after Doré’s drawing of a fictitious procession of “Merlin”, rigged by a duke and duchess to manipulate Don Quixote and Sancho, the artist capitalizes on white on black delineation to highlight the spectral quality the midnight scene would have had for the two frightened protagonists.
This vision of the episode allows readers to experience the knight errant and squire’s fear, and then to feel the disappointment and eventual loathing for the cynical aristocracy as the truth is revealed. This inversion of perspectives is another turn in the visual narrative. Nonetheless, Doré did not renounce the comic. Returning to the windmill scene, Doré foregrounds Don Quixote’s defeat as the tattered sail sweeps Rocinante into the air, exposing the horse’s underbelly and carrying the thwarted madman along a great arc that literally brings down to earth the vision of a battle between a hero and giants.
In the case of eighteenth-century deluxe editions, the move by publishers and literary biographers to canonize Cervantes and his novel was coupled with the illustrators’ neoclassical visual vocabulary that tended toward sentimentalizing Don Quixote. As editorial projects, these editions were monumental in scale and succeeded in envisioning Cervantes as a “classical” author, yet the illustrations depict an intentionally one-sided perspective on the novel’s complexity, sacrificing its humor and irony. Nineteenth-century editions, cheaply produced and including vignettes, reintroduced the comic episodes side by side with the sentimental. Even more influential was making visible the perspective of Don Quixote himself, in all its excessive attractiveness, as seen in Doré’s vision. So it is that the character Don Quixote slipped away from the straitjacket in which he had been held when considered a mere tool for attacking chivalric romances, and became a hero of the popular imagination. Cervantes had already glimpsed how slippery the claims to his wonderful nutcase would be, when in the prologue to Part One he quipped, “But though I seem to be the father, I am the stepfather of Don Quixote.”4
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

author: Rachel Schmidt


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Who Says Michelangelo Was Right? Conflicting Visions of the Past in Early Modern Prints

By Monique Webber
February 10, 2016

When the lost classical sculpture Laocoön and His Sons — lauded as representing the very highest ideal of art — was dug up in 1506 with limbs missing, the authorities in Rome set about restoring it to how they imagined it once to look. Monique Webber explores how it was in reproductive prints that this vision was contested, offering a challenge to the mainstream interpretation of Antiquity.

Rome, 1506. A Vatican envoy races across the Renaissance city to the home of Giuliano da Sangallo, Pope Julius II’s architect. Something wonderful has been found on the Esquiline Hill. Soon after Sangallo, his son Francesco, and his close friend Michelangelo – who was at the Sangallo home as usual – are lowered into the ground to another world. The Roman Emperor Titus’ palace, believed to have been built over the infamous Golden House of Nero for which Rome (supposedly) burnt, had been found beneath the vineyard of Felice de’ Freddi. Peeking out from the now-underground palace was the Laocoön and His Sons. This monumental sculpture of the Trojan priest and his children, killed by Poseidon’s sea serpents for prophesying the city’s destruction by the Trojan Horse, had been lost to sight since the fall of the Roman Empire. But this had not prevented its fame from burning as brightly in the early modern period as it had in the ancient city. One of the works praised in Pliny the Elder’s first-century treatise Natural History, the Laocoön was amongst the revered lost treasures of Rome. And now it had been returned to the city and its artists. There was only one problem – the Laocoön was broken. But the Vatican could see to that.
At a time when a farmer could be tilling a vineyard and reveal an imperial palace, the lines between the ancient and the modern city were not definitively drawn in Rome. The same could be said of its art. Rome attracted thousands of artists, as eager to scour Pliny’s Natural History and the city’s antiquity galleries for inspiration as they were to learn the latest techniques from the leading court artists. And so when a work such as the Laocoön was found to be missing arms and sections of snake, and with one son detached, it was only natural that one of the pope’s favoured artists should complete it. After all, the pope was the guardian of the city, and his artists were the inheritors of the Roman tradition. In the same way that an apprentice would show the depth of his understanding by finishing the background of the master’s painting, so Rome’s modern artists would express respect for their ancient predecessors by restoring their work “maniera all’antico” (“in the ancient style”), as Giorgio Vasari was later to praise the Laocoön restoration in his Lives of the Artists. And perhaps with just a little of their own individuality, so that the much-desired affinity with antiquity could also add to their own status. But the question in 1506 was, who amongst Rome’s artists would be entrusted with the commission?
Pope Julius II had amassed a court of the most celebrated artists of the day. Having promptly purchased the Laocoön from de’ Freddi and placed it in the Belvedere courtyard, the Pope had his pick of masters to complete the sculpture. The work remained fragmentary until 1510, when the elderly architect Donato Bramante challenged the leading masters to come up with the best solution for the damaged Laocoön. Raphael, a distant relative of Bramante, was elected as the judge. In a few short years, the young artist from Urbino had established himself as the enfant terrible of Rome’s art scene. Having goaded the formerly pre-eminent Michelangelo by winning papal favour and sneaking into his as-yet unfinished Sistine Chapel, Raphael further insulted his Florentine rival in the Laocoön competition.
Ignoring Michelangelo’s argument that Laocoön’s right arm was turned back in anguish, Raphael instead declared Jacopo Sansovino the winner. His version, in which the priest’s arm extends upwards to create a dramatic diagonal composition, was implemented in a series of restorations in 1520-1540. This Renaissance-revised Laocoön enjoyed an impeccable heritage of papal patronage and leading artists’ deliberation. It was the standard vision of the sculpture until the twentieth century when, in an historical twist of fate, an antique backward-bent arm was discovered in a Roman workshop in 1906. Affirmation in 1942 that the fragment belonged to the Laocoön, and the subsequent decision to reaffix it to the sculpture, posthumously vindicated Michelangelo’s argument long after even he had come to agree with Sansovino’s composition. This popularity of Sansovino’s version did not signify, however, that everyone else approved.
At the same time as the Laocoön was unearthed and became the talk of Rome, the engraver Hans Brosamer was born in the German city of Fulda. Brosamer never travelled to Rome, so he could not participate in the ongoing debate about the Laocoön’s restoration or even see the work for himself. This did not prevent him from forwarding his own interpretation of the sculpture that flooded Europe’s visual culture through reproductive prints and miniatures. In response, in 1538 Brosamer created the tiny engraving Laocoön Troia.
In the centre stands Laocoön, his face upturned in anguish as in the Vatican sculpture, while sea serpents bind his limbs and those of his sons. In case the viewer remained in any doubt that Brosamer intended to depict the recently discovered sculpture, behind this scene of agony can be seen imagined Roman buildings. Their embellishments include a Pegasus capital very similar to those from the Augustan Temple of Mars Ultor, and famously illustrated in Sebastiano Serlio’s architectural treatise Tutte l’Opere d’Architettura, et Prospetiva (All the Works of Architecture, and of Perspective). Brosamer is closely aligning his sculpturally modelled Laocoön with that being debated over in Rome. Yet Brosamer’s image has not followed the restoration dictated by the Italian architects. Some elements, such as the smaller serpents in slightly different positions, could be regarded as minor differences of interpretation from one print to the next. However, Brosamer has taken this further, and dramatically revised the composition.
Freed from the practicalities of the actual stone, Brosamer rearranged and elaborated the fragments. The resulting image expresses his own understanding of how a statue of the Trojan priest should look. The son on the right, whose missing arm had been restored to be raised in fear, now holds his father instead. The other son has been detached from the composition and turned ninety degrees to struggle with the serpents on the ground. The altar against which Laocoön leans has also been detached, and forms the composition’s background. And, in direct engagement with the arguments over the sculpture in Rome, Brosamer has bent Laocoön’s arm back just as Michelangelo had first intended. In opposing the sculptor’s revised approval of Sansovino’s restoration, Brosamer challenged the “official” image of the Laocoön and its adjacent culture of superstar artists and faithful mass-market reproduction.
Reproducing a work visible in Rome, Brosamer’s engraving can be aligned with the European tradition of what were known in their Italian centre of production as vedute (“views”). Although some artistic licence was allowed, these were primarily intended to show the city as it was seen by visitors. Hieronymus Cock’s 1550 etchings of the Forum of Augustus and Nerva demonstrate how closely vedute could be modelled on the visual reality. Even though he did not know what they were, Cock was eager to show the ruins as they stood in the city. In terms of sculpture, Nicholas Beatrizet’s engraving of the River God Tiber replicates almost exactly the form of the work as it was seen opposite the Laocoön in the Belvedere Courtyard (now in the Musée du Louvre). Brosamer’s composition is clearly based on such an image of the Laocoön. Yet he has used this not as a model, but as an inspiration for his own vision.
With Brosamer having boldly revised the “official” Laocoön, other artists followed suit. In a design eventually printed by Nicolò Boldrini, Titian reimagined the Trojan priest and his sons as apes in a Venetian landscape. Although praised by the seventeenth century biographer Carlo Ridolfi as “un gentil pensiero. . .” (“a delicate concept. . .”), the image’s attitude towards the Laocoön is unmistakeably satiric. Notably, Titian’s parody – which has been variously interpreted as opposing either the sculpture, its adulation, or its replica by Bartolomeo Bandinelli – does not respect the Sansovino restoration. Like Brosamer, Titian has opposed Raphael’s decision and bent back the priest’s arm. The Laocoön may have been completed and installed at Rome, where Titian likely saw it in 1545-1546. But in Venice, The Laocoön Group as Monkeys targeted an audience open to an alternative vision.
Centuries after Brosamer and Titian’s images, William Blake similarly utilised print media to forward his own opinion of the iconic sculpture. In his 1826 Laocoön the carefully rendered work is newly identified as a group comprising of Jehovah, Satan, and Adam from Solomon’s Temple. This modern Laocoön exceeds Brosamer and Titian’s revisions, and for the first time significantly reorients the sculpture’s meaning away from the predominant Greco-Roman tradition. Yet in this audacious reimagining of the Laocoön intellectual institution, the sculpture’s Renaissance form is not altered. Blake has maintained the composition as Sansovino created it, and as he would have known it. To a certain extent, the form of the sculpture has become immaterial. As a simultaneously exalted and questionable masterpiece, subject to both rapturous praise and reappraisal, the Laocoön is for Blake a platform for exploring new concepts. Surrounded by snatches of his theories on culture and society, Blake’s image revives debate over the sculpture’s significance in its contemporary context.
Livia Stoenescu has suggested that Brosamer’s Troia “foster[s] a climate of insubordination. . .” to the dominance of the Laocoön as a singular representation of the past, and in so doing casts its restorers as “slavish imitators. . .” of this singular model (Stoenescu, 2015, p. 185). To this can be added a challenge to the Roman artists’ authority to determine what the past looked like. Ignoring the assumed restrictions on his artistic freedom as a maker of vedute, in his version of the Laocoön, Brosamer was amongst the first to assert the validity of his interpretation of antiquity. Laocoön Troia reveals how open visual culture was to interpretation in early modern Europe, even in the period at which its revival was at its highest. When regarded alongside Titian and Blake’s versions, the extent to which artists across Europe engaged in these debates is evident. Antiquity – and its reinterpretation – may have been superficially cloaked in academic learning and deliberation. In reality, it was a lively and fluid debate. If Brosamer had a hand in the actual Laocoön restoration, we would certainly see a very different sculpture in the Belvedere Courtyard today. And with his print Brosamer has ensured that, in some way, we do.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 10, 2016

author: Monique Webber

source: public-domain-review

type: essay

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


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On Oscar Wilde and Plagiarism

By Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell
January 13, 2016

Celebrated for his innovative wit, Oscar Wilde and the notion of originality are common bedfellows. The pairing, however, is not without its complications. Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell explore the claims of plagiarism that dogged Wilde's career, particularly as regards his relationship with that other great figure of late-19th-century Decadence, the American painter James McNeill Whistler.

“[W]hen I see a monstrous tulip with four wonderful petals in someone else’s garden, I am impelled to grow a monstrous tulip with five wonderful petals, but that is no reason why someone should grow a tulip with only three petals.” – Oscar Wilde1
Charges of Oscar Wilde’s plagiarism are certainly not new; they have their origins in his contemporaries’ sharp criticism of his first published volume, Poems (1881). Even if they did not claim that any of his poetry had been stolen verbatim from the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites whose work he adored, commentators grasped that much of his work was highly derivative. The Saturday Review was fairly typical of the critical reception: “The book is not without traces of cleverness, but it is marred everywhere by imitation, insincerity, and bad taste.”2 At the same time, the Oxford Union famously rejected on similar grounds the very copy of Poems that its secretary had solicited from Wilde; at the Oxford Union, the undergraduate Oliver Elton — later to become a renowned literary historian — asserted that Wilde’s poems were “not by their putative father at all, but by a number of better-known and more deservedly reputed authors.”3 Modern scholars have on occasion rebutted Elton’s claim, suggesting that disdain for Wilde’s developing poetic voice or even downright jealousy motivated the outcry.4 Nevertheless, the stigma attached to the reception of Poems has stuck firmly to that work and to many others in Wilde’s oeuvre.
In the late twentieth century, his presumed unoriginality appeared to one scholar as a symptom of his constitutional indolence: “[O]ne feels that Wilde was more than usually immature in his slavish regurgitation of diverse and unassimilated poetic tags; one is impatient with his lazy refusal to replace the shorthand of quotation by a carefully thought-out phrasing of his own; and one is shocked at the effrontery of a would-be literary imposter.”5 Many observers dismissed the idea that Wilde’s youthful identification with his Romantic and Pre-Raphaelite poetic idols was so strong that his devotion to them — and not a desire to steal from them — resulted in his apparent copying of their writings. And in a connected point, while charges of affectation were frequently applied to Wilde’s aesthetic mannerisms, it seems that few took seriously the idea that the lassitude or nonchalance he embodied was itself affected; his languor was (like the “Double First” degree he earned at Oxford even as he insisted to friends that he would be lucky to escape with a third) the product of intense — if skillfully concealed — effort.
From the early 1880s onward Wilde found it hard to escape the entrenched belief that he happily filched other people’s ideas. By far the most controversial conflict in Wilde’s career arose from criticisms that the socially competitive painter James McNeill Whistler made about Wilde’s unacknowledged appropriation of his bon mots. The rivalry between the older American artist and the younger Irish author, who moved in similar fashionable circles, developed through a spirited if eventually bitter exchange in the periodical press. On February 20, 1885, Whistler delivered his notorious “Ten O’ Clock Lecture”, whose title indicates the attention-grabbing late-evening slot he chose to deliver his thoughts on art. In particular, Whistler attacked the modern critic: “the unattached writer” who “has become the middleman in the matter of Art”.6 Such an arbiter of taste, in Whistler’s view, could not see the “painter’s poetry” in the artwork, since the critic treated it as he would “a novel — a history — or an anecdote.”7
Wilde retorted by objecting to Whistler’s belief that only the artist can comprehend aesthetic beauty. “An artist”, Wilde commented, “is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage, and can no more be born of a nation that is devoid of any sense of beauty than a fig can grow from a thorn or a rose blossom from a thistle.”8 In other words, Wilde claimed that cultural traditions created the conditions in which the finest types of art could flourish. Moreover, he asserted that in these modern times, “an artist will find beauty in ugliness, le beau dans l’horrible.”9 Challenged, Whistler responded briskly in the World, stating that Wilde had implied that it was left to modern poets to find “‘l’horrible’ dans ‘le beau’”.10 In turn, Wilde sparred back that Whistler had scarcely understood his critique: “Be warned this time, James; and remain, as I do, incomprehensible. To be great is to be misunderstood.”11 With intentional archness, in this last line Wilde drove home his point by quoting — though not explicitly acknowledging — Emerson’s famous essay, “Self-Reliance” (1840)12, thus further appropriating another person’s wisdom to speak eloquently on his behalf.
Toward the end of 1886, Whistler’s temper flared up once more when he detected Wilde’s flagrant appropriation of some of his phrases. “What has Oscar in common with Art? except that he dines at our tables, and picks from our platters the plums for the pudding he peddles in the provinces.”13 “Oscar,” Whistler’s barbs continued, “has the courage of the opinions . . . of others!”14
Matters did not rest there. Years later, the American painter again grew vociferous when he read Herbert Vivian’s reminiscences, which appeared in the London Sun in the autumn of 1889. Vivian recalled a lecture that Wilde delivered almost seven years before, for which Whistler had “in good fellowship crammed him”. In the lecture, Wilde wryly addressed Whistler as “Butterfly” (Whistler commonly signed his artwork with a stylized butterfly) but failed to give the elder artist credit for his assistance.15 Vivian also noted that in “The Decay of Lying”, published in the Nineteenth Century in January 1889, Wilde had incorporated, without acknowledging Whistler as the source, the artist’s claim that he had “the courage of the opinions . . . of others”.16 Wilde’s alleged offense occurs early in the essay, when his main speaker in this critical dialogue argues that the modern novelist has lost the ability to lie and simply “presents us with dull facts under the guise of fiction”:
He has not even the courage of other people’s ideas, but insists on going directly to life for everything, and ultimately, between encyclopaedias and personal experience, he comes to the ground, having drawn his types from the family circle or from the weekly washerwoman, and having acquired an amount of useful information from which never, even in his most meditative moments, can he thoroughly free himself.17

In Whistler’s eyes, the irony could not have been more blatant. From Whistler’s perspective, Wilde could hardly argue for artistic originality in the novel when his criticism of such repetitive and predictable fiction relied on words that he had stolen from his erstwhile master: Whistler himself. Whistler went so far as to call Wilde the criminal “arch-imposter”, the “detected plagiarist”, and the “all-pervading plagiarist” — one who would have violated in America the “Law of ’84”.18 Yet, to Wilde, Whistler’s “shrill shrieks of plagiarism” were the pitiful sign of “silly vanity or incompetent mediocrity”.19
No matter how petty Whistler’s gripes may appear, they illuminate the difficulties involved in casting Wilde in the role of a deceitful plagiarist. Whistler described his holding forth at dinner as a type of “cramming”, positioning himself as the workaday instructor of the younger man, raising pressing questions about the connection between pedagogy and plagiarism: Can the teacher accuse his student of this crime because the pupil has parroted the content of the instruction? Is not one’s goal, when preparing intensively for an examination, the ability to duplicate with as much fidelity as possible the information studied?
Looked at critically, Whistler’s self-important accusation against Wilde may well appear as an excuse to generate a decidedly public feud, one that Whistler exploited to keep himself in the public eye. Nonetheless, Whistler’s insults helped sustain the broad allegation that Wilde’s was not an original mind. Much later, Frank Harris — who developed a close relationship with Wilde as editor and friend — reiterated the belief that Whistler had done more to shape Wilde’s wit than any other figure: “Of all the personal influences which went into the moulding of Oscar Wilde’s talent, that of Whistler was by far the most important; Whistler taught him the value of wit and the power a consciousness of genius and a knowledge of men lend to the artist.” In Harris’ view, Wilde enjoyed great success as a writer because of his “great ability” as well as “inordinate vanity” — qualities, it would seem, that no charge of plagiarism could stifle.20
This success did not inoculate Wilde from claims that his work was unoriginal. In early 1892, when his earliest Society comedy, Lady Windermere’s Fan, won many plaudits at the St James’s Theatre, Wilde’s apparent borrowings again incensed critics. The fairly liberal-minded A. B. Walkley, for example, claimed that the “staleness of the incidents” came “from half a dozen French plays”, and he observed that Wilde’s female protagonist was “a guileless young bride” who resembled “M. Dumas’s Françillon”.21 Meanwhile, as far as Walkley could tell, another of Wilde’s characters, Mrs. Erlynne, appeared to have stepped out from a further play by Dumas fils, L’Étrangère (1876). Elsewhere, one commentator found the drama to be a “not too ingenious blend of the Eden of Mr. Edgar Saltus, with the Idler of Mr. Haddon Chambers,” together with that other well-known drama of adultery, Françillon (1887), once more put in for good measure.22 Not everyone agreed these were capital offenses. As Frederick Wedmore perceived it, such borrowings were standard fare in the theatre, a comment supported by the sheer number of texts cited as sources for Wilde’s play. In his view, even if the fan — Wilde’s major stage prop — had a clear antecedent in Haddon’s Idler (1890), it had “hardly . . . occurred to the least intelligent to suggest plagiarism”.23
How, then, to make sense of these borrowings? Over the years, the amassing scholarly research on Wilde’s later works showed that many passages echo writings that were essential to his intellectual growth. These inquiries disclosed that parts of “The Critic as Artist”, for example, repeat ideas in Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance.24 The same might be said of many sections of the dialogue where Lord Henry Wotton speaks in The Picture of Dorian Gray.25 Yet Wilde scarcely concealed the influence that Pater’s Renaissance had exerted on him since his “undergraduate days at Oxford”, as he freely stated in his review of Pater’s Appreciations (1889):
Mr. Pater’s essays became to me “the golden book of spirit and sense, the holy writ of beauty.” They are still this to me. It is possible, of course, that I may exaggerate about them. I certainly hope that I do; for where there is no exaggeration there is no love, and where there is no love there is no understanding.26
As Wilde suggested, to be impassioned about another writer’s work created for him the possibility of understanding his source of inspiration critically. In any case, Wilde’s frequent evocations of Paterian phrases hardly resembled theft.27 Consider the many echoes of Pater’s Renaissance that are detectable in Wilde’s sole novel. It would be difficult to claim that Lord Henry’s advocacy of the “New Hedonism”, for example, evinced the author’s intent to steal surreptitiously from what was a fully recognizable source. The advice Lord Henry gives to Dorian Gray about the need to pursue pleasure, which sounds similar to sentences in Pater’s “Conclusion” to his 1873 study, has terrible consequences — ones that are entirely contrary to Pater’s insistence on the “desire for beauty” as the “fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness”.28 Areas more vulnerable to allegations of plagiarism would be the extensive sections that paraphrase entries from South Kensington Museum catalogues, a French book on embroidery and lace, and information gleaned from John Addington Symonds’ five-volume Renaissance in Italy (1875–1886).29 These exhaustive lists — which detail the artifacts, instruments, and vestments that capture Dorian Gray’s attention — also evoke the kinds of objets d’art that recur in J.-K. Huysmans’ anti-realist novel about an aesthetic collector, À rebours (1884), a well-known work of fiction that counted among several French sources that at least one indignant contemporary reader believed Wilde had plundered.30
Still, these various allegations of Wilde’s fearless thieving of other writers’ ideas, phrases, and situations stand in contradistinction to his carefully elaborated ideas on literary borrowing, criminality, and creative expression. In his reviews from the 1880s, Wilde addressed uninspired borrowing as a demonstration not of an author’s artistic integrity or work ethic, but as an indication of poor taste. That is to say, both the writers from whom an author chooses to poach and the finesse with which he commits the act create the proper grounds for assessing this type of theft. His commentary in the popular Pall Mall Gazette on two works of poetry reveals this distinction: the one volume ostensibly written by “Two Tramps”, and the other by H. C. Irwin. Here Wilde considered the permissibility of poetic borrowing. By using language pulled directly from his “Chatterton” notebook (another text that has generated charges of plagiarism), he took the “two tramps” to task for conflating the “defensible pilfering from hen roosts” with the “indefensible pilfering from poets”.31 “[W]e feel”, Wilde wrote, “that as bad as poultry-snatching is, plagiarism is worse. ‘Facilis descensus Averno!’ From highway robbery and crimes of violence one sinks gradually to literary petty larceny.”32
Earlier in his review, Wilde had excused the authors, even praised them, for trying to “annex the domain of the painter” through their aesthetic choices in paper color and binding, but here he suggested that plagiarism was a transgression far worse than that.33 One reason was that, although the appropriation of colors from the painters led to beauty in the finished product, the plagiarized lines simply resulted in terrible poetry: the difference between the five-petaled tulip and the three-petaled tulip. This contrast was heightened through Wilde’s positive assessment of Irwin’s collection, which, as he put it, “gains her colour effect from the poet not from the publisher.”34 In Irwin’s poems, Wilde certainly witnessed traces of Matthew Arnold’s works, but he nonetheless praised Irwin for “studying a fine poet without stealing from him, a very difficult thing to do, and though many of the reeds through which he blows have been touched by other lips, yet he is able to draw new music from them.”35  In other words, even when learning lessons from a master it was the case that the epigone might transform evident echoes of his idol into innovative art. Such is the meaning that underscores the epigraph to this essay; to transmute and to improve source material, in Wilde’s view, was a perfectly legitimate approach to literary creativity.
One of Wilde’s last, and most fascinating, direct engagements with plagiarism occurred in a series of letters published in the Pall Mall Gazette under the heading, “The Ethics of Journalism”.36 The episode began on August 5, 1894, with the publication of a poem, “The Shamrock”, in the London-based Weekly Sun, which the paper erroneously attributed to Wilde. Soon thereafter, the poem was reprinted in the New York Sun, where an alert reader recognized the poem as one that “Helena Calahan” had previously published, and he demanded an explanation from Wilde in a letter to the London paper.
The Weekly Sun’s editor, T. P. O’Connor (whose paper Wilde clearly disliked), pressed Wilde for a response, which came in a letter the following month to the Pall Mall Gazette.37 Wilde noted the ridiculousness of the situation. He faced an accusation of plagiarism from an editor who had published a poem under his name without having verified the authorship of the work, much less having asked for his — the (ostensible) author’s — permission to publish it. Wilde referred to “The Shamrock” derisively as “some doggerel verses”, which raised the serious question of authorial and editorial taste in addition to the “ethics of modern journalism”.38
A letter of rebuttal from the Weekly Sun’s assistant editor quickly appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette. By prefacing his comments first with the acknowledgement that the editors “regret exceedingly the suggestion of plagiarism”, the editor explained the circumstance of the attribution: the poem had arrived in the mail with a letter ascribing it to Wilde, and so the Weekly Sun published it under Wilde’s name. Perhaps because of the impeachability of this explanation, the editor then pivoted to debates about taste, alternately defending the poem’s “melodic charm” and “pure and exalted patriotism” and suggesting that the editors’ willingness to attribute the poem to Wilde was an act of generosity:
So conspicuous, indeed, was its elevation of tone that we were reluctant to believe it could have been the product of a mind like Mr. Oscar Wilde’s, and were driven to take refuge in the charitable belief that it belonged to the period of a forgotten and generous youth.39
A final missive from Wilde closed the conversation. He critiqued the Weekly Sun for sloppy editorial practices and blurring the boundaries between ethics and taste. If, he maintained, the paper actually believed the “fifth-rate verses” to be his, its staff would have asked his permission to publish.40 “[N]o respectable editor”, wrote Wilde (himself a former periodical editor), “would dream of printing and publishing a man’s work without first obtaining his consent.”41
We take from this episode a snapshot of Wilde’s position in the press. Since Wilde had long been a target for charges of plagiarism, the unscrupulous Weekly Sun suspended editorial integrity in order to catalyze once more a dated public conversation about his artistic inferiority. Moreover, the assistant editor’s letter intimated that the author’s Irish background should be considered the source of this embarrassment. It is remarkable, even amid all of this sniping, that in the Weekly Sun’s letter to Pall Mall Gazette, in which the assistant editor admitted his fault and apologized for accusing Wilde of plagiarism, a postscript serves as an unabashed advertisement for his own newspaper: “We are giving a number of letters bearing upon ‘The Shamrock’ in our next issue, together with the text of the poem and a letter from its actual author.”42 Such a self-serving apology, clearly enough, sharpens the belief that certain areas of the late Victorian press had little to lose when intervening in polemics about literary plagiarism.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: January 13, 2016

author: Joseph Bristow and Rebecca N. Mitchell


text:
The Anthropometric Detective and His Racial Clues

By Ava Kofman
February 24, 2016

Ava Kofman explores how the spectre of race, in particular Francis Galton's disturbing theory of eugenics, haunts the early history of fingerprint technology.

A complex pattern is capable of suggesting various readings, as the figuring on a wall-paper may suggest a variety of forms and faces to those who have such fancies.— Francis Galton, Finger Prints, 1892
By the time Arthur Conan Doyle published “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder” in The Strand Magazine in 1903, the reputation of the fingerprint as a powerful and “self-evident” forensic technology — one that could be used in a court of law to prove a suspect’s guilt — was on the rise. In 1902, a fingerprint was accepted in an English court as evidence for a burglar’s presence at the scene of the crime. By 1904, Scotland Yard was processing as many as three hundred fingerprint cards every week. Precisely because the fingerprint’s authoritative status was taken for granted, Conan Doyle’s fictional detective Sherlock Holmes sought to undermine it. In “Norwood Builder”, Holmes discovers that the fingerprint in question does not belong to the suspect, but is, instead, a forged print used to frame him.
Although Holmes published on fingerprints in the anthropological journals of his fictional universe, the most prolific author of actual texts on fingerprinting found Holmes’ methods in Conan Doyle’s latest tale suspect. Not long after the story appeared, the gentleman scientist Francis Galton wrote to Conan Doyle asking how the wax mould of a seal could have left a legible bloody fingerprint on the wall, given that it is not “possible to get good impressions from a hard engraved material upon a hard uneven surface”. Taking the fiction’s depiction of forensic science in good faith, Galton asked Conan Doyle for further details of his experiments with fingerprints. It is unclear whether Conan Doyle responded and unlikely that he ever conducted experiments.
While this curious bit of correspondence ended before it really began, Galton’s own career in the emerging science of fingerprinting was often compared to the fictional detective’s, although his work had quite different implications for the potentials of fingerprinting technology. To anthropologists and evolutionary theorists like Galton, the fingerprint was more than a criminal trace. At the heart of Galton’s exhaustive research program into fingerprints was always the “great expectation” that they might serve as tiny fossil records, providing evidence of the genealogy, personality, criminality, and perhaps even destiny of individuals and groups.
In 1888, a reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette paid a visit to Galton’s Anthropometric Laboratory in London, where instruments developed by Galton measured the physical and mental characteristics — from keenness of hearing to breathing power — of over 10,000 people. The resulting article, titled “A Morning With the Anthropometric Detectives”, described Galton’s laboratory as a world of “order and precision, and tests of the nicest accuracy”. “Dumb though they are,” Galton told the reporter, “what splendid detectives our instruments might prove”. “Splendid detectives!” the reporter exclaimed, “I am not, I hope, in a department of the Criminal Investigation Department, unconsciously yielding convincing proofs of personal identity with some scoundrel hitherto unhung.”
The comparison to detection in the article’s title is no accident: the scientific development of medical and anthropometric instruments like Galton’s coincided with the rise of the detective novel, a genre which, in the words of the literary scholar Ronald Thomas, was “preoccupied with the professional monitoring and identification of bodies”. Fears of mistaken identity and unconscious slips were crystallized in the literature of detection but emerged from a broad range of hermeneutic practices across the era, at a time in which those in power considered the borders of empire and boundaries of racial identity to be insecure.
These links between Galton’s work with fingerprints and detective fiction continued in the reviews of his most important contribution on the subject, his 1892 monograph Finger Prints. Many noted its immediate parallels to other books of clues. “A capital title for a detective story, Fingerprints” wrote the National Observer. A writer for the British Medical Journal, likely not having encountered Conan Doyle’s multiple stories on fingerprints, remarked that he would be “astonished if Mr Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, does not work something up by Mr Francis Galton’s unique book on thumbmarks”. The Humanitarian went as far as to suggest that the technology “opens up a new avenue for the Braddons and Gaboriaus, and other ‘detective novelists,’ to track and run to earth the most mysterious crimes. A field of investigation is here opened which will rival in fascination the celebrated ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.’” These reviewers were right. But perhaps, in retrospect, not in the way they had intended.
In the late nineteenth century, knowledge based on the interpretation of “clues unnoticed by others” became increasingly influential across a wide spectrum of professions — from doctors to physiognomists, from connoisseurs to naturalists. In his classic text, “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method”, the historian Carlo Ginzburg traces the rise of this semiotic model in the human sciences, as best exemplified by his titular trio of diagnostic sleuths, to the emergence of “an increasingly clear tendency for state power to impose a close-meshed net of control on society [. . .which] involved attributing identity through characteristics which were trivial and beyond conscious control.”
by Karl Pearson — Source.
It is unsurprising then that Galton, who described his own early training in forensic medicine as having “a sort of Sherlock Holmes fascination”, referred to the fingerprint as having a “very pronounced, symptomatic character.” The anthropometric detective, like his fictional ally Holmes, coupled his forensic expertise with his conjectural knowledge to read and interpret unruly documents and bodies. But unlike Holmes, Galton was guided less by the hopes of catching criminals and more by the expectation that fingerprints could reveal inherited traits.
Despite Galton’s best efforts, when surveying his research from the past decade in Finger Prints, he concluded that fingerprints did not contain such evidence. He definitively declared that “no peculiar pattern . . . characterizes persons of any of the above races.” And yet, despite his admission that “hard fact had made hope no longer justifiable”, a closer look at Galton’s writings reveals that racial typologies were never far from his thoughts. The conflicted speculation, conjecture, and hesitation in Galton’s racial rhetoric in Finger Prints can be understood as a deliberate strategy, one which allowed him to perpetuate a strong racial and imperial research program even when his scientific data undermined it.
This combination of speculation and data would be necessary for his eventual development of eugenics, a political program of selective breeding to improve, in his view the human race.
*
Throughout Finger Prints, Galton continued to alternate, sometimes in the space of a single sentence, between claiming that fingerprints were and were not marked by racial difference. His remarks illustrate the tensions of disciplines like anthropology and comparative anatomy in this period, which attempted to simultaneously identify both deviant individuals and visible traces of generalisable criminal types from body parts.
In the second to last chapter, Galton definitively detailed his findings on “Race and Classes”. After examining the impressions of various races and classes, he determined that they “may all be spoken of as identical in the character of their finger prints”. To demonstrate the lack of difference across racial groups, he even included a table displaying the similar frequency of arch patterns in the right fore-finger of each group.
But even in his disavowals of racial difference in fingerprint patterns, Galton still searched for traces through which to decipher the devious and degenerate clues of suspect identities. Galton noted:
Their patterns are not, so far as I can find, different from those of others, they are not simpler. . . Still, whether it be from pure fancy on my part, or from the way in which they were printed, or from some real peculiarity, the general aspect of the Negro print strikes me as characteristic. The width of the ridges seems more uniform, their intervals more regular, and their courses more parallel than with us. In short, they give an idea of greater simplicity, due to causes that I have not yet succeeded in submitting to the test of measurement.
Despite the data, Galton’s initial “great expectations” still inflected his analysis. His ideas about both the lack of evolutionary complexity of “degenerate” forms and the homogeneity he perceived between members of extra-European races underpinned his analysis from the outset.
It is telling that a hand that both individuates and that conveys information about extra-European racial groups was, to Galton, a hand marked by “greater simplicity”. That it did not matter to Galton whether the “greater simplicity” he sensed in non-white hands lay in the faulty method of printing or in the hands themselves reveals that he saw these hands as posing a threat to his own empirical efforts. This failure, in fact, redoubles Galton’s recourse to his own analytical powers. He closes the chapter by stating that his conclusions do not apply to investigating the shape of the hand, which might yet offer racial insights. These scenes of detection in Galton’s writings allowed the Imperial fantasy, that extra-European others might be identified and controlled, to masquerade as a reality.
*
The year following the publication of Finger Prints, Galton followed up with a supplemental text, Decipherment of Blurred Finger Prints (1893), which outlined his method for illuminating indistinct impressions. Its publication was occasioned by Galton’s receipt of a round of prints from men in India, whose impressions had been taken once in 1878 and again in 1892. This provided a rare opportunity to demonstrate the persistence of impressions. Galton also saw it as an opportunity to demarcate the superiority of British science and his own.
Galton begins the text without even analyzing or exhibiting the prints. Instead, he takes a curious detour to focus on their context: “The documents are characteristically Oriental; they are on a common kind of apparently native-made paper, worm-eaten with many holes, and abundantly subscribed with attestations, names, ages, and dates, partly written in English and partly in native characters.” Having already published on the lack of racial signification in fingerprints, Galton attempted to secure racial characteristics through other means.
Holmes, of course, could realize Conan Doyle’s fantasy of a textual body unconsciously inscribing its traces in a way that Galton, bound by the disappointing readings of his empirical data, never could. And yet, the meaningless script of the fingerprint did not stop Galton from anxiously detecting “characteristic” and unconscious traces of race on its periphery. When he thanks the imperial bureaucracy for putting him “into the possession of such interesting materials”, he conflates these foreign bodies of these men with the texts themselves.
Galton contrasts these “Oriental” methods of fingerprinting to his own in order to demonstrate the superiority of European science. He notes his dissatisfaction with the Indian method of printing and quality of the paper, which he assumes uses Indian dye or watercolor. The Indian materials, he complains, were “too coarse” when compared to those in his English laboratory. Whereas Indian methods for printing are “moist”, “blackened all over”, “coarse”, and blurry, those in Galton’s lab are “regular”, “rapid”, “clear”, “uniform”, “very thin”, and “uniformly of a high-level order of goodness”. His invocation of morality — not only subtly with contrasts of light/dark imagery, but explicitly with the reference to “goodness” — explicitly justified the superiority of British empiricism and so implicitly hinted at the necessity of his empire’s “civilizing” rule.
Galton then further locates the blurred and indistinct qualities of the fingerprints in what he perceives to be generic characteristics of the Indian race. He attributes the indistinctness of the impressions to hard manual labor and to “the disintegration of skin, owing to the advanced ages of the persons in 1892 [. . .] which I presume corresponds to greater ages among ourselves, since Indian children are more precocious than ours.” The logic of racial contamination underpinned this apparent reflexivity: fingerprints were originally introduced for Europeans to distinguish between the otherwise indistinguishable mass of extra-European peoples, who themselves produced “indecipherable” fingerprints. In this way, Galton’s prints exemplify the postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha’s discussion of the “repeated hesitancy afflicting the colonialist discourse when it contemplates its discriminated subjects; the inscrutability of the Chinese, the unspeakable rites of the Indians, the indescribable habits of the Hottentots.”
This “art of decipherment”, as Galton called it, reified the racial categories from which it emerged. Patterns, like foreign peoples, were likely to deceive. Therefore, they needed expert scrutiny to decipher them. For instance, Galton wrote in Scientific American that when looking at an enlarged reproduction of fingerprints “one might be deceived and take such a production for a specimen of graphic ornamentation of barbarous origin”. The act of deciphering any fingerprint, even in a completely deracinated context, was linked to the act of disciplining, segregating, and classifying racialized bodies. The criminal and Indian body — both understood as sites of interpretation, enforcement, and diagnosis — became objects of scientific expertise.
In this respect, the pedagogical component of Galton’s text — his cautious and painstaking explanations of how to see “the facts and their interpretation” — aimed to give readers the power not just to classify their own fingerprints but to mark foreign bodies as such. Galton drew upon the logic of detection to present readers with the fantasy that seemingly dangerous bodies could, under the right gaze, be controlled. And yet, it was precisely the success of fingerprint identification in the “colonial laboratory” of India abroad that aided the technique’s return to the center of empire in 1901, thus turning English citizens, too, into colonial subjects that needed to be tracked, surveilled, and deciphered.
*
How the fingerprint familiar to us today ended up emptied of meaning is part of the larger shift in locating criminality on the criminal’s body to locating it in the criminal record. As biologists increasingly looked to genes for the secrets of heredity, law enforcement took over the scientific domain of interpreting, standardizing, and administering fingerprint technology. The fingerprint’s dominance as an archival sign made it increasingly necessary to separate its identificatory functions from dubious diagnostic research like Galton’s.
At stake in wiping away these anthropological traces was the legal reputation of an increasingly powerful and “self evident” forensic technology. “It is not to the finger-print expert’s advantage”, the head of Chicago’s fingerprint school cautioned in 1925, “to be associated, in the minds of the public, with fortune tellers and palm-readers. The science of fingerprint identification is a real science and should not be dragged to the level of the pseudo sciences.”
Galton, for his part, never tired of searching for ways to identify characteristics that could be selectively bred for eugenic improvement. His obsession with quantifying racial difference led him to devise “analytical portraiture”, invent geometric notation for facial profiles, measure the noses of exceptional English leaders, and calculate the efficiency of people with differing hair colors. Galton even attempted to track physiognomic changes in Englishmen by studying their portraits in the National Gallery.
Revisiting the early history of the fingerprint reminds us that ostensibly color-blind identification techniques often contain the biases and cultural assumptions of their makers. In this light, Galton’s search to reify racial difference in the body bears a striking resemblance to the contemporary search for the “crime gene” and other personality markers in DNA. That his hunt may have been pseudo-scientific did not make the fears and assumptions that guided his research any less influential, or dangerous.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: February 24, 2016

author: Ava Kofman


text:
Bad Air
Pollution, Sin, and Science Fiction in William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City (1880)
By Brett Beasely
September 30, 2015

Deadly fogs, moralistic diatribes, debunked medical theory — Brett Beasley explores a piece of Victorian science fiction considered to be the first modern tale of urban apocalypse.

Scarcely can I portray in words the dire and dismal scenes that met my vision here. . . . For here, where on the previous night had throbbed hot and high the flood-tide of London’s evening gaiety, was now presented to my poor fevered sight, the worst, the most awful features of the whole terrific calamity. I had entered into the very heart and home of horror itself.
This is the way the world ends: not with a bang but a bronchial spasm. That is, at least, according to William Delisle Hay’s 1880 novella, The Doom of the Great City. It imagines the entire population of London choked to death under a soot-filled fog. The story is told by the event’s lone survivor sixty years later as he recalls “the greatest calamity that perhaps this earth has ever witnessed” at what was, for Hay’s first readers, the distant future date of 1942.
The novella received only mild acclaim among its late Victorian readers, and today it is almost forgotten. But, surprisingly enough, it has become possible to read our social and environmental problems foretold in Hay’s strange little story. In our age of global warming, acid rain, and atmospheric pollution, we may become the first readers to take Hay seriously. When Hay imagines a city whose wealth and “false social system” lulls it into complacency, we can recognize ourselves in his words. And as for those air problems that loomed dangerously around them, Londoners “looked upon them in the light of a regular institution, not caring to investigate their cause with a view to some means of mitigating them”. At moments like these, we get the feeling that Hay’s obscure 135-year-old story is eerily prophetic.
But before we canonize Hay as an environmentalist and his story as An Inconvenient Truth in Victorian garb, we have to look at the story’s other features. Readers of The Doom of the Great City unfailingly notice that the story does not fit easily with other science fiction narratives, but seems to belong also to another class of tales, which Brian Stableford has called “ringing accounts of richly deserved punishment”. This is because Hay’s narrator seems to slide back and forth between material and moral explanations for pollution. While he talks of how “In those latter days there had been past years of terribly bad weather, destroying harvests”, he adds in the same paragraph, “prostitution flourished rampantly, while Chastity laid down her head and died! Evil! — one seemed to see it everywhere!”
In fact, the narrator goes so far as to cast himself as a prophet. Like a latterday Jeremiah he reviles London as “foul and rotten to the very core, and steeped in sin of every imaginable variety”. In a twenty-page diatribe he catalogues vices such as prodigality, corruption, avarice, and aestheticism — not to mention feminine vanity, for which he reserves special scorn. He denounces tradesmen, aristocrats, theater-goers, and the young as well as the old. For him, London is like Atlantis or Babylon standing blithely unaware of the divine wrath about to strike it.
All of this raises an important question: can pollution be material (i.e. made of soot, ashes, smoke, chemicals, etc.) and moral as well? The same question could also be stated as a problem of genre. What exactly are we reading when we read The Doom of the Great City? Is it a forward-looking sci-fi tale about a dystopian future that may yet arrive? Or is it a fantasy of divine retribution that belongs with the ancient past?
In order to answer that question, we need a working definition of science fiction. For that definition we could look to Rod Serling’s statement that science fiction is “the improbable made possible”. Hay certainly draws from available scientific ideas to make his improbable story into a reasonable possibility. Hay’s contemporary F. A. R. Russell consistently noted higher instances of death from asthma and respiratory complaints during intense fogs, and he published widely in an effort to raise public concern about them. But Hay’s literary precursors (like the public in general) tended to see the fog as a mere nuisance. They could even at times show some fanciful tenderness toward it as toward an ugly pet that won’t go away. For example, William Guppy in Dickens’ 1853 novel Bleak House describes the fog in familiar terms as “The London Particular”. But Hay makes that seemingly friendly pet bite — and, increasingly, the data was on his side.
In addition to the evidence of news and anecdotes, Hay needed a plausible cause of death, not just for the infirm, but for an entire metropolitan population. That is where the “bronchial spasm” comes in. Hay, a published scientist (specifically a mycologist) is scrupulous on this point. On the chance journey into the country that saves his life, Hay’s protagonist discusses the fog with a friend who also happens to be a leading medical authority, one Wilton Forrester. Forrester gives “the benefit of his scientific acquirements,” (emphasis mine) by laying out what he considers to be the only possible scenario in which a fog can prove fatal. He explains that in a case he previously observed that
the bronchi and tubes ramifying from them were clogged with black, grimy mucus, and death had evidently resulted from a sudden spasm, which would produce suffocation, as the lungs would not have the power in their clogged condition of making a sufficiently forcible expiatory effort to get rid of the accumulated filth that was the instrument of death.
Hay goes so far as to include footnotes referencing actual medical authorities on this point. Rather than seeming far-fetched, Hay’s first readers could hardly have doubted that, past a certain threshold of pollution, a fog would certainly prove fatal to those who inhaled it.
Read closely and in its context, the science in Hay’s novella is not just persuasive, it is also politic. Writing in 1880, Hay was working at a time in which science and the emerging discipline of public health were in a state of flux. Long-held views about the causes and consequences of disease were being eroded by new findings, especially the emerging germ theory of disease. Thus, in attempting to write a fictional work that used science to “make the improbable possible”, a writer like Hay would have to navigate a changing terrain of what counted as possibility.
In his emphasis on filth in both its moral and material forms, Hay was borrowing the vocabulary and social ethic of what have been called the “anti-contagionists”. The anti-contagionists tended to hold the belief that diseases spread by miasma, or “bad air”. The bad air could come from any number of places: from corpses or other rotting organic materials, from the bodies and homes of the poor, from cesspools and stagnant or dirty water, and even, in the view of one important miasmatist, from the groundwater lying beneath a city.
Most miasmatists equated bad air with bad smell. Thus, miasmatist works like Edwin Chadwick’s Report of the Sanitary Conditions of the Working Classes can be read not just for their contribution to the emerging discipline of epidemiology, but also as veritable anthologies of stories about stench. Chadwick correlates “miasmatic exhalations”, “putrid” and “obnoxious effluvia”, “pestiferous vapours and fogs”, “vitiated” and “foul air”, “noisome vapours”, “injurious gas”, and “foul ordure” with outbreaks of diseases like cholera and typhus. For him, the only solution was to institute broad sanitary reforms to remove the causes of these bad airs. At their best, the miasmatists practiced social medicine that included a focus on diet, education, and forms of social uplift. At their worst, they were racist and classist bureaucrats. But whatever their scientific and ideological deficiencies, miasmatists were amazingly successful at marshalling the resources and political will (often with the important tool of disgust at their disposal) to create a compelling vision of the sanitary city. If, as Chadwick put it, “all smell is disease”, then only a city-wide solution could possibly stop it. ※※Indexed under…Odourof London (and disease)
But by the time Hay was penning his tale in 1880, the whole miasmatist position was losing its power to provoke the kind of disgust necessary for political action. Analyzing the “Great Stink” of Paris, which also occurred in 1880, David S. Barnes shows that “scientific progress as represented by the nascent germ theory of disease, may actually have blocked rather than accelerated remedial mobilization”. The germ theory suggested that diseases were not spread by the air at all, whether good or bad, smelly or pure. Thus the stink could not produce what Barnes calls a “sensory crisis”, whereas a similar Great Stink in London in 1858 led to comprehensive sanitary reforms.
Hay’s lurid tale of destruction is technically scientific while also being a bricolage of available science. From the miasma theory, he takes his focus on the air and his social ethic. But he jettisons the mechanism of miasma itself. I quote again from Dr Wilton Forrester, this time reading from a newspaper: “We must suppose that a gush of foul sewer-gas, or some similar poisoning of the thick and heavy air, produced the fatal effect”. This popular belief in miasmas he finds laughable. In fact, Hay gives us an indication that Forrester, as a cutting-edge medical professional, accepts the germ theory. But he has Forrester mention it only in passing on the way to what is a clear espousal of a non-germ cause of death:
No; I see only one way in which the fog is likely to act as a life-destroying agent — apart, that is, from its action in carrying poisonous germs and spreading epidemics, which illustrates its slower action — but as a rapid and immediate extinguisher of vitality the cause must be bronchial spasm.
Germs here represent a “slower action”, a secondary and, in this case, minimal threat. Hay allows this concession to the germ theory while retaining urgency for something like the older filth theory, although it is now presented as mere mechanical suffocation rather than disease.
In order to understand Hay’s work in its totality, then, we have to see it not just as a representation of a particular view of science, but as a changing view of danger and how danger relates to a social system. As the anthropologist Mary Douglas showed in her groundbreaking work Purity and Danger, pollution behavior always has to do with the maintenance of a social system. She writes, “Dirt is the by-product of a systematic ordering and classification of matter, in so far as ordering involves rejecting inappropriate elements. This idea of dirt takes us straight into the field of symbolism and promises a link-up with more obviously symbolic systems of purity”.
Thus, for Douglas, rituals either in modern secular cultures or in primitive ones, reinforce duties, relationships, and morality.
Douglas’ theories help us explain the climax of Hay’s tale, which is a single spectacle that he calls “the most horrible, the most gruesome, the most ghostly and unutterably terrific of all”. He sees all the gradations of London society illuminated by gas lamps in a theater but fixed in a kind of collective rigor mortis. He writes:
I had a full and instant view of the whole interior. The gas still burnt, and threw a light upon the scene more brilliant than perhaps it had been on the previous night; and the people—no, not the people, the DEAD!—there under the glaring light they sat, they lay, they hung over the benches, the galleries, the boxes, in one tremendous picture of catastrophe!
And again, later:
Yes, there they lay, the old, the young, the rich, the poor; of all ranks, and stations, and qualities, all huddled in one cold and hideous death; while open eyes, piteous faces, distorted limbs, and strange, unnatural attitudes told the tremendous tale of that sudden midnight agony.
Douglas writes that, failing their normal supportive functions, filth rituals can also enact a shattering and renewal of social systems. Every duty is taken out of place and disordered to the point of creating a productive “formlessness”. Only in this “final stage of total disintegration” can formlessness become a symbol not just of decay but of “beginning and of growth”. Or as Mircea Eliade put it in discussing tales of water cataclysms:
In water everything is “dissolved,” every “form” is broken up, everything that has happened ceases to exist; nothing that was before remains after immersion in water, not an outline, not a “sign,” not an event. Immersion is the equivalent, at the human level, of death at the cosmic level, of the cataclysm (the Flood) which periodically dissolves the world into primeval ocean. Breaking up all forms, doing away with the past, water possesses this power of purifying, of regenerating, of giving new birth . . . Water purifies and regenerates because it nullifies the past, and restores — even if only for a moment — the integrity of the dawn of things.
So, in the end, if Hay’s novella speaks to us today, it is not because Hay writes a rigorous science fiction tale using a form of science we recognize as our own. It is rather because his confusion — or what we see as confusion — helps us understand our own predicament better. Even in our most rigorously scientific environmental efforts, we still feel the need for moral parables. One thinks of the decidedly unscientific analogy of the boiled frog amidst the otherwise rigorous claims in An Inconvenient Truth. And certainly there are strains of dystopian imaginings and apocalyptic visions in some environmentalist writings — why shouldn’t there be? As Hay knew, in order to combat the ills of society we need to appeal to both science and morality — and if that doesn’t work, a little horror can’t hurt.
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 30, 2015

author: rett Beasel


text:
Visions of Algae in Eighteenth-Century Botany

By Ryan Feigenbaum
September 7, 2016

Although not normally considered the most glamorous of Mother Nature's offerings, algae has found itself at the heart of many a key moment in the last few hundred years of botanical science. Ryan Feigenbaum traces the surprising history of one particular species — Conferva fontinalis — from the vials of Joseph Priestley's laboratory to its possible role as inspiration for Shelley's Frankenstein.

Algae are rarely thought of as remarkable plants, when and if they’re thought of at all.1 Attitudes seemingly haven’t changed all that much since the eighteenth century; people were as blasé about algae then as they are now.
Given such an unremarkable status, it is surprising to find that a single species of algae managed to catalyze major eighteenth-century discoveries concerning photosynthesis and embryogenesis, especially in light of the fact that the naturalists responsible for these discoveries only stumbled upon this alga while looking for something else entirely. The species in question — a fine, light to dark green, filamentous aquatic plant, about a half inch in length, that clumps together by the thousands into decumbent, interwoven mats that look like wet felt — was often (but not always) identified at the time as Conferva fontinalis. (It’s now identified as Vaucheria fontinalis, a species of yellow-green algae.)
By following it through the scientific literature of the eighteenth century, we find quite the complicated little being, a species that came to be recognized by the century’s end as beautiful, curious and, without a doubt, an alga worth the trouble of getting to know.
Neither Sought Nor Seen
The Italian botanist Pier Antonio Micheli (1679–1737), famous for being the first to collect and sow the spores of various fungi, was also the first to describe and illustrate the C. fontinalis systematically in his Nova plantarum genera (1729), though he called it Byssus palustris, subobscura, filamentis non ramosis, brevibus. That old chestnut. Whereas Micheli affirmed the existence of seeds in the alga, his contemporary, Johann Jacob Dillenius (1687–1747) denied their existence. Dillenius thought that in lieu of bearing seeds, these plants grew by aggregation, in the manner of minerals. This prominent German-born English botanist also scientifically described and illustrated the C. fontinalis (though under a different name) in his Historia muscorum (1741), a work completed entirely without the use of a microscope. These naturalists’ vexed hypotheses portend years of confusion about algal reproduction, which also indicates just how much phycology (the study of algae) was still in its infancy. Nevertheless, their works would remain the standard reference until the turn of the nineteenth century.
They retained this standing partly because of Carl Linnaeus, the century’s most famous botanist. He adopted the research of Micheli and Dillenius as the conclusive word in algae, conducting little if any research himself. In fact, when Linnaeus described the alga in his Species plantarum (1753), a book that stands at the beginning of modern botanical taxonomy, he used Dillenius’s own herbarium specimen as the type species. What Linnaeus did change, however, was the alga’s name and taxonomic position. He replaced the previous naturalists’ long polynomials with his own binomial nomenclature: “Conferva fontinalis” was born.
By basing his taxonomic system on the number or position of flowers’ reproductive organs, Linnaeus effectively discouraged algal research because the reproductive organs of these plants were thought to be either imperceptibly small or altogether missing. Hence, algae were of little concern to Linnaeus and his disciples. Moreover, because C. fontinalis and many other species of algae were so small, they required tedious observations with high quality microscopes using well-developed protocols. The trouble was these microscopes weren’t yet widely available and protocols weren’t yet established. Accordingly, this alga remained in muddy waters.
Not Sought But Seen
Given the longstanding neglect of algae and the poverty of established methods for its research, it would be surprising to find C. fontinalis at the center of a major scientific discovery, let alone two. And yet, it was. Its appearances in these discoveries make more sense once it’s realized that they were completely fortuitous. Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), responsible for the first discovery in question, said as much: “In looking for one thing I have generally found another, and sometimes a thing of much more value than that which I was in quest of. But none of these unexpected discoveries appear to me to have been so extraordinary as that which I am about to relate”, that is, the remarkable property of what he called “green matter” (1790, 282–3).
Priestley, a veritable polymath who published on subjects ranging from theology, philosophy, natural science, politics, and more, began to experiment on gases in the 1770s. One of the first and most significant of his consequent discoveries was the identification of dephlogisticated air or, as it would soon be called, oxygen2, and that certain processes like respiration depleted the air of oxygen, whereas others, like introducing a plant into the test vial, restored it. This last finding led him to a crucial realization: plants produce oxygen.
While testing this latter hypothesis, he observed that many of his vials became covered with a mysterious green matter. Initially concluding it to be neither animal nor vegetable, “but a thing sui generis”, Priestley soon became convinced otherwise by his more botanically skilled friends who declared it to be indisputably a plant (most likely C. fontinalis).
Forced to leave vials of this green matter unattended for three months while he traveled, Priestley observed upon his return that specimens kept in poor sunlight did not survive, whereas those in the opposite condition flourished. Further experimentation showed that sunlight was necessary not only for the survival of green matter, as would be expected of a plant, but also, significantly, for its production of oxygen. In short, experiments on an alga likely to be C. fontinalis were among the first to reveal the necessary role of sunlight in a plant’s production of oxygen. Priestley’s inadvertent discovery of green matter thus began to illuminate the concept of photosynthesis, one of the most fundamental and important processes in nature.
While Priestley conducted his experiments on green matter in the late 1770s, one of the most celebrated naturalists in Germany, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840), was occupied with his own. He published his results in an article entitled “On an Extraordinarily Simple Manner of Reproduction” (1781), which described what its title promised: the propagation of an alga, namely, C. fontinalis.
As with Priestley, the alga itself wasn’t Blumenbach’s focus. He only came across it while looking to support his own theory of generation, which he called the Bildungstrieb or formative drive. The theory is complex, but the long and short of it is that this formative drive is responsible for bringing living beings into existence, keeping them alive, and, ultimately, producing more kangaroos, oak trees, algae, and every other living thing. Yet, how was an alga, something that Blumenbach described as looking like “wet mouse fur”, supposed to support this new theory of life?
By being simple. For Blumenbach, everything about this alga was simple. It was simply collected. One only needed to check the nearest pipe, spring, ditch, pond, etc. It was simply formed. It consisted of a single straight filament with an identical internal and external structure that was simply examined under the microscope. Lastly, its manner of propagation, as the essay’s title indicates, was simple. Over the course of a mere forty-eight hours, the tip of the filament would swell up into a nub that detached from the alga’s body, fixing itself to a favorable location. The nub would then begin pushing out a filament of its own until it had grown into an entirely new C. fontinalis. This simplicity afforded any naturalist the opportunity to examine the alga inside and out, literally, and to observe the entire course of its generation. If this opportunity were taken, Blumenbach thought, then the naturalist would have no choice but to reject previous opinions and accept his theory of the formative drive.
While Blumenbach’s algal experiments, in addition to his other studies, swayed many natural researchers in eighteenth-century debates over embryogenesis and inspired new research, they weren’t quite the coup for which he hoped. This disappointment stemmed, in part, from the fact that C. fontinalis just wasn’t as simple as he thought. According to modern phycology, this genus of algae reproduces sexually and asexually, and in a variety of ways to boot. Even in Blumenbach’s time, shortly after the publication of his article, the eminent botanist James Edward Smith, founder and first president of the Linnean Society of London, recognized the genus Conferva to be so understudied and misunderstood that he called it the “opprobrium of botany”.
Sought But Not Seen
Although the C. fontinalis happened to prove illuminating for Priestley and Blumenbach, its lingering obscurity further confounded two other longstanding controversies in the latter half of the eighteenth century. A. P. de Candolle (1778–1841) aimed to resolve the first of these with his “Report on the Confervae” (1802), in which he reviewed foregoing scientific literature in order to determine whether species of Conferva were plants, animals, or some intermediary thing between them. This third possibility referred to Priestley’s sui generis hypothesis, which, as we saw above, he abandoned, instead judging the alga to be a true plant. Several other naturalists, however, claimed species of Conferva had animal natures. For instance, the French scientist, Justin Girod-Chantran (1750–1841), believed that C. fontinalis was an animal or at least of animal origin. (In his defense, the alga does discharge motile spores that look like swimming microscopic animals). Candolle responded to Girod-Chantran’s arguments as well as those of other naturalists, arguing that the evidence was overwhelmingly in favor of Conferva being a plant, a conclusion that stuck for more than a century. (In a final twist, to happen much later, this alga is now considered neither plant nor animal, but falls into another kingdom altogether.)
The second controversy concerned how this plant comes into existence. Some scientists thought it was the product of spontaneous generation; that is, it came from inorganic matter and not from egg or seed. As strange as this idea might sound today, it persisted well into the nineteenth century. An example of the evidence given in support of it, which is as unpleasantly familiar today as it would’ve been in the eighteenth century, is the experience of finding weevils in flour. Supporters of this theory explained the pests’ presence by saying that they were produced spontaneously out of the flour itself and not from any parent. They then extended the same logic to other living things whose propagation was not clearly understood, including algae.
This controversy returns us to Priestley, who went to great lengths to demonstrate that his green matter wasn’t spontaneously generated, a theory he abhorred. Jan Ingenhousz (1730–1799), another scientist important in the elucidation of photosynthesis, asserted the contrary: “The water itself, or some substance in the water, is, as I think, changed into this vegetation” (1779, 90–1). To whomever might have balked at such a thought, that water could be transformed into a plant, Ingenhousz asked if he would have the same disbelief in the case where a ruminant transformed grass into fat.
Neither Priestley nor Ingenhousz were alone in their positions, each finding vociferous adherents and opponents. Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802), grandfather of Charles, was one such adherent. Despite being a dear friend to Joseph Priestley, Darwin partly sided with Ingenhousz in the debate concerning the generation of C. fontinalis. In describing his own theory of spontaneous generation as part of the “Additional Notes” to his poem, The Temple of Nature (1803), Darwin wrote, “There is one vegetable body, which appears to be produced by a spontaneous vital process, and is believed to be propagated and enlarged in so short a time by solitary generation as to become visible to the naked eye; I mean the green matter first attended to by Dr Priestley, and called by him conferva fontinalis” (4).
Darwin’s remarks on the spontaneous vitality of the C. fontinalis have their own surprising legacy. Mary Shelley (1797–1851) attributed the premise of her novel Frankenstein to Darwin, who supposed it “as not of impossible occurrence” (1818). Yet, the reader learns nothing more of what Shelley has in mind, at least not until prodded by “The Publishers of the Standard Novels” to answer how “such a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea” (1831).
In her response, which occurred in the book’s third edition, Shelley recounted listening to a conversation between her husband and Lord Byron; at one point, one of them had inquired into the principle of life and asked whether it could ever be discovered and expressed. Shelley continued, “They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin, (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of has having been done by him,) who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion”. It was but a short distance for Shelley to consider the possibility that various once-living body parts could be reassembled into an amalgamous creature, then given life anew.
But what Shelley meant by “vermicelli” — a kind of pasta that consequently bears no direct reference to anything in Darwin’s corpus — is unclear. Nonetheless, scholars agree that if Shelley is referring to something specific in Darwin, it likely stems from the note in The Temple of Nature on spontaneous generation. One possibility is the vorticella, an aquatic animal that shows no signs of life when dry, but begins swimming about and searching for food when placed in water. While this example bears a resemblance to Shelley’s recollection, scholars have identified another possible source: Darwin’s discussion of C. fontinalis. Samuel H. Vasbinder has provided an intriguing argument on behalf of this possibility (1981). He points out that Darwin mentions a “glass case” with respect to Priestley’s alga; it isn’t there in the vorticella passage. Vasbinder also argues for a “strong rhythmic and phonemic similarity between ‘conferva fontinalis’ and ‘vermicelli,’” connecting, for instance, “ferva” with “vermi” (117). Unfortunately, the evidence is indeterminate and neither side’s arguments are ultimately decisive, or, in other words, it happily remains quite possible that the initial spark that brought the monster of Dr Victor Frankenstein to life was none other than the C. fontinalis. Given its already long list of exploits, should we really expect anything less of this alga?
Sought And Seen
There were a handful of scientists around the turn of the nineteenth century who certainly wouldn’t have underestimated it, like the German botanist, Albrecht Wilhelm Roth (1757–1834). After admitting that this part of the vegetable world was quite unfamiliar to him, he resolved to become acquainted with algae; however, he quickly realized the lack of resources available to the beginner in this area of study. This shortfall, he lamented, frustrated and discouraged research on these plants. He thus set out to redress the situation in his Remarks on the Study of Cryptogamous Water Plants (1797). How could the botanist, he asked, be expected to study algae effectively when there were no guidelines, methods, or best practices yet in place? He enumerated the difficulties waiting to beset the researcher in the investigation of a water plant like C. fontinalis. How should it be gathered from its body of water without damaging it? Should it be studied while wet or while dry? How should it be preserved? How should its structures be communicated when extant terminology focused on flowering plants? How should it be mounted for microscopic examination? How should the researcher build a collection of other algae for the sake of comparison? How should the “wet felt”, constituted by thousands of slender filaments, be drawn? Roth answered each of these questions in turn, not hesitating to underscore how difficult it was for him to investigate this phenomenon without predecessors: “The lack of a teacher or guide, after which I could properly organize my work, was quite palpable to me. I believe, however, to have fortunately overcome the most significant difficulties and held it as my responsibility to make budding plant lovers familiar with the same” (8).
Roth’s hard work did not escape the notice of another botanist, Lewis Weston Dillwyn (1778–1855), even if Dillwyn ended up disagreeing with almost all of Roth’s algal taxonomy. Dillwyn himself contributed to the study of Conferva through his aptly named British confervae, which comprises a series of fascicles published from 1802 until 1809. In this work, we find a scientist with an unmistakable reverence for Conferva. He enthused that there was no genus more interesting than it, that its study relieved the mind from the hustle and bustle of active life, that the genus was a constant source of amusement, and that it, in the end, like all of natural history, produced satisfaction in the mind and led the naturalist to “admire and adore” the works of God. Finally, as if that weren’t enough, Dillwyn also hailed the genus Conferva as the “most beautiful and curious” of the algae.
While the eighteenth-century largely discounted most nonflowering plants like algae, C. fontinalis was one that got itself noticed, for better and for worse. As it helped to clarify the phenomena of photosynthesis and embryogenesis, it also confused the kingdoms of nature and perpetuated belief in spontaneous generation. Nevertheless, at the turn of the nineteenth century, at least for a few intrepid researchers, this complicated, extraordinary little being inspired a new attitude toward algae, a reverence warranted just as much now as it was then.
This new attitude persisted into the nineteenth century with the efforts of Carl Agardh (1785–1859) and William Harvey (1811–1866) who established the foundations of modern phycology. Previous dismissals and confusions gave way to the recognition of algae’s economic potential and its vital role in ecosystems. This recognition is captured particularly well by one of the first American phycologists, John Hooper (1802–1869). In his “Introduction to Algology”, a little known pamphlet self-published in Brooklyn in 1850, he delivered an impassioned defense of algae and its study, echoing many of the sentiments first voiced by Roth and Dillwyn. Hooper reinterpreted earlier confusions regarding the reproduction of Conferva as evidence of the “chain of creation” that revealed the harmony and unity of nature. He reminded his readers that algae offered habitats and food for countless creatures and produced the oxygen essential for animal life. For the most recalcitrant of readers, Hooper called on a language with universal currency. “Let us speak in dollars and cents”, he said, pointing out that important industrial materials like kelp (i.e., soda ash) and iodine were both extracted from algae, and that seaboard farmers used algae as a fertilizer known as “vraic”.
Hooper intended these remarks as encouragement for his readers to take another look at algae (or, in some cases, a first look) in order to see it not as “the green, slimy substance on the stagnant pond” or as “corruption emanating from feculent water”, but rather as “a beautiful Alga, pleasing to the eye, and, by its act of vegetating, freeing that stagnant pool of its impurities, which might have otherwise spread around pestilence and death” (11). His encouragement is one still worth hearing today, to look again not only at the algae living all around us, but also at the illustrious species like C. fontinalis that constitute its history.3
The text of this essay is published under a CC BY-SA license, see here for details.

date: September 7, 2016

author: Ryan Feigenbaum