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MARKING THE bicentenary of Queen Victoria's birth, Maria Zytaruk's exhibition Nature on the Page: The Print and Manuscript Culture of Victorian Natural History was displayed at the University of Toronto's Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library from January to April 2019. The exhibition showcased an impressive array of print and manuscript volumes from the Fisher Library's Victorian Natural History Collection, including mass-produced handbooks, limited-edition illustrated works, and one-of-a-kind albums and herbaria. As Loryl MacDonald, director of the Fisher Rare Book Library, writes in the forward to the exhibition's accompanying catalogue, the breadth of featured materials "reflect[s] the Victorian commitment to the study of the natural world around them" (7).
Zytaruk's exhibition catalogue further explores this commitment, introducing readers to nineteenth-century natural history "crazes" and highlighting the Victorian desire to observe and collect a wide variety of specimens—from seaweeds to orchids to ferns to birds to butterflies (8–9). Drawing evidence (and featuring images) from the exhibition's materials, Zytaruk explores the direct and reciprocal relationship between print culture and Victorian natural history pursuits. Throughout the catalogue's five chapters, Zytaruk juxtaposes evidence from published and unpublished materials from the era, providing a compelling and thorough demonstration of the "interplay between print and manuscript culture" and how this culture helped to inspire generations of Victorians to search for, study, collect, and contain a variety of specimens, whether from home or abroad (9).
In the first chapter of the catalogue, Zytaruk explains, "the 'bookishness' of Victorian natural history is apparent in the circular pattern by which readers consumed items of botanical print, made their own herbaria collections, and sometimes used printed works of botany to encase the objects of their own field work" (11). To illustrate this cycle, the chapter begins with the history of William Withering's Arrangement of British Plants (1776), a popular manual that instructs readers in collecting plant species and arranging them (according to the Linnaean classification system) in a herbarium. Moving from Withering's first edition to adaptations that were published in the nineteenth century, Zytaruk describes how the manual became more affordable and more portable with each iteration, thus opening up the practice of herbaria assembly to wider audiences (15–16). The second section of the chapter turns its attention away from printed matter. Examining a herbarium...