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JONATHAN SMITH, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxiii + 349. ISBN 0-521-85690-6. £60.00 (hardback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087407000520
Jonathan Smith's fascinating new book is part of a wider turn to the visual in two related bodies of scholarship on nineteenth-century Britain. Studies of literature and culture have been much influenced by Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, 2000), which argued for the distinctiveness and novelty of the period's attitudes towards sight. In historical writing on the sciences, meanwhile, leading scholars such as Jennifer Tucker and Bernard Lightman have demonstrated the integral involvement of images in the making as well as the communicating of scientific arguments. Surprisingly, Charles Darwin, serviced by a legendary scholarly ' industry', has been largely absent from most of this work. The absence is all the more remarkable given the centrality of the visual to Darwin's evolutionary thought. Accounting naturalistically for the purported perfection of the organ of vision was, after all, pivotal to Darwin's attempt to overturn natural-theological arguments which posited the eye as the ultimate proof of intelligent design. The scrupulous care and attention that Darwin paid to the production of the illustrations in his books also deserves notice. Or consider the crucial difficulty Darwin faced, as Smith notes, of rendering visible the immensely protracted and infinitesimal workings of natural selection. Akin to Gillian Beer's well-known treatment in Darwin's Plots (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000) of Darwin's difficulties and subtle accommodations in employing linguistic resources that implied intention and agency to articulate a theory which disavows them,...