By Ralph O'Connor
Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor indicates, advertised dazzling visions of prior worlds, piquing the general public mind's eye with glimpses of man-eating mammoths, speaking dinosaurs, and sea-dragons spawned via devil himself. those authors—including males of technological know-how, ladies, monks, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, smooth poetry, and the city leisure undefined, developing new types of literature with the intention to delivery their readers right into a vanished and alien past.
In exploring using poetry and spectacle within the merchandising of renowned technological know-how, O’Connor proves that geology’s good fortune owed a lot to the literary innovations of its authors. An leading edge combination of the background of technology, literary feedback, booklet background, and visible tradition, The Earth on Show rethinks the connection among technological know-how and literature within the 19th century.
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For an outline history of vertebrate palaeontology see Buffetaut 1987. 68. Cuvier 1813; Hitchcock 1851 (on which see Guralnick 1972, 537). 69. Anon. 1857b, 317. 1. The anatomy of the landscape: Gideon Mantell’s “Plan of the Stratification of the South Eastern part of Sussex”, drawn by his wife, Mary Ann, and coloured by hand. Mantell 1822, plate 3, detail. Although I have been speaking of a literary tradition, these narratives of earth history did not occupy a single genre, however broadly we might defi ne that term.
From this rapid view of these majestic remains it must appear, that the creature to whom they belonged was nearly 60 feet long, and 25 feet high! 41 Here, besides the rhetoric of terror, is a response reminiscent of William Paley’s recently published Natural Theology (1802), in which each creature’s perfect fit to its environment was presented as evidence for a benevolent Creator. For Ashe, the monster’s claw has been designed so perfectly for its horrific purpose that it is “beautiful”. This seeming dissonance is conventional enough for its time, being one of several possible developments of the argument from design in an age when the existence of animals long before man was becoming increasingly familiar among the learned.
Smith 1994 and Heringman 2004. introduction 16 < 17 poems, autobiographies, children’s stories, travelogues, and sermons. By approaching science writing from this angle, it will become possible to redraw the literary landscape. These writers included not only pioneering geologists like Buckland and Lyell, but the whole spectrum of scientific expertise: local fossil collectors, specialists in other sciences, proponents of a biblically literalist young-earth geology, and writers who never touched a hammer in their lives.