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By Ralph O'Connor

At the flip of the 19th century, geology—and its claims that the earth had a protracted and colourful prehuman history—was commonly dismissedasdangerous nonsense. yet simply fifty years later, it was once the main celebrated of Victorian sciences. Ralph O’Connor tracks the marvelous progress of geology’s status in Britain, exploring how a brand new geohistory way more beautiful than the normal six days of construction was once assembled and bought to the broader Bible-reading public.

Shrewd science-writers, O’Connor exhibits, advertised impressive visions of earlier 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, girls, monks, biblical literalists, hack writers, blackmailers, and prophets—borrowed freely from the Bible, sleek poetry, and the city leisure undefined, developing new kinds of literature as a way to shipping their readers right into a vanished and alien past.

In exploring using poetry and spectacle within the merchandising of well known technology, O’Connor proves that geology’s good fortune owed a lot to the literary options of its authors. An leading edge mix of the heritage of technology, literary feedback, ebook heritage, and visible tradition, The Earth on Show rethinks the connection among technological know-how and literature within the 19th century.

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Extra info for The earth on show : fossils and the poetics of popular science, 1802-1856

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78. W. Buckland 1820; Mantell 1822, 1–13, 304–5. introduction 24 < 25 a wide readership, which often display considerable stylistic variety in order to capture readers’ imaginations. Quoting from a poem caused a sudden lurch into a new form of discourse, the break clearly marked by indentation. This lurch could be just as sudden when the writer launched into lyrical descriptive prose, as in the example from Miller’s Cruise of the Betsey quoted above. Such demarcation was encouraged by the wider literary culture of the time, dominated as it was by review articles and anthologies which excerpted the most attractive or striking passages (“beauties”) for readers with no time to read entire books.

Nevertheless, spectacle as well as science was a fully international practice: the same forms of display in which geological popularization was rooted, such as panoramas and biblical paintings, were current in most of the major urban centres in Europe and North America, including many of the same shows and canvases. Our story begins in 1802, when the British public first set eyes upon the complete skeleton of a large extinct animal. This skeleton, on loan from Philadelphia, was bound ultimately for Paris.

On Darwin’s poetry see McNeil 1986; Heringman 2004, 191–227. The continuing popularity of didactic verse in the early nineteenth century is discussed in Duff 2001. 76. Compare W. Jones 1966, 200–9. 77. On these three compilatory forms see Butler 1993, Price 2000, and Topham 2004a, respectively. On compilatory strategies more generally see Dean 1968, 16–38; Crawford 2000. 78. W. Buckland 1820; Mantell 1822, 1–13, 304–5. introduction 24 < 25 a wide readership, which often display considerable stylistic variety in order to capture readers’ imaginations.

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