Victorian Science and Imagery

Representation and Knowledge in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

Nancy Rose Marshall

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780822987994
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la ciencia

The nineteenth century was a period of science and imagery: when scientific theories and discoveries challenged longstanding boundaries between animal, plant, and human, and when art and visual culture produced new notions about the place of the human in the natural world. Just as scientists relied on graphic representation to conceptualize their ideas, artists moved seamlessly between scientific debate and creative expression to support or contradict popular scientific theories—such as Darwin's theory of evolution and sexual selection—deliberately drawing on concepts in ways that allowed them to refute popular claims or disrupt conventional knowledges.Focusing on the close kinship between the arts and sciences during the Victorian period, the art historians contributing to this volume reveal the unique ways in which nineteenth-century British and American visual culture participated in making science, and in which science informed art at a crucial moment in the history of the development of the modern world. Together, they explore topics in geology, meteorology, medicine, anatomy, evolution, and zoology, as well as a range of media from photography to oil painting. They remind us that science and art are not tightly compartmentalized, separate influences. Rather, these are fields that share forms, manifest as waves, layers, lines, or geometries; that invest in the idea of the evolution of form; and that generate surprisingly kindred responses, such as pain, pleasure, empathy, and sympathy.

CHAPTER 1

MEASURING NATIVE AMERICA

EARLY AMERICAN ARCHAEOLOGY AND THE POLITICS OF TIME

Rachael Z. DeLue

The Copernican Revolution of the sixteenth century displaced the earth from the center of the universe, and Darwin’s theory of evolution remade the human as just another animal among countless other beasts. In analogous fashion, geology in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries radically expanded the timescale of the earth while drastically reducing humanity’s share in its chronology.¹ Geology’s scrutiny of the earth’s crust also revealed ancient civilizations and the fossilized records of extinct organic life, fueling the disciplines of archaeology and paleontology and producing a revolution in knowledge about the relationship between the present and the past, including the status of modern humans in relation to earlier human cultures and to the animal kingdom.

Revolutions in thought inevitably produce problems for representation. In Europe and North America from the sixteenth century forward, visual images played a substantial, often essential role in scholarly inquiry and the production and dissemination of new knowledge.² In the nineteenth century, geologists on both sides of the Atlantic, confronted with radically new theories about the earth’s history and temporality, found existing conventions and strategies of visualization severely lacking. Established models of scientific illustration, predicated on observation and mimesis—as with a botanical illustration or a drawing of a dissected corpse—could not manage the task of delineating what the new science described: abstract, extraempirical concepts and unobservable phenomena. Consequently, scientists and image makers sought new modes of picturing, seeking to visualize within the limits of a static, two-dimensional format the animate, ever-changing, and newly immeasurable ancient terrain of the earth’s crust and its interior depths.

The development of new image types in the sciences went hand in hand with the formulation of new knowledge, the one catalyzing the other. As did their colleagues in geology, paleontologists and archaeologists contended with the problem of picturing the distant past, not least because relatively little of that past, including its life forms, remained to be observed. More problematic, however, was the fact that the temporal and biological relationship of past life, human and otherwise, to organic life in the present had yet to be fully fathomed. Linnaean taxonomic systems accounted for morphological and physiological relationships among living species, but the knowledge and the technology for determining how one species might relate to another across time were still developing in the period. Moreover, time itself would not submit to measure. The inability to establish anything but a relative rather than absolute timeline for existence—to assign an actual date to a rock layer or a fossil specimen—made the attempt to cognize and render the flow of time in relation to the present all the more vexing.³

In the case of archaeology in the United States, such calculations came equipped with immensely high social and political stakes, as exemplified by a particularly striking episode in the early history of American archaeology to which the remainder of this chapter is devoted. The most visible product of this episode, Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, a moving panorama commissioned by the physician and amateur archaeologist Montroville Wilson Dickeson to entertain and edify the American public, embodies the difficulties and desires that attended any attempt to delineate the past and measure time in light of the modern human. Examining and analyzing the panorama’s particular visual and narrative strategies, which drew equally on scientific and popular contexts and colluded in the formulation of knowledge about America’s past and present, elucidates in especial fashion the intellectual and political formations that shaped the actions of American institutions and individuals at midcentury while illuminating the active role played by visual culture therein. As an image-cum-apparatus, the moving panorama shared with the visual culture of geology the attempt to render multiple temporalities, including deep time, within a single, always presenttense pictorial plane. Unlike geology, which persistently endeavored to understand all things and all histories as existing as part of a single and comprehensive timeline, Dickeson’s panorama, for reasons equally scientific and political, postulated multiple and contradictory chronologies for the span between then and now.

The first major landmark of archaeology’s eventual professionalization in the United States in the late nineteenth century was the establishment in 1812 of the American Antiquarian Society. That name of course connotes an interest in the distant past, and the moniker also served to align American scholars with their counterparts in Europe. The society’s founders took as their model the Society of Antiquaries in England as well as other such organizations in Europe and the United Kingdom.⁴ The very existence of such a society presumed an American antiquity on par with the ancient civilizations of Europe, including ancient Greece and Rome. The rediscovery of classical antiquity in the eighteenth century, including the celebrated excavation of the Roman towns of Pompeii and Herculaneum, led to the rise of archaeology in nineteenth-century Europe as a full-fledged scholarly and professional discipline, one that functioned as a national and imperial endeavor through the amassing of national collections, often by way of conquest and plunder.⁵ Those individuals in the United States eager to dig up America’s ancient past could only follow so far in the footsteps of their European colleagues, in part because they lacked the training and institutional support to do so, but also, of course, because the so-called New World possessed no classical Greek or Roman ruins. As the Reverend Abiel Holmes stated in an address to the American Antiquarian Society in 1814, on the occasion of its second anniversary, “Our antiquities . . . do not extend back beyond the distance of two centuries. . . . In vain, then, do we make pretensions to an ancient origin,” thus associating “antiquity” with Anglo-European history and white settlement of the North American continent in the early seventeenth century.⁶ Yet members of America’s intellectual and political elite, driven by scientific rivalry and an aggressive nationalism, desired an American antiquity to rival Europe’s ancient past.

The study of America’s past, including its visual and material culture, would highlight America’s many noble accomplishments as well as corroborate the nation’s exceptional promise. “Who is not gratified,” asked Holmes, “in tracing our salutary institutions to their origin, and in discovering the causes of our rapid progress in population, wealth and refinement, of our freedom and independence? Who can behold the portraits of the first settlers of New England, without mingled delight and admiration? . . . Who can step on that rock, on which the pilgrim fathers from Leyden first stepped, or even survey its fragments without grateful emotion?”⁷ Scientific inquiry abetted this nationalist project. Geology became such a celebrated and popular science in nineteenth-century America in part because its revelations made the New World as old as deep time, enabling the United States to claim a storied history, albeit a natural rather than a human one.⁸ Archaeology took a somewhat different turn: again, because it had to, but also because of its fundamental connection in the United States to the discipline of ethnology and to the project of territorial expansion, and because what lay buried beneath the ground presented myriad problems of identity, visibility, and time for science and for the American nation-state.

Few primary visual documents illustrate this better than the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley, created around 1850 by John J. Egan at the behest of Dickeson in the thick of territorial reconnaissance and the interlinked professionalization of archaeology and ethnology, which in the United States served as intellectual arms of westward expansion.⁹ Based in Philadelphia, Dickeson left his medical practice in 1837 to head west to study Native American earthworks in the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys, becoming one of the first European Americans to excavate and document a large number of Native American burial mounds.¹⁰ Dickeson’s fieldwork belongs to the preprofessional phase of archaeology in the United States, which originated in the late eighteenth century in the form of curiosity about Native American earthworks—mounds in particular—and professionalized largely as the study of Native America. Dickeson was thus equal parts archaeologist and antiquarian, curious about America’s past and bent on amassing as many artifacts for his collection as he could. His travels overlapped with the rapid expansion of both ethnology and archaeology in the 1840s, signaled by the foundation of the American Ethnological Society in 1842, which Dickeson joined in 1847, and abetted by numerous expeditions launched to explore the territory west of the Mississippi River.

Dickeson’s own findings played no small role in stimulating interest in indigenous peoples and North America’s ancient history.¹¹ He spent nearly a decade in the field, returning to Philadelphia with a sizable collection of artifacts, including human and animal bones, pottery, arrow points, stone tools, metal ornaments, beads, rock and mineral specimens, and fossils, many of which he deposited at the Academy of the Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.¹² Dickeson published a series of detailed accounts of his travels, collectively titled “American Antiquities,” in the Philadelphia journal the Lotus. He also delivered lectures on “Indian Antiquities,” illustrated with objects from his extensive collection, and staged several exhibitions, including an “Indian Cabinet” that opened at Philadelphia’s City Museum in 1854. In 1876, visitors to the main hall at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exhibition could view a selection of Dickeson’s artifacts, which were displayed again in 1885 in Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall.¹³

Many others preceded Dickeson in heading west to view Native American earthworks, prompted, as was he, by increasing fascination with America’s so-called prehistory and what scholars have dubbed “mound mania.”¹⁴ Observers in the eighteenth century and earlier had reported the existence of monumental earthworks in the Southeast and the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys, part of a much larger network of indigenously produced and enormously varied earthen structures throughout the Americas, including structures that continue to play a vital role in Native American culture today. Largely dating between 1000 BCE and 1700 CE, these earthworks represent what specialists have described as two main traditions, the Woodland and Mississippian, each of which cuts across different Native American social groups. Construction decreased with the arrival of European explorers and colonization.¹⁵

Nonindigenous period observers from the late eighteenth century onward almost always commented on the remarkable character of these earthworks, and most accounts noted the mystery of their existence as well as their probable ancient origins. Such fascination with potentially ancient American monuments spurred tourism as well as scientific study—or what counted as scientific study at the time. From the point of view of indigenous cultures then and now, archaeology functioned as a glorified version of grave robbing, a violent act of desecration rather than enlightenment. Feeding the mania was the alluring hypothesis that the mounds were built by a lost, possibly non–Native American race, one far more ancient and advanced than living Native American peoples, and thus more in line with the citizens of ancient Greece and Rome, or even the denizens of biblical history. It was proposed, for example, that the ancient builders of the mounds were Israelites, Mesoamericans, Vikings, or Danes.¹⁶ As one observer wrote in 1791, “Who those inhabitants were, who have left such traces; from whence they came, and where they are now; are queries to which we never, perhaps, can find any other than conjectural answers.” Another, writing in 1794, similarly characterized the “ancient fortifications and stupendous mounds of earth” as “vestiges of immense population and infinitely greater share of science than is possessed by the present ‘red people.’ Who then were the authors, is the question that is proposed—and when, and where did they migrate.”¹⁷

This majority view persisted into the 1840s. The first major publication on the Mississippi River Valley mounds, Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis’s Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley (1848), postulated that the builders of the earthworks were an extinct race, likely Mesoamerican or Peruvian in origin, a view reflecting what by midcentury had become conventional wisdom. Such hypotheses granted America an ancient, storied past while also advancing the white supremacist racial theories that buttressed the political agenda of the settler colonial state, including territorial expansion and the removal or extermination of contemporaneous indigenous populations.¹⁸

Dickeson’s thinking fell right in line. Recalling in the Lotus his excavation of the earthworks on the plantation of a Major General Quitman, near Natchez, Mississippi, Dickeson lamented the disappearance of the “by-gone people” who had once populated the area. “Where are now the thousands that once thronged these glorious heights,” he wondered, “girded in their warlike armor, and who fought, even unto death, for the defence of these, their native hills? They have long since gone to the bar of God, where neither the victor’s wreath nor the largest conquest of earth will avail them aught.”¹⁹ For Dickeson, it was the unknown, ancient origins of the mounds—“the mystery, the impenetrable mystery veiling these aged sepulchres, which gives them an interest for the traveller’s eye”—along with their status as the object of inquiry and locus of debate for early American archaeology that motivated his expedition to the Mississippi Valley in the first place.²⁰ And it was his sense of the public’s own fascination with America’s earthworks that inspired him, on returning to Philadelphia, to commission John J. Egan to create a moving panorama, which Dickeson took on tour in the 1850s.

Fig. 1.1. Dickeson produced a broadside advertisement to entice the public. Montroville Wilson Dickeson, “Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi River Valley! Now Exhibiting for a Short Time Only, With Scientific Lectures on American Aerchiology [sic]” (Newark, NJ: Mercury Office, ca. 1851), printed broadside, 6 × 7 1/2 in (15 × 19 cm). Call number E78. M75 M65e, Western Americana Collection, Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey.

In commissioning Egan to create a moving panorama, Dickeson capitalized on the “panoramania” of the 1840s in the United States. Like many of the most popular moving panoramas in the period, Egan’s Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi River Valley featured the region of the Mississippi River, including locales Dickeson visited during his travels.²¹ A broadside advertisement indicated that Egan used sketches made by Dickeson “on the spot” to ensure accuracy, and promised, in the inflated rhetoric typical of the industry, “over 15,000 feet of canvas” (fig. 1.1).²² In actuality, the painted canvas, now in the collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum, measured around 350 feet long, and featured over two dozen scenes that unspooled one by one before the audience. They depicted in no particular order a variety of subjects and periods: hillsides and waterways at sunset or in snowstorms, steamboats alighting at riverside towns, crystal-lined caves, a devastating tornado, the exhumation of two mastodon skeletons, and a humorous vignette depicting a man chased by a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. Victorian Science and Imagery
• Chapter 1. Measuring Native America: Early American Archaeology and the Politics of Time
• Chapter 2. “All That Is Solid Melts into Air”: Burne-Jones, Glaciation, and the Matter of History
• Chapter 3. Grasping the Elusive: Victorian Weather Forecasting and Arthur Hughes’s Illustrations for George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind
• Color Gallery
• Chapter 4. A Haunting Picture, in Light of Victorian Science: John Everett Millais’s Speak! Speak!
• Chapter 5. Photographing Ether, Documenting Pain: Representing the Chemical Invisible in the Daguerreotypes of Southworth and Hawes
• Chapter 6. Drawing Racial Comparisons in Nineteenth-Century British and American Anatomical Atlases
• Chapter 7. The Post-Darwinian Eye, Physiological Aesthetics, and the Early Years of Aestheticism, 1860–1876
• Chapter 8. Darwinian Aesthetics and Aestheticism in James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room
• Notes
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index