Epistemic Images and Vital Nature: Darwin’s Botanic Garden as Image Text Book

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the function of images in Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) by drawing on recent work in the history of science. I argue that the full-page intaglio prints of plants in Darwin’s book function as “epistemic images” by propounding a visual argument about organic life. The epistemic values embedded in the images of plants—specifically, the appearance of life and motion—are the result of artists’ engraving techniques deployed in the service of eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions. These conventions allow the images to align the knowledge claims of Darwin’s allegorical verse with those put forward in the prose notes. In conclusion, I suggest this method of unearthing the epistemic values of images could be productively extended to literary texts less obviously engaged with scientific debates of the time.

Notes

1 See, for example, Stanton; Millgate; Suarez and Zimmerman; Mason; St Clair.

2 See, for example, Piper and Lynch.

3 On materiality, see the recent volume of essays on Romantic Materialities edited by Guyer and Langan.

4 For recent studies of Romantic visual culture, see Calè and Haywood. For illustration of literary texts, see Jung’s “Visual Interpretations” and Garside.

5 See the short bibliography of work on Blake’s “Commercial Book Illustrations” in The William Blake Archive.

6 See especially Jung’s “Illustrated Pocket Diaries” and Mole.

7 There is also considerable disagreement over the term “naturalism,” which is often used to describe images that abide by the rules of perspective; “naturalistic” images, however, do not necessarily correspond with observed reality. See Kusukawa 4–8.

8 In the in-text citations and captions, I will differentiate editions of Loves of the Plants by date (1789, 1790, or 1791), and will distinguish verse from notes with the addition of lines. References to individual physical copies are also noted.

9 See Gascoigne 107–18.

10 For binding instructions, I inspected specific physical copies of The Botanic Garden, including two copies of both volumes at the University of Virginia and three copies of both volumes at the University of Pennsylvania.

11 I thank Roger Gaskell for this insight.

12 Here it is worth noting that the flowers of the kōwhai, the native name for Sophora tetraptera, appear before the leaves.

13 As with truth, objectivity, experience, and many other keywords of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century natural philosophy, accuracy did not signify in the modern sense of correctness. As Meghan Doherty argues, standards of accuracy in scientific illustration and experimental practice were produced in the mid-seventeenth century through the lexicon of accuracy shared by engravers and members of the Royal Society (“Creating Standards” 15–36).

14 See Porter, “Specimen Poetics” 71–75.

15 Buffon’s vitalist account of nature relied on analogical thinking while also historicizing nature through the continuity and succession in the reproduction of species (Reill 6, 55).