Bright Paradise: Victorian Scientific Travellers - Softcover

Raby, Peter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691048436 ISBN 13: 9780691048437

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1997

Synopsis

Whether looking for the sources of the Nile, the Niger, or the Amazon, penetrating the Australian outback, or searching for the Northwest Passage, the Victorians were intrepid explorers, zealously expanding the limits of science and human knowledge. In Bright Paradise, Peter Raby describes brave voyages and gives us vivid and unforgettable portraits of the larger-than-life personalities of Charles Darwin, Alfred Wallace, and Henry Bates, glorious examples of Victorian energy and confidence. He also explores wider issues such as the growth of knowledge and the spread of the empire.


Witty, provocative, and exciting in the breadth of its research, this book charts an important period of scientific advance and transforms it into a compelling narrative.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Raby is the head of the English and Drama Department at Homerton College, Cambridge. He is the author of a highly acclaimed biography of Samuel Butler.

Reviews

A lucid and lively survey of Victorian explorers from Raby (English/Homerton College, Cambridge). ``For the English in the nineteenth century, abroad, and especially the Empire and the colonies, existed to bring things back from,'' notes Raby in a neat introductory capsulization. Bring things back they did, to a fare-thee-well, but they were also, the author makes clear, agents in the imperial juggernaut, ``part of a slow but inexorable process of domination and annexation.'' Opening the world to commerce may have been the end result, yet each of the venturers heard his or her own drummer and fashioned an inimitable style afield. Raby profiles Mungo Park, Richard Lander, and Heinrich Barth on their African sorties; Joseph Hooker's plant collecting in India and the mountain kingdoms to the north; Charles Darwin's monumental classification undertakings while being ferried about on the Beagle; the scientific entrepreneurs Henry Walter Bates, Alfred Wallace, and Richrad Spruce, who traded in beetles (a Victorian fancy), birds, and dried plants (though it is odd that Raby makes no mention here of the recent biopiracy controversies, particularly with Spruce, whose cinchona and rubber gatherings are a hot topic). And as women explorers have been given short shrift for their contibutions, Raby takes pains to chronicle the work of Mary Kingsley in West Africa and Marianne North's superb botanical artwork. Raby then turns his attentions to how the jottings of these explorers were appropriated and deployed by writers as diverse as Charles Kingsley, whose Water Babies Raby considers ``a coded tour round the scientific debates of the mid-century,'' and Samuel Burler in his utopian Erewhon, the romantic Rider Haggard, son-of-the-manse John Buchan, Dickens in Bleak House, and, of course, Conrad. Importantly, Raby shows how the works of the explorers shaped a new Darwinian and colonialist worldview, one that remains mighty influential in the modern imagination. (8 pages illustrations and maps) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Global in their travels and undaunted by difficulties of climate and disease, a special clique of Victorians sought out, preserved, classified, and shipped back home insects, plants, fishes, and mammals from around the world. English professor Raby (Homerton Coll., Cambridge) focuses on the British men and women who pursued this field work, their publications, and the controversies they created, participated in, or solved. In the early chapters, Raby focuses on specific continents; later chapters examine the use in literature of "scientific travelers" and the issues their work raised. Well written, fascinating, and with wide appeal, this should be in all collections.?Michael Cramer, North Carolina Dept. of EHNR Lib., Raleigh
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691048436
• ISBN 13: 9780691048437
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304