From the Wonders of Nature to the Wonders of Evolution: Charles Kingsley’s Nursery Fairies

Abstract

As Philip Henry Gosse highlights, surprise, wonder and expectation partake of the Victorian naturalist’s work as he discovers terra incognita and unknown species — even in England. The naturalist’s quest, close to that of the knight of romance, seems to inhabit a fantastic world where magical spells may be cast at any time. Gosse’s Romance of Natural History (1860) makes explicit how, as unknown natural specimens were discovered in England, brought back from foreign countries, or even revealed by the microscope, nature constantly flirted with the impossible and the marvellous. His popular science book epitomizes how naturalists and natural history writings emphasized the endless possibilities and bizarre forms of nature, clothing the natural world with wonderful and fanciful garbs paradoxically as naturalists and scientists unveiled its secrets. As this book will underline, the rhetoric and images of Victorian natural history permeated Victorian culture, and Philip Henry Gosse’s Romance of Natural History is a significant case in point to start our survey of the narratives that popularizers of natural history were offering readers at the time. The title of Gosse’s book makes explicit how natural history was seen as fraught with imaginative potential, nature looking like ‘the enchanted imaginings of an author in a medieval romance’, in Lynn Merrill’s terms.2