Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture

Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture
by Jonathan Smith

Jonathan Smith examines the images in Darwin's books from his Monograph on barnacles in the early 1850s to his volume on earthworms in 1881, and traces their relationships to Victorian visual culture and aesthetics. In this brilliant study, Smith argues persuasively that Darwin's images should not be viewed merely as adornment, or even as illustration in the rhetorical sense, but as a completely integrated component of the work in which they appear.

"...deserves to be recognized as one of the finest (and most careful) cultural studies of Darwin that the growing Darwin industry has produced. This is a major book, one of the very few studies of Darwin that attends to the entire range of his writing." --George Levine, Rutgers University

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