Abstract
Against the background of Victorian sensationalist fiction and newsprint, Edney examines the popular science writing of Philip Gosse and Charles Kingsley, Christian popular scientists who detailed the lives and deaths of sea animals in the rock pools of British coastal resorts. In the relationship between their popular science styles and Victorian Gothic, Edney uncovers the uncanny concealed in fashionable home aquariums, to materialise as monstrous in middle-class parlours. The haunting persistence of sea animals as uncanny ornaments in Victorian homes created miniature alien presences whose strange behaviours reflected wider Victorian anxieties about science, religion, and social unease.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abberley, Will. 2015. Animal Cunning: Deceptive Nature and Truthful Science in Charles Kingsley’s Natural Theology. Victorian Studies 58 (1): 34–56.
Billiani, Francesca. 2016. European Gothic. In The Encyclopedia of the Gothic, ed. William Hughes, David Punter, and Andrew Smith, 219–223. Oxford: Wiley Blackwell.
Botting, Fred. 2014. Gothic, 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
De Quincey, Thomas. 1821/1995. Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, ed. P. Smith. Mineola, NY: Dover.
Fyfe, Aileen. 2004. Science and Salvation: Evangelical Popular Science Publishing in Victorian Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Garrett, Peter K. 2003. Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in Nineteenth-Century Fictions. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Gosse, Philip Henry. 1846. The Ocean. London: SPCK.
———. 1853. A Naturalist’s Rambles on the Devonshire Coast. London: John Van Voorst.
———. 1856. The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea. London: John Van Voorst.
———. 1859. Evenings at the Microscope. London: SPCK.
———. 1860–61. The Romance of Natural History, 2 vols. London: J. Nisbet.
———. 1865. Land and Sea. London: J. Nisbet.
Hadjiafxendi, Kyriaki, and John Plunkett. 2017. Science at the Seaside: Pleasure Hunts in Victorian Devon. In Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, ed. Nicholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith, 180–203. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hamera, Judith. 2012. Parlor Ponds: The Cultural Work of the American Home Aquarium, 1850–1970. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Hibberd, Shirley. 1870. Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste (1856), revised 3rd ed. London: Groombridge and Sons.
Hoeveler, Diane Long. 2013. Introduction: A Gothic Cabinet of Curiosities. European Romantic Review 24 (1): 1–2.
Hutchinson, Rev. Henry. 1893. Extinct Monsters: A Popular Account of Some of the Larger Forms of Ancient Life. London: Chapman and Hall.
Kingsley, Charles. 1859. Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore, 4th ed. London: Macmillan.
Lewes, George Henry. 1858. Seaside Studies at Ilfracombe, Tenby, the Scilly Isles and Jersey. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood.
Lightman, Bernard. 2007. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Logan, Thad. 2003. The Victorian Parlour: A Cultural Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Royle, Nicholas. 2003. The Uncanny. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Sigwart, Julia D., et al. 2008. Crystal Creatures: Context for the Dublin Blaschka Congress. Historical Biology 20 (1): 1–10.
Smith, Andrew. 2014. Gothic and the Victorian fin de siècle, 1880–1900. In Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, ed. Dale Townshend, 124–149. London: The British Library.
Thwaite, Ann. 2002. Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse. London: Faber and Faber.
Wagner, Tamara. 2014. Gothic and the Victorian Home. In The Gothic World, ed. Glennis Byron and Dale Townshend, 110–120. London and New York: Routledge.
Warwick, Alexandra. 2014. Gothic, 1820–1880. In Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination, ed. Dale Townshend, 94–123. London: The British Library.
Winter, James. 1999. Secure from Rash Assault: Sustaining the Victorian Environment. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Wolfreys, Julian. 2002. Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Basingstoke: Palgrave.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Edney, S. (2020). At Home with Miniature Sea-Monsters: Philip Henry Gosse, Charles Kingsley, and ‘The Great Unknown’. In: Heholt, R., Edmundson, M. (eds) Gothic Animals. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34540-2_9
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-34539-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-34540-2
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)