THE AFFINITIES OF NATURAL OBJECTS: OBSERVATION AND ANALOGY IN ROMANTIC NATURAL HISTORY

This thesis explores the role played by observation and analogy in Romantic natural history. In particular, it considers the various ways in which eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ideas about plants and animals were shaped, to borrow Ashton Nichols’s terms, by ‘forms of figurative comparison more often associated with the imaginative realm’, examining how the observation of affinities across different kinds and kingdoms enabled natural historians (an eclectic group of botanists, physiologists, poets, amateurs, nurserymen, systematisers, popularisers and explorers) to draw conclusions from one living thing to another and to extend botanical and zoological knowledge into new areas. Chapter One will explore the increasing complexity and exuberance of natural history knowledge and activity in the late eighteenth century, describing how exploration, the mass introduction of new species into Europe, and the growth of natural history as material culture fostered a greater awareness of biological multiplicity and intricacy and expanded the range of models and metaphors available for naturalists to figure with. Chapter Two will address the various ways in which plants and animals were characterised and ordered in the period, focusing on the challenges involved in defining the limits of the two kingdoms and examining the discourse regarding their analogies. The middle chapters of this thesis will shift focus in order to consider morphological and physiological questions. Chapter Three will focus on the structure and sexual characteristics of flowers, analysing their form and fertility through the lens of the Linnaean sexual system and the works of Erasmus Darwin, in particular Darwin’s bestselling poem of 1791, The Botanic Garden. Chapter Four will, in turn, consider the various ways in which Romantic natural historians approached the phenomenon of insect pollination, describing some of the ways in which analogical readings of floral ecology hindered recognition of plants’ strange and mediated nature. The fifth chapter of this thesis will begin with a discussion of the complex and tangled morphology of trees, exploring how hybrid models from the animal kingdom (in particular corals and asexual zoophytes) were used by poets and botanists to explain arboreal growth and development. This will be developed into an analysis of where and how Romantic naturalists advanced towards the idea of ecological relationships in nature, the final section of this thesis considering the scientific response to symbioses such as parasitism and exploring how lateral modes of species interaction were accommodated (or not) within prevailing models of natural hierarchy