Counterfactual taxonomies: Evolution and empire in the work of Edward Lear

This dissertation interrogates the structures and patterns of Edward Lear’s (1812-1888) works as reflective of the evolution of nineteenth-century networks of empire and philosophies of the self and humanity’s place in nature. His life and works carry inherent contradictions that are emblematic of those that proliferated throughout nineteenth-century culture, art, and literature. These contradictions include an ambivalence towards the taxonomies of empire and natural history that were bound with the expansion of empire and exploitation of colonial resources. They also include associated Romantic inheritances of the inner search for self versus evolving Victorian hierarchical and binary frameworks of sexuality, materialism, and scientific naturalism and the outwardly oriented search for the self via the classification of the ‘other’. How does Lear’s grappling with his own ideas of self and his place in nature, as well as his own relationship in empire’s exploitation of that nature, reflect a similar grappling in the nineteenth century as a whole? Taxonomy and performance were potent tools in Lear’s practice of subversion and parody and in the nineteenth century as a whole. Because of my contention that Lear’s works are emblematic of nineteenth-century questions of empire, nature, and the self, re-examining Lear’s reclassifications of imperial and natural history taxonomical hierarchies assists in the humanities’ engagement with the development of an alternative view of Darwinian thought and its literary representations and expressions, as well as an expansion into Victorian ecocritical investigation. Lear’s subversion of nineteenth-century hierarchies of nature and empire through what this dissertation coins as ‘counterfactual taxonomies’ problematised Lear’s relationship with the various hierarchies that ruled his life and profoundly influenced his nonsense. Counterfactuality was a prominent trend in nineteenth-century thought. Coupled with the mania for collection, classification, and display, this dissertation posits that the ‘counterfactual taxonomies’ of his nonsense served as a vehicle for Lear’s grappling with ideas of the self and empire’s place in nature. Lear’s works provide us with a subversive natural history that is resplendent in its chaotic and interrelated web of life on Darwin’s bank from On the Origin of Species (1859), and on the banks of the Jellybolēē