During the heyday of the two-cultures discourse, historians of science contributed to bridging the gap between science and the arts by teaching courses on science as literature, discussing parts of classic scientific texts not just for their content but for their literary form. By and large, however, this approach never amounted to much and certainly never caught on in professional circles of the history of science. Of course, science in literature, as opposed to science as literature, has been a popular topic, with fine studies of, for example, geology in the works of Romantic poets such as Coleridge or in those of Victorians such as Tennyson. Moreover, among scholars of English literature, the influence of Darwin on George Eliot, Conrad, Hardy and other novelists has been a not uncommon topic of study. Gillian Beer, in a classic of the kind, Darwin's Plots (Cambridge, 1983), included Darwin's own writing in an analysis of evolutionary narrative in nineteenth-century fiction. More comprehensively, another scholar of English, David Locke, in Science as Writing (New Haven, CT, 1992), also looked with the eyes of a literary critic at the writings of Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein and other scientists, arguing that attention to the literary qualities of scientific texts adds to understanding of how science operates. One modus operandi, stressed by several authors, is the use of rhetoric by scientists in arguing their stances.

Now another scholar of language and literature joins the field by examining as literature the science of geology from the first half of the nineteenth century, when a new imagination of the past was formed to compete with the Book of Genesis and with Milton's Paradise Lost. Ralph O'Connor's account of the emergence and spread of the new perspective on the past in Britain is, by and large, a familiar one to historians of science, yet in going over known ground he blazes a new trail. What concerns him is not so much the facts of earth history – the discovery of deep time with its succession of different worlds and its changing inhabitants of unfamiliar forms – but the contemporary representational construction of these as a means of persuading an incredulous public.

The star of O'Connor's story is the idiosyncratic Oxford geologist William Buckland, but many others, in particular Charles Lyell, Gideon Mantell and Hugh Miller, figure prominently. Oddly, Richard Owen, who, partly alongside Buckland and partly in succession to him, acted as chief British necromancer of the palaeontological past, gets short shrift. To cast Buckland in the starring role is a felicitous choice, given his histrionic style and talent, and O'Connor makes the most of him in analysing his lectures and publications as a form of entertaining self-enactment. ‘Buckland enlivened his lectures with an eccentric sense of humour. He was renowned for his disconcerting swerves between the sublime and the ridiculous, a tension characteristic of Regency show-culture’ (p. 80). Buckland's greatest claim to fame, his hyena-den theory of Kirkdale Cave, serves O'Connor ideally in making his point. By means of poems and cartoons that use the fantasy of time travel, Buckland was placed amidst the ancient cave animals, evoking the reality of that past.

The book consists of two parts, the first centring on 1800 to 1830, when the new visions of former worlds were made available to narrowly circumscribed audiences, for example Oxbridge students; the second 1830 to 1860, when, from the time Lyell's Principles of Geology appeared, the literary market became flooded with popularizing works that captured a broad middle-class readership by means of various techniques of representation. ‘Thanks not only to what he said, but more importantly to the way he said it, Lyell transformed the public profile of geology and its genteel practitioners at a critical stage in the science's development’ (p. 164). Also, the second part opens with Buckland, who during the 1832 BAAS meeting at Oxford gave a famous talk on the megatherium, the extinct giant sloth from the South American pampas.

O'Connor emphasizes the importance of textual, verbal representation, but also pays considerable attention to visualization. The coryphée of the pictorial representation of early nineteenth-century geology was the painter John Martin, whose awe-inspiring apocalyptic scenes were matched by ‘grotesque’ reconstructions of monster scenes from the geological past. The range of visual communication was dramatically expanded for the urban public by museum exhibits, dioramas and panoramas. ‘Here virtual tourism began in earnest’ (p. 265). The book offers a smorgasbord of insightful approaches. Rather than restrict himself to any one of these, O'Connor follows them all and in places the book gives the impression of a somewhat inchoate, not yet fully digested mass of research materials. Yet this abundance can also be seen as one of its attractive features.

Given the multiplicity of approaches, it may seem churlish to point to an absence; but in a study of science as literature one might have expected the author to provide a self-reflexive moment, in the form of some thoughts on the author's own literary strategy and adopted style or at least on that of the secondary literature he uses. This, however, is missing from the book and, probably related to this, also missing is a reference to William Clark's paper on ‘Narratology and the history of science’ (Studies in History and Philosophy of Science (1995), 26, 1–71). Clark shifted the searching light beam of literary scrutiny from the scientists to the historians of science, taking his cue from Northrop Frye and Hayden White in arguing that historical narratives can be understood in terms of four universal plot lines: romance, tragedy, comedy and satire. It would stretch this review well beyond its limited scope to analyse in those terms The Earth on Show – and, even more, to take my own medicine and self-reflect on the narrative structure of this very review. But tragedy my review is not, given that I can end on a positive note, warmly recommending this book as a significant contribution to our understanding of how the new science of early nineteenth-century geology became so successfully established.