With Natures in Translation: Romanticism and Colonial Natural History, Alan Bewell has written an important book that links literary and natural history to the colonial experience in Britain and around the world. The study of romantic natural history has come in for a great deal of attention in recent years, especially since Timothy Morton began drawing our attention to the complexly contested nature of the word “nature” itself, and the way the romantics' attempt to engage the category of the “nonhuman” led to modern environmentalism.
Romantic poets praised nature repeatedly: they favored anti-industrialism, as in Wordsworth's desire to keep railroads out of the Lake District, and fostered a nature worship evident in Percy Shelley's love of weather (see poems like “The Cloud” and “Ode to the West Wind”); famous lyrics on flowers and birds by Burns, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, and John Clare; and any number of other texts that show sensitivity to the nonhuman world—not to mention myriad poems on landscape. Romanticism was an artistic and cultural movement embedded in living things and natural processes. It was also a movement interested in the natural sciences, as important scholarship has pointed out over the last two decades.
Half a century after these poets, when the British (and other Europeans) read Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and the Struggle for the Preferred Races in the Survival of Life (1859), what upset them so much was not the idea that we were descended from monkeys or great apes. What traumatized most of those early readers—evident in personal letters, journals, and often private writings—was the idea of extinction, the thought that what dies is not only the individual (you or me), but the entire species, Homo sapiens (the knowledgeable hominid). Extinct: gone, gone forever, entire species passing from being into nonbeing, never to return. If this is what happens to species, as Darwin argued so convincingly, then insofar as humans were part of nature, there was no reason that our species would not be just as likely to disappear.
Bewell captures something of this shock in his critique of society's earlier responses to works like Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803), William Bartram's Travels (1791), and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1816). Books like these altered society's way of looking at itself—and other cultures—through lenses of science and nature, natural philosophy (the phrase that came to mean “science” in general), and finally “natural history,” the phrase in Bewell's subtitle, which perhaps should read “Romanticism and Colonial Natural Histories.” This latter editorial emendation is because, for Bewell, there is no “nature,” only “natures,” a plural idea that develops in different ways under differing contexts and cultural pressures.
The colonial period is crucial for Bewell's argument, insofar as it combined discovery with control and novelty with tradition. The book brings together perspectives about the precolonial, colonial, and even postcolonial interactions between humans and the nonhuman world; it also explains ways that naturalists (including also Gilbert White, William Wordsworth, and the peasant-poet John Clare) paved the way for current environmental awareness. Even the politics, poetry, and personal consciousness of 2017's encroaching understanding of the challenge of climate change—arguably the worst natural (and human) threat to our society in history—can be traced directly to Bewell's critique of the period 1780–1860.
Each reader will be drawn toward particular favorites among the authors in this volume. My own include Gilbert White (author of Natural History and Antiquities of Selbourne [1789]), the small-town Anglican parish priest with his journal of natural and ancient events in his little corner of England; and Charles Lyell, author of Principles of Geology (1830–33), the literally earth-shattering book by an aristocratic attorney who turned to the study of geology in his thirties and contributed as much as any thinker to knowledge about the planet and its changes over time: earthquakes and volcanoes, glaciers and icebergs, mountain heights and valley depths.
In addition, Lyell's work affected Darwin directly, insofar as it explained the vast amounts of time required for natural changes to take place on earth, and it proved, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the evidence for these millennial changes lay all around us: alluvial deposits and silted river mouths, layered rock formations on exposed cliffs (stratigraphy), and especially the theory of uniformitarianism, the idea that the forces now at work on earth's surface and beneath are the same forces that have operated since the formation of the planet; therefore, the evidence we see around us today records changes that have taken place from the dawn of time to the very recent past and even the present. Romantic science, indeed!
A short review like this one cannot do justice to a book with the richness and range of Bewell's. That said, however, another aspect of this book's value is the way a reader can dip in to those topics that are of particular interest: by author (William Bartram, John Clare, Mary Shelley) or by subject (ecology, evolution, extinction). Finally, what makes Bewell's book so valuable is his range of broad topics combined with his effective treatment of details, his attention to the small, specific ideas, and his observations that can widen out to explain entire movements, eras, and environments. For Bewell's hard work of naturalistic synthesis, as well as analysis, we should all be grateful.
