Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science by Jim Endersby

How natural science was conducted in Darwin’s day

Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911) was an important figure in the history of botany and in British science in general. He was a close friend and supporter of Charles Darwin, and the two exchanged over 1300 letters. In a career move similar to Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, young Hooker served as naturalist on the ship Erebus in its exploration of the Antarctic and many Southern islands. Joseph’s father, William Hooker, was the founding director of the Kew Gardens, and Joseph succeeded his father in that post in 1865. Although he may have started out as a nepo baby, Joseph’s accomplishments in botany eventually surpassed those of his father. In his 2008 book Imperial Nature, science historian Jim Endersby looks at Hooker’s life and what it reveals about science and scientists in Victorian England.

As Endersby soon admits in his introduction, this is not a full biography of Joseph Hooker. Rather, it focuses on a specific period in Hooker’s early career, from the late 1830s to the mid-1860s. Endersby’s research is drawn largely from letters and publications of that period. Though he focuses primarily on Hooker, Endersby provides a broader view of how natural science was conducted in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century. What he reveals on this subject could be applied to just about any of Hooker’s British contemporaries studying biology at this time, including his father William Hooker, Darwin, George Bentham, Robert Brown, Edward Forbes, Asa Gray, John Lindley, Richard Owen, and Hewett Cottrell Watson—all of whom are discussed frequently in the book.

Endersby provides much interesting insight into how these botanists practiced their profession—collecting, preserving, classifying, drawing, writing, and publishing—but he also reveals much about the social status of science and scientists at this time. During this period in history, science was largely the domain of independently wealthy “gentlemen.” Conducting science for money was considered crass and menial. Even medical doctors were looked down on as lowly blue-collar laborers. Hooker, however, needed to earn a living, so he had to navigate the difficult transition from aristocratic “men of science” to professional “scientists” that took place in the 19th century. Even the word “professional” was considered derogatory; Hooker and his colleagues preferred to be called “philosophical” botanists.

In his leadership role at Kew, with its extensive herbarium (collection of plants), Hooker was the foremost authority on botanical matters, such as naming plant species, in the British empire, if not the world. As Endersby describes him, Hooker was somewhat of a dictator over his domain. Endersby closely examines the relationships between metropolitan (London) and colonial (e.g. Australia, India) botanists. During his Erebus voyage, Hooker met two skilled amateur plant collectors, William Colenso in New Zealand and Ronald Campbell Gunn in Tasmania. For decades thereafter, these two men supplied Hooker and Kew with dried and preserved plants from these islands, which Hooker then analyzed, classified, and described in his botanical books. Through a deep dive into their correspondence, Endersby shows how Hooker was dependent on these colonial collectors but also strove to keep them in their place, asserting himself as the real botanist and big-city authority while condescendingly quashing their ideas.

I enjoy reading biographies and histories about the glory days of the naturalist explorer, so I found Endersby’s book quite interesting and informative. I will caution the reader, however, that Imperial Nature reads very much like a dissertation or a scholarly treatise intended to win over fellow historians or a tenure committee, not a general audience. There is much repetition in the text, frequent hair-splitting, and a lot of cross-referencing from one chapter to another. Endersby cites nine examples to defend a point he’s making, when three would have sufficed for the general reader. It’s very workmanlike prose, but Endersby delivers the goods. Those who are interested in the way these nineteenth-century scientists plied their trade will certainly learn plenty here.

Small Souls by Louis Couperus

Compelling start to a Dutch family saga

Name a Dutch author. I dare you. If you’re an American, chances are it’ll be Anne Frank or maybe Spinoza. Not much Dutch literature has been available to English-language readers, although there has been an increase in the last few decades. One notable Dutch author, however, did enjoy worldwide success in the early 20th century: Louis Couperus. His novel Small Souls was first published in 1901, then came out in English in 1914. It is the first of four books in a series also called Small Souls.

The Van Lowe family lives in The Hague. The family patriarch, “Papa” van Lowe, is deceased when the novel opens. He is survived by his widow, eight children, and numerous grandchildren. The elder Van Lowe was formerly the Dutch governor general of the colony of Java, a very prestigious position through which he might occasionally rub elbows with the King and Queen. None of Papa’s children, however, have quite lived up to his level of distinction. The eight Van Lowe siblings now find themselves in varying levels of social status and class, which sometimes inspires envy and resentment among them. Because they’re well-to-do, they spend most of their time visiting one another, throwing parties, criticizing and gossiping about each other. (Some of the men have careers, but we don’t really see them at work.) Twenty years ago, one daughter, Constance, married a diplomat forty years her senior. She cheated on her husband with one of his subordinates, causing a divorce and a scandal that forced her and her lover to flee to Brussels. Now, after 15 years in exile, she has returned to The Hague to reconnect with her family and her homeland, but not everyone is willing to overlook her shameful past.

Small Souls reminds me of British author John Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga (I have only read the first book in that series). In both cases, the reader is introduced to a large, rather wealthy family. An extramarital scandal threatens the family’s respectability, and the various siblings all have deep-seated beefs against one another. Often these squabbles feel like much ado over rich people problems.

What makes Small Souls interesting, however, is its quintessential Dutchness. There are thousands of novels set in London, but The Hague? In English, hardly any. Couperus’s novels provide a welcome look into Dutch life, one unique aspect of which is the Netherlands’ relationship to its colonies in Indonesia. The East Indies played an important role in the Dutch economy. The Van Lowe children grew up in Java, and the family still has agricultural interests on the island. In this novel, the adjective “Indian” is used to describe anyone or anything from Java. Couperus’s writing also exhibits a sensibility that’s more Northern than Western European. There’s an understated yet authentic psychological sensitivity here that reads more like the writings of Scandinavian authors such as Knut Hamsun, Jens Peter Jacobsen, and Henrik Ibsen than that of English or French novelists.

Much like Galsworthy’s Forsytes, the difficult aspect of reading Small Souls is just getting a grasp on the huge roster of Van Lowes. One really needs to chart out a family tree to keep them all straight. Since I couldn’t find hardly any information on this novel online, I’ve done that for you (image attached below). As a member of a large family myself, I found Couperus’s depiction of brother-sister, parent-child, and husband-wife relationships quite authentic and insightful. As the first novel in a tetralogy, much of Small Souls is spent introducing us to this clan, thus setting the stage for further developments in the subsequent novels. I found myself thoroughly engaged in the Van Lowe family dynamics, enough to make we want to follow their fortunes through the next three books: The Later Life, Twilight of the Souls, and Dr. Adriaan.

Van Lowe family tree (click to enlarge)

A Life Wild and Perilous: Mountain Men and the Paths to the Pacific by Robert M. Utley

Exciting adventures of the American West rendered confusing and dull

I’m a frequent tourist visitor to the state of Wyoming, where many locations are named after legendary mountain men: Colter Bay, Sublette County, Hoback Junction, Bridger-Teton National Forest, and even Jedediah’s House of Sourdough. Over the past two decades of venturing out that way, I had gleaned a few details about these historical characters. I was really looking for an authoritative history to provide a more comprehensive education on the lives and accomplishments of these intrepid adventurers, when I came across A Life Wild and Perilous, a history of mountain men by Robert M. Utley, former historian for the National Park Service.

Utley begins his history with the Lewis and Clark expedition. He focuses not on the two captains, however, but rather on two members of their crew: John Colter and George Drouillard, who remained in the West to become pioneering fur trappers in the Rocky Mountains. Utley then charts the profession of mountain man from the beaver-trapping industry to wagon train trail guides to government-commissioned explorers and cartographers. The book closes with the annexation of the West Coast territories into the United States, which some of these mountain men helped bring about. Even though you root for and admire these bold explorers, it is quite depressing to realize that much of this history was inspired by the pointless extermination of the beaver species just to make fashionable hats. Published in 1997, this book probably isn’t “woke” enough for today’s standards in the field of history, but any book on mountain men is going to glorify manifest destiny to some extent. Utley doesn’t treat Native Americans as evil villains in this book, but rather as obstacles that needed to be overcome. Critics might scold Utley for not telling the Indian side of the story, but really that would belong in another and different book than this.

Though eager to learn about this subject, I found A Life Wild and Perilous frequently confusing and consistently dull. Utley is a highly respected historian, so I’m sure the book is well-researched­. He has drawn widely and deeply from the diaries and published exploits of many historical figures. I don’t doubt the accuracy of his facts, but his storytelling leaves a lot to be desired. While no doubt these mountain men had some exciting adventures, the text is mostly, “This guy went here. That guy went there,” over and over again in an exhausting morass of detail. The table of contents makes you think that Utley will be focusing on one or two famous mountain men in each chapter, but that’s not the case. In each chapter, he’ll drop the names of forty or fifty of these trappers, their stories all jumbled up together, and you’re expected to keep them all straight. As a prose stylist, Utley has a way of phrasing a sentence that makes you think, “What exactly did he just say?” and requires frequent backtracks and rereads.

It’s also difficult for the reader to orient himself geographically. There are very few maps in the ebook, and they are pretty useless when reading on the Kindle. (The print edition might have more maps; I don’t know.) In keeping with the frontier times he’s discussing, when state boundaries and most towns as we know them today had not yet been established, Utley denotes locations by rivers and mountain ranges. The result is that the reader better have a very firm knowledge of the topography of the American West, or you’re going to get lost. It would have been quite helpful if once in a while Utley threw the reader a bone with a comment like, “near present-day Driggs, Idaho,” but no; he never does.

A Life Wild and Perilous is packed with data, particularly on who was where and when, but because of Utley’s confusing way of relating these facts, I’d be hard-pressed to remember much. All the information is there, it’s just difficult to process. This would be a fine reference work for looking up specific historical details, and that’s pretty much how it reads. As a linear narrative, it’s not very user-friendly at all.

The Cabin by Vicente Blasco Ibáñez

Short but powerful naturalist novel of Spain

Spanish author Vicente Blasco Ibáñez (1867–1928) published his fifth novel, La Barraca, in 1898. In English, the book is titled The Cabin or The Shack. The novel takes place in a huerta, or farming community, outside the city of Valencia, which is located on the Mediterranean Coast of Spain. The farmers who comprise the novel’s cast do not own the land on which they live and work. They rent from a landlord who lives in the city. Most of the families in the huerta are struggling to make ends meet, and many owe debts and back rent to the landowner.

In the opening chapter, Pepeta, a farmwife, brings her goods to market in Valencia. In the city, she runs into a former neighbor who is now a prostitute. Pepeta remembers when this young woman was once a respectable farmer’s daughter. This inspires a flashback to a momentous event in the history of the huerta. A poor, hardworking farmer named Barret (the prostitute’s father) suffers the persecution of his oppressive landlord, Don Salvador, which leads to a violent altercation between peasant and master. The Barrets are driven from their land, leaving their farm and its barraca vacant for many years. The other residents of the huerta see this unoccupied, unproductive land as a symbol of rebellious pride, a thorn in the side of the rich landowners. One day, however, a new family appears at the huerta, their belongings in tow. To everyone’s surprise, the newcomers take up residence on the old Barret farm. Much like scabs would be viewed by strikers, these interlopers are treated with hostility and animosity by their neighbors. Although the new resident, Batiste, is just a poor and industrious farmer struggling to succeed like everyone else, he and his family are shunned and antagonized by the other families of the huerta.

Though largely forgotten by American readers these days (who would be hard-pressed to name any Spanish novel other than Don Quixote), Blasco Ibáñez was highly respected and widely read by English-language readers and critics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The English edition of The Cabin alone sold over a million copies. Blasco Ibáñez wrote in the style of naturalism that was forged and popularized decades earlier by French author Émile Zola. In fact, Blasco Ibáñez is the first author I’ve come across who can do Zola’s style as well as Zola himself. That’s not to say that the Spanish author is merely an imitator of his predecessor. Active roughly a quarter century after Zola, Blasco Ibáñez brings naturalism into the modern world of Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos.

Naturalism is a form of realism that aims to document modern life in rich detail and unflinching verisimilitude without shying away from subject matter traditionally considered difficult, ugly, or unseemly. Drawing from modern science and social science, naturalism generally depicts its characters as not being masters of their own destiny but rather as slaves to forces of nature and nurture—evolution, heredity, economics, politics—that shape their identities and influence the course of their lives. This is apparent in La Barraca as animosity and violence escalate the Barrets and their neighbors, when everyone’s real enemy is the system of feudalistic peonage that enslaves them.

The joy of reading old books by dead guys is that every once in a while you discover a writer whose work you really love, and that author has twenty or thirty books that you’ve never heard of that you can now look forward to reading. Such is the case with Blasco Ibáñez, my latest discovery. The Cabin is the second of his novels that I’ve read, and both have been excellent. This is a short novel, smaller in size and more intimate in scale than his epic The Four Horseman of the Apocalypse, but a lot of emotional power is packed into this small package.

The Way of All Flesh by Samuel Butler

Yet another English novel about a country parson (or two)

English author Samuel Butler’s novel The Way of All Flesh was written between 1873 and 1884, but it wasn’t published until 1903, after Butler’s death. It’s unlikely that England would have been ready for the novel much earlier than that, since the book is defiantly critical of Christian doctrine and conservative Victorian conventions. This novel traces the lives of five generations of the Pontifex family but focuses primarily on just two of those generations: Theobald Pontifex and his son Ernest, both of whom are clergymen. The bulk of the narrative takes place during the 1850s and ‘60s. The novel is narrated by a playwright named Overton, a childhood friend and lifelong acquaintance of the Pontifex family. Overton has a bothersome habit of foreshadowing, which often amounts to spoiling the events of future chapters.

The Way of All Flesh is a satirical work in which Butler lampoons the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the Anglican church and its clergy. In addition, he criticizes the educational system, the class system, and even the marriage system in practice in England at this time. Butler mentions Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of the Species and recently published works criticizing contradictions in the Bible as challenges to fundamental beliefs of Christianity. He stops short of atheism, but his criticism of the church and his skepticism of Christian dogma would have been considered radical freethought by Victorian standards. This multi-generational story also illustrates a recurring pattern of cruelty from fathers to sons and its effect in molding those sons’ later lives and characters. The wryly comedic tone, though not overly done, at times clashes with the serious subject matter—such as child abuse, for example—but Butler’s comical comeuppance of the clergy is deftly pointed and amusing.

Even though The Way of All Flesh is a refreshing reaction against religion, I was still disappointed to come across yet another British novel about a country parson and his moral crisis, including lengthy debates about church policy. Why were English authors so obsessed with their clergy? Other European national literatures—French, German, Spanish, even Polish—just seem to be more concerned with real life and a broader view of it. In French novels of the same era, for example, the characters actually have sex like real people, whereas the antiseptic morality in English novels doesn’t allow the characters to even touch each other; they just seem to reproduce by spontaneous asexual blastogenesis. Though Butler satirizes Victorian stuffiness, he still buys into many traditional British ideas of class. People are born as “gentlemen” or born “low,” and the best they can do is learn their place and stay there. As an atheist, I admire Butler for boldly criticizing organized religion. I think there are better ways to do that, however, than making me sit through 60 chapters about the life of a country parson.

The final quarter of the novel finally veers away from theology, at least temporarily, into more secular matters, but it’s still rather tedious. Marital, financial, parental, and medical problems are dispatched far too conveniently to be believed. Another cliché of English lit rears its silly head: An abundance of bachelor uncles and spinster aunts just waiting, like a good deus ex machina, to bestow their wealth upon nieces and nephews. When a man has all the money he could ever want handed to him on a silver platter, and he can pawn off his children onto idyllic foster parents, imagine what he can do with his life! That’s not realism; that’s fantasy.

The Way of All Flesh is a great title, but it implies that this novel will reveal universal truths about human existence. There’s really nothing universal about this story, however, unless you happen to be a clergyman or a seminary student. The characters are sympathetic and the humor is witty, but the life lessons are contrived and unrealistic. Even so, if you can make it through the first half, the second half is moderately entertaining.

Auto-da-Fé by Elias Canetti

German humor escapes me

Despite his Italian-sounding name, Elias Canetti was born in Bulgaria of Spanish and Sephardic Jewish ancestry. Over the course of his life he resided in Austria, Switzerland, Germany, and England and eventually became a British citizen. He won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature, a victory claimed by both Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Canetti wrote his literary works, however, in the German language. His 1935 novel Die Blendung has been published in English translation as Auto-da-Fé and/or The Tower of Babel. The novel takes place in an unspecified European city, though there are a few indications that the characters are speaking German. The term “auto-da-fé” refers to a public punishment inflicted by the Spanish Inquisition, often in the form of burning victims at the stake. Both of the English titles are metaphorical, not literal.

Peter Kien is the Western world’s leading sinologist (scholar of Chinese philology) and the owner of a private library of rare and important books on the subject. He leads a reclusive and regimented life spent mostly within his apartment of four rooms, the walls of which are covered floor to ceiling with books. The first two chapters of this novel start out with great promise. Kien’s intellectual pursuits could possibly serve as the basis for an intelligent and engaging novel. Kien is also an extreme misanthrope who stoically critiques the idiocy of all the human beings he encounters. This dark outlook on mankind also intrigues the reader, who wonders if Kien is just a surly curmudgeon or a potential serial killer.

Auto-da-Fé never lives up to the promise of those first two chapters. It immediately takes a left turn into a slapstick comedy about henpecked husbands and shrewish wives. Like most Nobel laureates, Canetti has received much critical and popular praise. I read several reviews online that made it sound like Auto-da-Fé was not only Canetti’s greatest work but also one of the best novels of the last century. Imagine my surprise, therefore, to find that his novel is terrible! I’m guessing that Canetti was going for an absurdist humor somewhere along the lines of Witold Gombrowicz’s Ferdydurke (1938) or Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1928), neither of which I liked, but Auto-da-Fé is not even absurdist, it’s just asinine. Nor is it the least bit fun. In fact, it is incredibly tedious to slog through insanely long chapters in which the characters grind their way through interminable conversations and capers that amount to nothing. This novel is an even more colossal waste of time than The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, another Nobel-hallowed work of German-language humor that I didn’t get. Late in the book, there is a serious chapter dealing with childhood sexual abuse. It is handled very well, which makes one think that Canetti might actually be a very good writer if he would stay away from comedy.

Perhaps one reason critics and “intellectuals” praise this book is because one of its themes is the love of books. Beyond those first two chapters, however, the books in question are not discussed in any way intelligently. Kien, contrary to his personality and his profession, values all books indiscriminately as if they were just bricks of paper whose contents are irrelevant. Another defiance of logic is the fact that Kien seems to have an unlimited supply of money at hand. If pointless silliness isn’t enough to put you off this book, Canetti also provides many derogatory comments towards women and Jews. Defenders might say, “Those are the characters speaking, not the author.” Canetti himself is of Jewish heritage, so perhaps he’s criticizing anti-Semitism instead of Semitism. However, when three of the main male characters are extreme misogynists, two others are womanizers, the only female character is portrayed very negatively, and the reader has to sit through lengthy sermons about how women are simply evil, isn’t it safe to say the novel itself is misogynistic?

Jack Kirby’s The Demon by Jack Kirby

Supernatural adventures with spectacular art

Comic book artist extraordinaire Jack Kirby is best known for co-creating many of Marvel Comics’ most famous superheroes. He was Marvel’s number-one artist (both qualitatively and quantitatively) throughout the 1960s. In 1970, however, Kirby got fed up with his treatment by Marvel and jumped over to rival DC Comics. With the new creative freedom that DC allowed him, Kirby created some bold and innovative new comics series. These titles didn’t achieve household-name status like Superman and Batman, but they are nonetheless regarded in hindsight by comics aficionados as groundbreaking and amazing work. One of Kirby’s creations from this period, The Demon, made his debut in September 1972 in his own eponymous series that ran for 16 issues, up to January of 1974. The entire run of that series has been collected in a beautiful paperback edition entitled Jack Kirby’s The Demon, first published in 2008. I’m reviewing the 2017 edition (ISBN 978-1-4012-7718-5).

The story begins in the days of King Arthur. The evil sorceress Morgaine Le Fey, after laying waste to Camelot, hunts down the wizard Merlin. As he flees into another plane of existence, Merlin summons up a powerful demon named Etrigan to battle Morgaine Le Fey’s army of evil minions. Flash forward to the 1970s, and Etrigan is still doing Merlin’s bidding by fighting the forces of supernatural evil. Jason Blood, an expert in demonology, is the human host for the Demon. He undergoes a Hulk-like transformation when Etrigan’s powers are needed. This coexistence with the Demon has granted Jason immortality. He has lived for centuries without aging.

The stories here are somewhat basic: a monster shows up, and the Demon fights him. Like Shakespeare, Kirby draws story material from folklore and public domain literature. There’s a werewolf story, a Phantom of the Opera story, and a Frankenstein story, all with original touches from Kirby. The real attraction here, however, is the fabulous art, which is some of the best Kirby work I’ve ever seen. Kirby seems to have designed this series to allow himself to draw all the things he loves to draw: monsters (reptilian, rocky, furry, metallic), medieval-looking weapons and warfare, bizarre artifacts and machinery, and ugly faces. I don’t know if Kirby ever drew Doctor Strange for Marvel, but if he did, it would have looked a lot like this. This book unfortunately demonstrates that Kirby was not so great at drawing women’s faces. They look like unbaked biscuits with receding hairlines. He was a master, however, at drawing men’s faces, the uglier and craggier the better.

The Demon was not a part of Kirby’s Fourth World saga—a sci-fi/mythological epic that ran through at least four Kirby-created titles. When the Fourth World comics didn’t sell so well, DC asked Kirby to create some new stand-alone superheroes. The Demon was among these early-1970s creations, along with OMAC and Kamandi. Jason Blood, Etrigan’s human alter-ego, resides in an apartment in Gotham City, which sets him up for crossovers with Batman and other DC heroes. Although Kirby only wrote and drew the original 16-issue run of The Demon, the character has since been revived by later DC creators. The Demon has had a handful of his own series over the past half-century and has also guest-starred in the adventures of other DC heroes. Although not an A-list hero, Etrigan the Demon continues to be active in the DC universe today.

Paperback reprints of classic comics are usually printed either in black-and-white on newsprint or in full-color and bright matte paper that makes the colors too bright and garish. This volume, however, is printed on something in between, a clean white sheet with an uncoated texture that makes the colors rich and vivid. It’s very well done. Diehard Kirby fans should own this book.

Above: Cover of The Demon #2, 1972. Below: Spread from The Demon #6, 1973. Art by Jack Kirby. © DC Comics.