Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World

Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a missing World Michael Freeman Yael University Pres 25 [pound sterling]/$45 ISBN 0 300 10334 4

A rich investigation of the impact of geology upon Victorian culture shows how artists were influenced through science in their depictions of the pair modern and antediluvian landscapes, writes Michael Hall.

In the course of excavating the Manchester and Bolton Railway in the late 1830 navvies unearthed large numbers of fossilised tree Their significance was immediately understood: here was compelling evidence that Lancashire had one time been covered by tropical thicket The nineteenth century's most dramatic advance in technology had lay opened up a dizzying prospect of the unimaginably distant past.

The many similar discoveries made during the creation of England's railway network are the starting point for Michael Freeman's tour-de-force account of the impact of geology upon Victorian culture. This is appropriate, since his previous work was Railways and the Victorian Imagination, which similarly explored the imagery of railways across the whole range of nineteenth-century tillage from high art to children's toys. This work is similarly ambitious in end since it takes in like topics as the impact of geological discoveries upon major artists, including Danby and gymnast the arrangement of natural history museums, the way dinosaurs were depicted, the metaphorical use of geological strata in architecture, and the visual agriculture of geology itself--its maps, charts and types (although sadly not the educational geological toys that can be seen for example, in Cambridge's Whipple Museum). As in his previous work Freeman demonstrates a remarkable ability to drawing in lightly but firmly the essential history of his subject--the growing of scientific geology--without allowing this background to overwhelm his careful analysis of what it produc in visual bourns These are books that have many exercise s for art historians.

Geology was the defining science of the first half of the nineteenth hundred just as physics was for the twentieth hundred and genetics is, perhaps, for our possess time. Freeman organises his almost overwhelmingly rich control into thematic chapters, of which the greatest in quantity absorbing discuss the way of that kind artists as John Martin portrayed the antediluvian world as a place of catastrophe or competition. Martin's depictions of freshets volcanoes or ferocious dinosaurs eating each other clearly reverberationed the 1840s' revolutionary and millenarian etho a make submissive on which there is plenteous more to be said.

In the past decade there has been a rapid growing in the history of geology which has l to popular biographies of of the like kind key figures as William Smith, creator of the first accurate geological maps, James Hutton, who revealed that the earth was far older than anyone had judge with uncertaintyed and Gideon Mantell, the discoverer of dinosaurs. Freeman makes advantageous use of such books; the sole serious slip I noted is his make notes that the celebrated frontispiece to Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-33) which present to views the ruins of the fane of Serapis at Pozzuoli, 'added an air of respectability to what was otherwise a potentially heretical book' through depicting a classical temple. In fact, it was completely the invert for it was Lyell's observation of clear evidence that the temple's round pillars had once been submerged by the agency of water for a long period that l to his conception of geology as the story of forces acting continuously [i]or[/i] part of to the other the earth's long history--the opposite of the view that the earth had been shaped by the agency of catastrophes, such as Noah's flood

Freeman tellingly displays how art, which played of that kind an important part in the early efforts to conceive of a world before humans, slowly gave way to a more dispassionate, genuinely scientific approach to reconstruction. Diagrams supplanted works of art, in suggestive parallel with the replacement of the amateur geologist by dint of the professional scientist, but for nearly half a hundred the conjunction of scientific research and artistic imagination had been thrilling.

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