Epistemic Images and Vital Nature: Darwin’sBotanic Gardenas Image Text Book

Abstract

This essay considers the function of images in Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1789, 1791) by drawing on recent work in the history of science. I argue that the full-page intaglio prints of plants in Darwin's book function as "epistemic images" by propounding a visual argument about organic life. The epistemic values embedded in the images of plants-specifically, the appearance of life and motion-are the result of artists' engraving techniques deployed in the service of eighteenth-century aesthetic conventions. These conventions allow the images to align the knowledge claims of Darwin's allegorical verse with those put forward in the prose notes. In conclusion, I suggest this method of unearthing the epistemic values of images could be productively extended to literary texts less obviously engaged with scientific debates of the time. In recent years Romanticism has, like much of literary studies, experienced a material turn. Building on earlier studies like Judith Stanton's work on Charlotte Smith's fraught relation to her publishers, new work on authors from Walter Scott to John Clare to Lord Byron consider how books were made and who made them, authors' relations with their publishers, the economics and business of publishing, how printed matter proliferated and circulated, and so on. 1 Studies that tackle the centrality of books and print to Romantic culture more broadly soon followed. 2 This flurry of bookishness has pushed us to rethink the conceptual orientation of Romanticism, and especially how materiality might be part and parcel of the Romantic celebration of the organic, the ideal, the vital principle, the "indwelling law" of true being (Coleridge 2: 50). 3 In tandem with this artefactual turn, we've begun to build on studies of literature's relation to visual culture to consider literature's visual paratext: what exactly are wood block illustrations, engraved frontispieces, aquatints, even printers' flowers, doing vis-à-vis the literary text? 4 Work