Hugh Miller, The Old Red Sandstone, or New Walks in an Old Field, edited with a critical study and notes by Michael A. Taylor and Ralph O’Connor (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2023), 2 vols: 684 pp. £30.00. Sb. ISBN: 9781910682258
The most well-known nineteenth-century British palaeontologist is probably Mary Anning, the working-class Lyme Regis collector who excavated and sold spectacular fossils of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. While Anning is sometimes presented as a ‘forgotten’ figure, this is of course not correct. While excluded from the elite and male worlds of formal geological institutions, she was widely acknowledged in her lifetime, and dramatic retellings of her life have been a feature of science writing from the Victorian period onwards. Possibly a better candidate for a ‘forgotten’ figure of lower-class origins in the history of British palaeontology would be the subject of this critical edition, Hugh Miller, the Cromarty stonemason turned accountant, newspaper editor and geological writer, who was widely read up until the 1900s, but has since fallen somewhat into obscurity. While Ralph O’Connor’s The Earth On Show drew him to the centre of early-nineteenth-century geological writing, and there has been a revival of interest in Miller in Scotland (a Friends of Hugh Miller society was set up in 2006, for example, and a North Sea oilfield is named after him), he is still not in the historical canon of British geologists alongside Anning, William Buckland, Roderick Impey Murchison and Charles Lyell.
These two volumes provide a new critical edition of Miller’s key early work, The Old Red Sandstone: or New Walks in an Old Field, and is apparently only the second reprint of the work in over a century (the other was printed in Boston in the 1970s). Miller’s book is ostensibly a guide to the geology and stratigraphy of his native Cromarty, focussing on what would now mainly be termed Devonian formations. But it is more than that. For Miller, Cromarty became a gateway into personal experience and interpretation of deep time, which is connected with global, even cosmic, processes – a well-developed example of how the locality can provide insights into much larger scales. The second volume of the set is a facsimile reproduction of the first edition of the work, published in 1841 (later editions were altered significantly, before being ‘petrified’ in the posthumous seventh edition of 1858, prepared by his wife Lydia). The work is faithfully presented, and the annotations provide key context to the period and writing, without being overbearing.
The bulk of the new material is in the first volume, the critical study, which has two main stated aims. The first is to look seriously at Miller as an important and indicative scientific figure, and not just a ‘popularizer’ (and indeed, the editors are very wary of the term ‘popular science’ as being far too baggy and reductionist). In particular, the elements which might strike a modern reader as strange – especially the close links between evangelical Protestantism and deep time geology – are shown as in fact wholly consistent with contemporary ideas. The second aim is to take The Old Red Sandstone seriously as a work of literature, and a complex one at that, expressing the dizzying depths of geological time by moving between a dizzying array of genres – including (but not limited to) autobiography, self-help, fairy tale, scientific treatise, natural history, taxonomy, time travel, epic of the creation of the earth and life, and Christian eschatology.
These aim weave in and out of the discussion of Miller’s work, with substantial chapters discussing the background to The Old Red Sandstone, the book’s structure, its literary construction, how it was published and marketed, its reception, and a ‘postlude’ thinking about Miller’s significance, and why he has fallen out of the canon. There are many important insights here, with a close sensitivity to how the work was edited and constructed from earlier articles in The Witness (which make up 44% of the book), and also how Miller interacted with the wider community and hierarchies of geologists. A series of appendices go into more detail on the editing and publication process, how Miller’s stratigraphy and analysis would relate to modern geological and palaeontological ideas, and a short guide to geological walks around Cromarty (with helpful guidance on fossil collecting). Across all of these commentaries, the differing backgrounds of the two editors – a literature scholar (O’Connor) and a palaeontologist (Taylor) – really pay off in combination.
The book definitely succeeds in its aims of giving a comprehensive critical edition of Miller’s work. This meant that I was often thinking ‘what next,’ while reading the text. There is a subsidiary thread in the commentary, an argument that Miller should be better known and more widely read, but an awareness that there are numerous obstacles in this. The diversity of genres, his opposition to evolutionism, the unexpected (but as the editors say, wholly conventional for the time) linking of deep time and Christianity, and The Old Red Sandstone’s opening, urging a notional working-class readership to stay away from Chartist meetings and study nature and the Bible instead, mean that he does not fit into easy narratives. This is especially because much general discussion of the history of Victorian geology is still locked in the largely southern English story of the first uncovering of marine reptiles and dinosaurs (and not the fossil fish and ‘monsters of the vegetable world’ which populated Miller’s world). But the editors make numerous points that the mix of genres, and combination of personal and cosmic, aligns well with modern narrative nature documentaries and ecological works, and has been an influence on popular writers like Robert MacFarlane. So it does seem as if a wider reappraisal of Miller is much in need.
A further point is raised an introductory section, that the publication of this edition was considerably delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which means that it expressly does not take into account changes in the academic literature after May 2019. This raised for me the point of just how much the literature around the earth sciences and geology has changed over just the last five years. The book takes Martin Rudwick as the canonical writer (although Miller is extremely marginal in Rudwick’s oeuvre, and notably absent from his large later surveys). But we now have a stream of works that are seeking to move beyond what could be termed a ‘Rudwickian’ frame in the history of geology, by emphasizing the global elements of the deep time sciences, arguing that the sharp break in understandings of the earth the late-eighteenth century might not have been such a break after all, and tying the history of geology with debates over the Anthropocene, and the role of race and colonialism in science (which Miller became embroiled in, when sections of his later Testimony of the Rocks were ‘uncovered’ and used to argue he was a racist, a characterization which was itself rebutted by O’Connor). This absence of engagement with these later currents of scholarship is of course no mark on this edition, as it should be looked on in terms of when it was produced. But it does raise the issue that further engagement with Miller and his legacy in the light of this more recent work would be an important future project.
Chris Manias, King’s College London
