Category: Romantic and Victorian

Stefanie Markovits, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 240 pp. $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780198937791 ‘Number sense’ is the term Stefanie Markovits uses to describe the numerical thinking that permeates the lines and pages of nineteenth-century novels and poems, crafting patterns across the tapestry of poetic imagery and narrative arcs. As she…

Adrian Desmond, Reign of the Beast: The Atheist World of W. D. Saull and his Museum of Evolution (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2024) xii+664 Free e-book. £25.46 Pb. £37.36 Hb. ISBN: 978-1-80511-240-2 In 1851, Admiral Sir John Ross returned to London from the Arctic expedition that had discovered the sad fate of Franklin’s lost expedition.…

Lucy Cogan and Michelle O’Connell, eds, Life, Death and Consciousness in the Long Nineteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) 280 pp. £119.99 Hb. ISBN: 9783021133626 The long nineteenth century was a time of vast scientific advances, when new knowledge of chemistry, anatomy and medicine developed at an unprecedented rate, changing the way people interpreted the world…

Gowan Dawson, Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2024) 392 pp. £30.00 Hb. ISBN 978-0-300-27062-4 Monkey to Man is Gowan Dawson’s study of the 1860-1979 emergence of the ‘March of Progress’ image: the well-worn notion of evolutionary development as an orderly left-to-right ascent. One finding:…

Michelle Speitz, The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024) 216 pp. £80 Hb. ISBN: 9781835536704 In The Romantic Sublime and Representations of Technology, Michelle Speitz ‘offers the first full-length study of the sublime stories British Romantic writers told about technology’ (p. 1). This is a welcome and original study, casting…

Elizabeth Massa Hoiem, The Education of Things: Mechanical Literacy in British Children’s Literature, 1762-1860 (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 2024) 328 pp. $30.95 Pb. ISBN: 9781625347558 Winner of the 2025 Justin G. Schiller Prize for the best bibliographic study of pre-1951 children’s literature. Elizabeth Massa Hoiem’s winning of this influential award is completely warranted.…

Richard Fallon, Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard’ Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021) 283 pp. £75 HB. ISBN: 9781108834001 This is a book that will, I suspect, resonate deeply with the interests of the BSLS. Dinosaurs must surely be the most popular science topic…

Mary Orr, Sarah Bowdich Lee (1791-1856) and Pioneering Perspectives on Natural History (London: Anthem Press, 2024) 294 pp. £80.00 Hb. ISBN: 978-1083998-609-3 The last two decades have seen an almost exponential advance in our knowledge and understanding of women’s many contributions to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European science. Building on groundbreaking works in the 1990s by…

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…