The Divine in the Commonplace
Reverent Natural History and the Novel in Britain

Explores how natural theology features in both early Victorian natural histories and English provincial realist novels of the same period.

Amy M. King (Author)

9781108730181, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 18 March 2021

316 pages, 11 b/w illus. 2 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.428 kg

'King not only declares the importance of honoring the divine in the nineteenth-century commonplace but also quietly invokes a loving and devotional respect for the everyday in our own.' Emma Mason, Victorian Studies

Realism has long been associated with the secular, but in early nineteenth-century England a realist genre existed that was highly theological: popular natural histories informed by natural theology. The Divine in the Commonplace explores the 'reverent empiricism' of English natural history and how it conceives observation and description as a kind of devotion or act of reverence. Focusing on the texts of popular natural historians, especially seashore naturalists, Amy M. King puts these in conversation with English provincial realist novelists including Austen, Gaskell, Eliot, and Trollope. She argues that the English provincial novel has a 'reverent form' as a result of its connection to the practices and representational strategies of natural history writing in this period, which was literary, empirical, and reverent. This book will appeal to students and scholars of nineteenth-century literature, science historians, and those interested in interdisciplinary connections between pre-Darwinian natural history, religion, and literature.

Introduction: natural history, the theology of nature, and the novel
1. Reverent natural history, the sketch, and the novel: modes of English realism in White, Mitford, and Austen
2. Early Victorian natural history: reverent empiricism and the aesthetic of the commonplace
3. The formal realism of reverent natural history: tidepools, aquaria and the seashore natural histories of P. H. Gosse and G. H. Lewes
4. Reverence at the seashore: seashore natural history, Charles Kingsley's Two Years Ago (1855), and Margaret Gatty's Parables from Nature (1857)
5. Seeing the divine in the commonplace: George Eliot's paranaturalist realism, 1856–1859
6. Elizabeth Gaskell's everyday: Reverent form and natural theology in Sylvia's Lovers (1863) and Wives and Daughters (1866)
Epilogue: Barsetshire via Selborne: Anthony Trollope's The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867).

Subject Areas: The Earth: natural history general [WNW], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]