riters about science tried to interest young readers by exploiting the attractions of imaginative romances and fairy tales. To explain scientific matters to the young, Granville Penn (1761-1844), Charles Kingsley (1819-75) and Arabella Buckley (1840-1929) aimed to forge an alliance of scientific logic and youthful imagination, in the hope that they could present the Natural Sciences as simple, interesting, wonderful, and, above all ‘magical’. Here Penn does not succeed, since despite the book’s title, his Conversations are one-sided and take the form of lectures rather than attempt to simplify difficult technical language and concepts. Penn aims for the target but misses. By contrast, Kingsley and a minor successor, Buckley, succeed remarkably, particularly in their emphasis on conveying knowledge of the facts by involving romance and imagination.
There can be no doubt how highly Kingsley values the role of the ‘imagination’ or ‘fancy’ in studying natural history: ‘Second only to the good effect of this study on the logical faculty, seems to me to be its effect on the imagination’ (1846, p.16). You might, for instance, take something like a pebble or ‘the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit’ and your imagination will find ‘inexhaustible wonders’ and be stimulated to create ‘a fairy-land’ (pp. 16-17). Study and Imagination are then symbiotic.
However, Kingsley, who acknowledges ‘romance’ only as connoting things imaginative, does not acknowledge the potential contradiction in his suggestion that scientific study can create an imaginative ‘fairy-land’. An inductive scientist seeks to discover the laws that govern the physical workings of the universe, but the creatures and the events of fairy land defy scientific laws: a bird made of gold which can fly (‘The Golden Bird’); an old fairy who is an owl by day and a cat by night and whose castle can root any young man who enters to the spot and can turn a pretty young maid into a bird (‘Jorinda and Jorindel’); Tom Thumb so called because he is no bigger than a thumb when born; and most relevantly in this context, the queen who is barren and sentenced to be denied food and water and kept in a tower till she dies. Her rescue requires a miracle: ‘God sent two angels from heaven in the shape of white doves, which flew to her twice a day, and carried her food until the seven years were over’ (‘The Pink’).
However, for two good reasons Kingsley can present science as not only verifying natural laws but also inspiring students to create a fairyland in which miracles defy natural laws. First, he regards the universe as immanent, and in Glaucus or, The Wonders of the Shore the Christian Kingsley uses ‘wonders’ in one its earliest meanings, given in the OED as ‘wunderlice’ (1154) - miracles created by a supernatural power, an idea very close to the German Wundermärchen (another term for a fairy tale) in which magical events necessitate the suspension of natural law. He will return to the concept of a natural law-defying fairy land in The Water Babies’ in 1863.
Second, he values the imagination and the idea of romance so highly that he is determined to rescue it both from the Enlightenment and, ironically, from the Romantic period as well. He therefore argues in ‘How to Study Natural History’ (1846):
Now, from fifty to five-and-twenty years ago, under the influence of the Franklin and Edgeworth school of education, imagination was at a discount. That school was a good school enough: but here was one of its faults. It taught people to look on imagination as quite a useless, dangerous, unpractical, bad thing, a sort of mental disease. And now, as is usual after an unfair depreciation of anything, has come a revolution; and an equally unfair glorifying of the imagination; the present generation have found out suddenly that the despised faculty is worth something, and therefore are ready to believe it worth everything; so that nowadays, to judge from the praise heaped on some poets, the mere possession of imagination, however ill regulated, will atone for every error of false taste, bad English, carelessness for truth; and even for coarseness, blasphemy, and want of common morality; and it is no longer charity, but fancy, which is to cover the multitude of sins. [p. 18]
Characteristically Kingsley objects to the abuse of something valuable, whether that be rational capacity or imaginative power. In particular he asks his ‘elder readers’ not to devalue his estimation of imagination as ‘light praise’. Instead he reminds them of their duties. ‘Imagination is a valuable thing....a real thing.... which everyone has....with which you must do something’. You cannot ignore it because it will assert itself as a quality which we all possess. Further, it occupies a special place in the life of the young, and the education of young imaginations is a perennial preoccupation on which he issues this most important caveat: ‘You will be wise not to neglect it in young children; for if you do not provide wholesome food for it, it will find unwholesome food for itself’ p. 19). In The Water Babies the mind-numbing ‘educational’ activities administered in Laputa exemplify the most unwholesome educational diet adults could impose on young minds (p. 163).
Cultivating the Healthy Imagination
Kingsley is so very concerned about cultivating young imaginations healthily because he has no doubt that a healthy imagination will protect the young against moral degeneration. The older generation must not allow youth to become obsessed with a diet of ‘its own fancies, its own day dreams, its own morbid feelings, its likes and dislikes; even if it do not take at last to viler food, to French novels, and lawless thoughts, which are but too common, alas! Though we will not speak of them here’ (pp. 18-19). Instead, it must offer the young a healthier diet, i.e. ‘a class of objects which may excite wonder, reverence, the love of novelty and of discovering, without heating the brain or exciting the passions’. The ‘objects’ are, of course, the proper study of the Natural Historian that elicit essentially selfless responses — the reason that Kingsley believes Natural History will play the major part in achieving the ‘great need of all men, to get rid of self’ (p. 19). Here Kingsley the Broad Church Anglican priest is speaking, and he glorifies in the extent to which his Christian beliefs determine his attitude to natural history. He suggests, for instance, that an hour’s summer walk will furnish the young walker with a month’s worth of scientific investigation of precisely the ‘class of objects’ that excite ‘wonder, reverence’, and ‘the love of novelty’ — that is, ‘plants, shells, and animalcules, on each of which a whole volume might be written’, all of which are ‘wonders’ and miraculous. But, as he explains in How to Study Natural History, a book already exists that celebrates the Divine gift of abundance studied by the natural historian (or what we would call a scientist):
Oh Lord, thy works are manifold; thy ways are very deep. In wisdom hast thou made them all, the earth is full of thy riches. Thou openest thy hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness; they continue this day according to thine ordinance, for all things serve thee. Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever; thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken. Let them praise the name of the Lord; for he spake the word and they were made, he commanded, and they were thou made them all, the earth is full of thy riches. Thou openest thy hand, and fillest all things living with plenteousness; they continue this day according to thine ordinance, for all things serve thee. Thou hast made them fast for ever and ever; thou hast given them a law which shall not be broken. Let them praise the name of the Lord’. [pp. 10-11].
In The Ancien Régime, Kingsley explains that such divine immanence reinforces selflessness. ‘LECTURE III - THE EXPLOSIVE FORCES’, reminds his audience that in a previous lecture he had ‘said that the human race owed more to the eighteenth century than to any century since the Christian era’ (p.36). Following this model of historical inheritance but switching centuries, he has designed his lecture on ‘How to Study Natural History’ to enthuse the next generation by imitating his own predecessors and handing on to them ‘that great heirloom which the philosophers of the seventeenth century left for the use of future generations’ (p. 27). However, since he aims at the younger generation, he therefore cannot take too much for granted when dealing with as yet untutored minds, and so he concentrates on the ways in which his young readers will learn: ‘I appear here to-night; not to teach you natural history; for that you can only teach yourselves: but to set before you the subject and its value, and if possible, allure some of you to the study of it’ (p.7).
Kingsley’s lecture, ‘How to Study Natural History’, contains a masterly example of presenting complex evolutionary theory in the guise of a simple tale. He chooses as his narrator a ‘little black rounded pebble’. Many teachers of youngsters routinely set tasks such as to write ‘A Day in the Life of an Apple’. However, the pebble’s story, which is more than a junior pupil’s activity, implicitly demands from the young people a considerable scientific awareness. The pebble comes from the street outside, and Kingsley explains that if he has the requisite qualities needed — honesty and a patient and impartial approach — it will tell a tale ‘wilder and grander’ than any which he could have dreamed for himself, for even the lowliest thing in creation will ‘shame the meanness’ of his imagination by ‘the awful magnificence of God’s facts’. (p. 14 ; my emphasis). This proves to be a ‘scientific fairy tale’ nonpareil!
‘The Pebble’s Tale’; is too long to quote in full, a careful summary has to suffice. When it begins with a reference to ‘Ages and Æons since, thousands on thousands of years before there was a man to till the ground’, the word which would cause a youngster difficulty is ‘Æons’ so Kingsley provides first a synonym, ‘Ages’. This is a minor preparatory step in introducing adult language. The pebble then explains how it once existed as a living sponge in the depths of a large chalky ocean. The pebble’s history is straightforward until it speaks of ‘hundreds of living atomies, each more fantastic than a ghost-painter’s dreams’ which swam around it and multiplied as they began to grow on it so that it became ‘a tiny hive of wonders’. The word ‘atomies’ is such an archaic synonym for tiny creatures, or even skeletons, that a young audience would surely not immediately understand the word unless they had encountered it in the ever popular Romeo and Juliet.
Kingsley may be patronizing his young readers when he has the pebble say that it would take a lifetime for them to understand each of the wonders in the hive. But perhaps not. Through the pebble, Kingsley makes a remarkable concession. It tells its audience that they will never know how ‘the delicate flint-needles in my skin gathered other particles of flint to them, and I and all my inhabitants became a stone’, until it knows how, and that, until it can, it will never be able to tell them! (pp. 14-15). What may at first seem patronising turns out to be a recognition of the limits of scientific insight into events which the scientist has not actually observed.
Kingsley here has implicitly acknowledged the role of speculation about processes so ancient that the natural historian cannot have observed them. As Charles Gillispie points out in Genesis and Geology. (1969), ‘with geologists like Hutton, you can describe past events only by an inductive analogy with what you can see in the present and by the evidence of resulting formations’ (p. 47). Kingsley knows certain ‘facts’ about pebbles but he has to extrapolate a history of events, which he did not witness but which he ‘pretends’ to have witnessed through the pebble as his persona: ‘chalk-mud settled round the pebble’; it ‘lay for ages in the dark’; ‘it felt the glow of fires below’; ‘it was violently shaken about by earthquakes’; again and again it ‘became part of some island or other, which sank in to sea, and was heaved up again centuries later’. Finally it dropped from a cliff-side chalk face, fell into the sea which then tossed it ashore on Reading beach when Reading was no more than sandbank in the sea (p. 15).
This disarmingly, even covertly, simple account would make strenuous demands on an untutored young reader’s ability if challenged to decipher Kingsley’s geological references. Kingsley issues no such challenge but he has laid the basis for a more mature reading. For, in writing the pebble’s story, he refers at an appropriately young level to the state of geology as he sees it, and is particularly keen to disseminate in a simple form the ideas of William Hutton (1726-1797), who in his Theory of the Earth (1795) posited that sedimentary rocks were a combination of fossils and the products of erosion. The reference to ‘the glow of fires below’ is also decidedly Huttonian. When Hutton considered two possible explanations for the consolidation into rocks of the sediments on the ocean bottom, he rejected the Neptunist idea of deposition from solution, and since he was confident that heat under atmospheric pressure could fuse all the substances found in the different types of sediment, he adopted the Vulcanist theory of a fusion of the sediments by the great heat which they believed to exist beneath the lower regions of the earth’s Crust.
As the pebble continues its tale, Kingsley incorporates the Neptunist’s theories based on the idea of successive floods that wiped out ‘individuals, species and whole genera’, and modern life forms possibly being ‘distinct creations’ (Gillispie, 46). In the pebble’s tale, what happens is not explicitly attributed to a geological school of thought, but, to an informed reader it moves from Vulcanism to Neptunism, as ‘flood after flood’ passes over the pebble for ‘many a century’ and it gets swept along with ‘fresh flints from wasting chalk-hills’, ‘freestones from the Gloucestershire wolds’, ‘quartz-boulders from the mountains of Wales’, ‘the carcases of drowned elephants and bison, and many a monstrous beast’, ‘uprooted palms, and tropic fruits and seeds’ and ‘the wrecks of a dying world’. The result is ‘new earth’ with distinct creations (p.15).
Although the simplification of very complex geological processes may not necessarily distort the available material, it does involve loss. The final stage of the pebble’s history exemplifies this. The ‘new earth’ grew ‘wondrous cold’. The ice melted in the sun, the stones and the fine sand fell out of the melting icebergs and covered it up. Once again earthquakes tossed it around but it finally became part of ‘this brave English land’ (p.15). Kingsley here omits what happens in glacial ages when thick sheets of ice cover much of the land. Kingsley truncates geological history because he adopted the persona of a pebble to create accessibility for the young audience. Hence, whereas geologists were already conceiving of a glacial age taking thousands of years of preliminary formation and lasting several millions of years, Kinglsey skips many crucial effects of glaciers on the pebble, which, he tells us, ‘lay for ages in the dark’, and the island on which it lands is ‘heaved up again centuries later’. And, of course, the pebble’s explanation of how the ice age comes to an end is inevitably simplistic: his readers learn only that ‘the ice melted in the sun’.
The pebble’s evolution not only has a past but it also has a future in which it is very confident. Even though it may be ground under ‘the wheels of busy men’, no one will destroy it. Because the universe it inhabits is numinous, the pebble evolves in divinely pre-ordained ways. Like a character in a fairy tale, it changes shape, but such change does not defy natural law. Instead it fulfils the providential design that governs nature. The pebble is now a pebble, but next year ‘dust in the fields’, and then it will resurrect in a new life as a wheat harvest ready for human consumption. Even this will not kill it because it has to fulfil ‘the law which cannot be broken’. It has become ‘trampled and sodden straw’ ready to rot into a ‘new life’, and ready to ‘pass through a fresh cycle of strange adventures, age after age, till time shall be no more; doing my work in my generation, and fulfilling to the last the will of God, as faithfully as when I was the water-breathing sponge in the abysses of the old chalk sea’ (p. 7). Kingsley’s tale is a remarkable tour de force.
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Last modified 7 January 2019