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Richard Owen - Victorian Naturalist (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R2,671
Discovery Miles 26 710
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Richard Owen - Victorian Naturalist (Hardcover, New)
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Richard Owen (1804-92) was, after Darwin, the most important figure
in Victorian natural history. He was, for most of the six decades
of his career, Britain's foremost comparative anatomist and
vertebrate palaeontologist. Leader of the nineteenth-century museum
movement, he founded London's monumental Natural History Museum,
wrote and published copiously and won every professional honour.
Positioned at the cutting edge of Victorian science, his work
attracted enormous general interest, and he himself came to
symbolise 'natural history' in the public mind. His company was
sought by royalty (Prince Albert), prime ministers (especially Sir
Robert Peel), and by contemporary literati such as Charles Dickens.
Owen was, however, a controversial figure whose disagreements with
colleagues developed into epic power struggles, the most notorious
of which were with Darwin and Huxley. As the most renowned opponent
of natural selection, Owen was type-cast as a Cuvierian creationist
and became the bete noire of the Darwinian evolution debate. In
this comprehensive intellectual and scientific biography, Nicolaas
Rupke argues that Owen was no simple-minded anti-evolutionist and,
moreover, should be freed from the distortion of the evolution
dispute that was only a minor part of his work, yet has come to
dominate his memory. Using the museum movement as the primary
context of explanation, Rupke throws new light on a wide area of
Owen's activities. He reveals the central division in Owen's
scientific oeuvre between the functionalism of Oxbridge natural
theology and the transcendentalism of German nature philosophy.
This epistemological duality confused and puzzled his
contemporaries as well as laterhistorians. But as Rupke
convincingly demonstrates, it was a fundamental extension of the
intellectual and political manoeuvering for control of Victorian
cultural institutions, and an inextricable part of the rise to
public authority of the most articulate proponents of the
scientific study of nature.
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