Science at the Seaside: Pleasure Hunts in Victorian Devon
Plunkett, JS
Date: 1 July 2017
Publisher
Oxford University Press
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Abstract
This chapter argues that the scientific and imaginative appeal of the Devon coast in the mid-Victorian period played a key role in the development of popular science and, more particularly, marine biology. It also played an important part in the tourist development of resorts such as Ilfracombe and Torquay. The publications of Philip ...
This chapter argues that the scientific and imaginative appeal of the Devon coast in the mid-Victorian period played a key role in the development of popular science and, more particularly, marine biology. It also played an important part in the tourist development of resorts such as Ilfracombe and Torquay. The publications of Philip Henry Gosse, Charles Kingsley, George Tugwell and George Henry Lewes, amongst others, helped to encourage a fascination with the littoral space of the seashore, and the exotic creature that could be found there. As a leisure pursuit, natural history combined pleasure, curiosity and spectacle with an enlightenment desire to better understand the surrounding world. The popularity of seaside science was given a further boost by the refinement of the marine aquarium by Gosse; their domestic display became a fashionable craze of the 1850s.
English
Collections of Former Colleges
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