The Victorian aquarium

Literary discussions on nature, culture, and science

Silvia Granata, Andrew Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526151957
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

The Victorian aquarium explores the vogue for home tanks that spread through Great Britain around the middle of the nineteenth century. This book offers an example of how the study of a particular object can be used to address a broad spectrum of issues. The Victorian aquarium became in fact a point of intersection between scientific, technological and cultural trends; it engaged with issues of class, gender, nationality and inter-species relations; it drew together home décor and ideals of domesticity, travel and tourism, exciting discoveries in marine biology and tensions between competing views of science; it also marked an important moment in the development of a burgeoning environmental awareness. Through the analysis of a wide range of sources, including aquarium manuals, articles and fictional works, The Victorian aquarium unearths the historical significance of nineteenth-century tanks, reconstructing their far-ranging cultural resonance.

1 The marine aquarium in context

The making of the saltwater tank

The vogue for the marine aquarium was the result of a remarkable convergence of interests, which is mirrored by the tortuous history of the invention itself. This chapter retraces the different paths that led to the making of the saltwater tank, explores the key elements that made the aquarium craze possible, and looks at what tank keeping actually entailed for its early enthusiasts. The last two sections provide a brief overview of the material and textual lives of the aquarium, discussing how the hobby was practised and conceptualised. In fact, to recover its significance for Victorians, it is important to look not only at what they materially did with their tanks, but also at the discursive contexts in which tank keeping developed.

One of the obvious ancestors of the saltwater tank was the cabinet of curiosities. Cases made of wood and glass, devised to display various kinds of collections, were already a well-​established feature in upper-​class homes.¹ In the Victorian era, cabinets became more widespread than their eighteenth-​century predecessors, usually enjoying pride of place in the parlour or in the drawing room, that is, in the most public rooms of the house.² They were meant to function as a display of selfhood, showcasing the wealth, the taste, and the interests of their owners. Victorian cabinets hosted a wide variety of objects, from structured collections arranged according to scientific criteria to pretty displays of curios, hand-​made items or souvenirs. In particular, cabinets increasingly reflected the growing interest in natural history, which became charged with a wealth of new implications: a rich and ordered collection of pressed flowers, seaweeds, insects, or fossils testified to the owner’s interest in science, but also to the capacity to appreciate nature, which came to be considered a sign of refined sensibility.³ Moreover, a well-​cared-​for collection also attested to habits of industry and order, much valued by Victorians even when pastimes and leisure activities were concerned.⁴

In the 1830s, a significant addition to the traditional cabinet was the invention of Wardian cases, named after Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward (1791–​1868), an East End physician and botanist who came upon the principle of the closely glazed glass case by observing ferns and mosses grow from mould in a covered jar where he had placed a chrysalis. He understood that the level of humidity inside the jar could remain constant because moisture evaporated, condensed on the jar’s walls, and was again deposited on the soil. Ward soon began to make experiments, publicly announcing his discovery to the British Association in 1837.⁵ At first, due to the high price of glass, Wardian cases could be afforded only by the wealthy, but the 1845 repeal of glass duties eventually allowed widespread use. As mass-​produced sheet glass became cheaper, Wardian cases began to be used to create terraria, much appreciated by those involved in another mid-​Victorian passion, the pteridomania, or ‘fern craze’.⁶

But glazed cases could also be applied to uses other than growing ferns or shipping exotic plants to Europe; in fact, they soon attracted the attention of marine biologists. The early nineteenth century saw an impressive growth of interest in aquatic creatures, especially invertebrates. New, more powerful microscopes allowed researchers to explore their puzzling biology, which often seemed to challenge received knowledge. Moreover, marine animals also became central to transmutation theories. Lamarck had observed that invertebrates were crucial to understanding the evolution of all other forms of life,⁷ and by the 1840s the notion that the first living organisms must have been aquatic single-​celled beings became increasingly current. Even though transmutation was not generally accepted by the British scientific establishment, which considered it bad science with dangerous political implications, the basic tenets of the theory were well known, especially in radical circles.⁸

Together with geological theories that attributed to the ocean a key role in the shaping of the earth, these ideas were widely popularised and central to heated debates. Discussing the beginnings of life on earth, the author of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844) famously observed:

[a]nd what were those creatures? It might well be with a kind of awe that the uninstructed inquirer would wait for an answer to this question. But nature is simpler than man’s wit would make her, and behold, the interrogation only brings before us the unpretending forms of various zoophytes and polypes, together with a few single and double-​valved shell-​fish, all of them creatures of the sea.⁹

Marine invertebrates were indeed the most likely candidates for research on possible primitive life forms. Therefore, species that did not previously figure prominently in biological studies were now eagerly sought by a growing number of scientists. Nevertheless, while on the one hand they were interesting precisely because they were ‘unpretending’, that is, because they displayed a primitive simplicity, on the other they were far from easy to understand: their biology was very different from that of land animals and, in many cases, the way they ate, reproduced, or moved was still a mystery. They posed puzzles that could not always be solved by looking at dead specimens. As Robert Grant explained to young Darwin, sponges (which were interesting because they were so similar to fossilised ones, meaning they had not changed much through the ages) had to be studied outside, in the water, while still alive.¹⁰ Of course, this kind of research was quite laborious, and necessarily limited to those species that lived near the coast. Thus, many turned to the shores, enthusiastically combing beaches or plunging into rock pools in order to carry out their research. By the 1830s and 1840s, the most prominent life scientists (or those who would soon become so) were all engaged in the study of marine invertebrates: to name just a few, Thomas Henry Huxley worked on jellyfish, Edward Forbes on starfishes and medusae, Robert Grant on sponges, Richard Owen on the nautilus and, obviously, Darwin on barnacles.¹¹

For most of these species, and many more that emerged in this period, a close, continuous observation was needed to understand their unpredictable life cycles. Hence the interest of marine zoologists in Wardian cases. Nevertheless, to keep sea species alive, the new container was not enough. With freshwater aquaria, one could easily change the water every time it was needed, but to keep marine creatures one had to live by the sea for a constant supply of saltwater. This was indeed the method adopted by all those who had tried to keep sea species alive in captivity, including Sir John Graham Dalyell in the late eighteenth century, or Edward Forbes and George Johnston in the first half of the nineteenth century.¹² A solution to this problem, however, was about to be found.

A way of preserving live marine collections when far from the sea was successfully tested in the late 1840s by Anna Constantia Thynne (1806–​66), the wife of John Thynne, Sub-​Dean of Westminster. She kept a thriving colony of madrepores in her London house for three years by aerating the water every day. The process consisted in pouring the water in and out of the tank with a watering pot standing near an open window for forty-​five minutes every morning (a task materially performed by her maid). Thynne’s role in the invention of the saltwater aquarium, however, is difficult to assess. According to Rebecca Stott, this may be due to the fact that, being a woman, she had no established position in the world of science.¹³ Moreover, she did not seek recognition: she was even willing to donate her notes on the reproduction of madrepores –​ the result of years of observation –​ to Philip Henry Gosse (who refused, and encouraged her to publish it under her own name; but the article eventually came out only in 1859, when the vogue for home aquaria was already established).¹⁴ However, her absence from most Victorian accounts of the invention was also due to the fact that her experiment did not fully match the accepted definition of a successful marine tank as a ‘collection of plants and animals that is self-​supporting, self-​renovating’.¹⁵ In fact, even though Thynne had added seaweeds to her collection, she was not sure whether this, or the repeated aeration performed by her maid, was the key factor in the survival of her specimens. As she admitted in one of her notebooks,

I do not know from which [aeration or seaweed], or whether it was from both causes, that my little flock continued to thrive so much; but I had not many deaths and they might be from natural causes … In this manner I maintained my marine collection in London for nearly three years and it was examined by very many professed naturalists and other persons interested in natural history during two or three months in the spring of 1849.¹⁶

As noted by Stott, Thynne lived at Westminster while the Dean was William Buckland, the prominent geologist, and it is possible that some of the many scientific visitors entertained by Buckland and his wife (who was also interested in marine zoology) may have seen, admired, and reflected upon Thynne’s tank;¹⁷ yet we have no written trace of this, and knowledge of her aquarium probably remained circumscribed.¹⁸ Of course, priority of discovery or invention depends to a great extent on which elements you choose to consider. Among recent studies, Stott decisively argues that Anna Thynne invented the aquarium, while most other historians tend to attribute the invention to Robert Warington. Modern criticism establishes precedence according to publication date, endorsing the idea that invention does not only entail a working saltwater tank, but also a thorough understanding of its functioning.¹⁹ Thus, the actual invention is customarily connected to a better understanding of the photosynthetic process, which was eventually achieved thanks to the growing focus of research on chemical cycles.

Studies on photosynthesis dated back to Joseph Priestley’s research on ‘airs’ in the late eighteenth century. Various scientists added to its comprehension including Jan Ingenhousz, Jean Senebier, William Prout, and William Kirby, but the application of the principle to the saltwater tank was finally achieved by Robert W...