Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Styling Science
- 2 Dispute and Dissociation: John Black’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811)
- 3 ‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)
- 4 ‘A Plain and Unassuming Style’: Thomasina Ross and Humboldt’s Travels (1852–1853)
- 5 The Poetry of Geography: The Ansichten der Natur in English Translation
- 6 Cosmos: The Universe Translated
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Styling Science
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 April 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Series Editors’ Preface
- List of Abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Styling Science
- 2 Dispute and Dissociation: John Black’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811)
- 3 ‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)
- 4 ‘A Plain and Unassuming Style’: Thomasina Ross and Humboldt’s Travels (1852–1853)
- 5 The Poetry of Geography: The Ansichten der Natur in English Translation
- 6 Cosmos: The Universe Translated
- Conclusions
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
‘The mad fancy has seized me’, wrote Humboldt to the German diplomat Karl Varnhagen von Ense in autumn 1834, ‘of representing in a single work the whole material world’ (Humboldt 1860: 15). It would contain
all that is known to us of the phenomena of heavenly space and terrestrial life, from the nebulæ of the stars to the geographical distribution of mosses on granite rocks, and this in a work in which a lively style shall at once interest and charm. (Humboldt 1860: 15–16)
Humboldt's final, magisterial, work, Kosmos, was arguably the greatest holistic narrative of the natural world to be written in the nineteenth century. It was not just its content that was so ambitiously all-embracing. By employing a ‘lively’ style, Humboldt deliberately aimed his work at scientific specialists and general readers alike. Knowledge, he recog¬nised, could never be divorced from the techniques of its presentation. Yet even for an experienced author like Humboldt, writing a work such as Kosmos was fraught with difficulty. ‘The besetting sins of my style are’, he confessed to Varnhagen von Ense, ‘an unfortunate propensity to poetical expressions, a long participial construction, and too great concentration of various opinions and sentiments in the same sentence’; these were evils, he reflected, that only a strict agenda of simplicity could remedy (Humboldt 1860: 19).
Like Humboldt, Darwin was obsessed with style. ‘Some are born with a power of good writing,’ he wrote to the entomologist Henry Walter Bates in December 1861. ‘Others like myself’, he continued:
have to labour very hard and slowly at every sentence. I find it a very good plan, when I cannot get a difficult discussion to please me, to fancy that some one [sic] comes into the room and asks me what I am doing; and then try at once and explain to the imaginary person what it is all about. I have done this for one paragraph to myself several times, and sometimes to Mrs. Darwin, till I see how the subject ought to go. […] But style to me is a great difficulty.
Darwin's concern to be direct and clear underpinned the conviction that language should facilitate the communication of scientific ideas, making them comprehensible to a range of different audiences.
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- Nature TranslatedAlexander von Humboldt's Works in Nineteenth-Century Britain, pp. 22 - 39Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018