Metascience (2009) 18:269–273
Springer 2009

DOI 10.1007/s11016-009-9273-y

REVIEW

GEOLOGY AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION

Dennis R. Dean, Romantic Landscapes: Geology and its Cultural

Influence in Britain, 1765–1835. Ann Arbor: Scholars’ Facsimiles &
Reprints. 2007. 426 Pp. US$200.00 HB. (Available from Academic
Resources Corporation, PO Box 5934, Carefree, Arizona.)

By David Oldroyd

This book has had a lengthy gestation. Its first form was that of a
PhD dissertation from the University of Wisconsin in 1968, entitled
ÔGeology and English Literature: Cross-Currents 1770–1830’. We
learn from a note in Romantic Landscapes’ comprehensive bibliog-
raphy that a revised version was deposited at some time with the
Welcome Library in London, but this version is now superseded by
the present substantial volume. Now, nearly forty years after its
original incarnation, Dennis Dean’s book finally appears in his ser-
ies Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. But the fact that the book is
privately published should not be held against it. SF&R’s History
of Earth Sciences Series has already produced four excellent biblio-
graphical texts or reprints by Dean and the present offering is a
major piece of scholarship in its own right.
The volume does, however, bear indications of extensive emen-
dations over several decades, without being completely rewritten. It
contains numerous well-chosen illustrations, but the captions for
these are sometimes like Ôpaste-ins’, in that they are not referred to
in the text and thus stand somewhat detached therefrom. There are
also some pages – especially those making up the twenty-eight
appendices of extracts from various primary sources by scientific
authors – where the material is, so to speak, divorced from the
main narrative; and these sections are likewise, I imagine, additions
to the original thesis. Fortunately, however, these quirks don’t
really detract. The illustrations are all-important and the eighteen
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pages of colour plates are crisply printed and substantially enhance

the book.
It should be understood that Dean has been primarily a special-
ist in English literature and landscape, but he is also an author
who has devoted much time to the history of geology (especially
through his biographies of James Hutton and Gideon Mantell) and
he also has a particular interest in the study and portrayal of vol-
canoes. From the literary and artistic points of view, his special
field is Romanticism and in this book he endeavours (successfully)
to show how that intellectual movement manifested itself in studies
of the Earth and how Earth studies impacted on Romantic writing
and art. Others have written on the influence of Romanticism on
physics or chemistry, etc., but here the causal arrow tends for the
most part to be pointing in the opposite direction: i.e. from geol-
ogy to literature or painting.
Dean suggests that there were three major aspects to the
Romantic attitude to landscape: the Sublime, the Picturesque, and
the Geological. The Sublime, he says, was concerned with the effi-
cacy of natural forces; the Picturesque sought to deny or contain
such forces; and the Geological ‘‘stresse[d] the roles of natural for-
ces through time’’ (p. 66). Three paintings by Turner are repro-
duced with the intention of illustrating the three Ômodes’: ÔThe
Passage of the St Gothard’ (in the Swiss Alps); ÔAeneas and the
Sybyl, Lake Avernus’ (a lake in a crater in the Phlegraean Fields
near Naples); and ÔVesuvius in 1817’. Whether they are apt exem-
plifications is perhaps open to question, as the categories are neces-
sarily imprecise. For example, one might well take the view that the
St Gothard canyon is a manifestation of geological phenomena
that might capture the imagination of the geologically-interested
Romantic – though it is a sublime scene! And in this regard such
Ôcapture’ is really the sort of thing that Dean’s book is about. That
is, he gives a large quantity of interesting detail about how writers
and artists were inspired or influenced by the new discoveries in
geology, rather than how geologists were themselves Romantically
inclined (and from my own reading I am not persuaded that many
of the top-rank geologists were Romantics as characterised above,
though some later authors such as Hugh Miller and Archibald
Geikie certainly were).
What was Romanticism? This question has been asked many
times and answered in countless different ways. I like the suggestion
 GEOLOGY AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION 271
that it was the antithesis of Classicism. The Romantic did not sup-
pose that every problem could have a determinate calculable solu-
tion. There is an untidiness and contingency about things that
precludes there being simple solutions to complex problems of nat-
ure, society, morals, etc. Romanticism also entailed (or entails) a
yearning for that which is unattainable, whether it was the past, some
distant land, some exotic place, spiritual enlightenment or perfection,
or some unattainable lady (or gentleman) who could only be wor-
shipped from afar. Romanticism also had overlaps with religious
sensibilities and being Ôattuned’ with nature (or Nature). Thus it had
affinities with German Nature Philosophy.
Whatever Romanticism actually was (or is) there is little disagree-
ment as to who were Romantic writers, painters, or musicians: e.g.,
Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Turner, Martin, or Berlioz. Certain pla-
ces had Romantic cachet too: the Lake District, the Alps, Venice,
Rome, Istanbul, Fingal’s Cave, Tahiti, and so on. So one could
almost offer Ôostensive definitions’ of Romanticism. Geology, as the
study of the Earth’s contingent history and with the demand that the
practitioner should be out in the countryside or the wild was ideal as
an emerging science suited to the European Romantic imagination. It
revealed strange scenes and exotic creatures from the otherwise unat-
tainable and unimaginable past. Mediaeval church paintings fre-
quently showed imagined beasts and fiends inhabiting Hell, ready to
devour sinners. By 1800, these hellish imaginings were in decline, as
an outcome of eighteenth-century rationalism; but geology could,
through its excavations of strange and sometimes fearsome creatures,
also prompt fervid imaginations about a remote past, which had
never before been approached empirically, as it was by the emerging
band of geological fieldworkers. Dean’s comprehensive study, where
such Romantic Ôgeo-imagination’ is the object of detailed analysis, is
the first of its kind that I have encountered in monographic form. As
Martin Rudwick has said in the titles of two recent important books,
geology learnt how to Ôburst the limits of time’ and discover Ôworlds
before Adam’. These achievements were what excited the Romantic
imagination.
Samuel Coleridge is famous for his remark that he liked to con-
sort with natural philosophers such as Humphry Davy – to Ôimprove
his stock of metaphors’. In a sense that kind of Ôimprovement’ is also
what Dean’s book is all about. He has minutely studied the literature
of his chosen period and painstakingly demonstrates the remarkable
272 REVIEW

extent to which geological notions appeared in Romantic English

writings and manifested themselves also in various paintings. Some
of the evidence is quite striking. John Keats, for example, is often
thought to have been an opponent of science, suggesting that New-
ton Ôunweaved’ the rainbow with his prism, destroying its beauty by
his physical analysis of light. But in Keats’ Endymion, Dean reminds
us, the poet gave an imagined word-picture of a subterranean ocean,
with

Skeletons of man,
Of beast, behemoth, and leviathan,
And elephant, and eagle, and huge jaw
Of nameless monster.

The Biblical Ôbeast, behemoth, and leviathan’, he suggests, were

generalised prehistoric monsters, likely inspired by the contempo-
rary excavations of ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs. The elephant
could have referred to a mammoth, the eagle to a pterodactyl. The
nameless monster was probably the ÔMaastricht animal’ (or moso-
saur), found in 1770. These suggestions seem plausible to me. So
Keats was not by any means indifferent to or untouched by scien-
tific developments.
More secure examples are provided, for example, by Lord
Byron, who in his Cain avowedly took Georges Cuvier’s ideas
about successive Ôrevolutions’, regarding them as compatible with
Genesis. Byron’s Cain led to various rebuttals, which Dean exam-
ines in an interesting way, showing how some readers, at least,
objected to the injection of geology into literature. But the point
that Byron the poet interested himself in contemporary science
(to improve his stock of metaphors, analogies and similes, I sug-
gest) is surely proven.
Taking the volume as a whole, we are offered an immense num-
ber of examples of this ilk to back up the thesis that Romantic
writers were interested in, and clearly well informed about, contem-
porary developments in geology. But the book offers much more
than that. For in fact it also offers a history of geoscience for the
seventy years covered by its study (with some of the authors of
that period making backward glances to earlier writers such as
Thomas Burnet in the seventeenth century), and how developments
in the study of earthquakes and volcanoes, rock types, caves and
landforms,…, and (most particularly) fossils and stratigraphy found
 GEOLOGY AND THE ROMANTIC IMAGINATION 273
their way into the literature and art of the period. Thus we have a
new and detailed history of the early years of geology (especially
British geology), seen through a glass provided by a student of
English literature. Considerable attention is also given to the sec-
ondary literature relating to all matters raised in the book. I there-
fore think it is a significant and valuable contribution to the history
of geoscience. It has just a few scholarly lapses. For example, the
English traveller to Austria and Hungary (and later Australia),
Robert Townson, is referred to as Robert Townsend. And rather
too many quotations are not given precise references. But reviewers
are never fully satisfied.
School of History and Philosophy
The University of New South Wales
Sydney, Australia