Jonathan Smith's fascinating new book is part of a wider turn to the visual in two related bodies of scholarship on nineteenth-century Britain. Studies of literature and culture have been much influenced by Kate Flint's The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge, 2000), which argued for the distinctiveness and novelty of the period's attitudes towards sight. In historical writing on the sciences, meanwhile, leading scholars such as Jennifer Tucker and Bernard Lightman have demonstrated the integral involvement of images in the making as well as the communicating of scientific arguments. Surprisingly, Charles Darwin, serviced by a legendary scholarly ‘industry’, has been largely absent from most of this work. The absence is all the more remarkable given the centrality of the visual to Darwin's evolutionary thought. Accounting naturalistically for the purported perfection of the organ of vision was, after all, pivotal to Darwin's attempt to overturn natural-theological arguments which posited the eye as the ultimate proof of intelligent design. The scrupulous care and attention that Darwin paid to the production of the illustrations in his books also deserves notice. Or consider the crucial difficulty Darwin faced, as Smith notes, of rendering visible the immensely protracted and infinitesimal workings of natural selection. Akin to Gillian Beer's well-known treatment in Darwin's Plots (2nd edn, Cambridge, 2000) of Darwin's difficulties and subtle accommodations in employing linguistic resources that implied intention and agency to articulate a theory which disavows them, Smith suggests that the ‘existing visual conventions of the natural sciences’ which Darwin inherited ‘were associated in varying degrees with conceptions of species fixity’ (p. 1). As with his use of language, Darwin's response was generally to retain such conventions while subtly manipulating and reworking them for his own particular purposes. Again running parallel with Beer's influential argument that how Darwin said things is a crucial component of his thinking and not just a layer that can be skimmed off, Smith proposes that Darwin's use of such visual materials is not ‘merely “illustrative”’ (p. 9), or a means of simply representing certain scientific concepts, but is constitutive of those very ideas.

The Origin itself, of course, contains only a single illustration, the now iconic abstract diagram that succinctly captures the branching patterns of natural selection. In Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture Smith has, for the most part, no choice but to look beyond Darwin's most celebrated work in examining his use of a variety of visual materials in presenting his evolutionary arguments, as well as his complex engagement with nineteenth-century visual culture more generally. This seeming limitation is actually one of the book's chief merits, as Smith ranges broadly across Darwin's career, from his volumes on barnacles in the early 1850s to his final book on worms and vegetable mould some thirty years later, focusing particularly on the botanical publications of the 1860s and 1870s as well as The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, where Smith builds on Phillip Prodger's pioneering work on Darwin and photography. As such, Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture presents a much fresher, more detailed and wider-ranging portrayal of Darwin than the more Origin-centric versions of him that still prevail even in some scholarly accounts. The book, which is as profusely illustrated as its topic demands, is organized into broadly chronological chapters on Darwin's barnacles, birds, plants, faces and worms, each of which examines these particular facets of Darwin's work in relation to rival visual presentations of the same subjects by the likes of Philip Gosse, John Gould, John Ruskin and Charles Bell. Indeed, Smith affords such a wonderfully thick context for each of these issues that his book often reads more like a general study of the pictorial conventions of nineteenth-century natural history. Again like Beer in Darwin's Plots on the reciprocal relations between Darwin and language, Smith gives a strong sense of Darwin's own impact on Victorian visual culture, and especially the burgeoning genre of caricature, as of it on him.

Drawing on W. J. T. Mitchell's suggestive notion of the ‘imagetext’, Smith contends that the numerous illustrations and accompanying letterpress deployed in Darwin's publications must be understood as working in a dynamic synthesis with the text rather than viewed in isolation as merely adjuncts to the separate and more significant writing – something that the textually oriented training of most literary critics and historians of science has rendered the regrettable norm. Smith himself is a professor of English, whose previous monograph Fact and Feeling (Madison, WI, 1994) examined the attitude towards Baconian methodology of canonical literary writers such as Ruskin and George Eliot, but in Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture he surveys much broader areas of nineteenth-century material culture, as well as offering some fantastically acute close readings of particular images, such as the many mid-century paintings of seaside scenes whose foreground depictions of natural history collecting are often disrupted by hints of the availability of less rational and respectable recreations, like donkey rides or furtive male voyeurism, creeping in at the edges. Such pungent details are significant. To take but one example, Darwin's illustrations of the curious sexual arrangements of barnacles must be located, as Smith argues convincingly, within this wider cultural nexus of both visual and verbal representations of the marine grotesque.

Smith's emphasis on the visual components of evolution inevitably leads him to consider Darwin's attempts during the 1870s to account for beauty as a product of either sexual selection or, in the case of plants, natural selection. Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture's extensive discussion of this provokingly physiological aesthetics, as well as its energetic popularization at the hands of the prolific Grant Allen, affords by far the best historical account of this neglected and hugely controversial aspect of Darwin's thought currently available. In so doing, Smith's excellent study joins recent books including Rebecca Stott's Darwin and the Barnacle (London, 2003) and George Levine's Darwin Loves You (Princeton, 2006) which, while emerging principally from the perspective of science and literature studies, speak equally to historians of science and to literary critics.