In Bloomsbury Scientists: Science and Art in the Wake of Darwin, Michael Boulter, a paleobiologist who trained at University College London during the 1960s, charts the main developments in biology from the time of Darwin's death in 1882 to the death of British zoologist and evolutionary biologist Edwin Ray Lankester in 1929.

Literary scholars in particular should be aware that the “Bloomsbury” referenced in Boulter's title is meant primarily to designate the physical location in London rather than the artists, writers, and intellectuals of Virginia Woolf's Bloomsbury Group. Still, Boulter situates his study in Bloomsbury because it offers a distinct atmosphere of “cultural achievement” brought about by a mix of artists and scientists with different backgrounds and frequently conflicting interests (161). In this way, readers become acquainted with thinkers like botanist Daniel Oliver, physiologist Sir John Sanderson, chemist Sir William Ramsay, statistician Karl Pearson, tax collector Benjamin Kidd, ecologist Charles Tansley (memorialized in Woolf's To the Lighthouse), playwright George Bernard Shaw, novelists Samuel Butler and H. G. Wells, economist John Maynard Keynes, vorticist Wyndham Lewis, and philosopher Karl Popper, among many, many others.

This is not to say that those associated with the Bloomsbury Group are not featured. Boulter mentions Leslie Stephen early and often as a sort of exemplary figure around whom “the social and cultural circles … of London's artistic and scientific life turned” throughout the 1880s (5). Roger Fry appears as a transitional character—he trained in the 1890s as a science student but eventually made the leap from laboratory to library as he became increasingly interested in aesthetic form. While Boulter incorrectly identifies Fry's evocative post-impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries as presenting “Monet and the Post-Impressionists,” when Fry was, in fact, revealing the work of Édouard Manet, he does, nonetheless, set Fry up as a significant figure who “dipped [his] toes into the scientific waters and then withdrew … confused about where science would take [him], and unsure that [he] could afford to make a living as a scientist” (149).

Virginia Woolf (an early lover of insects and secretary of the Stephen Family Entomological Society) grew to dislike “how men of science objectified nature” (125). She believed it was “safer” for her ilk at Gordon Square, most of whom had been Cambridge Apostles, to “stay with what they knew” and “leave the risks of dabbling in science to others,” particularly the men and women around University College London and the British Museum (125). In this way, Woolf retreated to the dark places of psychology and began to write more convincingly of character, thought, desire, and memory, though, in many ways, she never abandoned her love of insects and other small, overlooked creatures (think of the yellow butterfly in The Voyage Out, the moth in The Waves and To the Lighthouse, the snail in “A Mark on the Wall” and “Kew Gardens”).

For those familiar with Woolf's oeuvre, “Kew Gardens” can serve as a valuable port of entry into the narrative structure of Bloomsbury Scientists, as Boulter attempts to bring together an endless array of montage-like biographies. “Kew Gardens” reads as a series of juxtapositions between scenes of nature, though it depicts a single snail as it makes its way through a flower bed and moments of human interaction. Bloomsbury Scientists, too, reads as a dialectic between vignettes on the scientific advancements of the period and discussions on the transpirings of the arts. Through it all runs Edwin Ray Lankester—Boulter's snail, as it were, whose life helps to mark the passage of time as a cast of disparate characters enter the narrative to cultivate the garden of scientific and humanistic thought in the early twentieth century.

Boulter characterizes Lankester rightfully as one at home in almost all fields of biological knowledge. He was a prominent Darwinian, educated at Cambridge, and a fellow of Exeter College. He also believed that science, more than anything else, could “help improve humanity” (36). Following professorships at University College London and Oxford, Lankester was named director of the natural history department of the British Museum from 1898 to 1907, a service for which he was eventually knighted.

Like Woolf's “Kew Gardens,” the genius of Boulter's work lies in the structured view of existence it presents. Boulter demonstrates an inter-involvement and an intimacy between the arts and the sciences as thinkers from various disciplines work to resolve how humans fit into the natural world. Boulter captures assorted developments, both scientific (such as advances in evolutionary biology, natural selection, horticulture and pharmacy, eugenics, ecology, paleontology, genetics, chemistry, physics, psychology, and psychopathology) and humanistic (like Fry's post-impressionist exhibition, mysticism and spirituality, and sexuality studies) and configures a spatial whole built on complicated, sometimes hostile, sometimes friendly, relations. To his credit, Boulter succeeds in finding the coherence within.

The danger of any account that jumps from biographical sketch to biographical sketch is that it can easily leave readers hoping for more analysis, and Bloomsbury Scientists does have that effect. Lankester cites the disappointment H. G. Wells felt after enrolling in an unsuccessful course on stratigraphy at the National School of Science: “most of the lectures were badly delivered,” Wells complained, “full of facts and with very little interpretation” (61). Such a statement strikes this reader as perhaps the most appropriate evaluation of Bloomsbury Scientists: full of information but too often lacking in substance or significance beyond the author's own nostalgic experiences and associations. Likewise, Boulter's text is sprinkled with, and, at times, tortured by passages of sweeping speculation: at one point, for example, Boulter insists that Samuel Butler and George Bernard Shaw must have spoken to each other in the British Museum reading room, and in this abstract encounter, “they would have been unable to resist sharing their approval of Lamarckian evolution” (50). In another moment, Boulter imagines an extended dinner scene between Shaw and Lankester, where Shaw “might have made evolution seem brighter and more palatable than the scientists were able to, endowing it with a benevolent life force” (41). It is clear that Boulter has a great range of knowledge and sympathy when it comes to scientific discovery. He provides thorough descriptions of the thought, the doctrine, and the eminent men and women who make the actors in his field—often with a memory of facts that renders his knowledge singularly vivid, instructive, and real. Yet his discussion of the literary and artistic landscape feels superficial and speculative.

Nonetheless, the aims of this study are admirable. As Boulter insists, scientists and humanists have been drawn together by common conceptions of the human for a very long time: collectively, their energy changed the social mood of the late nineteenth century and ushered forth a new synthesis of knowledge in the twentieth. In Bloomsbury Scientists, he highlights the likeness between the two camps but offers a new slant. Indeed, as the sweeping history of the text shows, we, like E. Ray Lankester himself, are always ready for a new turn, but can't help but be comforted by that which came before.