In this book of interconnected essays, David Amigoni interrogates the meanings of culture in nineteenth-century British literary and scientific writing. He does so with a view to showing that the connotative interplay of the concepts of culture, evolution, and colonialism in the writings of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Darwin, and Huxley—to name just four of the writers he discusses at length—was more complex than established traditions of literary criticism have generally assumed. Culture, Amigoni argues, was rarely if ever a stable concept in either literary or scientific discourse. Rather, it was an evolving and often ontologically disruptive intermediating field—a discursive “hothouse,” as he puts it, in which cross-fertilization took place between scientific, philosophical and literary accounts of humanity's true place and purpose in the cosmos, often with unanticipated and troubling consequences.

Amigoni suggests that in making sense of the hothouse that was culture we would do well to approach those who labored within it as having sought to make sense of the concept in ways more akin to present-day anthropologists and cultural sociologists than we realize. Indeed, Amigoni offers a persuasive case for recognizing that “some of the most active interpretive devices in the cultural discourse of the present—defamiliarisation, hybridity, cybernetics—carry a genealogy that can be linked back to `culture' as the nineteenth-century field of symbolic power that hosted complex encounter between literary and scientific discourse” (3).

Much of the best insights Amigoni offers derive from his sensitivity to how conflictual responses to interpretations of culture often came to be tellingly articulated in informal notes and marginalia penned as aids to memory in writing new works, and also in discursive footnotes and appendices to both poems and scientific treatises. Amigoni uses these sources to illuminate many subtle connections between discourses on culture, natural history, and colonial ambition through the course of the nineteenth century that current disciplinary aims and assumptions have disposed us to overlook.

It is impossible to summarize fully the intellectual terrain Amigoni covers, or go beyond noting some of the more interesting things he brings to light in the journey. In the book's introduction, he discusses the orientalist and colonial administrator John Crawfurd's account of his 1826 mission to Rangoon, drawing parallels between Crawfurd's efforts to understand Burmese religion and Clifford Geertz's conceptualizing culture as a “web symbolic signification” (8). Crawfurd remains a neglected figure in British ethnography; but as Amigoni shows, reading Crawfurd's account of his time at the Burmese court of Ava, mindful of Geertz's work, alerts us to the presence of unresolved speculation and uncertainty about the boundaries between humans and animals in British discourses on culture and the ends of colonialism by the second decade of the nineteenth century. What is more, Amigoni points to the blurring within Crawfurd's ethnology of taxonomic distinctions between animals and men as possibly an important stimulus to Darwin's thinking about the causes and limits of variation in species. Similarly, Amigoni treats Huxley's conception of culture drawing on Bourdieu's analysis of intellectual fields. The result is that more so than recent commentators, Amigoni makes sense of Huxley's wariness of the eugenic ambitions of his contemporaries and draws attention to his naturalistic reinterpretations of received notions of sympathy and fellow feeling as expressed in contemporary literary and theological circles.

The first chapter of the study considers Coleridge's later writings in the context of his antagonism to scientific materialism. Amigoni discusses Coleridge's prose writings on Christianity and his formulating of an idealist natural history of humanity in opposition to the evolutionary claims of contemporary materialist physiology. He highlights Coleridge's concern to show that humanity was subject to evolution, in the sense that through the gifts of reason and free will man enjoyed the divinely bestowed potential to achieve both moral and material improvement. Amigoni then examines how Coleridge's thinking about the cultivation of moral evolution, notably in Church and State (1830), was both informed and problematized by his engagement Crawfurd's ethnographic reportage.

In chapter 2, Amigoni explores Wordsworth's concern with sympathetic observation of nature as a source of mental inspiration and the creation of culture. In doing so he draws our attention to Wordsworth's reflections via the poetic figure of wanderer on the creation and curation of cultural traditions and the connections between the cultivation of sympathetic observation, the transmission of knowledge, and the growth of civilization in times of growing colonial ambition. Yet Amigoni also draws attention to the poet's celebration of the active, sympathetic mind being nonetheless alloyed by fears that emotional receptiveness to the impulses of nature and the earth's deep past could erode faith in humanity's distinctiveness from the rest of animate creation.

In chapter 3, Amigoni reads Darwin's Journal of Researches appraising the naturalist's responses to the familiar and the exotic in the context of growing colonial transplantation of culture. He teases out the connections between Darwin's puzzling over the question of organic variation and his poetic sensibilities in response to encountering new landscapes, animals, and men during the course of the Beagle voyage. This portrait of Darwin suggests that Wordsworth in particular may have furnished Darwin with symbolic resources highlighting parallels between colonial culture and colonization in nature, which were to shape his thinking about how variation led to speciation. Chapter 4 selectively explores the competing accounts of culture that emerged in the wake of the remarkable assent Darwinian modes of evolutionary thought gained in British medicoscientific circles from the 1860s onward. Here, Amigoni revisits to make a more expansive assessment of Arnold's vision of culture and that of evolutionists, notably Alfred Russel Wallace. Amigoni also says much that is interesting about Huxley's scientific journalism, Wallace's thinking about culture in the light of his religious and politics sensibilities, and how key literary and scientific writings of the early nineteenth century became resources in the construction of competing late Victorian interpretations of culture.

Amigoni's last two chapters focus on the influence of evolutionary thought by the late nineteenth century in fostering growing awareness of culture as a potentially diverse and mutable repertoire of symbolic practices. In chapter 5, he discusses Samuel Butler's literary reworking of evolutionary theory in the light of his religious and colonial experiences, and his use of Lamarck in the face of the anarchic implications of Darwinian theory to recast the history of organic development as essentially a history of progressive, purposeful “moral struggle.” Chapter 6 forms a companion piece, exploring the connections between evolutionary thought and the culture of the self as they find expression in Gosse's Father and Son.

Amigoni offers a richly suggestive study of how notions of culture in Britain evolved through the circulation and often unpredictable influence of key writings in various genres on culture, biological evolution, and colonialism from the 1820s to the turn of the twentieth century. At times his use of literary conceit in arguing for the conceptual interplay between scientific and literary discourse will leave historians hungering for stronger evidence of influence. But he nonetheless provides many valuable insights into how the meanings and values of culture were subject to ongoing evolution amid the competing claims of scientific, theological, and poetic accounts of reality.