Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 1 (2006), p. 168

Although published by a university press, this is a trade book rather than an academic monograph. It is printed on heavy, glossy paper and contains many illustrations, often in colour. Its topic is the Victorians’ discovery of the earth’s history through geological time, with plentiful observations on the cultural significance of these often disturbing revelations. In one sense, I was surprised by the book’s contents – from the title I had expected something focused mainly on the Victorians’ discovery of prehistoric archaeology, which opened up the whole idea of a primitive ‘stone age’ preceding recorded history. But Freeman’s definition of prehistory is restricted to the pre-human past, with the exception of the one event which was traditionally taken to link earth and human history, the Noachian deluge.

The book offers detailed studies of many aspects of the history of geology, palaeontology and evolution theory. It is particularly strong on charting the literary and artistic responses to the discovery that the earth’s structure was best understood as something shaped by a long history of geological and biological change. Freeman has already written on railways and the Victorian imagination, and here we see the role played by railway cuttings in revealing the earth’s internal structure. There are many other fascinating insights into the ways in which the Victorians’ view of landscape was transformed by the new discoveries, and this, I presume, will be the book’s chief interest to readers concerned with agricultural history. Some themes are more original than others – the role of natural history museums as ‘cathedrals of science’, for instance, has already been widely explored by other scholars.

My own approach to the book, however, is through an interest in the history of geology and evolution theory, and from this perspective it is less satisfying. Freeman is certainly in command of the primary literature in these fields, at least as far as the 1860s, and he has made a serious attempt to grapple with some of the modern secondary literature. But he is much less secure on the late-Victorian period, and thus misses some of the most important reinterpretations offered by modern historians of science. All too often, his approach to the issues is old-fashioned, and succeeds only in perpetuating myths that historians of science have been trying to deconstruct for decades. Geology is still focused on the old heroes, James Hutton and Charles Lyell – there is little to show that it was the rival catastrophists who articulated the developmental model of earth history which dominated Victorian thought. And the Darwinian revolution is still presented very much in terms of the challenge of materialism to traditional religion. Freeman shows little interest in the ways in which late nineteenth-century scientists (including the architects of the emerging human sciences) developed alternatives to the Darwinian theory which would preserve a teleological view of history in which the human race emerged as the final goal of life’s development. Noah’s flood may have still been a serious issue in the 1830s, but by the 1870s it had been marginalized by a model of biological, cultural and social progress which linked the life sciences with anthropology and archaeology into a powerful evolutionary paradigm.

I found this book simultaneously fascinating and frustrating. It helped me to understand some of the wider interactions of the earth sciences with Victorian visual culture, but it seemed out of touch with many of the latest interpretations offered by historians of science dealing with this and related areas of study. In the end, I suspect that if Freeman had (as his title implies) dealt also with the emergence of an evolutionary view of human prehistory, he would have produced a better-balanced account, at least for the later Victorian period.