Discovering Gilgamesh: Geology, narrative and the historical sublime in Victorian culture

By Vybarr Cregan-Reid

In 1872, a young archaeologist at the British Museum made a tremendous discovery. While he was working his way through a Mesopotamian ‘slush pile’, George Smith, a self-taught expert in ancient languages, happened upon a Babylonian version of Noah’s Flood. His research suggested this ‘Deluge Tablet’ pre-dated the writing of Genesis by a millennium or more. Smith went on to translate what later became The Epic of Gilgamesh, perhaps the oldest and most complete work of literature from any culture.

Against the backdrop of innovative readings of a range of paintings, novels, histories and photographs (by figures like Dickens, Eliot, James, Dyce, Turner, Macaulay and Carlyle), this book demonstrates the Gordian complexity of the Victorians’ relationship with history, while also seeking to highlight the Epic’s role in influencing models of time in late-Victorian geology.

Discovering Gilgamesh will be of interest to readers, students and researchers in literary studies, Victorian studies, history, intellectual history, art history and archaeology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526102386

Book preview

Part I: Gilgamesh

Introduction

[I]t is mostly in periods of turmoil and strife and confusion that people care much about history.⁴

(William Morris, News from Nowhere)

The rediscovery of the ancient Epic of Gilgamesh in 1872 became the fulcrum for a series of debates about time and history in the Victorian period. The oldest epic excavated from the earth contained stories that had been thought to be original to the Old Testament, but Gilgamesh , it was revealed, was written many centuries before even the earliest parts of the Bible. The manner in which the discovery was reported in the international media and the way in which the stories of King Gilgamesh were later taken up in periodicals, journals, and geological theory are indicative of an anxiety in Victorian culture concerning the status of history. Many critics, commentators, and historians have assumed that the extreme age of the earth was something of a settled matter for the Victorians after around 1830 (with the publication of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology ). ⁵ If this was the case, then there could not have been a Gilgamesh ‘controversy’ (as the poem’s first translator called it), where ideas about the age of the earth and about the length of humanity’s cultural history, so hotly debated at the beginning of the nineteenth century, again circulated in the international press. ⁶ The time of Gilgamesh’s rediscovery was also one when interpretations and chronologies of the Bible were again being tested against other forms of historical evidence. And finally, the controversy revisited the centuries-old question of whether there had ever been a global flood with only a few survivors from which we are descended. There are whole series of such debates about the age of the earth, going back to the chronologies of the Venerable Bede, but they take on a certain urgency and considerable loquacious variety in the Enlightenment through to the early/mid-nineteenth century. At the latter point, the once-volcanic debates that had fascinated, rather than simply divided, geognosists, earth physicists, and finally geologists, cooled somewhat. For the savants of the early nineteenth century the age of the earth was believed to consist of aeons of time far beyond the five to six millennia of the most prominent biblical chronologers. For Europe and America’s mid-nineteenth century savants deep time was not really an issue when set against the young-earth model of time; instead, deep time was only something that needed to be titivated and refined by further research.

So if the idea of deep time was more or less settled for ‘western’ savants, then what is the controversy that surrounds the discovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh? It is a number of things, but the first is a cautionary warning that savants are not an entire culture; they do not write all of its novels, paint all of its canvasses, or compose all its music. What we can see in the nineteenth century is that some of the debates that emerge as a result of the epic’s translation reveal at the very least a considerable tension in Victorian ideas about the past, the present, and the future. Had the Victorians internalised ideas about deep time (the 4.55 billion years of history in which we now believe) then the rediscovery of the Epic of Gilgamesh would have been of interest principally to antiquarian specialists rather than the newspaper- and periodical-reading masses. The Gilgamesh controversy tells us that history, for the Victorians, was not a settled matter at all. While there are no stable models for how all ‘the Victorians’ may have thought, the controversy does suggest that the sublimity of deep time and the concept of short-earth, narrative-based biblical time were both stubbornly crouched in the reading public’s consciousness. If this is the case, then the mid- to late-Victorian period begins to look quite different, resembling an era in which numerous conflicting models of time coexist, rather than a more straightforward paradigm of one model shifting and giving way to the other.

I was, and still am, fascinated by a sentence that I read a long time ago in Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots in which she explained that ‘evolutionary theory implied a new myth of the past: instead of the garden at the beginning, there was the sea and the swamp’.⁷ Where history had once been anthropocentric, starting with stories of humanity, the past had become something much stranger and emptier. It seemed to me then as it does now that the Victorians had had to undergo, endure, and internalise a change to their being almost unimaginable in its complexity. They were forced to question who they were, where they had come from, where they were placed in nature, and where they were going. But it is not possible to speak of ‘the Victorians’ as a homogeneous group. The Victorian intelligentsia may have been cautiously enthusiastic about evolutionary theory (in understandably varied ways), but that does not mean that all ‘Victorians’ had accepted Darwin’s ideas, or indeed Charles Lyell’s. An international debate over the translation of a newly rediscovered ancient epic is a reminder of the innate instability of the Victorian view of history.

This book, then, is about the Gilgamesh controversy and what it reveals about the Gordian and complex status of time and history in Victorian culture, as well as how it is tied up in geological theory at the end of the century. This book’s aim, though, is not to demonstrate the unidirectional influence of Gilgamesh on Victorian culture or vice versa; instead, it is an assessment of how the rediscovery of the poem both emerges from and contributes to ongoing debates about the nature of time and history in the nineteenth century. To that end, the book is also a rereading of the Victorians’ principal modes of historical narrative so that a more accurate assessment of the cultural, poetic, aesthetic, and political productivity of what I will call the ‘historical sublime’ in the period is possible. Moreover, it will demonstrate how the Gilgamesh controversy is integral to the conceptualisation of an ever-increasingly sublime model of history at the end of the nineteenth century.

At every point throughout this book, the idea that drives the analysis and argument is that in order to understand the complexity of the Victorians’ relationship with the past (and perhaps more importantly, their present and future, too) we must be prepared to accept the state of confusion that they were experiencing regarding the status of time as they understood it. The interdisciplinary approach that this book adopts is integral to this goal. A monograph on the representation of time in any one of the three ‘arts’ that I look at here would yield more specific and detailed results. For example, the chapter on nineteenth-century historiography would be improved by a much wider consideration of the methodologies of Victorian historians like J. A. Froude, E. A. Freeman, William Stubbs, S. R. Gardiner, and even Leslie Stephen. Similarly, the chapters on the representation of time and history in painting and in the novel again would be improved by wider consideration and focus on authors, movements, genres, or subgenres. A study that moves across the disciplines, albeit in a more particular manner, is able to show how the confusion over historical timeframes saturates Victorian culture and is not merely the interest of the novel, or any other individual art form. In each case, the Victorian authors, historians, photographers, and painters that I have chosen reveal the lack of coherence in their precise understanding or knowledge of the past. More importantly, they each demonstrate the move towards a more sublime understanding of history that emerges after Gilgamesh is taken up by late-Victorian geological theory.

Working under the assumption that the extreme length of history was a completed debate in the Victorian consciousness, many previous studies have taken for granted that Charles Lyell’s theory of gradualism (where the earth is formed through slow change over millions of years) had been triumphant in explaining the mysteries that the earth presented.⁸ But the Victorian media interest in the new translation of Gilgamesh (coupled with the financial support of a national newspaper for further excavations in Ottoman Iraq), the mainstream publication of the poem, the public interest in it both in Britain and in America, all of these would not have existed were it not for the fact that biblical narratives such as Noah’s flood still held sway in the Victorian consciousness as a valid representation of times past.

Many books that address these debates about time and history in the Victorian period have been drawn towards a focus on Darwin’s contribution to the field of study, leading in my view towards two errors concerning the dissemination and understanding of scientific ideas in Victorian culture. Across the disciplines, Gillian Beer, Michael J. Freeman, Nicolaas Rupke, George P. Landow, Sally Shuttleworth, Colin Renfrew, Marcia Pointon, Norman Cohn, John Burrow, and George Levine have all made compelling cases for the pivotal importance of a historicised understanding of both time and history in the Victorian period – particularly in the context of Darwin’s theory of evolution.⁹ But, in their concentration on Darwin as the focal point for thinking about the impact of science in the period, they have, to very differing degrees, prioritised his influence on the cultural life of the Victorians, rather than the lack of it. As such, they have not been able to sufficiently emphasise the tensions that exist in various forms of Victorian historical representation. While Darwin necessarily had to have internalised the idea of deep time in order to develop a theory of natural selection, the extreme length of history was not something that his theory set out to prove, or indeed contribute to. Furthermore, the approach of historians (of art, literature, or science) that engage with such scientific debates has often been based on a particular author. The majority of the studies of Darwin currently piled high in the bookshops focus more on the ingenuity or controversial nature of his ideas and not on the Victorians’ understanding or reception of them. The longstanding assumption in Victorian studies seems to have been that, except for cases that involved a particular controversy (for example, the Essays and Reviews scandal, or the Huxley-Wilberforce debate, both of 1860) Victorian audiences of science were silenced by their assumed passivity and tacit agreement with new ideas. Little account has been taken of the enterprising and creative processes involved in the act of reading itself.¹⁰ This book will not attempt to create a new historiographical paradigm that will enable such investigation (James Secord’s expansive Victorian Sensation is very good on outlining the difficulties of such an endeavour while also positing a solution to them).¹¹ It is all too easy to forget that Darwin’s laudable crowning as the principal thinker of nineteenth-century science was posthumous and not contemporary. Even Darwin’s Plots, with its valuable assessment of his influence upon the work of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy (among others), traces the impact of evolution by means of natural selection via the highest of high culture, paying less attention to the Victorian reading public’s lack of engagement with these ideas. While this book is not a reception study, and will not attempt to understand the complexity of all Victorian belief, the subject matter of the controversy itself does reveal that ideas about deep time were still the subject of wide, public interest in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Rather than looking directly at the impact of Darwin’s work or the state of new biblical criticism in the period, as many sophisticated studies have succeeded in doing, this book exposes the Victorian reading public’s confusion over the temporal bedrock of Darwin’s ideas.

Writers specifically working on the history of geology (not evolution) have tended to be more alert to the nineteenth-century uncertainty concerning the nature of history. Nicolaas Rupke’s The Great Chain of History is an account of geology’s heyday in British universities in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rupke’s range of periodisation is shared approximately by Martin Rudwick’s two volumes on the politics of geology, Worlds Before Adam and Bursting the Limits of Time, both addressing how geology came to be a historical science; the span of the two volumes reaches from the 1780s through to around 1845. Ralph O’Connor’s The Earth on Show assesses the performative aspects of geology’s cultural transmission, and likewise comes to a halt at the midnineteenth century, as does J. M. I. Klaver’s Geology and Religious Sentiment, and understandably John Wyatt’s Wordsworth and the Geologists.¹² Via similar periodisation, each in their way suggests that the debates over the extreme age of the earth that geology revealed were over by the mid-nineteenth century. One of the finest accounts of the life and impact of geology and deep time, again in the first half of the nineteenth century, is James Secord’s Victorian Sensation. It is an excellent redrawing of the received landscape or understanding of the circulation of scientific discourse in the mid-nineteenth century. It seeks to challenge the accepted view of science in nineteenth-century culture, persuasively arguing that the supremacy of Darwin has been written back into history, and that we ought to attempt to understand the period on its own terms, rather than those of the twenty-first century (which readily accepts Darwin’s theory as the most persuasive). True to its title, Mott T. Greene’s Geology in the Nineteenth Century does straddle both halves of the century, including discussion of Eduard Suess (with even a brief mention of Gilgamesh), but this is a geologist’s history, rather than an intellectual one.¹³ Greene’s subject matter is the progress of the science towards a more complete understanding of its own central issues (like the formation of mountain ranges or global plate tectonics); receiving perhaps insufficient attention is the science’s cultural or historical meaning in the period.

Of the comparative-literature studies of the Epic of Gilgamesh, David Damrosch’s The Buried Book stands out as the fullest assessment of the life of the poem through the ages. With an innovative reverse-narrative structure, his is a deft history of the poem’s life and dissemination. He carefully reconstructs how the poem has stepped in and out of the spotlight in the several millennia since its creation using some fascinating source material, but he is rightly less concerned with tracing the broader cultural impact of the poem in the time of its rediscovery.

While there is evidently a strong field of existing studies, either on Gilgamesh or on debates on the historical sublime in the period, none of these works bring together the material in one focussed study. To the detriment of Victorian studies, cultural historians of geology have proved themselves less interested in the science’s life in the late nineteenth century. By exposing our received misunderstanding of the Victorians’ relationship with time, this book aims to provide a reassessment of how history was (or was not) understood by the Victorians, and how that tension was so very productive in nineteenth-century culture.

The historical sublime

‘The historical sublime’ is a way of describing the new paradigms of time and history that emerge in the nineteenth century as a result of geological endeavour and debate. It is a means of describing the change that takes place when historical ideas formed through biblical interpretation are rewritten, reconceptualised, or even replaced by others that are neither didactic nor mythical but predominantly theoretical. In drawing upon ideas of sublimity, the term attempts to convey the complex and elaborate character of the emergent model of history in the period. Namely, that it is one that mobilises emptiness, extreme perspective, and narratological lack. To some extent it signals its own negation; the historical sublime is sublime precisely because it is not historical in the traditional sense. The historical sublime represents depths of time that are not narratable in the same way as other forms of historiography in the period. In Macaulay and Carlyle’s histories (which I will go on to discuss in Part II) there is a human chain that reaches back at least two millennia, and this is what their histories are concerned with. Amongst others, Austen Henry Layard, Henry Rawlinson, and George Smith (three figures that I will return to in the next chapter) pushed back into a third and fourth millennium in their committed interest in Babylonian history. Geology, though, reached much farther and deeper into time. Charles Lyell refused to be drawn on the question of the age of the earth; there simply was not sufficient data. Geologist James Hutton could not even bring himself to conceive of the idea of a beginning in what he saw as an unending ‘abyss of time’.¹⁴ In geological narrative, hundreds, thousands, even millions of years may pass that are unrecordable, so not only does the historical sublime carry with it the descriptive and epistemological criteria of lack or absence, but the emotive aspect of the sublime is relevant, too.

Geology and the sublime have been linked since their inception in Western culture; both concepts as well as their relationship are key in understanding the Victorians’ notion of history and deep time. Returning to the beginning of British geological endeavour, Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory recounts an engaging shift that took place in the cultural imaginary in the late seventeenth century.¹⁵ How was it that mountains, which had once been seen as despicable excrescences that ruptured the natural and classical beauty of the landscape, came later to be regarded as objects of awe, terror and sublimity, Nicolson asks. The earliest reference to the latter view that she notes belongs to one of the most famous early British geologists, Thomas Burnet, who in his Sacred Theory (1681) remarked that:

The greatest Objects of Nature are, methinks, the most pleasing to behold, and next to the great Concave of the Heavens, and those boundless regions where the Stars inhabit, there is nothing that I look upon with more Pleasure than the wide Sea and the Mountains of the Earth. There is something august and stately in the Air of these things … And whatsoever hath but the Shadow and Appearance of the INFINITE, as all Things have that are too big for our Comprehension, they fill and over-bear the Mind with sheer Excess, and Cast it into a pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration.¹⁶

Neither here nor at any other point throughout the Sacred Theory does Burnet overtly refer to the late seventeenth-century fad of the sublime. Dating approximately from the first to the third centuries of the Common Era, Longinus’s On the Sublime had been circulating in Britain since the mid-sixteenth century, in print for the first time (in its original Greek with Latin notes, edited by Franciscus Robortellus).¹⁷ The first edition to attract real attention in Britain was Boileau’s French translation in 1674. What is so significant about this section from Burnet’s thesis is that it does not belong to the Longinian sublime, which is quite different in structure and meaning to the forms of sublimity that succeeded it.

The Longinian sublime is fundamentally rhetorical; its domain is to be found in the grandeur and elevation of literary language. It describes a kind of ontological slippage and doubleness, where something is described as both one thing and another. It is a figure frequently found in Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), for example, where hell is described as ‘darkness visible’.¹⁸ This combination of two seemingly opposed concepts does not produce the nonsense of, for example, a black whiteness or an alive deadness. Instead, their combination successfully conveys a sense of place that is otherworldly, both in existence and in the sense of being beyond one’s immediate comprehension. The combination of these two terms, so easily grasped when used in isolation, transcends the usual possibilities of meaning and raises them to the status of the sublime as a rhetorical trick that conveys the vision of hell, but also as something that resists sufficiently finite explanation and definition.¹⁹

Around the same time that Burnet was completing his Sacred Theory, in broad terms English literature was moving away from the romance of courtly love towards the representation of the intensity of psychological experience caused by one’s interaction with, and experience of, nature. It is this particular aspect of the sublime that Burnet deploys in his discussion of mountains.

The natural sublime, emerging after the rhetorical sublime, is quite different insofar as sublimity is to be found not within the confines of a linguistic system but ‘out there’ in the world of nature. Yet another firm geological connection is to be found here. Later editions of Burnet’s Sacred Theory included as prefatory amusement a dedicatory poem by Joseph Addison entitled ‘Ode to the most illustrious Dr Thomas Burnet, on his being author of the sacred theory of the earth’.²⁰ In the history of the sublime Addison is notable for producing a series of articles in the Spectator collectively known as ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ (which appeared from 21 June to 3 July in 1712). Addison’s ideas on the location of sublimity (inadvertently concurring with Thomas Burnet’s) were that the source of the sublime lies with the natural object. But for Addison, the sublime is still, to some extent, rhetorical insofar as it is derived from the conversion of the natural object into only an idea of that object. And it is only the idea of the object which is pleasurable, because ‘[w]hen we look on such hideous Objects … We consider them at the same time, Dreadful and Harmless; so that the more frightful Appearance they make, the greater is the Pleasure that we receive from our own Sense of Safety.’²¹ For Addison (and other early eighteenth-century thinkers like John Dennis), the sublime emerges when terror transmogrifies into the idea of terror contemplated from safety, it is the ‘triumph of the rational over the real.’²²

Much later in the century, Frances Reynolds’ (sister to Sir Joshua) short Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Taste (1785) was the first treatise that acknowledged the indefinable nature of the sublime.

It is the mild admiration of grace raised to wonder and astonishment! … It is a pinnacle of beatitude, bordering upon horror, deformity, madness! An eminence from whence the mind that dares to look farther is lost! It seems to stand, or rather to waver, between certainty and uncertainty, between security and destruction. It is the point of terror, of undetermined fear, of undetermined power!²³

The century-long exploration and search for the definition of the sublime was inherently flawed for Reynolds, as its ultimate goal was to seek to define that which defied definition. The frontispiece to her essay comprised a diagram of the psychology of perception and taste, where nature was placed at its centre, but sublimity lay at the farthest and highest point on the page, as far from nature as could be expressed. Sublimity was not of nature; it was of ‘man’.

Despite Reynolds’ assertions, eighteenth-century commentaries continued to appear, each seeking in its own way to define the indefinable. Indeed the period’s most famous responses to this debate came in the latter half of the century with Edmund Burke’s study of 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790).²⁴

Burke’s Enquiry is to-date the most influential study of the sublime, not only because of its comprehensiveness but also for its juxtaposition and differentiation of the sublime and the beautiful. ‘Beauty’, Burke suggests, ‘should not be obscure’; it should be ‘small’, ‘smooth, and polished’, ‘light and delicate’.²⁵ Each of these adjectives denotes a noun that is perceivable, knowable, recognisable and identifiable. Reynolds more directly described beauty as a ‘demonstrable truth, and that truth is demonstrable beauty. Exactitiude. Completion. The just medium. The satisfactory rest of the mind.’²⁶ Burke’s ‘sublime objects’ are, on the other hand, ‘vast in their dimensions’ and they are ‘dark and gloomy’.²⁷ The sublime here, for Burke, is about perspective: that of humanity’s place amongst the vastness of the Alps. The sublime, though, is also produced by a kind of epistemological doubt; the dark and the gloom are that which prevent the viewer from perceiving and knowing the object. Burke also goes on to suggest that ‘[v]astness … as the great extreme of dimension is sublime, so the last extreme of littleness is in some measure sublime likewise’.²⁸ It is not so much magnitude that is productive of the sublime, but a particular kind of perspective that is so extreme as to render the simultaneous perception of the differing objects impossible. This kind of perspective applies to the Victorian historical sublime. Parallels may be drawn here between Burkean beauty and historical narrative, insofar as historical narrative is not ‘obscure’ and presents a view of time, history and the past as things that are knowable and intelligible – I explore this idea more fully in chapter three. Historical narrative presents a version of the past that is occupied by the stories of humanity and is consequently anthropocentric. The differing sorts of time and history that emerged particularly in the Victorian period, the geological pasts, were without precisely narratable event and existed only as a theory of the past, because the time involved was so vast as to make meaningful narrative impossible. Therefore, the past (which is not anthropocentric and consequently without narrative) allies itself with the Burkean sublime on a number of levels.

At several points in the Enquiry Burke meditates upon the fear and terror of the vast and the infinite and he also explains that obscurity is equally productive of the sublime.

To make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger, and how much the notions of ghosts and goblins, of which none can form clear ideas, affect minds, which give credit to the popular tales concerning such sorts of beings.²⁹

The sublimity of history, then, resides not only in its vastness but also in its obscurity, and most significantly, it was geology that endowed history with both of these facets. Burke’s achievement in the Enquiry was that he had returned the debates of the sublime to their starting point, namely Longinus who saw the sublime as a predominantly rhetorical function. Burke had shifted the focus away from the idea that an object presents its sublimity to the viewer, and instead suggested that sublimity resides in the psychology of the spectator. And although Burke’s explanation of the epistemology and psychology of the sublime provides a focal point for thinking about the sublimity of history in the Victorian period, it is Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement that provides the fuller context for the model of the historical sublime.

Kant’s Critique provides two essential models of sublimity: the dynamical and the mathematical. In both cases, Kant’s sublime is immaterial and psychological in origin: ‘when we speak of the sublime in nature we speak improperly; properly speaking sublimity can only be attributed to our way of thinking’.³⁰ The dynamical sublime for Kant derives from senses of both might and dominance experienced within a specific context. Kant explains that ‘thunderclouds … lightning and thunderclaps, … the boundless ocean heaved up … the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place.’³¹ Characterised by terror experienced from a place of safety, ‘when in an aesthetic judgement we consider nature as a might that has no dominance over us, then it is dynamically sublime’.³² Kant’s model for the mathematical sublime is much less specific.

The beautiful in nature concerns the form of the object, which consists in [the object’s] being bounded. But the sublime can also be found in a formless object, in so far as we present unboundedness, either [as] in the object or because the object prompts us to present it, while yet we add to this unboundedness the thought of its totality.³³

Unlike the thunderclap or the vision of overhanging rocks that is complete in its perception, though shocking in its perspective, the version of the sublime that Kant suggests finds its model in, for example, the idea of the sublimity in the universe. The sublime aspects of the universe are derived not simply from its darkness and immensity, as Burke would have argued. Kant suggests instead that it is the idea of the universe’s totality and the vague sense of its completeness that is productive of the sublime.³⁴ The sense of sublimity is created through the unimaginability of the universe’s vastness, but this must be grounded with a vestigial sense of its limits. The limits of the universe are provided by our reason, but in the knowledge that our reason is insufficiently capable of knowing the wholeness of it.

Such an idea finds an analogue in the kinds of temporality that emerged after the geological investigations of the gradualists. Geology was to some extent capable of arranging the past, but it could not do so with the narrative sequentiality of the Old Testament. The story of natural history, if you can call it that, is one that is only faintly written between layers of rock; everything else is lost. The strata of the earth, through geological investigation, have provided our reason with an array of vector markings in time, coupled with the sense that what lies between these vectors is both immense and unknowable. This is the historical sublime: geology provides a sense of the past filled with magnesium flashes of knowledge, but with that knowledge also comes a sense of the past’s vastness, its unrecoverability and its silence.

The relationship between narrative history and geology is a complex one (with so much history for geology to account for, how could it not be?). Ralph O’Connor’s recent book The Earth on Show with its