Breathless Beasts and Stuffed Savages

Abstract

This chapter takes the reader deep into the nineteenth-century afterlife of the Classical construction of nature, the wild, and the primitive and civilized, foundational to Victorian ideas of progress and to the nascent sciences that claimed the study of humanity as their own. It shows how the Natural History Courts of London’s Crystal Palace presented the marvels of ethnology and natural history, and how these displays were received in the context of nineteenth-century social evolutionist thought, which was itself built upon Classical foundations such as the account of primitive man in Lucretius’ De rerum natura. Against the Courts’ taxidermic dioramas of ‘savage life’, the ethnological casts displayed to the Victorian public prompted comparative questions about the evolutionary status of the non-European Other, while the ‘primitive’ nakedness of the casts created further parallels with the idealized nudity of Greek and Roman sculpture casts, engendering destabilizing dissonance with the connotations of civilization inscribed in the Classical ideal.