The Platypus and the Mermaid: And Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination

By Harriet Ritvo

Book Overview

Cats is 'dogs', and rabbits is 'dogs', and so's parrots; but this 'ere 'tortis' is a insect, a porter explains to an astonished traveler in a 19th-century Punch cartoon. Railways were not the only British institution to schematize the world. This book aims to capture the fervor of the Victorian age for classifying and categorizing every new specimen, plant or animal, that British explorers and soldiers and sailors brought home. As she depicts a whole complex of competing groups deploying rival schemes and nomenclatures, Harriet Ritvo shows us a society drawing and redrawing its own boundaries and ultimately identifying itself.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674673573
• ISBN13: 9780674673571
• Release Date: October 1997
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Those Kooky Victorians

Harriet Ritvo's The Platypus and the Mermaid (and other figments of the classifying imagination) is an interesting look at the Victorian passion for classifying things. The book ranges and prowls over many communities from the scientific to the farmer to the sideshow. This is more about the lack of firm boundaries in Victorian society as science tried to define itself than the author's whim. But the author does handle the twists and turns adroitly. This is a good read and a wonderful look at the Victorian period and what the scientist and the lay person considered important in their need to classify their world, particulary as it grew with the growth of the British Empire.