Oyster by Rebecca Stott

Author:Rebecca Stott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Reaktion Books

Curios from the collection of the late Johnny Noble, founder of Loch Fyne Oysters: an oyster plate in majolica, a Japanese oyster plate adorned with crabs, and one of a pair of four-tier revolving oyster-serving dishes, also in majolica.

The writer’s romantic portrayal of the oyster dredgers as a relic of old England, the embodiment of lost values, is typical of this period of rapid industrialization and of social unrest in the lead-up to the Second Reform Act which would enfranchise the working man in 1867. This romantic piece is full of class anxiety in its celebration of the oyster-dredging community and this is hardly surprising at a time when a large number of the middle and ruling classes were concerned about the future of a country in which supposedly uneducated workers would be given the vote. But it also strives to reassure – these simple people are the backbone of an older England. They are good citizens; they know their place; they are not to be feared.

The notion, however, that man might have evolved from primitive sea creatures, as some comparative anatomists had been proposing since the end of the eighteenth century, filled many nineteenth-century intellectuals with revulsion. Several writers used the notion of man’s evolution from the oyster as a way of pouring scorn on evolutionary ideas. In Silver-Shell; or, the Adventures of an Oyster (1856), for instance, the Revd Williams writes with ridicule: ‘And so it has been said, by a series of transitions the monad became an oyster, the oyster a monkey, and the monkey a man.’6 And in the months that followed the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection in 1859, the oyster was again used to mock Darwin’s ideas. In January 1860, for instance, Jane Carlyle wrote to a friend:

But even when Darwin, in a book that all the scientific world is in ecstasy over, proved the other day that we are all come from shell-fish, it didn’t move me to the slightest curiosity whether we are or not. I did not feel that the slightest light would be thrown on my practical life for me, by having it ever so logically made out that my first ancestor, millions of millions of years back, had been, or even had not been, an oyster. It remained a plain fact that I was no oyster, nor had any grandfather an oyster within my knowledge; and for the rest, there was nothing to be gained, for this world or the next, by going into the oyster-question, till all more pressing questions were exhausted.7

In the following year – 1861 – the marine painter Edward William Cooke, who had a special interest in geology and the new biological sciences, went to a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) in Manchester. The discussions that year in the wake of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection were all about human–animal kinship.

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