Shadow Journeys: Avian Movements in Natural History and Poetry in the Nineteenth Century

This essay examines the nineteenth-century global trade in ornithology and argues that it was deeply entangled with slavery, settler colonialism, and empire. Birds became an increasingly common material and textual presence in British homes and public institutions, and this essay examines correlations between poetry and natural history in their relations with birds. Focusing on mid-nineteenth-century texts, including the ornithological periodical The Ibis (1859–), John Gould’s A Monograph of the Trochilidæ, or Family of Hummingbirds (1861–87), Christina Rossetti’s poem “The Dead City” (1847), and Jean Ingelow’s poem “Gladys and Her Island” (1867), with further examples from early nineteenth-century natural historian Thomas Bewick, this essay uses poetry to deepen our understanding of the historical violence toward Indigenous peoples and animals, in which the field of natural history participated, as well as of the place of birds in the nineteenth-century British cultural imagination.