The Huntington - Art for Earth's Sake: Green Aestheticism and the Celtic Revival in Late-Victorian Periodicals

My PhD traces how scientific, artistic, and spiritual aesthetics revolutionised environmental discourses, ideologies, and practices during the Celtic revival, dedicating chapters to Patrick Geddes' The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal (1895-97), William Sharp's The Pagan Review (1892), and Pamela Colman Smith's The Green Sheaf (1903-04). My proposed Huntington research will inform my work on The Evergreen, building on substantial archival work already undertaken at the University of Strathclyde, where I examined planning notes, academic papers, and correspondence in the Patrick Geddes Papers (T-GED Collection). These materials show how The Evergreen's contributors aestheticised crystallisation, evolution, and symbiosis, using them as socio-political metaphors of development to imagine cultural Renascence. The Evergreen's complex scientific foundations and interdisciplinary networks remain uncharted scholarly territory. Geddes' biological career has been overshadowed by his publishing and town-planning legacies. My thesis recovers this overlooked ecological aspect of The Evergreen's revivalism, uniting the Huntington Library's History of Science and Literature collections with the T-GED collection to create innovative Victorian ecocritical scholarship. Over three months, I will examine the Thomas Huxley Letters, the Herbert Spencer Papers, the John Fiske Papers, the Louis Pasteur Collection, materials in the Warren D. Mohr/Charles Darwin Collection, and the William Sharp manuscripts.