While surveying the western coasts of Australia between 1818 and 1822, the naval officer and hydrographer, Phillip Parker King (1791-1856) avowed, “no country [has] ever produced a more extraordinary assemblage of indigenous productions – no country has proved richer than…

In 1869, the Victorian naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace—co-founder with Darwin of the evolutionary theory of natural selection—published an account of the eight years he had spent in the Malay Archipelago. Just five years beforehand, in 1864, Wallace delivered a paper…

A Tale of Two Cities is saturated with violence: execution, mutilation, rape, and mass slaughter abound; broken, discarded, forgotten, nameless bodies are everywhere. Dickens’s narrator, as the title teaches us, recounts one tale about two cities; as the novel progresses,…

Near the start of Charles Dickens’s 1838 novel Nicholas Nickleby, the cruel and conniving Ralph Nickleby speculates on a new monopoly, the “United Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual Delivery Company.” The actual motivation for the company…