Arthur O'Shaughnessy, A Pre-Raphaelite Poet in the British Museum

Arthur O'Shaughnessy's career as a natural historian in the British Museum, and his consequent preoccupation with the role of work in his life, provides the context with which to reexamine his contributions to Victorian poetry. O'Shaughnessy's engagement with aestheticism, socialism, and Darwinian theory can be traced to his career as a Junior Assistant at the British Museum, and his perception of the burden of having to earn a living outside of art. Making use of extensive archival research, Jordan Kistler demonstrates that far from being merely a minor poet, O'Shaughnessy was at the forefront of later Victorian avant-garde poetry. Her analyses of published and unpublished writings, including correspondence, poetic manuscripts, and scientific notebooks, demonstrate O'Shaughnessy's importance to the cultural milieu of the 1870s, particularly his contributions to English aestheticism, his role in the importation of decadence from France, and his unique position within contemporary debates on science and literature.

"Unjustly neglected for over a century, Arthur O’Shaughnessy is an unusual Pre-Raphaelite poet whose unromantic day job as a taxonomist set him apart from his literary peers. However, as Kistler shows, his writings shed important light on the works of better-known contemporaries such as Rossetti, Morris, and Swinburne. Kistler reclaims and contextualizes his works for a twenty-first-century readership, demonstrating that O’Shaughnessy is a Victorian poet with something significant to say about his own period and modernity. Her book constitutes a valuable contribution to the study of Victorian poetry and extends our knowledge not only of O’Shaughnessy, but of the broader context that gave rise to the Arts and Crafts movement, Aestheticism and Decadence."- Patricia Pulham, University of Portsmouth, UK"Kistler does a great job of showing not only that O’Shaughnessy’s poetry is worth further exploration (and appreciation), but also why O’Shaughnessy is significant..."- Helena Ifill, University of Sheffield in The British Society for Literature and Science

Jordan Kistler is a Teaching Fellow in Victorian Literature at the University of Birmingham, UK. Her work focuses on the often-overlooked Pre-Raphaelite poets of the 1870s.