“Elegy for an Age,” by John D. Rosenberg
Elegy for an Age: The Presence of the Past in Victorian Literature, by John D. Rosenberg. Anthem Press, July 2005. 288 pp. $26.95 ISBN 1843311542
Reviewed by George J. Leonard, San Francisco State University
If I had to rest the case for the immortality of John D. Rosenberg’s prose on one paragraph, I could choose the paragraph in “Mr. Darwin Collects Himself”– unknown to me before I read Elegy for an Age— in which Rosenberg caps a series of perfect hammered sentences with the image of Darwin, the enthusiastic entomologist, “at the center of a worldwide network of researchers in a multitude of fields, all touching antennae at local scientific societies or through the penny post . . .” It takes a second for one to register the creepy appropriateness of that image for entomologists, and by then one has pictured them, tete-a-tete, feelers waving. Anyone interested in Darwin who reads that description will never willingly let it be forgotten.