Telescopic images taken from
Uranography; or, a Description of the Heavens (1844). Reproductions like these were among the first widely circulated images of celestial bodies beyond the earth. They created a sense among educated nonspecialists of the wonder, strangeness, and variability of cosmic objects. Byron’s lyrical description—in Cain (1821)—of the earth seen from outer space represents one of the first poetic attempts to imagine an interplanetary point of view:
Is yon our earth?
. . .
Can it be?
Yon small blue circle, swinging
in far ether,
With an inferior circlet near it
still? (II, i)
A survey of relationships between literary works & natural history in the century before Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859)
