In her book Theatres of Glass, Rebecca Stott writes about the Victorian craze for home aquariums – which swept London in the 1850s, with people taking animals from the seaside and making miniature rock pools at home in large glass enclosures or pie dishes. The craze did not last long; people didn’t have a way to oxygenate the water and most of what they collected died.
But among the people who loved the idea that you could create a rock pool at home was Mary Ann Evans – who wrote as George Eliot. She and her partner, the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes, spent two summers hunting sea anemones in the town of Ilfracombe, where they were “absolutely fascinated” by what they saw, Stott says. Commenting on how difficult they found it at first to spot the anemones they had been told were as “plenty as blackberries”, Eliot wrote that it is “characteristic enough of the wide difference there is between having eyes and seeing”.
Lewes, meanwhile, wrote in an article for the Westminster Review:
