ABSTRACT
Looking at versions of the entangled bank by Robert Browning and Richard Dadd, this chapter argues that they each struggle, in very different ways, with the implications of evolutionary theory for the perception of order and meaning in the natural world. Gillian Beer has described Darwin's writing as partaking in an aesthetic sense of the 'wondrous strangeness' of the actual, characteristic of Victorian culture in general: 'The grotesque, the beautiful and the wonderful in the everyday was a major Victorian imaginative theme. It is clear that in Walter Bagehot's terms Darwin's evocation of the entangled bank would be an example of the grotesque. The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke is one version of the entangled bank of which Darwin wrote. But while Darwin's and Browning's entangled banks are full of life and of the various forms of life in relations of complex dependence upon one another, Dadd's entangled bank is marked by a lack of relation so extreme as to be alienation.
