Daybooks of discovery : nature diaries in Britain, 1770-1870 / Mary Ellen Bellanca.

Charlottesville ; London : University of Virginia Press, 2007.

x, 286 pages ; 23 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. [263]-277) and index.

Introduction : "shining like green flames" -- Observing by the day : a natural history of nature diaries -- "Ephemerae innumerable" : nature uncontained in Gilbert White's journals -- "Go and do likewise" : the nineteenth-century cult of white, mass-market natural history, and the nature diary in popular literature -- Communities of knowledge : Dorothy Wordsworth, natural history, and the web of nineteenth-century topography -- "I am going to turn author" : scientific self-fashioning in the Journal of Emily Shore -- Desacralizing nature : George Eliot's "Recollections of Ilfracombe," seaside natural history, and Victorian women's nature writing -- Catching the white tiger's skin : Gerard Manley Hopkins's journal and the poetics of natural history -- Conclusion : the 1870s and beyond.