The concept of eccentricity was central to how people in the nineteenth century understood their world. This monograph is the first scholarly history of eccentricity. Carroll explores how discourses of eccentricity were established to make sense of individuals who did not seem to fit within an increasingly organized social and economic order. She focuses on the self-taught natural philosopher William Martin, the fossilist Thomas Hawkins and the taxidermist Charles Waterton.

This volume offers a chronologically arranged smorgasbord of brief, annotated excerpts from "Nature" magazine's Victorian-era beginnings to the revolutionary publication of a study on DNA in 1953.