"Morpho Eugenia" and the Fictions of Victorian Englishness: A.S. Byatt's Critique (Critical Essay‪)‬

"There I was, in lands never before entered by Englishmen, and round me fluttered Helen and Menelaus, Apollo and the Nine, Hector and Hecuba and Priam. The imagination of the scientist [Linnaeus] had colonised the untrodden jungle before I got there. There is something wonderful about naming a species. To bring a thing [such as a butterfly] that is wild, and rare, and hitherto unobserved under the net of 'human observation and human language ..." [pondered William]. "Poor innocent insect," [replied Matty Crompton], "to have its small life burdened with so large an import." Byatt, "Morpho Eugenia"