The Evolutionary Imagination of Late‐Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank

Citation

Hannabuss, S. (2008), "The Evolutionary Imagination of Late‐Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank", Library Review, Vol. 57 No. 8, pp. 641-643. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530810899649

Literature functions within a social and cultural context and part of that is scientific and technological. This is clear to see in the nineteenth‐century novel where the influence of Darwin and Lamarck and Thomas Huxley can be found, not merely in the form of sidelong glances but in the very fabric of the ideas and the narrative. This makes the formal study of such novels a particularly interesting and cross‐disciplinary activity. Glendening (University of Montana) explores this linkage by concentrating on four main authors (Wells, Thomas Hardy, Bram Stoker and Joseph Conrad) (Hudson hovers in there too) and by closely examining four novels (The Island of Doctor Moreau, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Dracula and Heart of Darkness).

For anyone teaching the literature of the period, and coupling it with ideas of progress and civilization and science at the time, Glendening's book is of particular interest. It is one of several from Ashgate in this idiom: others include a study of culture and science, of language and science during the fin‐de‐siècle, George Eliot and psychology, and Thomas Hardy and cosmology. The author's introduction makes his approach clear and also provides a useful introduction to the current critical interest in applying Darwinism to literature, the so‐called new Darwinism advocated by writers like Joseph Carroll in books like Literary Darwinism, 2004). Levine and Beer and others have analyzed science in novels of the time. The historiography extends out into colonialism/imperialism as well as into contemporary science and technology, above all through and in ideas and controversies about nature, civilization, progress and faith.

All these are at work in Glendening's authors. Juxtapositions exist, like that of Darwin's Descent of Man, coming out in 1871, and Tess coming out in 1878, and these are not mere chance, because Hardy's ideas about a hostile and indifferent universe go much further back (beyond The Return of the Native). In describing the social and sexual constraints on his heroine, “a pure woman” as he calls her, Hardy dramatizes Darwin's ideas, Glendening argues, reflecting a moral universe of doubt and contingency found not only in Darwin (and how others responded to him) but also in Thomas Huxley, perhaps the most influential writer in the 1880s and 1890s on nature and culture. A Lamarckian optimism in progress was often the counter‐voice to fears of moral and social degeneration.

This degeneration can be seen clearly in these novels – not only in the sexual predatoriness of Alec (Tess's pursuer) but in the fate of Kurtz (from hero to cannibal in Conrad's Heart of Darkness) and Marlow's disillusion, in the beast‐folk of Wells's Island of Doctor Moreau (where even the leopard man reverts), and in Dracula himself, former aristocrat, now blood‐sucking undead (and Harker himself, civilized man, is placed at risk in his company). Under the veneer of urbanity, primitivism and deviancy and degeneracy lurk, offering a fascinating insight into the apparent hearty optimism of the period. Glendening starts the book with a prologue of Darwin, on his Beagle tour, visiting Tierra del Fuego in 1832‐1833 and wondering whether the natives were human or beast. The setting within which these ideas and debates take place – in the novels themselves and in this critical study – is that of nature. Nature is an ambivalent place, part garden and part jungle, part nurturing and part threatening civilization and moral stability. Transylvania and Conrad's African jungle show how nature (rather than nurture) can shape the moral self and society itself. These were preoccupations in the late nineteenth century, come through in key novels, and Glendening has reminded us of this.

The existing literature on this general set of topics is well‐known and so Glendening's book is by no means the first or only one there. His sub‐plot about nature (the “entangled bank” of the sub‐title) is relevant most of the time literally (garden and jungle and so forth) and metaphorically (as a way of representing the interrelationships between scientific ideas and narrative approaches at the time). Even so his epilogue when he himself returns to the Galapagos is merely self‐indulgent and starts to take over as a travelogue – gratuitous. Standing back to look at the book as a whole, and considering the important ideas it deals with, this is a good book for any collection seriously supporting study of nineteenth‐century literature and its links with contemporary science. Glendening is right to remind us that, in the form of the intelligent design debate today, this cross‐over is never one to go away.