Human Evolution and Fantastic Victorian Fiction

Anna Neill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000392722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Following the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species, Victorian anthropology made two apparently contradictory claims: it distinguished "civilized man" from animals and "primitive" humans and it linked them though descent. Paradoxically, it was by placing human history in a deep past shaped by minute, incremental changes (rather than at the apex of Providential order) that evolutionary anthropology could assert a new form of human exceptionalism and define civilized humanity against both human and nonhuman savagery.

This book shows how fantastic Victorian and early Edwardian fictions—utopias, dystopias, nonsense literature, gothic horror, and children's fables—untether human and nonhuman animal agency from this increasingly orthodox account of the deep past. As they imagine worlds that lift the evolutionary constraints on development and as they collapse evolution into lived time, these stories reveal (and even occupy) dynamic landscapes of cognitive descent that contest prevailing anthropological ideas about race, culture, and species difference.

1 Introduction

Strange Stories and the Descent of Mind

Deep Time and the Victorian Novel

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas, in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.¹

Bleak House famously opens with a magnificent collision of temporalities. A giant, carnivorous dinosaur sways up Holborn Hill in what seems like the stuff of 20th-century B-cinematic horror: a monster from the deep past, animated in stop motion, lurches into the scene, violently defamiliarizing the human and non-human crush of London’s mid-century Victorian streets. Yet there is nothing clumsy about the image itself. For it effortlessly seams together the Mesozoic with the modern, the infinite slowness of geological time with the speed of 19th-century London life, the death of the planet with the filth of the Victorian city, and the layering of rock types in the earth’s crust with the transformation of social relations by the accumulation of capital. Geological time is pressed into a human scale while, simultaneously, judicial and financial inefficiency and corruption seems as old as the rocks. Muddy London streets evoke the perils of the Middle Jurassic and a distant-future solar catastrophe alongside the daily discomforts of 19th-century city life.

Concluding its serial publication in 1853—the same year that the ninth edition of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and the tenth of the anonymously-authored, controversial, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation appeared—Bleak House appeals to mid-century fascination with a deep temporality within which human struggles might be interpreted. This is a history so vast and gradual that the mind can scarcely grasp it. Indeed, it is a past scarcely readable through a fossil record that is, as Charles Darwin revealed in 1859, “absolutely as nothing compared with the incalculable number of generations which must have passed away even during a single formation.”² Just as Dickens creates imaginative circuitry between geological antiquity and human-caused urban environmental and institutional degradation, other (broadly defined) Victorian realist novelists address the “slow agency of existing causes,” as Lyell famously described the history of the earth,³ by conceiving of human actions within multiple time scales, including those in which humans themselves do not figure. They may voice a conservative gradualism, as George Levine has argued of Anthony Trollope.⁴ They may pay patient attention to the cumulative effect of minute events across long stretches of time—what George Eliot describes as innumerable “unhistoric acts”—as well as to the inevitable gaps in our attempts to plot it. Or they may capture, as Thomas Hardy does, disjunctions between evolutionary time and human suffering in the present. Whether hopeful, exuberant, or sorrowful, and whether they are “anti-stories” in which the plot of human endeavor fails or narratives that celebrate the protean and mutative human worlds in which unexpected possibilities may arise, these novels attempt to measure lived experience within the immense, slow histories that evade both our empirical grasp and our full imaginative representation of them.

All this illuminates a decentering of the human within what Gillian Beer described some time ago as the evolutionary “plots” of Victorian fiction. Over recent decades, a range of studies have taught us how to read beyond ourselves in realist novels, even in narratives that are thick with the everyday details of social life.⁵ These novels embody tensions between determinative accretions and the swerves of chance.⁶ They voice a conservative organicism that rejects the Romantic, self-creating will even as they appeal to the optimism of Bildung, where cultivated individual growth mediates wider social developments.⁷ They also recognize at once the explanatory power of uniformitarianism and the uncertainties presented by gaps in the fossil record that cannot easily be subordinated to a single geological “plot.”⁸ In complex and varied ways, Victorian realist fiction engages, deploys, and lends form to evolutionary gradualism as it endeavors to position human agency within a profoundly non-human temporality. In this context, the magnificent implausibility of Dickens’s merging of the deep past and the lived present seems like a witty exaggeration of Victorian realism’s attention to evolutionary time.

Given realist fiction’s many modes of evoking the deep past, novelist Amitav Ghosh seems rather severe in his claim that by “banishing the improbable” and substituting the everyday and gradual, the realist novel reflects a poverty of imagination that has helped to bring about our current planetary crisis.⁹ Ghosh, to be fair, is focused on the failure of contemporary mainstream literary culture to adequately represent climate change, arguing that most attempts to do so are exiled into science fiction. For him, realism’s commitment to a slow past—the background against which the story of a single life or a small number of lives play out—necessarily struggles to portray a sequence of massively transformational events because these seem improbable within its uniformitarian horizon. At its birth, Ghosh asserts, the modern realist novel banishes fantastic compressions or accelerations of time that would bring such events into its foreground—forms of representation that could narrate the Anthropocene. Home to regulatory regimes of probability and the habit-driven rhythms of carbon-greedy bourgeois life, realism wants nothing to do with the kind of fantastic storytelling that leaps “from one exceptional event to another.”¹⁰

In my interpretations of fantastic Victorian (and a few Edwardian) fictions for both children and adults, I broadly concur with Ghosh. The chapters that follow focus on strange narratives from the 1860s onward where disruptions of deep, gradual time redefine human nature and human agency. Although they include a wide range of literary styles, these narratives all share what Eric Rabkin describes as a violation of the ground rules within the diegetic logic of the narrative (meaning that they do not include fairy tales, for example, which establish alternative rules). Hence their protagonists and implied readers are unprepared for the reality that these imagined worlds depict.¹¹ It is in this context that they play much faster and looser with time than even the most daring form of realist narrative where, as Beer emphasizes of Daniel Deronda, a predictable sequence of events may be broken or reversed to engender new sympathies and forms of “generation and descent.”¹² Realist representation of what Darwin called an “accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited modifications” certainly decenters human experience. By directly flouting the principle of gradualism, however, fantastic narratives are able to do more to challenge an often pernicious evolutionary conception of the human. Although my focus is not, like Ghosh’s, on climate change, I argue that the temporal havoc these narratives create simultaneously challenges human exceptionalism and ideas about gradual and progressive human social development that justified colonial violence. Their outlandish reconfigurations of deep time therefore deserve attention even where character and plot may serve other ends.

Human Exceptionalism and Evolutionary Progress

In 1942, Julian Huxley (Thomas Huxley’s grandson and co-author of the modern evolutionary synthesis) argued that while the process of specialization only reflected progress in relative terms, such a thing as absolute evolutionary progress could be observed objectively by recording the degree to which an organism achieved independence from and control over its environment. This is most true of humankind since “almost all of the increase in man’s control over nature [has] been non genetic, owing to his exploitation of his biologically unique capacity for tradition, whereby he is provided with a modificational substitute for genetic change.”¹³ Culture—technologies of food production, war and a built environment, as well as morality, and even aesthetics—has enabled humankind’s exceptional powers of domination “and this being so, we are justified in calling the trends which have led to his development progressive.”¹⁴ In other words, Huxley proposed, human exceptionalism allows us to measure the stages of progress across and between different human groups.

This is not to suggest that the (gradualist) theory of evolution by natural selection that emerged victorious from early 20th-century debate was inherently racist or even bound inextricably to the idea of progress. In Origin, gradualism does not necessarily imply evolutionary progress (nor did uniformitarianism more broadly, which for Lyell underpinned a steady-state view of the geological past). Indeed, the gradual accumulation of changes under selective pressure need not even necessarily be steady and continuous.¹⁵ Nonetheless, wherever the human enjoys an evolutionarily exceptional status, the long climb from primitive to complex organism, like the rise of “savage” to “civilized” nation, appears as simultaneously gradual and progressive. The Descent of Man (1871) set out to show that there is no fundamental difference between humans and other higher mammals even in the capacity for moral feeling, which supposedly marked man’s essential distinctness from other animals; Descent showed that moral sentiment is rooted in the social instincts that we share with many other species.¹⁶ And yet even while we belong to a community of descent, and while “man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin,” the exceptional quality of the human mind has lifted us “to the very summit of the organic scale.”¹⁷ Darwin’s expressions of revulsion at the degraded mental state of slaves and what he described as the barely human condition of the “Fuegians” he met on the Beagle voyage are well known.¹⁸ So too is his observation in Descent that a mark of advanced intellectual power and moral feeling is the capacity to feel for “lesser” beings “extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless members of society, and finally to the lower animals” (149).¹⁹ Through the slow accumulation of mental talents, humans have (unevenly) achieved cultural heights that endow them with an exalted form of sympathy over lower beings, even if the origins of such exquisite moral feeling can be traced to inferior minds.²⁰

Although we commonly think of social Darwinism as the erroneous application of the principle of biological selection to political and social theory, it more accurately refers to a form of social theory rooted in the evolution of the human faculties.²¹ As such, it was as useful to earlier-century radicalism, Whig reform, and laissez-faire liberalism as it was to eugenics and other theories of racial and class fitness.²² By identifying the development of human mental capacities and the cultural achievements they make possible ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Strange Stories and the Descent of Mind
• 2 Phylogeny Recapitulates Ontogeny: Fantastic Evolution and Fairy Science in The Water-Babies
• 3 Developmental Nonsense in the Alice Tales
• 4 Orality, Print, and Evolution in the Just So Stories
• 5 Becoming Animal in The Island of Dr. Moreau
• 6 The Machinate Literary Mammal: Samuel Butler’s Strange Stories
• 7 Exotic Geometry, Natural Religion, and the Liberal Case against Eugenics in Flatland
• 8 Deep Time and the Socialist Utopia
• 9 Coda: Shallowing the Past
• References
• Index