David Amigoni
“Everybody nowadays talks about evolution” (Allen 1888: 34). So wrote Grant Allen, the journalist and popularizer of science, in the Victorian magazine Cornhill in 1888. Everybody continues to talk about evolution, firstly because it provides human consciousness with a compelling yet unsettling story about its own origins, and secondly because nineteenth-century print democratized this key scientific theory, perhaps uniquely. It is tempting to think that the field of literature and science has been concerned with the question of evolution primarily since the important studies by Gillian Beer and George Levine in the 1980s, Darwin’s Plots and Darwin and the Novelists respectively. These seminal works demonstrated that between Darwin’s scientific writing and the prose fictions of the great Victorian novelists, “the traffic … was two way” (Beer 2000: 5), thus producing “complex interweavings” (Levine 1991: 2). Well before this work, however, in 1932 Lionel Stephenson had traced Darwin’s absorption into Victorian poetry in Darwin Among the Poets. In 1877, the possibilities of evolutionary thought stimulated Ernest Dowden’s synoptic essay on “The scientific movement in English literature.” Talk about evolution has been pervasive: but so has talk about its relation to literature.
Even in 1888, evolution presented general problems of definition and focus for Allen. Much of the voluble talk about evolution was unfocused, blurring at the boundaries through its fuzzy sense that it had something to do with the idea “that most things ‘growed’” (Allen 1888: 34). It was “in the air,” but Allen’s very formulation overlooked the material channels of mediation that have become important focuses of recent scholarly work on the topic. The relation of evolution to literature may be seen in the context of the emergence of the “popular” in the understanding of science, a phenomenon to which Allen’s essay was a particular testimony, and which his writing did much to expand (see, for instance, his popular biography of Charles Darwin, also in 1888). Allen’s essay also provides evidence of language itself as an index of the cultural conflict embedded in the discussion of evolution: taking strong exception to Matthew Arnold’s sneer in the name of humane learning at Herbert Spencer’s vocabulary of evolutionary exposition (Allen 1888: 37), Allen drew readers into an early iteration of the “Two Cultures” debate that C.P. Snow would lead in 1959.
The legacy of Herbert Spencer points to a particularly important consideration: although “Darwinism” has come to figure as almost a byword for the term evolution, there have been numerous theorists of evolution. In fact, Grant Allen took Spencer’s synthetic, cosmological theory of evolution, which held that all phenomena in the universe were subject to a process in which homogeneous force and matter divided and diversified into heterogeneous specialized functions, to be the most important (see, for instance, Spencer’s First Principles). Spencer’s Lamarckian theory of evolution (after the French naturalist, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck) emphasized the environment, and the organism’s malleability and responsiveness to it, as the key engine of evolutionary transformation. Literary resonances have played a role in determining what has been seized upon and preserved. Charles Darwin’s manipulation of the written word – his willingness to fashion imaginative analogies and metaphors to advance his case – is unquestionably more compelling and involving for the readers than Spencer’s writing. As this chapter seeks to demonstrate, multiple meanings of and relations to the “literary” have been fashioned in the forging of evolutionary theory.
“Evolution” was not widely used to describe theories of common descent, even at the point at which Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859. Theories of common descent, in which organisms descended from parent forms, varying to “become” new species during the process of descent, were known as “transformism,” or “transmutation.” These were approaches to answering the so-called “species question.” Natural historians tended to accept that God the creator had designed, created and fixed each individual species in the economy of nature: the exquisite design of this or that organism, as the English theologian William Paley argued in Natural Theology of 1802, was all the evidence of a creative plan that was required. Transformist principles were a controversial yet persistent theme of Enlightenment thought, and were prominent in the work of the French naturalist Buffon and, from the early nineteenth century, the work of Lamarck. Transformism was, however, by no means accepted in France: Georges Cuvier, the leading comparative anatomist who did important work in re-assembling fossilized forms of extinct species, was hostile to the implications of the theory. A transmutational solution to the species question undermined the authority of the Judaeo-Christian creation story and established religion.
In England, it was Erasmus Darwin who articulated an evolutionary worldview. Darwin was a powerful physician in Lichfield, a member of an influential and progressive scientific and industrial elite (the Lunar Club), and, in his time, a highly regarded poet (King-Hele 1999). Indeed, it was in the form of poetry that Darwin set forth his statement on evolutionary principles in a long, posthumously published philosophical poem in 1803 entitled The Temple of Nature. The poem consists of rhyming couplets, following Pope, and extensive explanatory footnotes drawn from natural historical and anthropological researches. Darwin’s fascination with the materialist principles of life’s origin and development was voiced in poetical form:
Nurs’d by warm sun-beams in primeval caves
Organic life began beneath the waves …
(E. Darwin 1973: Canto I, ll. 233–34)
Hence without parent by spontaneous birth
Rise the first specks of animated earth;
From Nature’s womb the plant or insect swims,
And buds or breathes with microscopic limbs …
(E. Darwin 1973: I, ll. 247–50)
From embryon births her changeful forms improve
Grow, as they live, and strengthen as they move.
(E. Darwin 1973: I, ll. 225–26)
Darwin presents a materialist account of the origins of life in chemical and heat-based processes of “parentless” spontaneous generation; there is no divine artificer evident, instead there is self-directed progress, whereby Nature’s “changeful forms improve.” With its emphasis on organisms self-willing change in response to environmental stimuli, Darwin’s hypothesis of development was similar to the work of Lamarck. But at the heart of the emerging worldview was an ambivalent acknowledgment of destruction, going hand in hand with copious reproductive power and development. In the fourth and final Canto, Darwin presents the reader with an image of life decimated in “one great Slaughter-house the warring world” (E. Darwin 1973: IV, l. 66). In a world of struggle living things can never be, unconditionally, ends in themselves, for they also exist as potential food for other organisms: “With monstrous gape sephulcral whales devour / Shoals at a gulp, a million in an hour” (E. Darwin 1973: IV, l.61). The mouth of the whale is both a grave and a consumption mechanism on an industrial scale.
Erasmus Darwin’s radical science was discredited by conservative satirical attacks from the periodical The Anti-Jacobin, so his reputation, and the question of evolution, became embroiled in the political conflicts of the French Revolution. Yet Darwin had arrived, arguably, at a similar view of living struggle to that elaborated by the supposedly conservative Thomas Malthus, whose Essay on the Principle of Population had been published in 1798. Both Erasmus Darwin and Malthus were important figures to the first-generation Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, though attracted to the work of both writers, vigorously resisted the materialist implications of Darwin’s work (Amigoni 2007: 34–37). Adrian Desmond’s research on early nineteenth-century Lamarckian theories of self-directed development establishes a complex of relations between a politically radical world of London medical practitioners who appropriated them, and the Coleridge-inspired “idealist” medical elite who feared the threat that “anarchic” Lamarckism seemed to pose to an already anxious English political and ecclesiastical establishment (Desmond 1989). Thus, when considering the relationship between evolution and literature before Charles Darwin, Erasmus Darwin’s legacy connects Augustan poetic tradition, materialist theories of life held among radical medical practitioners, and Coleridge’s romantic aesthetic and political theory, which was adopted as a source of opposition to both materialist transmutation, and its popularization in print (Amigoni 2007: 40–42).
These conflicts and debates continued to animate the rather febrile context into which the first popular evolutionary work was received, the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation in 1844. This work brought together much of the science on which the theory of evolution, in its subsequent articulations, would come to depend: astronomy and cosmology (the “Nebular Hypothesis”); geology and earth science; palæontology and comparative anatomy; philology and anthropology; and embryology. Embryology was particularly important to the controversial theory of transmutational change that the text proposed. Starting from recapitulatory theory of the embryo (during early stages of development human embryos appear similar to embryos of “lower” life forms such as fish), it proposed that one lower organism could give birth to the more advanced “next stage” that had always been part of an idealized predetermined plan – so a Creator was “author” of the process that, after a first cause, operated according to natural laws. The Vestiges is an important work because, even though it proposed an easily discredited mechanism of change, it demonstrated how many fields “transmutational” theory had to master and draw together in order to develop grounds for a theory of evolution. In achieving this, its literary drive and narrative powers have come, increasingly, to be recognized. Thus, its chapter on “Secondary Rocks” begins by drawing its reader into a community of understanding, reminding them that
We now enter upon a new great epoch in the history of our globe. There was now dry land. As a consequence of this fact, there was fresh water; for rain, instead of immediately returning to the sea, as formerly, was now gathered in channels of the earth, and became springs, rivers, and lakes. There was now a theatre for the existence of land plants and animals.
(Chambers 1887: 64)
For James Secord, Vestiges was a print “sensation”; his work borrows from book history and reader-response theory to argue that it is possible to reconstruct specific “geographies of reading” (noting differences of reception between mercantile Liverpool and Anglican Cambridge, for instance). But he has also argued that its author – who was in fact the Edinburgh popular publisher and scientific enthusiast, Robert Chambers – appropriated narrative strategies from the influential romantic historical fiction of Sir Walter Scott in order to bind these different findings from different fields of science into an epic of evolutionary development, in which the “theatre for the existence of land plants and animals” could prepare for the emergence of humans (Secord 2000: 87–90). The Vestiges presented evolution as, above all, progress, for Chambers speculated that there may evolve “species superior to us in organization, purer in feeling, more powerful in device and act … There may then be occasion for a nobler type of humanity” (Chambers 1887: 204–5). Chambers thus imagined the possibility of a more advanced, even perfected race of humans. This had its impact on key works of mid-Victorian literature. Though Alfred Tennyson’s great elegiac poem In Memoriam (1850) is often loosely thought of as a text about religious doubts conditioned by Darwinian evolution (“nature red in tooth and claw,” LVI), Tennyson had in fact taken his evolutionary worldview from the Vestiges, and he concludes his poem by imagining, after Chambers, that the deceased Arthur Hallam, as the occasion of his grief and mourning, may in fact have been an embryonic type of the perfected human: “Whereof the man, that with me trod / This planet, was a noble type / Appearing ere the times were ripe” (Tennyson 1989: Epilogue).
Charles Darwin, grandson of Erasmus, Cambridge educated and well connected to early Victorian elite savants such as the geologist Charles Lyell, distanced himself from what he dismissed as the literary and speculative excesses of the Vestiges (Amigoni 2007: 88–89). Paradoxically, his empirical attention to detail and theoretical sophistication opened new kinds of relation between science and literature.
In Charles Darwin’s own account of the formation of his theory, he accorded great significance to his reading of Malthus (C. Darwin 1983: 71). Returned from his life-changing Beagle voyage, it occurred to Darwin in 1838 that population pressure was the key to the mechanism of evolutionary change that he was seeking. Darwin pieced together a number of disparate observations and evidences. He had always been aware of the presence of variations among members of the same species or related varieties; he derived this knowledge from nature, and the work of stock breeders who selected “artificially” for this, rather than that, characteristic. Geology made him aware of a deep history of extinctions and changes in the population of the organic world; the same knowledge made him aware of the extent to which these patterns of extinction could be mapped onto changing territorial configurations of land and water. For Darwin, Malthus’s law of population – that population grows geometrically, while a food supply is subject only to arithmetic forms of growth – meant that members of a given species were in competition with one another, especially given that survival was premised on the need to reproduce more progeny than could ever reach maturity. In this context, an advantageous variation could be a key to survival and leaving further progeny. The variation might be passed on, and indeed, further changed over succeeding generations. Over time, the ancestral characteristics might be increasingly lost from the transforming variety; the ancestral stock might, eventually, become extinct. Imagining life as a great tree – an image he borrowed from philological research into the history of language development – Darwin argued that a new species or “branch” of life has been added, and “evolution by natural selection” has occurred in the context of “the struggle for existence.” It was, clearly, a life science that depended on history and narrative reconstruction, and Darwin had a coherent account of the theory in place by 1844.
Darwin delayed publication – his thesis was controversial – and On the Origin of Species was not published until 1859. In the end, Darwin was bounced into publication of his theory by the work of another naturalist. In 1857, when Alfred Russel Wallace wrote to Darwin from the Malay Archipelago, his own theory was reflected back to him, formulated independently by another naturalist speculating along the same lines. Thus, the Origin as a piece of writing was marked by Darwin’s eagerness to get a publicly accessible full account of his theory into print, and the need, rhetorically, to persuade his audience of the viability of his theory. The challenge faced by Darwin’s rhetorical powers makes the Origin into an extraordinarily fertile contribution to literature in its own right
For instance, Darwin had to persuade a largely skeptical world of nineteenth-century science – British, continental European and American – of the validity of the theory of transmutation, or the “mutability of species.” Conceding the powerful scientific opposition to his theory, he constructs an analogy between the “geological record” and the history of the world as an imperfectly preserved book “written in a changing dialect”:
Of this history we possess the last volume alone, relating only to two or three countries. Of this volume, only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines. Each word of the slowly-changing language, in which the history is supposed to be written, being more or less different in the interrupted succession of chapters, may represent the apparently abruptly changed forms of life, entombed in our consecutive, but widely separated formations.
(C. Darwin 1982: 316)
Darwin’s rhetorical strategy draws its persuasive power from the cultural authority associated with linguistic and literary knowledge. If geologists and palæontologists claimed that the geological and fossil evidence contained no conclusive evidence of evolution, Darwin counters by pointing to the imperfection of the record. The analogical basis for this argument is drawn from extensive philological research into the history of language that itself lent methods of analysis to evolutionary theory (“changing dialect”), but also the image of the exhumed and decaying fragmentary book. Thus a complex understanding of “literature” consisting of historically descended and interrelated linguistic traditions, as well as the book as an organic object in history, helped Darwin to mount the positive argument for the fragmentary evidence of evolutionary change.
If Darwin appealed to literary and linguistic knowledge as an analogical source of support for the theory of evolution, elsewhere Darwin’s writing confronts the richness and also difficulties associated with the metaphorical powers of language. Thus in his chapter on “The struggle for existence,” Darwin premises his discussion on the caveat that he uses the phrase in “a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving pro-geny” (C. Darwin 1982: 116). Darwin conceded that for most people, “struggle” connoted two ravenous canines fighting over one meal, but that it should really also include a plant at the edge of the desert struggling to draw in moisture, or even a plant that was struggling to secure a place for its one mature seed, from the thousand that it produces, on ground already “clothed” by other, competing plants of the same species. In other words, “struggle” as a metaphor imports into the word complex relations of mutual dependency, sexual selection and reproduction. It also unsettles questions of agency: in this process, the individual organism’s capacity for acting for and by itself is dispersed. Agency seems to pass to “nature,” which either selects, or does not. But how could impersonal nature actively select when Darwin acknowledged that variation was such a random if crucial factor in evolution? Such questions about Darwin’s language were actively debated in his own time: Samuel Butler was among the first to see that there was a literary connection between the traditions of discourse from which Darwin’s constructed his theory (reaching back to Erasmus Darwin’s generation), and the doubtful authority and coherence of his theory of natural selection when it depended on metaphors of agency and will that could be pulled in different directions (Butler 1921).
“Metaphor,” in its Greek original, means to transfer or transport, and Darwin’s theory as set out in the Origin required readers to transport meanings between explicit and implicit matter. By design, Darwin did not explicitly address the story of human evolution in the Origin. In fact, Darwin did not provide a statement about human evolution until 1871, when he published The Descent of Man. In that work, Darwin fully articulated his theory of sexual selection and reproduction, and its role in developing the “social instincts” that marked human biological and social evolution. However, during the intervening decade, a great deal of journalistic and scientific writing speculated widely on human evolution (for instance, T.H. Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature of 1863). Inevitably, such concerns were transported in to fill the very “gap” that Darwin had left in the Origin, and as Gillian Beer argued in Darwin’s Plots, imaginative literature played a key role in extending through narrative Darwin’s insights into the relations between the “lower” animals and humans.
Darwin’s epical and vividly literary closing statement in the Origin, about the “grandeur” in a view of life in which development and “war and famine” went hand in hand to produce “wonderful” evolutionary change, suggested powerfully that an “entangled bank” of mutual dependencies and struggles shaped humans just as powerfully as they did worms and insects (C. Darwin 1982: 459). The ontological relationship between so-called “lower” and “higher” organisms was radically altered by Darwin’s theory of evolution. This had an enormous impact on the imagination of nineteenth-century novelists who versed themselves in the thought paradigms of scientific naturalism, such as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy. Nowhere is this more dramatically visible than in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes of 1877, where the geologist Knight loses his footing on a cliff top and finds himself confronting his own death as he looks upon the fossilized remains of the extinct trilobite:
By one of those familiar conjunctions of things with which the inanimate world baits the mind of man when he pauses in moments of suspense, opposite Knight’s eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. … Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within reach of his vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now. … He was to be with the small in his death.
(Hardy 2005: 200)
Many meanings circulate around, and can be transported to, those stone eyes into which Knight gazes as he struggles for his life. Immediately, and in the context of the novel, the dead eyes contrast with the beautiful blue eyes of Elfride, with whom Knight is in love. Eyes were significant organs for the discussion and rebuttal of “transmutation.” In Natural Theology, Paley had argued that close attention to the design of the eye would effectively be a cure for atheism (Paley 1848: 20). In the Origin, Darwin conceded that the seemingly perfect, complex design of the eye was a challenge to the theory of natural selection, but he nonetheless theorized grounds for its emergence (C. Darwin 1982: 217–19). As Knight gazes into the fossilized evidence of natural selection, and continuities between his own perceiving eyes and those of the extinct trilobite, his mind is effectively “baited” by the connection. Hardy self-consciously reworks the generic trope of novelistic “suspense”: for the moment is one of acute “suspense” in the manner so recognizable to Victorian readers of “sensation” fiction (Knight is hanging there, we are on the edge of our seats). However, Hardy is also confronting us with an ontological form of suspension: in the face of evolution, humans themselves are struggling in a state of mental suspense, between an awareness of the processes of evolutionary development that have shaped a refined and complex consciousness, and the brute fear of extinction. Thus, “to be with the small” in death is, after Darwin, a condition of being.
As Gillian Beer has argued, new myths of existence were brought into view by Darwinian evolution, and the form of the Victorian novel became vital for their elaboration (Beer 2000: 118). These myths were explored and elaborated most richly by George Eliot’s realism, with its carefully refined and complex form of narration. In Eliot, Beer accounted for a writer who was deeply versed in the intellectual and scientific culture of her time. In fact, on first reading Darwin, Eliot was not especially struck by what she had encountered (the Origin seemed to be just another articulation of the “development hypothesis”–yet another mid-Victorian term for what we call evolution). However, as Beer argues, it was the total effect of reading and filtering Darwin through the “entangled bank” of Victorian intellectual life itself, including the scientific journalism of her partner, George Henry Lewes, that enabled Eliot to grasp something vital about Darwin’s own epistemology and ethics of the “entangled bank” in nature, and use it to narrate Middlemarch’s (1871) complex meditation on origins and relations in early nineteenth-century provincial English life (Beer 2000: ch. 5).
As Beer indicates, Darwin’s evolutionary work on sexual selection in The Descent of Man and emotions in The Expression of Emotions provided Eliot, and later Victorian novelists and poets in general, with a new naturalistic vocabulary for writing about romance, feeling, and sexual attraction (Beer 2000: ch. 7). At the same time, as Gowan Dawson has argued, such openings also initiated relationships with literary culture that had to be managed quite carefully by Darwin and his circle as the “respectable” faces of Victorian science, mindful of their reputations. Dawson’s work illustrates the way in which Darwin and T.H. Huxley were anxious to distance their work from a variety of literary trends that the press tended to conflate with their science: the poetry of Swinburne and its reputation for “sensuousness,” and the late nineteenth-century Aesthetic and Decadent movements (Dawson 2007).
At the fin de siècle, the relation of evolution to literature was marked by a general anxiety. In 1880, the biologist Edwin Ray Lankester published his essay Degeneration: a chapter in Darwinism. “Degeneration” decisively unpicked the confidence in progress that had characterized the pre-Darwinian work of Robert Chambers, and which had continued to condition many readings of Darwin that chose to overlook his theory of the natural selection of random variation. Lankester argued that an organism, if its food supply became more easily available, would tend to become simpler, rather than more elaborate, in structure, and degenerate. In advancing this zoological argument, Lankester drew upon analogies from other fields, such as a rich man acquiring a fortune and ceasing to work, and also the historical parallel of the late Roman Empire (Lankester 1880: 33). Towards the end of his essay, he gathered evidence of degenerative language structures from philology, and the racial history of humankind (58–59). In effect, “Degeneration” became a tract for anxious times, and it had an impact on the development of such popular genres as the “scientific romance,” pioneered by Grant Allen (among others). Perhaps the best-known example here is H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), in which Darwinian evolution becomes a source of parable for late nineteenth-century anxieties about work, wealth, class, and gender. Wells, who had been trained in evolutionary biology at T.H. Huxley’s Normal School of Science in South Kensington, takes his time traveler to a future in which humanity has degenerated into two distinct species. The easily visible Eloi seemingly want for nothing, indulge in pleasures, and have degenerated into human-like organisms that are no longer strongly marked by sexual difference or the ability to exert effort. Their position in a disturbing social and biological economy is only gradually revealed: the shadowy, ape-like Morlocks, who remain out of sight by day and mindlessly operate vast complexes of industrial machinery underground, prey upon the easy pickings of the Eloi and consume them as food (Wells 1958: 72).
Grant Allen observed in 1888 that everybody was talking about evolution. In the literature of the present, the talk persists in ways that have been shaped by that nineteenth-century engagement of the topic, during which refined scientific discourse interwove with manifold forms of popular literary and non-literary print. Certainly, the biology has changed vastly: theories of particulate inheritance (genetics) and the discovery of DNA have made certain positions (such as cruder forms of Lamarckian environmental determinism) more difficult to sustain. But we can still see the continuities in the example of the novelist Ian McEwan, whose fiction continues to engage explicitly and powerfully with evolution (Amigoni 2008). In Saturday, the central character, Henry Perowne, is a neurosurgeon. Though the toolkit that he brings to his job is neuroscience and genetics, the worldview that he appeals to in order to make sense of himself and his place in it is Darwin’s, from the closing page of the Origin: “There is grandeur in this view of life” (McEwan 2005: 55).
Darwin’s words provide Perowne with an enabling evolutionary myth, a way of making sense of both nature’s architectural powers and its destructive capacity. McEwan’s novel takes as its setting the modern city (London), itself seen by Perowne as a complex biological organism beset by the destructive threat of war (the threat of terrorist attack as London prepares for and protests against war with Iraq, it is February 2003), much in the way that Malthus had theorized civilization at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The murderous danger that Perowne eventually encounters is born of genetic malfunction (an unstable, petty criminal character with Huntington’s chorea, a chromosomal disorder), so that, in the individualistic tradition of the novel, the confrontation between the forces of destruction and growth is focused on the degenerative body of the diseased patient and the consciousness of the physician. However, at the heart of McEwan’s novel, the degenerate character is calmed by the affective power of poetry. McEwan makes interpretation of the incident far from straightforward, but it is striking that the novel continues to be a form for experimenting with evolution as a myth of existence whose wider relationship with, and embodiment in, literature continues to be explored.
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