‘Race’ was an unstable term in the nineteenth century, with new meanings emerging and colliding with older ones, challenging
and challenged by principles of equality and justice. At its most benign, ‘race’ denotes lineage or a ‘group of people, animals,
or plants, connected by common descent’.
1 The young, imprisoned Jane Eyre uses the word in this sense when she reasons: ‘Mrs Reed probably considered she had kept
[her] promise [to her husband]; and so she had, I dare say … but how could she really like an interloper not of her race,
and unconnected with her, after her husband’s death, by any tie?’
2 ‘Race’ here means ‘belonging to a family’: with Mr Reed dead, Jane understands that she is not of Mrs Reed’s ‘race’. The
word is also used to indicate ‘type’, as when Jane notes that she is ‘one of the anathematised race’ of governesses, or when
John Barton in Gaskell’s
Mary Barton realises that ‘[t]he mourner before him was no longer the employer; a being of another race, eternally placed in antagonistic
attitude’.
3 Here the word functions as a synonym for ‘class’, nation, people or any classificatory category marking difference.
Race also indicates a group or subdivision of a species that shares common characteristics. It is from this sense that more
divisive interpretations took shape in the eighteenth century and found full expression in the nineteenth. Differences – physical
as well as cultural (religion, customs and social organisation, for instance) – between humans were increasingly identified
as inborn characteristics. The distinction, in Philip Curtin’s formulation, is between race as an identifying feature of another
group versus race as a
cause of that group’s differences.
4 Further, the blurring of physical and cultural factors meant that all differences came to be read as fixed, inborn and all-determining,
rather than the product of specific environmental, social or other non-biological circumstances. In the nineteenth century
the notions that race was biologically determined and culture racially determined were given a ‘scientific’ imprimatur. In
brief, the eighteenth century’s hierarchical classification of races was replaced in the
nineteenth century by what Douglas Lorimer calls ‘a pervasive scientific racism’.
5 Cultural arrogance, xenophobia, prejudice and fear of the Other existed well before the period under discussion. What altered
in the nineteenth century is the pseudo-scientific sanction that fear and anxiety of the Other received: various branches
of the human and social sciences now offered support for the notion that race – fixed as biology – shaped the capabilities
and attitudes of persons. This racial determinism meant that a group’s behaviours, beliefs and social organisation were seen
to be unchanging.
Discussions about the meaning of ‘race’ occurred in three loci: the anti-slavery movement, the nascent discipline of anthropology
and Darwinism. The biological classification of humans began with Linnaeus in 1735, and dissent rapidly coalesced around the
question of the origins of different humans, with monogenesis and polygenesis marking the far ends of the spectrum. Monogenists,
drawing on Christian orthodoxy, argued for the unity of mankind; they insisted that all humans can be traced to a common source
and that current variations were acquired over time. Polygenists argued that the races were distinct, each a separate species
or lineage. The general rule was that pro-slavery advocates were polygenists, while abolitionists and other humanists were
monogenists.
6The distinction between the two positions was never neat. Edward Long was a vocal late eighteenth-century polygenist. Despite
having lived many years in Jamaica, where evidence to the contrary was plentiful, Long claimed that the sterility of ‘hybrids’
proved that the races were separate species. Yet, he simultaneously insisted that the existence of ‘creoles’ indicated that
residence in a place changed people.
7 Such environmental arguments were the stock-in-trade of monogenists, yet here was a prominent polygenist promulgating them.
By the same token, Curtin cautions us not to conflate monogenesis with a belief in the equality of humans: many monogenists
subscribed to the notion of African inferiority, differing from their adversaries only in believing that education or the
‘moral influence’ of Christianity could correct such ‘barbarisms’ (230–43). Between 1750 and 1850, polygenists and monogenists
waged a fierce battle in abolitionist and pro-slavery tracts, scientific journals and newspapers.
One of the strongest advocates of monogenesis and a link to the emerging discipline of anthropology was James Prichard, a
Quaker and physician who studied ‘primitive’ peoples. Between 1813 and 1848 he wrote books combating the arguments of comparative
anatomists, who viewed
the variety of humankind as indicative of separate species. Prichard aimed ‘to trace the history of the tribes and races of
men … to discover their mutual relations, and to arrive at conclusions … as to their affinity or diversity of origin’.
8 He concluded that the races of humankind had more ‘affinity’ with one another than ‘diversity’ and could be traced to a single
source. Prichard practised what by the 1850s was called ‘ethnology’ – comparing different groups in order to map human history
and origins – but unlike the comparative anatomists, Prichard studied not just physical traits (anatomy), but also religion,
political institutions, customs and especially language.
Prichard’s approach was one strand in the fabric of nineteenth-century anthropology, with the Aborigines Protection Society’s
humanitarian impulse pointing in another direction. The group coalesced in 1837 and, led by Thomas Hodgkin, had ‘an ambiguous
double thrust’: to protect the rights of aboriginal peoples from European colonialism
and to ‘civilise’ them.
9 To accomplish these ends, it studied their behaviour and habits. In 1843 those more interested in the ‘science’ than what
they considered Exeter Hall humanitarianism or colonial politics splintered into the Ethnological Society of London. Stocking
has called this development ‘the abandonment of active humanitarian involvement and movement into the world of “science”’
(245). In 1863 a further schism occurred when James Hunt, believing the Ethnological Society itself too humanitarian, created
the Anthropological Society of London (ASL). The new body was not so new: it substituted the Ethnological Society’s focus
on institutions, customs and language with an (re-)emphasis on anatomy. Nancy Stepan describes the development of the ASL
as ‘a shift from a sense of man as primarily a social being, governed by social laws and standing apart from nature, to a
sense of man as primarily a biological being, embedded in nature and governed by biological laws’,
10 and Stocking writes that Hunt’s was ‘an anthropological approach in many respects uncongenial to a developmental study of
man’ (249). Hunt and the leadership of the ASL were polygenists but with a stronger racial determinism than their predecessors.
In his presidential address, Hunt stated that Africans were closer to apes than Europeans, and in 1866 wrote about ‘the impossibility
of applying the civilization and laws of one race to another race of man essentially distinct. Statesmen may ignore the existence
of race-antagonism; but it exists nonetheless. They may continue to plead that race-subordination forms no part of nature’s
laws; but this will not alter the facts.’
11 In Curtin’s words, ‘where earlier writers had held that race was
an important influence on human culture, the new generation saw race as
the crucial determinant, not only of culture but of human character and of all history’ (364).
Hunt and much of the leadership of the ASL were also anti-Darwinian. Darwin himself was a monogenist and member of the Ethnological
Society. His The Origin of Species (1859) did not discuss humans, but most readers extrapolated and applied the theory of natural selection to humans. At first
glance, Darwin’s ideas gave credence to monogenists’ belief in the single origin of humankind. Hunt, writes Stocking, ‘greet[ed]
Darwinism as a disguised reassertion of the Prichardian doctrine of human unity’ (250). Yet Darwinism also swept away scriptural
historiography, the basis of monogenesis. With hindsight we can see that evolution did not so much end the debate between
monogenesis and polygenesis as alter it: within an evolutionary framework, the vast differences between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’
peoples no longer required explanation in terms of origins. But those of a racialist bent now had new ammunition: even if ‘savages’ and Europeans shared the same ancestors, their vast distinctions
showed one to be more evolved than the other. With Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism and application of ‘survival of the fittest’ to human societies and
history, the lesson many drew was that aboriginal peoples and societies that were destroyed were simply the least equipped
to survive. Social Darwinism was a comforting fiction to colonial powers, as the weaknesses of colonised peoples could be
understood as ‘natural’, not the result of human history and agency. At the end of the day, Darwinism did less to settle the
monogenesis–polygenesis debate than to render it moot. Stepan even argues that ‘far from dislodging old racial ideas, evolution
strengthened them, and provided them with a new scientific vocabulary of struggle and survival’ (49).
As these developments indicate, notions of racial determinism, in the ascendancy by the end of the century, did not go unchallenged.
In Stocking’s view, ‘a rigidly biological determinist approach, in 1850 … was far from necessarily the case’ (63–4). Nor did
these ideas remain in the secluded realm of learned societies. According to Curtin, ‘During the 1840s and 1850s, British theorists
whose background lay in moral, rather than natural, philosophy began to borrow the racial thoughts of the scientists’ (375).
It was these polemicists, more than the scientists, who popularised the idea that race was a biological destiny that shaped
human history, culture and society.
The central populariser is Robert Knox, an Edinburgh anatomist and physician whose practice collapsed when it was discovered
that he had received cadavers from Burke and Hare. Knox took to lecturing and in
1850 published
The Races of Men. Curtin calls Knox ‘the real founder of British racism and one of the key figures in the general Western movement toward
a dogmatic pseudo-scientific racism’ (377). Knox wrote: ‘With me,
race, or hereditary descent, is everything; it stamps the man.’
12 That race was a fixed, biological destiny is evident in his example: ‘If any one insists with me that a Negro or Tasmanian
accidentally born in England becomes thereby an Englishman, I yield the point; but should he further insist, that he, the
said Negro or Tasmanian, may become also a Saxon … I must contend against’ (12).
‘Commonsensically’ distinguishing nationality and race, Knox reduced a complex argument – nobody had contended that a ‘Negro’
could ‘become’ a Saxon, but many debated whether a race of people must always have the same cultural arrangements and intellectual
acquisitions – in order to underscore his central theme: that each race was distinct and must remain so. He revived Long’s
assertion that ‘hybrids’ were sterile beyond two or three generations (53). For Knox, human history was an evolutionary struggle
between races in which it appeared that ‘[i]f there be a dark race destined to contend with the fair races of man for a portion
of the earth, given to man as an inheritance, it is the Negro’ (306). In Curtin’s words, ‘Here was a new note in British racial
thought. Earlier generations had sometimes despised the Africans, sometimes pitied them, but never feared them’ (380).
The extent of Knox’s influence is debated (Peter Mandler calls him ‘the odd English racist’),
13 but few doubt the importance of Thomas Carlyle,
the Victorian sage. Carlyle’s 1849 ‘Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question’ (provocatively retitled ‘Occasional Discourse
on the Nigger Question’ in 1853) is an early and chilling statement of Victorian racism. The target of his essay is ‘Exeter
Hall philanthropists’ who with their ‘benevolent twaddle’ about ‘the rights of negroes’ have brought ruin on West Indian whites.
Carlyle claimed that while ‘Quashee’ sits ‘up to the ears in pumpkins’, ‘sugar crops rot round [him], uncut’ and Britons starve.
In grandiose rhetoric, Carlyle concluded: ‘If Quashee will not honestly aid in bringing out those sugars, cinnamons, and nobler
products of the West India islands, for the benefit of all mankind, then, I say, neither will the powers permit Quashee to
continue growing pumpkins there for his own lazy benefit, but will sheer him out, by and by, like a lazy gourd overshadowing
rich ground … perhaps in a very terrible manner’.
14 That West Indian Britons come to represent ‘all mankind’ is a standard colonising gesture; more troubling is the genocidal
impulse hinted at in the ‘sheering out’ by some unnamed
‘terrible manner’. But if Carlyle had more clout than Knox, he also aroused more resistance. J. S. Mill wrote an angry rejoinder
excoriating Carlyle for his ‘doctrine … that one kind of human beings are born servants to another kind’.
15 Mill’s critique drew on abolitionist rhetoric about the ethical and humane treatment of all, an argument that, as we have
seen, waned as ‘scientific’ arguments gained credence over those of humanitarianism.
Carlyle and Mill butted heads again in 1865 over the Governor Eyre controversy, the impassioned response in Britain to the
Jamaican governor’s harsh reprisals to a minor uprising (in two weeks over four hundred Jamaicans were killed, six hundred
flogged and a thousand houses burned by the army). To some, the events in Jamaica were an echo of the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’,
but this time the reaction in Britain was markedly different. Mill, along with Darwin, Huxley and Spencer, led the charge
against Eyre’s brutal response, while Carlyle, accompanied by Ruskin, Tennyson, Hunt and Dickens, defended Eyre. In response
to charges brought against Eyre, Carlyle castigated ‘the Majesty’s Ministers, who, instead of rewarding their Governor Eyre,
throw him out of window [
sic] to a small loud group … nothing but a group or knot of rabid Nigger-Philanthropists, barking furiously in the gutter’.
16 Eyre’s acquittal in 1868 seemed to vindicate the Carlylian camp; for us, the affair is testimony to the ways that debates
about race filtered into questions of policy and empire.
Where does Dickens fit into this story? Does his support for Eyre indicate a troubling racialism? If so, how do we square
that with his concern and regard for the poor and the downcast? The answers to these questions are far from clear-cut. Readers
of the fiction are likely to remember Mrs Jellyby of
Bleak House who neglects her family in favour of the ‘natives’ of the fictional and provocatively named ‘Borrioboola-Gha’ in Africa.
The nativist argument is unsubtly and clumsily made. Coupled with the portrait of Major Bagstock’s servant, ‘the Native’,
identified solely by his otherness and utterly silent (
Dombey and Son), we are left with the impression not merely of disregard but active disdain on Dickens’s part for the ‘dark races’. Such
disdain can be traced in some of Dickens’s earliest novels: Fagin (
Oliver Twist), Dickens’s most fully developed non-Anglo-Saxon figure, is, like Knox’s Tasmanian, English by residence, but his looks,
behaviour and outlook are entirely decided by his race, his Jewishness. With his ‘villainous-looking and repulsive face’,
red hair, glistening eye and depravity (ch. 8), Fagin is cousin to Knox’s and Carlyle’s ‘savages’. By the end of his career,
Dickens atoned for this
negative representation and in
Our Mutual Friend created Mr Riah, the kindly moneylender whose characterisation reverses negative Jewish stereotypes.
Dickens’s journalism provides more detailed material. In
American Notes he devoted an entire chapter to ‘that most hideous blot and foul disgrace – Slavery’, but when American slaves were emancipated,
he thought giving them the vote an ‘absurdity’.
17 Dickens was not alone in opposing both slavery and the franchise for ex-slaves; this seeming contradiction reminds us that
many Africans could only be objects of humanitarian intervention, never equals. With Dickens, the humanitarian impulse itself
was occasional. In an 1853 essay entitled ‘The Noble Savage’, which, like Carlyle’s ‘Occasional Discourse’, lambasted philanthropists,
Dickens declared:
To come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage … I don’t care what he calls
me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think
a mere gent … better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage … [A] savage [is] cruel, false,
thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift
of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.
18
A year later Dickens attacked ‘Esquimaux savages’ whose testimony suggested that Sir John Franklin and his men had not only
perished in their search for the Northwest Passage but also possibly resorted to cannibalism in their final days. In Dickens’s
words, ‘every savage [is] in his heart covetous, treacherous, and cruel’.
19 Both essays are committed to a racial hierarchy and steeped in ugly cultural chauvinism; yet neither suggests that Dickens
considered the behaviour of ‘savages’ fixed or the outcome of their race. Indeed, the possibility that savagery could be ‘
civilised off the face of the earth’ suggests, not biological fixity, but alteration.
Dickens’s most vitriolic statement on racial others came in 1857, shortly after the Indian ‘Mutiny’ broke. He wrote in a private
letter: ‘I wish I were Commander in Chief in India … I should do my utmost to exterminate the Race upon whom the stain of
the late cruelties rested … to blot it out of mankind and raze it off the face of the Earth’.
20 Grace Moore argues that in later years Dickens revised these views on the ‘Mutiny’.
21 I am disinclined to this position: as I have argued elsewhere, Dickens’s views of racial others, most fully developed in
his short fiction, indicate that for him ‘savages’ functioned as a handy foil against which British national identity could
emerge.
22 Where does that leave us? Was Dickens a ‘racist’?
Did he subscribe to notions of biological determinism? All the available evidence suggests that Dickens was never a Hunt or
Knox in matters of biological race. His ugly caricatures of ‘the Jew’ and ‘savages’, his rapid activation of the ‘savage’
trope in contrast to noble Britons, and his cultural chauvinism suggest a nativism of the sort that played a crucial role
in justifications of Empire.