The scientific breakthrough Wells imagined at the end of the nineteenth century has become a reality in the twenty-first. In the past few decades, the questions raised by the creation of interspecies hybrids, xenotransplants, and chimeras have become pressing enough to prompt the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to issue guidelines covering the ethical constraints on such research. The guidelines were new when they were published in 2005, but the problem was not: as far back as the mid-1980s, scientists had successfully created pigs with human DNA, transgenic mice, the “geep” (a goat-sheep hybrid), and human-monkey hybrids made by grafting stem cells from one organism into another. Dr. Moreau’s Monkey Man had seemed a monstrous fantasy at the time, but the questions Wells raised about the ethics of creating chimeras have a new relevance today.

H. G. Wells’s novel The Island of Doctor Moreau tells the story of Edward Prendick’s shipwreck and ten-month stay on an uncharted island in the Pacific where Dr. Moreau and his assistant Montgomery have established a biological station to conduct illicit experiments in xenotransplantation. A decade earlier, the discovery of Moreau’s gruesome activities had led to his banishment from the London scientific community. Now the doctor has refined his technique and operates on animals to transform them into “grotesque travesties of men” (110). He has devoted his life to the study of the “plasticity of living forms”; he has learned to change “not simply the outward form of an animal” but the “physiology, the chemical rhythm of the creature”; the entire being can be “made to undergo an enduring modification” (97). By the time Prendick arrives, the island is populated by some sixty of Moreau’s creations. These “Beast People” include three Swine Men and a Swine Woman, a chattering Monkey Man, a loyal Saint Bernard Dog Man, a Satyr, the dangerous Leopard Man, and other “half-humanized brutes” (169). Even though Moreau’s creations are formed by surgical rather than genetic modifications, they qualify as what scientists today call chimeras – mixtures of biological material from two or more species.¹

The IOM report that discusses chimeras is a 166-page document titled Guidelines for Human Embryonic Stem Cell Research. It reviews the scientific potential of stem cell research, the ethical concerns attendant on it, the current regulatory environment, and the appropriate protections for embryo donors, and then recommends guidelines in this contentious area.² The report endorses human stem cell research but proposes limits and increased oversight to address the concerns of opponents.

Regarding chimeras, the committee recommends that any research combining human with nonhuman tissue should be permitted only after review by special oversight committees and that the creation of chimeras involving humans and nonhuman primates should be prohibited at this time. This recommendation is prompted by two concerns, both of which Wells anticipated in The Island of Doctor Moreau – the possibility that chimeras might breed and the risk of enhancing nonhuman intelligence. Primates receive special attention for fairly obvious reasons. The degree of genetic similarity to humans affects the likelihood of a chimera’s developing human traits, and the size of an animal’s brain influences whether its neural development can approach that of humans.

The media greeted this report with a parade of mythological and literary references and quoted scientists and medical ethicists who did the same. Maureen Dowd accused the committee of having “a fit of Island of Doctor Moreau queasiness” and quoted Henry Greely, a leading scholar of law and bioethics who spoke at the committee’s two-day workshop, as remarking: “The centaur has left the barn” (Dowd A27). Nicholas Wade regaled readers with Lon Chaney in The Wolf Man, sphinxes, the Minotaur, mermaids, Caliban, and Medusa (D1). Scholarly articles about chimeras, before and after the report, mentioned the same imaginary monsters. For example, Karpowicz and his collaborators cite Doctor Moreau as evidence that the “sinister connotations” of chimeras in myth and literature “have probably had an impact on current negative perceptions of interspecies combinations” (“Ethical” 331). A 2011 report in the United Kingdom by the Academy of Medical Sciences on Animals Containing Human Material notes that the term “humanized animals,” now commonly “used in scientific literature to describe transgenic animals or chimaeras” (71), first appeared in Wells’s novel. The report situates Doctor Moreau with other fictions such as Shelley’s Frankenstein and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” which it sees as generating concerns that “we need to take seriously” (72).³ More than a century after the publication of Wells’s fable, it is still exerting an influence both on the public’s view of the life sciences and on the discourse of science policy.

Misreading Moreau

Unfortunately, prominent policy experts have drawn the wrong conclusions from novels like Doctor Moreau and then used them to recommend positions that Wells would have rejected. Citing mythological creatures such as the Greek chimera itself or monsters from literature as evidence of our instinctive abhorrence to mixing species is common among conservative and religious bioethicists, particularly those Steven Pinker has labeled “theocons.” What would dismay Wells, a passionate advocate of the biological sciences, is the attempt to use a feeling of repugnance as a principled argument for halting research on stem cells or other potential biomedical advances.

In opposition to this view, I want to emphasize two points. First, that Doctor Moreau actually weakens the case against creating chimeras by modeling an ethical stance toward this kind of research in the figure of the narrator. Prendick initially feels sympathy, not repugnance, toward the Beast Men, and his response contains a thoughtful assessment of the issues that surround the laboratory creation of chimeras. Although Prendick identifies both dangers that the IOM Guidelines saw as especially worrisome, the book as a whole cannot fairly be described as antiscience. Instead, it implicitly suggests standards for the ethical conduct of research on chimeras. Since bioethicists who endorse continued research on human-nonhuman chimeras have proposed some of the same standards, perhaps Doctor Moreau would have little to teach them. But it certainly holds a message for those who oppose such research – a very different message from the one they think it teaches.

Potentially more valuable to policy discussions is the historical juxtaposition of Wells’s situation in the 1890s with that of our own time. The disciplinary status of the sciences was in flux in the late-nineteenth century. Its reputation was on the rise, and its role in the larger culture was growing. One of the most telling indicators of how science was on the march was the threat it appeared to pose to the prestige of literature, a threat that Mathew Arnold made manifest in his debate with Wells’s mentor, Thomas H. Huxley. This debate over the comparative value of science and literature had a large impact on nineteenth-century society, as did Huxley’s related work to raise the prominence of science education in the universities. Hence, when Wells twice introduces Huxley’s name into Doctor Moreau, we should understand the references to be more than autobiographical allusions to Wells’s former mentor. They are indications of Wells’s lifelong commitment to renegotiating the relationship between science and literature. In different ways, the careers of both Huxley and Wells turn out to be exemplary of the disciplinary changes that were shaping their times.

With the rise of the policy realm today, science is having to renegotiate its relationship with the larger culture as well. Increasingly since the 1960s, science has had to account for its impact on society as part of normal operating procedures – most overtly, in dealing with institutional review boards (IRBs); most consequentially, in adapting to policy recommendations; most confrontationally, in responding to social movements, which intermittently but insistently have protested a wide range of environmental and ethical impacts. The changes in the two periods are very different from one another. I do not mean to draw a parallel between the forces reshaping nineteenth-century science and those at work today. Rather I want to show how we can learn from the differences between these two historical moments. Comparative historical study can illuminate as much by juxtaposing the contrast between historical formations as by identifying their similarities. In this case, I want to draw attention to mistaken strategies proposed by Wells later in his career for bridging the gap between science and literature and argue that we not go down that road again.

Understanding the history of literature’s relationship to science over the last 150 years will be a recurrent topic in this book. It is an important subject if humanists today are to capitalize on opportunities to participate in science policy discussions. Historical perspective can help us recognize the shape of the new configuration between the two disciplines, not misunderstand our moment, as did the cultural purists of the late-nineteenth century, like Matthew Arnold, who defended literature by emphasizing its aloofness and superiority to science, and those twentieth-century thinkers – characterized by Wells’s later books and by C. P. Snow – who hoped that being a generalist could bridge the two cultures. Neither strategy worked in its day, and neither is appropriate for our own time.

Moreau and Prendick: Two Visions of Science

Prendick’s adventures on a South Sea island make for a thrilling tale, one that combines elements of the shipwreck narrative, horror story, and Swiftian satire. His encounter with Dr. Moreau also contributes to a stereotypical critique of science comparable to that which has been derived from Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Brave New World. Like each of these fictions, Doctor Moreau is deeply embedded in the intellectual currents of its day – in Wells’s case, the debates over evolution, degeneration, and vivisection, as well as with the biology he learned as a student of Thomas Huxley. Yet the “lessons” of these novels have been consistently simplified and divorced from their historical moment and then adapted for films that further twist their meaning. Wells’s portrait of an irresponsible scientist, driven to pursue his investigations at any cost, contributes to a prominent cultural stereotype: the mad scientist.⁴ This vision of an egomaniacal scientist playing God is usually all that newspapers have in mind when they invoke the novel. Worse still, their memory of the mad scientist figure is usually derived from one of the wildly distorted movies.

The contrast between Moreau and Prendick, however, results in a more nuanced response to science. Prendick initially thinks that the Beast People have been created by altering humans to make them more animalistic. He fears that Moreau is using surgical means to accelerate what E. Ray Lankester called – in more biologically correct terms than Social Darwinists of the time – degeneration.⁵ Although relieved to discover that Moreau’s experiments were performed on animals, not humans, Prendick continues to be bothered by the cruelty of this research. Wells was aware of the antivivisectionist crusade of the previous two decades, and his descriptions of Moreau’s cruelty to research animals are as harrowing as any in Wilkie Collins’s attack on the practice in Heart and Science (1883). But Wells did not oppose experimentation on animals. In fact, his position resembles the normative stance of the scientific establishment (from the nineteenth century to the present), which objects to needless cruelty in research and medical education but finds animal experimentation justified in pursuit of legitimate scientific and therapeutic goals.⁶ Prendick reflects: “Had Moreau had any intelligible object I could have sympathized at least a little with him” (133).

Prendick’s next question involves the possibility of these new mixtures breeding. Just as the IOM committee is troubled by the idea of allowing chimeras to reproduce, Prendick is disturbed by the prospect of Moreau’s Beast People bearing offspring. Moreau’s assistant Montgomery admits that they do, but he justifies the practice by noting that the offspring generally die and that besides “there was no evidence of the inheritance of the acquired human characteristics” (112). This latter comment is an echo of the anti-Lamarckian findings of August Weismann, whom Wells had been reading in the 1890s,⁷ but the position remains relevant today. The IOM committee finds it “highly unlikely” that human cells “could contribute to the germline” of an animal already beyond the early stages of fetal development (Guidelines 33). Some members of the President’s Council on Bioethics take consolation from the same point:

To be on the safe side, however, the IOM committee recommends a ban against “breeding of any interspecies chimera” (Guidelines 5).

The concern with possible changes in nonhuman brains receives more extended consideration in Wells. Dr. Moreau expresses frustration at not being able to alter the brains of his chimeras enough to achieve something like full human cognition: “It is in the subtle grafting and reshaping one must needs do to the brain that my trouble lies. The intelligence is often oddly low, with unaccountable blank ends, unexpected gaps” (106). Prendick is aghast at Moreau’s arrogance. It torments him to think that by raising the Beast People’s intelligence, Moreau has produced creatures with a wholly new capacity for suffering. The Beast People have a new claim on Prendick’s sympathy. They live in agony, both physical and mental, beset by internal struggles between the old animal instincts and a new humanlike consciousness.

To juxtapose the views of Wells and contemporary bioethicists is to induce a slight shock – both of incongruity and of recognition – when one sees the reactions of Prendick rephrased in the language of policy analysis. Because many people today think that the ethical status of a being is related to its “mental capacities such as the ability to feel pleasure and pain, language, rationality, and richness of relationships,” ethicists are concerned that “neural grafting might change capacities in a way that changes moral status” (Greene et al. 385). They worry that “more humanlike capacities might also confer greater capacity for suffering” (Greene et al. 386). More blandly, the IOM committee remarks: “The idea that human neuronal cells might participate in ‘higher-order’ brain functions in a nonhuman animal, however unlikely that may be, raises concerns that need to be considered” (Guidelines 33).

The urgency of this issue was brought home by the success in 2000 and 2001 of experiments in grafting human neural stem cells into the brains of mice (Uchida et al.) and fetal monkeys (Ourednik et al.). Most scientists agree that there are good reasons for undertaking research in this area, including testing potential therapies for spinal cord injuries and neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s; learning whether neural stem cells can repair or regenerate damaged areas of the brain; and discovering whether functioning human tissue or organs could be grown in a host animal for later transplantation into humans. Scientists also believe it to be unlikely that transplanting human neuronal cells into postnatal animals would enhance intelligence to human levels, especially if three conditions are met: (1) the cells are dissociated rather than transplanted as a large mass or entire organ, (2) the cells are not implanted in the very early stages of fetal development before the native brain architecture has been established, and (3) the brain size of the host animal is significantly smaller than that of the human. It is these last two caveats that lead the IOM committee to recommend banning any introduction of human stem cells into nonhuman primate blastocysts (Guidelines 7), even though other commentators see less danger in such research.⁸ Additionally, the IOM recommends that oversight committees be created to attend to how human cells affect the higher functions of the nonhuman brain (Guidelines 6).

The Emergence of Disciplinarity in Science and Literature

Drawing attention to the serious as opposed to the sensationalistic features of Wells’s treatment of science could help deepen the public’s response to an important area of biomedical research. Although literary criticism is unlikely to reach a wider public, introducing such ideas into the classroom would have a salutary effect. I know from experience that The Island of Doctor Moreau has a similar appeal to secondary school and college-age students as widely taught novels like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies. When I draw out science policy issues from Doctor Moreau in the classroom, thoughtful and lively discussions of contemporary ethical questions invariably emerge.

A second approach to policy questions in the novel involves comparative historical studies. Because of Wells’s deep interest in the place of science in his time, his work illuminates the changing relationship between science and literature in the 1890s. According to Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente, “disciplines are always constituted in relation to, and in a kind of dialogue with, other disciplines” (5). This is especially true of Wells and Huxley, who both wrote in and about academic disciplines on either side of the two cultures.

In the early nineteenth century, there was nothing like today’s disciplinary structures. The sciences only began to assume their modern forms in the 1860s, and the humanities and social sciences developed still later in the 1880s and 1890s.⁹ For most of the nineteenth century, discipline-based expertise was not the primary way a savant gained influence in the public sphere, much to the frustration of early advocates of disciplinarity such as Charles Babbage. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, the existence of a professional elite, trained and credentialed in their respective disciplines, could be counted on as a resource by both government and industry. The story of this transformation has been frequently told, as has the tale of the divergent trajectories taken by the humanities and the sciences during the remainder of the twentieth century.¹⁰ But these developments form an essential backdrop to understanding the new potential for the humanities to participate in public policy debates. The developments I refer to are most frequently identified by the phrase C. P. Snow coined in 1959: the split between the “two cultures.” As is well known, Snow described the gulf between literature and science, using literature as shorthand for the humanities generally. Invoking his own career-long attempt to bridge the gap (and there is a strong affinity between the efforts of Snow and Wells), Snow lamented what he saw as the progressive worsening of the division, and he attributed it to the growth of specialization. Wells, too, struggled against this split, but his attempt (like all others in the twentieth century) must be judged a failure. Although Wells wrote best-selling books of popular science and successfully promulgated his positions on political and scientific questions, neither his fiction nor his nonfiction did much to reverse the widening gulf. Wells’s choice to reject literary modernism did not bridge the gap, nor did his plea to scientists to write more accessibly for a general public. Disciplinary specialization was becoming increasingly necessary to modern science, and no amount of clarity or intellectual breadth could heal a breach that was a consequence of some of the largest social and economic trends in Europe and the United States.

There is an even greater irony in Wells’s struggle. From his mentor Thomas Huxley, Wells inherited an abiding desire to reform higher education by elevating the prestige of science and engineering in schools and universities. In the 1890s, this project took the form of insisting that science teaching needed to be laboratory based (one of Huxley’s innovations at the Normal School of Science that Wells attended) and of advocating that scientists simplify their style and use a less technical vocabulary.¹¹ His goal was to spread science literacy throughout the general public and hence reduce the two-cultures gap. But he combined this mission with another, contradictory agenda, without recognizing how the two impulses worked at cross-purposes. This second agenda was an attack on the prominence of classical studies in the university, a cause also championed by Wells’s mentor, Thomas Huxley. Writing of the “conflict of studies,” Wells advocated replacing classics with more practical courses in science and engineering, thus driving another wedge between partisans for the humanities and the sciences (“Science Teaching” 23).

The parallel with those proponents of STEM education (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) today who call for the replacement of humanities classes in the curriculum with practical classes in science, engineering, and computer science is hard to miss. But such calls have become rallying points for some state legislators and business leaders, as well as by a few education reformists. Richard Posner typifies this vein of advocacy when he writes:

Posner’s rhetoric is more inflated than Wells’s, but the position is largely the same.

Wells’s campaign for science education exacerbated the two-culture split. As early as Anticipations (1901), Wells claimed that people with a scientific background were becoming “naturally segregated” (4: 255). Amid the “world-wide process of social and moral deliquescence” of the day, “a really functional social body of engineering, managing men, scientifically trained, and having common ideals and interests, is likely to segregate and disentangle itself from our present confusion” (4: 127). Wells’s account of why this division was probable reads like a formula for manufacturing the two cultures:

Just as important to Wells, scientists will be trained in a new type of institution, the research university: “The old-fashioned university, secure in its omniscience, merely taught; the university of the coming time will, as its larger function, criticize and learn. It will be organized for research” (4: 234). There is a place in this new university for literature, but it will be, in the words of an earlier essay, a “clear and sensible” literature that spurns classics and “hates allusions and quotations” (Wells, “Literature of the Future,” qtd. in David Smith, 85). As Wells continued in Anticipations, “To mumble over the past, to live on the classics, however splendid, is senility” (4: 234).

Rather than regretting this growing division, as might have been expected of a writer with a foot in both camps, Wells celebrated the emergence of a technocratic elite because he hoped it would produce the governing class of a new World State. In years to come, “the power that will finally supersede democracy and monarchy altogether, the power of the scientifically educated, disciplined specialist … will triumph” (Anticipations 4: 185). Wells felt comfortable trumpeting the demise of democracy and its replacement by the rule of technocrats because of science’s reputation for detachment and impartiality. More disturbing still, Wells’s unflinching displays of scientific reason justified him, in his own mind, in making heartless calculations, such as working out the competitive advantage that would accrue to a country that “sterilizes, exports, or poisons” its unfit people (Anticipations 4: 184).

Wells’s example should give us pause when considering Posner’s willingness to emphasize the technical fields even to the entire exclusion of “the classics of the Western philosophical, literary, and artistic traditions” (Catastrophe 95). Wells’s solution to the conflict of disciplines, like Posner’s, aligns him with the people whom Huxley, a great scientist, called “Goths and Vandals” who want “to sweep away all other forms of culture and instruction, except those in physical science” (Huxley 3:55). The answer, however, is not the integration of the humanities with the sciences – a vain hope – but collaboration among the disciplines, particularly on projects that raise pressing social, ethical, legal, and cultural questions. In pursuit of solutions to large, shared problems, the humanities, arts, social sciences, engineering, and natural sciences may each contribute valuably from its own perspective without sacrificing the methodologies that give each specialty its ability to produce new knowledge and insight.

Prendick’s Mentor, Thomas H. Huxley

The Island of Doctor Moreau is an indictment of irresponsible science, not all science, and of the kind of heartless experimenter that was even then a cliché of popular culture. It is critical, that is, of the very kind of unswerving rationalist Wells was to celebrate a few years later in Anticipations. Moreau freely admits: “I have never troubled about the ethics of the matter. The study of Nature makes a man at last as remorseless as Nature” (Doctor Moreau 102). Moreau’s cruelty to the animals he operates on without anesthesia, his blind neglect of all ethical questions, and his disdain for the critics who drove him from London are judged harshly in the novel. Prendick’s final verdict on this man is unsparing: “He was so irresponsible, so utterly careless. His curiosity, his mad, aimless investigations, drove him on” (Doctor Moreau 133).

Wells’s novel establishes Moreau as only one pole of a spectrum of scientifically trained men whose other pole is the narrator. Prendick, it turns out, has been educated as a biologist at the Royal College of Science under Thomas Huxley himself. Moreau’s assistant Montgomery represents a third variant of the scientifically trained person. He is a disillusioned young man who has washed out of medical school because of too much carousing and now spends his hours complaining about his lot. This range of attitudes and destinies contrasts with the “homogenous” class of “practical people” that Wells was to hail five years later.

Despite Wells’s sympathy with Prendick, he understands that the cultured scientist that Prendick represents is not readily available to the specialist of his own time. The narrator harks back to a type of amateur experimenter and literary man who already had a marginal or residual role in the 1890s because of professionalization in both fields. At the end of the novel, Prendick has escaped from the island of horrors and has retired into the country, where he writes the narrative we are reading and spends his “days surrounded by wise books, bright windows, in this life of ours lit by the shining souls of men…. My days I devote to reading and to experiments in chemistry, and I spend many of the clear nights in the study of astronomy” (Doctor Moreau 185). Prendick’s mixed predilections perfectly illustrate the unevenly professionalized culture of the late-nineteenth century, a position surprisingly epitomized by Thomas Huxley too.

From the very beginning of his career, Huxley was an eager participant in the push to professionalize science, working ceaselessly to reform university curricula, to infiltrate himself and his friends into leadership positions in professional societies, and to secure governmental posts, journal editorships, and prestigious university chairs. He was no leisured gentleman of science like his revered predecessor Darwin, who leveraged an 1830s scientific education and mode of practice into success in a mounting disciplinary regime. Rather Huxley was a self-made man, keenly aware of how a lack of disciplinary structures could be used to keep people such as himself out of power. (In this respect, too, he was a pattern for Wells, who rose from the working class to a position of influence.) For Huxley, organizing science into distinct disciplines was a way of democratizing intellectual labor and safeguarding the pursuit of truth from the interference of religious orthodoxy.

At the same time, Huxley also managed to emulate another cultural type, the scientist as literary figure or Victorian sage. Like Darwin and the other gentlemen scientists of the 1830s, Huxley was keenly interested in a host of topics that fell outside of his professional competence: art, literature, education, religion, and philosophy. His struggle to combine the role of public sage, reminiscent of an earlier generation of savants, with that of a dedicated professional scientist marks him as a transitional figure. A tireless advocate of disciplinary specialization, he was also an eloquent and versatile writer who addressed religious, ethical, and philosophical topics as widely as his sometime antagonist, Matthew Arnold. Indeed, Stephen Jay Gould nominates Huxley for the title of “greatest prose stylist in the history of British science” (“Introduction: Thomas H. Huxley” x).

One example of Huxley’s writing will have to suffice. It is a small piece, Huxley’s Romanes Lecture of 1893, “Evolution and Ethics,” but it happens to be an address that influenced Wells as profoundly as anything he ever read. One of Wells’s critics rightly remarks, “[t]here is almost nothing in Huxley’s lecture which did not issue in a literary equivalent somewhere in Wells’s work” (Haynes, H.G. Wells 26). Huxley’s address is a tour de force, written near the end of his life under constraints both professional and personal that brought out his best energies. He had been asked to deliver the second in a new series of lectures at Oxford, following up the inaugural address by Prime Minister William Gladstone, whose uninformed pronouncements on evolution and religion Huxley had devoted the prior year to demolishing. Both speakers had agreed to avoid politics and religion, and both found ways to circumvent their pledge.

“Evolution and Ethics” treats fairy tales, the Book of Job, Buddhism, Heracleitus, and the Stoics before drawing a series of concluding parallels with the “modern doctrine of evolution” (9: 69). It is structured as an allegorical Progress of the Ages, but unlike much Victorian writing that saw civilization as steadily advancing, Huxley offers a cyclical vision in which each age finds a way to say something similar about humanity’s place in the cosmos. Huxley is a rare example of a Victorian who confronted a disenchanted conception of deep time, rejecting popular views of evolution leading toward human perfection. “From very low forms up to the highest – in the animal no less than in the vegetable kingdom – the process of life presents the same appearance of cyclical evolution. Nay, we have but to cast our eyes over the rest of the world and cyclical change presents itself on all sides” (9: 49).

Huxley’s survey of philosophical and religious precursors to evolution presents us with the repeated spectacle of intellectual pioneers who embraced a disenchanted view of life only to have their vision diluted by renewed mystification. Heracleitus is the clearest exemplar of this pattern. His understanding of the universe as nothing but “restless, fiery energy” was doomed to be watered down by the Stoics, who “metamorphosed” his ideas into “transcendental theism,” “decked out with all the attributes of ideal Divinity” (9: 70–71). Buddhism, too, had at its core a rigorous, demystified vision. Huxley admires this “system which knows no God in the western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and the hope of it a sin…” (9: 68–69). But the turn to the doctrine of Karma represented an error for Huxley, a renewed mystification aimed at mitigating the severity of Buddhism’s ethical ideal. The notion that the transmigration of character from life to life gave each generation a chance to improve on its inheritance falls prey to the same wishful thinking, according to Huxley, as the contemporary belief in the idea of the “hereditary transmission of acquired characters” (9: 62).¹² Both are forms of grasping at straws.

The enduring contribution of “Evolution and Ethics” is its defense of human aspiration in the face of evolution’s message that the universe has no higher purpose. Huxley argues against the “fallacy” of social Darwinists who think that because “animals and plants have advanced in perfection of organization by means of the struggle for existence and the consequent ‘survival of the fittest;’ therefore men … must look to the same process to help them towards perfection” (9: 80). The struggle for existence may be the law of nature, but “social progress” has given humans the power to resist this cruel law of nature and substitute “that which is ethically best” (9: 81). Hence, Huxley scorns advocates of social Darwinism or the so-called “‘ethics of evolution’” (9: 80). True ethics

The error of social Darwinism arises because people mistake “fitness” in the evolutionary sense with “best” when the term only means most adapted to existing conditions. In a passage that directly inspired the ending of Wells’s The Time Machine, Huxley comments that if the planet were to cool again, the fittest organisms would be nothing more than lichens and microscopic creatures. Thus, social Darwinism is premised on a misunderstanding of evolution. It confuses adaptation to the conditions of existence with perfection of the species. “Let us understand, once for all, that the ethical progress of society depends, not on imitating” nature’s struggle for existence “but in combating it” (9: 83)

Huxley’s method for rising above the struggle for existence provides the key to understanding Wells’s perspective on science in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Huxley likens the action of human intelligence on the process of evolution to the operation of a governor on a steam engine, which controls the mechanism of which it is a part through feedback.¹³ The notion that the mind is part of nature, even as it potentially acts to modulate its environment, is a leap that few of his contemporaries were equipped to take. They saw the human ability to reason as evidence of what separated us from nature and as an argument against godless materialism. But this leap is exactly what Prendick advocates in the closing sentences of the novel. This vision of ethics as a feedback mechanism that checks natural processes is what gave Huxley – and later Wells – the certainty that a part of nature could rise above evolution. It gave both writers a rationale for a materialism that was not divorced from ethics.

The Use and Misuse of Moreau in Public Policy

Wells’s perspective at the end of Doctor Moreau reflects Huxley’s certainty that the truth of evolution did not vitiate humanistic ideals and spiritual strivings. Prendick, who represents the opposite pole of scientifically trained men from Moreau, refuses all the false consolations proffered by social Darwinists and neo-Lamarckians in the 1890s and embraces, instead, a disenchanted view of “man’s place in nature,” to echo the title of one of Huxley’s most famous books. After his rescue from the island, Prendick finds that his view of humanity has been undermined by strange doubts. He can no longer take solace in the thought that the people around him are different from the Beast People on the island. He feels a nameless sense of dread, an uncertainty, born of his realization that humans are part of the animal kingdom, that there is an unbroken continuity leading from the beasts in the forests on through to modern humanity. As he walks the streets of London, he fears that the men and women he meets are only “animals half wrought into the outward image of human souls and that they would presently begin to revert” (182). The prospect of reversion, rather than of upward progress, brings home Huxley’s understanding of evolution as non-directional, potentially “cyclical,” change.

This disenchanted view of human nature brings Prendick close to a breakdown. He feels a horror at his fellow men akin to what Kurtz experiences in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, published only a few years later, and Wells’s depiction of the London streets is as bleak as anything in Eliot’s The Waste Land.

The traditional comforts of religion are unavailing: “Then I would turn aside into some chapel, and even there, such was my disturbance, it seemed that the preacher gibbered Big Thinks even as the Ape Man had done” (184). Instead, Prendick turns to “a mental specialist” (182) for help, seeking a modern remedy for a modern ailment. But nothing works, and Prendick eventually retreats to the relative solitude of the countryside.

In retirement, Prendick takes consolation from his reading and his chemistry experiments, but most of all, he finds comfort in his contemplation of the infinite spaces of the stars: “There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope” (184–85). Victorian readers were prepared to hear either materialism or humanism in these words, depending on whether they laid stress on the “laws of matter” or on the “more than animal,” but it was hard to hear both unless they had taken to heart Huxley’s message. Like his teacher, Wells is attempting to account for the purely material basis of life and for what – to use a twenty-first-century vocabulary – we might call the unplanned “emergence” of a consciousness that is more than material. Without pretending to explain the mechanism, both men were clear that the emergence of the human mind did not require a superior intelligence organizing life from above.¹⁴

The last paragraphs of “Evolution and Ethics” sound the same Pascalian note while emphasizing that anything in humanity that may be more than animal – literature, art, civilization, ethical behavior – is so only because it is part of, not above, the vast and eternal laws of matter: “Fragile reed as he may be, man, as Pascal says, is a thinking reed,” Huxley writes; “there lies within him a fund of energy operating intelligently and so far akin to that which pervades the universe, that it is competent to influence and modify the cosmic process” (9: 83–84, my italics). For both Huxley and his disciple Wells, what makes human intelligence not only competent to, but worthy of, influencing its environment is a recognition that humans will forever remain part of that environment. Their future is tied up with the material universe to which they are akin.

The complexity of Huxley’s and Wells’s positions on “man’s place in nature” makes it clear why invoking Doctor Moreau as evidence of our “natural” repugnance to chimeras, as has occurred frequently in debates about genetic engineering, is mistaken. It is crucial to situate literary perspectives in their own historical contexts rather than simply apply them to today’s policy questions. It is not enough to invoke lessons from literature without also registering how they resonated in their day and how they intersect with the altered circumstances of the present.

An analysis of the current pair of writers, for example, would need to specify at least six relationships to science in the nineteenth century. (1) Darwin capitalized on the relatively incomplete disciplinary structures in place when he began writing in the 1830s and that remained viable throughout his productive years, enabling him to exert influence in scientific circles and in the culture at large; (2) Huxley was a transitional figure, able to retain some of the power of a Victorian sage like Darwin while also promoting and exploiting the emerging disciplinary environment of science; (3) at the same time, a figure such as Prendick had only a “residual” relationship to the new paradigm of professionalized science; while Wells himself shifted from (4) the posture he adopted in imitation of Huxley in the 1890s to (5) advocacy of the “emergent” paradigm of modern disciplinary science in Anticipations (1901) and later texts; a change that (6) paradoxically estranged him from literary modernists in the early twentieth century, many of whom were embracing autotelic conceptions of art in part as a reaction formation to literature’s increasing isolation from popularity and cultural power (see Chapter 5).

Prendick’s residual relationship to professionalized science makes him less well equipped to deal with a demystified universe than figures like Huxley or Wells. Unlike Huxley, the great advocate of modern disciplinary structures, or Wells, who later in the twentieth century advocates for the research university, Prendick clings to amateurism. He is trapped between two worlds – he has the skeptical posture of a modern scientist without the disciplinary training or professional status of a specialist. He is a generalist in an age when that position is already becoming less tenable. Thus, his ethical perspective on animal research is ineffectual because it is ungrounded in any of the modern institutions that would give it force. It remains merely one man’s opinion – sensible, well informed, but with little purchase on the emerging world of science.

Still, Prendick’s difference from the position of the President’s Council on Bioethics is stark and revelatory. “Would it not be degrading to our humanity and an affront to human dignity,” one Council report asks, “to produce animal-human chimeras with some human features and some features of lower animals?” (Schulman 17). It was not an affront to human dignity that concerned Wells, and his novel should not be adduced as supposed evidence of our culture’s repugnance to creating human-non-human chimeras. It was the realization that there was no difference between humans and animals that at first disturbed Prendick, and it was the realization of their shared place in nature that eventually brought him peace.

The reason Doctor Moreau seems to speak directly to contemporary ethical concerns about chimeras is that the place of ethics in research has changed in recent decades, a topic I broached in Chapter 1. For most of the twentieth century, the novel’s message resonated only with stereotypes of the heartless scientist, a critical perspective that made literature’s stance largely oppositional to science. Hostility to the excesses of science is certainly the lesson audiences derived from both the 1932 movie version of Island of Lost Souls (1932) with Charles Laughton and the grotesque 1996 film of The Island of Dr. Moreau starring Marlon Brando. Today, however, the same text carries more finely tuned resonances, which complement the efforts of people working within science to promote ethical standards of research. To put it another way, the cultural location of bioethics and health policy is, at least in part, internal to science, which means that the stance of the oppositional (but ultimately powerless) outsider is no longer the only posture available to literature and the other humanities. Oppositional critics of science, who speak from philosophical or theoretical perspectives circumscribed by their own disciplines, are certainly not amateurs like Prendick, but their insights have slight impact because of their isolation from a disciplinary structure like the policy world that would give them force. As long as humanists speak only to fellow humanists, they will have as little effect on scientists as Prendick in his retirement.

What should a humanist say to a future President’s Council on Bioethics if asked about Doctor Moreau’s lesson concerning chimeras? First, our hypothetical humanist would need to underline the obvious warning about scientific hubris. But then he or she would need to locate the novel in its time. Attending to the context of Wells’s novel in the disciplinary conflicts of the day enables one to show that Doctor Moreau cannot be invoked as an indictment of all scientific research on chimeras. The qualified affirmations of the ending of the novel indicate something more interesting. They suggest that the novel’s prophetic insights into the dangers of creating chimeras should be balanced against an equally profound respect for the importance of science, and for the value of pursuing research that acknowledges humanity’s kinship to the universe.

Much more remains to be said about Wells and Huxley. It would be instructive to show how Huxley’s comment about evolution reaching a summit and then taking the downward route to extinction (9: 86) provides the model for the far future depicted in The Time Machine (1895). Similarly, Huxley’s remark about the possible supersession of humanity by other species forms the germ of The War of the Worlds (1898). Huxley’s suggestion that both Karma and belief in the hereditary transmission of acquired characteristics were similar responses to the problem of undeserved suffering clarifies not only what Wells was attacking in Doctor Moreau but also what Collins was attempting to say in some rather muddleheaded passages in The Legacy of Cain (1888). Finally, Huxley’s talk of future modifications of the human species gives scientific precision to themes in the air in the years before and after his lecture in a group of novels that feature divergent paths of human evolution: Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871), W. H. Hudson’s The Crystal Age (1887), and, of course, the Eloi and Morlocks of The Time Machine.

These are some of the novels that I turn to next. In the following chapter, we encounter popular novelists who took a different path from Wells and instead of facing a materialist universe, cast about for reassuring answers to the doubts Huxley raised about “man’s place in nature.”

The Victorians knew nothing about genetics, but they had a vigorous discourse about the hereditary transmission of behavior. Scientists and novelists alike wrestled with the problem of whether “character” was heritable. Today, for reasons that at first seem entirely unrelated, we are witnessing a resurgence of interest in the biological foundations of character. After some fifty years of ethical doubts about the wisdom of pursuing such avenues of research, the heritability of behavior is once again a hot topic.

In the biological sciences, this renewed interest comes from three main directions: genetics, which garners the lion’s share of public attention for its success in identifying genes that are associated with increased probability for a given trait (a success that has accelerated dramatically with the advent of genomewide association studies); neuroscience, a diverse field that draws variously on cognitive psychology, linguistics, brain imaging, and evolutionary biology; and epigenetics, which is the concern of this chapter. Because of its focus on nongenetic sources of inherited traits, epigenetics should be of interest to scholars of the nineteenth century, a period that did not yet understand the genetic mechanism of inheritance. Surprisingly, the reverse is true as well – some epigeneticists look back longingly to the moment in the late-nineteenth century when it seemed to many that Lamarck, not Darwin, held the key to evolutionary theory.

“Epigenetics” can be defined as the study of heritable characteristics that have a molecular basis independent of DNA. According to the journal Nature, which ran a special section on the field in May 2007, “epigenetics is riding a wave of popularity” (Bird v). Noting that more than 2,500 articles had been published on the subject within the year, the editors of Nature observed that the media portrayed epigenetics as “a revolutionary new science” (Eccleston et al. 395). Epigenetic changes are crucial for normal cell growth and have long been a topic in developmental biology, but the recent discoveries have to do with how cells can transmit acquired traits to daughter cells through nongenetic modes of inheritance and with evidence that some variations in species may be directed toward a goal rather than being random. Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb summarized the four main contentions of epigenetics on the first page of their book, Evolution in Four Dimensions: “there is more to heredity than genes; some hereditary variations are nonrandom in origin; some acquired information is inherited; and evolutionary change can result from instruction as well as selection” (1).

These are disorienting claims, which seem to violate some of the central tenets of genetics and contradict much of what we have learned about Darwinian evolution. They suggest that biological traits can be inherited from sources other than DNA, that natural selection does not arise solely from chance mutations, that Larmarckism may have more validity than most of us dreamed, and that evolution at times may be channeled in a particular direction rather than being random. I will explain more of the fundamentals of this new research as I proceed, but first I want to characterize the related debates that raged around inherited behavior in the late-nineteenth century.

During the last three decades of the century, the question of whether acquired characteristics could be inherited increasingly preoccupied popular novelists from Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Samuel Butler in the 1870s to Grant Allen and Sarah Grand at the end of the century. Many scientists also returned to Lamarck to explain what they saw as the inability of natural selection to explain the dramatic changes required by Darwinian evolution. The evidence appeared to be mounting from all sides that the gradual accumulation of small changes could not account for the diversity of life, especially after Lord Kelvin’s (incorrect) calculations of the age of the earth seemed to demonstrate that there had been insufficient time for natural selection alone to have produced such abundant varieties of life.¹ Lamarck’s model of inheritance offered an alternative explanation to scientists who were convinced of the truth of evolution but had come to believe that natural selection played only a secondary role in shaping descent. Rival conceptions of biological inheritance were fought out between circles of true believers in evolution: neo-Lamarckian novelists, periodical writers, and many scientists on the one hand, and Darwinians, on the other. By 1885, the year the term “neo-Lamarckism” was coined, the anti-Darwinian party had become so strong that the historian Peter J. Bowler describes this period as “the eclipse of Darwinism.”²

“Neo-Lamarckism” was the name of a loose assortment of evolutionists who argued for the central role of the inheritance of acquired traits in shaping the descent of plants, animals, and humans. Little known today, it constituted a serious challenge to Darwin from within the ranks of naturalists, morphologists, and physiologists, as well as philosophers, novelists, and journalists. One of its guiding principles was the notion that characteristics that one learned during one’s lifetime could be passed on to one’s descendants. This idea applied equally to physical features and learned behaviors. Discredited during the 1930s, the period of the modern synthesis of genetics with evolution (discussed in Part II), neo-Lamarckism was long viewed with amusement or scorn by geneticists, who took it as a given that no acquired abilities can flow backward into the DNA of an individual. Even with the advent of epigenetics, which suggests nongenetic mechanisms for some acquired adaptations to be conserved for future generations, most geneticists still regard neo-Lamarckian ideas as preposterous. To be clear, so do I. But some epigeneticists, who perhaps do not understand all the implications of neo-Lamarckism, have aligned their research with this earlier movement.

The late-nineteenth-century revival of Lamarck incorporated other aspects of his thinking as well, including the directed nature of evolution, its progressive movement toward perfection of the species, use or disuse of an organ as a cause of species change, the importance of maternal inheritance, and the conscious, willed nature of some evolutionary changes. Darwin’s theory of natural selection made room for some Lamarckian ideas (a fact that Samuel Butler never tired of pointing out). In The Origin of Species (1859), Darwin acknowledged that use or disuse of an organ could lead to morphological changes in the species, and more grudgingly, that habits could eventually be internalized as instincts. In The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin increasingly emphasized the role of both Lamarckian concepts. But Darwin always objected to conceiving of evolution as progressive or directed toward the perfection of the species. Moreover, Lamarck’s more valuable ideas were often subsumed by neo-Lamarckians in popular culture under the banner of the heritability of acquired characters (Bowler, Eclipse 7n3; Otis 6). Samuel Butler established a powerful analogy for this process by arguing that acquired characteristics constituted an “unconscious memory” of the species, which directed evolution toward a purposeful goal.³ Every individual, Butler asserted in a series of polemical books published over nearly a decade (1878–87), contained the collected wisdom of the race as its birthright, an inherited record of successful adaptive strategies.

Neo-Lamarckians did not have the field to themselves. Ranged against them were Alfred Russel Wallace, Thomas Huxley, and most important, August Weismann, whose publications of 1883 and 1885 developed the concept of the “continuity of the germ plasm” (104).⁴ Weismann argued persuasively against the “transmission of acquired characters” and disputed that “changes of the organism which result from external stimuli can be transmitted to the germ-cells and will re-develop in the next generation” (104). Instead, he maintained that the germ cell “transfers its hereditary tendencies from generation to generation, at first unchanged, and always uninfluenced in any corresponding manner, by that which happens during the life of the individual” (69), or as we would phrase it today, one’s genotype is inherited from one’s parents and cannot be affected by changes in the parents’ phenotype caused by experience or the environment. Historians of science have identified Weismann’s concept as a precursor to what would later become the “central dogma” of genetics, the principle that information can flow only in one direction, from genes to the proteins that they express.

Some exponents of epigenetics view Weismann’s work as a harbinger of a “wrong turn” that biology took in the twentieth century toward “genetic centrism” and away from inquiries into developmental biology that might have revealed the possibility that acquired characteristics were heritable (Webster and Goodwin 111–17). Richard Lewontin, Evelyn Fox Keller, Susan Oyama, and others maintain that the emphasis on the “causal primacy of the gene” (Keller, Making Sense of Life 125) led biologists for much of the twentieth century to underestimate the importance of developmental systems and epigenetic interactions for the resulting organism. It also obscured the possibility of extra-genetic mechanisms of inheritance of the sort that neo-Lamarckism emphasized. Jablonka and Lamb are unabashed neo-Lamarckians. But a too-easy equation of epigenetics with neo-Lamarckism carries the risk of duplicating some of the mistakes of nineteenth-century literature and social theory, including the kind of beliefs that led to racial science or that a supreme being was directing evolution toward perfection of the human race.

This chapter will consider several areas in which an overly hasty assimilation of epigenetics to neo-Lamarckism presents policy risks. The first involves the religious impulse that frequently accompanies talk about “directed evolution.” In the nineteenth century, the idea that evolution might have a purpose quickly led to arguments for a divine Director as well as calls for eugenic interventions that would steer evolution toward goals that were assumed to be part of God’s plan for the species. Today we see similar religious arguments put forward by creationists under the banner of “intelligent design.”

A different risk stems from one of Lamarck’s more valuable points, the importance of the maternal-fetal environment. Evelyn Fox Keller discusses “the long disregard of ‘maternal effects’ on development” (Refiguring 34n10), which she believes contributed to genetic centrism and impeded developmental biology as a discipline. Lamarck’s salutary emphasis on the effects of maternal inheritance, when exaggerated and confused with gendered notions of women’s roles (as was the case in much neo-Lamarckian thinking), could lead to unfortunate assumptions about women’s proper place in society. A similar concern today is that epigenetics’ valuable insights into the importance of the maternal-fetal environment will lead to “blaming the mother” (Smeele; Metzl) for anything that goes wrong. The danger is that well-meaning efforts to increase attention to embryonic development and early maternal care will result in restrictions on rather than empowerment for women, especially among mothers of low socioeconomic status. This is what occurred when neo-Lamarckians highlighted the deleterious effects on children of alcoholism and bad diet among indigent mothers. Instead of striving to improve the conditions of working-class mothers, many reformers advocated eugenic solutions such as sterilization campaigns to reduce the birth rate of the poor.

Finally, the belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics in the nineteenth century eventuated in widespread assumptions that social behaviors – such as criminality or promiscuity – could be passed down to later generations. This dangerous assumption led to a deterministic conception of inheritance – your destiny lies in your genes, we might say today. The sins of the father, they said then, would be visited on the children unto the fourth generation. It was the curse of Cain.

Neo-Lamarckism in Late-Nineteenth-Century Popular Culture

Much popular fiction, especially in subgenres such as the imperial romance, detective novel, sensation fiction, utopian fiction, and the New Woman novel, drew on neo-Lamarckian themes. Why, then, were the major Victorian realists more attracted to Darwin? It would be easy to assume that canonical authors like George Eliot, Trollope, Gaskell, Meredith, and Hardy were simply more thoughtful than authors of Victorian genre fiction, but in many cases, formal aspects of the kind of fiction they wrote played a role too. Realist conventions accorded well with Darwin’s emphasis on the gradual accumulation of small changes; his insistence that species development was not unidirectional or predetermined; and his reluctance to think that a legacy from the past determined behavior in the present.⁵ All the same, I do not mean to suggest a causal relation between genre and evolutionary theories or vice versa. It is a mistake to think that formal structures entail a particular set of beliefs. What we find instead is a distinctive historical moment when a group of formal conventions interacted synergistically with a cluster of linked but not always consistent ideas about the nature and consequences of evolution. Not all popular texts took an interest in debates about evolution, and not all that did were neo-Lamarckian, but a significant number of the most popular and representative examples of Victorian genre fiction did.

I take my title for this chapter from a striking anomaly. Neo-Lamarckism was interpreted in popular culture through the notion that human evolution was guided by a collective destiny that was driving our species toward perfection. Each of our inherited talents is supposedly leading us inevitably toward a more perfect human race. Yet in the works I examine, the mark of Lamarckism is almost always Cain’s. Why should this Biblical tale of jealousy, murder, and a curse that descends through the ages be a prominent metaphor in novels that embrace neo-Lamarckian theories that maintain evolution will lead our species to perfection? The reason tells us much about why some genres tended to treat evolution differently from the canonical novels of realism. The answer lies in the demands of a thrilling plot.⁶ The mark of a criminal inheritance in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), She (1887), The Legacy of Cain (1888), The Fourth Generation (1899), and many other genre stories responds to the needs of what H. Rider Haggard promises in the very first sentence of She: “one of the most wonderful and mysterious experiences ever undergone by mortal men” (11). Inconsistency means nothing. Coherence of idea or theme falls by the way in the face of what a good story requires. In his autobiography, Haggard spells the requirement out: “action, action, action from the first page to the last. For the rest, little matters” (Days of My Life, vol. II 94–95).

There is one exception. The genre of utopian fiction in the period puts little emphasis on thrilling action. In Bulwer-Lytton’s utopia, The Coming Race, where perfectibility of the species governs the slow-moving plot as well as the neo-Lamarckian theme, Cain’s legacy nowhere appears. This absence is hardly surprising, however, for the mark of Cain highlights an originary violence and its descent in man, which is clearly at odds with a utopian outlook.

Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race

The cultural influence of neo-Lamarckism predated the coining of the term in 1885. More than a decade before, three British publications gave a powerful boost to the ideas that would become pervasive in the mid-eighties: St. George Jackson Mivart’s theistic account of evolution, On the Genesis of Species (1871), Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s utopian novel The Coming Race (1871), and Samuel Butler’s better-known utopia Erewhon (1872). Mivart’s work was one of the leading sources for arguments against natural selection (Bowler, Eclipse 49); his vivid depiction of evolution as taking place by large, discontinuous leaps helped associate skepticism about Darwin’s gradualism with the theistic argument by design. Bulwer-Lytton’s and Butler’s novels, though, set the mold for later neo-Lamarckian utopias, from W. H. Hudson’s A Crystal Age (1887), with its “later race,” which had developed the “passionless, everlasting calm of beings who had for ever outlived, and left [emotion] as immeasurably far behind as the instincts of the wolf and ape” (174–75) to William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891), with its socialist population that had evolved beyond the “hereditarily” weak, ugly, and idle people descended from slaveholders and capitalist employers (34) and to Grant Allen’s The British Barbarians (1895) with its traveler from the future who tells of a human race that has evolved beyond “war, bloodshed, superstition, fetich-worship, religious rites, castes, class distinctions, sex taboos, [and] restrictions on freedom” (58).⁷

Neither Bulwer-Lytton nor Butler was an opponent of Darwin when they published their utopias. Bulwer-Lytton saw his fable as a strong plea for evolution by natural selection, just as Butler did the following year, when Erewhon came out. Both novelists believed that the struggle for existence was a motive force for evolutionary change. Here is how Bulwer-Lytton puts it: “since in the competition a vast number must perish, nature selects for preservation only the strongest specimens” (52). But they believed that the progressive direction of natural selection would be shaped by the inheritance of acquired characteristics: “We are all formed by custom – even the difference of our race from the savage is but the transmitted continuance of custom, which becomes, through hereditary descent, part and parcel of our nature” (Bulwer-Lytton 94).

The Coming Race was enormously popular in its day, which is hard to comprehend. Many readers today find it dull, although the satire on war, religion, capitalism, and democracy amuses some and the vision of a future in which women are more powerful than men contradicts stereotypes of the Victorian age.⁸ Still, like many utopias, its static discursive chapters on linguistics and social customs can be heavy going. Whether one finds the work entertaining or not, this bizarre Darwin-haunted fable illuminates much about how evolution was assimilated by late-nineteenth-century popular culture.

Bulwer-Lytton’s novel tells the story of a mining engineer who stumbles across an underground civilization vastly more advanced than his own nineteenth-century world. The subterranean people have abandoned industrial and technological progress and rely entirely upon an all-pervasive energy in the universe that they call “Vril” – something like the Force that Jedi knights channel in the Star Wars movies. The people have developed the ability to harness this power over thousands of years of directed evolution. Their greatly elongated thumbs, the outward sign of this adaptation, have been cultivated by “continuous exercise, of the Vril power” by people who “devote[d] themselves to that paramount science,” and it could be “slowly developed in the course of generations” by the “higher beings of the [human] race” (58). The notion that the willed use of a trait could strengthen its powers and result in heritable characteristics became a pillar of neo-Lamarckism in the next decade. Vril is the source of the strange race’s many abilities: telepathy, winged flight, control over matter, and the power to blast entire cities into atoms with a single ray. The evolution of such powers has led them to abandon war and all forms of aggression as useless since any individual could destroy all others with a wave of her Vril-stick – a Victorian version of the doctrine of mutual assured destruction.

The relation of these themes to utopia lies in the apparent rationality of making hard choices to guide the species. In the wake of Darwin, selective breeding and willed species change fit easily into the utopian genre’s commitment to rational social planning. In Butler’s Erewhon, citizens who fall ill are imprisoned, and the ugly or weak forbidden to reproduce. Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril are eugenicists avant lettre,⁹ who strengthen their stock by exogamous marriages with distant communities and exterminate all weaker races. As a result of this rigorous program of social hygiene, an entirely new species of posthumans has evolved, the “coming race” of the title. Here is how the narrator describes them:

The Aryan reference is telling. As with later invocations of an Aryan destiny, the Vril are persuaded of “their ultimate destiny to destroy and replace our existent varieties of man” (119). Humanity’s only hope of survival would be miscegenation: “we might be saved from extermination by intermixture of race,” but the narrator is not optimistic: “instances of such mésalliance would be as rare as those of intermarriage between the Anglo-Saxon emigrants and the Red Indians” (119).

This ugly example of racial science looks forward to its pervasive role in the “imperial gothic” of Stevenson, Haggard, Conan Doyle, Kipling, and others (Brantlinger 227–53). The utopias that looked forward in time had a counterpart among adventure stories that portrayed lost civilizations from the distant past: H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), to which I turn in the next section, or Rudyard Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King (1888) and Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912). But there is a profound difference between the two forms, one that is simultaneously structural and ideological. Fredric Jameson has proposed that utopia incorporates a critical impulse by imagining an alternative to the existing social order (Archaeologies 12) – the feminism of The Coming Race is a clear example of this phenomenon. Lost world fiction, by contrast, tended to reinforce dominant ideology by flattering the existing social order’s vision of itself. In The Coming Race, the critique of society lies in the tension between an evolutionary destiny and present-day England, for the Aryan destiny belongs not to humanity but to another, posthuman species. The novel thus has it both ways. The white, Anglo-Saxon race may be the highest our planet has produced, according to the narrator, but England is not destined to be the home of the surviving Aryan line. A biological destiny that ends in the destruction of humanity manages to indict the existing social order and preserve the end-directed plot structure of utopia too.

Jablonka and Lamb are wary of any hint of goal-oriented evolution being read into epigenetics. Consequently, they are careful to assert that nothing in the evidence for directed variation entails believing in a purpose or destiny to evolution, and they explicitly reject an intelligent-design interpretation of their results. Scientists, however, rarely have control over how their findings are interpreted. Having a special destiny is a seductive concept – not only in religious belief systems but in popular literature as well, where formal closure is highly valued. The fact that nineteenth-century popular culture almost always invested directed evolution with spiritual meanings augers poorly for Jablonka and Lamb’s hopes.

H. Rider Haggard’s She

Holly, the principal narrator of Haggard’s monumentally popular adventure, She, is introduced in the novel’s first chapter as an abnormal specimen of humanity with “long sinewy arms,” a “low brow,” and “thick black hair,” a throwback that makes one woman whisper that his appearance had “converted her to the monkey theory” (18). With this shuddering reference to evolution, Haggard announces the post-Darwinian provenance of his romance. Elsewhere compared to a “gorilla” and “baboon” (12, 112), Holly stands in sharp contrast to his ward, Leo, whose golden curls, tall stature, and broad shoulders make him an idealized representative of English masculinity. The dichotomy aligns neo-Lamarckian fears of degeneration and fantasies of racial superiority with basic romance conventions that tend to assign characters to positions in a symbolic system – light vs. dark, good vs. evil, etc.

The literary critic Richard Chase’s influential account of romance fiction describes romance characters as “two-dimensional types,” “abstract and ideal” figures (13), which lend themselves easily to allegorization – exemplified in She by Leo and Holly’s nicknames, “Beauty and the Beast” (30). In contrast to the novel, “romance will more freely veer toward mythic, allegorical, and symbolistic forms,” which often results in plots that have a “symbolic or ideological, rather than a realistic plausibility” (Chase 13). This symbolic or ideological dimension is what makes romance such an effective vehicle for articulating neo-Lamarckian social theories. Wendy Katz, in her book on Haggard and empire, extends Chase’s point, arguing that romance’s “ideological plasticity” gives the genre “an infinite capacity for political propagandizing.” Romance’s allegorical characters and symbolic landscapes can be “controlled and manipulated so easily that [they] can be made to do the romancer’s ideological bidding” (Katz 44–45).

Haggard’s novel is a veritable treasure trove of romance motifs. An orphan, a casket, occult wisdom, a shipwreck, prophetic dreams, a magical basin of water, a quest through symbolic landscapes to find eternal life, labyrinthine underground passages, trials that have doomed countless forbearers, a sorceress of mesmerizing beauty living in a city of the dead, a loyal servant named Job and a wise mentor, Holly – these are only some of the details that shape the story of Leo Vincey’s legacy into a symbolic rather than realistic form. Leo’s legacy is the Sherd of Amenartas, a broken piece of pottery that has descended through sixty-six generations of Vincey ancestors. Inscribed on this Sherd is the story of an ancient quarrel between two women, one fair and the other dark, over Kallikrates, a man of uncommon beauty and the founder of the Vincey line. Ayesha, the imperious white Queen of an African tribe, kills her beloved Kallikrates in a fit of jealousy when she realizes that she cannot possess him and swears an awful oath to await his coming again, an oath whose fulfillment is made possible by her discovery of the Fountain of Life. Leo, we guess from the very beginning, is the destined heir, returned at last to the two rival women, but the consummation of this destiny destroys Ayesha and brands Leo, turning his beautiful head of hair completely white, a mark of Cain as visible as Holly’s simian features.

She is equally a treasure trove of social Darwinian and neo-Lamarckian themes, which can be demonstrated by a comparison of Haggard’s romance with the ideas of Samuel Butler, perhaps the most prominent voice in this period advocating Lamarckism. When Butler published Life and Habit in 1878, he saw himself as providing an interpretation for facts that Darwin himself could not explain, and Butler fully expected that Darwin would receive the work with respect. Instead, Darwin ignored Life and Habit, regarding it as mere speculation with little basis in anything but analogy and introspection. Darwin’s neglect infuriated Butler, and in three subsequent monographs, he attacked Darwin for not acknowledging his numerous predecessors, particularly Lamarck and Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin. The vitriol had some impact on Darwin’s reputation, but Butler’s arguments for the power of will to shape evolution toward an ideal destiny had an ideological influence of far more consequence.

Butler’s books on evolution are obsessively repetitive, but even a small sampling of his arguments will show how they promote a reassuring destiny for the human species. Here is Butler arguing that something more than chance must be guiding species change: “I cannot think that ‘natural selection,’ working upon small, fortuitous, indefinite, unintelligent variations, would produce the results we see around us. One wants something that will give a more definite aim to variations, and hence, at times, cause bolder leaps in advance” (Life and Habit 261). And again: “Will the reader bid me wake with him to a world of chance and blindness? Or can I persuade him to dream with me of a more living faith than either he or I had as yet conceived as possible?” (307). Butler openly affirms “the whole theory of Lamarck, that the development of organs has been due to the wants or desires of the animal in which the organ appears” (244–45). Hence, Butler often asserts that willed behavior is the source of evolutionary change: “a pigeon might in the course of ages grow to be a peacock if there was a persistent desire on the part of the pigeon through all these ages to do so” (202).

Butler’s boldest idea was his explanation of heredity as unconscious memory. Since Darwin admitted that he did not know the mechanism by which hereditary information was transmitted from parents to children, Butler felt empowered to argue that something in the child must remember features of its parents’ lives – remember both morphological processes and acquired habits of behavior. Memory, Butler asserted with increasing certainty, must be the hidden principle of hereditary descent, an idea encapsulated in one of the chapter titles from Life and Habit, “Instinct as Inherited Memory” (161). If an embryo can remember how to grow two arms and two legs, he reasoned, it must be capable of remembering other aspects of its ancestors’ lives, even if not consciously: “each of the germs to which the memory of the new germ reverts, is itself imbued with the memories of its own parent germs, and these again with the memories of preceding generations, and so on ad infinitum” (122). For an author whose first book was a memoir and last an autobiographical novel, The Way of All Flesh, the recourse to memory as the principle of continuity should not be surprising. In the next chapter, I shall return to the link between memory and literature as a way of identifying part of literature’s contribution to public discourse. For now, let me simply say that Butler’s substitution of “unconscious memory” for a biological link between the generations is a literary or aesthetic act, dependent on analogy and metaphor rather than scientific evidence.

Unlike Stevenson, Haggard does not seem to have had a detailed knowledge of the science behind evolution, but he had clearly absorbed much of the popular debate about the subject.¹⁰ Throughout She, references to the more sensational aspects of evolutionary theory abound. We hear Herbert Spencer’s notion of the “survival of the fittest” in lines like “Those who are weak must perish; the earth is to the strong” (She 204). Ayesha openly boasts of her eugenic breeding program, which she used to produce deaf and dumb servants: “it hath taken many centuries and much trouble; but at last I have triumphed” (157). Later, Ayesha invokes the idea of racial degeneration when she blames miscegenation for creating “a bastard brood” among the nearby tribes (184). She draws on ideological notions of progress when she describes the evolution of civilization from its primitive origins in Africa through Greece and Rome to its apex in present-day England (151).¹¹ Ayesha’s death scene, in which she shrivels back through evolutionary stages until she resembles a “baboon” or “monkey” (292), invokes while reversing Haeckel’s idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Finally, Haggard anticipates Wells’s vision of the extinction not only of humanity but also of the planet itself: “on and on, through periods, spaces, and times, from æon unto æon, till the world is dead, and the worlds beyond the world are dead” (189).

The most distinctive trace of neo-Lamarckism is the novel’s view of reincarnation. Butler’s notion that each embryo contains the memories of all its ancestors seemed to give a scientific foundation to the beliefs of many spiritualists in the late-nineteenth century. It was only a small leap from Butler’s assertion that a person’s “past selves are living in him at this moment with the accumulated life of centuries” (52) to the idea of reincarnation. Late-nineteenth century spiritualists from Madame Blavatsky to Annie Besant, although they do not mention Butler by name, were quick to make the connection between neo-Lamarckian conceptions of evolution and reincarnation.¹² Carolyn Burdett, who has written well on Haggard’s interest in reincarnation, connects him with Annie Besant, noting wryly that the lifelong Tory imperialist and the radical socialist made “unlikely bedfellows” (Burdett 218). Jeffrey Franklin attributes the spread of the idea of reincarnation in the popular consciousness to the novels of Haggard and Marie Corelli (89) and suggests that Haggard’s knowledge of Tibetan Buddhism came from Madame Blavatsky and several widely read Western scholars of the subject (94–96).

Reincarnation plays a crucial role in both She and its sequel Ayesha. In the earlier novel, Ayesha tells Holly that she has been waiting for more than 2,000 years “for one I loved to be born again” (153). She refuses to leave her hidden underground kingdom because “when he, my love, shall be born again … he shall find me here where once he knew me” (154). Her faith in this destiny is founded on a doctrine of descent through change. “There is no such thing as Death, though there be a thing called Change” (153), she declares, and Leo’s father says much the same thing the night before he dies (23). Each of us may die to the world, but something is passed down, to be “born again and again” in different forms (153). The whole course of the plot seems to validate Ayesha’s beliefs. Not only does Leo bear an uncanny resemblance to the mummified corpse of Kallikrates, but Ayesha’s rival for Leo’s love in the present age looks exactly like Kallikrates’s first wife. Despite her belief in descent through change, Ayesha overlooks the consequences of her own failure to change. She remains static, failing to develop or evolve over the course of sixty-six generations, and her timelessness proves to be her undoing.¹³

Ayesha’s prolonged life comes to a horrific end when she steps back into the path of the burning pillar of Life. She is hoping to demonstrate to Leo and Holly that the fire that brought her supernatural longevity was harmless, but instead it wrought another transformation, causing her to age catastrophically before their eyes. This scene has had an indelible impact, visible from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) to The Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981):

The moment has impressed critics too, provoking readings that link the episode to evolution, degeneration, gender (a beautiful woman is punished for her presumption), and imperialism (Western materialism triumphs over primitive magic) (Etherington xviii; Arata 101–3; Gilbert and Gubar 18–21; P. Murphy, 764–65; Stott 121–25). But I want to emphasize two additional points. First, in Ayesha’s death agony, descent through modification triumphs over an unnatural existence that has endured through the ages without change. Of the two options for continuity over time – hereditary transmission of traits or near-eternal youth – the former prevails. Second, historical memory proves more powerful than timelessness. The memory preserved in the writing on the Sherd – a memory reinscribed by dozens of Leo’s ancestors on its reverse side – sets Leo’s quest in motion and leads to Ayesha’s end.

Memory is intimately entwined with our sense of a human timescale rather than the incomprehensible durée of deep time. The poignancy of our memories of youth, of distant friends and lost loved ones, underlines the finitude of human existence as do few other emotions. A potent source of affect, memory has a privileged place in literary discourse, aligned with autobiography, lyricism, elegiac poetry, and closure in narrative. It is internal, subjective, personal. Its all-too-human qualities make it the very opposite of deep time.

Ayesha is immured from historical memory. In fact, she suffers from a memory disorder, traumatic fixation. She is “tormented by the memory of a crime … without companionship, without comfort, without death” (201). She is rooted to the scene of her crime, unable to forget her transgression or to move on to a new life. Nicholas Dames calls trauma the “conceptual opposite” of memory in the nineteenth century and quotes Cathy Caruth who argues that trauma is “‘a break in the mind’s experience of time’” (165). In this context, we might think of trauma, with its failure to heal over time, as the psychological equivalent of Ayesha’s physical timelessness. Her identity is as static as her body is ageless.

The novel leaves it uncertain whether Leo is the literal reincarnation of Kallikrates or merely a descendant with an uncanny resemblance to his ancestor. But Butler’s conflation of memory with both reincarnation and the mechanism of heredity makes this a moot point. Either way, two mortal men survive at the end of this romance, giving one the ability to continue his biological line if he chooses, the other to preserve his legacy through writing, which he does by composing the manuscript we have just finished reading.

By linking reincarnation to spiritualism, on the one hand, and neo-Lamarckian ideas, on the other, Haggard gave late-Victorian readers an attractive new way to assimilate evolution. Readers who were troubled by materialism but understood the power of science to transform the world could toy with the notion that something persisted after death, whether as spirit or as heritable personality traits, or both. Survival of the fittest, inheritance of acquired traits, willed species change, and directed evolution pass as background knowledge, the common sense shared by narrator and reader alike, in contrast to the outlandish events of the romance. In the process, this common sense served as an alibi for other ideological goals, such as justifying imperial expansion and eugenic measures to strengthen the position of white, middle-class Englishmen. This is one of the major ways in which repellent ideas become normalized by popular culture. And it is another reason why we should be cautious about linking the science of epigenetics with neo-Lamarckism.

Nineteenth-Century Literature and Science Policy Today

At this point, it is worth pausing to ask how one would go about making research on nineteenth-century novels useful for a policy discussion. Noting that fiction dramatizes the issues at stake and enables the public to identify with the consequences of ethical choices is an important first step. A more problematic approach is that advocated by Leon Kass, chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics: to insist that literature reveals enduring truths about the human condition. Literature presents a multitude of perspectives on human nature, even questioning whether there is such a thing. But even were one to embrace Kass’s viewpoint, one would not want it to apply to all aspects of fiction, particularly not to the racist and eugenicist themes in works like The Coming Race and She. Yet these popular works had enormous impact on the reception of evolution in their time and for years to come.

In opposition to Kass’s approach, many humanists would argue that readers learn to think critically about the human condition by situating a work of fiction in its own historical moment and by attending to the differences as well as the continuities between that time and one’s own. Others might suggest that examining the formal complexities of a work of art could potentially undercut the very lessons Kass seeks to derive from it. In short, most humanists would advocate an approach that was more critical because it was more alert to historical or formal complications.

My approach is to treat these late-nineteenth-century popular novels as part of a case study of how scientific developments are mediated by the larger culture. They demonstrate the power of popular culture to assimilate science to its own preoccupations. This assimilation occurs not only on the thematic level – through explicit passages and polemical messages – but on the formal level too, as in Haggard’s deployment of romance conventions for ideological ends. An adequate understanding of the impact of culture on the reception of science requires insight into the complex interactions of form and content, a perspective that can be aided by comparative literary-historical study.

A case in point: some epigeneticists have argued that knowing that the genome is not the only source of developmental traits might undermine genetic essentialism, the widespread belief that one’s character is written in one’s genes. As the editors of the special supplement of Nature put it: the field may be “an antidote to the idea that we are hard-wired by our genes” (Eccleston et al. 396). Jablonka and Lamb hold out a similar hope. They argue that molecular studies will help discredit the idea that “there is a gene for adventurousness, heart disease, obesity, religiosity, homosexuality, shyness, stupidity, or any other aspect of mind or body” (6, italics in original). They may be right: widespread awareness of the science of epigenetics might reduce the temptation to think there is a gene for adventurousness, intelligence, and so on, but it does not follow that belief in biological determinism will be undermined. Neo-Lamarckian common sense led to a very different result. Faith in the inheritance of acquired characteristics spawned a whole host of deterministic theories about human behavior. Take, for example, the belief in a hereditary propensity toward crime, the subject of my next discussion.

Wilkie Collins’s The Legacy of Cain

The Legacy of Cain (1888), a sensation novel by Wilkie Collins and the final novel he published before his death, is structured as a case study of the respective influences of nature and nurture. The novel tells the story of two sisters raised in the same household, one the adopted daughter of a woman who was executed for murder, the other the biological child of the Reverend Abel Gracedieu and his cold, overly intellectual wife. The central question of the book is whether the daughter of the murderess will reveal a “hereditary taint” from her mother (237) or whether an orderly, religious environment will prove the stronger influence on the child’s character. To complicate the mystery, the Minister, after his wife’s early death, conceals that one of the two children was adopted. For much of the novel, the reader is kept guessing about which young lady is the daughter of a murderer. We find ourselves weighing each mental and physical characteristic of the sisters against our memory of the two mothers, the murderess, who dearly loved her daughter, and the Minister’s cold, clever, and deceitful wife.

Let me relieve your suspense. If I don’t reveal the sisters’ names, I can safely disclose the outcome of this convoluted plot without ruining the novel for anyone who has not read it. The daughter of the murderess does indeed inherit the propensity for murder from her mother, but the biological daughter of the Minister and his intellectual wife is the one who ends up trying to commit murder. The unexpected twist of having the murderer’s daughter resist the temptation to kill and the Minister’s daughter give in to the same temptation stems from another neo-Lamarckian tenet: that maternal inheritance outweighs paternal influences. In the contest of nature vs. nurture, maternal inheritance beats out paternal environment. The outcome still seems paradoxical, though, until one realizes that the murderess’s daughter inherits both her mother’s propensity for violence and her great capacity for Love, and it is the latter that wins out in the end.

Collins reveals that the murderess’s daughter is struggling against an inherited tendency toward murder by a simple novelistic expedient, ready at hand from gothic conventions. When betrayed in love, she finds herself literally possessed by her mother’s murderous spirit. The ghost of her mother, in a perverse echo of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, comes to the daughter in her sleep and shows her three different ways to dispatch her rival. To make the overpowering force of heredity a bit more plausible, Collins borrows a device from his earlier novel The Moonstone by having her drink a dose of laudanum before she falls into her somnambulant trance. Nonetheless, when under the influence of what the narrator calls “the lurking hereditary taint” (237), the daughter feels overcome by a “new evil self” (153), a “hateful second self” (223). To dramatize behavioral impulses inherited from another rather than a product of one’s own will, Collins lets the daughter be possessed by a spiritual revenant of her mother.

The eventual criminal, the Minister’s biological daughter, ends up trying to poison her fiancé, for reasons I need not go into other than to say that they stem from her maternal inheritance. When crossed in love, the Minister’s daughter does not resist the temptation to kill because she has inherited her mother’s cold, rational disposition. Just as the impulse to Love in the adopted child is a finer quality that she has inherited from her mother, so an unfeeling nature is a legacy from the Minister’s intellectual wife. In both cases, the mother is to blame. The criminal sister is last heard of in America, where she leads a utopian community dedicated to the “Worship of Pure Reason” and to the “superiority of woman over man” (346), a last authorial sneer at intellectual women.

The problem of inherited traits is not allowed to rest there, however. Collins confuses matters by postulating that there exists an inherent quality in womanhood that is independent of both nature and nurture. Although “inherent,” it is somehow not derived from the nature side of the nature vs. nurture debate. Critics have attributed the novel’s incoherence to Collins’s supposed misunderstanding of Darwin (Ashley 120–21; Marshall 106, 114). This view is wrong on two counts. First, it is not Darwin whose ideas are being explored here but the neo-Lamarckian views circulating in the 1880s. Second, the confusion in the book does not stem from a faulty grasp of current thinking about heredity but from conventional assumptions about women’s roles, assumptions that contradict what the novelist appears to have learned about the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

In several places, the narrator affirms his faith that “[t]here are inherent emotional forces in humanity to which the inherited influences must submit” (217). These emotional forces do not come from the environment – the Minister’s careful nurture of his two daughters was of inestimable value to their development, but the narrator insists that these emotional forces are “inherent” rather than acquired. In particular, they seem to be intrinsic to womanhood. The narrator explains why he believes in this inherent force in a long passage dedicated to assessing the possible influences on the good sister’s character. While admitting the dominant power of heredity and marking a lesser role for environment, the narrator postulates a third, independent “power for Good,” whose origin remains unexplained by either nature or nurture. The narrator proposes (comically enough) that the advent of this power comes with the onset of puberty. When a girl becomes a woman, her feminine capacity for Love protects her. In hindsight, we can identify this mysterious “power for Good” as a pure emanation of Collins’s own ideological presuppositions about gender:

Woman’s inherent power to Love exists independently of nature or nurture. Postulating this intrinsic quality in womanhood renders all the foregoing analysis of heredity incoherent. Gender assumptions trump everything Collins knows about nineteenth-century scientific theories of inheritance. If the change brought by time, the great and vital transformation that marks the ripening of the girl into womanhood, is nothing other than puberty, then why did the other sister not find strength in a similar transformation? The answer is simple but ludicrous: the other sister is just too bright. Collins emphasizes again and again how much smarter the evil sister is than the good one, and her cleverness, inherited from the Minister’s intellectual wife, seems to prevent the ripening of a feminine power for Good.

In this context, we might recall Leon Kass’s celebration of literature’s ability to reveal enduring truths about humanity. Collins presents woman’s capacity for Love as one of the “inherent emotional forces in humanity” (217) that can counterbalance the effects of heredity. But who among us would be tempted to accept as enduring truths the gender assumptions that structure Collins’s belief? Who among us would endorse the principle that the possession of a strong intellect in a woman is liable to render her vulnerable to murderous impulses and that a woman’s inherent affinity for Love may be the only thing preventing her from giving into a biologically hardwired propensity for homicide?

In its very incoherence, Collins’s novel has something to teach us about the popular understanding of heredity in late-nineteenth-century England. It used to be commonplace to assert that Collins made “very little reference to the intellectual currents of his own time” (Marshall 114), but this view has been countered in recent years by the research of Jenny Bourne Taylor, Lyn Pykett, Christopher Kent, and others, who have demonstrated the ways in which Collins’s novels respond to the social and scientific debates of his day. Taylor stresses the novelist’s engagement with discourses of degeneration and points to an echo in The Legacy of Cain of Henry Maudsley’s work of the 1870s on “inherited taints” (J. Taylor 237–38). She also notes Collins’s familiarity with “Lamarck’s model of willed transformation” (138). Christopher Kent connects a minor character in the novel, Miss Chance, with Collins’s interest in the role of chance in evolutionary theory, and links the narrator, who begins the novel as the governor of a prison with notions of hereditary criminality prominent in late-nineteenth-century social science (61, 64). Given what we now know about the extensive preparation Collins made for writing his antivivisection novel, Heart and Science (1883), it is abundantly clear that the older view of the novelist as out of touch with intellectual debates is wrong.

In fact, Collins’s confused account of nature, nurture, and the inherent capacity of women for Love is typical of the unsettled state of evolutionary theory not only in the popular consciousness but among scientists themselves. As Morton puts it, “during the few decades which elapsed between the publication of the Origin and the foundation of Mendelian genetics around the turn of the century evolutionary biology was in a state of extraordinary confusion and ambiguity, and a wide range of writers were able to exploit the science for their own aesthetic or polemic ends” (6).

Epigenetics and Neo-Lamarckism

Let me end this chapter by turning again to the question of my argument’s bearing on science policy. Advocates of epigenetics think that attending to the nongenetic sources of human inheritance might have desirable social consequences. For example, more than one have argued that this new science will challenge the reductive conclusions of evolutionary psychology in which human behavior is referred back to adaptive evolution in the prehistoric past, what John Dupré amusingly calls “the appeal to the stoneage” (80–98). Since “epigenetic variations are generated at a higher rate than genetic ones, especially in changed environmental conditions,” Jablonka and Lamb believe that people can adapt to altered life circumstances on a far more rapid scale than traditional, gene-centered evolutionary psychology would allow (114). They think that this insight might dampen appeals to the “Paleolithic brain” by enthusiasts of evolutionary psychology, such as members of the school of literary Darwinists.¹⁴ I agree – it might, and it should. But this insight also undercuts one of the most powerful scientific arguments used against eugenics in the early decades of the twentieth century, which is that genetic change moves too slowly to be directed toward the kinds of racial, social, and behavioral results dreamed of by neo-Lamarckians. Which social consequence of epigenetics will prove to be the most powerful remains to be seen. The example of the nineteenth century suggests that eugenicist conclusions might prove to have more popular appeal. Hence, policy advocates might want to resist the association of epigenetics with neo-Lamarckism.

Other commentators on epigenetics have suggested that a continuation of the neo-Lamarckian emphasis on maternal influences would have had a salutary effect on twentieth-century biology and helped curb some of the social ills arising from genetic centrism. Epigeneticists emphasize that the mother’s cytoplasm makes an important contribution to the developing faculties of the embryo (Non et al.). They point to research on DNA methylation and RNA interference that suggests mechanisms by which heritable information other than DNA can be transmitted not only from cell to cell but from mother to child. These mechanisms can be activated by environmental stress, and if the stressful conditions continue for long enough, these cellular states can become subject to natural selection. This is, in effect, an explanation of how environmental conditions affecting the parent, especially the mother, can be passed on to the child (Barnes and Dupré 90–92).

Acknowledging the importance of maternal transmission of qualities, Jablonka and Lamb argue, would have encouraged research in developmental biology and have positive effects on maternal care. The example of Collins, among others, suggests something different. Although the popular understanding of heredity in the late-nineteenth century made ample allowance for the kind of maternal influences on biological development that epigenetics stresses, in the hands of Collins and other commentators on the dangers of educating women, this point led to unfortunate polemics about the threat of intellectual women. Collins’s assumptions about gender overruled his take on the science of the day, wreaking havoc with his novel’s theme. In 2014, Sarah S. Richardson commented on a similar tendency in the popular reaction to epigenetics to “blame today’s mothers” for the long-term health outcomes of their children (131).

The lesson is clear: The social consequences of science depend not only on how the population at large understands the research but also, just as much, on cultural concerns that may have little or nothing to do with the science. Literature and other symbolic forms are among the most powerful indicators of the concerns that are intertwined in people’s minds with research results that may be relatively distant from those concerns. The association of popular literary conventions with neo-Lamarckian themes is a case in point. The example of Collins shows that the public could well view results that proved the heritability of acquired characteristics as powerful new arguments for biological determinism and that cultural presumptions about gender (and other issues) often outweigh what people know about science. While Collins was not tempted to see the hand of an intelligent designer in adaptive evolution, many other people in the 1880s were eager to draw exactly that conclusion – as they are today.

The mark of Lamarckism was inscribed in nineteenth-century culture through novels that took readers to the heart of Africa, deep below the surface of the earth, and into sensational murder plots. We are only beginning to glimpse where the mark of epigenetics will take us today.

Alfred Russel Wallace lies sleeping uneasily in his cabin aboard the sailing ship Helen 700 miles off the Bermuda Islands, bound for England and home. He has been burning with fever for the last few days and is still feeling weak when the captain enters the cabin and says, “I’m afraid the ship’s on fire. Come and see what you think of it.” At first the smoke, thick though it is, does not seem threatening. But soon the Helen is engulfed by flames, and the crew and passengers clamber into the boats where they watch helplessly as the fire consumes their ship. Wallace writes: the flames

Wallace has lost almost everything and is fortunate to escape with his life. The fruits of four years labor on his first expedition – most of his journals, his drawings, his splendid collections of insects and birds, and worst of all, the live animals he was conveying, monkeys and parrots and other tropical birds – all lost. Only one parrot falls into the water and is picked up. Wallace struggles to preserve its life in the overcrowded boat, but it too dies. This terrible event haunts Wallace for the remainder of his days. The loss of his collections, which would have meant financial independence for a young naturalist, the loss of the animals and birds, the loss especially of the parrot – they return in his autobiography as ghosts of what might have been.

Wallace’s fire at sea reappears in two remarkable works of neo-Victorian fiction, A. S. Byatt’s novella “Morpho Eugenia,” which forms the first half of her 1992 book Angels and Insects, and Andrea Barrett’s “Birds with No Feet,” a story from her National Book Award–winning collection Ship Fever (1996). Both center on fictional naturalists who meet and correspond with Wallace in the South Seas; both mention that Wallace’s bad luck seemed to guarantee their safe passage home; and yet both lose their collections, nearly their lives too, in shipwrecks at sea. Barrett’s description echoes Wallace’s experience in striking detail, writing of the live animals trapped below deck, the birds wheeling in circles and then diving into the flames, even of a pet sloth, plucked out of the water, only to die later in the lifeboat.

These two stories about Wallace are only a fraction of the neo-Victorian fiction that deals with nineteenth-century voyages to the tropics. Anglophone authors whose cultural heritage circles the globe – England, America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Asia – have illuminated globalization today by juxtaposing it with Queen Victoria’s empire. Merely to list the most notable of these works is to register a surprising conjunction: Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988) and Jack Maggs (1998), A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects (1992), Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever (1996), Roger McDonald’s Mr. Darwin’s Shooter (1998), Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers (2000), Daniel Mason’s The Piano Tuner (2002), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Sebastian Faulk’s Human Traces (2005), Harry Thompson’s This Thing of Darkness (2006), Lloyd Jones’s Mister Pip (2006), and Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis trilogy (2008–2015).¹ Darwin and Wallace are prominent in many of these fictions, although H. G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau appears often as well, and even Dickens demonstrates the power of his legacy in Jack Maggs and Mister Pip.

Although many neo-Victorian novels are set in England, most of the books that feature Darwin or Wallace take place in the tropics, no doubt because of the naturalists’ formative voyages to the region. Cannon Schmitt argues that for many in the nineteenth century, “the tropics are nature … not simply because they offer the spectacle of intense struggle and diversity but also because” they represent “a remnant of the past that has survived into the present” (19, italics in original). To this, I would add that the tropical setting of these neo-Victorian novels draws attention to the global reach of Western imperialism and poses vivid examples of the risk explorers, missionaries, and merchants posed to sensitive ecologies – issues that came up in the writings of the naturalists at the time and remain pressing concerns in our own day (see Grove).

This chapter addresses a concern that inevitably arises when one makes the case for literary study’s relevance to public policy. As fiction, what kind of knowledge claim can literature make? Even if one asserts that literature has a cognitive component, as many do, it is clear that the insights of fiction differ in kind from knowledge provided by quantitative study, from “facts and figures,” in Dickens’s memorable phrase (Hard Times). There is nothing to be gained, in my view, from attempting to minimize the difference between literature and other forms of knowledge. Rather I want to emphasize that difference as part of my argument for why the policy world needs to add literary study to its armamentarium. Literary reading gives access to meanings, meanings that often circulate below the threshold of consciousness, meanings that may be difficult to capture in facts and figures. We are faced with a simple but enduring question, one that frames the differences between science, literature, and history in bold terms. The question is this: How do we weigh the respective claims of meaning vs. knowledge?

It is a new version of a very old debate: Poetry or Science? Fiction or Fact? The question of poetry’s place in the hierarchy of knowledge can be traced back to Plato and Aristotle, and it was prominent in Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy (1578). But from the Enlightenment onward and with increasing urgency in the nineteenth century, the debate about the value of poetry was framed in relation to science. Wordsworth maintained that the opposite of poetry was not prose but science, a sentiment Coleridge echoed in almost the same words a decade later. “Art is not science,” Hazlitt declared, “because science is mechanical and art is not” (482). Dickens famously parodied his century’s obsession with facts rather than imagination in Hard Times. But John Stuart Mill came closest to formulating the question I am posing in his two essays comparing Bentham and Coleridge. Bentham, Mill said, challenges us to inquire of any opinion “Is it true?” whereas Coleridge leads us to ask ourselves “What is the meaning of it?”²

Poetry and Knowledge

Once poetry was not so clearly divorced from knowledge. Although pleasure has always been central to determining poetry’s value, the Roman poet Horace emphasized poetry’s dual function, to “please and instruct.” For Sidney, poetry still united pleasure with instruction. But, for Wordsworth, the type of delight poetry gives readers was one of the things that separated it from the austere pleasure scientists can experience during their long and arduous pursuit of truth. According to Wordsworth, the Poet taps into universal sources of enjoyment, pleasures that are accessible to all, whether old or young, learned or unlettered. The Man of Science, by contrast, “seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor” pleasing himself, despite the difficulty of the path, with the conviction that the goal is lofty and the sacrifice justified (Wordsworth 738). Whereas for Horace, poetry pleased and instructed, poetry now is seen as bringing a richer, deeper pleasure than the sciences, especially when poetry eschews instruction. It already is “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge” (738) so does not need to stoop to didacticism. It infuses and enlivens all intellectual life, even what science has murdered to dissect. Thus, Wordsworth envisions a day in which the facts of science may themselves become the stuff of poetry. “The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed,” but only when “these things shall [become] familiar to us … as enjoying and suffering beings” (738).

The realignment of poetry and science in the nineteenth century creates a compelling rationale for neo-Victorian fiction to take up the question of their respective merits. Focusing on this question in metahistorical fiction further complicates matters by simultaneously raising the issue of history’s status as a discourse. Is history fact or artifice, a construct of the historian that makes it an unacknowledged variety of fiction? During the 1980s, a strain of postmodern theorizing about science and history argued that both discourses exaggerated their status as knowledge by ignoring the fictiveness of all discourse. The claim of either discipline to objectivity, one line of reasoning went, was undermined by the situated character of all knowledge. This postmodern critique, however, is not particularly relevant to neo-Victorian novels about science. Barrett and Byatt are representative of a number of contemporary novelists who are less invested in deconstructing science or history than in identifying the distinctive value and ethical use of each. They skirt the pitfalls of epistemology – as well as the scorched terrain of the science wars – by focusing on the affordances of each mode, not just the limitations of scientific and historical truth claims.

The different stances of postmodern theory and neo-Victorian literature are shaped by their divergent genres and audiences. As a realist form of metahistorical fiction, neo-Victorian novels emphasize sympathetic attention to the human dimension of science and the desire to know what we can about the past. This difference in orientation toward science is what makes neo-Victorian novels particularly useful for the researcher interested in thinking about science policy rather than in challenging the foundations of science. The genre explores the personal, social, and political meanings that flow from scientific discoveries, a task of importance to policy makers.

Neo-Victorian fiction probes not only the transgressions but also the plight of nineteenth-century scientists in the tropics. They attend to the sufferings and failures of their characters more often than to their triumphs. The dilemma of Victorian scientists in the tropics has been well described by Jonathan Lamb, who noted that European explorers and natural historians in the South Seas, “rather redoubled their ignorance than increased their knowledge” when “confronted with the vastness of the ocean, and the unclassifiable diversity of its people and its plants” (4). But the goal of understanding science and history on their own terms does not blind neo-Victorian novelists to the complicity of their scientific protagonists with what Robert Aquirre has characterized as “informal imperialism.” Aquirre argues that practices of mapping, categorizing, displaying, and narrating shaped “an audience receptive to the influx of British power in the region” (xvi), despite the prevailing opposition of British scientists to colonial conquest and slavery. Similarly, the scientists in Barrett and Byatt’s stories are progressive men of science who are horrified by the devastation of native populations and natural environments brought on by colonization, yet they are themselves still guilty of all manner of sins: scientific racism, eugenics, cultural appropriation, bio-prospecting, economic exploitation, and more.

In Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian England, George Levine details the costs of a scientific stance that required the sacrifice of human entanglements to produce knowledge. Nineteenth-century science, Levine shows, increasingly demanded “denial of self” as “the means to a greater good” (114). A dispassionate attitude and disinterested frame of mind were the price Victorian scientists thought they had to pay to obtain objective results. In related terms, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison explore this mindset as a requirement of nineteenth-century scientists who aspired to achieve objectivity.

Neo-Victorian novels about science dramatize the opposite loss: the sacrifice – of factual accuracy, of scientific knowledge, in some cases, of life itself – demanded in the pursuit of meaning rather than knowledge. Such fiction amounts to a rationale for literature, a contemporary defense of poesy, which counterposes the effort to find meaning in a character’s life to scientific lives spent in the pursuit of knowledge. They bridge the gulf Wordsworth postulated between science’s remoteness from the well-springs of shared human suffering and poetry’s close contact with those waters. That the scientific lives in question are Victorian – whether actual Victorian scientists like Wallace and Darwin or fictional versions like the characters in these stories – implicates history in the problem, challenging us to ask if history is a form of knowledge or of meaning.

The stories I turn to next capitalize on the prominence of the dichotomy between literature and science in the nineteenth century to write metahistorical fiction about the distinctive character of all three modes: literature, science, and history. The fact that the nineteenth century also saw the origin of the two-cultures split makes this period of special concern to the increasing number of novelists who are fascinated by science today.

Andrea Barrett’s “Birds with No Feet”

Wallace devoted much of his career to studying birds. Both of Wallace’s major voyages – to the Amazon and to Borneo, Sumatra, and the Aru Islands – were dedicated in part to the pursuit of rare species of birds. Wallace traveled hundreds of miles up the Amazon, battling fever, loneliness, and privation in a successful quest to find the white umbrella bird. Later, he devoted months to the search for the fabled bird of paradise, a quest that took him to one island after another in the South Pacific. His persistence was rewarded with triumphant success, as he collected examples of numerous varieties, including one that bears his name.

Andrea Barrett’s “Birds with No Feet” concerns an unsuccessful nineteenth-century explorer and would-be naturalist whose expeditions bring him into contact with Wallace, first in the Amazon and then in Borneo. Significantly, his experiences of bird hunting, feverish dreams, the capture of a live bird of paradise, and the loss of all his collections in a fire at sea mirror those of Wallace. Barrett uses her fictional collector, who fails to become the scientist he longs to be, as a way of responding to Wallace’s voyages, even as she includes Wallace and his achievements as independent elements in the story.

“Birds with No Feet” is only one of several stories in Ship Fever that juxtapose the lives of Victorian naturalists – Darwin, Wallace, and Mendel – with those of scientists today.³ The volume as a whole employs a dual time scheme – both within some of the individual stories and across the collection as a whole – characteristic of many neo-Victorian fictions. The first story of Ship Fever, “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds,” encapsulates Barrett’s method in miniature. The story moves fluently back and forth in time between a lonely woman in the present married to a genetics professor at a New England college, her immigrant grandfather who once knew Gregor Mendel, and Mendel himself who worked in isolation on a discovery that no one would notice until the next century. What unites the three is a letter that Mendel gave to the woman’s grandfather and that she in turn shared with her husband. Mendel’s letter is like a genetic trait passed down through time, but the letter itself is less important than the stories the characters tell one another about its transmission. These stories, more than the inheritance itself, bind the present to the past in ways that both damage and redeem. Stories prove as tenacious as DNA in connecting us across time.

In “Birds with No Feet,” Barrett imagines a young American collector named Alec, the wayward son of an improvident tavern keeper, who aspires to become a naturalist and gain the fame and position that Wallace eventually achieved. After the shipwreck that destroyed all the specimens he had hoped to sell in Philadelphia and the journals that he had hoped to turn into a narrative that would bring him both scientific and popular renown, he finds himself forced to abandon his scientific ambitions for more commercial goals. On his second voyage he becomes so consumed with killing and preparing specimens for the market that he has no time for science. By the end of his expedition to Borneo, he finds himself reduced to a shadow of his former self, wasted physically by repeated bouts of malaria and spiritually by his failure to live up to his dreams. When he returns to America in 1862, he finds his country consumed by civil war, a national trauma that extends and magnifies his sense that his pursuit of knowledge has been in vain. As he enlists for “another murderous journey” (122) with the army of the North, he sees his pretense to science – perhaps science itself – as merely an illusion. How do his dreams of contributing to knowledge matter in the face of an entire civilization tearing itself to pieces?

The story ends with a boy on Aru asking what would become of all the birds Alec has shot and preserved for his collections. Alec remembers a line from one of Wallace’s letters: “Each bird we shot and butterfly we netted was in the service of science” (122, italics in original), but this disappointed character knows the words do not apply to him. Instead of knowledge, all that has come out of his voyages is memory and a persistent desire for something more, something unattainable. In that, the collector mirrors – and comments on – Barrett’s own relation to the past. For her, historical knowledge plays a secondary role to meaning. Memory and desire for the unattainable – these are not what history or science would classify as knowledge, but they are the remainder of a life – its meaning, if you will.

What would become of all the birds? What becomes of Alec’s life? The Aru boy answers: “We believe that all the animals you kill and keep will come to life again…. They will rise … when the forest is empty and needs new animals” (121–22). To Alec, this answer seems as probable as Wallace’s theory of natural selection. Both are efforts to make sense of change over time, of generation and extinction, of loss. But one is a source of meaning and solace, the other a contribution to knowledge. If “meaning can never quite penetrate reality,” as Lukács tells us, “without meaning, reality would disintegrate into the nothingness of inessentiality” (88). That is what has happened to Alec, who has returned from the failure of his scientific dreams to a reality engulfed by war. Hence, his attraction to a myth about the resurrection of forest animals. But Alec sees the value of both the Aru myth and Wallace’s insight, a dual perspective that produces what Lukács calls “the melancholy of the adult state” (86). The pathos of Barrett’s story, the beautiful solace it offers, can help us distinguish Alec’s melancholy recognition from the convenient fictions that some people today prefer to scientific facts. It is fear or anger that motivates many in our world to deny reality and embrace myths about vaccines, say, or climate change, or to deny, as Alec never will, the theory of natural selection. The meaning Alec finds in Aru myth is as valuable as the scientific knowledge it will never displace.

Literature, Memory, and Meaning

Andreas Huyssen has observed a penchant in contemporary culture for approaching the past via memory rather than history. Memoirs, journals, memory gardens, memory quilts, testimonials, eyewitness accounts, oral histories, video recordings, autobiographies, and historical fiction – these forms of remembrance take pride of place today, Huyssen argues, replacing in the popular imagination forms of historical investigation that rely on documentary evidence or records that can be verified by others. This “memory fever,” as Huyssen calls it, is particularly intense in “border-crossing memory discourses” (12) – for which the Holocaust serves as Huyssen’s archetype – memory discourses that are simultaneously generalizable yet particularized with each new atrocity from Rwanda to Bosnia to Xinjang.

Given its popularity, neo-Victorian fiction would seem to be a prime symptom of “memory fever” supplanting history, especially when considering border-crossing stories of European scientists in distant lands. Huyssen foregrounds the intimate connection between art, memory, and meaning in these kinds of texts, and contrasts this affective collage, hyperbolically in my estimation, with the decay of history’s prestige in today’s media-saturated culture. Yet to view this genre merely as symptomatic of a deplorable, recent trend is to overlook the divergent aims and values of literature and history. Rather than seeing one as a pallid substitute for the other, providing the weak pleasures of nostalgia rather than authentic history, as Fredric Jameson once argued postmodernism did, one should look closely and care deeply about the particular cultural work performed by these forms. Literature has been a vehicle of both personal and cultural meaning since writing began to replace oral traditions as a source of knowledge about the past. A historical text can be such a vehicle too, but the burden of history is that it must strive for Truth before it can have meaning for others. Literature must have meaning for others before it can be True.

If one had to identify a period in which the affective collage of literature, memory, and meaning began to intensify, one would have to turn again to the nineteenth century. From Wordsworth’s day, and increasingly throughout the century, literature seemed called upon to supply the meaning once provided by religious belief. T. E. Hulme derisively called Romanticism “spilt religion” (118). Raymond Williams and M. H. Abrams both chronicled what the latter called “natural supernaturalism,” the investment in literature and the arts that led figures like Mill and Arnold to seek the consolation that they could no longer find in received doctrine through poetry – Wordsworth’s verse in particular. In the twentieth century, the emphasis on literature as a source of meaning was one of the factors behind the interpretive turn in literary studies, inaugurated by Eliot, Empson, and Leavis in England and Vanderbilt’s New Critics in America.

Of course, there have always been forms of literature that emphasized knowledge as much as meaning – wisdom literature, Menippean satires, Georgics and other didactic poetry, Hazlitt’s “Literature of Knowledge,” the group of texts Northrop Frye called “anatomies” (Anatomy 308–14), encyclopedic fictions like Finnegan’s Wake or Gravity’s Rainbow, the novel of ideas, roman a theses, or documentary fictions, such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle or James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. These are eccentric genres, however, oddities or sports that survive today but rarely flourish in furrows cultivated by uncommon energy or genius. They propagate few offspring.

Equally, science can be a source of meaning for both scientist and layperson alike. Einstein maintained that the “strongest and noblest motive for scientific research” was the “cosmic religious feeling” (238). In The Meaning of Human Existence, E. O. Wilson contended that science, not philosophy, would explain the meaning of humanity (38). Darwin himself always searched for the larger meaning of his theories, in part to forestall the very different constructions that would be put on his ideas by others: “There is grandeur in this view of life,” he wrote at the end of his greatest work (396). But Stephen Jay Gould spoke for the majority when he said that science had little to say about “questions of ultimate meaning and moral value” (Rocks of Ages 6). The notion that science can provide answers to existential questions has been called the “naturalistic fallacy” (Coyne 111), and belief in a guiding scientific idea has often led to pernicious ideologies, as was the case with eugenics in the early twentieth century or among some advocates of Wilson’s sociobiology today. On the other hand, disbelief in science has become a widespread problem in our society – witness creationists who reject evolution and climate change deniers. The mistaken notion that science is something that one should believe in (or disbelieve) represents an inappropriate response to the kind of knowledge it provides. One does not believe in scientific knowledge; one tests it, extends it, and employs it to improve the world and make new discoveries.

A. S. Byatt’s “Morpho Eugenia”

On one level, A. S. Byatt’s novella, “Morpho Eugenia,” is a takeoff on Victorian sensation fiction, filled with lurid sexuality, and connected to the extensive arguments about Darwin, Wallace, and evolution only by the dangers of inbreeding that an incestuous brother and sister run. The naturalist, William Adamson, finds himself marooned in England by shipwreck and poverty, dependent on an elderly, religious patron, Sir Harald Alabaster. Troubled at first by this enforced idleness, Adamson soon finds himself seduced by the charms of the family’s eldest daughter, Eugenia. The course of this plot is swift and predictable. Although far above him in social standing, Eugenia marries Adamson as cover for her ongoing affair with her older brother and promptly begins to bear children that run true to the Alabaster family morphology. But if this plot is as obvious to the reader as it is opaque to Adamson, a second, more complicated plot emerges from the naturalist’s friendship with Matty Crompton, a companion for the children who shares his fascination with birds, butterflies, bees, and ants. During their field trips with the children to nearby woods, Matty reawakens his passion for science and together they write a successful children’s book of natural history about an anthill on the estate. Matty turns out to be a secret author herself. Through an engaging faux-Victorian fairy tale, she conveys an allegory to Adamson with the moral: “Things are not what they seem.” The irony, of course – or rather, one of several ironies – is that this message is a commentary not only on Adamson’s marital charade but on Byatt’s metahistorical fiction.

“Morpho Eugenia” turns out to be a compendium of narrative structures for conveying double meanings. On the first page we learn of the split nature of experience for our protagonist. After ten years in the tropics, the loss of all his notes and collections at sea, and fifteen days of near starvation in a lifeboat, everything at the Alabaster estate seems unreal. His hostess is urging him to dance, and he admires the “shimmering girls,” pale and blond in their “shell-pink and sky-blue” gauze and tulle (3). But he cannot shake the image of “communal dancing” in the Amazon with dark, nearly naked Indian women. Throughout his time on the Alabaster estate, Adamson is haunted by what Byatt repeatedly calls “double consciousness” (28). The world seems filled with “strange analogies” (35) – analogies between English manners and Amazonian customs, and between instinctual ant behavior and human practices. Everywhere he looks on the estate – dances, marriage rites, religious beliefs, male dominance displays, a slave-making ant species – Adamson is tormented by a “double vision, of things seen and done otherwise in another world” (7), whether a distant human society or an equally alien insect world.

Doubleness is not merely a matter of Adamson’s experiences in two worlds. It is a structural feature of the story itself. Byatt underlines this point by making copious references to literary forms that highlight double meaning. The novella is chock-a-block with parables, fables, analogies, anagrams, dream interpretations, extended metaphors, didactic children stories, fairy tales, puzzles, and riddles.

Personally, Adamson distrusts analogy. In his arguments about evolution with Sir Alabaster, who reasons in the vein of Paley’s Natural Theology by basing his proofs of God’s hand on analogies, Adamson objects: “You may argue anything at all by analogy, Sir, and so consequently nothing” (104). Adamson speaks of “irrelevant analogies” (74) and reproves his own habit of seeing his life in terms of a “diminishing analogy” with the ant world. “Analogy is a slippery tool,” he comments. “Men are not ants” (116). Here we find in succinct form one objection to using analogy to prove a point. By contrast, Devin Griffiths has argued that romantic poets and nineteenth-century scientists alike employed analogy more creatively, turning it into an exploratory tool, an instrument for intellectual inquiry. For some writers, Griffiths maintains, analogy changed from being the kind of formal structure to which Adamson objects, the sort that simply maps information from a source domain to a target domain, while suppressing the semantic dimension of the former; instead, it became a reciprocal structure, where both domains in a comparison offered perspectives on a new relationship. In such cases, analogy would become a stimulus to further experimental investigation, turning literature, like science, into a vehicle for investigating reality. While this probing, exploratory use of analogy may inspire scientists as much as poets, analogy produces meaningful ways of looking at the world, not facts. The use of analogy that Adamson reproves is the kind that presents an analogical relation as a form of proof, as self-evident knowledge, not a tool of inquiry.

Adamson’s objections to “irrelevant analogies” prepare the way for the sustained case Byatt makes for the value of literary ways of thinking. The story endorses literary modes of saying one thing and meaning something else (reciprocal analogies, parables, riddles, allegories, fairy tales, etc.), one of the basic ways in which fiction makes meaning out of stories. The parade of literature’s formal resources for introducing ambiguity and doubt into the act of representation reaches a climax in the metaphor that gives the story its title. Eugenia, like the butterfly that shares her name, transforms from one morphological form to another, the Alabaster nympha he thought he was marrying to the imago who is her brother’s compliant mistress.

Griffiths argues that the probing, comparative form of analogy that emerged as a central feature of the nineteenth-century historical novel became a model for adventurous scientists of the period – Charles Darwin in particular. What Darwin (but not Paley) shared with historical fiction was a “commitment to analogy … as a tool that brings the relation between previous ages and present into focus, seeking the origin of contemporary social and natural order within the patterns of past events” (Griffiths 2–3). This same comparative historicism is what Byatt seeks to emphasize by parading such a wealth of analogical literary modes in front of the reader. She is making a claim about the value of literary modes of thinking for uncovering meaningful relationships between past and present. In the process, she dramatizes Adamson’s learning from Matty to trust analogy’s insights and to discover a more adventurous way of doing science, one more like his hero Darwin and less like that of an old-fashioned natural historian.

In the fairy tale Matty writes to warn Adamson about his deceitful wife, she uses a bit of nonsense language to capture the role that names and tropes play in making meaning out of relations between things. “Names, you know, are a way of weaving the world together, by relating the creatures to other creatures and a kind of metamorphosis, you might say, out of a metaphor, which is a figure of speech for carrying one idea into another” (150–51, italics in original). For this Son of Adam, who once thought that by naming the insects, natural history could pin down the world, the lesson comes painfully late, yet in time to enable him to escape on another voyage of discovery.

Byatt and Barrett both have a gift for ending their stories with resonant images, which condense meaning into emotion. It is a skill of special value to the short story as a genre, for stories rely on compression to make a life come to a head in a revelatory moment. Years ago, in The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode described the power of this kind of narrative closure in words that moved me as much as any critical writing I have read before or since. Kermode wrote that the end of stories cast the “benefaction of meaning” over all the turmoil and strife that had gone before (178). In our own lives, we are born into the middle of things, and we die before the world’s end, but in literature we can experience a completion that is impossible elsewhere – that is fiction in every sense of the word. Kermode’s insight enables us to recognize affect as a critical component of literary meaning and experience aesthetic pleasure as understanding, if not knowledge.

The end of “Morpho Eugenia” takes place on the deck of the sailing ship Calypso, bound once again for the tropics. Far out to sea, Adamson and Matty are surprised by a Monarch butterfly, which has fluttered exhausted onto the rigging. They are filled with emotion, although uncertain whether this feeling is fear or hope. The butterfly is “so fragile, and so easily crushed, and nowhere in reach of where it was going,” Matty murmurs. “And yet it is still alive, and bright, and so surprising, rightly seen” (183). We understand this butterfly as yet another metaphor for the two vulnerable characters, still nowhere in reach of their goal. “As long as you are alive,” the captain responds, “everything is surprising, rightly seen” (183). Not a conclusion that contributes to the store of human knowledge. But an end that makes sense of a life.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Unlike Barrett and Byatt’s stories, David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004) is not primarily a neo-Victorian fiction. Its innovative structure ranges across six different time periods, each nested within the others like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, an image the novel invokes more than once. But the opening and closing chapters are neo-Victorian. They consist of the nineteenth-century journal of Adam Ewing, a shipwrecked traveler searching for passage home from a South Sea island while being slowly poisoned by Dr. Henry Goose who is posing as his friend. The journal breaks off in mid-sentence, and the next chapter picks up the story of a different character, a young composer living in 1931. Each subsequent chapter shifts to the story of a new character decades in the future until the novel reaches its pinnacle in a distant, postapocalyptic world, only to reverse course back down time’s ladder, completing the stories in reverse order.

The neo-Victorian sections introduce one of the novel’s central themes: Will human history be ruled by survival of the fittest? In each of the six linked stories, characters who believe that “humanity may transcend tooth & claw” (508), as Adam does, contend with the will to power of characters such as his supposed friend who believes “the weak are meat the strong do eat” (489). This Darwinian theme is everywhere evident: in the extermination of a peaceful island tribe by conquering Maori, in the extinction of seals by overhunting, in the devastation of native populations by Western diseases, in the looming environmental damage from an unscrupulous nuclear power corporation, in the cloning of human slaves in the near future, and in the radioactive dead lands that cover most of the planet in the far future. “Our will to power, our science, and those v[ery] faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man,” one character declares, “are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens – before this century is out!” (444–45).

The opening sentence of Cloud Atlas literalizes Dr. Goose’s cannibalistic metaphor via a reference to the cannibals in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Adam stumbles upon a trail of fresh footprints on a forlorn strand, which leads him to the predator who will nearly kill him. Although supposedly a surgeon to the London elite, Dr. Goose is first seen collecting human teeth from the sand, the remains of a “cannibals’ banqueting hall,” where “the strong engorged themselves on the weak” (3). This is the first of many references to the later nineteenth-century belief in social Darwinism, the supposedly scientific justification for all manner of horrors, from unbridled laissez-faire competition to plundering of natural resources to human slavery and genocide. Dr. Goose has taken to heart a particularly uncompromising version of this “scientific” social law. In a conversation late in the novel, Dr. Goose listens to a preacher named Horrox who sermonizes on God’s wisdom in establishing Anglo-Saxons as the “highest of all the races” on “Civilization’s Ladder” (487). Horrox takes the standard line: “Nature’s Law & Progress” will lead to extinction of lesser races; “Unpleasant scenes may ensue, but men of intellectual courage must not flinch” (488). Dr. Goose agrees but goes him one better. It is not God who has made the white races dominant, he responds, and then explains later to Adam:

In case we have missed the analogy between cannibalism and social Darwinism, Dr. Goose adds that he sees humans not as “sacred beings” but as “joints of meat,” “ready for the skewer & the spit” (503).

Extinction and slavery were incidental themes in Barrett and Byatt, but they are major refrains in Cloud Atlas. Mitchell’s novel treats the urge for domination as one of humanity’s original sins and confronts not only the extinction of individual species but also the possible end of all life on the planet.⁴ We have come full circle. Wells’s Time Machine foresaw the strong Morlocks consuming the weak Eloi in our distant future and understood extinction of life on earth as part of an inevitable, planetary process, eons in the making.⁵ Writing in the twenty-first century when global warming poses a present danger and new forms of slavery thrive in global sweatshops and the sex trade, Mitchell sees each age hurrying on to the end through its own heedless will to power.

The unusual temporal structure of the novel allows Mitchell to end his story twice – once at the exact center of the book, when the story begun hundreds of years earlier in Adam’s journal reaches the chronological end of humanity in a distant, postapocalyptic future. Then, again, on the last pages of the book, when Adam is delivered from the murderous designs of Dr. Goose by his ship’s long-delayed arrival in safe harbor.⁶ Each of these endings – the chronological ending at the center of the book and the closing pages of the book’s final chapter – takes place in the tropics, in Hawaii to be exact. The shared tropical setting binds Adam’s Pacific Journal to the story of Zachry, the protagonist of the central chapter. A to Z, alpha to omega, the beginning and end of the six discrete narratives to the beginning and end of all humanity.⁷ Here, as elsewhere, the temporal structure of the novel expresses the conflicting imperatives of deep time and personal history. Each of the six time periods immerses us in the story of an individual. The Adam and Zachry chapters reinforce this personal dimension by employing what Huyssen identifies as “memory discourses” par excellence (12) – a journal and an oral life history.⁸ In the latter case, Zachry narrates his life story at the request of two young lovers, interrupting himself to explain, in his distinctive dialect, that “these are the mem’ries what are minnowin’ out” (243). A garrulous old man at fifty, Zachry is haunted by guilty memories, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, and his autobiography is as much expiation as personal history.

Huyssen laments the “memory fever” that has infected our times. An earlier theorist of history, Walter Benjamin, sees memory playing a more valuable role in our grasp of the past. In “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin writes that the kind of history that matters “seize[s] hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger” (255). And that is eminently true of Mitchell’s novel. All the historical periods respond to a “moment of danger,” for the protagonist, for society, and ultimately, for the species. The danger is particularly salient in the Darwinian passages that pepper Mitchell’s text, most of all in the passage I quoted earlier on the dangers that lie within the West’s “civilizing” mission. “Our will to power, our science … are the same faculties that’ll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!” (444–45). I hear echoes in this dark critique of another of Benjamin’s famous theses: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256).

The progress of civilization, inaugurated in the neo-Victorian chapters of the novel, moves inexorably toward barbarism and extinction. Yet there is a countermovement in Mitchell’s novel. Each time period also stresses the commonalities, recurrences, and shared traits that bind the characters together and transform them into instances of a cyclical or recurrent pattern. Reincarnation, Nietzsche’s Eternal Return, variations on a musical theme, nested matryoshka dolls – countless motifs in the novel evoke time’s cycle. Events repeat one another; characters share the same birthmark and remember things that happened centuries in the past or future; genres and media recapitulate the history of forms – journal, epistolary narrative, pulp fiction, film, hologram – then back to the earliest form of all, oral narrative. The paradoxical combination of linear and cyclical perspectives on time reflects both the genre’s commitment to the narrative of individual lives and our more contemporary concern with the fate of the planet. In doing so, it captures the way in which our culture’s understanding of time has developed since the nineteenth century.

The neo-Victorian embrace of such a paradoxical conception of time was not a recourse available to most Victorian authors. Cyclical time was still too resonant of its sacred roots for post-Darwinian materialists, while a starkly secular view of linear time, with no guiding destiny or redemptive end, was intolerable for most religious readers. Mitchell, by contrast, openly embraces time’s duality, an attitude characteristic of genome time. With our limited lifespans, individuals experience deep time primarily through art, ritual, and religion. But for Mitchell, these three modes are interrelated – literature and art, he asserts, construct belief. The novel repeatedly dramatizes how fictions give purpose and meaning to his characters’ struggles and to civilization’s best instincts – or its worst. “Pretendin’ can bend bein,’” Zachry declares (283). And Adam in his journal: “If we believe humanity is a ladder of tribes, a colosseum of confrontation, exploitation & bestiality … [then this] predatory world shall consume itself” (508). On the other hand, “If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world … [then] such a world will come to pass” (508, italics in original). Like Barrett’s failed naturalist finding meaning in a belief he knows to be a fiction, Adam finds purpose in believing in a cause, abolitionism, because “belief is both prize & battlefield, within the mind & and in the mind’s mirror, the world” (508).

Adam’s adventures in the Pacific prompt him to picture deep time as a “stream grinding boulders into pebbles through an unhurried eternity” (507). The earth’s unhurried ages have provided Adam with more examples of violence and rapacity than he cares to contemplate, and he has heard too many men justify their hunger for power as part of Nature’s plan. But Adam rejects this interpretation of deep time, averring instead that “for the human species, selfishness is extinction” (508).

Conclusion: Meaning or Knowledge?

In an essay on Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle, George Levine argues that Darwin increasingly came to prefer factual knowledge to the “entanglements and sublimities to which he was emotionally drawn” (365). Levine’s essay, “By Knowledge Possessed,” charts Darwin’s movement from “an essentially poetic response … to a scientific one” (379). As he grew older, Darwin “increasingly reject[s] the unmodified attempt to describe” nature in favor of capturing the “phenomenon in secular and systematic terms – ‘general laws’ produced from large collections of facts” (379–80). Levine’s account of Darwin’s journey away from pleasure and meaning to general laws and facts makes the opposite, yet complementary point to my own – that nineteenth-century science had to give up certain kinds of personal fulfillments to achieve knowledge.

It is an old debate: Poetry or Science? Fiction or Fact? to which I would like to add Meaning or Knowledge? Levine’s work laid bare the costs of a scientific epistemology that required the sacrifice of human entanglements to produce truth. “The West, in order to know, had to die to desire, had to die to its human interests” (Dying 268). In Barrett, Byatt, and Mitchell’s fictions those are the only things that remain, desire and its human interests. They are the beautiful remnants of lives that persist in memory – and in literature – after the fruitless voyages have come to an end. The scientist who has produced no knowledge produces for us, readers of literature, an alternative that seems to suffice: recognition of what it means for a person to have lived.