The VitalScience
Biology and the LiteraryImagination,1860-1900
(originally published 1984;copyright Peter Morton)
The argument of this book isthat in late Victorian England a group of novelists and essayists quiteconsciously sought and found ideas in post-Darwinian biology that werepeculiarly susceptible to imaginative transformation. The period 1860-1900was a time of great confusion in biology; the natural selection hypothesiswas in retreat before its acute critics, and no extension of evolutionarytheory to human affairs was too bizarre to attract its quota of enthusiasts.Writers capitalised on this prevailing uncertainty and used it to theirown artistic or polemic ends.
The core of The Vital Science is fourinterlocking chapters which examine certain ideas emerging from the newbiology which particularly appealed to literary minds: evolutionism - thephilosophy that organic adaptation is progressive in a human sense; degeneration- the belief that parasitism and retrogression are as applicable in thehuman sphere as in accounts of the extinction of species; eugenics - progresscan be assured by aping nature's methods; and theories of heredity - readvariously as encouraging or denying attempts to escape one's genetic destiny.Such ideas were used by many novelists, belles lettristes and journaliststo warn, abuse, encourage or inspire, and the discussion ranges widelyfrom minor utopian fiction to major novels by H.G. Wells, Samuel Butlerand Thomas Hardy. The Vital Science is designed to interest historiansand readers who will enjoy approaching the Victorian era from an unfamiliarangle as well as historians of biological theory between The Originof Species and Mendel.
Parts of the book have been anthologised intextbooks and along with Gillian Beer's Darwin's plots it has becomea standard text in its field.
Introduction: Definitionsand Perspectives
Darwin's Literary Impact: The Dominant View
Final Definitions and Limitations
1 Darwinism on the Deathbed, 1870-1900: The Failings of Natural Selection
Darwinism in Decay, 1870-1900
Anti-Darwinian Thought Concluded
2 Victorian Biology and VictorianLetters: An Overview
Biology and Letters: Some Specific Linkages
3 Better, Wiser, and MoreBeautiful Beings: The Cheerful Doctrine of Evolutionism
Evolutionism as Credo: Spencer, Reade and Drummond
W.H. Hudson and A Crystal Age
The Cost of Evolutionary Perfection
4 Laying the Ghost of theBrute: The Fear of Degeneration
The Victorians' Parochial Future
The Darwinists and Degeneration
Is Degeneration Really Perfection?
Degeneration and the Utopia
The Biological Vision of H.G. Wells
The Time Machine: Social or Biological Allegory?
The Time Machine and the Garden Metaphor
Wells's Controlled 'Inductive Future'
5 Remember, Beethoven's FatherWas a Drunkard: The Dubious Appeal of Eugenics
Late-Victorian Eugenics: An Overview
Literature and Galtonian Eugenics
Reformist Eugenics: Wallace and Grant Allen
Eugenics and Prevailing Theories of Inheritance
6 Nemesis without Her Mask:Heredity before Mendel
Butler on Heredity
Butlerism and Mainstream Biology Weismann and the GermPlasm
Butler's Roles as Biological Theorist and Novelist Compared
The Way of All Flesh as a Lamarckian Novel of Inheritance
Butler and Heredity Summarised
Tess and the Darwinian Motif
Hardy, Tess and August Weismann
Darwinism and Literature: a Bibliography